Tomorrow, Earthlings will have their first experience of what it might be like to receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. The European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft will send a message from Mars to our planet on May 24 at 19:00 UTC. This message will reach the people of Earth in about 16 minutes. But this message will not be clear and a code will need to be decoded. This is where the public will step in.
Three world-class radio observatories (the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Arrangement, the Green Bank Observatory’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, and the Medicina Radio Astronomy Station observatory managed by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics) stand by to detect the message. The “A Sign In Space” project will host and share data.
If one day we get a message…
Visionary artist Daniela de Paulis is the person who brought this project forward. De Paulis and his team provide no information on the content of the message, which is a challenge for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community and a good test for what we might one day experience if we receive a message of another intelligent type.
“Throughout history, humanity has sought meaning in powerful and transformative events,” says De Paulis. “Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization will be a profoundly transformative experience for all of humanity. A Sign in Space offers an unprecedented opportunity to concretely rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.”
The aim of the project is stated as understanding how such a detection will result, especially how scientists and the public will follow in decoding and interpreting the message. People who want to collaborate on decoding the message will have access to a dedicated Discord server and portal where they can offer data analysis or artistic commentary.
Franck Marchis, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer at Unistellar, will co-host the live stream of the signal as it reaches Earth. This project will require global cooperation, as it would if we were to receive a genuine alien signal from space.
Such an event will not just be about scientific expertise or space knowledge, but will involve Earth societies, cultures and talents in many fields working together to face something world-changing.
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