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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Science Fiction
- Subject: Pain / Problems / Adversity
- Published: 04/06/2015
BIOMATH
By Peter W. Mills
The Foundation for Scientific Signal Evaluation had been created fifty years ago with a single objective -- to search the depths of the skies for signals originating with extra-terrestrial intelligence. Professor Sullivan was the director of the Foundation. At 3 am he leaped out of bed somewhat stiffly, disturbing his wife who was lying beside him. The reason for his abrupt rising was the sounding of a buzzer and the flashing of a tiny red light on a small box standing on a bedside table.
He had dreamed for years of being woken by that buzzer. His wife rose sleepily on one elbow. “Is that...?” was all she said, her eyes widening.
Sullivan stooped slightly and took his wife’s face tenderly in both hands, beaming at her with a glint of a tear in the corner of an eye. His voice held an emotional catch. “Yes my darling, it is. I have to go right away.”
She gazed at him fondly; “I really hope this is what you have been waiting for all your life.”
He stopped to smile back at her with joy as he left the bedroom. “My darling, I hope this is what the whole world has been waiting for.”
Inside the nerve-centre of the Foundation a small crowd of nighthawks had already gathered. Seated at the main consul was Rob Jones the chief radio astronomer. Standing behind him was Dr. Ann Fisher the Deputy Director. Her face turned towards Sullivan, radiating suppressed excitement. “George, we think this is it! We have picked up an electromagnetic source emanating from M33 in Triangulum -- the Triangulum Galaxy, distance from earth approximately three million light years.”
Sullivan breathed softly. “So it started its journey to us some three million years ago, in the Pliocene Era when humankind was represented by Homo erectus, a bridge between ape and man. What about the signal itself?”
“Well,” answered Jones, “it is in a very tight and narrow beam. Black holes, quasars, pulsars, radio galaxies and neutron stars can all emit tight beams from their electromagnetic poles, producing millisecond bleeps. But they have never suddenly gone away again for many minutes at a time. ”
Sullivan jumped onto this with interest. “So the signal has gone away while being tracked?”
“Absolutely,” affirmed Jones. “It has entirely ceased four times, then started up again, and each time, the gap has increased by a logical self-multiple repeating sequence of 2-4-16-256. It’s unquestionably an artificial pattern. We have a message from an alien intelligence!”
#
Two weeks later the Foundation called a press conference to break the extraordinary news to the world. The Foundation’s lecture room was crowded with reporters and scientists. Professor Sullivan stepped onto a podium.
“I am Professor George Sullivan, Director of the Foundation for Scientific Signal Evaluation. I am seventy-two years old and have been a dedicated astronomer since I was ten. Earlier this month, my colleagues at the Foundation managed to give an old man a reminder of what it was that originally compelled him to start looking up at the night sky with his father’s old naval telescope over sixty years ago.”
He paused to prepare himself for the monumental announcement.
“Just over two weeks ago, the planet earth received its first fully confirmable signal from what we believe to be an intelligent alien life-form.” An immediate amazed hubbub rose from the audience. Sullivan raised his voice to continue speaking above the background noise, which slowly quietened down as he resumed.
“The point of origin of the radio signal has been identified as within the outer edge of the Triangulum Galaxy, catalogued as Messier 33 and NGC 598. This galaxy, one of the closest to our own Milky Way Galaxy and part of what we call the ‘local cluster’ of galaxies, lies some three million light years from our solar system in the constellation Triangulum, the Triangle.
“The distance of three million light years, though extremely short in intergalactic terms, is a truly staggering distance. It means that light, and other electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves, will take three million years to cross that vast gulf. To put it another way, whatever message we have received from space, it is three million years out of date. If we were able to send a reply, the time between the sending of the original message and receiving the answer to it would be six million years, almost one-tenth of the time which separates us from the dinosaurs.
“I have to say that, at this present time, we have no technology capable of sending any such reply, because the sheer distance defeats us. How exactly the alien message was transmitted in a coherent intact beam across that immense gulf of space, we have not yet been able to determine.”
A reporter spoke up. Professor, could this signal be a prelude to an invasion?”
Sullivan chuckled. “The notion that extra terrestrial life must automatically be belligerent and interested only in conquering or eradicating we poor humans and claiming earth for their own is nothing more than the imperfect psychological profile of our own savage species.
