Post by Lorpius Prime on Jun 23, 2011 1:27:49 GMT -5
Excerpted from The New York Times
What's wrong with this picture?
by Marlon Jensen
June 23, 2073
First let me say that I applaud our Chief Executive, Eduard Molinas, on his decision to render assistance to the solar system's newest group of squatters. The OES' mission of preserving Human independence without provoking the wrath of overwhelmingly powerful aliens is fiendishly difficult and often thankless. In a job where the temptation to timidity must often seem irresistible, Chief Molinas acted courageously. Facing a challenge in which there is only the finest separation between boldness and recklessness, Chief Molinas' demonstrated an intelligent fortitude. OES leadership has been excellent since its foundation, and Eduard Molinas has proven more than capable of continuing that tradition
Now, allow me to explain why I think we're all completely screwed.
The arrival of super-advanced aliens in the solar system was always an existential threat to Humanity. Indeed, Earth Fleet and the OES were established in recognition of this fact. To this day, I am astounded that our national leaders were wise enough to plow as much cash as they did into these organizations dedicated to our survival.
The nature of the threat was obvious enough, right from the moment the Bats introduced themselves. Even overlooking the aliens' explicitly demonstrated weaponry, the energy requirement to cross interstellar distances is a truly terrifying thing, and heaven only knows how much more it takes to do it faster than light. It's no significant leap of imagination to conclude that the physical destruction of our planet is well-within the capabilities of every alien starship, whether designed for that specific purpose or not.
That's the danger we've been confronting for 30 years now. But while the scale of it is dreadful, at least it was a danger we could understand. The Boneyards' engineers might not be able to make a planet-killer missile capable of striking its target at 40% of lightspeed just yet; but at least our physicists can describe what would happen if they did. Relativistic kill vehicles (as such weapons are called) are a known threat, one we can prepare for, even if the only preparation is to beg the Alien Emperor not to throw one at us.
What worries me now are the unknown threats, the ones we can't prepare for because we don't even begin to understand them, if we even suspect they exist at all. And these days, I'm starting to suspect quite a bit.
Most recently I've been concerned by a bit of news from the OES and Chief Molinas himself. Buried in the press releases regarding our new friends on Uranus was the revelation that the Tadpoles' starship does not have a faster-than-light engine like the Bats, Charterlings, or Kyhyex use. While it's still apparently faster than anything we can build, the Tadpoles got here more slowly than a beam of light. Now, I can understand why the OES and even Earth Fleet might not think much of this detail; it is rather innocuous by itself. Unfortunately, the OES and Earth Fleet brass never quite developed the proper sense of paranoia which was a necessary part of training for a sci-fi writer in the 20th century tradition. I have, and let me tell you, this little "detail" scares the hell out of me.
Most of you aren't going to be familiar with something called SETI. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was one of the great popular science projects of the late 20th century. SETI spent 70 years looking for evidence of alien life before the Straits War pretty much killed off public interest and, more importantly, public funding for the project. Diehard geeks like me were about the only ones who still remembered the whole thing even by the time the Bats flew in. But the important thing to realize is that we spent half a century and more trying to find aliens, gathering mountains of hard data, but none of it ever produced any positive results at all.
Actually, I should probably clarify what I mean by "evidence". Technical civilizations produce electromagnetic emissions, radio waves in particular, which should be obvious to anyone with a telescope looking in the right direction. Basically, if aliens were out there in any star system we could see, we should be able notice them. It was just a matter of looking at all of them; and a question of timing, since it'd take about 100 millennia for a radio signal to reach us from the other side of the galaxy. But we never found anything.
So then the Bats show up and, while the rest of the world freaked out, me and the 20 other guys who remembered SETI were asking ourselves why did we never see them before? Because, believe me, the Bats aren't invisible. I don't have access to all of Earth Fleet's fancy sensor equipment, but that's okay, because any amateur astronomer can point a telescope at Saturn and tell that there's something going on there which can't be explained by natural phenomena. The same goes for the Charterlings and Kyhyex, by the way. Scale that up a few thousand times for an entire civilization, and there's no way we could fail to notice any of the aliens' home star systems if we'd looked. Only we never did.
Ah, but then it came out that the Bats and others had cracked the lightspeed limit. Putting aside all the problems that raised, it at least explained how we could have missed something as glaring as a star system housing a technical civilization well past the invention of electronics. The aliens simply outran the still-expanding shell of their original radio signals. Not only would that explain how we'd overlooked them all those years, it was also pretty cool. So we old-time geeks sat back and celebrated first contact with the rest of the Humanity.
Of course that's all blown to hell again, now, and I may be the only poor geezer still alive to notice. Still, I'm a damned capable geezer, even with the life-support box. I've spent the last few weeks chatting with astronomers at various universities. Old SETI was a high school science fair compared to what these guys can do. All the old data is still there, with 50 more years on top of it. Past that it was just a matter of processing power. Old SETI used parallel processing, millions people linking computers over the internet. MJ's SETI 2 ran for half an hour on a terminal at an LIU research lab.
