[TillE]

Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.

[recursive]

Most things aren't known. The lack of a known alternative is hardly evidence of anything in this domain.

[lawlessone]

There was something a few years ago saying it was likely hydrogen getting lased or something by starlight and emitting the signal.

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...

[shagie]

The recent article on the WOW signal is "Arecibo Wow! II: Revised Properties of the Wow! Signal from Archival Ohio SETI Data" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 by Abel Méndez, Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (and many others)

This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).

[FatalLogic]

>but for now there's not really any known alternative

The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative

[djrj477dhsnv]

That's like saying God is the best explanation for any newly described natural phenomenon.

[pndy]

May I interest you in "Calculating God" by Robert J. Sawyer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector

[amenhotep]

How? We don't know gods exist. We know beings with technology and agency living on planets in space exist. There seems nothing at all similar between the two explanations.

[bluGill]

Planet. Man has reach the moon (not in my lifetime) but that isn't a planet. There are robots out a little farther but so far as we can be sure only one planet has life. (you can calculate odds of others but there isn't enough data to be confident)

[fallat]

God is an extraterrestial or not? :)

[goatlover]

In the ancient view of the cosmos, God/gods, the heavens and other divine beings were part of the same universe. They were literally above the Earth, but made of a different kind of substance. Or down in the depths.

At some point more this shifted to the divine being an entirely separate supernatural domain.

[zamalek]

It could just as easily be known, or unknown, physics.

[krapp]

Space aliens are also not a known alternative.

[ghurtado]

Not really.

There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.

At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.

Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.

So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.

Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.

[cmrdporcupine]

Indeed. Human history is riddled with anthropomorphism and people here trying to argue for more of it.

We probably wouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.

[autoexec]

I doubt they'd be all that unfathomable. We come from the same universe after all, and as far as we can tell it's all governed by the same physics. It stands to reason that life on their worlds would have developed under at least some of the same rules we developed under on Earth. That should put at least some constraints on their forms and functions.

They might have learned different things than we have, they might know a lot more about our universe than we do, but I'd guess that much of what we've managed to learn so far will still be a part of their reality regardless of their level of familiarity with it. For example, more than 90% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. They might have discovered things that are more exotic and never seen on Earth, but the hydrogen atoms we've studied won't be any different from hydrogen they'd have studied. We share a home. By the time they've figured out enough of how the universe works to reach us it's pretty likely that we'll have some common ground to talk about.

[ghurtado]

The real aliens were the friends we made along the way.