Okay, so maybe I don't really listen to the stars with headphones and all. But, I love everything outer space and big data. This blog is a way for our small community to come together and share our progress on analyzing SETI data and seeing if we can make sense of all that star noise.

Please note that I put the oldest posts first so you can easily get caught up by reading from top to bottom. Aren't I so helpful?

Come join my adventure to boldly listen where no one has listened before! *But not really listening. Please stop emailing me about that.

Okay, so, we've got some new data here. Well, not exactly new, per se. It's from 2010, but its new to us (thanks, SETIQuest)!

I have a new pattern algorithm that I'm going to run to see what we can find. If anyone is interested in following along, please hop over to our Discord channel.

Let's do this!

I didn't have much luck scanning last week, tbh. But this week – oh boy – you bet we'll find something. I'll post any results I find here. It took a century to process the data from our last scan, so this week I'm going to pull some more compute instances so we can bust through it faster. And yes, these are the things I spend my paycheck on. And yes, mom, I do have a date tonight. A date with destiny.

So, I've been completely fascinated by the Voyager program, specifically the Golden Record. We built a satellite and shot it into space with a blinged-out record plated in gold.

The record has a message from President Jimmy Carter that says:

"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings."

The record itself is analog, using grooves just like the records your grandparents used to have. There's a movie from the '80s called Starman that talks about the Golden Record. Even Star Trek references it (which is awesome).

So here's a challenge for my brainstorming session: if we weren't visited by aliens as a result, what would they do if they found the record? How would they transmit back a message?

Per aspera ad astra.

We had a great chat last night on the Discord. We broke down what was on the record. Specifically the math behind it all, and how they built the instructions so aliens could actually read what was on the record.

I shared the diagram above. The record itself is analog, but you can see that it's actually storing data in a binary format. Milly and I are going to start working on some algorithms to scan the data we get from the radio for any waveforms that might match. We'll allow for plenty of error and see what we get.

When Bernard asks why we are sending cat pictures instead of working.

The algorithm for Voyager is done. I'm going to start scanning through the same data as before, but this time, I'm looking for anything that even smells an teensy bit like a Voyager response. I know, I know. It's a long-shot. But its worth a shot right? I'm going to go through the data, upload anything interesting to GitHub, and then we can all tear it apart together.

Wish me luck. I'm off to the races.

EDIT: Found something. Could be nothing. But could be something!

I found a match. At least I think I found a match.

This is from the data. And it appears to be calibration image from the cover of the Golden Record!

I'm too tired to keep analyzing. I need sleep. But I'll look more into this tomorrow.

I couldn't sleep. So I got up and kept analyzing what I was getting. The calibration image is showing up over and over again in the data. About 85% of the instances match up. It's not just random garbage. It looks like whoever sent it is repeating it over and over so we can correct for errors from interference.

After about 5 passes through the data with corrections, I've uploaded it to GitHub, but the signal eventually cuts off and I can't make sense of the rest of it.

Ideas anyone?

Bernard, you're a genius. I can't believe I didn't think of that.

When I translated the Manchester encodings we found, that's when everything started to make sense. Whoever sent this has some working knowledge of the Command computer aboard Voyager. They reverse-engineered it. When I error-corrected the first 18 bits, I got a string of 0's then a string of 1's. After that, the numbers appear more random.

I think whoever sent this is trying to tell us that they are transmitting it using the onboard General Electric 18-bit TTL processor! Milly and I are going to spend this week going through all this code.

Per aspera ad astra.

After an entire week of slow coding, a fair bit of arguing, and an Olympic swimming pool's worth of coffee, it's ready to run.

Milly insisted we isolate it from our network. I'm not going to lie, I'm a little nervous. But let's see what happens.

We launched the program. It started eating up memory really fast. Then it accessed the hard drive. Then our keyboard and mouse stopped responding.

The log stopped working. Last thing we saw was that the program had started accessing the hard disk and creating data on it.

You guys...you guys. I want you to witness history in the making. Rizer is late, so we were about to pull the plug so we could pull out the hard drive and see what it was doing. But something marvelous is happening. Check out the video below.

I think...I think the software is trying to communicate with us. What do we do next? I never imagined first contact would be with a piece of software sent from the stars. Do we call NASA?

https://articrypt.com/starlistener/