At first, this might seem absurd—why don’t extraterrestrials simply come here themselves? The cosmic speed limit imposed by relativity and the vast distances involved make it practically impossible to journey to other stars within anything even remotely resembling a lifetime. Our fastest spacecraft would take roughly 70,000 years to reach any of the nearest stars. By comparison, 70,000 years ago, there were multiple hominid species on Earth, all competing for similar resources. Homo sapiens had only just ventured out of Africa, following the coastline of Asia and encountering Homo floresiensis among coastal islands, while Europe was dominated by Homo neanderthal. Where will we Homo sapiens be in 70,000 years time?
Although it’s not a popular opinion, robotic exploration is the most practical and efficient means of reaching the stars.
‘Generation ships’ are popular in science fiction, but they’re impractical. The resources and maintenance required to keep people alive are exorbitant while the risk of catastrophic failure will only ever increase over time.
‘Seed ships’ carrying sperm/eggs along with robotic womb/incubators will be possible one day, but whoever launches them has to be extremely confident about the viability of the target system to sustain life. Once life germinates onboard, they have all the same problems as generation ships.
When it comes to galactic exploration, that leaves von Neumann probes: robots powered by artificial intelligence, like the craft described in this story. Their advantage is they can mine asteroids to build replicas of themselves and spread like a virus.
The problem with von Neumann probes is as they replicate they’re susceptible to degradation—and that’s the angle that’s been explored in this novel. In the same way a copy of a copy of a copy of an original document slowly introduces errors by way of ‘noise’ in the image, often showing up as blots or grainy/blurred edges, von Neumann probes will be subject to mistakes being introduced that affect their function. These may occur during replication or even just with the passage of time and constant exposure to cosmic radiation over the years.
By comparison, biology has learned to protect itself and even exploit such errors, something machines can’t replicate due to the structural differences in how they’re made. To start with, the error/mutation rates in biological replication range from as low as one per hundred million to one in a billion nucleotides (mostly in bacteria). This is an astonishing degree of fidelity, far beyond anything we can achieve in engineering.
On the surface, the idea that each biological cell contains its own copy of the blueprint for the entire organism seems highly redundant. It’s like the brake pads in your car having the plans for the engine, and vice versa. But in practice, it’s an extremely efficient way of protecting an organism. When errors do occur, rather than being crippled by mistakes, life evolves.
Life escapes the photocopying trap by embracing errors.
Biological life reproduces at such an astronomical rate it wouldn’t be sustainable if the vast majority of offspring didn’t fail. In this way, by having a callous disregard for the prospects of each individual copy, natural selection favors errors that introduce even the slightest advantage. Too many bacterial cells divide, too many seeds fall, too many eggs are laid, and too many puppies are born for all but a fraction of them to survive, weeding out errors that detract from the overall survival of the species.
Whereas machines seek to maintain an optimum design, life repudiates the status quo, embracing errors/changes that improve the species (even though this is often to the detriment of individual losses and the emergence of replication-based diseases like cancer). From there, species branch out, splintering in different directions rather than breaking down like a machine. Instead of remaining static, natural selection exploits the tendency of things to degrade, and in this way life has survived for almost four billion years on this rock! The most advanced von Neumann machine, by comparison, simply cannot replicate and survive for more than a fraction of that time, hence the central conceit in 3zekiel is that von Neumann probes will become faulty—either through long-term exposure to the harsh environment of space or during replication.
Although the likelihood of alien machines visiting Earth is astronomically low given the difficulty/distances involved, the prize would be worth it. Rather than exploiting gold and silver, or enslaving us in some celestial slaughterhouse, extraterrestrials would consider observing and cataloging life on another planet as the greatest possible reward.
From a scientific perspective, aliens would be fascinated to observe how life arose and survived here on Earth. All life on this planet is part of an unbroken chain stretching back 3.8 billion years. There’s just one form of life on Earth, but it has branched and diverged into hundreds of millions of species over the ages, evolving into viruses, bacteria, microbes and complex organisms like us. Our planet is a testimony to the triumph of simple biological processes. The chances are, these same processes are common elsewhere, although they would undoubtedly arrive at entirely different species.
