by Lake, Jay
He’d phoned Ricard after getting an alert from Signals, urging the committee head to issue a statement. Ricard instead ruled that the matter needed a Media & Education consensus recommendation to the steerers. Damned committee process!
He stuffed the paper into his briefcase. There’d be time for it on the shuttle to New York for the emergency meeting.
* * * *
The early work of Media & Education had lulled Matthews into a false sense of security: the task force’s original findings were uncontroversial, and so quickly released. For those first few days they’d also had a monopoly on signal reception.
Things started changing once independent observatories came on-line and the bulk of the repeating message was posted to the Web. Now the task force was in a race with every other interested party to interpret ET’s message.
That message started simply enough: two pulse trains counting from one to 128. Next came hours of data without apparent pattern. The analysts soon recognized that the data immediately following the two pulse trains of 128 was a two-dimensional, 128-by-128 pixel image. The image was simple but informative: sets of tick marks, from one to sixteen, each set paired with alien symbols. ET was communicating by what amounted to facsimile transmission, he counted in octal, and he had shown Earth how he wrote his numerals—a quickly approved press release.
The bottom left corner of that first image carried ET’s symbol for one: he was enumerating images. The bottom right corner bore two numbers: 128 twice. As suggested, the next part of the message could be read as another 128-by-128 image.
Subsequent images were easily recognized as math lessons, building a common mathematical vocabulary. None of the symbols matched human conventions, of course, but there were no surprises at that early stage as to message meaning. The committee had little difficulty drafting a press release citing a shared view of arithmetic.
Contention arose with the next few images, perhaps not coincidentally because an undergrad physics major at the University of Calgary was first to interpret them. She identified one drawing as a spectrogram, an energy-intensity versus frequency plot, of Lalande 21185. The next graphic was a similar spectrogram for the sun.
Beyond confirming the source and destination of ET’s communication, those images introduced two new symbols: us and them. The solar spectrogram had one other novel aspect: a corner annotation indicating that a 3-D dataset followed. The 3-D dataset appeared to be a series of spectrograms, successively more crowded, but otherwise mysterious. The net effect was a crude animation, like a child’s flip book. The meaning of the dataset’s third dimension remained unclear. Intriguingly, each 2-D slice bore the symbol for “us.”
The committee was slow to comment on these images. The media types (and Matthews agreed) proposed simply stating that two new symbols had been decoded, but that the following dataset was not yet understood. The behavioral-response contingent thought it necessary to put these findings “into a suitable context” to protect fragile human egos. “To those countries that were recently colonies of the West, ‘us and them’ distinctions are sensitive matters,” was one Third World sociologist’s assertion. The behavioral-response folks were further concerned that an admission “ ‘we’ had failed to understand” a dataset could make humans feel inferior to, hence threatened by, ET.
Matthews just didn’t get their point: “us” and “them” were just pronouns. An undecoded dataset so early in the effort also failed to faze him … why should ET’s message be immediately clear? ET was alien. They waffled for two days, by which time the external media had moved on to newer news.
* * * *
Waiting for the emergency meeting to start, Matthews wondered if the committee had learned its lesson. The loss of signal was already widely known; he felt they should just acknowledge it.
Ricard had inexplicably brought a gavel, which he wielded to open the meeting. Some overseas members, unable to join the short-notice session in person, were videoconferenced in by encrypted network link; they winced as the chairman pounded too close to the mike.
“Thank you all for coming.” After excessive pleasantries, Ricard came to the point. “It has been reported that the signal from ET has been lost. The matter being so important, we will discuss a suitable statement for recommendation to the steering committee.” Heads nodded.
“Point of clarification,” interrupted Matthews. “A more precise statement is that the signal has ceased. Every observatory, government-funded and other, reports the same thing.” He’d been on-line for much of his flight; the message boards were unanimous about the time that the signal had disappeared. It hadn’t faded or been randomly garbled by cosmic interference, both of which had often happened. The signal was just gone.
“Do we know why?” asked someone.
“The short and honest answer is: no. On the ‘net, the most common guess is that ET’s orbit is bringing him to the side of his sun opposite us, so he’s stopped sending until he can get a clean signal through again. Perhaps, once we’ve decoded the entire message, he’ll have told us.”
In a pleasant surprise, reason won out. The not-too-tardy press release simply reported the cessation of transmission.
* * * *
“You’ve got incoming.”
For a Brit, Bridget had a fair grasp of American slang. Matthews still reserved judgment whether he had cause to worry.
He was nonetheless suspicious. It was eight in the evening for him, making it the middle of the night in Switzerland. Moreover, she’d contacted him over the ’net, and Internet telephony had far lower voice quality than a normal call.
The task force had provided its members with PC-compatible encryption devices of unusual robustness, which he guessed she wanted to use. That turned out to be correct.
