- 6/26/2025
Mankind has always been fascinated by the possibility of life beyond Earth, the idea of other civilizations thriving on distant planets captivates the imagination we are driven perhaps by the hope that humanity is not alone in the universe and by science’s promise to always seek the unknown.
On August 15th, 1977 a massive radio telescope operated by the Ohio state university detected an unusually powerful signal from deep space the signal had all the characteristics scientists expected in a transmission from an intelligent extraterrestrial source. The event lasted for 72 seconds and was never heard again named the Wow Signal it was a tantalizing moment in the search for extraterrestrial life and for the relatively young science of radio astronomy.
On August 15th, 1977 a massive radio telescope operated by the Ohio state university detected an unusually powerful signal from deep space the signal had all the characteristics scientists expected in a transmission from an intelligent extraterrestrial source. The event lasted for 72 seconds and was never heard again named the Wow Signal it was a tantalizing moment in the search for extraterrestrial life and for the relatively young science of radio astronomy.
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00:01:36Transcription by CastingWords
00:01:50It's biology that got clever enough to understand the universe.
00:01:55If there are other civilizations out there, we automatically know that all the questions
00:02:01of life are answered yes.
00:02:05If we did discover an actual signal from an alien civilization, it would profoundly change
00:02:13human beings.
00:02:15This is discovery.
00:02:16It isn't the kind of science you learn about in middle school where you have an hypothesis
00:02:19and you try and falsify it.
00:02:21You can't falsify this hypothesis.
00:02:23You can't prove they're not out there.
00:02:24All you can do is discover that they are.
00:02:27So we have these 50 digits, so it looks like a bunch of random numbers.
00:02:326EQUJ5, that was exactly what we were looking for.
00:02:38I don't think many people have looked into it in much detail.
00:02:42It's an intriguing case because it's a mystery.
00:02:44We don't know what it was.
00:02:46It was the strongest signal I ever saw.
00:02:49An enormously powerful signal.
00:02:52It is the best evidence we know of, of coming from some other civilization.
00:03:02Why do we search?
00:03:14Mankind has always been fascinated by the possibility of life beyond Earth.
00:03:22The idea of other civilizations thriving on distant planets captivates the imagination.
00:03:28We are driven, perhaps, by the hope that humanity is not alone in the universe and by science's
00:03:35promise to always seek the unknown.
00:03:41On August 15, 1977, a massive radio telescope operated by The Ohio State University detected
00:03:48an unusually powerful signal from deep space.
00:03:52The signal had all the characteristics scientists expected in a transmission from an intelligent
00:03:58extraterrestrial source.
00:04:00The event lasted for 72 seconds and was never heard again.
00:04:05Named the WOW signal, it was a tantalizing moment in the search for extraterrestrial life,
00:04:11and for the relatively young science of radio astronomy.
00:04:14It started going up and went 6EQUJ5 as it faded up to the other side.
00:04:21That's a just tremendously strong signal.
00:04:24We had never seen anything like that before.
00:04:27And that told us that this really is a very strong narrow band signal that did not come
00:04:31from some natural source.
00:04:33Most are familiar with the traditional science of optical or visible light astronomy.
00:04:41Optical telescopes capture light rays and magnify distant objects for closer observation
00:04:46by the human eye.
00:04:48In comparison, radio astronomy focuses on the invisible, the radio frequency portion of the
00:04:54electromagnetic spectrum.
00:04:57Radio telescopes are specialized antennas and radio receivers that can detect the radio waves
00:05:03emanating from distant celestial objects.
00:05:07Every object that produces energy, every star, every galaxy, produces energy all along the
00:05:15energy range which we call the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:05:19The trouble with a visual telescope is that it only looks at a part of that spectrum, why
00:05:26I have one right here, that is very narrow and a very small part.
00:05:31We actually see a very small part of the universe.
00:05:36On one end you have the higher energies like ultraviolet and x-rays and gamma rays.
00:05:44On the lower end, down below the red, you have the very low frequency energies like infrared
00:05:50and radio.
00:05:52This is very, very narrow.
00:05:54It happens to be the part we're interested in because it's the part that we can actually
00:06:01detect.
00:06:03So you can look at a lot more information about a star at the radio end of the spectrum than
00:06:10the very limited amount of information you get in the visual end of the spectrum.
00:06:17Although radio waves from space were first detected in the early 1930s and the first radio telescope
00:06:23was built shortly thereafter, worldwide interest in radio astronomy escalated in the years following
00:06:29World War II.
00:06:31The United States was eager to invest in this new branch of science.
00:06:35We were kind of in the space race, we were in this idea that our country wanted to be the
00:06:40best in the world in terms of science and engineering.
00:06:43We wanted to be out there and we were willing to spend a lot of money frankly to do that.
00:06:48So we spent a lot of money, we got men on the moon, we built telescopes, we built a lot
00:06:52of fundamental science facilities here in the country.
00:06:55And that was fantastic and that just led to so many advances.
00:07:00You know after World War II there was a lot of technological achievement, especially in
00:07:04electronics and with radar coming on the scene and all of that.
00:07:08But you know the war took its toll on most of the nations, but for whatever reason Europe,
00:07:16especially England and Australia, really ramped up radio astronomy research.
00:07:23The United States didn't.
00:07:25They kind of lagged behind until about mid-50s.
00:07:30Part of the reason was that instruments to detect radio signals from space are just so
00:07:35expensive to build.
00:07:36You know a single university generally can't afford to build what you need to build to be
00:07:42successful.
00:07:45As radio astronomy continued to evolve, a young professor of electrical engineering at the
00:07:50Ohio State University observed its development with keen interest.
00:07:54His name was John Krauss.
00:07:59In the 1930s, Krauss followed scientist Carl Jansky's historic discovery of radio noise flowing
00:08:05from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
00:08:08He was fascinated by the potential for using cosmic radio waves rather than visible light to
00:08:14observe the universe.
00:08:16In 1930, essentially all that we knew about the heavens had come from what we could see
00:08:21or photograph.
00:08:23Carl Jansky changed all that.
00:08:25A universe of radio sounds to which mankind had been deaf since time immemorial now suddenly
00:08:31burst forth in full chorus.
00:08:35During World War II, Krauss met Grote Reber, a radio engineer from Wheaton, Illinois.
00:08:42Heber had continued Carl Jansky's work, scanning the Milky Way with a homemade receiver and a
00:08:4730-foot dish antenna built in his backyard.
00:08:51For a decade, he was the world's only active radio astronomer, producing the first maps of
00:08:57the radio sky.
00:08:58His antenna design was the forerunner of modern radio telescopes.
00:09:03He told me about his equipment and observations of the Milky Way with a contagious enthusiasm.
00:09:09If we had not been at war, I think I would have started building a radio telescope then.
00:09:16But it was not until 10 years later, at the Ohio State University, that I had a chance to
00:09:21do it.
00:09:23When John Krauss joined the Ohio State faculty in 1946, he invented the helical antenna.
00:09:30The unique corkscrew-shaped design would ultimately find widespread use in satellite communication.
00:09:38In 1952, Krauss utilized the new antenna design to build his first radio telescope.
00:09:44With the help of Ohio State students, he constructed a 50-meter array of helical antennas on University
00:09:51farmland.
00:09:53While a sky survey conducted with the helix array proved successful, Krauss realized that
00:09:58a much bigger telescope was needed.
00:10:01Within a few years, he was ready to build the massive radio telescope that would ultimately
00:10:06capture the wow signal.
00:10:09He had grand plans of making the telescope 2,000 feet wide.
00:10:15Money for that was not forthcoming.
00:10:17So I saw at one point he had reduced that to 720 feet wide.
00:10:23Money was not forthcoming.
00:10:25So he reduced it to 360 feet wide for the paraboloid.
00:10:32In 1956, John Krauss negotiated an agreement to utilize a 20-acre site owned by Ohio Wesleyan
00:10:39University.
00:10:41The property was dedicated for the construction and operation of the Ohio State University radio
00:10:46observatory.
