‘Alien signal’ sent from Mars decoded by father-daughter team

In 2023, a coded message was sent to Earth from Mars. After over a year, this simulated alien signal has finally been decoded.

European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars Mars Trace Gas Orbiter probe sent us the signal in May 2023 as part of “A Sign in Space,” a multi-week art project led by Daniela de Paulis, current artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project was designed as an experiment to test what kinds of techniques might be useful for decoding signals that might be detected as part of THIRSTY (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts.

After more than a year, a father-daughter team decoded that signal. Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to decipher the message after “following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end,” according to an ESA. statement.

Before the simulated alien signal could be decoded, it first had to be extracted from the raw radio signal data. That took just 10 days, thanks to a group of about 5,000 citizen scientists. But that was the easy part.

It took Chaffins over a year to decode the signal. Ultimately, they discovered that it “contains motion,” the ESA wrote in the statement, which suggested it could contain information about cellular formation or life.

But decoding a signal does not necessarily mean that it can be understood. Now that the cryptic message has been decoded, citizen scientists like Chaffins will have to begin trying to interpret its contents and find possible meaning.

five white grid-like shapes on a black background

Amino acids as represented in a radio signal beamed back to Earth in 2023 by ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. (Image credit: ESA/Ken and Keli Chaffin)

And that is the overall goal of the A Sign in Space Project. “Receiving a message from an alien civilization it would be a profoundly transformative experience for all of humanity,” de Paulis said in a Statement 2023 project description.

“A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, encouraging an open search for meaning across cultures and disciplines.”

But interpreting a message of genuine extraterrestrial origin could prove much, much more difficult, if it ever does. Any simulated messages like the one sent to Earth from ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter they were created by humans and thus will embody the way we see the universe and to communicate our experience about it.

a cone-shaped spaceship with two rectangular solar arrays above a reddish-orange planet

An artist’s rendering of the Europa Trace Gas Orbiter at work around Mars. (Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab)

All of our ideas about language, data, information, and communication are rooted in how physics works on Earth, how human sensory organs perceive the world around us, how human languages evolved, etc. It is hard for us to imagine how the same processes could work. on a exoplanet harboring life, simply because we have yet to find or experience one.

For all we know, alien communication might be more like a collection of smells or the movements of a pile of leaves in the wind than anything we recognize as language.

However, the search has to start somewhere.

Projects like A Sign in Space provide useful thought experiments for planning how we might respond to the detection of a real alien radio signal. And the fact that this signal has been decoded by citizen scientists shows exactly the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that will likely be required when and if we ever get that signal.

“More than astronomy, communication with ETs will require a wide range of knowledge,” said Wael Farah, project scientist at the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California. “With A Sign in Space, we hope to take the initial steps to bring a community together to meet this challenge.”