The 1977 Wow! Signal—an unusually strong, narrow-band radio signal detected for 72 seconds—has long been treated as an unresolved anomaly in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This essay argues that the signal’s deeper significance is not what it was, but what our response to it reveals about how humans understand time, evidence, and reality.

The signal did not “last” 72 seconds in any intrinsic sense. That duration reflects the limits of Earth’s rotation and the telescope’s observational window. By treating interception time as a property of the signal itself, we mistakenly convert a relationship between observer and phenomenon into a claim about the phenomenon’s nature. This error leads us to ask the wrong questions.

Once duration is recognized as observational rather than intrinsic, the demand for repeatability comes into focus. Modern science privileges phenomena that repeat on human timescales, but repeatability is not a universal feature of reality. Many real and consequential processes—planet formation, extinction events, evolutionary transitions—are singular or unfold over timescales far longer than human institutions can easily hold.

The Wow! Signal failed not because it was unreal, but because it did not repeat on a schedule compatible with our expectations. This reflects a broader temporal bias: we quietly downgrade phenomena that don’t persist, recur, or resolve within our measurement windows, funding cycles, or institutional memory. The result is a form of temporal injustice, where realities operating on longer or misaligned timescales are dismissed rather than studied differently.

This bias appears across domains, from climate science to medicine to social change, where slow, cumulative processes are treated as noise until they cross visible thresholds—often too late for meaningful response.

Reframed this way, the Wow! Signal suggests that intelligence may not operate through discrete messages at all. It may function as context or infrastructure, maintaining conditions rather than transmitting content. Contact, in this model, is not an event but a capacity—an emergent alignment between systems operating on different clocks.

The essay concludes that the real question raised by the Wow! Signal is not whether we are intelligent enough to detect others, but whether we are durable enough to listen. Maturity would require institutions capable of thinking in centuries, holding knowledge across generations, and recognizing that some truths can only be detected by civilizations that last long enough to notice them.

The signal did not fail. It revealed the limits of our temporal literacy—and pointed toward the developmental work required to move beyond them.

AI doesn’t know what’s true, meaningful, or wise—but it is very good at producing language that sounds coherent under pressure.

Without a way to assess structure—load, capacity, thresholds—it’s easy to mistake pattern density for insight.

Physics doesn’t make AI smarter.
It makes readers more oriented.

Attention is the body’s allocation of contact.
It’s not focus, effort, or thinking hard. Those are uses of attention, not the thing itself. Attention is how a living system distributes sensitivity across its internal and external environment in order to stay oriented in time.

Attention is physiological before it is cognitive. The nervous system decides what matters—threat, safety, connection, rest—before conscious intention enters the picture. Willpower doesn’t control attention; it negotiates with it. When attention fragments, it’s usually because the body has made a rational allocation under conditions that demand vigilance.

To attend is to exclude. Attention is selective by necessity, which makes it inherently ethical. Every symbolic system—scientific, therapeutic, religious, astrological—proposes what deserves sustained contact and what may be ignored. The question isn’t whether a system shapes attention, but whether it helps the body allocate contact more skillfully toward what’s actually present, or overrides embodied knowing with prefabricated significance.

Attention is temporal and relational. It tracks rhythm, anticipates cycles, and emerges between bodies and environments. When rhythm is shredded—by trauma, acceleration, or engineered urgency—meaning can’t stabilize. At scale, attention becomes collective: cultures synchronize what they notice, what they ignore, and when contact is allowed to deepen.

Meaning enters the body through attention.
Schema organizes perception.
Attention allocates contact.
Together, they generate the gravitational field in which meaning emerges.