00:10:48This large radio telescope, designed to listen for signals in deep space, was appropriately
00:10:54nicknamed the Big Ear.
00:10:57With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Krauss began construction on the Big Ear in
00:11:02late 1956.
00:11:04Under his supervision, university students did much of the construction work.
00:11:09Ultimately, the process took five years.
00:11:13When John Krauss got the money to build the place, he didn't have very much money.
00:11:18So between 1956 and 1963, they constructed this gigantic thing as big as three football fields,
00:11:28with the use mostly of volunteer helpers and graduate students.
00:11:33So it took a long time.
00:11:36The design of Big Ear was intended to be the most sensitive telescope for the least amount
00:11:41of money.
00:11:42And it was John Krauss' original design that did that.
00:11:46There was only one other telescope in the world that was built like it, and that was in France,
00:11:51Anse, France.
00:11:53If you can imagine here, a large flat surface of aluminum foil, three acres in extent.
00:12:00At one end was a curved parabolic reflector standing on the ground, and the other end
00:12:07was a flat surface tilted up like this, which could be tilted up and down.
00:12:13And out in the middle of the ground plane, there were some things that we called feedhorns
00:12:16that looked like scoops, which were pointed toward the parabolic part, and they scooped up
00:12:21their radio waves.
00:12:22Signals came down from the sky, they bounced off this flat reflector, traveled horizontally
00:12:27across this big field of aluminum to the parabolic reflector, which focused them down to these
00:12:33scoop-like horns sitting in the middle of the ground plane.
00:12:37Unlike today's parabolic dish antennas, the Big Ear could not be electronically controlled
00:12:42to pan the sky on demand.
00:12:44Rather, it depended on the rotation of the Earth.
00:12:48The telescope could not steer in the left-right direction, it could only steer in the up and
00:12:53down direction.
00:12:54But that's okay, because we could set to a certain angle and then allow the Earth to turn.
00:13:00And as the Earth turned, then the beam swept out a little strip all around the whole sky
00:13:05in 24 hours as the Earth turned.
00:13:08And we'd sit there for a couple days, and then we'd change the angle slightly and cover another
00:13:12little stripe all around the whole sky like that.
00:13:15So in that way, we could cover the whole sky.
00:13:21When completed in the early 1960s, the Big Ear was one of the world's largest radio telescopes.
00:13:28It was designed to be a versatile survey instrument, capable of observing large sections of the
00:13:34radio sky.
00:13:35When it was finally built, using its old computer with 16K of memory to help collect the data,
00:13:44they managed for the next 10 years to do a map of the entire visible sky.
00:13:51I came here in 1963 as a graduate student working for Professor John Krause.
00:13:57I was placed in charge of analyzing the data coming from our radio telescope, which had
00:14:02just gone on the air.
00:14:04We were looking for natural sources of radio signals, not intelligent sources.
00:14:09That's why the telescope was built.
00:14:12This was in the early days of radio astronomy, when it was just really getting established
00:14:17as a mainstream science.
00:14:19And there had not been any big survey of the entire sky to discover all the radio signals
00:14:25that were there.
00:14:27People had used dish antennas.
00:14:29They'd used antennas like that to look at certain stars, certain galaxies, and study them in detail.
00:14:37But nobody had searched the whole sky.
00:14:40So we were like the pioneer explorers, and we created this huge catalog of 20,000 objects,
00:14:46and we published huge maps showing what the sky looked like to the radio telescope.
00:14:51They discovered objects like quasars and observed them, which at the time were the most distant
00:15:00objects ever observed by any telescope.
00:15:05One of the quasars, for instance, was about 12 billion light years away, which we now know
00:15:12is considerably far back, almost to the beginning of the creation of the universe in the Big
00:15:19Bang.
00:15:20They discovered 20,000 radio sources.
00:15:25Only 10,000 were known at the time.
00:15:28So it was a big deal, a big contribution to what was known in radio astronomy.
00:15:39You guys want to go down to the scope?
00:15:40Yeah, are we going up?
00:15:41Yeah.
00:15:42You want to?
00:15:43I guess.
00:15:44Shoes.
00:15:45Shoes.
00:15:46Shoes.
00:15:47I got the right shoes.
00:15:52Why do we search for ET?
00:16:12Ever since the beginning of human history, we've always looked out what's out there.
00:16:17The Green Bank Observatory is important to this area.
00:16:28It's one of the premier science facilities in the state of West Virginia.
00:16:33And as far as radio astronomy goes, it's one of the premier observatories in the world.
00:16:40You know, it's a treasure.
00:16:48Nestled deep in the hills of West Virginia, the Green Bank Observatory is home to the world's
00:16:53largest, fully steerable radio telescope.
00:16:57The site hosts eight radio telescopes and more than 60 years of scientific discovery.
00:17:04Like the Big Ear Telescope in Ohio, the Green Bank story began in the late 1950s.
00:17:11America's interest in radio astronomy was growing.
00:17:13The Green Bank site was chosen for building the first National Radio Astronomy Observatory
00:17:19in the United States.
00:17:22If you look back historically, coming out of World War II in particular, there was a lot
00:17:26of interest in radio waves and radio technology and, of course, the beginnings of radio astronomy
00:17:33got started.
00:17:34So people started listening to the cosmos, listening to the sky.
00:17:37If you move forward up into the 1950s, late 1950s by then, you had radio astronomy was an
00:17:43actual science.
00:17:44There was places around the world that were studying radio astronomy.
00:17:49Certainly if you look over to Europe and Asia, Russia was already building significant radio
00:17:53telescopes at the time.
00:17:55The Netherlands was already building significant radio telescopes, and other countries were
00:17:58starting to look at it.
00:18:00Within this country, although radio astronomy was acknowledged as a field of science, there
00:18:06wasn't any significant radio telescope that the astronomers could use.
00:18:11Instead, there was a lot of fantastic instruments, but kind of built in people's backyards, built
00:18:16in people's laboratories.
00:18:18So in 1956, they started searching for a place to put this new national radio
00:18:24astronomy observatory.
00:18:26And there were a lot of criteria.
00:18:28I mean, radio astronomy is a very sensitive science.
00:18:32The signals are very weak, so you had to look for a place that didn't have a lot of people.
00:18:37You know, people are noisy, and they build things that are noisy, especially in the radio
00:18:43spectrum.
00:18:44So they wanted a low population area.
00:18:47They wanted it to be free of things like overhead, high tension power lines, because those things
00:18:53can create noise.
00:18:55And you know, several other criteria that scientific staff sort of shortlisted to about 29 sites
00:19:03up and down the East Coast.
00:19:05And it turned out that Green Bank, West Virginia was the ideal or most ideal place.
00:19:12So, in 1957, the Green Bank site was dedicated, and we started building telescopes.
00:19:22As telescopes began to rise from the ground up, the advantages of having a national radio
00:19:27astronomy observatory in rural West Virginia quickly became apparent.
00:19:33Green Bank soon attracted professional radio astronomers, including those interested in
00:19:38a new subset of astronomy, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, also known as SETI.
00:19:45The reason a lot of astronomers came here in the early years of NRAO is, first of all, we
00:19:53were building the biggest and the best instruments in the world.
00:19:57And we were pushing the boundaries of what we do radio telescopes could accomplish and radio
00:20:02receivers could accomplish.
00:20:05One of the best things that happened when the idea of a National Radio Astronomy Observatory
00:20:10was first decided was this idea of radio quiet zones.
00:20:16So now you have a piece of land that's beginning to build a lot of radio telescopes, and you
00:20:21have legal guarantees around it that you're not going to see a lot of noise like you would
00:20:25anywhere else that might build a radio telescope.
00:20:28As soon as you have those two pieces, you have a very obvious location to come if you
00:20:32want to go look for weird signals, frankly.
00:20:35You don't want to do that someplace where there might be a lot of other noise that you have
00:20:38to find it through.