What's wrong with this picture?
by Marlon Jensen
June 23, 2073
First let me say that I applaud our Chief Executive, Eduard Molinas, on his decision to render assistance to the solar system's newest group of squatters. The OES' mission of preserving Human independence without provoking the wrath of overwhelmingly powerful aliens is fiendishly difficult and often thankless. In a job where the temptation to timidity must often seem irresistible, Chief Molinas acted courageously. Facing a challenge in which there is only the finest separation between boldness and recklessness, Chief Molinas' demonstrated an intelligent fortitude. OES leadership has been excellent since its foundation, and Eduard Molinas has proven more than capable of continuing that tradition
Now, allow me to explain why I think we're all completely screwed.
The arrival of super-advanced aliens in the solar system was always an existential threat to Humanity. Indeed, Earth Fleet and the OES were established in recognition of this fact. To this day, I am astounded that our national leaders were wise enough to plow as much cash as they did into these organizations dedicated to our survival.
The nature of the threat was obvious enough, right from the moment the Bats introduced themselves. Even overlooking the aliens' explicitly demonstrated weaponry, the energy requirement to cross interstellar distances is a truly terrifying thing, and heaven only knows how much more it takes to do it faster than light. It's no significant leap of imagination to conclude that the physical destruction of our planet is well-within the capabilities of every alien starship, whether designed for that specific purpose or not.
That's the danger we've been confronting for 30 years now. But while the scale of it is dreadful, at least it was a danger we could understand. The Boneyards' engineers might not be able to make a planet-killer missile capable of striking its target at 40% of lightspeed just yet; but at least our physicists can describe what would happen if they did. Relativistic kill vehicles (as such weapons are called) are a known threat, one we can prepare for, even if the only preparation is to beg the Alien Emperor not to throw one at us.
What worries me now are the unknown threats, the ones we can't prepare for because we don't even begin to understand them, if we even suspect they exist at all. And these days, I'm starting to suspect quite a bit.
Most recently I've been concerned by a bit of news from the OES and Chief Molinas himself. Buried in the press releases regarding our new friends on Uranus was the revelation that the Tadpoles' starship does not have a faster-than-light engine like the Bats, Charterlings, or Kyhyex use. While it's still apparently faster than anything we can build, the Tadpoles got here more slowly than a beam of light. Now, I can understand why the OES and even Earth Fleet might not think much of this detail; it is rather innocuous by itself. Unfortunately, the OES and Earth Fleet brass never quite developed the proper sense of paranoia which was a necessary part of training for a sci-fi writer in the 20th century tradition. I have, and let me tell you, this little "detail" scares the hell out of me.
Most of you aren't going to be familiar with something called SETI. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was one of the great popular science projects of the late 20th century. SETI spent 70 years looking for evidence of alien life before the Straits War pretty much killed off public interest and, more importantly, public funding for the project. Diehard geeks like me were about the only ones who still remembered the whole thing even by the time the Bats flew in. But the important thing to realize is that we spent half a century and more trying to find aliens, gathering mountains of hard data, but none of it ever produced any positive results at all.
Actually, I should probably clarify what I mean by "evidence". Technical civilizations produce electromagnetic emissions, radio waves in particular, which should be obvious to anyone with a telescope looking in the right direction. Basically, if aliens were out there in any star system we could see, we should be able notice them. It was just a matter of looking at all of them; and a question of timing, since it'd take about 100 millennia for a radio signal to reach us from the other side of the galaxy. But we never found anything.
So then the Bats show up and, while the rest of the world freaked out, me and the 20 other guys who remembered SETI were asking ourselves why did we never see them before? Because, believe me, the Bats aren't invisible. I don't have access to all of Earth Fleet's fancy sensor equipment, but that's okay, because any amateur astronomer can point a telescope at Saturn and tell that there's something going on there which can't be explained by natural phenomena. The same goes for the Charterlings and Kyhyex, by the way. Scale that up a few thousand times for an entire civilization, and there's no way we could fail to notice any of the aliens' home star systems if we'd looked. Only we never did.
Ah, but then it came out that the Bats and others had cracked the lightspeed limit. Putting aside all the problems that raised, it at least explained how we could have missed something as glaring as a star system housing a technical civilization well past the invention of electronics. The aliens simply outran the still-expanding shell of their original radio signals. Not only would that explain how we'd overlooked them all those years, it was also pretty cool. So we old-time geeks sat back and celebrated first contact with the rest of the Humanity.
Of course that's all blown to hell again, now, and I may be the only poor geezer still alive to notice. Still, I'm a damned capable geezer, even with the life-support box. I've spent the last few weeks chatting with astronomers at various universities. Old SETI was a high school science fair compared to what these guys can do. All the old data is still there, with 50 more years on top of it. Past that it was just a matter of processing power. Old SETI used parallel processing, millions people linking computers over the internet. MJ's SETI 2 ran for half an hour on a terminal at an LIU research lab.