In 2023, the signals received by three observatories were finally deciphered. This message left the scientific team with more questions than answers.
In May 2023, the observatory captured a signal containing an alien-like message, and the raw data was uploaded to the internet for anyone to examine.
Ken Chaffin and his daughter Keri obtained the data and worked to decipher the message. Keri said she didn't initially plan to participate in the effort, but once she realized the scale of it, she was immediately drawn to it.
The two then worked for nearly a year, reportedly spending thousands of hours experimenting with different ideas and mathematical simulations to figure it out. They are visualization It looks like five amino acids, but it is unclear what they represent. Although the visual only appears for about a tenth of a second, stations were showing it as a video on loop, which may have caused confusion.
“When I look at original images like star maps, I've always had the impression that they are biological life forms,” Kelly Chaffin said in an email to CNN. ”[A] Many members have seen mice, starfish, elephants and more. ”
It's a message from outer space, and although it's been described by the press as alien-like, it certainly comes from humanity.
The signal came from the SETI Institute in California, which decided to simulate a scenario in 2023 where it would receive encrypted messages from aliens or other unknown sources in space. The signal is Realistically, it would be transmitted from Mars to Earth. ExoMars Trace Gas Orbitera satellite that measures Methane and atmospheric gases around Mars.
The message reportedly traveled through space for 16 minutes before being picked up by the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, and the Medicina Radio Astronomy Station near Bologna, Italy.
The raw data had to be extracted from a deliberate tangle of other data from the Mars rover, and it took about 10 days to download and convert it into a visual format.
“I had no idea what the message was going to show or say.”
“We knew we had the skills to decode the messages,” said Ken Chaffin, who said he has been working on computational models of cellular automata for decades.
A cellular automaton is a grid of checkered cells that can display any number of patterns depending on which cells are “on” or “off.” Depending on the rules of the grid, you can represent static patterns, repeating patterns, or patterns that appear to move across the grid.
Chaffin and his colleagues ran a cellular automaton simulation of what they saw on the star map, ultimately producing images of amino acids.
“I had no idea what that message was going to show or say,” Ken Chaffin added. “I thought maybe that had something to do with life.”
He said he recognized an amino acid in chemistry class and when he saw the image it became clear that it was an amino acid.
Chaffin theorized that the message may represent hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen being transported through space and later assembled into life forms. What if a very interesting message actually came from a non-human.
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