Communication Codes: Can You Decode an Alien Message?

I have authored two books about extraterrestrial communication. One is published.

Extraterrestrial Communication Code: 

The second, Angel Communication Code, will be available to the public before the end of 2023.

This subject is very real and very fascinating. The theme of the books is that ETs left us a message to decode and repeat back to them. If we can demonstrate we understand their message, the lines of communication will open. That is the theory I put on the table along with the logic and evidence that built the theory.

Communicating with another species is probably not going to be easy. Consider how difficult it is already for humans from one culture and language to be understood by those from another. Now we are trying to achieve meaningful communication with ETs. Their bodies, minds and habitats are likely to be far different from humans on earth.

The scientific community recognizes the issue. An artist-led team created a mock message from the stars to test us Earthlings. On May 24, 2023, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter beamed the note from Mars toward Earth.  

Three observatories detected the transmission 16 minutes later.  The Medicina Radio Observatory in Bologna, Italy; the Allen Telescope Array in northern California; and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

This is an on-going interplanetary art project, called A Sign in Space.  Nobody has deciphered the May 24 message, but many continue to try. You can actually find the message and download it from several websites. A Sign in Space

Only three people in the world know what A Sign in Space’s message means. First among them is Daniela de Paulis, the project’s founder. She is an artist in residence at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. She also serves at the Green Bank Observatory. De Paulis and two other co-authors created the mock alien message after consulting with poets, scientists, programmers and philosophers.

Their challenge in creating the message was not just to think like an extraterrestrial but also to neutralize Earth’s regional biases. Her team immediately ruled out language-based communication. She will not however, confirm or deny whether the message contains any text. Her team even agonized over the using of mathematics. Although the fundamental concepts are universal, different societies may think about and represent math differently. “It was really very heavy work to dismantle our Western-centric thinking,” she says.

De Paulis struggled with the message for years after she conceived the project in 2019. A breakthrough came in late 2022 when she contacted artist and computer programmer Giacomo Miceli. He suggested that she draw inspiration from the short story “A Sign in Space” in Italian writer Italo Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics.

A month before the transmission deadline, astronomer Roy Smits joined the pair. He added a mathematical component to make the message “more universal, so to speak,” de Paulis says. It also made it and much harder to crack because it looks nothing like what humans use in our daily conversations.

We have been sending messages to ETs out into the stars for decades with no response to date.  In 1974, scientists shot a radio message into the universe using the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. It was a 1,679 string of 1’s and 0’s. When translated graphically, it consists of crude representations of a human, the Arecibo Telescope’s dish and the DNA double helix, and more.

The likelihood of this “Arecibo message” ever being understood by extraterrestrials is slim at best. Its composer, the late astronomer Frank Drake, gave the Arecibo message to his colleagues to interpret for fun, and not one of them figured it out.

That project, as well as the new experiment, illustrates just what a tall order true understanding between species is. “The beauty of A Sign in Space is to make us reflect on just how it is more frustratingly difficult and ultimately a much more profound sort of contact than Hollywood would ever portray,” says Douglas Vakoch. He is the president of the organization METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, who was not involved in the project.

One of the project’s more than 4,700 subscribers on Discord is Gonzalo José Carracedo Carballal. He is a 34-year-old Ph.D. student in astrophysics at the Complutense University of Madrid. A radio astronomy devotee, he fills his spare time working on radio wave projects. His lab in a room littered with instruments and parts. A satellite dish peeks from his balcony. Tattooed on his right triceps is an excerpt from the etchings on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes’ plaque. These were other 1970s attempts by Earth scientists to introduce our species to ETs that might encounter the craft.

Carracedo Carballal was part of the first group of people to extract the raw message from the ExoMars orbiter’s broadcast. The message was a 40-gigabyte string of numbers describing the waveform of the telemetry data, interwoven with the alien message. Unlike a real extraterrestrial note, which would arrive unannounced, this signal came in at a precisely scheduled time. Comparing the arrival timing with previous transmissions the telescopes received, the amateur code breakers identified a data packet in the radio signal that was more active and sizable than usual.

A week’s effort of filtering the data segment, which Carracedo Carballal likens to peeling layers off an onion, eventually led to an 8.2-kilobyte bitmap image of five speckled clusters set against a blank background. (Shown below)

Soon after Carracedo Carballal and his colleagues found the raw message, speculations on its meaning erupted. Perhaps the message was hinting at the aliens’ appearance, Morse code, cellular automata or the genetic secrets of E.T.

One user enlisted ChatGPT to reverse engineer a first contact appropriate message as a starting point. Several users suggested that the image was a star map broadcasting the civilization’s location. Others proposed that the dots represented constellations of a much smaller scale: molecules, perhaps the bio signatures of the foreign home world.

The raw message looked too random to be comprehensible. Decoding was necessary to wrangle it into a more intelligible form. However, where to start was the critical question. Every attempt would be a stab in the dark. “You start to see patterns,” Carracedo Carballal says of the process. “You have to stop and think whether something is actually there, or you’re just projecting.”

