Lecture excerpt: On the subject of alien intelligence
“Yes. It exists. No doubt about it. There is even some evidence to support its existence, but I am not in a position to discuss that in any detail just yet.
“As for the form of such intelligence, well, now we are really getting into the realms of conjecture. There are certainly forms of life out there that resemble our own; after all, we have been shaped by evolution, and evolution will of its own accord tend towards the best designs for any given task. Even if guided by a theoretical ‘creator’ figure, evolution will dominate over any intended blueprints. There is no argument against this that has any merit.
“Of course, I’m not saying that there aren’t other forms of life as well. Forms of life that are so fundamentally unlike us that we might not even realise they are alive at all. And this is both a wondrous and a terrifying prospect.”
<=> <=> <=>
Denise unbuckled her safety strap. Much to her surprise, she stayed in the chair. She’d expected to go floating off across the bridge.
‘Just because there’s no gravity,’ explained Dr. Richter, spotting her surprise, ‘doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly start flying about all over the place. You need to give yourself a push. It’s all down to Newton’s 3rd law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.’
‘I see,’ said Denise, lying. She pushed softly against the chair with her palm and found herself floating gently upwards. Unfortunately, she then found she couldn’t stop herself. She continued drifting upwards, arms and legs flailing, until she collided with the roof. Once there, she found there was nothing to grab hold of, and so rebounded back down towards the chair.
This weightless lark was going to take some getting used to.
It was alright for the physicists - they’d got a good grounding in forces and motion and could guess what might happen. The Captain, of course, had been into space before. But to Denise, this was a totally alien environment.
Eradani remained strapped in her chair for the time being. She reached forward with her gloved hand and with immense difficulty prodded a red circle on her computer screen. The gloves were built from a material that allowed electrical conduction and therefore worked as well as a finger on the capacitative touchscreens. However, the shortcomings of touchscreen technology (lack of precision, your hand obscuring the element you are attempting to interact with and so on) were amplified tenfold when wearing gloves designed for deep space. The design of the user interface tried to compensate for this by providing the largest possible targets, but in weightless conditions it was a hugely frustrating experience. Having eventually managed to prod the life support dashboard into life, Eradani studied the figures intently.
‘Environment looks good,’ she said through her helmet’s intercom. ‘Pressure normal, temperature okay, oxygen/nitrogen content precisely Terran values. We can take off our suits.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said Denise as she unclipped her helmet and eased it off. ‘Now I know what a goldfish feels like.’
‘Yes, I bet it’s remarkably similar,’ said Eradani, now free of her helmet, but extremely irritated with the way that her hair was sprayed out in all directions thanks to the fact that the Earth’s gravity had suddenly been ‘switched off’. She grabbed a handful and yanked it downwards, but it just stretched taut when it had reached its maximum length and rebounded back upwards again.
‘The Levcro suits are in the stasis rooms,’ said Richter, making a sincere effort not to draw attention to Eradani’s new roman candle hairstyle. ‘We’re going have to make our way down there.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Denise. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to do that...’
‘Nonsense,’ said the Captain. ‘It’s easy. Just pretend you’re floating about in water. All you’ve got to do is push yourself in the right direction.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ said Eradani, remembering her underwater training at NASA.
‘Just follow me,’ said the Captain reassuringly. ‘Do what I do and you’ll be fine.’ He was about to launch himself towards the bridge door when an ear-piercing scream erupted from the other side of the bridge. It was a scream that lit up the bonfire of everybody’s attention at the first attempt.
‘Oh my Jesus Lord Gordon Bennett in Heaven!’ screamed Denise, holding for dear life to her chair. ‘Look! Look at that!’
‘What? What?’ shouted the Captain worriedly.
‘The view! Look at the view!’
As one, the crew turned to the expansive main window and gawped: the view was, quite simply, out of this world. They found themselves gazing upon a panoramic view of space. They could see the studded jewels of the stars. They could see the distant Moon out to their right, illuminated brightly by the Sun. They could see distant nebulae, not-so-distant planets, a tiny speck in the distance that may or may not have been the ISS.
But the sight that really made them appreciate their eyeballs was the vast, curving blue surface of the Earth rotating slowly underneath as they orbited at great speed. Those members of the crew less used to space travel were amazed at the detail they could make out. Mountain ranges, rivers, large cities, raging storms, tiny islands; all distinctly visible even at this height (which was 403 miles on average). As they watched the terminator between night and day eased itself into view and began the inexorable consumption of the biggest blue-and-white gobstopper of them all.
