Bootstrap

by Mauri Niininen

  “Can you send me the target coordinates and receive parameters on chat. I will see what I can do. I will get back to you in 15 minutes,” Frank responded with excitement in his voice. It was not everyday he got this kind of emergency request. Jim must have found something very interesting. He was a rising star in the astrophysics community and had already published several high profile papers on the evolution of red dwarfs in the last couple years.

  Frank looked at the master schedule – the MB 20 receiver was available in the Parkes facility but there was a maintenance scheduled for the next 4 hours. He called John McFarland who was still up and he briefly explained this unusual request from Cornell University. John had participated this type of coordinated events across the globe several times during his long career so he was immediately interested and was willing to give up telescope maintenance time to record this event.

  Frank called Jim back. “I have some good news for you. John McFarland will be coordinating this observation with you from Parkes facility. You will have our full support.”

  “Thanks Frank - this is very much appreciated. I will chat with John and get ready to start recording. Have a good night.”

  “No worries, Jim. We are happy to help.”

  Jim looked up John McFarland's chat handle and opened a chat window. He explained briefly the status of observation of Gliese 3742. He was very careful not to mention anything about possible extraterrestrial sources but just talked about the signal anomaly they have discovered and confirmed the target coordinates and observation frequency. John sent the link and credentials to the file share where the received data would be stored and said that he would check in after a couple of hours.

  Jim called Manfred again.

  “I got a third feed from Parkes in Australia - here are the file share links and credentials. John McFarland is on-site in Parkes facility if you need to chat with him.”

  “Thanks. I don't know how you were able to pull that off. Did you tell them what we are observing?”

  “I just told them that we are observing an anomaly and we would need their data. John was leading the discovery of magnetars about 10 years ago so I guess I got his interest when I mentioned an anomaly.”

  Jim stressed to Manfred that they would need to keep this discovery secret until they will have time to properly analyze the signal. Manfred agreed to keep it under wraps. This could be a breakthrough discovery for both of them.

  BONN

  MANFRED FOLLOWED THE data feed coming from Medicina Radio Observatory in Italy and the new Parkes feed from Australia while performing analysis and calculations – after 2 1/2 hours the signal suddenly stopped and Manfred was looking at noise on his screen.

  He called Jim.

  “Hey, the signal is gone. I got 163 minutes captured. I also checked from all my sources – there were no known satellites in that sector. Look at the spectrum plot. The carrier frequency stays stable within 2.5 milliHertz if you account for Earth's orbital movement. It cannot be coming from any satellite in Earth orbit. It must be coming from an extraterrestrial source. Do you understand what this means?”

  “Yes, I saw the same data. We are lucky to have captured all of the signal. I have also been analyzing the signal structure from Arecibo data. There is a repeating amplitude pattern, looks like RHC polarization. The pattern has prime numbers 7, 31 and 523. This is not coming from any natural source. I need more time to analyze this, can you send me a link to your full dataset, please?”

  “Sure, I’ll send you the link to the dataset in our FTP servers. I will also send you my analysis results so far. Looks like this is going to be a long night!”

  “Indeed. It is lunch time over here, I will grab some food and will call you back.”

  BERLIN

  MANFRED HAD STORED the observation data in the Institute Linux servers in Bonn. Due to a configuration error made by a system administrator previous week the FTP file system was completely open to the Internet.

  Manfred wrote a quick email with some saved screen shots, files on his signal analysis work and a link to the latest observation datasets in the FTP server to taylor@cornell.edu but the auto completion function added an incorrect email address. Manfred hit the enter key quickly without paying attention and returned to his desktop to continue to analyze this mysterious signal.

  The email was sent to his ex-girlfriend Tania Klum who worked as a freelance journalist. Tania received the email at 19:03 CET in Berlin. At first she thought it was a bad joke from Manfred.

  Tania's relationship with Manfred was short and stormy. They first met in Barcelona where she was covering a story for Al Jazeera four months ago. Manfred was there for some astrophysics conference giving a talk on his research project. Tania was having some drinks in a bar when Manfred sat down next to her. They started chatting and after a few beers she found Manfred really funny and charming. That night was intoxicating and Tania felt a strong connection even though Manfred was 15 years older. In the following weeks Tania spent a lot of time with Manfred in Bonn but soon she realized that Manfred started drifting away from her. Tania could not understand why listening to some stupid noises from stars was more interesting to Manfred than spending time with her.

