Stuff You Should Know - How the Wow! Signal Works

Episode Date: June 9, 2015

In 1977, Ohio State astronomers discovered a radio transmission from space that was 30 times louder than the cosmic background noise. Since then every explanation of what it was has fallen short and the Wow! Signal remains possible evidence of alien life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic

podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Levy, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. So it's Stuff You Should Know. Wow. First of all, I think we should go ahead and apologize to

eight Stuff You Should Know fans who have already heard this. Yeah, we went to the World Science Festival. We were invited to the World Science Festival in New York City. And we want to give a little special shout out to Ben and the Ace Hotel for putting us up while we were there. Yeah, we did a live podcast short form in Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon. It was kind of a neat thing. So yeah, hey to everybody who came out to see us. We appreciated the support. Yeah, I actually thought I knew everyone by name. There were actual Stuff You Should Know fans. Yeah, I was going to apologize to them directly. There were some people who clearly were not familiar with us and were just mind blown. Yeah, walking around, glazed look in their face.

Uh-huh. They look kind of defeated. Uh-huh. I was like, oh, you like Stuff You Should Know now? Yeah, I had a couple of people come up and be like, oh, what do you guys do? This is neat. And I said, well, you just saw a short version of it, my friend. Yeah. If you want a lot more side stories and anecdotes, then tune into the long version. Yeah, we had 20 minutes. We had a 20 minute set. Boy, we had to get down to business, didn't we? Yeah, and we did, too. It was not bad. We didn't talk about tire stores or anything like that. We just talked about the wow signal. Yeah, this is, um, I think this is fascinating stuff because this is something that even the most hardened skeptic hasn't been able to fully debunk. Yeah, that's a good point. It's pretty neat that,

you know, they're upset probably. So we should say that we keep saying the wow signal and Chuck's talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of a potential transmission from an alien civilization here on earth. And it's been here on earth printed out, sitting in the Ohio State University Archives since the 1970s. Yeah. And potential is the keyword there. I think that's where most skeptics head will pop off. Right. But again, you got to say potential. You and I did. Yeah. I don't want anybody's head to pop off, you know? The thing is, like you said, Chuck, no skeptic has been able to say, here's your explanation, dumb dumb. Yeah. And they've tried. There have been plenty of explanations, but every single one has been systematically addressed

and reduced to rubble, basically. Yeah. So the whole thing finds its roots, like I said, back in the 70s, but actually goes further back than that. There's a lot of, there's been a lot of talk starting in the 20th century over aliens. Chatter. Are we the only life out there? Are there other people on other planets? And if so, can we communicate with them? And astronomers started crunching the numbers and doing the math and said, we basically have two things we can do here. We can try to go visit aliens and look for them in the flesh. Yeah. Expensive. Expensive and potentially impossible. Yeah. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yeah. But also it's the closest, the closest planet to us is like a few hundred light years away,

I believe, 400 plus, right? Which means that it would take 400 something years traveling at the speed of light to reach that planet. So we couldn't go find them. Instead, we decided that we would try to listen out to see if anybody was releasing any transmissions out there and find traces of alien civilizations that way. Yeah. And did we do a show on SETI? No. I'm sure we've talked about it before. All right. The search for extra. Oh, yes. Did we? We did. I don't remember when it came in. We definitely have talked about it before. Now that you say that. I think one of our South by Southwests or Comic-Cons might have had something to do with it. Oh, yeah. The UFOs. Maybe so. So SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It's not a

single organization, although there is the SETI Institute now since the early 1980s. But SETI is a bunch of different groups that are, they're not tinfoil hat wearing crackpots who are bound and determined to find if there's life out there. But they're open-minded folks that say, if there is life out there, let's get ahead of the game here and listen out for them and see if they're trying to say something to us. Right. There are basically people who say there's just too many stars out there that have planets and that have are potentially habitable to life. Yeah. For us, it boggles their mind to think that we are the only living beings. Sure. And they're scientists. Right. And to these scientists, the much more logical conclusions

that were one of many civilizations out there. And so they have dedicated their astronomical talents to searching for that. Yeah. And this all started happening in the early 1970s in earnest. And I think it actually started in the 60s in earnest. But with the big year, it was in the 70s, their SETI program. That's right. 1973, the Ohio State University radio observatory. I love that you laugh every time. They had something called the big year or had something called the big year. Yeah. They needed a golf course though. Yes, they did. So they got rid of the big year. Even worse than that, the big year radio telescope at Ohio State was demolished, not to build the golf course, but to expand an existing golf course. We need another nine

holes. Right. We need another clubhouse. Well, I think the big year had seen its best days by that point. So don't feel bad for the big year. I still feel bad for the big year. All right. So 1973, the big year starts scanning, listening for stuff out in outer space. Hence the name. Hence the name. And what would happen is because it was 1973, it would print stuff out on a dot matrix printer and student assistant would take that print out of what it was listening to and take it to another volunteer teachers, professors, and they would just basically look at all these numbers. Yeah. Page by page by page. If you've ever seen the wow signal, it's just numbers. One's, two's, maybe a three here or there. Yeah. It's the level of background noise in space.

Exactly. So a one is a blip, a radio transmission that was one time the intensity of the normal background noise in space on a particular frequency. Right. Yeah. A one is nothing like there's ones all over the place all the time. There's one's twos and threes. Yeah. Very common stuff. Yeah. And so this, these, these poor astronomers who were donating their time to the bigger telescope were basically, they were the, the, they were analyzing this stuff. Yeah. With their eyes. Yeah. There wasn't like a computer program they spit it into. No. They looked at this computer print out sheet after sheet after sheet. Right. So for a, they would look at a whole night's scan of deep space. Yeah. From a radio telescope. Again, with their eyes

going over sheets and sheets of computer paper, dot matrix printer paper. And that's what this guy named Jerry Amon, who is an astronomer at Ohio State was doing on August 18th, 1977. He was looking over some stuff from three days before. Yeah. And so he's scanning all the stuff and there's ones twos and threes and he's, you know, he's watching love American style on TV and eating his TV dinner. And he's bored out of his mind. Love American style. And he's bored out of his skull. And then, well, here's another important thing to point out because it was also 1973, the seven, that was the 77 at this point. They didn't have double digit printouts. No, it just went one through nine and then started with the letter a BCD as 10, 11, 12 and so on.

Right. Exactly. So he's reading this stuff and he sees six eq uj five, which means the transmission at its peak of you peaked at 30 times louder than anything they had ever seen before. Then the normal background noise. He circled it and put wow exclamation point on the paper. And that's why it's the wow signal. Exactly. And this is a big deal. I mean, like in this whole old, huge ream of dot matrix paper filled with ones and twos and maybe a three here or there, there's a you standing in the middle of this string. The string started at six, which was high. Yeah. I mean, six alone and be like, Whoa, this is kind of significant. This thing went up to you. And like you said, he circled it and wrote wow next to him and became the wow signal. And

almost immediately they started investigating this thing. Sure. And there are a lot of details to the wow signal that are make it even more impressive than just the fact that it peaked at you started at six and ended at five and peaked at you. There's a lot of different aspects to the wow signal that make people say, what in the name of God is this? Yes. And we will start getting those details right after this break. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to

be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck. Yes. We were talking about how the wow signal looks on dot matrix paper, 6EQUJ5. And that means that at its peak, it goes from six times the normal background noise, all the way up to 30 times, and then back down to five

times the normal background noise. Yeah. Over what we know, over 72 seconds. Yes. Which is very significant. Yeah. Turns out. So, the Big Ear Telescope, we should say a little bit more about, it was a Kraus Telescope that was built in the 60s. And it didn't move. It eavesdropped on the electromagnetic radio spectrum coming from outer space. Yeah. It eavesdropped on it, but it used the rotation of the Earth to move it. Yeah. It didn't pan its little Big Ear back and forth. It wasn't a show off. No. It just stayed fixed. The rotation of the Earth very slowly would pick up a new patch of Earth at the rate of the Earth spin. Right. So, the Big Ear Earth Sky, the rate of the Earth spin. Right. And so, it's just pointing out there in

