We’ve been all over Mars at this point – or at least, our robot proxies have – so it would be pretty wild to discover that we’d missed alien life at this point.
That said, there are always more mysteries to solve.
Like this “alien” signal that showed up about a year ago, and researchers have just managed to decode.
Of course, we know it was sent by Daniela de Paulis at the SETI Institute as a challenge for scientists in the event that a real alien signal ever arrived.
And hey, it did come from another planet.
The project is called A Sign In Space and it was sent from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on May 24, 2023 and received by SETI 16 minutes later.
Over 4,000 people all over the world have been trying to decode it.
June 7, 2024, an as-yet-unnamed father and daughter team presented the correct solution to De Paulis.
They considered that the encrypted message could have a connection with a computation model called cellular automation.
Conway’s Game of Life is a popular version where pixels can be considered “alive” or “dead” and evolve under specific rules.
It creates a complex scenario that evolves from basic rules and was used to go from a meaningless mess of ones and zeroes to finding something with meaning.
They used the Unity game engine and put the message through 6,625 transformations before they landed on the answer, which was an image of five amino acids.
Now, the new challenge will be to interpret the signal, and de Paulis is inviting more people to join the Discord server to discuss and decode the signal.
I’m sure this was a fun exercise for those hoping for alien contact sometime soon.
Which at this point is just about all of us.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about 50 amazing finds on Google Earth.