“What’s up?” he asked once they’d opened a secure session.
“You know there are ITU staffers on the Signals committee. One gave me a sneak preview of their latest finding. You’ll surely hear all about it in Media. Judging from the tizzy your friends got into over ‘us’ and ‘them,’ this news is sure to throw them for a circle. A head’s up seemed in order.”
For a loop, he thought to himself. “What is it?”
“Watch.”
She opened two windows on his PC. In a red window she ran the animation of ET’s “us”-labelled spectral flip book. The other window, colored green, showed a similar sequence of images. She slid the second window over the first, and re-ran them superimposed. The green charts were in all cases a superset of the red.
“Green is our best-guess reconstruction of Earth’s aggregated RF emissions over time. The big energy spikes are from TV transmitters and ballistic missile early warning radars.”
“When does your animation start?”
She grinned at him from the corner of his screen still showing real-time video. “The best fit matches ET’s spectrum animation with our reconstructed data starting in mid 1950.”
She had used the term “incoming” correctly: ET had lobbed a figurative bombshell at them.
* * * *
Apropos of the New York venue, it was deja vu all over again: another short-notice Media meeting. So far, only the task force had the explosive news. If Media moved quickly, this time they could shape the world’s impressions.
ET had in 1958 captured signals emitted by Earth in 1950. He’d waited more than thirty years to respond. Why?
“It’s devastating,” said Dr. Shah, a psychologist, “that ET could not be bothered to answer. Are we so insignificant?”
Thanks to Bridget, Matthews had had a day to ponder the matter. “A purposefully delayed response is not the only explanation. Perhaps ET is just explaining how Earth came to his attention. His radio astronomers might routinely capture and save radio energy from neighboring stars, and not have immediately recognized our �
��signal’ ”—he waggled his fingers as exaggerated quotation marks—“for what it was.
“ET sent us a systematically constructed message, much of which we almost instantly understood. He sent it at very high power levels. Whatever signal he’s gotten from Earth was much weaker, unintended leakage from TV and radio and military radars. None of that was designed for him to recognize or decode. I’m guessing, but what may have eventually convinced him that we’re here and aware is the rapid increase in power levels and in frequencies being used. I doubt ET extracted any meaning from the mish-mash.”
Dr. Shah imitated Matthews’ earlier gesture. “About those quotation marks … what did you mean?”
“The signals ET received from us were very faint. ‘I Love Lucy’ was not meant as an interstellar communication. If ET’s signal were as low-powered as what Earth emits, we’d never have detected it.”
Michel Margot, a Belgian sociologist, broke the thoughtful silence that had come over the committee. “You suggest that we can’t know how long ET delayed after suspecting our presence.”
Matthews nodded.
“But his radio technology is more advanced than ours.”
“Correct.”
“But not greatly more advanced, or his response would likely have come sooner.” Margot took Matthews’ silence as assent. “That’s good. There could be an adverse reaction to a perceived technology gap.” To the group, the sociologist added, “This seems a responsible position to articulate.”
Heads bobbed in what Chairman Ricard mistook for unanimous agreement. He assigned a writer to draft a press release.
The phrase “not greatly more advanced” contained a significant degree of ambiguity. ET had radio receivers in 1958 exceeding any Earth owned today. His high-power transmitter was a marvel. In the interest of an announcement more devoid than usual of spin, Matthews kept to himself the thought of how much he’d like to obtain ET’s radio technology.
* * * *
“In the General Assembly today, the Secretary-General of the United Nations urgently requested an emergency supplemental authorization. He stated that the UN’s budget has been unusually strained by peacekeeping duties across the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, and the former Indonesia. He pointed to growing requests for humanitarian assistance by the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. The Lalande 21185 task force was also identified as an unanticipated expense.
“Third World delegates responded skeptically, suggesting that the UN reallocate scarce resources to its core missions. The ambassador of Congo spoke for many of his peers. ‘What is the use of an arithmetic lesson from the stars? How many AIDS vaccinations, how much famine relief, could we provide with funds we are now squandering on ET?’
“Rising polarization on the subject of funding for the Lalande investigation seems certain to conflict with the proposed international treaty on interstellar communications. The treaty, recently passed by the General Assembly and awaiting ratification by member states, requires that any response to ET come under UN auspices.”
—BBC World New Service
CHAPTER 5
“To ET.”
Matthews rarely toasted with iced tea, but Barbara White seldom drank anything stronger. Barb stood five foot zip in high heels; she said her tolerance for booze was best measured in thimblefuls.
“To NetSat.”
Barb was CEO and founder of that company. He had been employee number four before going on leave of absence. They went back a long time together.
It had been a chance encounter at the shopping mall. They’d retreated to the food court. “Is ET still being mum?”