deep space. And as the Earth rotates, it would move the Big Ear's field of reception, I guess. Sure. Across any given point in the sky over a 72 second period. Yeah. And it just so happens that the 6EQUJ5 wow signal transmission was 72 seconds. Which suggests something very important here, Chuck. It suggests that the wow signal came from a fixed point in the sky. Right. That was staying in one place and the Big Ear just sweat past it over the course of its normal 72 seconds. Yeah. And I liken it to like if you're driving through the desert listening to your radio, your signal the further you are from that radio transmitter or that radio station is going to be pretty faint. And then as you get closer and have that direct signal is going to

peak and then as you drive further past it, it's going to get more faint again. Yeah. And that's what shape that this wow signal took. It took the shape of a pyramid if you graph it out. And I believe that's the Doppler effect because I was here with the Doppler effect being explained by how an ambulance siren sounds far away and then gets louder as it gets closer and then it gets, you know, weaker the further away you get. Yeah. Well, it also changes pitch though. Isn't that the Doppler effect? I think so. It's not just loudness. It's like if you're in England. Did you change pitch just then? Yeah. You didn't hear any difference? No. You didn't hear it go down? In volume. You didn't hear it go down in tone? No. Wow. Did you really?

Are you tone deaf? I don't think so. It would explain a lot as far as karaoke goes. Did you sing karaoke? Did you recently? Yeah. What'd you sing? I got some songs here there. You can't tell us one of them. Is that too revealing? No. Let me think of one of my karaoke songs. My big move is always under pressure. Oh, yeah. And someone's always like, oh, I'll do it with you. I'll do the Bowie part. I might not do both parts. I recently sang I the Tiger. Oh, yeah. There you go. I have a big problem though with my karaoke stuff. A lot of the songs that I pick are just slightly out of the key that I can comfortably achieve. Well,

if you're picking 80s rock, then yeah. But you would think I the Tiger that the guy's not singing that high pitch, although I know he hits that high note and I knew that. Yeah. But from the start, that guy starts out like a little higher than I can go. So it's just, it's not necessarily a treat for everyone around me when I'm singing karaoke because I accidentally, every once in a while, I'll have a night where like every song I pick is right in my wheelhouse. Yeah. And I'm nailing them. But for the most part, it's, yeah, I warble a little bit, I guess. I think the key to karaoke is to get your songs that you know you can do and kind of stick to those. Well, I'm not like a pro. Well, you know, like I did a foreigners cold as ice one time by accident because the song I wanted

to do, I think under pressure, someone had done and I was, they were calling me. I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll just do this. Yeah. And the karaoke guy in Philadelphia said, well, I hope you're, I hope you can have a vice for your testicles. But he didn't say testicles. Oh, he did. And I went, why? And then I remembered how high that song was. It is. It was a disaster. I had the tigers not that far off. Yeah. And I should give a plug here to SIG Gold's Request Room. Oh, yeah. If you're in New York City, you should go to SIG Gold's Request Room. It's on. Is that one of those private karaoke doors? 26. It's not private. It's just a piano karaoke bar. Oh, okay. Not private room. No.

Okay. But it's a back room with like a heavy curtain. So there's a sense that it's private, but it's not private. It's just, you just show up and, but it's live. It's a guy playing piano instead of a backing track. Yeah. It's a guy named Joe McGinty. Nice. He's very good, talented musician. He's actually a friend of Yumi's. And he used to play for the psychedelic first. Holy cow. And he, now he's a, one of the owners of SIG Gold's Request Room. Man, that place is going to blow up now. I hope so. It should. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Boy, that was a good segue or not segue because that leads to nothing. No, it leads to, uh, how did we get on that Doppler effect? Yeah, exactly. So, uh,

