‘Alien’ Code From Mars Cracked by Father-Daughter Duo

Would we be able to crack an alien code? That is the question posed by contemporary media artist Daniela de Paulis, who worked together with SETI Institute, the Green Back Observatory, and the ESA, to simulate an alien code. The ‘alien’ code was first sent to Earth in May 2023 through the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and was cracked by a father-daughter duo earlier this year.

It was crafted by a variety of scientists and artists, including De Paulis, several astronomers, and a computer scientist.

According to the ESA, citizen scientists were the primary target of the ‘alien code’ and were able to extract the signal from the raw data coming from space in only 10 days, but the hard part was figuring out what it meant. This is what the father-daughter duo of Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to do in July 2024, but the announcement came in the last week of October.

The father-daughter duo ran simulations for days to crack the ‘alien code’

But how could this father-daughter duo crack the mock ‘alien code’ sent from Mars? According to the ESA’s press release, the duo ran simulations on the signal for hours and days on end.

This process allowed the duo to discover that throughout the message, clues of biological information could be found, and the two eventually found that the message was an image of five amino acids that make up proteins, which in turn are the foundations of life as we know it.

Now that the father-daughter duo cracked the ‘alien code,’ the next task is finding the meaning behind it. The ESA’s press release said that a group of citizen scientists are dedicated to analyzing the message on the project’s discord server and that “the interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open.”

What would the procedure be if we actually got an alien code?

The project in charge of the ‘alien code’ cracked by the father-daughter duo is called “A Sign in Space,” and it’s meant to explore how our species would react after receiving an alien message.

But what would the procedure look like if we actually received an alien code here on Earth? The first thing that would happen is that any institution receiving an alien signal, be it NASA or the SETI institute, would have to send the signal to another observatory for it to be independently confirmed.

After the signal is confirmed, the government of the country that made the discovery would have to first inform the United Nations and the general public.

Despite this father-daughter duo showing that citizen scientists could potentially solve an alien code, it is more than likely that if we got a real one, the planet would not be relying on citizen scientists.

Instead, there would most likely be some sort of international coalition of linguists, mathematicians, cryptographers, and technologists that would come together to crack and give meaning to a hypothetical alien code.