It took humanity almost a year and a half to solve the unusual task set by the SETI Research Institute for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In general, astronomers are now inclined to the fact that a full-fledged contact with an extraterrestrial civilization is unlikely to occur, even if it exists. It turns out that, according to theoretical calculations, it is absolutely impossible to find an intelligent person in a radius of about a thousand light years around us. This inevitably means that we will receive a signal that is thousands of years old at best.

If we start from the moment when writing appeared, earthlings have existed as an intelligent civilization for only five and a half thousand years. Less than a hundred years after the advent of radio communications, we began to consider anxiously our chances of survival and perpetuation. So it is quite possible that the long-awaited moment to receive a meaningful signal from space will turn into a big disappointment: the senders will no longer be there by then.

Some scientists, despite this point of view, consider a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization to be fundamentally important for the further development of humanity: we can compare ourselves with them, learn lessons, and perhaps borrow breakthrough technologies that are not yet available to us.

However, it is necessary not only to receive the signal, but also to be able to understand it and decode it. SETI researcher Daniela de Paulis recently asked this question. On his initiative, in May 2023, the Trace Gas Orbiter interplanetary station flying around Mars sent out a radio signal that was easily distinguishable as artificial by all its characteristics.

It was received by three observatories in the USA and Italy, and then all the “raw” data collected was made public with an appeal to all progressive humanity to help read this letter. This is the essence of the A Sign in Space experiment. Thousands of people joined him. They spent more than a year on this “brainstorming”.

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently reported that two US residents managed to “crack” the code and decipher the message. Ken Chaffin and his daughter Kelly sent their findings to the initiative’s author, Daniele de Paulis.

Enthusiasts believe that before them is a picture showing complex organic molecules called amino acids – the “building blocks” of life. To them, such a message could be interpreted as an attempt to introduce the brothers to the biology of their home planet.

However, it is not yet clear how comprehensive this interpretation is. SETI deliberately did not reveal the content of the message, and even after receiving a response, it emphasized that: The experiment is not yet complete, one can continue to speculate about what intelligent hypothetical substances from another world might have in mind.