Whenever Ivi Hasanaj, a 32-year-old software engineer based in Germany, starts to work on decoding A Sign in Space’s message for the day, he opens up the raw image on his computer and stares. He stares, and stares some more until an idea occurs to him, and he writes code to manipulate the image.

Hasanaj does not think aliens, or A Sign in Space’s organizers, are the sadistic sort who would make message recipients bang their head for nothing more than their amusement. Messages are meant to be understood. Although he had not thought much about the problem of extraterrestrial communication before this project, He has solved many puzzles on the gamified coding platform Codewars, and this experience comes in handy. For one, he recognizes the difference between decryption and decoding.

Decryption is the process of making sense of a concealed message for which only the intended recipient has a key, or a translation hack, to understand it. This kind of code breaking is much more difficult than decoding: the biggest hurdle is guessing the missing key.

On the other hand, a message with the key already embedded inside lends itself to decoding. When decoding, the user should not introduce new information into the message. Any operation on the raw file, such as a rotation or an overlay, should come from instructions that the reader has managed to extract from the message. Otherwise, it would be like arbitrarily rearranging the letters of a word to arrive at a new anagram.

Hasanaj is not sure of the true content of A Sign in Space’s message, but his own best guess is a numerical system that counts from one to five. He uncovered this from observing a recurring pattern among the brightest pixels in the image.

Hasanaj has not been able to account for the remaining flecks, which constitute the majority of the signal. Perhaps other kinds of information beyond math lurk in the message. He thinks no part of the already slim communication is redundant.  Aliens would probably make every pixel count. He says he will know the correct answer when he sees it.

The community is still trying to decode the message, pursuing 30-some ideas for how to do so, before even attempting to interpret its full meaning. For this process, participants can take a less technical approach to making sense of the message, as they might do for an abstract painting. For now, the signal is still too random to be interpretable.

Watching their efforts unfold, de Paulis thinks these scattershot efforts may be distracting users from exploring each idea to the full. “They can’t focus on one particular decision,” she observes. “I think that’s the main problem.” If the public remains stuck on the decoding process, she says her team will likely organize an online hackathon later in August.

Humanity’s best shot at understanding an extraterrestrial message is to throw a consortium of diverse expertise at it, Vakoch says. A Sign in Space is a shining example of what that may look like. 

In the event of a real extraterrestrial signal reaching Earth, the public is not likely to be invited to help with the decoding process. In 1989, the International Academy of Astronautics established a post detection protocol that largely emphasizes secrecy. The guidelines have had little updating since. “An international committee of scientists and other experts should be established to serve as a focal point for continuing analysis, and also to provide advice on the release of information to the public,” the protocol decrees. “Parties to this declaration should not make any public announcement of this information” until the extraterrestrial, origin is verified.

“The world has changed a lot since the 1980s,” says Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and an outreach and education coordinator for A Sign in Space. Many more radio aficionados have rigged their own telescopes and trained them toward the skies. There is also social media, which spreads news like wildfire. “The public will know no matter what,” Marchis says.

A Sign in Space is a dress rehearsal for scientific organizations to iron out the technical challenges of message sharing and telescope mobilization to confirm signal detection. More idealistically, it is an experiment for sharing an extraterrestrial signal with members of the public and getting them involved. In that sense, A Sign in Space is the ultimate citizen science project, one on a planetary scale. De Paulis calls the participants on Discord her “co-creators.”

Marchis says he would love to make extraterrestrial communication and translation a more democratic affair. “I’d make the data available right away to the entire community of the world,” Marchis says, rather than having it “on the internal network of some random scientists.” That is what drew him to A Sign in Space in the first place. “I’m hoping that this is going to be the way we’re going to move forward in the future,” he says.

In construing the meaning of an extraterrestrial dispatch, those who give it a go often try to anticipate what the message might be trying to say. The go-to answer is often science and math, given that these concepts hold up anywhere in the universe. The movie Contact posits that space aliens will hail us with numbers, throwing us a sequence of primes that look unnatural enough to make humans sit up and take notice.

It is one thing to flag a different species’ attention but another to converse meaningfully across the vast reaches of space. “I think an alien would send information that gives us an idea of who they are and the level of complexity that they have reached,” Marchis says—something that may even give recipients a glimpse of the alien society and its evolution.

This is where art comes in. Art is a creator’s self-expression and a cross-cultural conversation with its beholder. Perhaps the true meaning of an alien’s message is the composer’s original intent plus what the recipients make of it. Interpreting such a message requires not only technical skill but also an artistic, philosophical thread. Thus, communicating with aliens is both a science and an art.

A Sign in Space recognizes the near futility of extraterrestrial communication and turns it into an endeavor that is much more open-ended. “If we ever receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, I can imagine that there will never be an agreement over the cultural interpretation,” de Paulis says. “I think there would necessarily be some miscommunication.” [1]

[1] Scientific American. Can You Decode an Alien Message? Shi En Kim August 3, 2023