3 weeks ago
38 ARTICLE AD
Over a year ago, we received a signal from Mars—an encoded message from Europe’s Martian orbiter, picked up by three observatories on Earth. The contents of this simulated alien message, crafted by an artist, remained a mystery for months. Recently, however, a father-daughter duo cracked the code, revealing the solution to the cosmic puzzle. Still, the true meaning of the message remains a matter of debate.
To prepare ourselves for a potential meet-and-greet with extraterrestrial beings, a collaborative project simulated an alien message to Earth to observe how we might interpret an otherworldly code. After beaming an encoded message from a Mars satellite, A Sign in Space, organized by the SETI Institute, invited the public to decipher it. The encoded message was developed by artist Daniela de Paulis, the founder of the interplanetary art project. Thousands of people tried to decipher the alien code, exchanging ideas online over what it could mean.
In recognition of its highly creative and captivating project, the A Sign in Space team won Gizmodo’s 2024 Science Fair Award.
Following a year-long effort, Ken and Keli Chaffin finally cracked the code. By running simulations, the father and daughter detected that the message contained movement, and that it symbolized cellular formation. They later discovered that it represented five amino acids displayed in a molecular diagram, the European Space Agency announced.
Amino acids are considered one of the main building blocks of life on Earth, and perhaps elsewhere in the universe. In the encoded message, they were presented by blocks of different number of pixels clustered together: one for hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen, and eight for oxygen. The signal also resembles the appearance of star clusters spread out across the universe, or the cosmic webs that connect galaxies.
Now that the message has been revealed, A Sign in Space invites the public to try and understand what it signifies. The contents of the message is up for interpretation and remains open, and the team behind the project is inviting members of the public to join the conversation over what it means through the Discord server.
The artist behind the project, de Paulis, sought to inspire conversation over human civilization and how we interpret our place in the cosmos. “We will have to make meaning of something that is completely outside the overall nature of our own culture, and I was really fascinated by this possibility…how can we make meaning of something while having no parameters?” de Paulis told Gizmodo during an earlier interview. “I’m very fascinated by this process, how society works to try to give meaning to reality.”
Although the transmission didn’t actually come from aliens, it highlights just how challenging communication between two alien worlds is likely to be, suggesting that detecting a signal from another planet might not be the most challenging part of making first contact.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission that launched in 2016 to study the Martian atmosphere, was used to beam the message on May 24, 2023, which was picked up by three observatories on Earth 16 minutes later. The European Space Agency’s mission control center sent the secret message to the spacecraft, where it was stored in its memory. The ExoMars orbiter then converted the message into telemetry (or digital data) and beamed it as radio waves back to Earth.
Astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy who received the signal, removed the telemetry and posted the message on the project’s website for anyone to download.
The message itself is a few kilobytes in size, but its contents was only known by de Paulis and two others. A week after receiving the signal on Earth, 400,000 people had downloaded it in an effort to decipher the code, each with their own interpretation of the alien signal. The effort to understand aliens, and ourselves, is not over just yet.
