Just over a year ago, people across this planet received a challenge from the heavens: Solve an encoded message. The message was created by Daniela de Paulis, Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute. The goal was to simulate an alien signal – and despite its earthly creation, it really came from another planet.
The project, A Sign In Space, was sent from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on May 24 at 7 pm UTC, and received 16 minutes later by the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope at the Green Bank Observatory, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station observatory. Over four thousand people worldwide joined the quest to decode the message.
On June 7, the correct solution was finally presented to De Paulis by John and Sarah (made-up names), who are father and daughter. They looked at the encrypted message considering the possibility that it had a connection with a renowned computation model called the cellular automaton. Conway’s Game of Life is a popular version of this model.
In this model, pixels can be considered “alive” or “dead” and evolve under specific rules. The model can create complex scenario that evolve from basic rules, and it was used to go from the whole seemingly meaningless message full of one and zeros (alive or dead pixels) to suddenly finding something with meaning.
They used the Unity game engine and put the message through 6,625 transformations to turn the binary message into something that was intelligible.
It turned out to be an image of five amino acids.
These crucial life molecules are represented by blocks of different number of pixels. One for hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen, and eight for oxygen.
This is not the end of the experiment that mixes science and art – De Paulis envisioned the challenge as a way to mimic what humanity will face in the event of receiving an alien signal. There will be the understanding of what the communication is in the first place, the part solved by John and Sarah. Now comes the interpretation: What does the signal mean? Why these five amino acids in particular?
De Paulis is inviting more people to join the Discord server that has been used as a hub for the decoding and discussion surrounding the signal. Since last year, there have been over 54,000 messages related to the project, and the project team hopes that many more people joins the thousands already there to discuss, opine, and propose possible meanings of the signal from space.