“We are still one percent intelligence and ninety nine percent animal, and our evolutionary animal heritage of many millions of years results in the human race being largely an aggressive, mistrusting, despicable, unpredictable, potentially psychopathic and emotionally unstable form of life. The dark shadows lurking beyond the camp fire or the cave mouth are still, to this day, haunting the deep labyrinths beneath our surface personalities. Since H. G. Wells, if not before, the cliché of an invasion by a hostile superior life-form from another planet has been just another one of those dark shadows.
“I would like to think that we will eventually evolve into something better. I would like to think that a distant life-form that is more evolved than humans will also be morally better than us -- beings that have long since abandoned the subconscious legacy of aggression, spite, murder and mayhem which is still the hallmark of human beings.
“I can assure you there is not the slightest likelihood of some alien invasion fleet of space-travelling battleships following in the wake of this message. The distances involved, and the time scales required to cover them, are really quite beyond our ability to even conceptualize as images in the mind.”
Another reporter spoke up. “Professor, if travel between stars and galaxies is not an option, why would an advanced intelligence want to just send out a signal?”
“Well,” replied Sullivan. “It would be inexcusably wrong of us to assume that an alien intelligence, especially an advanced one, is motivated by the same things which motivate us. However, being human myself, I can only answer that we should examine the single alternative to sending messages into the depths of the universe. That single alternative is to allow our civilization to metaphorically turn out the lights and go to sleep.
“It is surely in the nature of intelligence to want to explore, to reach out into the unknown. It would possibly not be wrong of me to suggest that this may be a common factor of intelligent thought everywhere. Even if no answer could ever be received, the mere knowledge that one has done something that will perhaps let another life form know that you exist, or once existed, might be considered a little more satisfying than never making that effort.
“And since physical travel between galaxies is likely to be a universal impossibility, the best alternative is to send something at the speed of light in the form of a radio message. So might a man on a desert island want to throw a message in a bottle into the empty ocean.”
A woman reporter looked up from her note-taking.
“Professor, is there any possibility of accidental risk or threat to earth, to human life, to our civilization or freedom, involved in our receiving this message?”
“Well,” said Sullivan, “the last thing we want is for some kind of intergalactic computer super-virus to be accidentally imported into the world’s internet and thereby disable all our computers. This might sound paranoid on first consideration, but we have to bear in mind that such a thing might happen entirely unintentionally and by accident if the incoming computer program is too advanced for our present level of I.T. management.
“Let’s face it; whatever kind of life form sent this message across the depths of intergalactic space three million years ago, the very content of the transmission -- even just that tiny mathematical portion we have yet been able to understand -- at least tells us that these beings were far more advanced than we are.
“I can tell you that the Pentagon and the CIA have been cooperating over a period of some years now to produce the world’s very best, most powerful and most advanced computer anti-virus system. This has now been in operation against hackers and virus programs for many months and has proved its capabilities many times, including preventing a breach of national security when an unfriendly foreign power recently attempted a full-scale cyber attack on the United States, designed to take out our entire military and civil computer network. Our super-anti-virus program identified and destroyed the attacking mega-virus immediately.
“Put simply, in regard to the message from space, we want to look carefully inside the box before we open it, and I believe we have the right tools to open it safely. And when we open it, we shall be secure.”
He paused for a moment. “In closing this press conference, I wish to give you a very personal view of the monumental event that has come upon us, and I ask everyone to kindly forgive a very old professor who still thinks he is a child looking for the first time at the moon through a small telescope. That was the single experience that inspired me for the rest of my life, and made me want to pass-on the untold wonder of the universe to a succession of younger generations for over fifty years.
“Since the time of Albert Einstein, we have known that it is not possible for a physical object possessing mass to reach the speed of light. All over this unthinkably vast universe, throughout the billions of galaxies, it seems likely that any intelligent life form will come to that same barrier. Even radio waves -- electromagnetic radiation travelling at the speed of light itself, the fastest thing possible -- take two and a half million years to get here from the Andromeda Galaxy, and three million years to get to us from the Triangulum Galaxy.
“These distances, these timescales, are prohibitive to any kind of life form we can envision. It seems that, no matter the level of a being’s intelligence, the laws of physics are universal and immovable.
“It might, therefore, be accurate to state that every intelligent life form that evolves anywhere in the universe will come up against this same problem -- it is the nature of intellect to explore and expand, and when an immovable barrier is encountered, it is also in the nature of intellect to attempt to think up a workable alternative path which somehow circumvents that barrier.
“How, then, could an intelligent life form circumvent the necessity of taking multiple millions of years -- whole geological eras -- to travel outward from their home world and make contact with another intelligence in another galaxy? How can it be made possible just to tell any neighbor behind the mist of stars: ‘Hello! Here we are. How are you?’
“Well, the beings who sent this signal found their solution to the problem. And it is a solution we here on earth can appreciate, a solution we ourselves may well have adopted when our own technology became capable of accomplishing it. It is an elegant solution -- even, a poetic solution.
“They sent a complex and detailed radio message, probably broadcasting it in all directions in the hope that somehow, at some unknown time in their future, their electronic bottle would eventually wash up on the shore of a world inhabited by an intelligent life form who could read the message.
“Such an action betokens qualities we ourselves admire and share; the better human qualities. Instead of fear of the stranger, doubt about the different, reluctance to share, building walls and national borders, fighting wars, bringing destruction on others, these better qualities are seeking out the stranger, enjoying and valuing the difference, growing through sharing, demolishing walls, building a vigorous and idealistic civilization.
“It is unlikely that the senders of this signal looked like us. They may not even have been ‘life as we know it’, to quote the old cliché. But in their outlook, in their philosophy, in their dreams and ideals, and even, I would say, in their capacity for love and poetry, they are unquestionably our brethren, whatever they may have looked like. The very fact that they invested in sending a message which has travelled for three million years betokens that they must have had the minds of poets as well as the abilities of scientists. They were Homers, Dantes and Shakespeares as well as Newtons, Einsteins and Bohrs.
“And if any of you are fearful of the content of this incredible signal, or fearful of its senders who transmitted it when our fossil ancestor Australopithecus had just learned to walk on two legs, I would say to you; have faith. Have faith not in the supernatural, the religious, or the strength of armies, but in the soaring spirit of the poet, the seeking mind of the enquiring alien Archimedes -- in the thinking beings beyond the stars who, in their own beautiful and poignant way, came up with their own neat solution to overcome the seemingly impassible barrier of interstellar and intergalactic distances. And we know, even if they do not, that they succeeded!
“I congratulate them from afar, and I call them my brothers whatever their lineage and form. For we are, all of us, related to them by the common bond of a universal need to enquire, to reach out, to communicate, to grow -- to shout into the fearsome darkness; ‘We are here! This is us! Join us in spirit, for we, too, have proved we existed. We, too, have written our name upon the universe!’”
#
It had been agreed that the thorough analysis of the signal from space should be conducted by an expert team who would work together on unraveling the secrets contained within the incredibly complex digital message. The chief scientific investigator was Professor Sullivan.
At the end of each afternoon the combined heads of departments met informally in a small conference room to compare notes and sign a daily progress report. Then came a day when a sudden unscheduled emergency meeting was called at noon.
Professor Sullivan sat in an armchair in a corner with a cup of coffee at his elbow as Professor Brenda Williams, head of the investigation team, waved a sheaf of papers in exasperation. “We’ve suddenly hit a brick wall,” she announced. “The cyber expert team has reported day-by-day that we were making progress examining and unraveling the coding behind the signal.
“Earlier this morning, however, we unanimously agreed -- and please believe this is not a joke or an error on our part -- that the precise content of the message contained within the signal underwent a small but significant alteration as it lay within our antivirus-protected computer systems. This alteration can actually be witnessed in real-time on our screens if you look in the right places, and it involves a minute but slowly growing re-numbering of the values believed to be represented by sequences of binary coding contained as ‘parcels’ or ‘cells’ within the main body of the entire coded message stream.
“The whole signal as a mass of electronic code has started to undergo a quite radical systemic re-formation into some other pattern. This is very worrying.
“Nothing we have been able to do to it so far seems to be halting the process, or slowing it down. It is gradual, but slowly gaining speed. Our verdict, after analyzing the available information, is that the recorded electromagnetic signal itself is being, somehow and for some reason, self-edited within our computers to produce a new, rebuilt, and very different version of itself.”
At this, Professor Sullivan suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair, staring at the speaker. Doctor Williams continued.
“Even stranger –- indeed, incredible -- and quite beyond our understanding at present, the same thing has started to happen, apparently spontaneously, to all the backup copies of the signal stored on our computer network, and even to the information on the disk on which the original message was stored as it arrived from space. This is entirely inexplicable in terms of our current levels of scientific awareness.
“We do not understand how or why this should happen, because the changes -- subtle though they are at present -- after an initial surge of highly surprising program activity and growth this morning, seem now to be in the reverse direction -- a reduction of digital information. The signal is, in effect, beginning to reset itself to a condition of smooth order. This is not good.
