Martian organic molecules may be messages, say professors
April 1st, 2025 (AFD News)
By Loo Trolleyer
Long chain organic molecules, recently discovered by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard the rover Curiosity in the Gale Crater on Mars may actually be encoded messages, rather than evidence of complex life having evolved on the red planet, according to two scientists at Jeddak University.
“The molecules just didn’t make sense to me, in terms of natural evolution,” says Prof. Tyrone Barry Ehyus, an exogeneticist who had been examining the recent data. “The presence of decane, undecane, and dodecane was evocative of fatty tissue, but the arrangements didn’t seem structured in a way that would result in any living organism. I happened to mention it to a linguist colleague of mine at lunch, who took a different approach.”
That colleague was linguist Dr. Rose Ellen Tah. Running the strand diagram through a custom built AI (Artificial Intelligence) program called DEJAH (Detecting Etymology and Jargon Antecedents Heuristic), Dr. Tah was suprised to see that DEJAH found something it considered intelligible.
“DEJAH is self-learning, hence the heuristic part of the name. At first, she just felt, if I may use that term, that there was something there. Within the course of an hour and multiple iterations, she began to produce sentences.”
Those sentences, while fragmentary, say that these molecules were engineered as a way to preserve a message. Organic molecules are a particularly effective medium for that, being able to survive in extreme circumstances for millenia.
What was the message?
Mars had once had a flourishing ecosystem, including lakes. A sentient species from somewhere else had used the planet as a place to build power generators for its AI systems, which were considered too ecologically risky to create on their own planet. Eventually, the use of those power generators damaged the atmosphere beyond the point of repair, resulting in the uninhabited Mars we see today.
Dr. Tah emphasized that this scenario should not be considered as accurate until further studies can be conducted. “It is possible DEJAH, which has familiarity with over one hundred years of science fiction, may have ‘hallucinated’ a story based on dramatic imperatives.”
Another fragment indicated that the AI on Mars, realizing that the changes would create an inhospitable situation for the simple lifeforms then present, sent specimens to Earth, where they may have seeded life here.
Other scientists have not responded to our requests for their opinions about this hypothesis.
Update: after initial publication, Dr. Tah contacted us with the latest sentence deciphered by DEJAH:
April Fool!
—
Yes, this was my annual April Fool’s Day joke! As usual, I have used some Easter Eggs:
- Loo Trolleyer is a pun on John Carter
- Jeddak University is also named after something from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars (Barsoom) novels
- Tyrone Barry Ehyus is a form of “Tiberius”, Captain Kirk’s middle name (as revealed in Star Trek: The Animated Series)
- Rose Ellen Tah is a play on “Rosetta”, as in the Rosetta Stone: I thought that was appropriate for a linguist
- DEJAH is, of course, named after Dejah Thoris of Barsoom. I figured that might be recognizable, but that it wasn’t unreasonable that a scientist might have also used that name as an homage
Note: while I wrote this myself, ChatGPT did some research on the molecule discovery for me.
Hope you enjoyed it!
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