The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  We know that the ship was traveling at least at the rate of 1% the speed of light, so to have traveled the maximum distance of 1000 light years, it would have taken the maximum time of a 100,000 years.” Jorge said, suddenly sounding a lot less enthusiastic after realizing the distance and time involved.

  “Sounds a bit far out man, but hey what’s the harm in trying? We have nothing to lose, and it sounds a lot less complicated programming. Probably will be a cakewalk after the crazy image processing we did. Where do we find this database?” Ramesh said as he got ready to program again.

  Jorge was reminded once again about how thankful he should be about a friend like Ramesh, who had not given up on him despite their disappointment. He even sounded enthusiastic.

  It was a disappointment again. Not a single star within a distance of a thousand light years had intersected that path in the last 100,000 years. Another dead end. It was now the turn of Jorge to be despondent.

  He just walked up, looking to pick up his jacket, before realizing he hadn’t brought one. He had rushed in here from the beach, what seemed weeks ago. “Let’s go home Ramesh, our bright idea wasn’t so bright after all, we came up with nothing. We are not going to find the home world today, if ever.”

  There was nothing more Ramesh could say to brighten things up, there were no more ideas to pursue, nothing more to give them hope. He rose too heading for the door. “Yeah. I guess this is it. These bastard aliens are giving us such a hard time tracking their home world. That cursed alien ship I hope had an equally tough time tracking its own home world to report back.”

  You knew that Ramesh was in a really foul mood, if you ever heard a curse from his mouth, because hardly anybody had ever had heard him curse. As Ramesh walked towards the door, he found Jorge blocking his way, staring at him dumbstruck. “What? Saw a ghost or something?” Ramesh asked curiously.

  “Did you ever play with those laser light pointer toys you get, as a kid Ramesh?” Jorge asked suddenly. Confused by the jump in topic, Ramesh replied. “As a matter of fact I did. I would take it out to the beach and point it into the clouds. I loved to see it point so far away on the clouds and the sand. I even loved pointing it through the windows of the neighbors and irritating them.”

  Jorge still stood in there blocking the doorway. “Ramesh you have this spooky talent of coming out with brilliant ideas without even realizing it yourself!” Jorge said with an affectionate smile, as he placed a hand over his short friend’s shoulders.

  “I do? Pray enlighten me oh wise one, what brilliant idea this ignoramus has come up with now?” Ramesh asked in a fake mocking tone.

  Jorge was heading back towards his desk as he started animatedly. “Well first, we all seem to forget, or at least ignore the fact that the ship must have been in communication with its home world all the time. It would not have been possible to have a real time communication of course, it must be taking years for signals to reach the world and back, but it must be reporting back continuously.

  This mean that it must have had a transmitter pointed back towards its home planet. We have not detected any radio frequency transmission from the alien ship. So we have concluded correctly I think, that the transmission must be through laser beams, which being invisible tight beam communication we could not intercept. Are you with me till now Ramesh?” Jorge asked to make sure Ramesh was following his train of thoughts. Ramesh nodded and Jorge continued.

  “I am sure you know why laser communication is invisible in space to everyone but the receiver at whom it is pointed. Every photon is directed straight towards the receiver, none leak out in other directions which could be collected by someone else. You can’t even see the laser beam sideways because space is empty.

  On earth you can see the laser beam because the atmosphere is dense with gas and dust, some of the photons of the laser beam hit this gas and dust particles, scatter in a different direction, so that an observer standing sideways receives some of those scattered photons and thus can see the laser beam.

  So now visualize the time the alien ship suddenly flipped and started accelerating, surprising us all. As it did that, its nozzle discharging ion plasma at high velocity turned to its rear. Now as we know that plasma, which is the fourth state of matter, is essentially very high temperature gas which has been stripped off its electrons.

  The moment it is ejected into space, it quickly cools down and turns back into gas. And as you remember I told you earlier, even the aliens with their advanced technology, cannot keep the plasma discharge from the nozzle in an exact straight line, some of it disperses, forming a cone out of the nozzle. This cone is essentially a cone of gas.

  If the aliens have to be in contact with their home world, which is behind them at a very small angle, and that rear direction is now occluded by a cone of gas, what do you get?” Jorge asked rhetorically.

  Ramesh answered his questions jumping up and down. “You get a laser beam travelling through a cloud of gas, scattering some of its light through them which would make it visible, pointing a straight line towards their home planet!” Ramesh’s eyes were wild with excitement now too.

  The two men rushed back to Jorge’s terminal.

  “Ok the first thing we need to figure out is what light frequency to look for. Any ideas Ramesh, this may be closer to your line of expertise.” Jorge asked.

  “We humans use green to blue laser frequencies for our long range space communications, these are our highest frequency stable lasers, but I would recommend that we start from ultraviolet given aliens have better technology than us. We can slowly move lower in frequency in our hunt.”

  They took all the frames after the alien ship had turned and lit its engine up. There was no real need to do any programming, they had to simply set up a filter for a certain wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  They started with the highest band of ultra-violet. Every few seconds, the computer would apply the filter on the scanning images for the set frequency, ghosting out the rest of the image, very similar to an X-Ray scan taken in hospitals.

  The two of them would quickly scan through the images visually and check if they could see any telltale straight line behind the ghosted image of the alien ship. When they found none, they would set the filter frequency a bit lower and repeat the process.

  For a change they did not have to struggle for very long before they hit pay dirt. About half an hour after they had started, they had reached the edge of the visible spectrum, somewhere between deep violet, and low ultraviolet, when they saw what they were expecting, hoping rather. A faint white streak, in a black and white image extending for miles at an acute angle to the rear of the alien ship.

  Ramesh was beyond himself with joy. He stood up and was jumping up and down. “My god, you did it man. You did it. Jorge you are a fucking genius man, you did it! Wait a minute, I can improve the picture. We have just reached the edge of the laser’s frequency range, if we lower the frequency by a few hundred Hertz, we should get a sharper picture.”

  Ramesh quickly played around with the frequency of the filter and in less than a minute, they had a picture in black and white with a sharp line indicating the path of the laser.

  It would never have been visible to a human eye if the frame had been seen in ordinary light. Only by applying the filter at this particular frequency, and then too specifically knowing where and what to look for, had they been able to identify it. No wonder it had never been noticed before.

  Jorge was pleased as a punch smiling ear to ear. He reclined his back rest all the way back, put his hands behind his head and in a relaxing posture said. “OK we have proved the theory that the line exists, now we need to see where this line points to. I think the math to do that is complicated, any idea how to go about it?”

  Ramesh was still walking up and down in the small office, not being able to sit down in his excitement, he said, “Actually the math is not that complicated. It should be straight forwards geometry. What is going to be tricky is t
o find out very precisely, and I do mean precise to the last arc of the last angle of view, the position and angle of view of each of the components of this picture.

  We need the exact position of ship at the moment this frame was taken. It needs to be probably within the accuracy of a few Kilometers. We will have to take the sun as the point of reference for all our calculations, because the earth has moved since then. The center of the sun is the only steady point of reference in the solar system.”

  Ramesh continued talking loudly about all the parameters he will need to program as input. He was really talking to himself, thinking through the calculation. “Then we will need to know the exact angle of the alien ship relative to the plane of the sun. Similarly we will need to know the exact position and orientation of Sedna – 1 relative to sun.

  And lastly we will have to calculate the angle of the laser beam relative to the front-rear orientation of the alien ship. Not to forget, we need to do all this in three dimensions, not two, while our image is a two dimensional one! Piece of cake! No complications.” He finished sarcastically and with a bit of an embarrassed look added. “This might be a wee bit more difficult than I thought.”

  Jorge still sat there in his relaxed posture with a smile. He had known all along that the calculations would be complicated, even as he was thinking up the idea in the first place. He had also known all along, that if there was anyone in the campus who could figure it out, it would be Ramesh. “So what do you need buddy?” Jorge asked.

  Ramesh thought for a moment before replying. “As input I need Telemetry and navigation data from Sedna – 1, detailed observational data of the alien ship annotated with positional reference, and food.”

  Jorge burst out laughing and said “And I would guess the last input is the most important one. I will get you those. I have access to all the data you mentioned, though I have never bothered to look at them. Never needed them before. I may need your help in identifying the correct data though, can you please have a look.”

  After they were satisfied that they had all the data they needed, Jorge got up and said. “Since I am useless here till you can get the program running, I will make myself useful by getting the last piece of input required… food. Since it’s too early for Denny’s, you will have to make do with a Cheese pizza I guess. Sorry, but my knowledge of vegetarian eating joints in the middle of the night is limited.”

  “Cheese pizza is fine, I actually like it.” Ramesh replied waving a hand towards him, but not looking at him. His eyes were now glued to terminal. He was now in his elements, doing what he did best, programming to solve a problem.

  It took Jorge less than an hour to return back with two large pizzas, and was amazed to see that Ramesh had actually started testing his program, which meant that he had already finished coding it. “I’ll go down the corridor and get us some soda to wash it down with, any preference?” Jorge asked, not sure if Ramesh had even heard what he had said.

  “Anything is fine.” Ramesh said dismissively waving his hand, but still looking into the screen.

  When Jorge returned with the soda, he saw Ramesh opening the boxes, trying to figure out which one was the vegan pizza. He picked the right one out, took a slice and started wolfing it down.

  “Aren’t you going to wash your hands before eating?” asked Jorge in mock admonition.

  Ramesh was embarrassed for a moment before he said “Nah. I have been around you for too long. I figure if it hasn’t killed you or made you sick yet, then I guess it is safe. Oh the program is running by the way, we should have our answer in a few minutes.”

  “That’s fast. You took longer to program it.” Jorge said as he picked up a piece of his pepperoni.

  “Yeah, this is the kind of calculations computers excel in. Sheer geometrical and spatial number crunching.” Ramesh replied.

