A signal beamed towards Earth from Mars has finally been decoded after thousands of people from around the world spent more than a year examining the message. In the end, a father and daughter duo from the US managed to crack the code and reveal the contents of the dispatch, yet the process of interpreting its meaning is only just beginning.
Sadly, the signal was not sent by an alien race, but was transmitted by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) as part of a multidisciplinary art project called A Sign in Space. Initiated by media artist Daniela de Paulis, the project aimed to explore how the global community might respond if a real alien message were ever received from beyond our home planet.
After TGO beamed the signal in May 2023, a worldwide hivemind of 5,000 citizen scientists quickly got to work on the raw data, which was made publicly available by the three radio astronomy observatories that received the transmission. Within ten days, the signal had been successfully extracted from the data, though it would take until June 7 2024 for the message to be decoded.
Eventually, US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin figured out that the memo consisted of a diagram depicting the structure of five amino acids, which are the building blocks of life. According to a statement from the ESA, the Chaffin’s ran simulations for “days on end”, before hitting upon the solution after realizing that the message contained “some sort of cellular formation and life forms.”
To create the project, de Paulis teamed up with ESA, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. Now that A Sign in Space has been successfully received, extracted and decoded, it’s up to the global community to debate the meaning of this abstract message from Mars.
What could these five biological components possibly be hinting at? Do the aliens come in peace, or is their transmission one of hostility? The answers are very much up for debate, and those who wish to join the discussion can do so by joining a Discord chat dedicated to interpreting the extraterrestrial communique.
