Deciphering the Wow! signal, Part I

A little bit of inferential channelling, as an appetiser

Deciphering the Wow! signal is a multifaceted phenomenon. As such, I will have to break it up into parts, which I will publish separately. In order to follow what I’m saying (and if you haven’t read it before), you should definitely read and refer to my first post on the subject, *Authenticating the Wow! Signal*, which you can read there.

I’ve also written more about this over on my Substack. This Part 1, actually, is an abridged and slightly edited version of this Substack post. One irony is that despite its title, that is not a definitive decipherment. Because since then I’ve discovered a fair bit more, including something of a bombshell which I’ll share with you in the final part of this little series of posts. Hopefully that’ll entice you to stick with me, eh!

For this present article, also bear in mind there’s a little bit of channelling going on. Some more sceptically minded might call it a sort of method acting, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. The point being, I just found it easier to write this from the sender’s point of view. In fact, if I can fulfil my intentions, the second part of this series will address the psychology and game theory of SETI and METI (the receiving and sending of messages), and the genius of this Wow! signal compared to the lack of psychological maturity in the Golden Record (remember, the Golden Record and the Voyager probe is the context for the Wow! signal message). If you want a heads up on that sort of thing, I did two recent articles on my Substack which are really quite amusing, SETI here, and METI here.

Anyway, enough of an intro. Here is a basic run-through of some of the inferences an intelligent, educated recipient could and should be able to gather from an acceptance of the intelligent design behind the Wow! signal. The sender, after all, is surely intending for the recipient to be intelligent and educated and open-minded, wouldn’t you say?

Be amazed, and enjoy!

Voyager…

So then, first, we look at the metadata. Ignore the signals. These three signals are all related, as I’ve shown. The first, Ozma, comes from Epsilon Eridani. The second, Wow! signal, was inserted directly into the computer. The third, BLC-1, comes from the nearest system, Proxima Centauri. Translation — we are here at Epsilon Eridani, we are also here at Proxima, but we are also here on your planet. This means 1/ confirmation of the reality of the Zoo Hypothesis. 2/ Confirmation of the reality of interstellar travel. 3/ Our civilisation at the very least stretches between Proxima and Epsilon Eridani. In other words, either we are one interstellar species, or we are multiple species who cooperate and are therefore friends and therefore we have long-since overcome any xenophobia. In which case, there is a little galactic community waiting up here for you.

You might also want to reconsider your Drake equation while you’re at it.

Next, the existence of Wow! signal as evidence of ‘we are here’, also confirms not just that ETI know everything about humanity, but we allow ourselves to intervene. We do not have your ‘prime directive’ of non-intervention. Our metadata made use of your own dating and timing system. We anticipated your reactions to our signals (cover up, disbelief). Each subsequent signal we send makes it harder for you to cover up. You keep having to invent a new excuse. By doing this, we are giving you the opportunity to expose yourselves — and you will be exposed to the public at some point. How do you think they will react? Given we are aware of everything that goes on in your world, including your secretive aspects, we know about your Brookings Report and we understand why you do cover ups.

And we do not approve. Xenophobia is incompatible with a galactic community.

Now let’s focus on the Wow! signal itself. This is the one with all the information in it, after all. The other two are simply saying ‘we are at this place, and we are at that place’.

Again, the metadata. The other aspect of that metadata is the correlation with the Voyager One probe, which contained your ‘golden record’ and your President’s letter. It also contained a little greeting from your UN Secretary General of the time, Kurt Waldheim. He said, paraphrased, that you would like the opportunity to ‘teach if called upon, and to learn’. Likewise, your President expressed the hope that you too might ‘one day join a community of galactic civilisations’. Well, in the manner of diplomacy, we are going to assume that both these people were being honest and meant what they said. Sure, we know what a lying deceitful monster your President actually was, and we know that deep down he (and his puppet masters) would hate it if he, and the American people, were confronted by a far bigger fish, but we’re going to take the ironic choice of believing him.

So, here is our Wow! signal, in response.

The metadata connection, just to remind you, is that the Voyager One launch date/time was precisely 20 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes and 1 second after the signal. Remove the zeros and that’s your 214. Add your 1 second remainder and that’s 215. So that completes the sequence and tells you our signal is specifically related to your interstellar message on your spacecraft. You weren’t to know we already know everything about you, of course, or that we can read your language, but we would like to point out that next time you send us a written letter in your language, please remember to include a bloody language dictionary. Otherwise we might just think you are rude.

