‘Alien signal’ sent from Mars deciphered by father-daughter team

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

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter sent a signal to us in May 2023 as part of “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 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) efforts.

A year later, a father-daughter team deciphered the signal. According to the ESA statement, Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to decipher the message after “following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days.”

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

Connected: Search for alien life

It took the Chaffins more than a year to decipher the signal. They eventually discovered that it “contains motion,” the ESA said in a statement, which suggested to them that it could contain information about cell formation or life.

But decoding a signal does not necessarily mean it can be understood. Now that the mysterious message has been deciphered, civilian scientists like the Chaffins will have to start trying to interpret its contents and find possible meaning behind it.

five white cobweb figures on a black background

Amino acids 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 this is the overall goal of the “Sign in Space” project. “Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformative experience for all humanity,” de Paulis said in a 2023 statement describing the project.

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

But interpreting a message of true alien origin could be much more difficult if it ever happens. Any simulated messages like the one transmitted to Earth from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter were created by humans and would thus reflect how we see the Universe and convey our experience of it.

conical shaped spacecraft with two rectangular solar panels above a reddish orange planet

Artist’s rendering of the European orbiter operating 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, how human senses perceive the world around us, how human languages evolved, etc. It is difficult for us to imagine how the same processes could work . on an exoplanet that has life, simply because we haven’t found or experienced it yet.

For all we know, alien communication may be more like a collection of smells or the movement of a pile of leaves in the wind than anything we recognize as language.

Still, the search needs to start somewhere.

Projects such as Sign in Space offer useful thought experiments for planning how we might respond to the detection of a real alien radio signal. And the fact that this signal was deciphered by citizen scientists shows exactly the type of out-of-the-box thinking that will likely be required when and if we ever receive this signal.

“Communicating with aliens will require not only astronomy, but also extensive knowledge,” said Wael Farah, a scientist at the Allen Telescope at the SETI Institute in northern California. “With Sign in Space, we hope to take the first steps toward bringing the community together to tackle this challenge.”

‘Alien signal’ sent from Mars deciphered by father-daughter team

Archives

Categories