Callum Jones
A father and daughter duo have made history by finally decoding an 'alien' signal from Mars.
Of course, governments across the world likely have people on translation duty in the event of aliens arriving on Earth, but that doesn't mean everyone else won't give it a crack as well.
And that's exactly what's happened after an 'alien message' was released by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute.
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'A Sign In Space', the company's project, is a sort of intergalactic piece of 'global theatre'.
Daniela de Paulis, the artist behind the project, said: "Throughout history, humanity has searched for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena.
"Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilisation 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."
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The project sent an encoded message from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter back to our planet back in May 2023.
Well, the 'alien message' has finally been encrypted, more than a year after it was first released.
On Friday (7 June), the correct solution was presented to De Paulis by John and Sarah, which are not their real names as they requested to be anonymous.
The father and daughter duo looked at the message considering the possibility that it had a connection with the computation model called the cellular automaton.
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The model remarkably turned the seemingly manfulness message of ones and zeros to find something of meaning.
Using the Unity video game engine, the pair put the 'alien message' through 6,625 transformations to turn the code into something tangible.
Well, it turns out to be an image of five amino acids, all of which are represented by blocks of different number of pixels.
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For example, one is present or hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen, and eight for oxygen.
Before the father and daughter duo solved the code, the message was picked up by three radio astronomy observatories, the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, California, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, West Virginia, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station Observatory, Italy.
However, no one ever expected it would take this long for the code to be cracked.
ATA Project Scientist Dr. Wael Farah said: “This experiment is an opportunity for the world to learn how the SETI community, in all its diversity, will work together to receive, process, analyse, and understand the meaning of a potential extraterrestrial signal.”