Saving proxima, p.5
Saving Proxima, page 5
“Agreed. I would have thought that the data showing we’ve been announcing our presence for a century and a half to anyone nearby listening would have swayed them. After all, anyone within one hundred and fifty light-years would have a chance of picking up one of our own early radio or television broadcasts. If they had sensitive enough equipment, of course,” Stephan said.
“Play the odds. Someone would have to be listening, with sensitive enough equipment, at the right frequencies, and at the right time. If they stopped listening before 1920, then they would be convinced there was no one out there and be blissfully ignorant of our existence. And to pick up our earliest signals out that far is a long shot in and of itself. They would be awfully dim at those distances and mostly lost in the noise due to all the other, much more energetic radio sources out there. No, the Proximans might have been able to pick it up, but they didn’t have the tech yet,” Rain countered.
“And now we’re mostly quiet,” Stephan nodded.
“And now, thanks to fiber and laser comm, we don’t emit nearly the radio noise we did a hundred or so years ago. And you know, as a radio astronomer who up until a few months ago fought against what radio noise we still produce, I was elated. Now, not so much.”
“Yeah. If the Proximans are listening, they won’t hear much. Our peak signal years happened too long ago. Technology marches on. Their signals aren’t even digital, for God’s sake. It’s still analog and probably created using vacuum tubes,” he said.
Rain stopped chewing her General Tso Chicken and looked straight at Stephan.
“Technology marches on. Technology marches on,” Rain said after swallowing her half-eaten bite.
“You’ve got something,” said Stephan.
“Your comment made me think of those odd, almost-digital signals we started picking up on the carrier wave from Proxima two days ago. When did the code breakers at the National Security Agency get them to do their magic?” she asked.
“Not until this morning. I wouldn’t expect to get anything back from them for a week or more,” said Stephan, cautiously.
“Your mentioning old technology made me think of something. What if we’re trying to be too ‘high tech’ in looking at the data and in trying to figure it out? The intelligence community will be running their best code-breaking, AI-enhanced algorithms trying to figure it out. What if we need to look extremely low tech?”
“Go on,” Stephan said.
Rain reached to her side and pulled her tablet computer out of the bag from next to her seat. She was never far from her purse or her access to the data from Proxima.
“Here’s one of the new data sets,” she said, holding up her tablet and pointing to the rows of numbers. “Let’s not look at this as some sort of binary code to break, but as a simple binary encoding similar to what our technological forebearers had to work with. Let’s send the data to the image processor and tell it to render all the zeros as black and the ones as white and to arrange it into a single image.”
Rain’s fingers flew across the tablet as she had her computer do just what she said. Then, she stopped and stared at the screen.
“Oh my God,” she said, finally.
“What? What have you got?” asked Stephan, starting to rise out of his chair.
“It’s a picture. We picked up a fax machine transmission. They’ve got bloody fax machines!”
“What’s it a picture of? Don’t keep me in suspense,” Stephan exclaimed.
Rain turned her tablet display around so Stephan could see the image. On the screen was a black-and-white picture of a man holding what looked like a fish. He was wearing some sort of robe. He appeared to be in his early adult years, perhaps in his twenties, with features that were clearly Asian.
Both were speechless for several minutes. The room was so quiet that Rain could hear the sound of water dripping out of a faucet in the hotel’s nearby bathroom. Drip. Drip. Drip. It was almost a mocking sound to Rain’s ears.
“They’re human,” said Stephan.
“But that’s impossible. Parallel evolution toward bipedal shape, bilateral symmetry, and all that I can buy. But parallel evolution to looking just like us is simply . . . impossible,” Rain replied.
“We need to look at the other binary data sets. There are hundreds by now. How could we have missed this? How could the code breakers have missed this?” asked Stephan, now getting out of his chair and moving toward the hotel room’s desk where he had put his tablet.
“I don’t know, but let’s see what else we have,” said Rain, already scrolling to the next bit of data.
Two hours later, they had a collection of photos depicting different people, animals, buildings, and page after page of illegible text documents. It seemed that the Proximans used their radio fax-machine technology in much the same way those on Earth had—to send and receive documents. The additional images confirmed what they had seen on the first one: the Proximans were as human as Rain and Stephan, shared features that on Earth would be considered Asian, and they had cities and towns that anyone on Earth would recognize as such. There were humans just like them on a planet more than four light-years distant.
* * *
Five days later, the UN General Assembly, with hundreds of images received by fax from Proxima Centauri before them, voted nearly unanimously to prepare and send their new neighbors a greeting from Earth.
Though not a linguist, of which there would be plenty on the assembled message team, Rain Gilster was named the technical advisor. They were given one month to develop the message that would change the course of history for two worlds—two worlds inhabited by humans.
* * *
Not quite ten months since the discovery of the signals from Proxima Centauri, using a radio telescope in Australia modified for sending a message and not just receiving one, the people of Earth began sending their greetings.