00:20:40And so the existence of a National Radio Astronomy Observatory combined with the radio quiet zones
00:20:45around here made this a perfect place for a lot of radio astronomers to come, including
00:20:50Frank Drake and many of the other pioneers of radio astronomy in this country.
00:20:54Dr. Frank Drake, a radio astronomer regarded as the father of modern SETI, was a young staff
00:21:01astronomer at Green Bank in 1960.
00:21:04He devised an experiment using interstellar radio waves to search for signs of intelligent
00:21:09life on distant planets.
00:21:11Drake called his experiment Project OSMA.
00:21:16Conducted with one of Green Bank's 85-foot telescopes, it was the first modern search
00:21:22for extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:21:24It was an experiment to literally go out and listen, let's go see if we can find signals
00:21:31from another intelligent life out there.
00:21:34So in this particular case, Project OSMA was using radio waves, so the same type of technology
00:21:40we use today with the Breakthrough Listen Project.
00:21:43Frank had to spend many, many hours per star to just look to get the level of sensitivity
00:21:47he thought he would need in order to see a signal.
00:21:49He pieced all of that together to just see for the first time ever, let's just go take
00:21:54a measurement in a very scientific manner to see if we can see a signal from alien life.
00:22:00Obviously, he didn't see anything.
00:22:01If he did, this would be a very different conversation we're having.
00:22:04So this is the Drake Lounge.
00:22:16You can see it's furnished 1960s decor all the way, all the original furnishings and decorations.
00:22:24So it looks basically exactly as it did back in 1960 when Frank Drake and all his colleagues
00:22:28gathered here to discuss the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:22:33Frank Drake was not the only famous scientist here.
00:22:35There were famous scientists from Carl Sagan to Philip Morrison.
00:22:38So the fun thing we always try to do is say, hey, which chair did Carl Sagan sit in?
00:22:43So it's sort of neat history about this place.
00:22:49In 1961, following his experience with Project OSMA, Frank Drake organized a meeting at Green
00:22:55Bank to discuss the possibility of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
00:23:01In preparation for this meeting, he created an equation that laid the groundwork for a
00:23:05meaningful scientific dialogue about finding ET.
00:23:10It became known as the Drake Equation.
00:23:14At that time, there are very few people in the world who are interested in the search for
00:23:17extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:23:19So Frank Drake being one of them, he started thinking about, you know, what are all the factors
00:23:24that influence the probability of life elsewhere?
00:23:27So he was starting to think about things like star formation and exoplanets per star and things
00:23:32like that.
00:23:33So he thought, well, this actually fits into the form of an equation.
00:23:38He just started writing these factors down and saying, you know, this is what it's going
00:23:42to take.
00:23:43We have to know, well, we have to know a whole lot of things, but we have to know about how
00:23:46many planets are there out there in the universe, for example.
00:23:48Of those planets, how many could actually sustain life?
00:23:51And you have to piece all of these factors together and it makes an equation, an absolutely
00:23:57beautiful and fairly timeless equation, which is the Drake Equation.
00:24:02What's been amazing about the Drake Equation is certainly you can take a look at it now,
00:24:06many, many years later.
00:24:08It's really still the equation that you need in order to look and say, what is the probability
00:24:12of finding this?
00:24:13L is a lifetime of a communicating civilization.
00:24:18We only have one example of such a communicating civilization, and that's us.
00:24:24So people try and estimate, you know, how long do you think a civilization like ourselves would
00:24:29last?
00:24:30Would it last 50 years, 100 years, 500 years, a million years?
00:24:35That sort of determines how many civilizations you're going to detect, because the longer they're
00:24:40out there, the longer they're communicating, and the more likely it is that you'll detect their
00:24:43signals.
00:24:44What Frank did was consider a way to theorize the potential for the existence of an extraterrestrial
00:24:57civilization.
00:24:59A lot of his numbers, a lot of his assumptions were sort of proving we're correct, or very
00:25:05close to being correct.
00:25:07So that narrows the guesstimate factor down to a more knowing, true figure.
00:25:16You're still talking about 100,000 potential sites that you have to look at in this huge
00:25:22galaxy.
00:25:24Still becomes a daunting task.
00:25:26SETI's always been about good science.
00:25:31They have to make assumptions about what they're looking for.
00:25:34That's a really difficult thing to do when you don't know what you're looking for.
00:25:39So they've always been trying to do the best science they can with the equipment and telescopes
00:25:47and things that they have.
00:25:48SETI is such an integral part of the history of Greenbank Observatory that you can't come
00:25:57here as an astronomer and spend any time and not start hearing, not just about what's happened
00:26:02here on site with SETI, but also what's happened just around the country and around the world
00:26:06with SETI, including things like the Big Ear Telescope, WowSignal, and all of those types
00:26:10of studies that have been done.
00:26:15Oh, this would be some of the equipment, the radio equipment that they used to modulate
00:26:33the data, to collect that data with a radio, what we might call a radio, except that it
00:26:41monitors many frequencies at the same time.
00:26:45And just for fun, if you want to modulate some of that information and put it on a screen,
00:26:50you can use an oscilloscope.
00:26:52That's why old science fiction movies look so great, because they have those oscilloscopes
00:26:57running.
00:26:58From 1963 until the early 1970s, Ohio State's Big Ear Telescope conducted a survey that covered
00:27:0770 percent of the entire sky.
00:27:10Their comprehensive Ohio All-Sky Survey produced detailed maps of the radio sky that proved useful
00:27:17to astronomers throughout the world.
00:27:20But by 1972, budget shortages forced the National Science Foundation to terminate funding for the
00:27:27Big Ear.
00:27:29That decision closed one highly successful chapter in the Big Ear's history, and began another.
00:27:35In the early 70s, they ran out of money.
00:27:39The National Science Foundation stopped funding them.
00:27:45New areas of astronomy and new telescopes were being built, and that's when Bob Dixon put
00:27:51in a new receiver better suited to finding the narrow band signals that people think might
00:27:57be out there if other civilizations are broadcasting at us.
00:28:04In 1971, Bob Dixon attended a large gathering of scientists and engineers at NASA's Ames Research
00:28:11Center in Mountain View, California.
00:28:14The group shared ideas about the possibility of detecting signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
00:28:21Their findings were published in a report titled Project Cyclops.
00:28:25The goal of Cyclops was to assess what it would take to mount a large search for radio signals
00:28:31from interstellar civilizations.
00:28:34Widely circulated by NASA, the final Cyclops report strongly influenced the development of
00:28:39a SETI program at the Big Ear radio observatory.
00:28:42I became very interested in SETI at the time.
00:28:48Funding for the radio observatory nationally was lost.
00:28:52We realized we have a wonderful radio telescope here, and this would be a wonderful purpose
00:28:57to put it toward as the first large telescope dedicated to searching for extraterrestrial
00:29:02life.
00:29:03We have a perfectly good staff of people who would be willing to volunteer, and we attracted
00:29:07more volunteers.
00:29:09I was actually a volunteer at the Ohio State University radio observatory.
00:29:14My job was as a radio astronomer, specifically looking at the computer printouts from the radio
00:29:22telescope.
00:29:23So we had the equipment, and we had the people, and we reconfigured some things, and we put
00:29:28it together, and we started that search.
00:29:32Unlike the All-Sky Survey, which had utilized wideband radio waves to search for naturally occurring
00:29:38signals, the Big Ear SETI program demanded a much more narrow focus.
00:29:43Natural signals, they sound the same no matter where you tune your radio.
00:29:48If you had, like, your AM radio, it would sound the same hissing sound no matter where.
00:29:52On the other hand, an intelligent signal, we believe, would be tuned in only at one point
00:29:58on the dial.
00:29:59And that's what we're looking for, a narrowband signal.
00:30:02Narrowband signals are artificial.
00:30:04There are not very many things in nature that make narrowband signals.
00:30:09The Big Ear SETI program began in December 1973.
00:30:14With no external funding and a volunteer staff, the program and equipment were set up to operate
00:30:21with as few people as possible.
