‘Alien’ message from Mars finally solved a year later

An “extraterrestrial” message from Mars was decoded after a year.

The message was created by artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, Daniela de Paulis, who was looking to simulate an extraterrestrial signal.

Although it was created here on Earth, it actually had a supernatural origin.

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What we know about the alleged extraterrestrial message

The project, named “A Sign In Space,” was sent from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.

It was received on May 24, 2023 and a challenge was announced for others to decode it.

More than 4,000 people from around the world have undertaken this task.

On June 7, the right solution was found by an anonymous father-daughter team.

How this was understood

They speculated that the message had a connection to a renowned computational model called “cellular automation.”

In this model, pixels can be considered “alive” or “dead” and evolve according to specific rules.

John and Sarah used it to look through the message of ones and zeros (live and dead pixels) to find something meaningful.

Using the Unity game engine, they put the message through 6,625 transformations to turn it into something intelligible.

It turned out to be a picture of five amino acids.

Each was represented by a block of different numbered pixels – one for hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen and eight for oxygen.

De Paulis had intended this experiment to mimic what humanity would face if it actually received an extraterrestrial signal.

First there will be the challenge of how to decode the message.

Then it will be up to us to understand what the message itself means.

As well as unknown things from space, science has also helped us decipher messages from the past – like this student who used AI to translate an ‘illegible’ ancient Roman scroll for the very first time.

A Discord server was set up to serve as a discussion and signal decoding platform.

Since last year, more than 54,000 messages relating to the project have been received.

It is hoped that many more people will join in to discuss and propose possible meanings of the signal.

And that’s not the only extraterrestrial communication we’ve encountered recently: NASA sent 500 photos of animals into space using laser beams.

Additionally, there is a new “eternal” library on the Moon that could last billions of years and outlive civilization.