Humanity is, in the end, an explorational species by its very nature, and ever have we looked upward to the heavens at night and yearned to be among the stars. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that we are intended to be “out there,” and pursue that goal with more determination, despite potential danger.
References
NASA console positions:
Flight — Flight Director (JSC)
Surgeon — Flight Surgeon, chief medical officer on the ground (JSC)
INCO — Instrumentation and Communications Officer (JSC)
GC — Ground Controller (JSC)
PAO — Public Affairs Office/Officer (JSC)
CapCom — Capsule Communicator (terminology and call sign dates back to early NASA flights) (JSC)
POD — Payload Operations Director (MSFC)
DMC — Data Management Coordinator (MSFC)
Crew positions:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3408800279.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut_ranks_and_positions#International_space_station_positions
Effects of microgravity on skeletal systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast01oct_1/
http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/gcrc/space/#Bone
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/118.html
Miscellaneous:
Aerospace Medicine coursework, Section III 3.2 Waste Management, Federal Aviation Administration, Aeromedical Education Division, Civil Aeromedical Institute, 2004, Kira Bacal, MD PhD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Mission_controls
PMC — Private Medical Conference. The Air-to-Ground loop being used is placed into private mode, and the astronaut (who may be ill, or may be on an experimental medical protocol) converses with the Flight Surgeon, with option for more medical personnel to be involved.
SAS — Space Adaptation Syndrome aka space-sickness. Most have it in some degree on first flights.
Other languages:
“chikushō” — Oh shit! Oh blast! Oh hell! (Japanese)
“manuke” — Clueless, loser (literally “out of rhythm” or “missing a beat”) (Japanese)
“Nande kuso” — What the hell? (literally “Why shit?”) (Japanese)
“Govno” — Shit (Russian)
“Chyort” — Damn, hell (Russian)
© The Author 2017
Michael Brotherton (ed.)Science Fiction by ScientistsScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-41102-6_10
One for the Conspiracy Theorists
Jon Richards1
(1)Mountain View, USA
I am a scientist at the SETI Institute searching for radio signals hinting at extraterrestrial life. We’re not UFO seekers, we’re just serious engineers using hard science to detect a radio signal from anywhere that hints we are not alone in our galaxy.
When I am forced to attend a social event or party (engineers hate parties), I am inevitably asked, beer in hand, “So, what do you do for a living?” If I answer honestly, I get one of two responses. If the person has never heard of SETI, they look at me like I am a UFO conspiracy nut and try to inconspicuously slink away. The other response is wide eyes and the excited question, “Find anything yet?” Before answering, I think to myself, “Well, it’s complicated; how much time do you have?” Then I smile and say, “Not yet.”
The truth is most of the time I don’t see any of those radio signal hints. Like I said, “It’s complicated…”
Is there a civilization on a planet emitting radio signals that we can detect? We won’t know if we don’t look. I’m the guy looking. I am looking. I’m lucky enough to be the operator of the SETI radio searching for a needle in an infinity of haystacks at the Allen Telescope Array.
The ATA is located in remote northern California among cow pastures and ancient lava fields at 3,200 feet elevation. The SETI Institute owns forty-two dishes, each 20 feet in diameter and 2½ stories high, scanning the sky, searching for any sign of radio emissions that may be from an intelligent civilization beyond Earth. The ATA is often used in stock video footage whenever UFO conspiracies arise in the news, or when the NASA Kepler program discovers new planets orbiting distant suns.
Most of the people at the SETI Institute have PhDs and are actively involved in studying various areas of astrobiology — the study of life on Earth and beyond. The group involved with the ATA is very small in relation to our larger organization. It has dwindled to just a few people, eclipsed by the rest of the science being explored at SETI. When I started in 2008, I was working with a team of six. Now, eight years later, due to attrition and funding issues, I have inherited the entire job of observation at the ATA. That is bad for the SETI effort as a whole, great for me. I pretty much work alone. I keep the computers running, continually fix problems, writing code. A real geek’s paradise. The most interesting part is that I am the guy searching for extraterrestrial life 365 nights a year. I decide what to observe, what frequencies to monitor and what to report. Sadly, though, I’m really the only one paying close attention. I comb through the data for signals with the help of computers. If there is a signal from ET received by the ATA, I am the guy who would have to determine if it is real, then decide what to do with that information. I think I am doing a good job, but I’m always my worst critic.
I work a lot from my home, in my garage, only occasionally going to the ATA. It is a long drive and most of the work can be performed remotely over the Internet. When computer hardware fails, I travel to the ATA, spending three to five days, over the weekend. If I go over a weekend or on a holiday, I am usually alone onsite. Just the 42 dishes, the computers and me. The dishes hum all the time, being cooled by air flowing through their cavities to avoid overheating of the receiving and motor pointing components. In the winter, if I get cold, I quickly warm up behind one of our racks full of computers churning away, searching for signals. The cooling fans push out a lot of heat. The place always feels alive, like something big may happen at any moment.
