George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt

by Lucy Hawking

  The screen flickered and then went dull. But then Cosmos beeped again—once, and then twice. And another line appeared across the center of his screen. The line turned into a squiggle for a few seconds, and then a circle, and then disappeared.

  “This is weird,” said Emmett slowly. He punched in a few commands. He pressed a few more keys and sat back.

  There was a whirring noise. And then, finally, Cosmos spoke.

  “1010111110000010,” he said.

  George and Annie were stunned into silence. It had never occurred to them that they might get Cosmos working but then not understand what he said.

  “11000101001,” Cosmos continued.

  Annie tugged Emmett’s shirt.

  “What have you done to him?” she asked him, her face a picture of panic. “Where’s the alien message?”

  “Holy supersymmetric strings!” exclaimed Emmett. “He’s speaking Base Two!”

  “What’s that?” said George.

  “It’s a positional notation with a radix of two,” said Emmett. “It’s binary—the system used internally by all computers.”

  George tried typing a command on the screen but jumped back as Cosmos screeched, “101000101011 101010100010101010101101010000010010101!”

  “What?” said Annie. “What’s happening to Cosmos? Why can he speak but we don’t know what he’s saying?”

  “So this computer, like, it speaks to you in English and you understand it…?” said Emmett slowly. “Because now he’s speaking the underlying system, the one underneath a computer language. Like a pre-language.”

  “1101011!” wailed Cosmos.

  “Oh my gosh!” Annie gasped. “What if it’s like he’s become a little baby computer, and he’s speaking baby language?”

  Cosmos gurgled. And then laughed.

  “So he could just be saying ‘’Poon! Dada! Mama,’” Annie continued.

  “I think you’re right,” said Emmett, who was too busy staring at the screen to notice he’d just agreed with Annie. “I’ll try him on something. Let’s see if he knows BASIC.”

  “GOTO GOTO GOTO GOTO,” said Cosmos.

  Emmett inserted a disk into the supercomputer. “I’ll try to update him on something harder,” he said. “Something more up-to-date. It’s like he’s in an ancient computer world right now. I’ll try FORTRAN 95.”

  * * *

  BINARY CODE

  Our normal numerical system works with a base of 10. There are numbers from 1 to 9 and then the number 1 moves into the next “column” to show that there is one group of 10s. After 99 (9 x 10 plus 9 x 1), a new column is needed to show the amount of 100s (10 x 10); then again for 1000s (10 x 10 x 10) after 999 is reached. And so on.

  With binary, the base is 2 instead of 10, so that the columns will represent multiples of 2, i.e.: 2, 4 (2 x 2), 8 (2 x 2 x 2), etc. The number 3 therefore appears as 11 (1 x 2 plus 1 x 1). And counting 1 to 10 becomes 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010.

  Early computer programmers decided to use binary code because it is simpler to design a circuit with either on or off positions than one with many alternative states. Binary code works on the principle that the early computers were constructed using electrical systems that recognized on or off positions only—which could be represented by using 0 for off and 1 for on. In this way complicated calculations could be translated into on/off circuits throughout the computer.

  * * *

  “REAL. NOT. END. DO,” replied the supercomputer.

  Emmett tried once more, and Cosmos’s screen dimmed and his circuits fizzed. “He is gobbling up these disks,” said Emmett. “Spooky, huh?”

  Finally Cosmos spoke in a language they could understand. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Cosmos!” said Annie excitedly. “You’re back. That’s great news! Now I need you to open up the portal, quick as you can. I need to have a look—”

  “Yo,” said Cosmos lazily.

  George jumped in. “Cosmos!” he pleaded. “We’re in deep trouble. We really need you to help us.”

  “Dude, I’m chillin’,” replied the world’s most intelligent computer.

  “You’re doing what?” said George slowly, bending down to take a closer look at him.

  “Don’t look at my screen!” shouted Cosmos suddenly.

  George tried again. “We’ve got a big problem—,” he began.

  “Dude,” Cosmos interrupted him. “I’m busy. Don’t look at my screen.”

  “Cosmos…,” cooed Annie gently. “Why are you so annoyed?”

  “Because I don’t want to roll with these losers,” he replied. “But you’re cool.”

  “Thanks!” said Annie. “But, Cosmos, things are really messed up right now. My dad’s freaking out because someone’s, like, jacked his robot.”

  “Word!” exclaimed Cosmos, finally sounding interested.

  George and Emmett listened in complete bewilderment as Annie chatted to the computer.

  “Cosmos, you rock!” said Annie. “Can you help us find out who’s been messing with our robot?”

  “Word,” replied Cosmos. “I’m on it.”

  As he whirred away, Annie turned to face the others with a smug grin on her face.

  “He said I was cool!” she exclaimed happily. “And look…,” she said, breathlessly. “The door to the Universe!”

  A little beam of light had shot out from Cosmos’s screen, and on the other side of the room, he was drawing the doorway through which George and Annie had once walked into the Universe. The door swung open, and behind it they saw a dark sky peppered with stars that shone much more brightly than when they were seen from Earth.

  A red planet was coming into view.

  George took a step toward the portal, but before he could get any closer, the door slammed shut in his face. On it was pinned a large poster with the words KEEP OUT scrawled in big letters. They all jumped as loud electronic music blared from behind the door.

  “Annie, what’s going on?” asked George.

  “Well, I’m not really sure,” she said. “But Cosmos sounds like the older kids at my school back home. I mean, he’s speaking the way they do when they think they’re really cool.”

  “How old are these kids?” asked George.

  “Oh, about fourteen, I suppose,” said Annie. “Why?”

  “Because,” said George, who had worked it out, “Cosmos started out with baby computer language when we first got him going. And Emmett moved him on but couldn’t update him totally. So that means that now—”

  Annie finished the sentence for him: “Cosmos,” she said with fear and wonder, “is a teenager.”

  “What’s your dad going to say?” asked George.

  “I think we’d better not tell him. At least, not yet.”

  They heard the front door open downstairs. “Quick!” said Annie. “Emmett, close Cosmos down!”

  Emmett shut down the computer, and they shoved Cosmos under Annie’s bed. Footsteps came up the stairs, and when Eric opened the door to Annie’s bedroom, he found the three kids sitting in a row, looking at a book he had written.

  “Nice to see you all getting along,” he remarked.

  Annie slung an arm around Emmett’s shoulders. “Oh yes,” she said. “We’re friends now, aren’t we?” She poked him lightly. “Speak,” she whispered in his ear.

  “Yes, I can confirm that,” said Emmett mechanically. He hadn’t yet recovered from seeing Cosmos open up the portal.

  “Good, good,” said Eric. “I see you’re reading one of my books. The Large-scale Structure of Space-time. How are you finding it?”

  “It’s very interesting,” said George politely. He hadn’t understood a word of it.

  Emmett came back to life. “You’ve made an error on page one hundred and thirty-six,” he said helpfully.

  “Is that so?” said Eric, smiling. “No one’s ever spotted that before, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

  “I have a suggestion as to how to rectify it,�
�� said Emmett.

  Annie groaned, but George gave her a stern look. “I mean, well done, Emmett,” she said.

  “Okay, good,” said Eric slowly. “I was going to suggest we all go out for ice cream. But if you’re all absorbed, then I won’t disturb you any further—”

  “Ice cream!” Annie and George jumped up. Emmett stayed sitting on the bed, his eyes still glued to the book.

  “Earth to Emmett!” said Annie. “Ice cream! You know, the cold sweet stuff that kids like! Let’s go have some!”

  Emmett looked up, unsure. “Do you actually want me to come too?” he said.

  “Yes!” said Annie and George. “We do!”

  Chapter 7

  The next day dawned beautiful and calm, the perfect day to set off into space. Annie woke George and Emmett up early.

  “It’s space-shuttle day!” she shrieked into George’s ear. He groaned and turned over beneath his duvet. “Get up, get up!” she said, pulling the duvet off him and dancing around the room with it. “This is the most exciting day of our lives!”

