Astrophysicist Michael Hippke of the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany checked whether the creator of the universe, if he exists, could leave a message visible to all sentient beings. Several theoretical physicists suggested in 2005 that such a message could have been encoded in the background radiation of the universe. Hippke disclosed the search results in a preprint, published in the arXiv repository.
The scientist decided to find out whether the hypothetical creator of the universe could have left traces in the background radiation (relict background) – the thermal radiation uniformly filling space, left over from the epoch of recombination, when the universe first became transparent to light. Since the space was not uniform, slight temperature fluctuations were noticeable in the background radiation. Then the binary message can be encoded in the CMB temperature changes.
According to the assumption of theoretical physicists, the message can contain thousands of bits and is visible to everyone in the Universe. However, Hippke found several significant problems. First, the relict radiation cools down and after 10 to 41 degrees of years will become undetectable for intelligent civilizations, if they still exist. In addition, it is doubtful that the background radiation looks the same to observers at different locations. Third, the Milky Way makes it difficult to measure the temperature of a fairly large part of the CMB, which is why a large number of bits are lost. According to Hippke, only a thousand bits are available for observation.
The scientist also analyzed data from two satellites, which recorded fluctuations in the temperature of the relict background, which allowed him to determine the sequence of bits. However, he found no evidence that this sequence corresponded to an integer sequence that could indicate any meaningful message. At the same time, this does not deny that the message does not exist, but it is not easily detectable.