Imagine a radio telescope on Earth picks up a transmission, and a specialized algorithm concludes that it's an artificial signal—a message whose origin lies "beyond" the Solar System. The message has been processed into binary representation, so all we have before our eyes is an enormous string of ones and zeros. How would you decipher it? Astrophysicist René Heller from the Max Planck Institute presented this challenge... and the web exploded.
The search for extraterrestrial life is being carried out in different ways. Some projects focus on neighbors like Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa, while others aim directly at remote stars or clusters that could generate activity. Two good examples are SETI, where anyone can collaborate through SETI@Home, and Breakthrough Listen, presented in the middle of last year. The reason for all this is more than obvious: We need to know if we are not alone in the universe. But what would happen if we found that definitive proof? Imagine for a moment that one of our telescopes receives something that would leave the famous Wow! signal of 1977 in the dust. No faulty satellite, no strange atmospheric conditions. A clear, direct, and definitely artificial message. There is "someone" on the other end of that message, and they want us to know. What is it that they sent? Something like this:
To tell the truth, this is nothing more than a challenge created by astrophysicist René Heller of the Max Planck Institute. The formal presentation of the challenge (link below) includes other very important details about the message: Its origin is about 50 light-years from Earth, and it arrived as a series of long and short pulses in a very narrow band through a frequency of 452.12919 MHz. The pulses represent binary digits, and you, stellar translator on behalf of the entire human species (no pressure!), must decipher the message. If you do it correctly, you will be able to answer specific details such as the average height of our extraterrestrial colleagues, what their life expectancy is, what the scale of the devices they used to send the message is, how long they have tried to communicate with someone else, what kind of object they live on (moon? planet?), and how old their star system is.
The rules for this challenge are quite simple, as it allows collaborative actions, discussions on social media, and the request of three helps through official channels (email, Twitter, and Facebook available in the official announcement), but the number of interested people has been so high that Heller simply cannot respond to everyone. Interested? In that case, you have time until next June 3, the date on which the correct answers will be published.