let's talk about SETI again. Okay. Let's bring this all back home. All right. SETI, uh, or the different SETIs around the world decided at one point that, um, like you said, a good way to find, uh, transmission might be to listen out for it. And if we're going to listen, um, what would be the most likely, um, radio station that they would transmit? Well, yeah. I mean, like, uh, and of course it's not a radio station. I say that as a joke, but, but that was the first, that was the first, um, that wasn't the first thing they thought of. No. Like if, if you say, okay, we can't go to distant planets to start searching for aliens, there's just, it's just too far away. We would all die on the way there, right? Yeah. We're going to wait for them to come down and play a moog

at devil's tower. Exactly. Instead, we're going to look for traces of them. Yeah. Listen. How can we find, but that the, well, listening wasn't immediately the thing. They started thinking like in different ways that you could find evidence of alien civilizations. And finally, what they settled on was there, if you're an alien civilization, you are probably familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum. So let's start looking there. Yeah. And they started looking at the electromagnetic spectrum to see maybe where you would find some sort of evidence of alien civilization. And they thought, how about the radio band? Yeah. There were a couple of, uh, physicists, uh, from Cornell in the sixties, Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Caconi, who, uh,

reckoned that, you know, they're going to find a common language. They're going to broadcast on what, what's like the most common language of the universe. Hydrogen. Not quite a language. Espanol. Espanola. Not quite, uh, I'm sort of being fun here with like saying it's a radio station and it's a line, but hydrogen is the most abundant common element in the universe. Right. And there is a hydrogen line, a hydrogen frequency. Yeah. So they figured this may be a good place to start listening. Yeah. And, and, um, hydrogen's protons flip. They change spin in pretty, pretty much all the time, right? Okay. And as they flip and change their spin, they emit a little bit, just a tiny teensy bit of electromagnetic radiation. Like a little glow.

Right. And that the frequency of that emission is at 1,420 megahertz since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And hydrogen is flipping all of the time. It's also emitting this, um, radiation all the time, which makes 1,420 megahertz the most common frequency on the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All hydrogen all the time. And again, these city researchers, Philip Morris and Giuseppe. And I know it's Philip Morris and I was just making a joke. Sure. A tobacco joke. Yeah. They have their hands in everything. Um, since these guys said it, they would probably transmit somewhere on the radio spectrum. Um, and they would probably be familiar with radio spectrums and electromagnetism. They would also probably know just like we just

figured out that the most common frequency in the entire universe, no matter where you are, is 1,420 megahertz. So maybe this would be a really good place to listen out for alien radio transmissions. That's right. And the while signal was broadcast at 1,420.4556 megahertz right in the middle of the hydrogen line, right on the most common frequency in the entire universe. We found in 1977, a radio transmission that was 30 times stronger than the normal background noise on that frequency. That's right. And that makes, uh, made scientists go, holy cow, or wow. Wow, indeed. That even made skeptics go, oh, what, what's this all about? Exactly. The shape of it, like we talked about, the pyramid shape, um, is exactly what you would expect. So that made

everyone sit up and go, all right, well, there's also that. And then the sharpness I know is the third big reason that it just doesn't fit in, right? Or it does fit in as an alien transmission. So there are tons of like, um, very powerful bursts here. They're radio transmissions like quasars emit, um, radio transmissions and, um, satellites. There's, well, there's a lot of natural ones. I mean, the natural ones are very messy. They get spread across the band, the electromagnetic band. So, um, if you got like a burst from like a quasar or something like that, you, you found it through the big year, you're going to, it's going to turn up on, say, like channel 1420, 1430, 1440, it's going to spill over across the band. They're very messy.

