Jakarta, Indonesia Sentinel — A coded message sent from Mars to Earth back in 2023 has finally been deciphered, marking a milestone in a project designed to simulate receiving an “alien message” and examining humanity’s ability to interpret it.
The signal was transmitted by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in May 2023 as part of A Sign in Space. The project, described as an artistic and scientific initiative, is led by Daniela de Paulis, the current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
According to Space.com, the project is an experiment designed to explore potential techniques that could be used to decode signals as part of the broader search for life beyond Earth. Dubbed the “alien message,” it seeks to simulate the challenges of interpreting extraterrestrial communication.
The encoded message was sent from ExoMars orbiter circling the Red Planet. The SETI Institute then invited the global community to participate in decoding the transmission, sparking contributions from thousands of individuals who shared their interpretations and ideas in online forums.
Before any decoding could begin, the signal first had to be extracted from raw radio data. The encrypted transmission appeared as cryptic faint white dots arranged in five clusters against a black background.
Cracking the Code
After nearly a year of effort, a father-daughter team of amateur scientists, Ken and Keli Chaffin, successfully unraveled the signal. After running extensive simulations for “countless hours and days,” they determined that the encoded blocks within the signal represented specific atomic numbers: 1, 6, 7, and 8, corresponding to hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
The father-daughter pair discovered that the signal contained “movement,” hinting that it might encode information about the formation of cells or life itself. They revealed that the so-called “alien message” symbolized the molecular structure of amino acids—essential building blocks of proteins and life.
“My decoded message is a simple image with 5 amino acids displayed in a universal (hopefully) organic molecular diagram notation and a few single pixel points that appear between the clusters and molecular diagrams,” Ken Chaffin wrote while sharing their findings, as Reported by The Independent.
Deciphering the Meaning
The message’s content remains the subject of ongoing debate and interpretation. While decoding a signal is a significant achievement, understanding its deeper meaning presents an entirely different challenge.
The whole process was the primary goal of A Sign in Space Project: to explore how humanity might react to and interpret a real extraterrestrial signal. “Receiving a message from an alien civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind,” de Paulis stated in 2023, emphasizing the project’s importance as a rehearsal for such a moment.
“This project provides an unprecedented opportunity to practice and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, encouraging an endless search for meaning across cultures and disciplines,” she added.
Deciphering an actual alien message, if one were ever received, would likely be far more complex. Unlike the simulated signal created by humans, a genuine extraterrestrial communication would reflect entirely different perceptions of the universe and modes of expression.
For now, the A Sign in Space project with its “alien message” underscores the challenges and possibilities of decoding messages from beyond Earth, serving as a crucial exercise in humanity’s quest to understand the unknown.
(Raidi/Agung)
