by Jerry
Hannah Plaxton, a compact woman with dark hair and a birdlike way of moving, was the aforementioned astronomer; in today’s proceedings, being televised worldwide, she was representing the side not just in favor of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but those advocating active SETI, the deliberate sending out of signals. “Thank you, Your Honor. We call Ursula.”
Emily felt her eyebrows go up, and she could hear a murmur wash across the room. It seemed just about everybody, including the court staff, had expected various human experts to be summoned to the stand first; Emily herself was here to testify about the work her team had done to make all this possible.
Two uniformed guards quickly wheeled a seventy-inch paper-thin monitor, flipped to portrait mode, to a position next to the dock, and the image of Ursula—still startling no matter how much time Emily had spent staring at it—appeared.
“Please raise your upper right arm,” said the clerk.
On the screen, Ursula—being a female, she did indeed have two right arms—did as she was asked.
“Do you solemnly state that the testimony you may give in the cause now pending before this court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.” The bubbly voice was based on that of a popular web-series actress. Emily had abandoned attempts to simulate the way alien speech really sounded; that was akin to pebbles rattling inside a tin can.
Hannah opened her mouth to ask her first question when Judge Weisman silenced her by lifting his own right hand, palm out. “Just a minute. Ursula, I need to be satisfied that you understand the oath you just took. Do you?”
Ursula’s eyestalks turned to face the edge of the monitor. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“You affirmed, ‘So help me God.’ Do your people have a God?”
“We freely acknowledge that in a universe as old as this one, beings superior to us almost certainly exist—and so of course I would welcome their assistance in this or any other matter.”
Emily suppressed a snort. Ursula was practically making Hannah’s case for her—and the judge seemed to realize that, as he chose not to pursue the issue further. “Very well,” he said. “Dr. Plaxton, you may proceed.”
“Thank you. Ursula, why did your people choose to contact us?”
Emily’s team of programmers had done their job well: When time was needed to query the Reticulum, the simulated alien made a show of bobbing and weaving its eyestalks, just as we’d seen real aliens do in the thousands of videos they’d sent us.
After a second, the answer came. “We had detected your radio and TV transmissions, and particularly your radar. Also, spectroscopic studies of your atmosphere suggested the presence of biological processes that replenished oxygen, not to mention signs of an industrial society.”
Hannah seized upon that. “In other words,” she said, “your people already knew about our existence long before anyone here had thought seriously about deliberately announcing our presence to the universe, correct?”
“Correct.”
This, of course, was one of the key points: Hannah’s opponent today was the chair of the committee urging a moratorium on active SETI, or “METI,” the messaging of extraterrestrial intelligence; its members felt that deliberate signaling might attract alien invaders or pillagers. Hannah’s side felt such a ban would be pointless, since we’d already accidentally revealed our existence—a fact Ursula had now confirmed.
“What motivated your people to send out the Reticulum?”
“We wanted to share what we knew and what we had created,” said Ursula in a tone that made it all sound eminently reasonable. “After all, surely you’d do the same thing for us.”
When Emily Chiu had first arrived at the Interstellar Communications Society, she’d been all set to talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So she’d been taken aback by Hannah Plaxton’s initial question: “Do you like dinosaurs?”
“Who doesn’t?” Emily had replied, settling into a chair on the opposite side of a cluttered desk.
“Ever been to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto?”
“No.”
“They were planning a new dinosaur gallery, oh, about twenty years ago,” Hannah said. “They already had the best hadrosaur collection in the world—those are duck-billed dinosaurs. A lovely Stegosaurus. Lots of ceratopsian material and a nice T. rex cast. But they were missing a sauropod—you know, like Brontosaurus.”
Emily smiled. “ ‘Thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin again at the other end,’ to quote Monty Python.”
“Exactly. The iconic dinosaur. They figured they really needed one of those, and so went looking for a sauropod skeleton they could buy or excavate. Except, it turns out, they already had one. It had been shipped to Toronto from Pennsylvania in 1962, put in storage, and literally forgotten about; it wasn’t until 2007 that a curator stumbled upon the fact that they had such a thing already. It’s now the centerpiece of their gallery. They named it Gordo, in honor of the former curator who had originally acquired it.”
It had been an early flight down, and Emily was tired. “So?” she said.
“So we’ve been listening for ETs for seventy years now, starting with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma in 1960. And for a while there, we had a decent crowd-sourced search: people using spare processor cycles on their computers to comb through chunks of data collected by radio telescopes. But two things have largely derailed that. First, modern processor chips throttle down automatically to save energy, so there aren’t that many spare cycles anymore. Yup, green policies may have kept us from finding little green men. And, second, people lost interest—they’d expected us to find something quickly in the data, and, well, as time went on and nothing was found, fewer and fewer people participated.”
Emily nodded. She remembered hearing about SETI@home years ago, but hadn’t seen anything about it recently.
“These days,” Hannah said, “we do most of our listening with what we call an LNSD radio-telescope array: a large number of small dishes. We currently have forty-two operational, and hope to increase the quantity eventually to three hundred and fifty. But even forty-two just might be the answer to life, the universe, and everything: With them, we receive eight gigabytes of data a second.”
