She’ll only start to release hints if people “really struggle” to decode the transmission, she tells CNN. So far, de Paulis is staying quiet about the content of the message. Anyone can find and join the interpretation discussion on the project’s Discord server. Theories abound, with interpreters exploring “possible connections to chemistry, DNA structure and numerical systems,” according to an ongoing feed of updates. Next, with the data in hand, participants are trying to puzzle out the message’s meaning. “It gives us a little sense of what would happen if we really did get a signal, everything from capturing the signal to processing the data.” “It’s fascinating,” he tells New Scientist. One of those attempting to decipher the signal is Neill Sanders, part of the United Kingdom-based astronomy group Go Stargazing. “If you don’t know the format of the file, you pretty much can do nothing.” “It’s basically a stream of ones and zeroes,” says Wael Farah, a radio astronomer who helped receive the message at the Allen Telescope Array, to Wired’s Ramin Skibba. The first step: separating the contents of the message from the electromagnetic radiation picked up by the telescope, leaving them with a file of binary data. Since then, researchers and amateur codebreakers alike have been working to decipher the message de Paulis sent. On May 24, the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter beamed the encoded message to Earth, where it was received by astronomers with the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy. “After that, I narrowed the group down to five people, and then eventually down to three-because it was really important that not many people knew about the content.”įinally, with the help of a computer scientist and an astronomer, de Paulis was ready to send the message. “We were meeting on a monthly basis, brainstorming ideas on what a possible extraterrestrial civilization would send to us,” she explains. To create the signal, de Paulis worked with an interdisciplinary group that included artists, astronomers, anthropologists and other scientists, she says to CNN’s Jacopo Prisco. “We have been searching for extraterrestrial signals for more than 60 years, but we never really thought about what receiving and decoding such a signal would be like.” “This kind of experiment is long overdue,” Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in California who helped to coordinate the event, tells New Scientist’s Jonathan O’Callaghan. It was the work of Daniela de Paulis, an artist and licensed radio operator who is the artist-in-residence at the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and the Green Bank Observatory.Ĭalled A Sign in Space, De Paulis’ project is an artistic test run of what it might be like for humans to receive-and attempt to decipher-an extraterrestrial message. The signal, though beamed from space, was of Earthly origin. The mysterious transmission seemed to be a message from intelligent life trying to contact Earth-as it was designed to be. In late May, three radio astronomy observatories detected a strange signal coming from around Mars.
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