00:30:24In just a few years, the Big Ear would make one of the most intriguing discoveries in the
00:30:29search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, a signal that continues to fascinate.
00:30:49In the search for intelligent, the Big Ear SETI program was determined by an
00:31:17From what I've been told, the WOW signal was a signal that came in, lasted for 72 seconds,
00:31:27and it looks to me like a radio source, like a real one.
00:31:34On the evening of August 15, 1977, the Big Ear Telescope was engaged in its ongoing mission,
00:31:42the search for narrowband radio signals.
00:31:46With its flat reflector set at a predetermined angle, the Big Ear's beam rotated with the Earth,
00:31:53patiently scanning a continuous strip of the night sky.
00:31:57Incoming radio waves were automatically processed by computer.
00:32:01Computer printouts provided a chronological record of the alphanumeric data for later analysis.
00:32:08When we set up the receivers and the computers,
00:32:12we did it with the purpose of not having to have a large group of people maneuver data and do various things,
00:32:21because that was time consuming, costly, and so forth.
00:32:25We built everything into the receiver and the computer to do things on their own.
00:32:32We had, at that time, a 50-channel receiver, so we had 50 different receivers.
00:32:38You can imagine that 15 radios sitting on your counter, each one tuned to a slightly different frequency.
00:32:44And the output of all of those 50 was going into the computer we had at the time.
00:32:48And we had written programs to record carefully each of those 50 signals,
00:32:53and the intensity of each of those was then printed out on a sheet of paper,
00:32:57channels 1 through 50 running across the paper.
00:33:02Shortly after 11 p.m., the Big Ear registered a signal many times stronger than the normal levels of radio noise.
00:33:10The signal lasted for 72 seconds, rising and falling as it passed through the Big Ear's beam.
00:33:17No one was present to witness the event, but the computer system recorded the sudden escalation in signal strength,
00:33:24and the data printout clearly showed the tremendous spike in intensity.
00:33:30The moment passed, and Big Ear continued scanning the sky throughout the night.
00:33:36There's nobody there, typically, to look at it.
00:33:39And then, at that time, the computer, after it printed everything out, would be taken off to Jerry's house,
00:33:44and he'd look at it, and he'd look through there and see what he could find.
00:33:47Computer records were delivered to my home every, oh, about two times a week,
00:33:53a printout that contained three or four days' worth of observations.
00:33:57What you get when you're looking at data from a radio telescope is just a big ream of paper with numbers on it,
00:34:06representing what the signals were at various frequencies.
00:34:11When I would get home from teaching or at night after supper, I would sit down with the computer printout
00:34:20and start to look for anything interesting.
00:34:25The data that included August 15, 1977, and two or three days past that, just a few pages into that,
00:34:34I saw the pattern 60QUJ5, and I saw, okay, the numbers are increasing, hitting a peak, and then dropping off.
00:34:46That's exactly what we expect for a strong narrow band signal.
00:34:51Since its discovery, there has been a popular notion that the WOW signal can somehow be decoded,
00:34:57that its alphanumeric sequence harbors some hidden meaning, or message.
00:35:02In truth, the use of numbers and letters was a practical method for describing the intensity of radio signals observed by the Big Ear.
00:35:12The computer printouts generated by the Big Ear featured 50 columns, one for every channel being monitored.
00:35:19Each column had room for a single digit. Low-intensity signals were assigned a 1. Stronger signals were assigned a higher number.
00:35:29Because the printout columns were limited to single digits, signals stronger than a 9 were assigned a letter value.
00:35:36A 10 became A, 11 became B, and so on.
00:35:41This simple method clearly demonstrated the intensity of the WOW signal.
00:35:46In purely numerical terms, the WOW signal was 30 times higher than the lowest levels of random radio noise.
00:35:54We tried to think of, how could this be a fluke of some kind?
00:35:59That's the biggest thing we ever saw.
00:36:01Within 10 seconds or less, with my red pen, I circled the 60QUJ5 and wrote the word WOW exclamation point.
00:36:10And it's fortunate, I got to thinking about this later, that WOW was kind of like an expletive, but a good expletive, and so it didn't have to be deleted.
00:36:23In searching for ET, the WOW signal is the best candidate that's ever been seen.
00:36:30The thing about the WOW signal is that it had the characteristic shape, the change of intensity with time,
00:36:38followed what you would expect from some transmitter that's up there in the sky moving with the stars.
00:36:44That's what made it so appealing, so different from the kind of normal interference that you get.
00:36:51Amazed by the WOW signal's intensity, Jerry Eamon continued reviewing the computer printouts from the night of August 15th, and the days immediately after.
00:37:01He was searching for evidence that the incredibly strong signal had repeated.
00:37:06I was especially interested to see if that same signal came back a day later, which would mean in the same position in the sky.
00:37:14It didn't. It didn't appear on the third or fourth days either.
00:37:21After I got through looking at all the printouts, I called Dr. John Krause and said,
00:37:27we've got something interesting here.
00:37:30The WOW signal presented many questions.
00:37:34Was it a natural celestial phenomenon?
00:37:38Could it have been a man-made signal from a passing satellite?
00:37:42Was it an artificial signal from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization?
00:37:48John Krause, director of the Ohio State Radio Observatory, and his assistant director, Bob Dixon,
00:37:55immediately began to investigate and eliminate the possibilities.
00:38:00This is the scientific method.
00:38:02To discover something extraordinary, you need extraordinary proof.
00:38:06And so we wanted to eliminate everything else we could.
00:38:09Now, interference is the common situation with radio astronomers.
00:38:13But we have interference all the time to the radio telescope.
00:38:17But we know what it is.
00:38:18We recognize it.
00:38:19We've done it for so long.
00:38:20We recognize it for what it is.
00:38:22And the characteristics of local interference, say, coming from the Earth, is totally different.
00:38:28Interference pulses on and off.
00:38:30It looks like it's static jumping up and down.
00:38:33Never does it follow the curve of the radio telescope like that.
00:38:36Because what that means is the telescope was scanning across that area in the sky,
00:38:41and it went across whatever was sending that signal, and it went back down.
00:38:45It followed exactly the theoretical curve that it should follow for the shape of the antenna pattern of the telescope.
00:38:51That's another astounding piece of evidence.
00:38:54Dr. Krauss did the bulk of the investigation as to what it could be.
00:39:00He looked at stars, galaxies, planets, satellites, and anything else that could have sent the signal,
00:39:10and didn't find anything.
00:39:13Is it equipment malfunction?
00:39:15No.
00:39:16We ruled that out.
00:39:17Is it some planet or star or something?
00:39:20No.
00:39:21I mean, one could say it might be an Earth satellite of some kind, but the strikes are against that,
00:39:27because we're using a frequency that's protected internationally for any transmitter.
00:39:33Nobody's allowed to transmit there.
00:39:34It's reserved for scientific research.
00:39:36So for a satellite to be transmitting there, they'd have to be disobeying that rule.
00:39:41But the fact is, if it's a satellite, it has to be moving in the sky.
00:39:45It would have to be moving at exactly the right rate.
00:39:48And that's just really not very practical to think about that.
00:39:52Is it a hoax?
00:39:54Well, Jerry and I are the only ones that could have pulled this hoax by fiddling it up with the computer program.
00:40:00And I know I didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure he didn't do it.
00:40:03So we knew it was there.
00:40:06The Big Ear continued to search the same section of sky for 30 days following the WOW Signal discovery.
00:40:13Eventually, it scanned the area again for 70 more days.
00:40:18The signal never reappeared.
00:40:21And what was even more puzzling is we actually had two beams in the sky at the time,
00:40:27slightly a few minutes apart from each other.
00:40:30And when it went through one beam, we saw it, and it went through the other beam, we didn't see it.
00:40:35So that means that the signal turned off at the time we were looking at it.
00:40:40And that's even more exciting, because no natural signal would have done that.
00:40:45The Big Ear design featured two large feed horns situated side by side near one end of the telescope's aluminum ground plane.
