Humanity has sent its own simple outgoing messages, such as Frank Drake’s message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to the globular star cluster M13, which contained information about our solar system and DNA, or the Golden Records on the Voyager spacecraft, which made sounds and contain symbols that show the diversity of life and culture on Earth. We even tried sending outgoing ‘music lessons’.
Still, aliens can send us something more complex, or a message in a format that humans have never encountered before. As much as aliens want to be understood, their message can be difficult to decipher, as they likely have an entirely different language, culture, history, biology, and level of technological development than humans. And of course, a true alien signal would come from much further away than Mars, perhaps coming from many, many light years away. That means it may have been sent millennia ago, perhaps even by a long-dead civilization, de Paulis says.
But the Sign in Space experiment is more about us than them. De Paulis has been collaborating with radio astronomers on art-related projects for years, including one called optics which reflected images from the moon’s surface, with their distorted colors and shapes evoking a long journey to the moon. With this new project she aims to reach a wide global audience – and so far thousands of people from all over the world have shared their theories about a Discord channel while they work on decryption attempts. (One theory is that some of the radio data, when arranged in a certain way, could form a 256-by-256-pixel image, with clouds of dots rendered in a way that might resemble the Pleiades or some other star cluster.)
During a small online workshop she led yesterday, De Paulis pointed out that so far people have signed up more than 100 sketches, images, poems and essays, which shows the wide range of thoughts and emotions evoked by the idea of alien contact. Many sketches look inviting, including drawings of people, a human hand, the Earth, a waving alien, or the word “peace.” Others contain made-up symbols or icons — speculations about what might be included in a “first contact” message.
Video: Olivier Auber
SETI has sometimes straddled astrobiology — the study of exoplanets that might harbor life — and efforts to see UFOs, which are difficult to verify or scientifically investigate. But that could be seen as a largely Western distinction, says Bowdoin College anthropologist William Lempert, who led a workshop for the project last week on differing cultural understandings of the celestial realm. “This tendency to see space as a cold void separated by material objects and perhaps life forms is really an outsider frame,” he said, pointing out that the Polynesian and Aboriginal Australian people he has worked with have different perspectives. “Most people imagine space and aliens as neither ‘outer’ nor ‘alien,'” he says.
Philosopher and ethicist Chelsea Haramia, another of De Paulis’ colleagues, will lead a workshop later in June on how humans can deal with the uncertainty inherent in thinking about alien contact. While the response to A Sign in Space has been overwhelmingly positive, an actual call from ET could evoke more mixed reactions, including fear, panic and the urge to lash out at scientists and other experts, Haramia says. This project could help people get a subjective experience of how they would react if it actually happened, she says, and answer the question, “What would be a successful alien detection?” for me?” She describes the art project as a way to make the abstract real, like actually tasting a durian fruit instead of just hearing a description of what someone is like.
De Paulis believes it will take at least weeks — or possibly months — for someone to crack the message. It is also possible that the message will never be fully deciphered, and De Paulis is okay with that. She and her colleagues point to other artworks about extraterrestrial contact, such as those by Italo Calvino Cosmic comicsthe film Arrivaland the Star Trek episode “Darmok” – in which an alien race confusingly communicates through metaphors, conjuring up histories and stories that humans don’t understand. “If we ever receive an alien signal, scientists don’t know where the noise ends and where the actual message begins,” she says. “So this is pretty true to what would happen if the scientific community decided to share the signal in an open source format.”