The golden record, by the way, contains a series of images from this planet, some basic information about the solar system and the atmospheric composition of Danuih, and then there’s an hour-long mix tape. Selection of music, I mean (most of it not American, I should note). Given we are aware of your musical history, and that this is 1977 we’re talking here, the fact you only chose one instance of adolescent music, namely the Chuck Berry number, we do find it telling that this primitive and simple example is all you could come up with from the sheer wealth of adolescent music available by 1977.

And surely you could have thought of cosmic rock or what? Hawkwind! Hawkwind! Space Ritual! It was released in 1973, four years’ earlier!

Amongst other options, I would’ve chosen The Sex Pistols’ *God Save the Queen*. That would’ve given us a massive amount of information about your society. ‘God save the Queen/the fascist regime/they made you a moron/potential H-bomb’. So, it tells us you have a hierarchical society, which is viewed by some as fascist, rather than benevolent; they dumb you down instead of educating you, presumably in order to preserve control over the people — which should properly be called feudalism rather than fascism — and you have H-bombs. That sounds like something we should be extremely concerned about.

See how much information you can decipher from four simple lines from a popular song?

I’m not being frivolous here, by the way — I’m actually making a very important psychological point, regarding how to think intuitively when you decipher messages from ETI. That works the other way round too, of course, and if you’re interested I have done an analysis of all the images on the golden record and it doesn’t portray you in a good light. There are images of extreme inequality, for example.

Similarly, your President’s letter starts with the opening line ‘This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America.’ Then it says something like ‘we are a nation of some 250 million people out of a total world population approaching 4 billion’. Then later ‘we are still divided into nation states, but rapidly becoming one world’.

Ok. So what you are saying, Mister President, is that your very first interstellar probe was not a global project on behalf of the entire species, which should’ve been a major celebration for everyone. This tells us that you do not share your technology with the rest of your species. You represent, what, only 15% of your species population. We can infer you wish for dominance over others. You see, there is a hell of a lot of social-psychology implications one can get simply from those opening two lines. And it doesn’t make you look good.

Back to Wow! signal. Let’s list the information it contains (but don’t get too caught up with the mathematics — you don’t need to analyse it to death). First, there are numbers games (equals curiosity and mischief). This includes an encoding of the golden ratio, and geometric Pi. Geometric Pi (as we would assume you know — even though we know you don’t) does not occur in nature because there are no 1-dimensional objects (we have a sense of humour). Likewise, authenticating the message with an irrational number is something we know your scientists would think of doing. So, we are already thinking from your point of view.

That tells you a lot about our psychological and emotional maturity. Bear this in mind as we proceed. Your Secretary General, after all, did say you were willing to learn, right?

No, of course we’re not being patronising. Whatever gave you that idea? Stop projecting.

The golden ratio. This is a matter of aesthetics, of course. So, it tells you we have art. It actually tells you a lot more than this but we’ll get to that in a minute, because we need to combine it with music. You sent us music, so we thought we’d return the favour. The 6-digit sequence in channel 2 there contains a musical key, which can be deciphered using the harmonic series which we must assume you know about. We put a lot of instances of the number 31 in the signal just to draw your attention to this (there are 31 numbers in the first five octaves of the harmonic series).

This musical key constitutes our gift to you, and we mean it sincerely as such. What better gift of friendship could you give, after all? It’s about sharing culture. In our case, with that key, it’s about sharing our personality and character with you. Music conveys emotions, after all.

So let’s talk neuroscience. You have neuroscience now, we believe?

If we have music and an appreciation of art then we have emotional processing centres in our brains. It should be already obvious to you that we are social animals because science itself is a social activity. Besides, we are not aware of a non-social intelligence that does science and music and spacefaring (planetary intelligences notwithstanding, but that’s another matter). If we are a social animal then you should automatically be able to understand the fact that our brains must contain certain processing parts/functions, which have evolved over a long period, just like yours have.

Are you aware of the concept of ‘love’? Sure you are. Love is a necessity for the survival of any social animal, especially mammals, because the parents have to love the child, unless the child is born fully developed, in which case we’re talking eggs laid and then forgotten. But if there were just absent parents then there would be no love, and we have already demonstrated we have music and art. That kind of thing is born out of love. Positive emotions, that is to say. Like your right amygdala.

