A brand new project goals to assist prepare humanity for the day — should it ever come — that we make contact with intelligent aliens.
At 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) on Wednesday (May 24), Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) Mars probe will send a coded message that will likely be received by three big radio telescopes here on Earth.
Scientists all over the world — and interested members of the general public — will then try and decode the missive, as a part of an ambitious, multiweek project called A Check in Space.
“This experiment is a chance for the world to learn the way the SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] community, in all its diversity, will work together to receive, process, analyze and understand the meaning of a possible extraterrestrial signal,” Wael Farah, project scientist for the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a network of dishes in Northern California run by the nonprofit SETI Institute, said in a press release.
“Greater than astronomy, communicating with E.T. would require a breadth of data,” Farah said. “With A Check in Space, we hope to make the initial steps towards bringing a community together to satisfy this challenge.”
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The ATA is considered one of the three facilities that may pick up the TGO message, which is able to take 16 minutes to succeed in Earth from Mars orbit. The opposite two are the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope on the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in northern Italy, which is managed by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.
Teams at each of the three observatories will process the coded signal and make it available to the general public. So, in case you’re interested, you possibly can try your hand at deciphering it — and submit your solution and other ideas via the project’s website.
Indeed, public engagement is a key a part of A Check in Space, which is led by Daniela de Paulis, the present artist in residence at each the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory.
For instance, the project will host a webcast on Wednesday that features interviews with team members and live look-ins on the control rooms of the three radio telescope sites. The livestream will begin at 2:15 p.m. EDT (1815 GMT), 45 minutes before TGO beams out its message.
And, over the following six to eight weeks, the project team will host a series of public Zoom meetings that may discuss the societal implications of spotting a signal from an alien civilization.
“Throughout history, humanity has looked for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena,” de Paulis said in the identical statement.
“Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization could be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind,” she added. “A Check in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended seek for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.”