“The best way I can explain what is happening to anyone not familiar with the intricacies of I.T. is like this. Think of all the books in the Library of Congress. Then imagine the result if somehow the printed alphabet letters were resetting their values. First, all the letter x’s reset themselves to just dashes. The letter x is relatively rare in books, so this change might not be noticed at first. Then this is followed by the letter z in all the books setting itself to a mere dash, which might then be a little more noticeable. Then all the letter q’s, then maybe the vowels, then the consonants, by which time the books would be unreadable and the knowledge and information they once stored would be wiped out.
“Well, this is what seems to be slowly taking place to the actual coding of the message from space within our entire state-of-the-art and advanced antivirus-protected computer system and all its associated networks and cyber-attack protected data storage facilities. My staff calls it an increase in digital entropy. I call it a slow disintegration of the signal. It means the same thing both ways.”
In the corner chair, Professor Sullivan suddenly and visibly jerked, with sufficient energy to make everyone stare. His elbow hit the coffee cup and spilled it on the carpet. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes had widened. He was visibly turning pale.
“Oh my God!” he almost shouted, rising shakily to his feet. “No, no, no! -- Please don’t let it be...” He suddenly stared at Brenda Williams. “I must get there at once. Quickly!”
“Do you know what’s happening,” she asked in surprise.
“Renumeration of the values of the discrete program cells...” Sullivan muttered almost incoherently as he rushed forward. “Internal resetting of the coded values... increasing systemic entropy... loss of information... I fear the worst possible thing that can be conceived is already happening!” There were tears flowing from his eyes.
#
Just before midnight Professor Sullivan wearily returned to his home. His wife was waiting for him. He looked gaunt and grey. He seemed to have lost something of himself. She quickly noticed exactly what was no longer there in his manner, his speaking, in the missing gleam from his eyes -- the young boy who had first looked at the wonder of the Moon through a small telescope sixty two years ago had gone away forever. Only the old man was left now. She took him in her arms and brought him inside from the porch and sat him down on the sofa, sitting by his side with her arm tenderly round him.
“What’s happened, George?” she asked. Talking, sharing thoughts, emotions, the simple act of communication between two people, these things were important at a time like this she believed.
Sullivan turned a saddened face to look at her. “I don’t think there are words adequate enough,” he stated quietly, taking her hand between his own. “It is a tragedy even a Shakespeare would have difficulty in expressing in mere words. Yes...” he murmured half to himself, “... yes, a truly dreadful cosmic tragedy.” A tear slid down his cheek and plopped onto her hand.
Suddenly he took in a deep breath and visibly tried to pull himself together. “It was the signal we received from the Triangulum Galaxy... humankind’s first message from an extra-terrestrial intelligence. And we failed the test! We did not get it right -- how could we possibly have guessed? How could we primitive, violent, distrusting, psychopathic, warring, aggressive humans have understood what was really happening?
“We could not know... we never even suspected the truth! Such a wonderful truth was beyond our current ability to comprehend. Until afterwards -- when it was too late!
“The signal consisted of binary digital information in an extremely complex array containing multiple organized collections of information, or data-cells. And there was a clue, which we were not sufficiently advanced to notice. The message had three parts -- a preceding section, a second extremely complex middle section, and a small tail-end section.”
He paused and gathered his thoughts again. “You see, we all thought that it was a message from another life form. How could we have been so utterly wrong? How could we possibly have guessed how wrong we were?”
“Isn’t that what it was?” enquired his wife gently.
“It was so much more than that,” he explained. “The intricate complexities of the main section of digital coding were already grouped in discrete cellular bundles. The complex pieces of programming within the signal were analogous to actual DNA strands and were doing the same job. The first part of the signal, and the final part, were like a shell protecting the whole signal as it sped through space... a journey of three million years... their civilization must have been even more advanced than we primitive beings can possibly imagine... think what wonders we might have learned from them -- and weep!
“They had heroically, magnificently, solved the universal problem of travelling at the speed of light. It wasn’t a message from another life form at all -- it was the life form itself! An actual digital life form, with complex cells of binary code replacing the functions of DNA. And it was beginning to hatch from the protective digital egg that had protected it from damage through its epic three million year journey.
“But it was not recognizably life as we know it in our state of primitive warlike vanity -- and because we are still ignorant, untrusting savages, our own military standard, cyber attack-proof, state-of-the-art anti-virus systems murdered it as it was being born!