  Emmett had sat bolt upright in bed. “I’m so happy I might be—” He jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom.

  Annie grabbed one of George’s hands and pulled him to his feet as he blearily tried to wake up. Emmett tottered back in, looking rather pale.

  “Tree!” Annie said to both of them. “Now! We’ve got planning to do.”

  Still in their pajamas, they scrambled downstairs and out onto the veranda. George shinned up the tree and Annie swiftly followed him, leaving Emmett standing forlornly at the foot.

  “Come on, Emmett,” said Annie. “Get up here!”

  “I can’t,” said Emmett miserably.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve never climbed a tree,” he admitted. “I don’t know how.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” exclaimed Annie. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Writing computer programs,” said Emmett sadly. “By myself.”

  Annie sighed noisily, but George dropped out of the tree in one single fluid movement, grabbed Emmett, and hoisted him up. George pushed from below and Annie pulled from above, and with some squeaking and scraping, they propelled the smaller boy onto the big branch. Emmett looked down nervously.

  “Now then,” Annie told him sternly. “We are going to have an adventure today. We are going to be brave and amazing. And hopefully we are going to save planet Earth. And that means no crying or whining or running to my mom. Do you understand, Emmett?”

  Emmett nodded while clinging tightly to the branch. “Yes, Annie,” he said meekly.

  “You’re our friend now,” Annie told him. “So if you have something to say, you tell me or George—you don’t go charging off to a grown-up.”

  “Yes, Annie,” he agreed, giving her a little smile. “I’ve never had a friend before.”

  “Well, now you’ve got two,” said George.

  “And we’re going to need you,” added Annie. “You are super important to the master plan, Emmett. Don’t let us down.”

  He gasped. “I won’t!” he said. “I absolutely totally and utterly will not!”

  “Okay, great!” said George. “That’s all great! But what, in fact, Annie, are we going to do?”

  “We are going,” she said, “on a great cosmic journey. So listen up, savers of planet Earth, and prepare to meet the Universe. I’m going to tell you the master plan: We’re going to change out of our pajamas, pack up Cosmos, find my dad, and get to the Global Space Agency. And that’s where it will all begin.”

  The first step of their cosmic journey, Annie explained, took them to the launchpad at the Global Space Agency, where they would be watching the space-shuttle launch.

  * * *

  MANNED SPACEFLIGHT

  “The Eagle Has Landed!”

  This is the message U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong radioed back from the Moon to mission control in Houston, Texas, on July 20, 1969. The Eagle was the lunar module, which had detached from the spacecraft Columbia, in orbit sixty miles above the surface of the Moon. While astronaut Michael Collins remained on board Columbia, the Lunar Excursion Module touched down on an area called the Sea of Tranquility—but there is no water on the Moon so it didn’t land with a splash! Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the two astronauts inside the Eagle, became the first human beings ever to visit the Moon.

  Astronaut Armstrong was the first to step out of the capsule onto the Moon (with his left foot). Buzz Aldrin followed him and looked around—at the totally black sky, the impact craters, the layers of moondust—and commented, “Magnificent desolation.’ As they’d been instructed, they quickly put Moon rocks and dust into their pockets, so that they would have some samples of the Moon, even if they had to leave in a hurry.

  In fact, they stayed for nearly a day on the Moon and covered over half a mile on foot. This epic voyage of Apollo 11 remains one of the most inspirational journeys into the unknown that mankind has ever undertaken, and three craters to the north of the Sea of Tranquility are now named after the astronauts on the mission—Collins, Armstrong, and Aldrin.

  Walking on the Moon

  Including those on Apollo 11, a total of twelve astronauts have now walked on the Moon. But each mission was still a dangerous business, as was clearly shown on the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, when an explosion on board the service module meant that not only the astronauts but also the people on the ground had to make heroic efforts to return the spacecraft safely to Earth.