‘Wow,’ said Denise, finding to her delight that it was all boundlessly more fabulous even than the glossy pictures she’d seen in those large, hard-backed encyclopaedias of space that her Dad always bought her for Christmas as a child. ‘Just... wow.’
‘Seen it all before,’ intoned the Captain dismissively. ‘Come on, let’s get these Levcro suits on. We’ll have plenty of time to walk round and look at the view then. There’s a good two hours yet before the main engines fire and hurl us off into deep space.’
‘Hopefully,’ reminded Eradani, hoping the Captain wouldn’t be too upset when Cofomaristics failed in its first real test.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the Captain. ‘Now, everybody watch what I do. This will be the only time I give you any help with getting yourselves around this ship, so pay attention and remember what I say. First of all, I want to get to that wall over there, opposite the door, so I push myself,’ he kicked against the chair, ‘in that direction.’ He sailed gently towards the specified wall. ‘See? Easy,’ he said halfway.
‘Looks simple enough,’ said Dr. Richter. The Captain was nearing the wall.
‘Now comes the tricky bit,’ he said. ‘As I near the wall, I need to be ready to push myself off in the right direction.’ Expertly, he spun himself around in mid-flight so that his back was to the rapidly approaching wall. ‘And now I give it a kick,’ he grunted. He pushed himself back off the wall with the soles of his feet and powered himself towards the bridge door. It slid open with a hiss as he neared it. ‘If you get the angle wrong, or you miss your kick, you could end up anywhere,’ he warned as he grabbed hold of the doorframe. ‘Okay, who wants to try?’
<=> <=> <=>
An hour and a half later, the Captain finally shepherded his charges into the two stasis rooms. He and Dr. Richter took one room while the girls took the other. The Levcro suits were stored in full-height cupboards on the far wall of the stasis rooms, which meant there was a certain amount of machinery to negotiate. The Captain retrieved his and Dr. Richter’s suits expertly. Eradani fetched hers and Denise’s rather less so, but she did at least manage not break anything in the process.
They removed their spacesuits (with a lot of effort) and slipped into their respective Levcro-adorned costumes. They were all the same fetching shade of green, with black piping and neat little red logos embossed on the chest.
Dr. Richter thought they looked like relics from a ‘50s B-movie. He knew he shouldn’t have let them hire that camp clothes designer with the glass eye.
The process of getting dressed was made slightly more difficult than normal, partly because of the zero gravity environment (well, not strictly zero gravity, but free-fall weightlessness due to their orbiting the Earth) but mostly because the Levcro pads kept sticking awkwardly to the annoyingly receptive carpeting.
Dr. Richter began to get seriously annoyed when he found that although he’d managed to get one of the suit’s legs into place, the other one was stuck firmly to the ground behind him. In the process of trying to tug it free, he launched himself into the air, performing a series of tumbles and spins before getting firmly lodged in the corner of the ceiling, one leg in and one leg out of his suit.
Denise and Eradani were having similar problems in their sleeping quarters. Things got particularly complicated when one foot of Eradani’s suit got attached to a frazzly hairband that Denise had unpacked and insisted on wearing. Needless to say, all extraneous items of fabric-based clothing were banned for the remainder of the flight.
Once fully suited up, the four crew members reconvened in the main passageway, stoked up and ready to begin their space lives proper. Initially, they found that walking in the Levcro suits was extremely tricky, as they had to wrench their feet off the ground every time they took a step. However, they soon adjusted to it, and found that the available freedom of motion in low-gravity environments was actually lots of fun. Within minutes they were chasing each other up the walls, across the ceilings and along the backs of the settees in the lounge (which were happily also covered in a Levcro-compatible fabric).
The novelty quickly wore off, however, and within the hour they found themselves back on the bridge running through shipwide diagnostics.
‘How’s it look so far?’ asked the Captain, standing behind Eradani.
‘Okay,’ she said, seated at her station. ‘All life support systems check out, and the reserves are at maximum and fully available through all levels of the ship.’
‘Excellent,’ said the Captain. ‘What’s the situation with the comms?’
‘Fine,’ said Dr. Richter, manning the communications terminal. ‘Mission control acknowledge clear receipt of sound and vision. No problems here.’
‘Denise?’
‘Great,’ said Denise, manning the odds-and-sods engineering terminal. ‘The computer registers a full inventory of supplies, the engines are fully operational and the external lights are working just fine.’
‘I do believe we’re ready for the dry run of the navigation systems.’ The Captain made his way over to the remaining terminal and powered up. He selected the autopilot program and instructed it to simulate the journey. He watched as it picked out Barnard’s Star, rotated a virtual Garden Wall around and fired some imaginary main engines.
So good so far.
He closed the program and called up manual control. He grabbed the joystick (his was the only machine with a joystick as he was the only one qualified to pilot the ship) and gave it a jiggle left and right a couple of times to get a feeling for it.
‘Better buckle up,’ he said just before he hit the red thrust button. ‘This is the riskiest part of the procedure. If we’ve got faulty thrusters, we may spin out of control.’
‘Spin out of control? What, into deep space?’ asked Denise frantically.
‘Yup. Into deepest space. Or, alternatively, straight into the atmosphere, where we would burn up.’
‘Oh great.’
‘What happens if the thrusters are good?’ asked Richter, clicking himself in.
‘I take her for a test drive,’ shrugged the Captain. ‘See how well she handles.’
‘Is that a normal way to test the ship?’ asked Eradani suspiciously. ‘Seems a bit risky.’
‘Standard procedure’ said the Captain. ‘Done it a hundred times over.’ With a quick wink at Eradani, the Captain pressed the throttle. The crew were hurled back in their seats as the Garden Wall leapt ferociously forward. The stars, so distant that their vast discs were as sizeless dots, didn’t seem to move at all, but the Earth below shifted noticeably and the Moon drifted out of sight entirely. ‘Woohoo!’ shouted the Captain. ‘This baby can shift!’ He waggled the joystick left and right, rocking the ship left and right. He pointed the nose down towards the Earth and dove at near maximum acceleration. With a grin he pulled back on the stick and the Garden Wall pulled out of the dive with endless ease and power to spare. He finished his test run by flipping the ship 180 degrees vertically in a sudden braking maneouvre. ‘Oh yes,’ he said as he unbuckled, ‘this is one seriously fine machine.’
Eradani loosened her grip on her chair and glanced at Richter, who failed to notice. ‘Just the re-entry software to test now and that’ll be it,’ said the Captain as he closed down the manual control and ordered the ship to simulate a splashdown. Immediately, a heat-shield surged up outside the window and a solid inner panel dropped in front of the cabin door, sealing them safely in a heat-proof cocoon. On-screen, the computer generated a virtual Garden Wall and a mathematical planet Earth. The ship performed a perfectly choreographed change of attitude and started its descent, thrusters flaring from all four sides in a ballet of ballistics. The computer adjusted the angle of descent continuously in order to minimise the drag of the atmosphere and therefore restrict friction heating as much as possible. Burnup on re-entry was one of the real risks on this project and nobody wanted to take any chances. Two readouts relayed the calculated hull and cabin temperatures alongside the recommended maximum values. They were well within the safety margins.
Everything looked good for a text-book re-entry.
Confirmation of this came when the computer splashed the model spaceship down safely in the Atlantic Ocean, bang on target. When and if they eventually returned, it looked like they’d have no trouble getting back to the surface of their home planet. After all, solid state electronics very rarely fail; all software was kept on solid state memory, so there were no hard drives or CDs to suffer from dust contamination or severe jolting. In fact, only the on-board mechanical systems stood an outside chance of breaking down, and even that wouldn’t be too disastrous - the computer was capable of compensating automatically under such conditions. In the unlikely event of a total systems failure, the crew would still be securely contained within the heat-proof shell of the bridge, giving them at least some hope of coming out of it alive. But it was of course a billion-to-one chance that such a complete catastrophe would strike.
‘Everything checks out,’ said the Captain, satisfied. ‘Looks like we radio Mission Control and tell them we’re ready.’
‘No problem,’ said Richter. He selected an icon on his terminal and a voice crackled over the cabin speakers.
‘Mission Control receiving loud and clear,’ it said.
‘The Garden Wall is go for main burn,’ said Dr. Richter. ‘Repeat, the Garden Wall is go for main burn.’
‘Roger that, Garden Wall. Begin ignition procedure.’
The Captain dragged a new control widget into view and selected a large green button. He jabbed in a password when prompted - Eradani and Dr. Richter were slightly surprised as they were not privy to this information. Obviously they were not important enough to be trusted with the ability to turn the main engines on. A faint throb could be heard in the background as control rods were lifted from the nuclear power core and the ship started to generate its own power.
‘Ignition sequence initiated,’ confirmed the Captain. Dr. Richter relayed the message to Mission Control.
‘Ah, we have a confirmation on that. Await next signal before main burn. Out.’
The intercom clicked off.
‘What now?’ said Eradani.
‘Now we wait,’ said the Captain.