Aliens are interesting,
microwaves are boring.
All the circles have been cropped.
The principles of parsimony
have few followers
while there are benefits in believing.
This time is different,
beyond sophistication
and there’s money to be made in the bubble.
Are you insulted when asked
if it’s plugged in?
Not everything is a conspiracy.
The answer you seek
is often closer than you think.
Start in the lunch room.
Inspired by a David Elikwu newsletter, which included this little story:
In 2015, we discovered aliens again.
A group of astronomers at Parkes Observatory in Australia noticed these brief, intense, and seemingly random bursts of radio information; mysterious signals that seemed to be coming from the further reaches of space. They called them “perytons”.
For months, the team worked to identify the source. It could be neutron stars colliding. Black holes merging. Or potentially, hopefully, signals from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Emily Petroff was determined to solve it. But she’d noticed something odd. The perytons only appeared during working hours. Australian working hours. Never at night. Never on weekends. Always during the day when staff were in the building.
She eventually realised that every time they detected a signal, the telescope had been pointed in the rough direction of the staff break room.
After deep investigation, she discovered the truth. The alien signals weren’t coming from deep space. They were coming from staff heating lunch in the microwave.
The microwave happened to operate at 2.4 GHz, close enough to frequencies the telescope could pick up.
Even though microwaves famously work within Faraday chambers, anytime someone impatiently opened the door before the timer finished, the magnetron was still running, sending a burst of radiation that the telescope dutifully recorded as a cosmic event.
Despite months of investigation, with sophisticated equipment and some of the world’s best astronomical experts, they were all undone by a microwave twenty metres away in the kitchen.