In addition to mirroring some of the radio broadcasts that had been intercepted, as a way to get the Proximans’ attention, the message contained verbal and visual information about the people of Earth, its languages, cultures, arts, and, of course, its science and technology. It was the latter upon which most of team pinned their hopes of beginning a dialog: mathematics and physics had to be universal. Using the work of the late Carl Sagan and others from the 1970s as a starting point, they developed a message that used prime numbers as a starting point, followed by various universal principles and facts of mathematics and science, each building upon the previous. An Encyclopedia Mathematica.
Many members of the message team argued that communicating with these aliens ought to be relatively simple since they were, for all practical purposes and without having one to test and observe close up, human. The linguist developed a verbal and written language dictionary filled with common images and the associated words to describe them that almost any elementary school child would recognize: beginning with dog, cat, and house, the dictionary ended with more complex definitions like love, forms of government, and the performing arts. The result was probably the lengthiest and most complex fax ever sent.
The message, traveling between the stars at nature’s speed limit, light speed, began crossing the interstellar void and losing strength almost immediately. No matter what the broadcast power, the signal strength at any distance from the source dropped in proportion to the square of the distance, meaning that by the time it arrived at Proxima Centauri, the signal would be relatively weak. Much weaker than the local broadcasts. That meant there was a chance it would not be detected for quite some time until someone stumbled across it. For this reason, the signal was set to repeat indefinitely. No one wanted the Proximans to miss it just because they weren’t listening at the “right” time.
Two-way radio communication across four and a quarter light-years would take some time.
CHAPTER 5
April 14, 2082
After the flurry of activity surrounding the release of the news that humans weren’t alone in the universe, including all the excitement of briefing the world’s politicians, astronomers, anthropologists (who were the most excited at the news), philosophers, ethicists, laypeople, and just about every community group she could imagine, Rain had returned to her office on the Moon and her beloved radio telescopes. Like before the discovery, she would stop daily to admire the telescope array and its contrast with deep space. This time, she imagined she could see others out there, looking back.
Most people on Earth went about their daily routines without giving the humans on Proxima Centauri so much as an extra thought. There were bills to be paid, babies to be made, and places to see—just like there had always been. Before the discovery, some had thought there might be widespread panic at the news that humans had found life elsewhere. That there would be riots, people would finally give up religion, people would become more religious, or that the aliens would become an obsession to change people’s lives forever. None of that.
Even the world’s religions mostly took it in stride. The Christians were mostly curious as to whether the aliens had “fallen” into sin like we humans and if they had a redeemer. The Mullahs proclaimed that the aliens must “worship and be accountable to Allah,” though not to Mohammad—he was only for humans on Earth. The Hindus embraced the news and, like the Christians, were curious as to how the aliens worshipped their gods. The Mormons, on the other hand, simply replied saying, “We told you so.” There were pockets of deniers in just about all of the religious camps who, despite their theological differences, shared the general opinion that the Proximans couldn’t really be human and therefore must be demons or some other nefarious creature that should be avoided at all cost.
After the initial shock, most people simply filed it away like they would the daily stock market report and moved on. Except, of course, for those who had a vested interest in studying and learning from the newly discovered aliens on Proxima Centauri b. Rain was, of course, among them. Her world had changed dramatically.
Rain was now the technical assistant to the director of the Lunar Farside Radio Observatory. The previous director, Deborah Kirkland, had long since retired and been replaced by a dynamic, much younger, and much more politically savvy woman named Samineh Bensaïd. Samineh had studied at Oxford and later at Nanjing University. Rain liked her much more than her predecessor and their respect was mutual.
Rain’s discovery and fame, combined with Samineh’s acumen and connections, landed the Radio Observatory its first major upgrade since its initial construction two decades ago. The array was being expanded by a factor of four, with all-new electronics and the latest AI-assisted signal processing. They also had secured management of the newly funded Solar Gravity Lens Telescope being placed six hundred astronomical units out, in the direction opposite to Proxima Centauri. The SGLT would allow direct optical imaging of Proxima Centauri b and extremely sensitive radio reception of their signals thanks to the amplification of electromagnetic radiation emitted from the distant planet by the sun’s mass. The distortion of gravity around the massive sun would bend space-time and allow radiation passing through the bending to focus on the detectors they were building to send to six hundred astronomical units for just that purpose. Rain liked to describe the sun as acting like a magnifying glass, allowing select regions of the electromagnetic spectrum to be focused on their detectors like the magnifying lens would fry ants, if placed the appropriate distance from them on a sunny day.
Thanks to the Samara Drive, the SGLT would be on station in only a few months after launch. You can get places quickly if you can accelerate at one gee and use light as your reaction mass, thought Rain. Initially there were concerns that the intensity of the light emitted by the drive would adversely affect the Earth’s upper atmosphere, but those were mostly dispelled when limits were agreed upon to prevent the highest energy drives from being used anywhere near the Earth and Moon system. Most robotic missions and small crewed tugs fell into the category of having allowable emissions for use near the Earth. Larger ships, like the new mining ships and those bound for Mars, had to wait until they were much farther away to take advantage of the Samara Drive. Thus, like she had predicted nearly a decade ago, her trip times between the Moon and the Earth now took less than a day. Not bad. I can even go home for the occasional weekend.