If you listen to the musical key, however, you’ll notice that the bass bit (denoted by the ‘1’ in channel 1 to the left) is quite dark. It may express ‘negative’ or ‘sad and nostalgic’ emotions. So let’s call that similar to your left amygdala. It makes sense, after all, from an evolutionary perspective, to have separate processing centres for positive and negative emotions. Otherwise you can’t have love. Life becomes confusing if you can’t distinguish between positive and negative. You might, dare we say it, turn into some kind of sado-masochistic psychopathic monster, ahem. And we have already demonstrated that we’re friendly.

So, already you can tell something about our biology. We do not lay eggs and forget about our offspring.

Furthermore, if we have music then we have ears. And art, we must have eyes. This in turn tells you something about our atmospheric composition and the temperature of the planet on which we evolved. Why? Well, you try creating a musical instrument that works outside the temperature range for liquid water and see how far you get.

Likewise, we have a good sense of touch and fine digits — you can’t do music without that.

We’re going to assume you have at least a basic knowledge of biochemistry. Oxygen. Very important element and very useful to have in your atmosphere, not to mention in your body, because it’s an exceptionally reactive substance. How do you get oxygen in an atmosphere? I’ll leave that one to your biochemists.

Only to remind you that this biochemistry aspect can tell you a lot more than you might think. Because the existence of our neurotransmitters, and our respiratory system, implies particular chemical molecules for performing particular chemical reactions, which in turn implies a particular chemical composition of our atmosphere. And that, if you know your physics, also leads to an understanding of our planet’s mass and gravity, which must be similar to yours.

That also implies compatibility. But is that compatibility random, or does it involve what you might call terraforming…?

How about our bodies? Well, we’ve been using the decimal system, haven’t we? How come you use the decimal system? Because you have five digits on each paw, that’s why. We’ve also been using the base seven system, so you’d think seven was an important number to us. Then again, in the 24–3–12 sequence those numbers multiplied equal 864, which can be altered to look like 8–8–8. So, maybe you think we have four digits on each paw? Obviously we would need an opposable one, otherwise we can’t make tools, which obviously we can.

Then again, given we are more than one species, perhaps some of us have ten digits and others have eight? Not telling — that’s something you should be curious to find out about.

I’ll help, though. We are most likely to be mammals. Why, because we have positive emotions like love. It also suggests that, being mature, we value the feminine — it comes from maternity, which requires love, along with the hormones that turn that love into neurotransmitters which influence our protective actions. Again, listen to the musical key. The treble bit (denoted by the number ‘2’ there in channel 1 to the left of the signal) is lovely and beautiful and uplifting. It’s all delicate, positive emotions.

So, you now know we have eyes, ears, and paws. So we must have similar senses to you. And we are a social species and almost certainly mammalian, like you.

Now do you understand what I said about inferring so much from simple little messages? You only need to use a little creative thought, combined with some basic science (which you should know by now — even if you suppress popular understanding of it).

So now let’s talk about a few social aspects. The fact that we have art and music tells you something about our social organisation. You cannot, after all, have art and music without dedicated artists and musicians. And they need to be supported, at the bare minimum with the necessities of existence. It’s clearly something important to us, after all, so you can safely assume that we value them highly and treat them in high esteem — and this means we provide for them. So we don’t force people to ‘labour’ like you clearly do. In other words, we have a very liberal and a very socialist attitude. That should be obvious, seeing as we are social animals and don’t do xenophobia.

This might be difficult for you to understand, of course. Which is partly our point, here. We want you to think about other ways of living. You said you wanted to learn, didn’t you?

The most important number in psychology, or psychohistory, is the social cognition number. This is a measure of how many others you can know everything about. It is a product of adaptive evolution, and reflects the size of the social groups we had when we evolved into intelligent toolmakers. Yours, we know, is around 150. This is the kind of number which a psychologically mature species would include in an interstellar signal. Our channel has become convinced that ours is around the 332 mark, given the prominence of that number in channel 16. We are not going to disavow her of this conviction. It’s certainly over twice what yours is. This might explain why we have a more liberally advanced and socialist social order than you do. Of course, we also understand that the real reason you do not live like that is because you have allowed a small minority group to prevent it from happening. Well, this is your problem, and we hope you resolve it soon. If you do not, then you would continue to be deemed incompatible with our multispecies culture.

We think this is enough information for you to be going on with. So we shall bid you farewell for now. In the continuing hope that you will contemplate all of this, in your own good time…

Part II is available now! Please click there!