  The email was apparently meant for Dr. Jim Taylor. Tania met Jim in Berlin over a dinner with Manfred and few of his other colleagues from the Institute. Dr. Taylor was there for a European seminar on Astrophysics. They had dinner at Hofbräuhaus near Alexanderplatz. Tania got bored when the guys kept drinking beer and talking about their project and the astrophysics of red dwarf star systems. She didn't really understand what they were talking about and she felt stupid. Every time she tried to change the topic to something more interesting Manfred just ignored her. Two weeks after that dinner Tania broke up with him and she had not heard from Manfred until now.

  She looked at the email again. It appeared like Manfred was very excited – he had discovered some extra terrestrial signals and was explaining something technical to Dr. Taylor. There was a link to a server that had some files. Some files were pictures showing some graphs, the other files her Mac could not open. She didn't really understand and that made her feel stupid. “This is so typical from Manfred”, she was thinking.

  “Perhaps there is an ET story here that I could sell but I am too tired to write a story now. I'll just tweet the link,” she thought. “This might be the discovery Manfred was so passionate about.”

  At 19:23 CET Tania posted a tweet with the FTP link with a title “Dr. Manfred Kramer discovers Extra Terrestrial Signals from outer space”.

  She had gathered over 10,000 followers in Twitter as she had written fairly popular articles that were published on many prime websites over the last 2 years. Within 2 hours her post was re-tweeted 3000+ times and the link was posted on the front page of Reddit.com, Slashdot.org and 50+ other sites. Soon after that the FTP file server at the Max Planck Institute went down due to a huge growth in the download traffic.

  WASHINGTON D.C.

  11:30 AM EST Chief of staff office at the White House, Washington D.C.

  Eric Neumann received a call from Admiral Rodgers, the Director of the National Security Agency. Rodgers explained that the NSA had gathered intelligence indicating that a major discovery was in progress that would impact national security. The NSA was monitoring communications between several individuals. Based on NSA analysis these individuals were trustworthy and the data the NSA was able to access at this point indicated that this discovery was a matter of major political and scientific importance. Rodgers wanted to meet the President in person as soon as possible to explain the details.

  Eric was pressing for more details but admiral Rodgers insisted that he wanted to meet the President in person. Eric checked the President's schedule and the only possible time slot available was at 4:45 PM. He had to re-schedule a 30 minute meeting with FCC director on Net Neutrality topic. He arranged the meeting with admiral Rodgers but was disappointed in not being able to get any more details in p
reparation for this meeting.

  Eric had lunch with the White House Communication Director Steven White and gave him heads up that something newsworthy might come up around 5 PM. They chatted about upcoming press announcement where the President was supposed to announce a new trade agreement with China and discussed the soccer game last Saturday. They both had sons playing soccer on the same team so their families spent some time together outside of work as well.

  Coming back from lunch Eric got a call at 1:30 PM from his 9-year-old son Jason who had just come home from school. He had a short school day on Fridays.

  “Hey Dad! You can't believe what I just saw on Twitter. A German astromoner has discovered Extra Terrestrial Signals from outer space!” Jason was explaining full of enthusiasm. Jason was very interested in all kind of space related things and his favorite movie was “Contact” where Jodie Foster aka Dr. Ellie Arroway discovered extraterrestrial signals.

  “Hi Jason. Did you have good day at school?” Eric was trying to calm down Jason.

  “Dad, Dad – listen. This is really true, some Dr. Kramer from Germany found ET signals. It is just like in the movie, remember?” Jason was trying to convince his father.

  “I hear you, Jason. Let's look at that when I get home from work, OK?” Eric was already late for his meeting and was trying to end the conversation.

  “OK Dad. I want to be an astromoner when I grow up. Just like Dr. Arroway.” Jason was still full of excitement.

  “It is astronomer, not astromoner. I love you son, bye, ” said Eric and was now rushing down the corridor.

  Eric checked for any last minute changes in the schedule of the President and went to a budget meeting trying to collect his thoughts and focus on boring numbers for the next three hours.

  HELSINKI

  JULIA KOSKI HAD some unusual hobbies as a kid. Electronic gadgets surrounded her ever since she was a baby and she liked to take them apart to figure out how they work. While other five year old girls in the neighborhood were playing with Barbie dolls Julia was busy soldering electronic components together. There was never a shortage of components or gadget prototypes at home as her father had worked at the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki.

  She started programming at the mature age of 6 years and signals came into play 2 years later. She got a short wave receiver as a birthday present and started listening to number stations and other mysterious signals during the long summer holidays in the lake area in Finland. She learned quickly about the hacker community, Linux hacking and signal decoding, SIGINT, TEMPSET and other neat stuff. After passing her ham radio test at 9 years old she was also pretty active in Finnish ham radio circles though her interests were more on the digital communications side. She had also traveled by herself to Germany to a SIGINT event organized by Chaos Computer Club at the age of 15 and was well connected in the hacker community.

