What would happen if an extraterrestrial civilization contacted humans? Could we understand a message we caught? Would it be possible to decipher it? A curious experiment called A Sign in Space, carried out by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with the SETI Institute and thousands of scientists around the world.
In May 2023, the satellite ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) of ESA and Roscosmos, which orbits Mars since 2016, sent an ‘alien’ coded signal to Earth. The message, designed by the artist Daniela de Paulis and whose content was only known to her and two other people, was captured by three ground-based observatories 16 minutes after the satellite sent it. The first challenge was to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal and the next, to decipher it.
The first part was the easiest. In just 10 days, a community of 5,000 scientists worked collaboratively, online, to extract the signal. Deciphering it, on the other hand, has taken much longer.
On June 7, 2024, de Paulis received the deciphered image, representing five amino acidsin your mailbox. They had achieved it Americans Ken and Keli Chaffin, father and daughterwho deciphered the code by performing simulations for hours and days, explains the ESA. The process took them more than a year.
‘The father-daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some type of cell formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the basic components of life,’ explains the ESA.
Amino acids are considered one of the main building blocks of life, not only on Earth, but perhaps in other parts of the universe. In the encoded message, They were presented in blocks of different numbers of grouped pixels.: one for hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen and eight for oxygen. The signal also resembles the appearance of groups of stars in the sky.
Now that the message has been revealed, A Sign in Space invites the public to try to understand what it means. The content of the message is open to interpretation, and the team behind the project encourages anyone interested to join the conversation about what it means via Discord.