Learning the World

So I have given this matter some thought already, as soon as we knew about the plants and the biosphere. That was the first hole in the hull, if you’ll forgive my crudity. If there really is intelligent life down there it makes things complicated in all sorts of ways, which I’ll come to in a minute. But the fundamental shock is finding multicellular life in the first place.

Think about it. Fourteen thousand years — longer, I suppose, because even in prehistory people must have looked at the sky and seen, you know, nothing like the green haze of the Civil Worlds — of expansion into a volume hundreds of light-years across, and we’ve never found anything more advanced than bacteria or algae or slime moulds or something like lichen. Nothing but rock crust and pond scum.

OK. Now, that makes sense, makes sense in a very deep way. It’s called the principle of mediocrity. I looked it up. What it means is that multicellular life, leave alone intelligent life, is either very rare, or very nearly ubiquitous. If it were the latter, our whole sky would have been green and the galaxy would have been called the Grassy Path. And because it’s not, we know it’s almost vanishingly rare. What we have found, all the way out from the Moon, has just confirmed this, over and over and over again. The planets have spoken with one voice, and what they’ve said thousands of times over is pond scum pond scum pond scum. The silence of the sky chimes in with nobody’s home nobody’s home nobody’s home. The silence is telling us: there’s nobody else out here to talk to.

Now there is, almost certainly. But think about it. Apply the principle that there’s nothing special about us. What are the odds against the only two intelligent species in the galaxy arising independently within five hundred light-years of each other, and arriving at civilisation (city lights and electromagnetic communications) within less than twenty thousand years of each other? On the scale of the galaxy, we’re neighbours. On the scale of evolutionary time, of billions of years, we’re in the same generation, the same cohort. More: we share the same birthday, to the hour, to the minute…

This is so unlikely that something else, something quite shattering, is more probable: we aren’t the only two.

It’s not just that we’re not alone. We, the humans and the aliens, are not alone. We two are not alone.

And that means, I’m afraid, that we can’t just do the colonisation thing, at least not without thinking about it very carefully. So let’s think about it very carefully.

14 365:01:13 13:45

Look, folks, lay off the hate mail, OK? I was just saying.

Television, thought Horrocks Mathematical. Like almost everyone else on the ship, he gazed transfixed at the images of the planet’s nightside, the coastlines and some of the interior spaces of its continents pricked out by light. Unlike anyone else, he jumped to a swift conclusion as to the nature of the enigmatic signals that had been troubling him for months.

Television. That was what it was.

Not the kind of television that gave him pictures in his head, but something quite other and more primitive. But the pictures in his head gave him access to and an interface with the processing power that could reconstruct that suspected source. He plunged into its depths, brushing aside all the confuted hypotheses about codes and encryption, and insisting instead on the command to turn the signal into lines: a few hundred at the most, each at most a few hundred pixels across.

The answer came back in less than a second.

Bat-like beings flew behind his eyes. He closed his eyes, but still they were there, in fuzzy black and white. The flurry settled, dark smudges whirled like snow, and an image stabilised: of one of these beings behind a desk, reading aloud from a sheaf of paper. He heard the voice in his head. Fluctuating from a chirp to a deeper, more measured pitch, it intoned a sequence of phonemes that, even across the gulfs of space and species and speech, sounded like statistics.

It seemed fitting that the first words to be heard might be the names of numbers. That could be a meaty bone for some ravenous heuristic. Horrocks had only a vague idea of what kind of programs would be needed to begin to pick away at interpreting the language, let alone what kind of human skills would be needed. In the population of the ship and in the vaster virtual space of the ship’s intelligence repertoire, such programs and skills were certain to be found.

He released the images he’d reconstructed into the ship’s nets, with a priority attention override that few people ever cared or dared to use in all their long life-spans. It seemed that he heard a sound like an intense gust, the sound of a million indrawn breaths, but that might just have been his imagination.

He turned off most of his own input cha

The alien stopped in front of the camera. A hand with three fingers and a thumb loomed; then one of the fingers reached forward and out of shot. The image dwindled to a dot and vanished.

Another image replaced it, not from the alien transmission. Horrocks had never seen Constantine before, but he recognised him.

“I should have you shot,” the Oldest Man said. “For endangering the ship and everyone on it.”

“How did I do that?” Horrocks asked.

“You sent images from an unknown source to the brains and screens and contacts of everyone on this ship,” said Constantine. “You released it into the ship’s intelligence. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be?”

“No,” said Horrocks. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s obviously a very primitive transmission.”

Constantine passed a hand across his eyes, rubbing his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. “That’s exactly the problem,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” said Constantine. “You don’t.” He glared at Horrocks for a few seconds, then smiled. “Don’t do it again.”

14 365:01:13 20:19

Well, that’s it settled. Aliens.

What a day. There’s nothing to say that doesn’t sound banal. Is it always like this, on days when the world changes? Did people who wrote, assuming people did write, have this stupid gnawing feeling all the way back to the Moon Caves and before, that your words are inadequate to the events and that anything you say now will shame you in days to come with its inadequacy? What was it like to react to the first starship launch? The first extrasolar colony? The first news of a fast burn?

This changes the world more than any of these. I see from some of the comments I’ve received that some people don’t grasp this at all. They think intelligent aliens are just one more interesting thing out there, like any new biosphere, or a new stellar process, but more exciting and of more immediate import. Quote from D — :

Isn’t this cool? We’ll be able to settle the new system with help from an intelligence native to the system. Nobody’s ever done that before!

And so on. Lots more like that — check them out.

Look, dear readers: all of that is a possibility. What relations, if any, we establish with the natives of Destiny II is a very serious question and the one that’s raging through the air and airwaves as I write. All the boards and committees and juries are in permanent emergency session and everybody has suddenly got an opinion on it and it’s driving me crazy.