An Alien Message was Decrypted

Post date: Jun 03, 2016 2:58:59 PM

This is the list of 66 successful crackers (teams or individuals) of the SETI Decrypt Challenge, which ran from 26 April to 3 June 2016. The solutions to the six test questions Dr. Rene Heller asked are:

1. What is the typical body height of our interstellar counterparts? 2.45 m

2. What is their typical lifetime? 180 yr

3. What is the scale of the devices they used to submit their message? 100 km

4. Since when have they been communicating interstellar? 10,000 yr

5. What kind of object do they live on? This one is tricky because I don't know the answer myself, making this part of the experiment a blind-blind test. The spatial information translates into 0.26 AU (100 times the Earth-Moon distance, if anyone recognized). The corresponding picture shows four planets or moons, one of which seems to be inhabited by our alien friends. So they might live on the 4th planet (or on one of three moons orbiting a giant planet) in the habitable zone around a low-mass star.

6. How old is their stellar system? 6 Gyr

Dr. Heller have been asked whether they could not have used the period of the radio signal as a yardstick for the temporal dimension to make the message more universally readable - and not only by us. Obviously, the fact that they used the 50 yr as a yardstick means that they deliberately sent the message to us. Yes, the wave period could also be used. But the fact that they used their distance to us as a yardstick tells us that they know that we exist. They found us first. It's like they winked at us with this yardstick.

In total, Dr. Heller received about 500 e-mails relating to the SETI Decrypt Challenge and sent out about 200. More background information including a full description on how to interpret the message will be given in a journal article.

Thanks for your participation also to those about 30 individuals who sent Dr. Heller their not fully correct solutions. The successful crackers are sorted by date of their submission below. Their twitter user names are in braces if provided and cleared for publication.