A new project aims to prepare humanity for the day—should it ever come—when we make contact with intelligent aliens.
On Wednesday (May 24) at 3 p.m. EDT (7 p.m. GMT), the European Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) Mars probe will transmit an encoded message that will be received by three major radio telescopes here on Earth.
Scientists around the world — and interested members of the public — will then attempt to decode the message, as part of an ambitious multi-week project called A Sign in Space.
“This experiment is an opportunity for the world to learn how the SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] community, in all its diversity, will work together to receive, process, analyze and understand the meaning of a potential alien signal,” said Wael Farah, project scientist for the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a network of satellite dishes in Northern California run by the non-profit SETI Institute, said in a 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.”
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The ATA is one of three facilities that will pick up the TGO message, which will take 16 minutes to reach Earth from Mars orbit. The other two are the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in northern Italy, operated by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics.
Teams from each of the three observatories will process the coded signal and make it available to the public. So if you’re interested, you can try to decipher it – and submit your solution and other ideas via the project website.
Indeed, public engagement is an important part of A Sign in Space, which is led by Daniela de Paulis, current artist in residence at both the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory.
For example, the project will host a webcast on Wednesday featuring interviews with team members and live looks in the control rooms of the three radio telescope sites. The live stream will begin at 2:15 p.m. EDT (1815 GMT), 45 minutes before TGO broadcasts its message.
And over the next six to eight weeks, the project team will host a series of public Zoom meetings that will discuss the societal implications of noticing a signal from an alien civilization.
“Throughout history, humanity has searched for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena,” De Paulis said in the same 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.”
