Readit NewsIt seems sort of like wondering if a fiber ISP is profitable per GB bandwidth. Of course it is; the expensive part is getting the fiber to all the homes. So the operations must be profitable or there is simply no business model possible.
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I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth".
From the first arxiv paper's abstract
> We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). A maser flare or superradiance mechanisms can produce stimulated emission consistent with the Wow! Signal. Our hypothesis explains all observed properties of the Wow! Signal
> we confirm that small, cold HI clouds can produce narrowband signals similar to its detection, which might suggest a common origin.
The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things...
Edit:
I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more).
Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important.
But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect that it does exist given what we know about life and cosmos.
Finally, many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength. Some folks found “close accident” more likely than “distant and impossibly strong.”
To have an extraterrestrial origin, and still be so anomalously strong at the point of reception, it must have been so strong at the source that it didn’t fit any known cosmic process. Given the inverse square law, the easiest explanation for the unusual strength was simply that it was unusually close. But this work seems to rule that out and also propose a process to create such a strong signal.
I also have a faceted search that some stupid crawler has spent the last month iterating through. Also mostly uncached URLs.
Of course they are crawling every day to improve their training data. The goal is LLMs that know everything, but “everything” changes on a daily basis.
Meta and OpenAI are simply the largest after Google, but Google has had ~20 more years to learn how to politely operate crawlers at full-Internet scale.
I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
don't go on the rival platform and legitimize it further, IMO
High-profile brands are somewhat stuck because departing would cause a negative news cycle. Quite a few have shrunk their organic social media teams and put more resources into paid social media, which has a more directly measurable ROI.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
I would not be surprised to find out that Synology is seeing a smaller market year over year and becoming desperate to find new revenue per person who is shopping for a NAS today.