A signal beamed at Earth from Mars in 2023 has finally been decoded by a father and daughter team in the United States.
In 2023, a coded message was transmitted to Earth from Mars. After more than a year, this simulated alien signal was finally decoded.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe sent the signal in May 2023 as part of A Sign in Space, a multi-week art project led by Daniela de Paulis, the current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project served as an experiment to explore techniques that could be useful for decoding potential extraterrestrial signals detected in SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts.
After over a year of effort, a father-daughter duo cracked the code. Ken and Keli Chaffin successfully deciphered the message by “following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end,” according to an ESA statement.
Before the simulated signal could be decoded, it first needed to be extracted from raw radio signal data, which was accomplished in just 10 days thanks to the efforts of about 5,000 citizen scientists. However, that was the simpler task.
Decoding the signal itself took the Chaffins more than a year. They eventually determined that it “contained movement,” ESA noted in the statement, suggesting it might include information about cellular formation or life.
Yet, decoding the signal doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding it. Now that the cryptic message has been deciphered, citizen scientists like the Chaffins must work on interpreting its contents and uncovering any potential meaning.
This process aligns with the overarching goal of the A Sign in Space project. “Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind,” de Paulis stated in a 2023 description of the project.
“A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.”
Interpreting an actual alien message, however, could be an even greater challenge. Simulated signals, like the one sent from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, are human-made and thus reflect our understanding of the universe and how we communicate.
Our notions of language, data, and communication are rooted in how physics operates on Earth, how humans perceive the world, and how our languages have evolved. It’s difficult to conceive how these processes might function on an exoplanet harboring life since we have yet to encounter one.
For all we know, alien communication might resemble a sequence of odors or the movements of leaves in the wind more than anything we recognize as language. Still, the search must start somewhere.
Projects like A Sign in Space offer valuable thought experiments for planning how we might respond to the discovery of a genuine alien signal. The fact that this signal was decoded by citizen scientists underscores the importance of unconventional thinking in such scenarios.
“More than astronomy, communicating with E.T. will require a breadth 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 make the initial steps towards bringing a community together to meet this challenge.”