Rain’s day started, like so many before it, with a quick shower and breakfast, followed by a brisk walk around the perimeter of the base where all of those who maintained the Lunar Farside Observatories (it was now more than one) lived. Her warm-ups and cooldowns were, of course, at the large observation window overlooking the radio telescope’s array. She never grew bored of the sight.
Rain liked her morning runs. Aside from the obvious health benefits, like keeping her cardiovascular system healthy in the Moon’s paltry one-sixth-gravity environment, it gave her time to think and reflect. Today was one of those days she could sink into melancholy if she weren’t careful; she was pondering her life that almost was, her own mortality, and what her next career steps might be.
Rain’s thought train began as she finished her warm-up at the observation window and reminisced about her time with Stephan. He’d finally grown weary of Rain’s lack of interest, left the observatory staff, and found himself a job working at a nearside university teaching astronomy. She missed him and sent an occasional message informing him of the latest scientific discovery—just before the details were published and widely available. It made him feel like an “insider” and kept their friendship warm. There had been no one significant in her life since him and she was fine with that—most of the time. Today, her next thought was what it would have been like to marry Stephan and start a family. This one didn’t last long since Rain had extreme difficulty intellectually reconciling the demands of family, husband, and children with her work. She knew which one would take priority and, if she had taken this path, that the likely outcome would have been acrimony and divorce. A path, she admitted to herself, that was probably best not taken. Even if it did make her sometimes feel lonely.
By the time she was in her cooldown, Rain had moved on to thinking of what she would do after her time on the Moon. She was now near the maximum allowable lunar stay time. Despite her morning workouts and the many pharmacological treatments given to those on the Moon for more than just a few weeks, her heart was still losing strength, her bones were weakening, her muscle tone declining, and her total radiation dose from solar and galactic cosmic ray exposure was ticking inexorably upward. Every lunar facility adhered to these universal health guidelines and they would soon catch up with her, forcing her return to Earth and . . . what? It was her thinking about the “what” that made her melancholy.
She thought that looking at the moonscape through the observation window would bring her out of it, and it did, but only by changing what she was thinking about. It was as beautiful as ever, stark, desolate, and mostly unchanging.
Unlike the Moon’s nearside, which always faced the Earth, giving those back home the same constant and unchanging view of the Moon to which they were accustomed, there was little or no commercial activity on the farside. To maintain the pristine, radio-quiet environment that had led to the discovery of the Proximans, the UN’s ban on farside development remained intact and no orbiting radio communications relay satellites were ever approved. Keeping the farside pristine was now a widely recognized “good idea” that was almost universally supported by the world’s politicians and public.
Lunar nearside was a vastly different story. With the advent of the Samara Drive, the Moon was far more accessible both logistically and financially than ever before, with bases, hotels, universities, and research facilities being built there at a prodigious rate. With a land area roughly equivalent to Asia, there wouldn’t be a lunar land shortage for quite some time.
Today, Rain was back in the control room, but instead of being the one directing—or, more accurately, watching—the AI direct the day’s observations, she was simply there to discuss with one of the operators how the new parts of the extended array would be integrated with the existing system as the new segments were completed. They had discussed this many times in the design phase, but now was the tricky part: putting the plans into action. And, like a general’s battle plan becoming useless once the battle was engaged, sometimes the best-designed interface would have unexpected problems. Rain was trying her best to avoid having that happen.
She and the operator—a slim, inexperienced but eager female post-doc named Margie, from Ontario—were just getting into the details when the observatory’s AI interrupted. The AI had a male voice and, Rain long ago concluded, a very male personality. It was the latest generation general-purpose AI, meant to resemble a human when in direct interaction, and designed to fool just about anyone who tried to give it a Turing Test. Most AIs resembled men, Rain had noted many times, thinking that the reason might be its inherently linear thinking. Women’s thoughts tended to interconnect with everything, shaded with nuance and too holistic for most men to really understand. Men’s thoughts, however, tended to be much more focused, one topic at a time, with an almost conscious effort to not follow the obvious interconnected thoughts. AIs, being software and still mostly based on simple “if/then” coding, were also linear. Hence, the male thinking pattern that she perceived.
“Dr. Gilster. We are receiving a new transmission from Proxima Centauri. I am sending the translation to your station.”
Rain, now excited by the news so blandly reported by the AI, moved away from the wide-eyed Margie and to her station just to the left of the picture window that overlooked the massive array. Rain moved so quickly she nearly stumbled, easily recovering thanks to the low gravity. After she unlocked the device with her thumbprint, the contents of the message began to scroll across the display.