00:40:55The dual horns acted as funnels for the radio waves bouncing off the parabolic reflector,
00:41:01essentially giving the Big Ear two beams for observing and capturing data.
00:41:06After passing through one beam, a radio wave would be picked up in the second beam a few minutes later.
00:41:13The WOW Signal's failure to appear in the second beam did cause excitement.
00:41:18It also caused ambiguity.
00:41:21If we were to pick up the WOW Signal today, you know, you would be able to, at least with some SETI experiments,
00:41:27you would be able to follow up right away, right away.
00:41:30You would immediately start looking at it again.
00:41:32Now, you could say, yes, but they did that at Ohio State.
00:41:35They did. They followed up with one more observation.
00:41:38That was an automatic feature of the antenna they were using.
00:41:42So, two minutes after they find the WOW Signal, they've looked at it again.
00:41:45And that's it.
00:41:46But, of course, today you would keep looking at it, keep looking at it, keep looking at it,
00:41:50for, you know, minutes and minutes and minutes and minutes.
00:41:53And if you didn't find it, you would say it's probably interference.
00:41:57In the years since its discovery, the WOW Signal has been recognized worldwide as a significant event in the search for E.T.
00:42:06Many still believe it's the best evidence to date of a communication from an intelligent extraterrestrial source.
00:42:13Others question its scientific validity.
00:42:17The WOW Signal certainly was a strong signal, right?
00:42:20There was no doubt about a signal being there.
00:42:23That's not the question.
00:42:24The question isn't, was there a signal?
00:42:26The question is, where did that signal come from?
00:42:28Did it really come from outer space?
00:42:30Did it come from something artificial?
00:42:31Did it come from something natural?
00:42:33Did it come from the Earth?
00:42:34And, of course, nobody knows.
00:42:36It remains unexplained.
00:42:39It was a highly significant signal that was unexpected and difficult to explain by natural phenomenon.
00:42:48But it was never repeated.
00:42:50It could never be verified.
00:42:52And so we're left really not knowing what caused it.
00:42:57You could imagine if an extraterrestrial civilization was intentionally trying to contact us,
00:43:02they wouldn't just send us one signal and then let it leave us hanging for, you know,
00:43:07many years wondering what that signal meant.
00:43:24This is a movie of the galaxy M33.
00:43:29This came from the VLA in January of this year.
00:43:33What I'm looking for here is a big colored dot that's not always there.
00:43:38That's only one radio picture at one frequency, which might be a radio signal pointed our way from the galaxy M33.
00:43:48No one's ever looked at this before.
00:43:50No one's ever seen this little movie I'm playing.
00:43:54This is what I call the small SETI radio telescope I built in the early 1980s.
00:44:00And this displays the direction the antenna is pointing.
00:44:05And this actually controls the antenna.
00:44:07So this 12-foot dish that's feeding electrical signals into this is being pointed around by a 1944 surplus military radar pedestal.
00:44:20Where's the dish that you use with this?
00:44:23Well, the dish is outside.
00:44:25Watch your step a little bit.
00:44:27I first heard about the Ohio State Wow Signal when I read an article about it in Cosmic Search magazine,
00:44:45a small radio astronomy magazine being published by John Krauss, the founder and designer of the Ohio State radio telescope.
00:44:54He wrote an article that described this unusual and intriguing signal that they discovered in 1977.
00:45:02I was a data analyst, computer jockey programmer at the time.
00:45:09This seemed so intriguing to me that I called the people at Ohio State, called Bob Dixon, I believe.
00:45:16So much to my surprise, he didn't object when I suggested I'd visit Columbus, Ohio, and look at the radio telescope and the data personally.
00:45:27Personally, everything I heard about the Wow Signal seemed more and more intriguing and more and more likely to be a real signal from the stars rather than interference.
00:45:40Since the early 1980s, Robert Gray has been searching for the Wow Signal.
00:45:48Like Grote Reber several decades earlier, Gray searched the sky using his home-brewed equipment and 12-foot dish antenna stationed in his backyard.
00:45:59Along with writing the elusive Wow, which chronicles his searches, Gray has hunted the Wow Signal at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts,
00:46:10the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory at the University of Tasmania.
00:46:18The Ohio State Wow Signal was only seen once.
00:46:23It was present for six, ten-second measurements, so it wasn't just a quick flash, but it wasn't seen twice for 72 seconds like a constant celestial source should be.
00:46:39This is a flaw in the Wow Signal, that it was only seen in one beam.
00:46:46Some astronomers believe the Wow Signal appeared in only one of the Big Ear's beams because it was man-made interference,
00:46:54or perhaps some sort of natural anomaly.
00:46:57But an opposing school of thought suggests another possibility.
00:47:01A radio signal from an intelligent extraterrestrial source might appear intermittently.
00:47:08It's possible that the Wow Signal didn't show up in the second horn because it was some kind of sweeping signal like a cat's-eye beam of a transmitter
00:47:20that was sweeping across the sky and swept across the Ohio State beam in merely a few minutes.
00:47:29Most people involved in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have one of two scenarios in mind.
00:47:36One is a beacon that's shining all the time.
00:47:40So any time we happen to look at a certain spot in the sky, we'll see it, if we're tuned to the right frequency.
00:47:45That's a terribly expensive thing to do.
00:47:49The amount of power is way more than all the power on Earth to operate a beacon that shines in all directions all the time.
00:47:56The other scenario is a big antenna that points our way every so often.
00:48:02A directed beam, and that uses a lot less power.
00:48:06That's the reason why big radio telescopes are so big is that they see a smaller spot in the sky.
00:48:13And for transmitter, that means that they're only shooting the power towards a small spot in the sky.
00:48:18So you need a lot less power.
00:48:20The drawback to a directed antenna pointing at us is it's probably not going to be pointing at us,
00:48:25not going to be pointing at us all the time.
00:48:28That's another possible explanation for something like the WOW signal being intermittent.
00:48:34Despite his continued searches and long-term effort, Gray has not been able to find the WOW signal again.
00:48:42As far as I can tell, having talked to nearly everyone in the field, no one else has ever looked for it.
00:48:49No one except for me has tried to follow up on it.
00:48:55And my observations are admittedly those of a non-professional and might very well have had some flaws.
00:49:05The professional astronomical communities never really looked hard for this thing.
00:49:12It might be worth doing so.
00:49:19People will ask me at parties when they hear what kind of work I do.
00:49:35They say, well, are you close?
00:49:37I don't know what that means.
00:49:38Are you close?
00:49:39Because until you've found a signal that you can verify and that is clearly extraterrestrial in origin,
00:49:45you've not had any close calls.
00:49:48You've not had any successes.
00:49:49You've been looking, looking, looking.
00:49:51It's like, you know, Captain Cook in the South Pacific in the 1770s, right?
00:49:55Every day, he just sees more water around the ship.
00:49:58And, you know, so, well, are you close?
00:49:59Well, he doesn't know whether he's close.
00:50:01As a senior astronomer for the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak has been an active participant in the Institute's SETI observing programs.
00:50:11He has written and lectured extensively about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the WOW signal.
00:50:19The WOW signal, of course, continues to intrigue people.
00:50:22And many people think that it's our best case for a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:50:29I find that maybe a little bit, I don't know, overstated to say it's our best case.
00:50:34It's an intriguing case because it's a mystery.
00:50:36We don't know what it was.
00:50:37But then again, if you look back into that era in the late 1970s, there were other SETI experiments running as well.
00:50:44And they would come up with mysterious signals as well.
00:50:47They would come up with signals that were seen only once and that had the hallmarks of the kind of signal you're looking for.
00:50:53But they didn't have the great name WOW signal.
00:50:57They were just sort of anonymous signals coming from a certain spot on the sky.
00:51:02I've written occasionally about a signal that we picked up in 1997, which was the, to my mind, the most interesting candidate signal that we've ever gotten.
00:51:11And for most of the day, it looked like it was the real deal.
00:51:14It turned out it wasn't.
00:51:15It was due to a solar research satellite, a European solar research satellite, SOHO is the name of the satellite.
