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Father and daughter decipher artificial "alien code"

Spektrum der Wissenschaft
27.11.2024
Translation: machine translated

What might a message from extraterrestrials look like? Researchers have designed an encrypted signal. A year later, a father-daughter duo have cracked the content.

The result looks unspectacular: A few white dots against a black background, whizzing back and forth between five pixel clusters. Ken Chaffin and his daughter Keli worked for more than a year to create this video. They were the first to decode a fake message from extraterrestrials, which was created as part of the "A Sign in Space" research project.

The project was initiated by artist Daniela de Paulis at the SETI Institute (a non-profit organisation for the search for extraterrestrial life). She collaborated with a computer scientist, a poet, a radio technician, a physicist, a space lawyer and several astronomers and astrobiologists. Their aim was to consider what the message from an extraterrestrial life form might look like. The result was sent from space on 24 May 2023 by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on a 17-minute journey towards Earth, where it was detected along with other signals by radio telescopes in the US states of West Virginia and California and in Italy. The data received was published with a call to filter out and decode the fake alien message.

After just ten days, 5000 people had already worked together via the online service Discord and extracted the signal from the data set. However, decoding the signal proved more difficult. When Ken Chaffin came across the signal, he surmised that a "cellular automaton" could have generated the data, he told the news magazine CNN. This is a specific type of computer programme: individual cells change their value by following simple rules. Chaffin decided to recreate cellular automata with the data from the SETI project.

Initially, his adult daughter Keli Chaffin had no intention of being involved. But she was fascinated by the sheer size of the project, she told CNN. When the five clusters of dots revealed themselves after thousands of hours of painstaking simulation work, the Chaffins realised that they must be amino acids, the building blocks of life. On 7 June 2024, just over a year after the signal was published, they sent their findings to de Paulis. On 22 October of the same year the artist announced that the father-daughter duo had cracked the "alien message".

However, the members of "A Sign in Space" are keeping a low profile when it comes to interpreting the message. Whether such a message could mean a peaceful meeting or a hostile takeover is currently the subject of lively debate on Discord.

Spectrum of science

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Original article on Spektrum.de
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