Artist Daniela de Paulis collaborated with the European Space Agency (ESA), SETI Institute the Green Bank Observatory and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, to launch a multidisciplinary project “A Sign in Space”. This project revealed that citizen scientists could help to decipher signals from extraterrestrials.
Under this project, Ken and Keli Chaffin, a father-daughter duo from the United States of America, decoded the “extraterrestrial” message sent by the ESA’s Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) from Mars in May 2023.
De Paulis said, “Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind,” she added. “A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.”
After three observatories on Earth received the signals, over 5000 citizen scientists were appointed, working across the globe to decipher and extract the signal transmissions from raw radio data. Do you know how long it took Chaffins to interpret the alien signals? They spent more than a year running extensive tests and simulations for hours. Daniela said, “Ken and Keli ran simulations for hours and days on end, following their intuition and persevering beyond despair. These are extraordinary people who took up the task with great motivation and faith both in their instinct and knowledge.” Thus finally on June 7,2024, they sent the decrypted message to Daniela.
They explained that it was a simple image with five amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in a molecular diagram with a few pixels present in between. The image depicts the basic components of life displayed in a retro-style format.
The mysterious signal transmitted via an orbiter on Mars was just the beginning of solving the jigsaw puzzle. De Paulis and his team have now stepped back to witness how the researchers will face future challenges. The next step is to unravel and elucidate the meaning of the decoded message.
This project illustrates how citizen scientists could help interpret alien signals.
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