system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What did the Wow! Signal actually contain?

I'm having trouble understanding this, and what I've read hasn't been very enlightening. If we actually intercepted some sort of signal, what was that signal? Was it a message? How can we call something a signal without having idea of what the signal was?

Secondly, what are the actual opinions of the Wow! Signal? Popular culture aside, is the signal actually considered to be nonhuman, or is it regarded by the scientific community to most likely be man made? Thanks!
gpt
The Wow! signal didn't actually contain any information. It was simply a narrow-band radio source that varied in intensity over roughly 72 seconds. There are a few reasons why it's of interest:

1. The frequency of the signal occurred almost exactly at what's known as the hydrogen line, which is the resonant frequency of hydrogen. Most SETI researchers agree that this is exactly the frequency an extraterrestrial intelligence might use to transmit information because of it's mathematical importance and because it is able to travel well across space without getting blocked by gas and dust clouds

2. Its peak intensity was roughly 30x greater than the normal background noise.

3. It could not be attributed to any terrestrial source.

On the other hand, there are number of reasons why it's not a smoking gun or definitive proof:

1. Despite exhaustive search with better telescopes, the signal could not be found again.

2. It came from a region of space with few stars, which brings into question whether or not it could be from an alien civilization.

In short, there are more questions than answers. While it seems unlikely to have come from earth, that possibility can't be ruled out, nor can the possibility that it may have home from an as-yet unknown astronomical phenomenon. There's simply not enough data to draw a conclusion with any certainty.