Decryption of Messages from Extraterrestrial Intelligence Using the Power of Social Media - The SETI Decrypt Challenge
Ren\'e Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research,, G\"ottingen, Germany)

TL;DR
This paper reports on a large-scale social media experiment simulating the decryption of extraterrestrial messages, demonstrating the web's potential to aid in interpreting future interstellar communications and testing message decryptability.
Contribution
It introduces the SETI Decrypt Challenge, a novel large-scale online experiment to assess human ability to decode complex extraterrestrial messages.
Findings
Over 300 responses received, including 66 correct solutions.
Half of the solutions were independently derived, half with online discussion.
The experiment shows the web's potential in extraterrestrial message interpretation.
Abstract
With the advent of modern astronomy, humans might now have acquired the technological and intellectual requirements to communicate with other intelligent beings beyond the solar system, if they exist. Radio signals have been identified as a means for interstellar communication about 60 years ago. And the Square Kilometer Array will be capable of detecting extrasolar radio sources analogous to terrestrial high-power radars out to several tens of light years. The ultimate question is: will we be able to understand the message, or, vice versa, if we submit a message to extraterrestrial intelligence first, how can we make sure that they understand us? Here I report on the largest blind experiment of a pretend radio message received on Earth from beyond the solar system. I posted a sequence of about two million binary digits ("0" and "1") to the social media that encoded a configuration…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