00:51:22But for about 16 hours or so, we weren't sure.
00:51:25We thought it might be the real deal.
00:51:26And that was actually a very interesting event.
00:51:28It was a good thing it happened in my mind because it showed us what happens if you actually pick up a signal that is what you're looking for.
00:51:35The WOW signal may be a case of the triumph of branding over product, perhaps.
00:51:44Whether it's the best case of a signal from ET or an unintentional triumph of branding, the WOW signal may be the most widely recognized event in SETI's short history.
00:51:56In the years since the WOW discovery, SETI experiments have continued, benefiting greatly from advancements in technology and more sophisticated search techniques.
00:52:07Still, there are those who feel we have barely scratched the surface.
00:52:12It's hard to describe how modest our searches have been so far.
00:52:18We've typically only looked for a minute or two in any one direction and any one frequency.
00:52:24It's entirely possible that there's beamed transmissions pointed at us from other stars that if we happened to point a big antenna in the right direction, tuned to the right frequency, we would hear.
00:52:40We simply haven't conducted a long enough search yet at enough different frequencies to even know if that's possible.
00:52:51Most SETI experiments, you spend very little time looking at any given direction at any given spot on the radio dial.
00:52:57Seconds, minutes, no more than that.
00:53:00And you might say, well, that doesn't sound like a very good strategy.
00:53:02Maybe they do broadcast in our direction, but only once a day or once a week or once a year.
00:53:07You're going to miss them, most likely.
00:53:09And that's true.
00:53:10But if you're doing this experiment, you know, you have to decide what's the better strategy.
00:53:14Are you going to use that time to just keep looking in the same direction at the same frequencies?
00:53:19Or are you going to look at another star system?
00:53:22It could be that somebody is not incessantly targeting the Earth.
00:53:27Because after all, they probably don't know that Homo sapiens is here, right?
00:53:30Unless they're within 70 light years, they haven't picked up the kind of radar or FM radio or television signals that would betray our presence.
00:53:38They know there's life on Earth because of the oxygen in our atmosphere, but they don't know that there's any intelligent life.
00:53:44So, you know, how much money would you spend to relentlessly target some other planet with a signal if all you knew was that it had biology?
00:53:52Maybe all it's got is microbes.
00:53:53That's the situation that obtained here for a couple of billion years.
00:53:57So, you know, maybe you don't spend a lot of money there.
00:53:59But maybe what you do is you have a long list of all the planets that you know have life, and you just target them all sequentially.
00:54:06You give them a quick ping, right? You give them a ping and then you come back two weeks later and you ping them again.
00:54:10Or maybe two years later or 200 years later.
00:54:12And you just ping them occasionally and see if anything happens.
00:54:15And, you know, the wow signal could have been a ping. That's certainly a suggestion.
00:54:19That's just one possibility. There are many possibilities.
00:54:22And unfortunately, that doesn't turn it into science until you can prove that one of them is true.
00:54:29Scientific opinions continue to differ about the origin of the wow signal.
00:54:34Even with the controversy, it remains an extraordinary event in the broader search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:54:42I think probably the majority of astronomers think that it was just some naturally occurring phenomenon that just happened once.
00:54:50We're left really not knowing what caused it.
00:54:54We can't really be sure that it was an extraterrestrial civilization.
00:54:59He said he is based on the presumption that we are not the only civilized society in the galaxy,
00:55:05and that there are civilized societies in the galaxy that are willing and able to communicate with us.
00:55:12There are two primary paths by which we are looking for life in the universe.
00:55:18One is a systematic, more scientific path.
00:55:22The first step that you might want to know is, well, are there planets around other stars at all?
00:55:28Then, if you know that there are planets around other stars, the next thing you might want to ask is,
00:55:33well, do those planetary systems look anything like our own?
00:55:36Once we find some solar systems like ours, then what we really want to look for are planets like the Earth, pale blue dots.
00:55:43So those are rocky planets with thin atmospheres located at the right distance from their parent star where they can have liquid water on the surface.
00:55:53And that's a lot of the way in which we go about science is we take one step at a time.
00:55:58We build upon previous advances in knowledge until we ultimately get to the final question that we want.
00:56:04SETI, on the other hand, is kind of like taking a novel and going back to the last chapter and reading that and finding out what happens.
00:56:12It's kind of cheating in some sense. It's not going through the whole book.
00:56:18So you're just trying to look directly for intelligent civilizations immediately without having to go through all this systematic process of leading to the discovery of life.
00:56:30The opinions of SETI and scientists that are searching for life range from it's a crazy thing to do to it's a reasonable thing to do.
00:56:40SETI is only for patient people because you can search a lifetime and never find anything, but it's still so interesting and important that you always do it.
00:56:50So that's why people like Jerry and I get involved in doing things like this.
00:56:54The big danger in SETI is called anthropomorphism, looking at things from the viewpoint of man, because it's the only way we can.
00:57:02We try not to think about specific signals, but look at general signals, which are narrow band, which would be characteristic of any such signals.
00:57:10I think that the wow signal, even though it couldn't be identified, couldn't be verified, was a kickstart to the continued search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:57:28I mean, you think about even a young scientist, a young astronomer, who is trying to decide what his path or her path may be.
00:57:38You read something about the wow signal, and it gives you a whole new door to open. It gives you another possibility.
00:57:45We're looking for something that we don't know is there or if we're going to ever be able to detect it.
00:57:54And that's, you know, a difficult thing to justify, but it's also potentially one of the most important questions, you know, we ever want to answer.
00:58:05So you have this balance of something that's very high risk, but very high gain.
00:58:12The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I think it's fair to say, to some extent, has had a stigma associated with it.
00:58:22The perception of SETI is the UFOs and the sightings, that little green man with big eyes.
00:58:40And it's been potentially difficult to shake off that association.
00:58:48There's an entire culture of people that believe in UFOs and that we have, in fact, been contacted by aliens many, many times.
00:58:57Of course, there's a lot of excitement around the idea of aliens, of SETI, of any of that,
00:59:04because how could it not be just incredibly exciting to think that there is some other race out there,
00:59:10some other very exotic type of race out there in the universe,
00:59:13and the idea that, hey, we'll be able to interact with them is just really, really enticing and really, really exciting.
00:59:19We get a lot of UFO reports at Perkins in one form or another.
00:59:25And I have to say, it's always, always, always some natural event.
00:59:33There was one thing that I saw one time I had no idea what it was.
00:59:37These beautiful white points of light darting around, darting around.
00:59:43There was just a whole lot of them.
00:59:45So I got in my car and I drove toward it.
00:59:47What was it?
00:59:48It was a bunch of seagulls dancing around a billboard.
00:59:54The billboard lights tend to point up, and it was the lights reflecting off their stomachs.
00:59:59Thought I had it, but it was seagulls.
01:00:03The sensationalism that surrounds SETI research can be pretty amazing,
01:00:08and Green Bank has not been immune to it.
01:00:11When the 300-foot telescope collapsed in 1988, there were, albeit tabloid, newspaper headlines that said,
01:00:22Aliens destroy radio telescope in Green Bank.
01:00:27That's just proof of, you know, the need for people to think about the fantastical,
01:00:34to be exposed to the fantastical.
01:00:38If somebody could come up with one thing, one time,
01:00:43that they could describe to me that I couldn't figure out what it was,
01:00:49then I might be more interested in this kind of thing.
01:00:54Human beings love to wonder why.
01:00:59Other beings out there in the universe is just so tantalizing, so exciting to think,
01:01:05you know, there's something else out there. We're not alone.
01:01:08As a skeptic, as a scientist, I'm a skeptic.
01:01:12And as a skeptic, I have to say that I don't believe there's been any real definitive evidence
01:01:16of extraterrestrial life contacting us.
01:01:20Of course, which begs the question, does that mean that such life is rare?
01:01:24A lot of people are familiar with the Fermi paradox,
01:01:27which, simply put, is if intelligent life is out there, why?
