For over a year, we received a signal from Mars, a coded message from the European Mars rover, captured by three observatories on Earth. The content of this message, simulated for extraterrestrial beings by an artist, remained a mystery for several months. However, recently, a father-daughter duo decoded the message and revealed the cosmic puzzle solution. Nevertheless, the true meaning of the message remains a subject of debate.
To prepare for a potential encounter with beings outside Earth, a collaborative project simulated a message from an alien entity to Earth to observe how we can interpret symbols from another world. After sending an encrypted message from a satellite to Mars, the A Sign in Space initiative, organized by the SETI Institute, invited the public to decode it. The encrypted message was developed by artist Daniela de Paulis, founder of the Art Project Between the Planets. Thousands of people tried to decode the alien symbols and exchanged ideas online about what it could mean.
In appreciation of their highly creative and engaging project, the A Sign in Space team won Gizmodo’s Science Fair award for 2024.
After a year-long effort, Ken and Kelly Shavin finally managed to decode the message. Through simulation operations, the father and daughter discovered that the message contains movement, symbolizing cell formation. They later discovered that it represents five amino acids displayed in a molecular diagram, as announced by the European Space Agency.
Amino acids are considered one of the basic building blocks of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere in the universe. In the encrypted message, they are presented through clusters of pixels assembled together: one for hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen, and eight for oxygen. The signal also resembles the appearance of star clusters scattered across the universe, or cosmic networks connecting galaxies.
Now that the message has been revealed, A Sign in Space invites the public to try to understand its meaning. The contents of the message are open to interpretation, and the team behind the project invites the public to join the conversation about what it signifies on their Discord server.
The artist behind the project, de Paulis, sought to inspire a conversation about human civilization and how we interpret our place in the universe. “We have to make meaning of something completely outside the ordinary nature of our culture, and I was truly fascinated by this possibility… How can we make meaning of something without any cues?” de Paulis told Gizmodo in a previous interview. “I am very excited about this process, and how the community works to try to give meaning to reality.”
Although the transmission did not actually come from extraterrestrial beings, it highlights the difficulty of communication between alien worlds, indicating that discovering a signal from another planet may not be the most challenging part of making initial contact.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft, a mission launched in 2016 to study the Martian atmosphere, was used to broadcast the message on May 24, 2023, which was captured by three observatories on Earth after 16 minutes. The mission control center of the European Space Agency sent the secret message to the spacecraft, where it was stored in its memory. The ExoMars orbiter then converted the message into remote sensing (or digital data) and transmitted it as radio waves to Earth.
Astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California, and the Medicina Radio Observatory in Italy, who received the signal, removed the remote sensing and posted the message on the project’s website for anyone to download.
The size of the message itself is a few kilobytes, but its contents were only known to de Paulis and two others. After a week of receiving the signal on Earth, 400,000 people downloaded it in an attempt to decode it, each having their own interpretation of the alien signal. The effort to understand extraterrestrial beings and ourselves is far from over.
