'Alien' Signal Decoded (esa.int) 5
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.
US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.
US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.
Some background (Score:4, Interesting)
Some background for people who aren't familiar...
Amino acids all have the same "top" section, an N-C-C=O,OH section which is linear, and a separate structure hanging down from the C in the middle. The different amino acids have the same top but different attached structures.
To make a protein you connect the tops of a bunch of amino acids together like a string with various shaped beads hanging down, and the extra structures electrostatically attract or repel each other in complicated ways, so that the string crumples up to make the complicated structure of the protein. If you take a rubber band and twist one end repeatedly until if forms a complicated knotty structure, that's similar to how chains of amino acids fold up to make proteins.
(Or you can think of the attached structures as having little magnets that attract and repel the magnets of other structures to make a complicated knotty structure, except that the forces are electrostatic and not magnetic.)
The image from the article shows what appears to be a set of amino acids shown diagrammatically, and from the structure you can deduce the image encodings of C atoms, N atoms, O atoms, and hydrogens that match exactly the top section of the known amino acids.
In the images, we see an amino acid with attached structure CH2-CH3, which I can't find in any of the amino acid diagrams online so... it's an alien amino acid? I also can't find CH2-CH2-CH3, nor CH2-CH2-NH2 which are also in the image.
Someone fact check me on this: they're all alien amino acids?
IIRC, the amino acids used on Earth are thought to be randomly chosen, in that there are other possible structures that could have been chosen by evolution but that we don't see. This came up in the context of whether humans could eat alien life (ie - alien plants): presumably alien life forms would use a different set of amino acids, some of which would be the same as the ones we use, but it's highly likely that they would have some that we don't use, and also that they would be missing ones that we require. The conclusion was that if we go to colonize a distant planet, we'll have to bring and grow our own foodstuffs.
('Sorta like the red weed of "War of the Worlds".)
Maybe someone with a biochem background can further decode the structures in the image?
Re: Some background (Score:2)
Thank you _so_ much for not making a "this is all bullshit" post. I appreciate the insight you've shown.
The message: (Score:2)
Don't order the meatloaf
Damn... (Score:1)
I had my bets on "CowboyNeal's Greatest Hits."