01:01:33Where are they? Why haven't they contacted us?
01:01:35There are various solutions to this apparent paradox,
01:01:39but one of them is simply that there is no other intelligent life out there,
01:01:44that we are the only intelligent life in our galaxy.
01:01:47If I were a betting man, and I'm not, but if I were,
01:01:51I would bet that simple life is probably fairly common,
01:01:55and we will probably find it.
01:01:57Maybe not in my lifetime, but certainly within the next few hundred years.
01:02:02One of the problems with SETI is that you can't guarantee success.
01:02:06If you decide that, you know, as a young astronomer,
01:02:09you're going to go study exoplanets, you can be sure you're going to find some.
01:02:12You're going to learn something new.
01:02:14You can't miss. We found thousands of exoplanets.
01:02:17So, of course, you're going to find some.
01:02:19With SETI, there's no guarantee.
01:02:21It may be that you spend, you know, decades, maybe this takes centuries,
01:02:25maybe more, who knows, to find something.
01:02:28In all that time, you didn't find anything.
01:02:30And you've got to be able to take that.
01:02:32You've got to be able to say, look, I'm down with that.
01:02:34I can handle that.
01:02:36I personally feel that it is entirely possible
01:02:39that we will discover life beyond our own.
01:02:43Can I definitively say that it's going to happen in my lifetime?
01:02:48No, I can't.
01:02:50Do I think it will happen?
01:02:52I absolutely do think that it will happen.
01:02:55I do believe that there's life elsewhere beyond our planet.
01:02:59How advanced that life may be is a question.
01:03:03But, you know, certainly if we have progressed to the level of intelligence that we are,
01:03:10and some argue that, well, maybe we aren't either,
01:03:14I can't imagine that other potential life forms haven't progressed far beyond where we are.
01:03:24Will we discover life that is beyond just the cellular life,
01:03:29and moving on to something that is intelligent?
01:03:31Boy, you know, it's such a guess.
01:03:36I guess, um, we might.
01:03:44I think you have to be honest with people from whom you are asking for funding.
01:03:50The difficulties are great here, and the chances of success are very limited.
01:03:57And you probably won't find anything.
01:04:01Funding of basic research seems to be a challenge, especially in this day and age.
01:04:12We can't say that we're creating anything.
01:04:14We're not building widgets.
01:04:16We're not selling something for retail.
01:04:19We're doing basic research.
01:04:22And basic research sometimes is a hard sell.
01:04:25Americans like a result.
01:04:27You know, they like something they can hold in their hands.
01:04:30Careful.
01:04:33There's a tag in there, it's just loose.
01:04:37Is that Einstein right there?
01:04:39Yeah.
01:04:40Ever since 2012, the observatory has faced some issues in terms of decreased funding.
01:04:47As the first national radio astronomy observatory in the United States,
01:04:54Green Bank had always been fully funded by the National Science Foundation.
01:04:59But changing federal priorities created funding challenges over the years.
01:05:04In 2012, the National Science Foundation recommended a gradual defunding of the Green Bank facility.
01:05:12You know, the potential is there that one of the options is dismantling the telescope.
01:05:18You know, we disappear.
01:05:20And the research that's done here at Green Bank could disappear.
01:05:25There's nobody I'm aware of that would like to see Green Bank close.
01:05:32And I mean that all the way up to the people that are making the funding decisions to cut back our funding.
01:05:37They really don't want to see this place closed.
01:05:39Nobody wants to see this place closed.
01:05:41While the observatory could find other collaborative parties which could provide funding,
01:05:47the problem with that is the NSF provides open sky science,
01:05:51which means anyone can come in and apply for time whether they have the money or not.
01:05:56That is a really important thing to keep going.
01:05:59We're just going to try and do what we can to help keep that secured.
01:06:06The Green Bank Observatory has had more impact than I can say on my future
01:06:12and my ideas of what I'd like to do.
01:06:14Aspects of astronomy that I was not familiar with.
01:06:18For example, I've gotten so interested in the instrumentation side.
01:06:22I just think it's really important to have that background in knowing your equipment
01:06:26and knowing what you're researching so that you can do things like compare,
01:06:30you know, is this an actual signal or is this some sort of system issue,
01:06:35which I think is really important in SETI as well as in every field of research in radio astronomy.
01:06:43When I first met Ellie White, her and her mother came into my office.
01:06:48She was about 11 years old.
01:06:51And the funding problems for Green Bank Observatory
01:06:55had sort of just been released.
01:06:57And Ellie had been in her own time creating these cloth dolls of scientists.
01:07:04So she picked her favorite scientific people from history.
01:07:08And she had a Madame Curie doll and she, you know, she had these others.
01:07:12And the purpose of her visit was to see if we might want to sell those in our gift shop,
01:07:19which I thought, well, that's kind of cool.
01:07:21You know, maybe we could do something with her.
01:07:25But what she said next is what I'll never forget.
01:07:28It'll be one of those moments that will live with me well after I'm retired.
01:07:34The reason that she wanted to sell them in our gift shop is because she wanted to give part of the proceeds
01:07:40back to the observatory to help fund our mission.
01:07:44So these are two of the scientist dolls.
01:07:49This is Nicholas Copernicus and Albert Einstein.
01:07:53I started showing them to people and they said you should sell these.
01:07:57So I thought, well, I'll sell them and donate part of the profits to Green Bank.
01:08:01How appreciative have they been about these dolls?
01:08:04Very.
01:08:05They're very, very appreciative.
01:08:08And just it's great to hear some of the stories of people who come in and buy them.
01:08:14I think the first doll that was sold was to a lady from New Zealand.
01:08:18Will you keep doing this?
01:08:19Yeah, as long as I can keep up with the demand.
01:08:23Green Bank has had such a profound effect on her.
01:08:30Just the exposure to what we do here changed her completely.
01:08:36She became so passionate about astronomy.
01:08:40So passionate about protecting the Green Bank Observatory, you know,
01:08:45to make sure that other people get the same reaction, you know, get the same effect.
01:08:50This has been a life-changing experience for Ellie, for Josh, my son, for us.
01:08:56She's learned things about how to ask questions without fear,
01:09:00to have curiosity and enthusiasm about learning,
01:09:04which is really what we are all striving for, and it's what we look to the heavens for.
01:09:09Ellie's passion for science and for astronomy is amazing,
01:09:13and it's just really neat to watch.
01:09:15If we were, heaven forbid, to stop funding fundamental science,
01:09:21then I think we lose a lot of things.
01:09:23I think in the near term, we lose a little piece of humanity.
01:09:27I think we lose a little piece of our ability to just go ask the question why
01:09:30and try to understand who and how we got here.
01:09:33And then in the long term, if you don't have people doing the basic fundamental research,
01:09:38you're not going to have big breakthroughs 10, 20 years from now in understanding everything.
01:09:44And to me, that's the most important part of all this.
01:09:48It's time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth.
01:09:54The breakthrough initiatives are making that commitment.
01:10:02Breakthrough Listen takes the search for intelligent life in the universe to a completely new level.
01:10:10In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, along with Stephen Hawking, Frank Drake, and others,
01:10:17developed a long-term initiative dedicated to the search for intelligent civilizations beyond Earth.
01:10:24The highly funded SETI project, known as Breakthrough Listen,
01:10:28required the world's most powerful radio telescopes,
01:10:31including the world's largest, fully steerable scope, at the Green Bank Observatory.
01:10:37Much like Ohio State's Big Ear Telescope many years earlier,
01:10:41Green Bank's path led to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
01:10:46and the opportunity came at the perfect time.
01:10:49It's interesting how the timing of these things works out.
01:10:54The GBT and the Green Bank site were in need of finding external sources of funding.
01:11:00The Breakthrough Listen program is a privately funded project over 10 years,
01:11:07with $100 million being spent on it.
01:11:10It is the next huge modern search dedicated to extraterrestrial intelligence detection.
01:11:18They needed to utilize the best technology that they could find.
