But the event also correctly simulates the fact that it wouldn’t be SETI’s role to decipher the message, just to point out its reception. We don’t want to cry wolf.”Īmong the checks would be making sure that the transmission doesn’t come from any human spacecraft and that it can be received in the exact same form by different telescopes, which is why the test involved three of them. “It’s not like the movie ‘Contact,’ where Jodie Foster has her headphones on and suddenly she picks up something. “There’s a whole series of rigorous testing that might take months,” he said. We had to establish (the transmission) completely from scratch … That was actually quite complex and took almost two years of work.”Īccording to Wael Farah, a radio astronomer and data analyst at the SETI Institute who participated in the event, it’s important to spread the knowledge that receiving an alien transmission does not equate to understanding its meaning, and that while an intelligent signal would be easy to recognize, the process would still be laborious. “NASA and ESA do two-way communication with their spacecraft all the time, but they have their own dedicated equipment. “It’s not as trivial as people think,” de Paulis said. The event also served as a general rehearsal of all the steps involved in identifying and correctly processing a signal of extraterrestrial and intelligent origin. “But then, everyone can join in for the cultural interpretation, which for me is the most exciting part,” she said. This first step in the process, according to dePaulis, requires very specific technical knowledge. The message, which is only a few kilobytes in size, had to be disentangled from the rest of the raw data received during the transmission, which might have included background noise, telemetry data and spurious information. After that, I narrowed the group down to five people, and then eventually down to three - because it was really important that not many people knew about the content.” “We were meeting on a monthly basis, brainstorming ideas on what a possible extraterrestrial civilization would send to us. “I was working with astronomers, anthropologists and other scientists, it was a very interdisciplinary group, and we also had artists from different fields,” she said. A few days on, the collaborative effort is still ongoing, and a Discord channel has been set up for public discussion. Once received, the raw data containing the message was released on the internet via Filecoin, a large decentralized storage network, to give everyone a chance to decode it and interpret its meaning. The transmission traveled across space for 16 minutes before being successfully picked up by three observatories: the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station near Bologna, Italy. The message went out on May 24 from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft launched in 2016 that is currently orbiting Mars to study its atmosphere. It is meant to explore the process of decoding and interpreting an intelligent signal from the cosmos and how it would impact humanity. The event - organized by SETI, a nonprofit organization with a mission to search for extraterrestrial intelligence and explore the origin of life in the universe - straddles the line between art project and technical rehearsal.
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