If Earth’s astronomical observatories were to pick up a signal from outer space, it would require an all-hands-on-deck effort to untangle and decipher the extra-terrestrial message.
An art project from the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, California, devoted to searching for life beyond Earth, simulated that scenario over a year ago before a father-daughter team of citizen scientists recently deciphered the message. Its meaning, however, remains a mystery, reports CNN.
After the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency spacecraft orbiting Mars, beamed a signal containing an alien-like message in May 2023, three observatories on Earth picked it up and released the raw data on the internet, giving citizen scientists across the globe a chance to decipher the transmission.
Ken Chaffin and daughter Keli, who worked on decoding the message for nearly a year, uncovered the answer in June, the European Space Agency announced on October 22. Doing so required thousands of hours experimenting with various ideas and running mathematical simulations on a computer, the Chaffins told CNN.
In what appears to be clusters of white pixels on a black background, the visualised message is of five configurations that represent amino acids, the building blocks of life. The message is not static but is in motion and only displays the arrangement for about one-tenth of a second. The project’s designers confirmed that amino acids are the intended message, but they are leaving the interpretation open.
Decoding cosmic puzzle
The signal was sent from Mars to Earth — traveling 16 minutes through space before being picked up by the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station near Bologna, Italy.
It took around 10 days to extract and visualise the data, but deciphering what the message was took even more persistence.
A community of citizen scientists refer to the original visualization of the extracted data as the "starmap."
A sign in space
By running the cellular automata simulations on the “starmap,” the Chaffins were eventually able to generate the image of the amino acids.
“I had no idea what the message would show or say,” he added. “I suspected that it might have something to do with life.” When the image of the clusters revealed itself, Chaffin said he immediately recognised them to be amino acids from school chemistry classes.
“Maybe that is just us as humans looking for the recognisable within random dots, a Rorschach test of sorts,” said Keli.
The project’s goal was to keep the simulation as close as possible to how it might occur in real life, de Paulis said, so the project developers did not give any help, including confirmation or denial, until receiving the solution from the Chaffins.
“There were basically thousands of interpretations, because … everybody was really moving in the dark. They didn’t know where to go. They just have this image of a ‘starmap’ that everyone interpreted in many possible ways.”
The signal is a representation of what it would be like to receive an extra-terrestrial message under ideal circumstances, as it came from relatively nearby Mars and was thus a stronger transmission than one that might come from deep space, de Paulis said. Multiple telescopes picked up the signal, whereas only one might detect an actual extraterrestrial, she added.
Now that the message has been unlocked, the next step is to figure out what it means and why another civilization would send it, she said.
Interpreting
On a global scale, it’s difficult to agree on a meaning with so many people from different backgrounds and cultures involved, she added. “The chances are that in this extreme scenario, when we have to give a meaning to a message from an alien civilization, we might never be able to really agree on an exact meaning.”
The father-daughter team has tossed around hundreds of possible interpretations, Ken Chaffin said. If the moving message begins with the amino acid configuration, then it appears as if the five clusters deconstruct and move throughout space. If the message starts with the scrambled “starmap” and ends on the amino acids coming together, it could represent various compounds such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen being transported across space and then assembled into life, he said.
“In the end it is up to each viewer to interpret it just like the Rorschach Test, we may never know what the ‘aliens’ were trying to tell us,” Keli Chaffin said. “It might just be them saying ‘Hello!’”
Bd-pratidin English/ Fariha Nowshin Chinika