All stories draw upon external resources and 3zekiel is no different. The anecdote about spelling cat/kat is based on a university commencement speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Isaac Asimov’s essay The Relativity of Wrong.
Why set this story in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Although the jungle spans barely 6% of the Earth’s surface, it is home to more than half the planet’s land species! The jungle canopy is a belt of interconnected tree-tops forming a distinct ecosystem in its own right and is home to 90% of all jungle plant and animal species, making it an ideal target for our fictional aliens wanting to learn more about the diversity of life on Earth. The rate at which we’re polluting and decimating environments like this is heartbreaking, and something that would give extraterrestrials cause to wonder about our supposed intelligence.
When it comes to gorillas using sign language, most people have heard of Koko, a captive female gorilla who had a vocabulary of around 2000 words, or roughly the same as a preschooler. Researchers from St Andrews University, UK, and the University of York, UK, have both found that in the wild, apes naturally use about a hundred distinctly different hand gestures to communicate with each other. What was surprising was that these gestures seemed to be innate rather than learned, and were common across ape species from vastly different, unconnected geographic locations. Apes combine these to form a complex repertoire of concepts that reinforce their social bonds, which is something I wanted to explore in this novel.
As much as is practically possible, I try to keep stories like 3zekiel realistic—as realistic as something that’s entirely fictitious can be. For example, when our protagonists approach Cruithne they look back at Earth and it appears about the size of a basketball. In reality, the size of Earth as seen from a geosynchronous orbit is about 20 degrees. To put that into perspective, with your arms stretched out wide on either side of you, you’re covering 180 degrees. Place one arm vertically above you and you’ve reduced that to 90 degrees. Half that is 45 degrees. Half again is about the size Earth would appear—roughly the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.
In the same way, the section describing gravity for those on the space elevator is based on actual physics. When you see astronauts in orbit around Earth, their sense of weightlessness is deceptive. Rather than floating freely, their motion is akin to being shot out of a cannon—only they never hit anything. They just keep going round and round. The only way NASA gets astronauts into orbit is by being really, really good at missing Earth.
Dr. Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway from Monash University double-checked my back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine the strength of Earth’s gravity at the various altitudes described in this novel.
The formula used was:
altitude-gravity = gravity@sea-level / (altitude/sea-level)2
Using 9.8m/s2 at sea level, this results in gravity being approximately:
• 9.69m/s2 when in an SR-71 Blackbird flying at ~35,000m
• 8.65m/s2 in the In
ternational Space Station at ~400km
• 0.22m/s2 at the fictional height of Cruthine in this novel
Somewhat astonishingly, the Moon is held in orbit around Earth by a meager gravitational acceleration of 0.0026m/s2 or a mere 1/4 of a centimeter per second squared. Out that far, Earth’s gravity is akin to a fluffy feather drifting on a breeze, but it’s still enough to ensure the Moon orbits Earth! Science really is far more wild and crazy than anything a science fiction author like myself can dream up.
Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. For writers, patience isn’t a virtue, it’s a necessity, as is the ability to absorb criticism. Book publishing is a tough gig. Only two of my twenty-plus books have been picked up by a traditional publisher, which is a shame as it means most of them have slipped into obscurity. Independent authors like myself are buskers standing on a street corner, pouring their heart and soul into each song, working at their art for the love, not the money, dreaming of one day making it big. The odds are 3zekiel will disappear beneath the waves within a few months, but I’m glad you found it, and I hope you enjoyed this First Contact story as much as I did.
Thank you for taking a chance on 3zekiel and for supporting science fiction as literature. You can find all of my novels on Amazon. If you’re interested in new releases, sign up for my monthly email newsletter. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter, so feel free to drop by and say hi.
Statistically, less than 1% of readers leave a review, which often distorts the actual merits of a novel as the majority of readers are underrepresented, so please take the time to leave a review online as your opinion of this novel counts far more than mine.
Peter Cawdron
Brisbane, Australia, 2019
3zekiel (First Contact) Page 30