END
BIOMATH(Peter Mills)
BIOMATH
By Peter W. Mills
The Foundation for Scientific Signal Evaluation had been created fifty years ago with a single objective -- to search the depths of the skies for signals originating with extra-terrestrial intelligence. Professor Sullivan was the director of the Foundation. At 3 am he leaped out of bed somewhat stiffly, disturbing his wife who was lying beside him. The reason for his abrupt rising was the sounding of a buzzer and the flashing of a tiny red light on a small box standing on a bedside table.
He had dreamed for years of being woken by that buzzer. His wife rose sleepily on one elbow. “Is that...?” was all she said, her eyes widening.
Sullivan stooped slightly and took his wife’s face tenderly in both hands, beaming at her with a glint of a tear in the corner of an eye. His voice held an emotional catch. “Yes my darling, it is. I have to go right away.”
She gazed at him fondly; “I really hope this is what you have been waiting for all your life.”
He stopped to smile back at her with joy as he left the bedroom. “My darling, I hope this is what the whole world has been waiting for.”
Inside the nerve-centre of the Foundation a small crowd of nighthawks had already gathered. Seated at the main consul was Rob Jones the chief radio astronomer. Standing behind him was Dr. Ann Fisher the Deputy Director. Her face turned towards Sullivan, radiating suppressed excitement. “George, we think this is it! We have picked up an electromagnetic source emanating from M33 in Triangulum -- the Triangulum Galaxy, distance from earth approximately three million light years.”
Sullivan breathed softly. “So it started its journey to us some three million years ago, in the Pliocene Era when humankind was represented by Homo erectus, a bridge between ape and man. What about the signal itself?”
“Well,” answered Jones, “it is in a very tight and narrow beam. Black holes, quasars, pulsars, radio galaxies and neutron stars can all emit tight beams from their electromagnetic poles, producing millisecond bleeps. But they have never suddenly gone away again for many minutes at a time. ”
Sullivan jumped onto this with interest. “So the signal has gone away while being tracked?”
“Absolutely,” affirmed Jones. “It has entirely ceased four times, then started up again, and each time, the gap has increased by a logical self-multiple repeating sequence of 2-4-16-256. It’s unquestionably an artificial pattern. We have a message from an alien intelligence!”
#
Two weeks later the Foundation called a press conference to break the extraordinary news to the world. The Foundation’s lecture room was crowded with reporters and scientists. Professor Sullivan stepped onto a podium.
“I am Professor George Sullivan, Director of the Foundation for Scientific Signal Evaluation. I am seventy-two years old and have been a dedicated astronomer since I was ten. Earlier this month, my colleagues at the Foundation managed to give an old man a reminder of what it was that originally compelled him to start looking up at the night sky with his father’s old naval telescope over sixty years ago.”
He paused to prepare himself for the monumental announcement.
“Just over two weeks ago, the planet earth received its first fully confirmable signal from what we believe to be an intelligent alien life-form.” An immediate amazed hubbub rose from the audience. Sullivan raised his voice to continue speaking above the background noise, which slowly quietened down as he resumed.
“The point of origin of the radio signal has been identified as within the outer edge of the Triangulum Galaxy, catalogued as Messier 33 and NGC 598. This galaxy, one of the closest to our own Milky Way Galaxy and part of what we call the ‘local cluster’ of galaxies, lies some three million light years from our solar system in the constellation Triangulum, the Triangle.
“The distance of three million light years, though extremely short in intergalactic terms, is a truly staggering distance. It means that light, and other electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves, will take three million years to cross that vast gulf. To put it another way, whatever message we have received from space, it is three million years out of date. If we were able to send a reply, the time between the sending of the original message and receiving the answer to it would be six million years, almost one-tenth of the time which separates us from the dinosaurs.
“I have to say that, at this present time, we have no technology capable of sending any such reply, because the sheer distance defeats us. How exactly the alien message was transmitted in a coherent intact beam across that immense gulf of space, we have not yet been able to determine.”
A reporter spoke up. Professor, could this signal be a prelude to an invasion?”
Sullivan chuckled. “The notion that extra terrestrial life must automatically be belligerent and interested only in conquering or eradicating we poor humans and claiming earth for their own is nothing more than the imperfect psychological profile of our own savage species.
“We are still one percent intelligence and ninety nine percent animal, and our evolutionary animal heritage of many millions of years results in the human race being largely an aggressive, mistrusting, despicable, unpredictable, potentially psychopathic and emotionally unstable form of life. The dark shadows lurking beyond the camp fire or the cave mouth are still, to this day, haunting the deep labyrinths beneath our surface personalities. Since H. G. Wells, if not before, the cliché of an invasion by a hostile superior life-form from another planet has been just another one of those dark shadows.