01:11:24And the GBT, the Green Bank Telescope, is a radio telescope that can give them more sensitivity,
01:11:31more sky coverage than any other radio telescope in the world.
01:11:36The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on for more than 50 years now.
01:11:42With the advent of Breakthrough Listen,
01:11:4420% of the Green Bank Telescope's time per year is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
01:11:50And that is hundreds of hours.
01:11:53Much, much more time and resources put towards SETI.
01:11:57So I think that really ups your chances.
01:11:59Would we like to actually see a signal in there?
01:12:03Of course.
01:12:04It would be amazing.
01:12:05It would change the way we would look at the universe.
01:12:07Because it's one thing to say there might be a signal out there.
01:12:11It's another thing to say we have found a signal out there.
01:12:15Green Bank is searching for its own WOW signal.
01:12:19We are looking for the signal that's going to knock our socks off.
01:12:24And we can't wait till we find it.
01:12:27Why would we ever want to give up the capability to expand our horizon
01:12:33and go back to a level where even the most basic question about our universe
01:12:42has to go unanswered because we didn't put a dollar into it.
01:12:47If the GBT or the Green Bank Observatory were to disappear, it's gone.
01:12:55These are national treasures located all around this country and some located around the globe
01:13:02that we just don't want to give up.
01:13:05The amount of money that it takes to run them is minuscule compared to the potential
01:13:12for expanding our knowledge that exists because they are here.
01:13:18Let's go to the future.
01:13:41Let's go to the future.
01:13:43What are we looking at in here?
01:13:52We're coming to the Big Ear room.
01:13:54This is a room that we created in honor of the Big Ear.
01:14:00And we made copies of the WOW signal, the data that we call the WOW signal.
01:14:07And we had built a beautiful scale model of the telescope, the Big Ear telescope.
01:14:17Imagine taking this element right here, the collector,
01:14:24and moving this enormous metal structure up and down
01:14:29so that you can collect information from different parts of the sky than, say, straight up.
01:14:36Can you take us out to the Big Ear?
01:14:39Sure. Let's go.
01:14:41Let's look.
01:14:42Let's go.
01:14:43Let's go.
01:14:44Let's go.
01:14:45Let's go.
01:14:46Let's go.
01:14:47Let's go.
01:14:48Let's go.
01:14:49Let's go.
01:14:50Let's go.
01:14:51That just happened, of course.
01:14:52And we'll get that out of there eventually.
01:14:55Eventually.
01:14:56I come back here practically every day.
01:15:03Big Ear is just over the crest of this hill oh I hate to walk on a golf course in my street
01:15:16shoes but what are you gonna do ladies and gents Big Ear
01:15:33after losing federal funding in the 1970s the Big Ear telescope shifted to the
01:15:44search for extraterrestrial intelligence besides discovering the
01:15:49historic Wow signal the Ohio State SETI program was recognized by the Guinness
01:15:54Book of World Records for running the longest full-scale SETI program for its
01:15:58time in 1997 despite its contributions to radio astronomy developers decided the
01:16:07land under the Big Ear would be better served as a housing development and
01:16:11golf course we got word that the land had been sold out from under us without even
01:16:20informing dr. John Krause or anybody they simply sold the land to land developers
01:16:26and their goal was to increase the size of the golf course from a nine hole
01:16:32course to an 18 hole course and then to build some 400 homes on the land just a
01:16:40few months before John Krause died at age 94 he decided he needed to write a little
01:16:47notes expressing this as a day of infamy the day that he received notification
01:16:54that the Big Ear was going to be torn down that caused a great hue and cry and Ohio State University said we are not going to spend money with lawsuits fighting over developers so they threw in the towel
01:17:09had they had a well-financed research program going I think they might have survived unfortunately a lot of these major scientific instruments get superseded
01:17:16they become obsolete interest of science scientists and scientists and scientists
01:17:23had they had a well-financed research program going I think they might have survived
01:17:28had they had a well-financed research program going I think they might have survived
01:17:31in the world
01:17:50the Big Ear had its day and important research in Astronomy
01:17:55it did that SETI research for all of those years but there comes a time when
01:18:02old technology simply has outlived its usefulness and with sadness you tear it
01:18:12down. It was a sad moment to see it go but a simple fact was that it had
01:18:23outlived its usefulness it had its time in the Sun and the land was useful for
01:18:31other purposes. Do you think a golf course and housing development do you think that
01:18:36was useful? Well the fact is that before the big year came along the land was
01:18:42basically just wasteland it was covered with trees and brush and of course the
01:18:49big year really wasn't good for much anymore the simple fact was it was frozen
01:18:57in place you could no longer remove the main primary light gathering device up
01:19:03and down like this so it was frozen in place like this so that what they
01:19:08essentially had to do was to wait for the sky to rotate above them if they wanted
01:19:13to collect information on a given star or from a given star to do SETI research.
01:19:19People miss it? I would say there was a giant uproar when the land was sold but
01:19:27when by the time the big year was finally torn down people weren't so upset about it.
01:19:35Is the Ohio State Observatory an icon? A temple of science that shouldn't have been demolished?
01:19:47It accomplished a lot but I don't think it was an icon. Unfortunately if it turns out the
01:19:56wow signal is a real thing that sometime somewhere down the road somebody demonstrates that it's a
01:20:02interstellar broadcast it'll be tragic that the Ohio State radio telescope was torn down.
01:20:11If the wow signal had been verified if it had been found again then you know it would be in every
01:20:20every history book in the world that would be in one of the most important discoveries of all time
01:20:25and because of the fact that it has this wonderful name Jerry Amen was really brilliant to write wow next
01:20:31to it if he just you know made a check mark but you probably nobody would have ever heard of the wow
01:20:35signal at least the public probably wouldn't have heard of it so you know that's the difference
01:20:40between a confirmed result and an ambiguous one unfortunately why do we search the road is long with few rewards
01:20:55the skepticism demanded by good science tempers our excitement and discovery remains elusive and yet
01:21:04we persevere fascinated by the possibility of what could be
01:21:10why care about life elsewhere that's a good question
01:21:20life here is a riot of different forms colors sizes noises environments behaviors
01:21:29and I think that people probably have an innate interest and whether something like that happened
01:21:37elsewhere and the only way to settle that question of course is to go look
01:21:46I do think there is extraterrestrial intelligent life and more than one instant in our galaxy
01:21:55and certainly in our universe the universe is so vast and the earth
01:22:02the earth and the sun are not unique in any way that we know of there are literally millions and billions
01:22:09of other planets like the earth it just seems scientifically improbable that life would have emerged only here
01:22:18but on the other hand someone has to be the first so maybe we are the first
01:22:23if so it gives us a greater responsibility to say all right we're the first
01:22:28we better not destroy ourselves we better populate the universe and make things better for everyone
01:22:36and not blow ourselves up in some stupid way
01:22:41we desperately want meaning of some sort we'd like to know why we're here are we here just by random
01:22:48accident or we were here on purpose we are trying to find context to our humanity
01:22:55it's really hard to predict what the consequences of finding a signal proving that we're not alone
01:23:02what what consequences that would have this would be a sort of an inflection point a change
01:23:07in human civilization because we would know that somebody's out there if we could ever understand any
01:23:11part of the signal that might change us much more because you would suddenly be privy to knowledge
01:23:17that's most likely far more advanced than our own so you know that could change everything
01:23:21think of the impact of it the entire world would be transformed when each and every person on this planet
01:23:37realized that we are not alone we live sometimes in a difficult ugly violent world
01:23:49and you're looking for some solace from that and the one thing that this search for extraterrestrial
01:24:02intelligence gives you is that kind of hope we want this we want that sense even more
01:24:15that we are capable of escaping the tyranny of the gravity that holds us that we can soar outward into
01:24:28the universe and where do we find that in the hope the faint hope that other civilizations have survived
01:24:37their crises have been around for long enough to be able to soar themselves we're lonely
01:24:51we want that sense
01:24:56that we are not alone
01:25:00we want it so badly
01:25:07we want it
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