‘Alien message’ will be sent from Mars to Earth TODAY

 Earth is set to receive its first ‘alien message’ in just a few hours.

The SETI Institute, a non-profit dedicated to understanding life in space, is kicking off a program to beam a signal from Mars to be decoded on Earth.

The idea is to prepare scientists for the ‘profoundly transformational experience for all humankind’ when extraterrestrials contact us – and this is practice for deciphering otherworldly communication.

SETI is hosting a live-streamed event at 3 pm ET (7 pm GMT), where a Mars orbiter will send the encoded transmission that will travel 180 million miles to Earth in just 16 minutes.

Researchers are taking a collaborative approach to solving the message by allowing the public to access it and help decode what it reads. It has provided a submission for anyone up to the challenge.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (pictured) is one of three telescopes that will capture the ‘alien message’ that will be decoded as practice for when extraterrestrials make real contact with Earth

Humans crafted the alien message, so SETI notes that actual communication for life in space would look much different from what humans could mustard up.

And the team knows that any transmission from the final frontier would come from worlds much farther away than Mars. 

Earth has captured signals traveling through space.

‘Much of the radio emission that comes from space is emitted by tiny electrically charged particles, known as electrons, moving through magnetic fields,’ according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

‘These electrons have usually been accelerated away from the shock waves of exploding stars, known as supernovae.’ 

One problem was that astronomers have always struggled to differentiate between potential extraterrestrial signals and human-caused ones.

This changed in February when a team of scientists led by the University of Toronto designed an algorithm capable of determining what signals are artificial and which could potentially be alien messages.

SETI’s project, called ‘A Sign in Space,’ is a major part of Earth being contacted by extraterrestrials.

Daniela dePaulis, the visionary artist behind the A Sign in Space project, said in a statement: ‘Throughout history, humanity has searched for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena.

The Mars orbiter will beam the message at 3 pm ET, which will be received on Earth 16 minutes later

‘Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind.

‘A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.’

The signal will be sent from ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which hangs over Mars, studying its atmosphere.

The transmission will be captured by three massive telescopes around the globe: The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), Robert C. Byrd at the Green Bank Observatory (GBT) in West Virginia and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in northern Italy.

Teams will then collect the data and securely store it in collaboration with Open Data Archive and Filecoin, a decentralized storage network.

To engage the public, the SETI Institute will host a social media live stream event featuring interviews with key team members, including scientists, engineers, artists and more, joining the live stream from around the world, including control rooms from the ATA, the GBT, and Medicina.

‘Anyone working to decode and interpret the message can discuss the process in the A Sign in Space Discord server,’ SETI shared.

‘Submissions of findings, thoughts, and artistic and scientific inputs may be made through the dedicated submission form on the project’s website.’

Following the transmission, the A Sign in Space team will host a series of Zoom-based discussions open to the public around topics that consider the societal implications of detecting a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

And discussions will occur over the next six to eight weeks after receiving the transmission.