  All the Apollo astronauts, including the ones from the harrowing 13 mission, came back safely. Astronauts are highly trained specialists with backgrounds in aviation, engineering, and science. But to launch and operate a space mission, people with a wide variety of skills are needed. The Apollo missions—like all space missions before and since—were the result of work by tens of thousands of people who built and operated the complex hardware and software.

  The Apollo missions also brought back 840 pounds of lunar material to be studied on Earth. This allowed scientists on our planet to gain a much better understanding of the Moon and how it relates to the Earth.

  The last mission to the Moon was Apollo 17, which landed on the Taurus-Littrow highlands on December 11, 1972, and stayed for three days. When they were 18,000 miles from the Earth, the Apollo 17 crew took a photo of the complete Earth, fully lit. This photo is known as The Blue Marble and may be the most widely distributed photo ever. Since then, no human being has been far enough away from the Earth to take such a picture.

  The First Man in Space

  The Apollo missions were not the first time that man had flown into space. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth on April 12, 1961, in the Vostok spacecraft, was the first-ever human being in space.

  Six weeks after Gagarin’s historic achievement, U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced that he wanted to land a man on the Moon within ten years, and the newly created NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—set to work to see if they could match the Russian manned space program, even though at that time, NASA had only sixteen minutes of spaceflight experience. The space race—to be the first on the Moon—had begun!

  Mercury, Gemini—and Walking in Space

  Project Mercury, an American single-astronaut program, was designed to see if human beings could survive in space. In 1961 astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space with a suborbital flight of fifteen minutes, and the following year, John Glenn became the first NASA astronaut to orbit the Earth.

  NASA’s Project Gemini followed. Gemini was a very important project, since it taught astronauts how to dock vehicles in space. It also allowed them to practice operations such as space walks—also called EVAs (Extra Vehicular Activity). But the first space walk ever performed was by a Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, in 1965. The Russians didn’t make it to the Moon, however, with this honor going to the United States in 1969.

  The First Space Stations

>   After the race to land on the Moon was over, many people became less interested in space programs. However, both the Russians and the Americans still had big plans. The Russians were working on a supersecret program called Almaz, or Diamond. They wanted to have a manned space station orbiting the Earth. After a doomed first attempt, the next versions, Salyut-3 and then Salyut-5, were more successful, but neither of them lasted for much more than a year.

  The Americans developed their own version, Skylab—an orbiting space station that was in operation for eight months in 1973. Skylab had a telescope on board that astronauts used to observe the Sun. They brought back solar photographs, including x-ray images of solar flares and dark spots on the Sun.

  A Handshake in Space

  At this time on Earth—the mid 1970s—both the USSR and the U.S. were locked into what was known as the Cold War. This meant the two sides were not actually fighting a war, but they disliked and distrusted each other very strongly. However, in space the two countries began to work together. In 1975 the Apollo–Soyuz project saw the first "handshake in space" between the two opposing superpowers. Apollo, the U.S. spacecraft, docked with Soyuz, the Soviet one, and the American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut—who would have had difficulty meeting in person on Earth—shook hands with each other.

  The Shuttle

  The space shuttle was a new type of spacecraft. Unlike the craft that went before it, it was reusable, designed to fly into space like a rocket but also to glide back to Earth and land like an airplane on a runway. The shuttle was also designed to take cargo as well as astronauts into space. The first U.S. shuttle, Columbia, was launched in 1981.

  The ISS

  In 1986 the Russians launched space station

  Mir, which means “world” or “peace.”

  Mir was the first elaborate and large space station ever to orbit the Earth. It was built in space over a span of ten years and designed as a space laboratory so that scientists could carry out experiments in a nearly gravity-free environment. Mir was the size of six buses and was home to between three and six astronauts at a time.

  The International Space Station (ISS) was built in space with its construction beginning in 1998. Orbiting the globe every ninety minutes, this research facility is a symbol of international cooperation with scientists and astronauts from many countries involved both in running it and spending time there. The ISS is serviced by a space shuttle from NASA, the Soyuz spacecraft from Russia, and the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicles. The crew also have permanent escape vehicles, in case they need to make an emergency exit!