(NewsNation) — Decades of listening to signals coming from deep space have yet to yield anything that we believe is a message from another civilization. But if we did receive such a message, how would we know what it says?
Scientists from all over the world now have a template for doing just that, thanks to a project from the SETI Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It began in May 2023 when a European Space Agency craft that’s orbiting Mars beamed a signal containing an alien-like message. Three observatories on Earth picked up the signal and released the raw data on the internet.
“Citizen scientists,” using the Discord app to communicate, took about ten days to extract the data that was jumbled inside other data coming from the satellite.
Then, the race was on to figure out just what that data was: sound, text, calculations, video or something else?
Americans Ken and Keli Chaffin, father and daughter, ran simulations and threw in some intuition to eventually come up with the answer. It was a video of white dots that slowly formed into arrangements depicting the cellular formation of five amino acids.
Daniela de Paulis, the artist who designed the video, said she wanted to spur conversation about how we interpret our place in the universe.
“We will have to make meaning of something that is completely outside the overall nature of our own culture, and I was really fascinated by this possibility,” de Paulis told the website Gizmodo.
Finding the message inside the code is not the end of the project. The next step, said de Paulis, is to figure out what it means. She’s not sharing her thoughts but says the worldwide debate could be the best rehearsal for the day when people on Earth receive an actual message from space.
“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,” de Paulis told CNN.