novelxo Chapter 11: Space Puss
Chapter 11: Space Puss
Language is a virus from outer space.
- William S. Burroughs
SETI (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) had picked up signals from another star. After nearly 80 years of listening, the program seemed to have hit its mark. Analysis using information theory estimated these signals were 95% likely to not be random noise. (On the other hand, SETI had listened to 100,000 stars, and all of them had signals 95% likely to be random.) The team was thrilled, but after 10 years of analysis, had not been able to decipher any meaning. Alternative theories abounded: it was a trinary star, it was the birth of a quasar, etc. But far worse than this, the star was 180 light years away. SETI dutifully sent binary codes off to their destination, starting with basic mathematics. After a year of transmission, SETI had transmitted nearly the full contents of the Library of Congress (naively, they assumed no hostile intent on this presumptive intelligent race. The initial excitement died down after a year of listening and analysis, with no result and the realization that not much would be learned until an answer came back 360 years from now. The U.S. Congress cut back to the original funding levels, quoting newspaper wags: “ET can phone us... We’re broke.” The program was mothballed; even people who knew about it had to agree, 80 years of searching had not yielded much. Subsidies for corn, sugar, flax, and mohair (set up during the Great Depression or WWII) persisted, but that was another issue.
More exciting by far, was the discovery of life off Earth.
Europa, one of the largest moons of Jupiter, has an atmosphere of methane, was covered with frozen ice (water and carbon dioxide), and relatively warm (only minus 200 degrees!). Of all the objects in the Solar System, only Mars, Ganymede, and Europa had a chance of supporting “life, as we know it”. Europa had been watched, probed, and measured for decades. Finally, a safe landing from a robot probe, collected ice samples, subjected them to simple chemistry experiments, and found chemical reactions “consistent with terrestrial biology”. Funds were raised. Another, more sophisticated and extremely expensive, probe was sent. This one included mass spectrometers, video cameras, three robot crawlers, and even optical microscopes. After three years journey, the verdict was in: Europa was covered in a thin film of dormant (frozen), algae-like slime, and virtually nothing else. It turned out that the entire Jovian system was infected with this stuff. One theory was that it actually still was active on Io (the moon closest to Jupiter). Io was volcanically active, spewing magma into orbit, and experiencing daily lightning storms between it and the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. Io vomited dusts into space all day long. Perhaps a few “spores” made their way to the other moons?
The basic biology was unicellular and photosynthetic. That it was DNA-based raised profound philosophical questions. Life existed elsewhere in the Universe, and was less interesting (to comparative biology) than the sulphur-based cyanobacteria in living near the volcanic vents at the bottom of the oceans. What was to be made of this discovery? The entire genome of the Jovian algae had been sequenced remotely. Was there any point to man going there (if technically feasible), scooping up some of the gunk, bringing it home, and potentially causing a world-wide plague? Should Man colonize this place, farm it; try to accelerate its evolution by 4 billion years, so he has someone to talk to?
The environmentalists had a collective, ethical orgasm, mounting a campaign to quarantine the Galilean moons from human interference. They need not have bothered. The campaign was ridiculed as “Save the Scum”, but in reality, there was no real opposition to the premise. The purists were nothing more than fringe Luddites, but their numbers were few. On the other hand, no force in nature would stop humans from investigating the most profound discovery in human history. On the other extreme, no identifiable constituency existed for Colonization: To what purpose? There was not enough money in the world to send a team of men to even visit the worthless and distant snowball, let alone farm it. Raising money to oppose colonisation seemed to be an even more fruitless investment for a world with 30% unemployment. Faced with Universal consensus, starved of villains, the Greens declared victory and moved on to inventing new crises.
If there was a net “winner” in all of this, it was not the Humanists, but the world’s major religions: Life existed elsewhere. It was of the same Grand Design as life on Earth. There were no competing Gods. If there were intelligent life 180 light years away, it was even more likely to be like us. In any event, we would not ever be able to seriously discuss religion with them for 360 years.
Hundreds of Science Fiction romances and fantasies died. The Universe was both more and less interesting than we thought. There is other life in the universe, and it is dumber than us. Alien invasion seemed unlikely.