Emily’s specialty was large data sets. She did the mental math: That was enough to fill a one-terabyte hard drive every minute.
“There was no way we could store it all when we started,” continued Hannah, “so we relied on real-time array processing to sort the wheat from the chaff, determining on the fly if something looked promising—that is, looked like something other than just the usual stellar noise; otherwise, we had to discard the information. But all of that changed a couple of years ago. With storage costs continuing to plummet, we could finally afford to record and store everything we collected. Of course, dealing with all that data is another matter. It’s going to take not just a lot of computing horsepower to sort through it, but innovative analytical tools.
“And that’s where you come in: As I say, we’ve been collecting tons of data every day for years now, but it’s never been properly searched. And, well, we’re hoping what we want is already in there: We want to look for an alien message in the data we’ve already recorded.” She spread her arms. “In short, we’re looking for our Gordo.”
Emily Chiu was very proud of the work her lab had done in creating the Ursula avatar, which was built atop their signature personal-assistant AI technology and incorporated the real-time speech-to-speech translation capabilities they’d originally developed for video calling. Hannah Plaxton spent the rest of the afternoon questioning Ursula, and, to Emily’s delight, the software performed beautifully. No judge had yet allowed an AI to testify under oath in a real case, but since Ursula was doing so well in this mock one, perhaps one soon would.
The trial was a fundraiser for the Interstellar Communications Society. Whatever verdict the jury reached wouldn’t be binding
on anyone, but the event was certainly getting a lot of media attention, which is no doubt why Hannah’s opponent, Piotr Sudeyko, had agreed to participate. He was a historian who specialized in Earth’s own previous first-contact situations, including the arrival of Europeans in the New World; he’d long felt that the anti-METI arguments hadn’t been given sufficient publicity. Emily watched intently as Sudeyko rose from his chair; his probing would be the real test of Ursula’s programming.
“Good morning, Ursula,” he said, dolorous brown eyes peering over Ben Franklin glasses. He was bald with a high forehead that bulged out like that of a beluga whale.
Ursula’s twin eyestalks separated to their maximal extent, but both jade-green spheres faced intently toward Sudeyko. Like all of the intelligent natives of 47 Ursae Majoris, Ursula had six limbs—three for locomotion and three for manipulation—all sprouting from a central torso. A wasp-waist constriction in the copper-colored torso marked where Ursula’s ancestors had rotated their upper bodies ninety degrees when they’d risen up to stand on just three legs. The two thicker and longer legs were in front, and the shorter, thinner one was in back; that had the effect of tilting their bodies backward, as if the aliens were perpetually recoiling in comic surprise. The perfectly circular iris of a mouth located well down the torso just added to the astonished look.
Sudeyko continued: “Ursula, we humans have struggled with many vexing issues since the dawn of time. Perhaps you can help us.”
Emily had managed only a second-row seat today. She craned her head to see the monitor clearly. “I would be happy to try,” Ursula replied.
“Thank you,” said Sudeyko. “During the USSR era, Soviet SETI proponents had taken as a given that any advanced civilization would be a socialist Utopia run by an entrenched central authority. Is that, in fact, the case?”
“No. We govern by plebiscite.”
“Ah,” said Sudeyko. “So, each of your citizens gets one vote?”
“No,” said Ursula, splaying all her pincers in strong negation. “We would never be so limiting. Each of us, as you can see, has three hands—two on one side, and one on the other. Each hand gets its own weighted vote. The inside hand has a vote worth one point; the outside upperhand gets a vote worth two-thirds of a point, and the outside lowerhand gets a vote worth one-third of a point. For any proposition, each individual may cast a total vote worth two points, one and two-thirds points, one and one-third points, one point, two-third points, one-third points, or zero points. We may each assign whatever combination of our weighted votes we wish to any of the choices offered, but once all votes have been assigned, one can make no further selections. So, if there are four or more candidates or choices in a plebiscite, one may fractionally support no more than three of them. The winner is determined by simply summing all the factional votes; if there’s a tie, the candidate or choice receiving votes from the largest number of individuals wins.”
The mathematician in Emily couldn’t keep from trying to crunch the numbers in her head, wondering if this was an efficient system. But Sudeyko, it seemed, was on the trail of something else. “And so when it came to the question of whether to send the Reticulum to Earth, what choices were put forth?”
“There were four propositions. ‘We should send the Reticulum to every star system we’ve identified as being a likely harbinger of life.’ ‘We should listen to and observe each star system that appears inhabited, and if we detect an overture of contact from them, only then should we send the Reticulum.’ ‘While acknowledging that it would be a protracted process thanks to delays necessitated by the finite speed of light, rather than sending the Reticulum, we should instead send only a small tantalizing sampler in hopes of fostering an ongoing trading relationship, swapping portions of our knowledge and culture for portions of theirs.’ And, lastly, ‘Even if we’ve detected that another star system has inhabitants, and even if they reach out to contact us, we should neither initiate contact with nor respond to contact from them.’ ”
“And when the voting was held, what was the outcome?”
