Voyager 2, one of NASA’s greatest achievements, was launched in 1977 on an ambitious mission to explore planets beyond our Solar System and carry with it a “Message to Aliens” – a golden record of sounds and images of life on Earth.
After more than 40 years of drifting through space, Voyager 2 is now more than 20 billion kilometers from Earth, far beyond the boundaries of the Solar System and into interstellar space.
Despite having surpassed the limits of any spacecraft, Voyager 2 is still sending back faint signals – streams of extremely valuable scientific data that NASA researchers have been quietly collecting.
But then, something strange happened. In a recent series of signals sent back by the spacecraft, engineers discovered something was wrong. An irregular sequence of radio waves that did not match any scientific data that Voyager had ever transmitted.
Initially, they assumed it was a technical glitch—perhaps the transmitter had become corrupted by age or because the spacecraft had entered a region of space with high radiation levels.
However, because of the unusual level of the signal, the team decided to use an advanced linguistic artificial intelligence (AI) model to analyze it—a new technology trained to detect coding patterns hidden in seemingly meaningless signals.
The results stunned everyone.
Not only did the AI recognize that the signal had a structure, it also showed that it could be a coded message—and, more importantly, that it was likely not man-made.
After hours of processing and decoding, the system was able to “interpret” part of the message. What it found was not only unexpected, but also shocking: **a warning.**
A warning about what? And if it wasn’t Voyager, then who—or what—had sent the signal from the far reaches of space?
