Work is underway on an ambitious new SETI test (search for extraterrestrial intelligence).
Today (May 24) at 3 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT), the European Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe beamed an encrypted message to Earth. Sixteen minutes later, it was received by three major radio telescopes on Earth, launching a global effort to decipher the cryptic signal.
That effort is A Sign in Space, a multi-week project led by Daniela de Paulis, current artist in residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
“Throughout history, humanity has searched for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena,” said De Paulis said in a statement.
“Receiving a message from an alien civilization would be a profoundly transformative experience for all of humanity,” she added. “A Sign in Space provides the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open search for meaning across cultures and disciplines.”
Related: The search for extraterrestrial life (reference)
The Green Bank Observatory is one of three telescopes listening to the signal from the Trace Gas Orbiter today, along with the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Northern Italy, which is being operated by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics.
Researchers at each of these facilities will now process the signal and make it available to their colleagues around the world and to the general public. The project team wants people from different backgrounds to study the signal and try to decipher it.
“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 Wael Farah, project scientist for the ATA. said in the same statement.
“Even more than astronomy, communication with ET will require broad knowledge,” Farah said. “With A Sign in Space, we hope to take the first steps in bringing a community together to meet this challenge.”
You can get more information and submit your own ideas about the post at the project website.
You can also participate in A Sign in Space in other ways.
For example, over the next six to eight weeks, the project team will host a series of Zoom meetings that will focus, among other things, on the societal implications of detecting a “technosigature” from advanced extraterrestrial life.
You can learn more about these workshops and register to attend them. here.
