>Radon

I live in a high-radon part of the world (Appalachia), and there are so many more benefits to having an ERV[0] than just getting rid of toxic gasses (handles farts, too!). Worth every penny — one will remove stink from the entire 1000sqft house (including indoor cat litterbox), with partial heat/humidity recovery.

[0] Energy recovery vent, e.g. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Panasonic-WhisperComfort-60-20-5...

Not sure about radiation, but I once tried to boil an egg in the microwave and the microwave exploded. For a second, I thought the chicken had secretly developed human-level intelligence and planted an explosive inside the egg to get back at those stealing its babies. That was my "wow" moment. Then my dad confirmed it was my fault and compared my intelligence to the chicken's.

Well it was radar. The first Raytheon microwaves were really pushing for 3GHz not 2.4GHz. If you like to play Connections, the reason for that is the first mass produced magnetrons were made by gun manufacturers like Colt and Smith & Wesson and the tooling for gun bore holes and magnetron cavities lined up at 3GHz.

The official FCC minutes from 1945 [1] indicate that publicly they were marketed for heat therapy massages not food, with a weird wink, wink that if they could get a carve out for using for medical reasons they could also sell it to the Navy for reheating food as well.

The ISM carve out came after by a couple of years in 1947 because Raytheon had got an exception for this machine, not the other way around.

The whole origin story of why this particular slot of spectrum is full of carts before horses. That water oscillation thing is a common misconception - water oscillates at much higher frequencies [2].

[1] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-FCC/FCC-Annual-Rep...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...

We have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.

Yep. It's wildly unlikely that this was any kind of deliberate signal. Whatever caused it, it only happened once -- which isn't what you'd expect from aliens hoping to make contact.

We only recorded the fact of the signal's existence, without enough resolution to make out any pattern within it. If the aliens were hoping we'd decode it, they were banking on us happening to catch their signal at a very specific instant in time, never to be repeated.

On our timescale, sure. But then we wouldn't want to communicate with intelligences that experience time so differently that a pulsed signal from their perspective would be a single pulse from our perspective.

> Yes, but one is far more likely.

Well, yeah, but I wasn't addressing that. My point is that any signal from an intelligent species is going to look exactly like the signal from someone walking past with an emitter.

Statistically speaking, everything points to human interference.

My theory is that the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference. That's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.