A collaborative project dubbed “A Sign in Space” is a winner of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair for simulating a message to Earth from intelligent aliens. The project involved beaming an encoded message from a Mars satellite and inviting the public to decipher it, offering a unique glimpse into how humanity might respond to the challenge of interpreting a message from an entirely unknown civilization.

The question

Could we decipher an alien message if it reached Earth, and could we collectively make sense of something entirely unfamiliar to us?

The results

On May 24, 2023, a Mars satellite transmitted a radio signal to Earth. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission that launched in 2016 to study the Martian atmosphere, beamed out an unusual message that was picked up by three observatories on Earth 16 minutes later. Although the transmission didn’t actually come from aliens, it highlighted just how challenging communication between two distant worlds would be, suggesting that detecting an alien signal might not be the hardest part of making first contact.

The SETI Institute, a non-profit that’s on the lookout for electromagnetic signatures of advanced alien civilizations, organized the event (SETI itself stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The European Space Agency’s mission control center sent the secret message to the spacecraft, where it was stored in its memory. The ExoMars orbiter then converted the message into telemetry (or digital data) and beamed it as radio waves back to Earth.

The signal itself was an encoded message developed by artist Daniela de Paulis, the founder of the interplanetary art project, A Sign in Space.

“While I was developing this project, I was thinking how early humans must have been feeling when, for example, they were faced with natural phenomena that they could not explain,” de Paulis said. “They must have been creating an explanation of these events together…so I’m very fascinated by this process, how society works to try to give meaning to reality.”

Astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy who received the signal, removed the telemetry and posted the message on the project’s website for anyone to download. Thousands of people have attempted to decipher the alien code, exchanging ideas online over what it could mean.

The message itself is only a few kilobytes in size, and it had to be extracted from the rest of the raw data received during the transmission, but the content of the message remains unknown, except by de Paulis and two others. “The message composition was the most difficult part. I was really losing sleep over it,” de Paulis said. “Everything seemed not suitable for a message to be sent by another civilization.”

Wael Farah, a radio astronomer who helped capture the signal at the Allen Telescope Array, was unsuccessful in trying to decipher the encoded message, but he has some theories. “What I think it is, it’s some reflection of who we are as humans,” said Farah. “At least that’s what I think it would be, or I hope it would be, something that reflects or projects about who we are as humans.”

The experiment highlights just how challenging it can be to make sense of an unknown signal. It also highlights the collaborative effort needed, much like what we might face during a real first contact with an alien civilization. The team wanted to show that making contact with aliens would not play out the same way it does in the movies; it would require months of testing to ensure the integrity of the message. The first thing scientists would have to do is to make sure the transmission isn’t coming from a human spacecraft and that it can be received in the exact same form by different telescopes, which is why the test involved three observatories.

Why they did it

A Sign in Space blends art and science to prepare humanity for the possibility that an alien civilization might reach out to Earth, while also allowing us to reflect on our own world based on how the message is interpreted.

“As an artist, what I was interested in was to explore this process of meaning making, so my question was: What if we take this really radical form of theater and we present humanity with a scenario where we simulate the reception of an extraterrestrial message?” de Paulis said. “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…how can we make meaning of something while having no parameters?”

The project also shed light on the ongoing search for life beyond our planet. “We’re drawing this attention because there have been programs in the past five to 10 years that have transformed this idea that SETI is not just a bunch of people with tin hats on,” Farah said. “It’s a genuine scientific, astrophysical field on its own and it deserves academic respect.”

Why they’re a winner

Around 400,000 people downloaded the signal a week after it was intercepted on Earth. “We could see an interest right at the beginning,” said Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute who coordinated outreach for A Sign in Space.

Marchis was offered the chance to know the content of the message, but he refused for fear of spoiling it. “In my mind, the signal is the aliens telling us that they know we’re here,” Marchis said. “They just want to tell us that they know we’re here and this is what they know about us.” The discourse sparked by the project, even within the team itself, was the exact purpose of A Sign in Space.

“We got a lot of different ideas…some of the ideas are way more interesting than anything we considered or what we uploaded,” de Paulis said. “We gave the message this fluidity, which allows for several stages, to emphasize the idea that knowledge is always a process—it’s never completely crystallized.”

What’s next

The team behind the project is still monitoring the online discourse surrounding the ‘alien’ signal. De Paulis hopes the public’s attention won’t focus solely on the content of the message but will remain open to various interpretations.

In terms of finding a true signal from extraterrestrial life, the SETI Institute team is still scanning the cosmos. “I will bet that we will find life in our solar system in the next 10 to 15 years,” Marchis said. “In terms of exoplanets, that’s going to be the next generation of instruments that will probably take an image of an exoplanet like Earth with an ocean and maybe signatures of biological life, and this will happen when we launch new telescopes. We will then get an image of another pale blue dot.”

The team

Daniela de Paulis, artist in residence at the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory; Wael Farah, radio astronomer at the SETI Institute; Franck Marchis, senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute; Gregory Betts, experimental poet; Mukesh Bhatt, physicist; Germano Bianchi, researcher at IRA-INAF; Klara Anna Capova, anthropologist; Victoria Catlett, software engineer; Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist.

Click here to see all of the winners of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair.