Looking for Gordo
by Robert J. Sawyer
“Order in the court! All rise!” Emily Chiu and the two hundred other people in the wood-paneled room got to their feet. She was a witness, but most of the others had donated five thousand dollars apiece for their seats. Countless millions were also watching the streaming coverage online.
Richard Weisman—portly, with thundercloud-gray hair—entered through a side doorway and strode to the bench. Although the opposing counsels on this Saturday afternoon weren’t actual lawyers—one was an astronomer; the other, a historian—Weisman was a real judge, donating his time, just as the city had donated the use of the courtroom.
The US and California flags that normally stood behind the bench were in their usual places. Emily had pointed out to the reporter sitting next to her that the California one, depicting a big bear, was particularly apt, since today’s proceedings revolved around 47 Ursae Majoris, but she didn’t think the guy got the joke.
Even more appropriate, though, was the third flag that had been added to the right of the other two. Since it was hanging limply, the people present couldn’t make out what it depicted, but Emily had seen the same design flapping in the breeze out front of the Interstellar Communications Society headquarters. Until her first visit there, two years ago now, she’d had no idea there was such a thing as an official flag of Earth, but this was indeed it. In the center was a blue circle, representing the home planet; in back of it, dominating the left side, was a portion of a much larger yellow circle, representing the sun. A smaller white circle to the right stood for the moon.
As Judge Weisman sat down, everyone in the courtroom did the same. “All right,” he said. “We heard opening arguments before lunch. Now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Dr. Plaxton, you may call your first witness.”
Hannah Plaxton, a compact woman with dark hair and a birdlike way of moving, was the aforementioned astronomer; in today’s proceedings, being televised worldwide, she was representing the side not just in favor of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but those advocating active SETI, the deliberate sending out of signals. “Thank you, Your Honor. We call Ursula.”
Emily felt her eyebrows go up, and she could hear a murmur wash across the room. It seemed just about everybody, including the court staff, had expected various human experts to be summoned to the stand first; Emily herself was here to testify about the work her team had done to make all this possible.
Two uniformed guards quickly wheeled a seventy-inch paper-thin monitor, flipped to portrait mode, to a position next to the dock, and the image of Ursula—still startling no matter how much time Emily had spent staring at it—appeared.
“Please raise your upper right arm,” said the clerk.
On the screen, Ursula—being a female, she did indeed have two right arms—did as she was asked.
“Do you solemnly state that the testimony you may give in the cause now pending before this court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.” The bubbly voice was based on that of a popular web-series actress. Emily had abandoned attempts to simulate the way alien speech really sounded; that was akin to pebbles rattling inside a tin can.
Hannah opened her mouth to ask her first question when Judge Weisman silenced her by lifting his own right hand, palm out. “Just a minute. Ursula, I need to be satisfied that you understand the oath you just took. Do you?”
Ursula’s eyestalks turned to face the edge of the monitor. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“You affirmed, ‘So help me God.’ Do your people have a God?”
“We freely acknowledge that in a universe as old as this one, beings superior to us almost certainly exist—and so of course I would welcome their assistance in this or any other matter.”
Emily suppressed a snort. Ursula was practically making Hannah’s case for her—and the judge seemed to realize that, as he chose not to pursue the issue further. “Very well,” he said. “Dr. Plaxton, you may proceed.”
“Thank you. Ursula, why did your people choose to contact us?”
Emily’s team of programmers had done their job welclass="underline" When time was needed to query the Reticulum, the simulated alien made a show of bobbing and weaving its eyestalks, just as we’d seen real aliens do in the thousands of videos they’d sent us.
After a second, the answer came. “We had detected your radio and TV transmissions, and particularly your radar. Also, spectroscopic studies of your atmosphere suggested the presence of biological processes that replenished oxygen, not to mention signs of an industrial society.”
Hannah seized upon that. “In other words,” she said, “your people already knew about our existence long before anyone here had thought seriously about deliberately announcing our presence to the universe, correct?”
“Correct.”
This, of course, was one of the key points: Hannah’s opponent today was the chair of the committee urging a moratorium on active SETI, or “METI,” the messaging of extraterrestrial intelligence; its members felt that deliberate signaling might attract alien invaders or pillagers. Hannah’s side felt such a ban would be pointless, since we’d already accidentally revealed our existence—a fact Ursula had now confirmed.
“What motivated your people to send out the Reticulum?”
“We wanted to share what we knew and what we had created,” said Ursula in a tone that made it all sound eminently reasonable. “After all, surely you’d do the same thing for us.”
When Emily Chiu had first arrived at the Interstellar Communications Society, she’d been all set to talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So she’d been taken aback by Hannah Plaxton’s initial question: “Do you like dinosaurs?”
“Who doesn’t?” Emily had replied, settling into a chair on the opposite side of a cluttered desk.
“Ever been to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto?”
“No.”
“They were planning a new dinosaur gallery, oh, about twenty years ago,” Hannah said. “They already had the best hadrosaur collection in the world—those are duck-billed dinosaurs. A lovely Stegosaurus. Lots of ceratopsian material and a nice T. rex cast. But they were missing a sauropod—you know, like Brontosaurus.”
Emily smiled. “‘Thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin again at the other end,’ to quote Monty Python.”
“Exactly. The iconic dinosaur. They figured they really needed one of those, and so went looking for a sauropod skeleton they could buy or excavate. Except, it turns out, they already had one. It had been shipped to Toronto from Pennsylvania in 1962, put in storage, and literally forgotten about; it wasn’t until 2007 that a curator stumbled upon the fact that they had such a thing already. It’s now the centerpiece of their gallery. They named it Gordo, in honor of the former curator who had originally acquired it.”
It had been an early flight down, and Emily was tired. “So?” she said.
“So we’ve been listening for ETs for seventy years now, starting with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma in 1960. And for a while there, we had a decent crowd-sourced search: people using spare processor cycles on their computers to comb through chunks of data collected by radio telescopes. But two things have largely derailed that. First, modern processor chips throttle down automatically to save energy, so there aren’t that many spare cycles anymore. Yup, green policies may have kept us from finding little green men. And, second, people lost interest—they’d expected us to find something quickly in the data, and, well, as time went on and nothing was found, fewer and fewer people participated.”