A father-daughter team successfully decoded a simulated alien-like message sent by a European Mars orbiter, which was part of a project by the SETI Institute to prepare for potential extraterrestrial communication. The message, extracted by 5,000 citizen scientists, was a video depicting the cellular formation of five amino acids. The project aims to explore how humanity might interpret and find meaning in a real message from space, sparking global discussion on our place in the universe.
The global effort to decode and interpret an extraterrestrial message, transmitted by the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, continues to engage millions of people worldwide. The encoded message remains undisclosed, allowing the public to participate in its interpretation. Online discussions, workshops, and a Discord community have emerged to foster collaboration and diverse perspectives. While various creative ideas have been suggested, a dominant interpretation has yet to emerge. The team is considering future activities, including a mini online conference and a hackathon, to sustain engagement.
A transmission designed to mimic correspondence from an extraterrestrial civilization made its way to Earth from Mars, organized by SETI, a nonprofit organization with a mission to search for extraterrestrial intelligence and explore the origin of life in the universe. The message was successfully picked up by three observatories and the raw data containing the message was released on the internet via Filecoin to give everyone a chance to decode it and interpret its meaning. 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.
A transmission designed to mimic correspondence from an extraterrestrial civilization made its way to Earth from Mars, organized by SETI, a nonprofit organization with a mission to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 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. 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.
A team of international experts, including SETI researchers, space scientists, and artists, have come together to stage a project called A Sign in Space, which aims to explore the process of decoding and interpreting an extraterrestrial message by engaging the worldwide SETI community, professionals from different fields, and the broader public. As part of the project, on May 24, 2023, the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in orbit around Mars will transmit an encoded message to Earth to simulate receiving a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. Three world-class radio astronomy observatories located across the globe will detect the encoded message, and the specific content of the encoded message is currently undisclosed, allowing the public to contribute to decoding and interpreting the content.
Researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a machine-learning algorithm that can decode a mouse’s brain signals and reproduce images of what it’s seeing. The algorithm, called CEBRA, was trained on a black and white movie clip from the 1960s of a man running to a car and then opening its trunk. CEBRA was able to correctly identify specific frames the mouse was seeing as it watched and generate matching frames that were a near-perfect match. The research potentially paves the way for improvements in how we study both human and animal brains and how we understand the brain’s reactions to visual and other stimuli.
