On 24 May 2023, Earth received a message from Mars...🧵

Three radio telescopes captured the signal, producing 60+ GiB of raw data for a worldwide “decode-it-yourself” exercise.

SETI, artist Daniela de Paulis, and hundreds of citizen-scientists treated the event as a dress-rehearsal for real extraterrestrial first contact, releasing the packets for open analysis.

Storing a civilization-defining artifact in a hyperscaler facility is risky. Central clouds create single points of failure that invite breaches, outages, or political takedowns.

SETI needed a vault that was tamper-proof, always online, and immune to censorship

What Filecoin delivered: 🔹 Content addressability: each shard is retrieved by its cryptographic hash, not by server location, so anyone with the CID can fetch the data from any node.   🔹 Provable persistence: Storage Providers must show daily cryptographic proofs that every replica matches the original bit-for-bit. 🔹 Geographic dispersal by default: no two replicas sit on the same hardware

Filecoin is the DePIN backbone for datasets that matter to all of humanity, things like simulated (or one day real) alien messages, climate models, and genomic libraries.

By substituting centralized trust with cryptographic proof and economic incentives, Filecoin transforms archiving from a cost center into an open, verifiable public good.

For those who fear data loss, lock-in, or censorship, the network offers a scalable alternative that turns once-fragile knowledge into a shared, immutable commons.