This is how the observation works: At any given time, the 42 dishes stare in unison at the same spot in the sky, tuned to look for radio signals at frequencies between 1 GHz (one billion cycles a second) and 10 GHz, usually focused on a single star. The faint radio signals arrive via underground fiber optic cables into our computer systems. The signals from all the dishes are converted from analog to digital and fed into a special device called a beamformer. The entire array of dishes is looking at an area of the sky that is 1/3 to 3 degrees in diameter, depending on the frequency being observed. The beamformer is a nifty device that further focuses attention on one really small point, removing the signal chaff coming in from that whole big area of the sky except from that small point. I can then focus on a particular star exclusively, cutting out most interference from other parts of the sky. Satellites and radio stations cause lots of trouble. They can potentially drown out signals of extraterrestrial life. As a consequence, signals received are immediately deemed suspicious, and most are identified as interference.
The thought is that if an alien sent a “Hello There” signal it would be sent at a frequency between 1 GHz and 10 GHz. This frequency range contains a lot less noise, or “static,” than other frequency ranges; there is a natural dip in this range. As we figure, our best chances are within this frequency range.
Every night, I choose what to look at by dipping into a large star catalog for ideas. We like to concentrate on nearby stars and stars that are confirmed to have actual planets as identified by NASA’s Kepler Mission. It really is a crap-shoot deciding what is best to observe. Occasionally, a new planet makes news because of some an
omaly identified by the Kepler Mission data suggesting it is a good candidate for being habitable. We observe these planets soon after they are discovered and get some PR mileage out of it by writing blogs or short scientific papers.
I pay close attention to the observing, watching the system chunking away all night. I make sure nothing is impeding the observing, like a computer failure or one of the dishes having trouble pointing. Keep in mind that each dish is a big hunk of metal and it takes a lot of motor power to point them and keep them on target. I modified the software to detect problems and alert me by text in the middle of the night. What I really like to do is pay attention to the signal data. This is where we find extraterrestrial life amongst the cosmos static. The computers comb through the data creating statistics and reports. I analyze and tweak, telling myself I have to go to bed soon.
Needless to say this is a very interesting thing to do for a living, but constantly having something interesting prodding at me gets wearisome after a while. I wake every morning telling myself not to immediately log on and check out the previous night’s results, not until I have my first cup of coffee and a “good morning” chat with my wife. But ET might be waiting.
***
OK, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I saw something.
Well, I did not “see” it, it’s more like I deduced it. Like I keep saying, it’s complicated.
I started concentrating on a type of signal we call a transient. This is a signal that looks like just the kind of ET signals we want to see, but quickly disappear. We see it loud and clear, then five to ten minutes later it is gone. Why do they disappear? What are they? In most instances, we will never know, maybe it’s a satellite or ground-based radio interference. We see a lot of transients, effectively disregarding them as interference. Several times I’ve gone back and looked for one of these signals and I have never been able to see it a second time. It’s frustrating.
The Earth is rotating, so the ATA is either moving toward or away from a distant planet at any given time. Any ET signal received at the ATA will drift in frequency due to the Doppler Effect. The lack of signal frequency shift is the easiest way to determine received signals are simply interference. We see thousands of non-drifters every night that are deemed as interference. The observing system tries its best to weed though all the interference.
Like any other engineer, when I am not sure what to do, I write a computer program and have a couple more cups of coffee than usual. Geek alert. I love writing computer programs that can be automated to run daily. Although I am comfortable with several computer programing languages, my latest favorite programming language is Ruby. On the morning that I first saw a pattern in the transients, I had a working Ruby program ready in about an hour to comb the signal databases daily for all past transients and chart their frequency over time. The program could text the chart images to my phone before I got up in the morning. If ET was transmitting intermittently over time at the same frequency, I should be able to see some type of pattern in the graph of transients. A sort of sine wave should appear if I squint my eyes. I condensed the report down to five charts that would take about a minute to review every day. The thought was that over years of collecting data maybe would see something worth investigating.
The next morning I checked for messages on my phone. There were the charts. I sat hunched over in bed, pinching at my phone screen searching for the sine wave.
I saw a pattern. Before my morning coffee.
A mess of dots was on the charts. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, but there it was, a pattern in the mess. A curvy sine wave.
It could be a coincidence, I thought. Random data points sometimes line up in a pattern by chance. I decided to look at the source of the signal every day for an hour and chart the transient signals, if there were any. Sure enough, every day like clockwork, the signal reared its head. Every 16 minutes and 31 seconds the signal would turn on and be loud and clear for five minutes and two seconds from the time it rose over the horizon till the time it set, only three hours a night. The signal was drifting in frequency, just as it would if it was emanating from a distant planet.
