Wherever Seeds May Fall (First Contact)
Page 34
“These things are like voracious caterpillars. The resin-like pod we called An̆duru is a cocoon. They would have devoured our world. Once finished, they’d move on into some adult form, something that could spread through space like insects on the wind. They’re the reason for the Great Silence. Whenever and wherever life arises, they feed.
“We got lucky. Had they arrived a thousand years ago, a few hundred years ago or even just a few decades ago, Earth would be yet another lifeless husk floating in space. Our planet would have been stripped bare like a field of wheat devoured by locusts.”
McGuire’s face is blank. Okay, she’s got his attention. Kath straightens, looking into the cameras at the back of the room as she speaks.
“They will be back, but we have a plan. We’ll build a fleet of autonomous spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and Saturn. We’ll arm them with thermonuclear warheads. We can’t hurt an An̆duru-class alien pod, but we can knock it sideways. We can detonate in the clouds and send it spiraling into the heart of a gas giant, but only if we work together.
“We have to grow up. We can’t cling to myths and fables. We can’t continue to undermine ourselves by holding on to childish conspiracy theories. We can’t shrink in fear of change. We can’t balk at the advent of a new vaccine or dumb rumors about 5G and god-knows-what-else. If we can’t change, forget about alien invaders, we’ll destroy ourselves with fake news.”
Kath rocks on the lectern. Her legs ache. The deep tissue damage she sustained to her arteries means she struggles to stand for more than a few minutes at a time. Her medal swings on her neck. She’s got to stay focused.
“The hardest thing to accept in life is that things are going to change, but change is needed. We have to embrace the things that scare us, not run from them, or hide behind mediocre lies. We’re better than this.
“It’s time to stop bickering like kids in a schoolyard, peddling lies. We’ve got to stop letting our fears get the better of us, because it doesn’t stop with An̆duru. That’s where it starts. If we don’t, it won’t be marauding aliens we have to contend with, it’ll be the extinction of our world at our own hands. Honestly, I don’t know what terrifies me more—them or us?”
A wave of guilt sweeps over her. Now she’s vented, she feels as though she owes the audience some thanks. The back row contains some of the surgeons and nurses that helped in her recovery.
“We’re capable of so much more,” she says.
Kath lifts up her medal with what’s left of her right hand. She holds it beside her face so the news crews can get the shot they were after all along. Flashes go off as she smiles for the cameras.
“So thank you. Thank you for coming to get us in orbit. Thank you for patching us up and putting us back together. But most of all, thank you for refusing to shrink from the challenges we face.”
Kath turns and hobbles away as the audience rises, cheering.
The End
Afterword
Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.
With a pandemic sweeping the globe, life has been crazy. It’s been heart-breaking to see this disease ravage the world. Far too many lives have been lost.
My book sales are down 75% on the same time last year. The publishing company I worked with on Retrograde and Reentry closed its doors. I approached several big-name agencies and publishing companies with this novel, but they wouldn’t even consider it, let alone read it. So when I say, ‘Thank you for supporting independent science fiction,’ I mean it. Without your support, novels like this would not exist.
If you’ve enjoyed this story as an ebook, you might want to grab a copy of the paperback to sit alongside some of the classics on your bookshelf.
If you’d like to be notified when the sequel is released, sign up for my email newsletter. The working title is Generation of Vipers.
Please take the time to leave a review online and tell a friend about Wherever Seeds May Fall. Your opinion of this novel is far more important than mine.
I’d like to thank Sri Lankan academic, futurist, and science fiction author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne for his encouragement. He named the fictional comet in this story. His award-winning debut novel Numbercaste provides a chilling look at how social media can be abused to control populations. Unfortunately, Numbercaste is in danger of being fact rather than fiction. His latest novel, The Salvage Crew, is narrated by none other than Nathan Fillion (Firefly/Castle).
Although the characters in this novel are fictitious, Kath McKenzie was inspired by the real-life astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack. Dr. Mack regularly discusses scientific discoveries on Twitter. When the extra-solar comet/asteroid ‘Oumuamua soared through our solar system she joined the chorus of scientists saying, “It’s not aliens!”
In the words of Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Should aliens ever arrive on Earth, tens of thousands of scientists like Dr. Mack will be more than happy to review and confirm the evidence. If an object like An̆duru were to skim Saturn or Jupiter, I’d be checking her Twitter feed for updates. Dr. Mack has a non-fiction book called The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) that is well worth reading. It examines the various possible futures awaiting our universe.
Wherever Seeds May Fall is the fifteenth novel in my First Contact series. These stories explore obscure solutions to the Fermi Paradox. If you told me I’d write fifteen to twenty books on this subject when I started a decade ago, I would have thought you were mad. I thought four or five would be a herculean effort. The great thing about this series is there’s no order. As all the books are about First Contact, they’re all equal first. Although the settings and characters may change, the overall subject remains the same. Think of the First Contact series like Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone. Each book is a stand-alone episode. If you’ve enjoyed Wherever Seeds May Fall, be sure to check out the entire series.
