Message From Space Was Decoded

An art project from the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, California, devoted to searching for life beyond Earth, received a message from outer space over a year ago before a father-daughter team of citizen scientists recently deciphered the message. Its meaning, however, remains a mystery.

After the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency spacecraft orbiting Mars, beamed a signal containing an alien-like message in May 2023, three observatories on Earth picked it up and released the raw data on the internet, giving citizen scientists across the globe a chance to decipher the transmission.

Ken Chaffin and daughter Keli, who worked on decoding the message for nearly a year, uncovered the answer in June, the European Space Agency announced last 22 October. Doing so required thousands of hours experimenting with various ideas and running mathematical simulations on a computer, the Chaffins told CNN.

In what appears to be clusters of white pixels on a black background, the visualized message is of five configurations that represent amino acids, the building blocks of life. The message is not static but is in motion and only displays the arrangement for about one-tenth of a second. The project’s designers confirmed that amino acids are the intended message, but they are leaving the interpretation open.

Now, citizen scientists are grappling with the meaning behind the cryptic cosmic puzzle. So far, the community engaged in the project has not been able to determine and agree on what the amino acids represent.

When Ken Chaffin came across the original image from the scrambled raw data, which the Discord community of citizen scientists referred to as the "starmap," he said he suspected a cellular automata algorithm produced it.

Cellular automata are grids of units that are mathematically coded to move or follow certain sets of rules. "I knew I had the skills to decode the message," he said, explaining he has decades of amateur experience working with cellular automata.

By running the cellular automata simulations on the "starmap," the Chaffins were eventually able to generate the image of the amino acids.

"I had no idea what the message would show or say," he added. "I suspected that it might have something to do with life." When the image of the clusters revealed itself, Chaffin said he immediately recognized them to be amino acids from school chemistry classes.