“The first proposition, namely that we send the Reticulum to every likely star system, was approved overwhelmingly. In fact, the total fractional votes it received exceeded the combined totals assigned to all three of the other options.”
“Really?” said Sudeyko, who presumably already knew this answer, or else he wouldn’t have asked the question here in open court. Nonetheless, he did a good job of sounding surprised at the degree of consensus. And perhaps if this had been a trial, the judge might have objected to Sudeyko striding over to the jury box and leaning in, but it certainly made for good theater. “And just to be clear,” he said, looking not at Ursula but at the women and men who had won the contest to be seated here, “how many of your people got to vote on these propositions?”
Ursula sounded surprised by the question. “Why, all of them, of course.”
It had sounded reasonable when Ursula said her entire species had voted on whether to initiate contact. But debate over this very issue had torn the SETI community apart for a decade and a half now. One camp had been pushing to upgrade the traditionally passive search for extraterrestrial intelligence to active messaging.
A possible answer, they said, to the eerie silence—the failure to detect any extraterrestrial transmissions—was that there are in fact no other life-forms currently extant. But another possible answer, they contended, was that we’ve misunderstood interstellar etiquette. Perhaps aliens don’t speak until spoken to. They could well be aware of our presence, thanks to our decades of leaking signals out into space, but it might be incumbent upon us to make a gesture that indicates we are beings of goodwill.
Just passively listening, they said, is plain lazy: It implies that we prefer for others to do the heavy lifting of composing messages and beaming them with great power at specific stars. Worse than that, it also shows that we’re greedy, expecting others to give things to us. Any civilization we could contact, they pointed out, will almost certainly be more advanced than our own; the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and we’ve only been a radio-capable species since 1895. Civilizations around other stars might well be thousands, millions, or even billions of years ahead of us. We could gain enormously in terms of knowledge through contact with them; they, on the other hand, would have relatively little to learn from us. Since we would have more to gain, they argued, perhaps it’s expected that we should invest more, by being the first to reach out.
But others had considered this to be dangerous naïveté. First, they said, the underlying assumption that any advanced civilization must be peaceful and altruistic could be wrong. And even if some were, surely, they said, it was possible that others were not. One possible explanation for the Fermi paradox—the fact that although our science suggests that the universe should be teeming with life, all SETI efforts have so far failed—was that there is a violent berserker race that makes it its business to wipe out any civilizations it detects. Whatever other races might still exist locally may have learned by observing this that remaining silent was crucial to survival.
Nonetheless, the METI advocates pushed forward with amendments to the SETI protocol that would allow and encourage direct and immediate proactive transmissions designed specifically to signal our presence to other civilizations. This prompted a rash of resignations from the international commissions involved in drafting the protocol. These self-styled dissidents felt that no overture toward contact should be made without wide-ranging international and interdisciplinary consultation and consensus.
The debate continued to rage here in 2030, but those favoring active SETI had crowed victory when it became clear that the advanced beings at 47 Ursae Majoris had done precisely what they’d proposed humanity should be doing: Those aliens had boldly and deliberately announced their presence to the universe.
Many of the players on both sides had changed since the argument had begun—some had retired, others had died, a couple had even switched
positions—but, at last, the opponents of active SETI had gotten what they’d wanted all along: Rather than a few individuals behind closed doors deciding a matter that could have a profound impact on the entire planet, broad public discussions were now occurring. The METI dissidents were finally getting their day in court.
“Ursula,” Professor Sudeyko said, “we humans have a history of considering ourselves special, so forgive the vanity, but is it safe for us to assume that ours was the only world you sent the Reticulum to?”
Ursula clasped her two right arms together. “I’m afraid not. We identified eleven other systems that might have intelligent life. They each got sent copies.”
“Was there anything special about us?”
“Well,” she said, “your star system was the furthest one we sent the Reticulum to. My home system of 47 Ursae Majoris and yours of Sol are forty-six of your light-years apart. But we also sent the Reticulum to 20 Leonis Minoris, which is just twelve of your light-years from us; SV Leonis Minoris AB, just fifteen light-years away; 61 Ursae Majoris, sixteen light-years away; Groombridge 1830, seventeen light-years away—”
Sudeyko held up a hand—and Ursula was as good now at interpreting human gestures as Emily and others were at understanding alien ones. “Thank you,” he said. “And have any of these other systems sent you a reply?”
“The short answer,” said Ursula, “is ‘not yet.’ But, of course, that is a slippery concept in these matters. We made all of the transmissions over a period of three of our years, with the one to you, seeing as it had the farthest to go, being sent first. I have no idea if a reply has been received since that transmission.”
“So,” said Sudeyko, again facing the jury, “you don’t actually know if there were negative consequences to, if I may phrase it this way, shouting in the jungle?”
Emily and her team had spent months combing through the ever-growing data set from the array of radio telescopes. She’d joked to one of the other data-mining specialists that it was like looking for a needle in an infinitely expanding haystack.