In the summer of 1950, while sitting around a table having lunch, physicist Enrico Fermi casually asked his colleagues, “Where is everyone?” His fellow scientists laughed. Fermi had done the math. He understood that, given the sheer size of the universe, there should be other intelligent species out there. Twelve billion years is plenty of time for civilizations to rise and spread, so where were they?
Fermi’s Paradox has captured the popular imagination, but there’s been too much paranoia about flying saucers and alien abductions. We need to focus on science, not speculation. At this point, I’d settle for microbes on Mars or perhaps single-celled alien critters living beneath the ice on the moons of Jupiter. Will we ever find ET? I don’t know, but our ability to search the skies is improving. Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope may be able to detect photosynthesis on exoplanets.
Life is extraordinary, but there’s no reason it should be unique to Earth. The lack of any extraterrestrial signals has been called The Great Silence.
One explanation for this silence is the Great Filter. The idea is there’s a catastrophic event common to all emerging civilizations. Being an intelligent species, we have our own share of hazards to negotiate. We may not make it to the stars. We could be wiped out by a long list of problems. Humanity could be destroyed by nuclear war or environmental collapse. But perhaps we’ve already passed through the Great Filter. It could be something as simple as the leap to multicellular life during the Cambrian Explosion.
One possible filter is the Dark Forest.
This concept was popularized by Stephen Hawking and Chinese author Liu Cixin in The Three-Body Problem. To survive in a dark forest, you need to be quiet and cautious. Yelling attracts attention. In this context, ‘yelling’ is carelessly transmitting radio signals into space.
Wherever Seeds May Fall explores an alternative form of the Dark Forest. Instead of an advanced civilization attacking all comers, the threat might come from animals that have evolved to survive in space.
Science fiction is a genre that tries to capture aspects of known science in a fictional setting.
Wherever Seeds May Fall is based on a historical event. In 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter with the force of six million megatons. If it had hit LA, the crater would have consumed all of southern California. Debris would have spread over nine thousand miles! At the point of impact, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was traveling at 60 km/s or 134,000 mph. The resulting fireball reached temperatures in excess of 30,000 C or 54,000 F.
In this novel, An̆duru is a category of meteor/comet known as an Earth grazer. These pass through the upper atmosphere, releasing energy before skipping back out into space. The ‘Tunguska Event’ decimated over a thousand square miles of forest in Siberia. It was probably an Earth grazer as no crater or impact fragments were ever found.
Over the past decade, we’ve become aware of extra-solar visitors. Far from being UFOs, these are natural objects from outside our solar system, racing through space. Óumuamua made headlines around the world, but it’s far from being alone. In 2019, comet Borisov whipped around the Sun at 177,000 kilometers an hour, covering almost 50 kilometers a second (30 miles a second).
In 2020, the Global Meteor Network detected an Earth grazer traveling at 34 km/s. The asteroid dipped down to an altitude of 90km before ricocheting back out into space, much like a small An̆duru.
In space, the overriding concern is fuel. When traveling between planets, the size of a spacecraft is constrained by a balancing act with the amount of fuel required to get there. Far from what’s seen in science fiction, there’s generally a short burn of a few minutes followed by months of cruising. When the NASA Curiosity Rover launched for Mars, scientists likened it to hitting a golf ball in LA and landing a hole-in-one in Scotland.
This novel uses the concept of gravity braking and aerobraking to show how an alien spacecraft might approach Earth without using excessive amounts of fuel.
Gravity assist is the equivalent of cheat codes in a computer game. It allows for changes in velocity without using any fuel! Gravity assist describes how a spacecraft can speed up or slow down using the gravity of a planet as it orbits the Sun. If you threw a tennis ball so it bounced off the windscreen of a passing car, you’d get a similar effect. The ball would be accelerated by its interaction with a moving object. Instead of a car, gravity assist uses the mass of a planet to provide a little extra oomph.
Gravitational assist used by Cassini to reach Saturn
Image credit: NASA/Purdue University, Indiana
NASA’s Cassini probe launched from Earth in 1997. It used a Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter Gravity Assist (VVEJGA) to reach Saturn. This allowed it to travel far further than it could have using its engines alone.
Space agencies use this approach to save fuel when going to planets such as Mercury (which involves slowing down) and the outer gas giants (speeding up).
The Voyager missions of the 1970s used this concept to travel well beyond their fuel range. Gravity assist allowed them to conduct a ‘Grand Tour’ of the planets on their way to interstellar space.
Remarkably, the most fuel-efficient way to get to Mars is to head in the opposite direction and fly past Venus! Although it will take longer to get to Mars, this approach increases the mass that can be sent and even allows for shorter overall missions. In Wherever Seeds May Fall, the approach is reversed by An̆duru, allowing it to slow down.
