Any Martians seeing the Perseverance Rover would obviously realize that it was intelligently made. They would probably wonder about the function of the rover and the debris left from the landing. But would they discover anything else about it?

One of the engineers who designed and tested the rover landing parachute, Allan Chen, embedded a secret message into the parachute’s fabric. This brings to mind the plaque on the side of Apollo 11, meant to be interpreted and understood by an alien intelligence coming across it. As a man inspired by Carl Sagan from the 1980s, was Chen’s message meant for future aliens to crack? What was spelled out in the secret coding within the specific pattern of colours on the parachute?

nasa.gov

The message is written in binary code radiating outward from the centre. Each string of red and white stripes represents a single letter. These make up three words which are posted around NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Laboratory Campus in California: ‘Dare mighty things’, from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, the 26^th US President (1901–1909). The message concludes with the location coordinates of the JPL campus.

The parachute’s secret message would hardly have any meaning to any hypothetical alien intelligences. They would have no reason to suspect any sort of coded message within the parachute colours anyway.

Unlike the Apollo 11 plaque, this was likely just a bit of fun. But it brings SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) to mind. Even a tiny code coming in from space would be seen as coming from an intelligent source. Meanwhile, the obvious proof of intelligence far surpassing that of humans—the encyclopedic information encoded on the DNA of living things—is ignored.

• Strickland, A.,‘Dare mighty things’: The man behind the secret message in the Mars rover’s parachute; edition.cnn.com, 27 Feb 2021.
• Spektor, B., There’s a secret code in the Mars rover’s parachute; livescience.com, 22 Feb 2021.