One of the things that really makes the wow signal so significant is that it was, um, um, tuned basically. It appears to have been tuned because it came through only on the 1420 frequency. It didn't spill over and the big year was listening to 50 channels. So imagine like your radio is tuned or you have 50 radios tuned to 1400, 1410, 1420, 1430 and so on, right? Up to 14 whatever that goes to 50 channels out. Um, the wow signal only came through on the 1420 frequency right then. So you've got the sharpness. You've got the fact that it was right in the middle of the hydrogen line. You have that pyramid shape and everyone is wondering what the heck is going on. And, uh, right after this message, we will talk about a few reasons why it may not

be an alien transmission. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to

father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about

myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we've made a bit of a case that there's something hinky that happened on August 18, 1977. Right? Yeah, I think so. Pretty strong case. Of course, when you make a case like this, it's like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Basically, what we've ended up with is this is some evidence. So you can't make like a full claim that, hey, this is definitely an alien trying to get in touch with us because all we have is that 72 second burst. We haven't been able to find it since then, and we've looked or listened. Right. And just attending in an unexplained radio signal doesn't, I mean, it's just, it's not like the signal said,

hey, we're broadcasting to you live from Kepler 43B. Right. We'll be seeing you guys in 2150 AD. Right. When we come down and take over your planet. It can be a bad day for you. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, like you said, that it's not in and of itself a proven alien signal, but there are a lot of really unexplainable things that support the idea that that's potentially possible. There are a lot of people who have tried to put out explanations to the contrary. Right. For one, they have gone back and listened to that same patch of sky over and over again more than a hundred times and no one's ever picked up the wow signal again. Yeah. And I have sure it would be nice to go back to that same patch of sky and hear it again.

But if it takes a lot of energy to beam a signal like that from deep space, it may have been a one off. Yeah. Or some people have theorized that maybe if you were an alien civilization, it takes so much power to broadcast in every direction, you might use more of a lighthouse sweeping method. And so it wouldn't be at that fixed point. You know, it's just out there moving across the sky. Right. And it just so happens that the big year and this lighthouse radio beacon crossed one another just the same. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the right time. Yeah. That is a pretty good counter explanation or counter argument to that one. Sure. Another one was that it was some sort of transmission from Earth projected and reflected off of like a piece of space debris.

There's a lot of junk out in space. Yeah. You've seen gravity. I've seen gravity. Yeah. There's a lot of space junk out there and it can reflect radio signals, right? But there's some real problems with that explanation as well. Yeah. Because I believe that from Earth, we don't transmit on the hydrogen line, correct? Right. It's protected. Like you're not allowed to transmit on that because people are listening out for aliens on that line. So no bounce back. No. So even if you do have one jerk whose sole purpose in life is to mess with steady scientists by beaming radio signals at 1420 megahertz so that they'll get beamed back into space, even if there was somebody transmitting and it supposedly bounced off a space junk, there's still

problems with that explanation too. Chiefly, the space junk would have to be moving in the same direction at the exact same rate as Earth in order to give the illusion that it was coming from a fixed point in outer space. Yeah. Because remember, the Earth would actually, it would have to be even more mind-boggling and perfect than that. It would have to be moving at a rate that allowed the Earth to pass by it over the course of 72 seconds. Right. It couldn't just be moving at the same rate or else the big Earth would never signal. Exactly. So apparently Jerry Amon was a skeptic of his own wow signal. Yeah. And even he was like this, no, that the space debris thing, it's just the probability of everything lining up like that is just so small that I hereby dismiss

that. That's what he said. He did. And here's the thing, a few years later, I think in 1980, they actually developed the capability for this big year and then other radio telescopes to move on their own. So in other words, if it would have locked onto that signal, it could have locked on and then counteracted the rotation of the Earth and really listened to see how long that thing lasted. Yeah. Because we have no idea how long it lasted. We know it lasted at least 72 seconds. Yeah. But no more than 24 hours because it wasn't there the day before and it wasn't there the day after when the big year went through and sweat past the same patch of sky. Right. So they went over the data, believe me. Yes, they did. And like we said, they started listening for it specifically

