A global team of space scientists and artists have pooled together for a "dress rehearsal" of humankind's first contact with alien life. The team of international experts are calling on members of the public for their interpretations of a simulated message from an extraterrestrial civilisation sent from a satellite orbiting Mars.
The project, called A Sign in Space, promises the chance to 'rehearse' and prepare for the transmission of what would be a 'profoundly transformative experience' for all of humankind. The global experiment will see a signal transmitted from Mars' orbit which will be received on Earth around 16 minutes later by radio telescopes in California and West Virginia in the United States, as well as another in Italy.
The global team will then set about decoding the specific, encoded message - which remained undisclosed until its transmission. The researchers are calling on the public for their interpretations of the message by hosting global live-streaming events on social media, featuring interviews with key members of the team including scientists, engineers and artists.
Daniela de Paulis, an established interdisciplinary artist and licensed radio operator who currently serves as Artist in Residence at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) and the Green Bank Observatory, pooled together the international team to give a 'revolutionary presentation of global theatre'.
Her project aims to explore the process of decoding and interpreting a message sent by aliens by engaging the worldwide SETI community, as well as professionals from all fields and the broader public.
Ms de Paulis explained: "Throughout history, humanity has searched for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena. Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind.
"A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines."
The transmission was sent from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which is in orbit around Mars, to simulate receiving a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal was detected by three world-class radio astronomy observatories located across the globe, which detected the encoded message.
These include the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station observatory near Bologna in northern Italy, managed by Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).
"This experiment is an opportunity for the world to learn how the SETI community, in all its diversity, will work together to receive, process, analyze, and understand the meaning of a potential extraterrestrial signal," said ATA Project Scientist Dr Wael Farah.
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“More than astronomy, communicating with ET will require a breadth of knowledge. With A Sign in Space, we hope to make the initial steps towards bringing a community together to meet this challenge."
The SETI Institute will securely store the processed data in collaboration with Breakthrough Listen Open Data Archive and Filecoin, the world’s largest decentralised storage network. This collaborative effort hopes to ensure the preservation and accessibility of the processed data - safeguarding its availability for further analysis and decoding endeavours.
Anyone working to decode and interpret the message can discuss the process in the A Sign in Space Discord server. Submissions of findings, thoughts, and artistic and scientific inputs can be made through the dedicated submission form on the project’s website.
The A Sign in Space team will also be hosting a series of Zoom-based discussions open to the public around topics that consider the societal implications of detecting a signal from an extraterrestrial civilisation. The discussions will take place over the six to eight weeks following the transmission.
