10 Things Absolutely Nobody Knows The Answer To

2. The Origin Of The WOW! Signal

These days, the average length of a phone call is a mere fraction of what it was in the day before texts, emails, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik, and Yo!, a just-launched app which lets you send the message "Yo!" to anybody else who has the app (not a joke). If that seems like a sad indictment of where we are as a species, let us remind you that aliens are worse. Or whoever it is that beamed a 37 second message from the middle of space on 15 August 1977. They didn't even bother leaving a name in their haste.

So named because the guy who "heard" the message wrote simply "WOW!" on his notepad, the Wow! Signal was a narrowband signal picked up by the SETI radio satellites, which are designed to search the cosmos for messages in deep space. It came from somewhere near Sagittarius, at a frequency of 1420 megahertz, and the nearest star from where it originated was 220 lightyears away. And that's all we know about it for sure. Some have taken the unexplained message as our first contact with alien life, a signal sent off into the great black beyond the same way that we're constantly sending up junk for extraterrestrials to find and be impressed by.

Despite their best efforts, SETI have never "heard" anything from those coordinates since, which puts paid to that theory. Other spoilsports have tried to argue that what was heard was simply noise pollution, a radio broadcast from Earth that somehow got picked up by the satellites and had its origins confused. We'll never know for sure, unless the aliens call back and give us their return number at some point.