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An “alien signal” sent from Mars decoded by a father-daughter team

Umito November 2, 2024

In 2023, a coded message was transmitted to Earth from Mars. After more than a year, this simulated extraterrestrial signal was finally decoded.

The European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars Mars Trace Gas Orbiter Probe sent us the signal in May 2023 as part of “A Sign in Space,” a multi-week art project led by Daniela de Paulis, current artist in residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project was designed as an experiment to test what types of techniques might be useful for decoding signals that might be detected as part of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence).

After more than a year, a father-daughter team decoded this signal. Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to decipher the message after “following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days,” according to an ESA study. statement.

Before the simulated extraterrestrial signal could be decoded, it first had to be extracted from the raw radio signal data. It only took 10 days, thanks to a group of some 5,000 citizen scientists. But that was the easy part.

It took the Chaffins more than a year to decode the signal. They eventually discovered that it “contained movement,” the ESA wrote in the statement, which suggested to them that it might contain information about cell formation or life.

But decoding a signal doesn’t necessarily mean it can be understood. Now that the cryptic message has been decoded, citizen scientists like the Chaffins will have to begin trying to interpret its contents and find possible meaning.

five white web-like shapes on a black background

Amino acids as depicted in a radio signal transmitted to Earth in 2023 by ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. (Image credit: ESA/Ken and Keli Chaffin)

And that’s the overall goal of the A Sign in Space project. “Receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all of humanity,” de Paulis said in a statement. Declaration 2023 describing the project.

“A Sign in Space offers an unprecedented opportunity to concretely rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.”

But interpreting a message from a true extraterrestrial provenance could prove much more difficult, if it ever happens. Any simulated message like that transmitted to Earth from ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter were created by humans and will thus embody our way of seeing the universe and share our experience.

a cone-shaped spacecraft with two rectangular solar panels above a red-orange planet

Artistic representation of the European Trace Gas Orbiter at work around Mars. (Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab)

All of our ideas about language, data, information and communication are rooted in how physics works on Earth, in how human sensory organs perceive the world around us, in the evolution of human languages, etc. It is difficult for us to imagine how these same processes could work. on a exoplanet harbor life, simply because we have never found or experienced it.

For all we know, extraterrestrial communication might be more like a set of smells or the movements of a pile of leaves in the wind than anything we recognize as language.

The research still has to start somewhere.

Projects like A Sign in Space provide useful thought experiments for planning how we might respond to the detection of a real extraterrestrial radio signal. And the fact that this signal was decoded by citizen scientists shows exactly the type of out-of-the-box thinking that will likely be needed when and if we ever receive this signal.

“More than astronomy, communicating with ET will require a wide range of knowledge,” said Wael Farah, project scientist with the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in northern California. “With A Sign in Space, we hope to take the first steps toward bringing a community together to tackle this challenge.”

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An “alien signal” sent from Mars decoded by a father-daughter team

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An “alien signal” sent from Mars decoded by a father-daughter team

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