“Yup.” He bit a taco. “Not that it could be kept secret if he began talking again. In any case, it’ll be a while before we understand what he already had to say.”
“So when can I expect you back?”
“I can’t tell yet.” Pause. “Not till we’re done.”
She knew him too well. “What’s the problem?”
“What we’re learning is astounding. For example, ET’s replay of what he received from Earth will teach us a lot about radio propagation across interstellar distances. And I work every day with brilliant people.”
“There’s a big ‘but’ in there somewhere.”
“Think of the most bureaucratic dealings you’ve ever had with the government. This is worse. On top of a clumsy committee process, we’ve got all of the international politics. Amazingly, most prospective announcements get inanely entangled with nineteenth-century colonialism and worries about possible Third World misperception. Apparently our paramount mission is to build up humanity’s self esteem.”
“Then come back to NetSat. I need my chief strategist.”
“Barb … let’s not go there. This work is too important.”
It wasn’t the answer she wanted. She brightened as a safer topic came to mind. “Hey, I owe you a compliment. Your recommendation paid off.”
Dean guessed she meant the wrap-up memo he’d written on his way out the door at NetSat. He had a visceral dislike of loose ends. “The constellation reconfig?”
“The same. As you proposed, it was an easy software fix to keep our satellites and ground stations from broadcasting directly on a Lalande 21185 line of sight. We’ll lose a little capacity, but we maintained our launch schedule. It sure beat trying to start over on a new frequency to accommodate your ET buddies. That could’ve put us out of business.”
“I’m glad it worked out.”
Her wristwatch beeped on the hour. “Gotta run. Listen, it was great seeing you, and I do want you back sometime.”
After a goodbye hug she left and he finished his late lunch. The conversation had put an unaccustomed monetary perspective on the task force’s work: the cost associated with foregone use of spectrum. That was in addition to the cost of investigations, UN-sponsored and other, about which several countries were already complaining.
The epiphany came during his last taco. How about ET’s economics? Even without knowledge of how ET allocated resources, it stood to reason that ET had made a major investment to contact Earth. His transmitter, and its power requirements, had to be enormous. For how long would his society, whatever form that took, be willing to operate it? Was that why ET had gone off the air?
Congress cancelled NASA’s SETI program in 1993, when the agency was only spending about a nickel per taxpayer on the effort. Luckily, some private institutions had ponied up the money to keep the search alive. Many developing countries were now objecting to UN funding of the task force. Would ET’s society work any differently?
There was a new urgency to decoding ET’s full message, and answering while, Matthews hoped, ET was still listening.
CHAPTER 6
With intellectual discipline that many found intimidating, ET’s message continued to expand a common vocabulary. Some speculated that much of ET’s delay in responding had been time spent formulating the elegant reply.
Animations of motion introduced mechanics and ET’s notation for the calculus. Cartoons of atoms with emission spectra identified elements and ET’s symbols for them. Cartoons using the element symbols showed simple molecular representations, which were used to illustrate a simple chemical reaction. An image of a simple wet cell labelled with its chemical reaction provided a symbol for voltage, beginning a review of electrical engineering.
The purpose for all of this common vocabulary was still unknown when the task force was summoned to present its status to a philosophically divided COPUOS.
* * * *
“The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will come to order.” Ambassador and chairman Juan Roderigo, although Harvard-educated, spoke in his native Spanish.
Only the steering committee had been invited, but Bridget had wangled Matthews a guest pass in view of his liaison dut
ies. As a guest, he was expected to observe silently. He donned an earpiece, wondering how long it would take to adjust to English in one ear and whatever in the other. English was the worldwide language of technology, trade, and air traffic control; diplomats had no such standardization.
Undersecretary-General Kim spoke for his task force. The message summary passed quickly, boiled down to the diplomatic level of scientific literacy. Bobbing heads around the horseshoe-shaped table suggested that the summation had been understood. ET heard us; after an unexplained delay, he answered; he was now building a common vocabulary with us.
Roderigo paid the obligatory compliments to Kim for the hard work of the task force. The ambassadors from the US, Russia, Japan, Peru, and several western European countries followed suit. Then the manure collided with the ventilator.
Maurice Mbeke of Congo spoke in fluent French, but the ambassador’s message, like his dashiki, was distinctly afrocentric. “I think—no, I know—that I speak for many others in asking why the aliens have expended so much effort in communicating with us. We will resist interstellar colonialism, physical or cultural.”
Matthews was not entirely surprised: this was a perspective with which Matthews had become familiar, though not accepting, from innumerable discussions of the Media & Education committee. What did take Dean aback was the level of support Mbeke had. Speaker after speaker, especially from the nations who’d recently joined COPUOS, endorsed what Matthews thought was a head-in-the-sand view of the situation. To the physicist’s astonishment, even some industrialized countries shared a concern about ET.