in the very large array, the VLA in the mid 90s. And that is, is that in New Mexico, I think? Yeah, New Mexico. Okay. That has the power of 27 separate radio antennas 100 times more sensitive than the big year. And they specifically, this guy named Robert Gray, an amateur astronomer, went looking for it, pointed it towards Sagittarius, which is sort of the rough direction that the wow signal came from. And again, he's like, I haven't heard anything since then. No. Well, then that's another point that a lot of people say it was nothing is that the, that point out in deep space out in the sky, there's nothing there. Right. There's no planet. There's no star. There's no nothing. So what, what is some seemingly artificial radio transmission being broadcast

from when there's nothing but space out there? Pretty weird. It is very weird. But again, every argument that's been made has been, you can make a counter argument to an irrational, reasonable one. So when are we saying that they're, that this was an alien transmission, not necessarily, but it is still potentially a reasonable explanation, given the evidence that the wow signal presents. Yeah. I think the way I like looking at it is what Jerry Amon said sometime in the 80s. He says, the best way I can think of it is that it was a tug on the cosmic fishing line. It doesn't prove that you have a fish on the line, but it does suggest that if you keep your line in the water at that spot, you might get a fish. So I don't know

necessarily about that spot, but it was, it was something that we can't quite explain. Yeah. And um, you know, keep the very large array going, like keep listening, keep watching the skis. I mean, skies. Um, you got anything else? Did we miss anything? Oh man, we could go on about SETI and all that stuff for days. Maybe we will someday. I think the official skeptics line is that, uh, what did they finally say? They like it's a, the skeptics club. Yeah, the skeptics club. They said, uh, oh, an interstellar radio source of unknown origin is the official line. So the skeptics club. Yeah. A big shrug of the shoulders, essentially. Gotcha. Yeah. So who knows? Six EQU J five. Pretty remarkable. I'll bet somebody has that tattooed on him somewhere.

I bet he spit. Oh yeah, totally. Like on the back of their neck. Um, I bet Jerry Amon like spit his coffee all over the paper too. You know, did a big spit take. Yeah. Uh, classic Amon. Totally. He's like the Jerry Lewis of astronomers. Yeah. Uh, if you want to know more about Jerry Lewis or the wow signal or anything like that, you can type some words like six EQU J five in the search bar at how stuff works.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this purpose of life. We got a lot of great responses from does the body replace itself when you went into that really nice philosophical, um, sidebar on like, why are we here? Right? I thought it was interesting. Thanks. Um, hey guys, just finished my four month binge of

all 700 plus episodes of stuff you should know and wanted to write in about does the body replace itself towards the end. You discuss the purpose of life and why there can't be just a one or a few species. Uh, if the purpose of life is to cycle carbon, uh, et cetera, speaking as a geologist, biologist, the earth doesn't need life for anything. The planet would be just fine with no life and no carbon cycling. It would just look quite a bit different. Uh, talking about the purpose of life like this is an easy and common fallacy that implies some need that's being filled. A life's purpose, if you want to call it that is simply to replicate itself. That is, at some point, there was a molecule able to replicate itself as it did that some copies were better at

replicating than others and so on and so on. Over time, it became more effective to be encased in a membrane, uh, then to use DNA, uh, then to use DNA instead of RNA and so on and so on. Everything alive today shares the history of ancestors that replicated and passed on their genes successfully. Life doesn't need to live or die or eat or breathe or swim or fly or photosynthesize or procreate or think or love, but it does those things because they help it effectively copy and pass on the genes. Uh, this is the fundamental purpose of life and though some may think it's cynical or heartless, I find it beautiful and truly awesome. And that is Danny in Seattle. Thanks a lot Danny. Seattle, all the atheists and agnostics out there. Right. I just

posted a thing. They have like, uh, seven percent more agnostics and atheists than the rest of the country. Oh really? Seven percent? That's pretty significant. Yeah, and twenty percent less identifies Christian than the rest of the country. Huh. So, just a bunch of godless freaks. Well, thanks Danny for tossing your old pining in about the purpose of life or the purposelessness of life. Uh, if you want to chime in on this whole thing, we can keep it going. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

A different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need

you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.