“I would like to think that we will eventually evolve into something better. I would like to think that a distant life-form that is more evolved than humans will also be morally better than us -- beings that have long since abandoned the subconscious legacy of aggression, spite, murder and mayhem which is still the hallmark of human beings.
“I can assure you there is not the slightest likelihood of some alien invasion fleet of space-travelling battleships following in the wake of this message. The distances involved, and the time scales required to cover them, are really quite beyond our ability to even conceptualize as images in the mind.”
Another reporter spoke up. “Professor, if travel between stars and galaxies is not an option, why would an advanced intelligence want to just send out a signal?”
“Well,” replied Sullivan. “It would be inexcusably wrong of us to assume that an alien intelligence, especially an advanced one, is motivated by the same things which motivate us. However, being human myself, I can only answer that we should examine the single alternative to sending messages into the depths of the universe. That single alternative is to allow our civilization to metaphorically turn out the lights and go to sleep.
“It is surely in the nature of intelligence to want to explore, to reach out into the unknown. It would possibly not be wrong of me to suggest that this may be a common factor of intelligent thought everywhere. Even if no answer could ever be received, the mere knowledge that one has done something that will perhaps let another life form know that you exist, or once existed, might be considered a little more satisfying than never making that effort.
“And since physical travel between galaxies is likely to be a universal impossibility, the best alternative is to send something at the speed of light in the form of a radio message. So might a man on a desert island want to throw a message in a bottle into the empty ocean.”
A woman reporter looked up from her note-taking.
“Professor, is there any possibility of accidental risk or threat to earth, to human life, to our civilization or freedom, involved in our receiving this message?”
“Well,” said Sullivan, “the last thing we want is for some kind of intergalactic computer super-virus to be accidentally imported into the world’s internet and thereby disable all our computers. This might sound paranoid on first consideration, but we have to bear in mind that such a thing might happen entirely unintentionally and by accident if the incoming computer program is too advanced for our present level of I.T. management.
“Let’s face it; whatever kind of life form sent this message across the depths of intergalactic space three million years ago, the very content of the transmission -- even just that tiny mathematical portion we have yet been able to understand -- at least tells us that these beings were far more advanced than we are.
“I can tell you that the Pentagon and the CIA have been cooperating over a period of some years now to produce the world’s very best, most powerful and most advanced computer anti-virus system. This has now been in operation against hackers and virus programs for many months and has proved its capabilities many times, including preventing a breach of national security when an unfriendly foreign power recently attempted a full-scale cyber attack on the United States, designed to take out our entire military and civil computer network. Our super-anti-virus program identified and destroyed the attacking mega-virus immediately.
“Put simply, in regard to the message from space, we want to look carefully inside the box before we open it, and I believe we have the right tools to open it safely. And when we open it, we shall be secure.”
He paused for a moment. “In closing this press conference, I wish to give you a very personal view of the monumental event that has come upon us, and I ask everyone to kindly forgive a very old professor who still thinks he is a child looking for the first time at the moon through a small telescope. That was the single experience that inspired me for the rest of my life, and made me want to pass-on the untold wonder of the universe to a succession of younger generations for over fifty years.
“Since the time of Albert Einstein, we have known that it is not possible for a physical object possessing mass to reach the speed of light. All over this unthinkably vast universe, throughout the billions of galaxies, it seems likely that any intelligent life form will come to that same barrier. Even radio waves -- electromagnetic radiation travelling at the speed of light itself, the fastest thing possible -- take two and a half million years to get here from the Andromeda Galaxy, and three million years to get to us from the Triangulum Galaxy.
“These distances, these timescales, are prohibitive to any kind of life form we can envision. It seems that, no matter the level of a being’s intelligence, the laws of physics are universal and immovable.
“It might, therefore, be accurate to state that every intelligent life form that evolves anywhere in the universe will come up against this same problem -- it is the nature of intellect to explore and expand, and when an immovable barrier is encountered, it is also in the nature of intellect to attempt to think up a workable alternative path which somehow circumvents that barrier.
“How, then, could an intelligent life form circumvent the necessity of taking multiple millions of years -- whole geological eras -- to travel outward from their home world and make contact with another intelligence in another galaxy? How can it be made possible just to tell any neighbor behind the mist of stars: ‘Hello! Here we are. How are you?’
