They decode an extraterrestrial-looking signal from the year 2023; need to find out what it means

() –– If astronomical observatories on Earth were to capture a signal from outer space, a concerted effort would be needed to unravel and decipher the extraterrestrial message.

An art project at the SETI Institute, a Mountain View, California, nonprofit dedicated to the search for life beyond Earth, simulated that scenario more than a year ago, before a team of citizen scientists made up of father and daughter recently deciphered the message. However, its meaning remains a mystery.

After the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbitera European Space Agency spacecraft orbiting Mars, transmitted a signal containing an extraterrestrial-looking message in May 2023, three observatories on Earth picked it up, posted the raw data on the Internet and gave scientists at everyone the opportunity to decipher the transmission.

Ken Chaffin and his daughter Keli, who worked on decoding the message for almost a year, discovered the answer in June, the agency announced. European Space Agency on October 22. To achieve this required spending thousands of hours experimenting with various ideas and running mathematical simulations on a computer, the Chaffins told .

In what appear to be clusters of white pixels on a black background, the displayed message has five configurations representing amino acids, the building blocks of life. The message is not static, but is in motion and only shows the layout for about a tenth of a second. The project designers confirmed that amino acids are the intended message, but left it open to interpretation.

Now, the world’s citizen scientists are trying to decipher the meaning of this cryptic cosmic puzzle. Until now, the community involved in the project has not been able to determine or agree on what amino acids represent.

Daniela de Paulis, artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and recipient of the Baruch Blumberg Visiting Fellowship in Astrobiology at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, designed the project, called “A sign in space” along with a small team of international scientists and artists who explored what a signal from an alien might look like.

The signal was sent from Mars to Earth, and traveled 16 minutes through space before being captured by the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope and the Medicine Radio Astronomical Station near Bologna. Italy. Then, the scientistswho communicated through a Discord global chatthey extracted the raw data that was intertwined with other data from the Mars spacecraft. It took about 10 days to extract and visualize the data, but deciphering what the message was required even more persistence.

When Ken Chaffin found the original image of the encoded raw data, which Discord’s citizen scientist community referred to as the “star map,” he said he suspected a cellular automata algorithm had produced it. Cellular automata are grids of units that are mathematically coded to move or follow a certain set of rules. “I knew I had the skills to decode the message,” he said in an email, explaining that he has decades of amateur experience working with cellular automata.

By running cellular automata simulations on the “star map,” the Chaffins were finally able to generate the image of the amino acids.

“I had no idea what the message would show or say,” he added. “I suspected it might have something to do with life.” When the image of the clusters was revealed, Chaffin said he immediately recognized them as amino acids from school chemistry classes.

Keli Chaffin, his adult daughter, initially had no plans to join her father in the immersion effort, but said she quickly became fascinated by the immensity of the project.

“The original image that looks like a star map has always given me the appearance of biological life forms,” he said in an email. “Many members have seen a mouse, a starfish or an elephant.

“Maybe it’s just us humans looking for the recognizable within random spots, a kind of Rorschach test”.

The goal of the project was to keep the simulation as close as possible to how it could happen in real life, de Paulis said, so the project developers did not provide any help, neither confirmation nor denial, until receiving the Chaffins’ solution.

“The idea is that if we ever received a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, we would have no response. Therefore, we will have to find the meaning ourselves,” said de Paulis, who is also a licensed radio operator. “Basically, there were thousands of interpretations, because (…) everyone was moving in the dark. They didn’t know where to go. “They just had this image of a ‘star map’ that everyone interpreted in many possible ways.”

The signal is a representation of what it would be like to receive an extraterrestrial message under ideal circumstances, since it comes from Mars, a relatively nearby place, and is therefore a stronger transmission than one that could come from deep space, de Paulis said. Multiple telescopes picked up the signal, while only one could detect a real alien, he added.

The project team intentionally created a complex message, and some team members predicted it could take weeks or even years to decipher. “Someone said, ‘Maybe they’re never going to play him,’” de Paulis said. “So we had no idea how long it would take. “We really took this big risk.”

Now that the message has been deciphered, the next step is to discover what it means and why another civilization would send it, he said.

The designers behind the project do not plan to confirm or deny any possible interpretations soon, but are asking the public to submit ideas while de Paulis works on a book that will encapsulate the project and interpretations of the message.

On a global scale, it is difficult to agree on meaning when there are so many people from different backgrounds and cultures involved, he added. “Most likely, in this extreme scenario, when we have to give meaning to a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, we will never be able to agree on an exact meaning.”

The father-daughter team toyed with hundreds of possible interpretations, Ken Chaffin said. If the message in motion begins with the configuration of amino acids, then it appears as if the five groups are deconstructed and moved through space. If the message starts with the “star map” out of order and ends with the amino acids coming together, it could represent various compounds such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen being transported through space and then assembled to form life, he said.

A representation of the panspermia, The theory that life exists throughout the universe and is distributed was one of his favorite interpretations, he said.

“In the end, each viewer must interpret it, just like the Rorschach test. We may never know what the ‘aliens’ were trying to tell us,” said Keli Chaffin. “Maybe they’re just saying ‘Hello!’

“I think the most exciting thing for me was having the opportunity to work with my father on such a once-in-a-lifetime project,” he added. “We don’t give up on a project even if it seems almost impossible.”