  Julia saw Tania's tweet at 20:24 Finnish time. She logged into the FTP server using the link in the tweet and found out that the server was wide open to the Internet. She downloaded all the files into her secured personal server at home and started googling about Dr. Manfred Kramer. Dr. Kramer seemed to be quite famous scientist in the radio astronomy circles. He had over 100 published papers; most recently he had published several highly cited papers on planetary evolution in red dwarf star systems with Dr. Jim Taylor from Cornell University. All she read seemed pretty legit stuff.

  Julia also checked out Tania Klum. She was a freelance journalist who had many popular articles published in respectable news sites like Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN and even New York Times. Julia was wondering about the connection between Dr. Kramer and Ms. Klum - there didn't seem to be any. Ms. Klum had never published anything even remotely related to radio astronomy before.

  She started looking at her new treasure chest – some new files to play with, potentially extraterrestrial origin though Julia had seen enough conspiracy websites and YouTube videos to develop a skeptical attitude at the age of 18. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as Carl Sagan used to say,” she was thinking.

  The files were in FITS format. Julia was already familiar with radio astronomy jargon after spending one summer as a high school intern at Metsähovi Radio Observatory in Kirkkonummi, Finland. She pulled the CasaPy Python code from her toolbox and started her favorite activity - playing with the signals.

  “This is a piece of cake” thought Julia after 30 minutes of hacking. She was able to decode a two-dimensional 523 by 523 matrix that repeated 31 times by 7. The structure was using prime numbers and each frame consisted of 523 elements. To visualize the data Julia wrote a few lines of Python code. Mapping the signal amplitude to pixel values this would result in a 7 second black and white video clip at 31 frames per second. After a few more keystrokes she saved the python program and typed test.py gliese3742_data.FITS on the command line. On her laptop a window popped up and after a few seconds of processing a video clip started playing.

  The silent black and white video was showing all too familiar footage from New York City. This was from 9/11/2001 and the World Trade Center South Tower was collapsing.

  Julia let the video clip play a few times and then decided to post her Python code and the video clip on her blog. At 21:42 EET she wrote a few lines about Tania Klum's tweet, submitted a new blog entry and felt quite disappointed.

  “What a waste of time” she was thinking. “Why would anybody spend time on creating such a stupid hoax?”

  She felt quite tired and decided to go to bed early.

  BOSTON

  IT WAS LATE afternoon in Boston when John Kelp (aka user “tinkerbell4” in the Slashdot community) was reading Julia's blog post and decided to write up a story. He had been Julia's fan for the last three years and had a healthy respect to her hacker skills. Few years ago Julia published a blog entry about decoding GPS data from an audio track of a video clip where a news helicopter was filming a police chase in Los Angeles. John posted this story to Slashdot.org and it got promoted to the front page almost immediately.

  John googled some details about Dr. Manfred Kramer and scribbled what he thought a catchy headline “Finnish hacker discovers 9/11 terrorist attack from Dr. Kramer's extraterrestrial signals” adding some details about Julia's past achievements and links to original tweet from Tania Klum. At 3:15 PM John hit the submit button and saw the Slashdot community immediately voting the story up. At 3:35 PM the story appeared on the front page. Reddit.com community was also busy posting comments and at 3:48 PM “9/11 Terrorist attacks done by aliens – Dr. Kramer's ET signals decoded” story was on the Reddit front page.

  It was a relatively slow news day so major news sites got interested and sent dozens of journalists to investigate the story.

  ITHACA

  AT 22:12 CET Manfred’s cellphone started ringing. There was a journalist from the New York Times asking for comments on the material that Manfred had published about 3 hours ago. She was talking about extraterrestrial signals and some Finnish hacker called Julia who had decoded a video clip showing 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City. Manfred couldn't understand what she was talking about but got scared. He disconnected the call immediately and called Jim using Skype.

  “Jim – what the hell is going on? I got a call from a journalist from the New York Times asking some questions about extraterrestrial signals, “ Manfred was asking.

  “I don't know. Some reporter called me two minutes ago from CNN asking for comments on some 9/11 video clip based on extraterrestrial signals that you apparently published, “ said Jim.

  “What? My phone is ringing and ringing. Did you tell anybody about the signal?” Manfred asked with some fear in his voice. His cellphone kept ringing and ringing. He turned it off.

  “Of course not. We agreed to keep this secret until we have analyzed the data. Where is that email by the way? You promised to send me the link and details a while back,” Jim responded.

  “The email? I sent it couple of hours ago. Didn't you get it?”<
br />