“Well, the beings who sent this signal found their solution to the problem. And it is a solution we here on earth can appreciate, a solution we ourselves may well have adopted when our own technology became capable of accomplishing it. It is an elegant solution -- even, a poetic solution.
“They sent a complex and detailed radio message, probably broadcasting it in all directions in the hope that somehow, at some unknown time in their future, their electronic bottle would eventually wash up on the shore of a world inhabited by an intelligent life form who could read the message.
“Such an action betokens qualities we ourselves admire and share; the better human qualities. Instead of fear of the stranger, doubt about the different, reluctance to share, building walls and national borders, fighting wars, bringing destruction on others, these better qualities are seeking out the stranger, enjoying and valuing the difference, growing through sharing, demolishing walls, building a vigorous and idealistic civilization.
“It is unlikely that the senders of this signal looked like us. They may not even have been ‘life as we know it’, to quote the old cliché. But in their outlook, in their philosophy, in their dreams and ideals, and even, I would say, in their capacity for love and poetry, they are unquestionably our brethren, whatever they may have looked like. The very fact that they invested in sending a message which has travelled for three million years betokens that they must have had the minds of poets as well as the abilities of scientists. They were Homers, Dantes and Shakespeares as well as Newtons, Einsteins and Bohrs.
“And if any of you are fearful of the content of this incredible signal, or fearful of its senders who transmitted it when our fossil ancestor Australopithecus had just learned to walk on two legs, I would say to you; have faith. Have faith not in the supernatural, the religious, or the strength of armies, but in the soaring spirit of the poet, the seeking mind of the enquiring alien Archimedes -- in the thinking beings beyond the stars who, in their own beautiful and poignant way, came up with their own neat solution to overcome the seemingly impassible barrier of interstellar and intergalactic distances. And we know, even if they do not, that they succeeded!
“I congratulate them from afar, and I call them my brothers whatever their lineage and form. For we are, all of us, related to them by the common bond of a universal need to enquire, to reach out, to communicate, to grow -- to shout into the fearsome darkness; ‘We are here! This is us! Join us in spirit, for we, too, have proved we existed. We, too, have written our name upon the universe!’”
#
It had been agreed that the thorough analysis of the signal from space should be conducted by an expert team who would work together on unraveling the secrets contained within the incredibly complex digital message. The chief scientific investigator was Professor Sullivan.
At the end of each afternoon the combined heads of departments met informally in a small conference room to compare notes and sign a daily progress report. Then came a day when a sudden unscheduled emergency meeting was called at noon.
Professor Sullivan sat in an armchair in a corner with a cup of coffee at his elbow as Professor Brenda Williams, head of the investigation team, waved a sheaf of papers in exasperation. “We’ve suddenly hit a brick wall,” she announced. “The cyber expert team has reported day-by-day that we were making progress examining and unraveling the coding behind the signal.
“Earlier this morning, however, we unanimously agreed -- and please believe this is not a joke or an error on our part -- that the precise content of the message contained within the signal underwent a small but significant alteration as it lay within our antivirus-protected computer systems. This alteration can actually be witnessed in real-time on our screens if you look in the right places, and it involves a minute but slowly growing re-numbering of the values believed to be represented by sequences of binary coding contained as ‘parcels’ or ‘cells’ within the main body of the entire coded message stream.
“The whole signal as a mass of electronic code has started to undergo a quite radical systemic re-formation into some other pattern. This is very worrying.
“Nothing we have been able to do to it so far seems to be halting the process, or slowing it down. It is gradual, but slowly gaining speed. Our verdict, after analyzing the available information, is that the recorded electromagnetic signal itself is being, somehow and for some reason, self-edited within our computers to produce a new, rebuilt, and very different version of itself.”
At this, Professor Sullivan suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair, staring at the speaker. Doctor Williams continued.
“Even stranger –- indeed, incredible -- and quite beyond our understanding at present, the same thing has started to happen, apparently spontaneously, to all the backup copies of the signal stored on our computer network, and even to the information on the disk on which the original message was stored as it arrived from space. This is entirely inexplicable in terms of our current levels of scientific awareness.
“We do not understand how or why this should happen, because the changes -- subtle though they are at present -- after an initial surge of highly surprising program activity and growth this morning, seem now to be in the reverse direction -- a reduction of digital information. The signal is, in effect, beginning to reset itself to a condition of smooth order. This is not good.