Some other, random details supporting this novel are:
Yes, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex really does have a Subway sandwich shop in the heart of the mountain.
Yes, there really were only two SEAL teams when SEAL team six was developed. The idea was to fool the Soviets into overestimating the strength of US Special Forces.
Yes, there really are over a hundred million pieces of debris already in orbit. Fighting in space is stupid beyond belief as it will only make this problem worse.
Yes, NASA’s Voyager space probes were launched on identical rockets barely fifteen days apart. Now they’re separated by three trillion miles and traveling at vastly different speeds. Spaceflight is deceptively complex.
Could the US defeat Russian forces without using nuclear weapons? It’s an incredibly dangerous proposition, but the answer is a nervous yes.
Yes, NASA teaches its astronauts that, in the event of a communication outage, they can talk to each other by touching their helmets together. This allows vibrations to pass through the glass even though the astronauts are in a vacuum.
In this story, An̆duru disarms all the nuclear weapons on Earth. Although it’s purely theoretical, a surge of neutrinos with energy in the range of 300 TeV to 1 PeV could fry the core of a nuclear weapon on the other side of the planet! Such a surge would cause a warhead to superheat but not detonate!
Neutrinos are harmless. They’re whizzing through us all the time—a hundred trillion of them pass through you and me every second of every day. The Sun produces a phenomenal amount of them, but as they don’t have any charge (+/-) they don’t react with matter. Collisions with a nucleus are rare in normal circumstances.
Scientists have even taken a photo of the Sun as seen THROUGH Earth using nothing but neutrinos. Yes, that’s right. They pointed a camera at the ground, at night, and took a photo of the Sun on the other side of the planet!
Neutrino image of the Sun as seen through Earth
Image Credit: R. Svoboda and K. Gordan (LSU)
These tiny, energetic particles pass through Earth as though it wasn’t even there. As only a tiny fraction of them collide with anything, it took over a year to create this photo.
If you wanted to block all the neutrinos coming from the Sun you would need a wall of lead roughly a light-year thick as they barely interact with anything!
When it comes to heavy metals like uranium, the probability of a collision is higher than for lighter elements like oxygen. Scientists have calculated that, given enough neutrinos at a high enough energy, the effect could trigger a nuclear reaction without reaching critical mass. Just enough neutrons would be released to destroy a nuclear weapon, but not enough for an explosion. For the sake of this story, I’ve ignored any effect on biological matter when such a wave was unleashed. I’ve portrayed this as a means of disarming the entire planet in a matter of seconds.
During the Apollo 9 mission, astronaut Rusty Schweickart described urine dumps at sunset as “the most beautiful sight in orbit.” I had fun working that into this story. I felt it reflected how even mundane tasks in space can be surreal.
The spacesuits used by the crew of the Iris are based on the NASA ACES suit. Although primarily designed for launch and landing, these suits are fully functional and can be used for EVAs.
And yes, antiemetic injections are delivered to the butt—even for astronauts.
Conspiracy theories are the mental equivalent of tooth decay. They eat away at people’s minds.
While discussing conspiracy theories in this novel, the point is made that not all conspiracies are make-believe. Some are real. As an example, Exxon knew as early as 1977 that fossil fuels were causing climate change. In what has to be the most morally repugnant corporate campaign in history, Big Oil not only buried the science, they actively spread disinformation. Oil companies turned the public against scientists, and all for the sake of a lousy buck.
When it comes to the autism/vaccine debate that has plagued medical science for the past couple of decades, there’s no controversy. There were already nine comprehensive studies looking for any possible link prior to Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study. Since then, there have been over nine hundred studi
es and still the irrational and unfounded fear of vaccination persists. Five cohort studies followed over a million children and… crickets.
Just this morning, I read the results of a research paper that followed 650,000 children over several years. The conclusion was, “MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination.”
Over 50% of American’s think 9/11 was faked. Roughly half of all Russians think the US faked the Moon landings in the 60s. Within the US, polling in 2019 revealed upwards of 9% deny the landing ever happened. Another 17% are undecided, so roughly 1 in 4 Americans doubt Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Given this is the single most extensively documented technological event in modern history, it is madness to think anyone could be talked out of it—but humans. We have trolled ourselves into absurd positions.
The denial of basic facts is a serious problem for society. When this kind of distorted logic is applied to vaccinations, pandemics, or political decisions, the consequences are horrific. Lies cost lives.
Vaccines have changed our world for the better. In the West, they’ve all but eliminated debilitating diseases like polio. That people fear the cure is both perplexing and heartbreaking to behold.
Our pig-headed obstinance to cling to what we want to be true regardless of the facts has never been more evident than during the pandemic. Nurses reported people dying in denial of COVID-19. I’d like to think that, like Angry Andy Anderson, people can change, but we’re often our own worst enemy. If I can offer just one word of advice: listen to the science, not the hype.
Could an alien species survive in space?
Maybe.
Life is astonishingly resilient, even in environments as harsh as a vacuum.