A Sign in Space- SETI

On the twenty-fourth of May 2023, at 19:16 UTC, a signal was beamed home from the European Space Agency's ExoMars orbiter, and A Sign in Space was born. Conceived by the artist Daniela De Paulis and carried by a global SETI team, it was a rehearsal for first contact: an encoded message, its contents secret even to most collaborators, transmitted toward Earth and caught by great radio dishes in California, Italy, West Virginia and beyond. Astronomers, cryptographers, linguists and anthropologists, and anyone curious enough to try, were then invited to decode it together, a worldwide exercise in imagining how humanity might one day answer a call from the stars.

The chart of that transmission is fittingly eloquent. The Sun stands in Gemini, the sign of the messenger, that marriage of Helios and Mercury, forever moving information from one place to another, and it sits atop the tenth house, the highest and most public point, where the whole world can see. The Moon rests in proud, expressive Leo in the twelfth house, the hidden realm of the collective unconscious and the unknowable, while Leo also rises: a regal, torch-holding mask illuminating the path ahead. A message sent, a mystery kept, a species learning to listen.