This was the perfect transient to avoid true detection by our software. I would never have seen it without manually looking at those charts. The signal detection scheme we routinely use looks in 92 second intervals, then stops, processing the data for signals, then looking again for 92 seconds more. This signal could easily be in the “off” state the next time or next several times our software looked at it. It is a tricky thing to know what to do with transient signals.
The signal appeared to be coming from a star in the Sagittarius constellation. This is the same constellation from which the famous Wow Signal emanated in 1972. But this star is far away from the Chi Sagittarii system. The frequency of the signal was in the 5 GHz to 6 GHz range. I won’t be any more specific at this time, given the circumstances.
I bought some large capacity hard drives on my personal credit card so the gang at SETI would not get suspicious, and went to the ATA. I spent several nights collecting as much raw data as I could from one of the beamformers then made triple backups. Over the next several weeks, I continued to gather more evidence, more raw data.
***
Now what? I never actually thought I would actually see a signal that really panned out.
No one at the SETI Institute has ever briefed me about what to do if I ever see an actual ET signal. It seems strange. Maybe I missed that two minutes of employee orientation when I was hired. I always assumed I should tell my superior, but to tell the truth, I arrived at that assumption by reading science fiction books and watching movies.
“Contact” is one of my favorite movies and it was about SETI. In fact, before they made the movie some of the film crew spent time with the real SETI Institute employees to learn from them and be able to get the feeling for engineers so the actors would perform as close to real life as possible. They even took note of the pencils we used and what the coffee cups looked like. The protagonist of the movie, played by Jodie Foster, discovers an ET signal, admittedly much more interesting than the one I discovered, and look what happened to her! The government swooped in and pushed her aside, reducing her role to nothing. Would that happen to me?
The ATA does a good job at what it does, but admittedly there are radio dish sites that have hundreds of times the receiving capability of the ATA. Theirs just can’t do surveys of large sky areas like we can. If the signal was made public, attention would quickly shift to one of the big guys, leaving me and the ATA in the dust. And, if that didn’t happen and the ATA got more funding as a reward, they would be able to afford the best PhDs money could buy, and I’d be pushed out, just like in the movies.
What if I’m wrong about the signal? My lingering fear is that it’s actually the result of a nearby farmer’s old washing machine, or something even more embarrassing like a faulty baby monitor 20 miles away. I’m pretty sure of my pointing accuracy with the dishes. I regularly test the dish and beamformer pointing by trying to detect the Voyager1 signal. If I can detect Voyager1, which is outside of our solar system and has a transmitter the power of a refrigerator bulb, then the pointing is fine. I performed many tests by pointing off the ET signal location then back on again. That signal is definitely coming from the star I’ve identified.
But really, I should not be so paranoid. Can I think of some way to let people know about the otherworld signal in such a way as to benefit me and the ATA in the end? I know that if I cannot find any personal or organizational benefits, I still need to let the world know. How would I live with myself otherwise?
It’s been nine weeks since I found the ET signal. Shouldn’t I have reported this signal nine weeks ago? Shouldn’t I report this now?
I decided to think like any other engineer with the desire to procrastinate. I wrote another computer program. I had all that raw beamformer data sitting on my desk at home virtually staring at me. I wanted to dig deeper into that
data, hoping I could detect some pattern other than the timed 16 minutes and 31 seconds the signal is off then the five minutes and two seconds it is on. Maybe I could find a signal in the data. The computer that originally detected the signal has a generalized detection scheme that is not as high quality as it could be. It trades quality for speed, otherwise it would not be able to keep up with the data. There are less efficient, but higher quality ways to process the data. I thought I could see some structure in the signal. It was worth a shot.
The raw data from a beamformer and the data from the antennas, for that matter, is a series of power readings. In rough terms, this is basically representative of a sample of the signal power, 100 million times every second. These 100 million values are fed into our computers every second and transformed into frequency readings using a process called the Fourier Transform. The computer then searches these values for frequency values that slowly drift over time. This data is visualized as a waterfall graph.
Waterfall graphs look like static from an old TV, charting noise from the electronics, the environment, and random noise from space. If there is an alien signal, it will rise from the static and appear to have structure to it, like a straight slightly sloping line. The ET signal looks like a straight line that is shifting slightly in frequency. Actually it was somewhat curved, drifting slowly back and forth over the course of a day.
I had the luxury of being able to take my time processing the raw beamformer data, so I pulled out the really big guns and performed a multimillion-order Fourier Transform of the data. The result was much higher quality and took much longer than would normally be acceptable in our real-time signal searching process. The process created a really large waterfall plot and it took time to go through this data and find the signal. But there it was, drifting back and forth depending on whether the ATA was moving toward or away from it. I was able to zoom in.
Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction) Page 18