  They hadn’t even finished their first slice when the results came through. “And… we have the answer!” Ramesh announced with a flourish. “Keep in mind that this direction is with respect to the sun, when we point our telescope, we will have to make the minor adjustment taking into account the position of the telescope relative to the sun. Over to you buddy, now it is your show.” Ramesh said as he picked up his second piece.

  Jorge didn’t need to be told. He was already hacking away on his terminal looking at catalog records of this particular part of the sky, after making the adjustment mentioned by Ramesh. He looked at various recent images from multiple telescopes that had scanned on most of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio, to infra-red, visible and x-ray.

  There was nothing visible at that point in the sky. This time however he was not discouraged. He had definitive evidence that the alien ship had pointed in that direction. If they were not seeing anything there in the pictures, then that simply meant that the pictures were not sharp enough or sensitive enough. They would have to look at that point with the sharpest eye in the sky humans have got.

  As a PhD student, and a member of the investigative committee, he had access to all the data he needed from any telescope in the world. He could even book observation time on almost any telescope owned by US or its allies, which would go through with reasonable priority and be allocated to him within months.

  He wanted to know now, he was not going to wait months for an answer. He knew two people who had control over such resources. He wasn’t going to call Heidi at this hour, however close they might have worked in the last few months. Dr. Herman Heinz however was in Darmstadt at the ESA operations center in Germany. It would be well past midday there and a decent hour to call.

  He had met Dr. Heinz personally only once, but they had worked together virtually over so many hours in the past months. He felt he knew him well enough to place a call request with an urgent tag on it. Herman was an easy going guy anyway, everybody liked him.

  Herman answered in less than minute. “Hello Jorge, how have you been? I can see from your location tag that you are back in Hawaii. When do I start calling you Dr. Sterner? Soon I hope?” Herman started in his easy and friendly manner.

  “Hello Dr. Heinz. I am doing well, and hopefully I will be able to restart my thesis work soon. But I called you because I need your help. We may have made a discovery about the home planet. Can I send you some data over this line?” Jorge started, cutting down on preliminaries and getting to the point quickly.

  “I am on my way to the administrative building for a very long and very boring budget appropriation meeting, but wait let me get my tablet out.” Herman replied. Jorge saw the image settle down under a shade of trees. Probably Herman sat on a bench, and then the image switched from his personal com device to his tablet. “Ok, send me now, let’s see what you got.”

  Jorge sent him the data and spent the next 10 minutes giving him a synopsis of what the two of them had been doing for the last 20 hours.”

  “You know Jorge, if you pull this off, I am going to recommend you for some prize, and your friend out there too. Maybe even the Nobel Prize. So I assume you need my telescopes. Why not ask Heidi? She can give you what you need. Does she even know about this?” Herman asked suspiciously.

  Jorge’s white cheeks turned red at the implication, as he spoke. “It’s not like that Dr. Heinz, it’s just that it is very late in the night here, and we didn’t want to call her at this hour.”

  “Ah. It is the case of two intrepid night owl geniuses working late in the night, too impatient to wait till morning to know the fruits of their labor. I can understand that. You know when I was your age in college, I too had difficulty working anytime other than nights.

  Not a bad trait for us astronomers though. I will get you what you need on one condition though. I get a message from you the moment you find anything, or even you found nothing. And so does Heidi.” Herman said.

  “Agreed sir, it is the least we would do. Dr. Heinz we believe that the object of interest must be cold, so it is not visible in the current picture. We think deep infra-red would be good starting frequency
for observation. I would like your opinion.” Jorge asked.

  “I agree with you fully on that analysis. Give me a few moments. I will speak to Mr. Alvarez at Chile. I believe you have met him at all those teleconferences we have had. I will ask him to do the needful. I am sending him the data you just sent me.

  Get in touch with him after say 10 minutes. He would know best how fast we can position our resources and start streaming the data. Bye for now Jorge, let me make the call to Alvarez. Good luck Jorge, and keep me and Heidi informed.” With that Herman cut the line without giving a chance to Jorge to thank him. Herman must also be excited about this Jorge thought.

  They ate their pizza and waited for the agonizing 10 minutes before Jorge placed the call to Alvarez. Alvarez was the administrator who scheduled the utilization of all of the resources commanded by Herman. He was a helpful guy and seemed equally excited by the prospects.

  He gave them a login id and password to log on to his systems, indicating that it will be valid for 7 days only as per procedure. The data would start streaming on to the home folder of the id the moment the telescope he had assigned got into the correct position, which should be in about 15 minutes. Jorge thanked him and quickly logged in.

  While they were waiting, Jorge started having doubts about what they were going to see. Why would they see anything this time, when previous scans on this point of the sky with the same telescope have shown nothing? He did not have a good answer to this, he realized he was going on hope, and that was not good enough.

  They had to do something different, otherwise they will get the same result. Einstein has once famously said “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the sign of insanity.” He realized he was expecting exactly that.

  He suddenly recollected the Hubble Deep Field images taught to freshman astronomers. Forty years ago Hubble space telescope was pointed to a very tiny patch of apparently empty space. It was just kept pointing there for two weeks doing nothing but accumulating the photons coming in. In the end astronomers were stunned with the result.