“The best way I can explain what is happening to anyone not familiar with the intricacies of I.T. is like this. Think of all the books in the Library of Congress. Then imagine the result if somehow the printed alphabet letters were resetting their values. First, all the letter x’s reset themselves to just dashes. The letter x is relatively rare in books, so this change might not be noticed at first. Then this is followed by the letter z in all the books setting itself to a mere dash, which might then be a little more noticeable. Then all the letter q’s, then maybe the vowels, then the consonants, by which time the books would be unreadable and the knowledge and information they once stored would be wiped out.
“Well, this is what seems to be slowly taking place to the actual coding of the message from space within our entire state-of-the-art and advanced antivirus-protected computer system and all its associated networks and cyber-attack protected data storage facilities. My staff calls it an increase in digital entropy. I call it a slow disintegration of the signal. It means the same thing both ways.”
In the corner chair, Professor Sullivan suddenly and visibly jerked, with sufficient energy to make everyone stare. His elbow hit the coffee cup and spilled it on the carpet. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes had widened. He was visibly turning pale.
“Oh my God!” he almost shouted, rising shakily to his feet. “No, no, no! -- Please don’t let it be...” He suddenly stared at Brenda Williams. “I must get there at once. Quickly!”
“Do you know what’s happening,” she asked in surprise.
“Renumeration of the values of the discrete program cells...” Sullivan muttered almost incoherently as he rushed forward. “Internal resetting of the coded values... increasing systemic entropy... loss of information... I fear the worst possible thing that can be conceived is already happening!” There were tears flowing from his eyes.
#
Just before midnight Professor Sullivan wearily returned to his home. His wife was waiting for him. He looked gaunt and grey. He seemed to have lost something of himself. She quickly noticed exactly what was no longer there in his manner, his speaking, in the missing gleam from his eyes -- the young boy who had first looked at the wonder of the Moon through a small telescope sixty two years ago had gone away forever. Only the old man was left now. She took him in her arms and brought him inside from the porch and sat him down on the sofa, sitting by his side with her arm tenderly round him.
“What’s happened, George?” she asked. Talking, sharing thoughts, emotions, the simple act of communication between two people, these things were important at a time like this she believed.
Sullivan turned a saddened face to look at her. “I don’t think there are words adequate enough,” he stated quietly, taking her hand between his own. “It is a tragedy even a Shakespeare would have difficulty in expressing in mere words. Yes...” he murmured half to himself, “... yes, a truly dreadful cosmic tragedy.” A tear slid down his cheek and plopped onto her hand.
Suddenly he took in a deep breath and visibly tried to pull himself together. “It was the signal we received from the Triangulum Galaxy... humankind’s first message from an extra-terrestrial intelligence. And we failed the test! We did not get it right -- how could we possibly have guessed? How could we primitive, violent, distrusting, psychopathic, warring, aggressive humans have understood what was really happening?
“We could not know... we never even suspected the truth! Such a wonderful truth was beyond our current ability to comprehend. Until afterwards -- when it was too late!
“The signal consisted of binary digital information in an extremely complex array containing multiple organized collections of information, or data-cells. And there was a clue, which we were not sufficiently advanced to notice. The message had three parts -- a preceding section, a second extremely complex middle section, and a small tail-end section.”
He paused and gathered his thoughts again. “You see, we all thought that it was a message from another life form. How could we have been so utterly wrong? How could we possibly have guessed how wrong we were?”
“Isn’t that what it was?” enquired his wife gently.
“It was so much more than that,” he explained. “The intricate complexities of the main section of digital coding were already grouped in discrete cellular bundles. The complex pieces of programming within the signal were analogous to actual DNA strands and were doing the same job. The first part of the signal, and the final part, were like a shell protecting the whole signal as it sped through space... a journey of three million years... their civilization must have been even more advanced than we primitive beings can possibly imagine... think what wonders we might have learned from them -- and weep!
“They had heroically, magnificently, solved the universal problem of travelling at the speed of light. It wasn’t a message from another life form at all -- it was the life form itself! An actual digital life form, with complex cells of binary code replacing the functions of DNA. And it was beginning to hatch from the protective digital egg that had protected it from damage through its epic three million year journey.
“But it was not recognizably life as we know it in our state of primitive warlike vanity -- and because we are still ignorant, untrusting savages, our own military standard, cyber attack-proof, state-of-the-art anti-virus systems murdered it as it was being born!
END
Kevin Hughes
09/30/2019Peter,
Wonderful, believable, clever. They just don't get any better than that!
Five Stars forever.
Smiles, Kevin
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