Emily nodded. She remembered hearing about SETI@home years ago, but hadn’t seen anything about it recently.
“These days,” Hannah said, “we do most of our listening with what we call an LNSD radio-telescope array: a large number of small dishes. We currently have forty-two operational, and hope to increase the quantity eventually to three hundred and fifty. But even forty-two just might be the answer to life, the universe, and everything: With them, we receive eight gigabytes of data a second.”
Emily’s specialty was large data sets. She did the mental math: That was enough to fill a one-terabyte hard drive every minute.
“There was no way we could store it all when we started,” continued Hannah, “so we relied on real-time array processing to sort the wheat from the chaff, determining on the fly if something looked promising—that is, looked like something other than just the usual stellar noise; otherwise, we had to discard the information. But all of that changed a couple of years ago. With storage costs continuing to plummet, we could finally afford to record and store everything we collected. Of course, dealing with all that data is another matter. It’s going to take not just a lot of computing horsepower to sort through it, but innovative analytical tools.
“And that’s where you come in: As I say, we’ve been collecting tons of data every day for years now, but it’s never been properly searched. And, well, we’re hoping what we want is already in there: We want to look for an alien message in the data we’ve already recorded.” She spread her arms. “In short, we’re looking for our Gordo.”
Emily Chiu was very proud of the work her lab had done in creating the Ursula avatar, which was built atop their signature personal-assistant AI technology and incorporated the real-time speech-to-speech translation capabilities they’d originally developed for video calling. Hannah Plaxton spent the rest of the afternoon questioning Ursula, and, to Emily’s delight, the software performed beautifully. No judge had yet allowed an AI to testify under oath in a real case, but since Ursula was doing so well in this mock one, perhaps one soon would.
The trial was a fundraiser for the Interstellar Communications Society. Whatever verdict the jury reached wouldn’t be binding on anyone, but the event was certainly getting a lot of media attention, which is no doubt why Hannah’s opponent, Piotr Sudeyko, had agreed to participate. He was a historian who specialized in Earth’s own previous first-contact situations, including the arrival of Europeans in the New World; he’d long felt that the anti-METI arguments hadn’t been given sufficient publicity. Emily watched intently as Sudeyko rose from his chair; his probing would be the real test of Ursula’s programming.
“Good morning, Ursula,” he said, dolorous brown eyes peering over Ben Franklin glasses. He was bald with a high forehead that bulged out like that of a beluga whale.
Ursula’s twin eyestalks separated to their maximal extent, but both jade-green spheres faced intently toward Sudeyko. Like all of the intelligent natives of 47 Ursae Majoris, Ursula had six limbs—three for locomotion and three for manipulation—all sprouting from a central torso. A wasp-waist constriction in the copper-colored torso marked where Ursula’s ancestors had rotated their upper bodies ninety degrees when they’d risen up to stand on just three legs. The two thicker and longer legs were in front, and the shorter, thinner one was in back; that had the effect of tilting their bodies backward, as if the aliens were perpetually recoiling in comic surprise. The perfectly circular iris of a mouth located well down the torso just added to the astonished look.
Sudeyko continued: “Ursula, we humans have struggled with many vexing issues since the dawn of time. Perhaps you can help us.”
Emily had managed only a second-row seat today. She craned her head to see the monitor clearly. “I would be happy to try,” Ursula replied.
“Thank you,” said Sudeyko. “During the USSR era, Soviet SETI proponents had taken as a given that any advanced civilization would be a socialist Utopia run by an entrenched central authority. Is that, in fact, the case?”
“No. We govern by plebiscite.”
“Ah,” said Sudeyko. “So, each of your citizens gets one vote?”
“No,” said Ursula, splaying all her pincers in strong negation. “We would never be so limiting. Each of us, as you can see, has three hands—two on one side, and one on the other. Each hand gets its own weighted vote. The inside hand has a vote worth one point; the outside upperhand gets a vote worth two-thirds of a point, and the outside lowerhand gets a vote worth one-third of a point. For any proposition, each individual may cast a total vote worth two points, one and two-thirds points, one and one-third points, one point, two-third points, one-third points, or zero points. We may each assign whatever combination of our weighted votes we wish to any of the choices offered, but once all votes have been assigned, one can make no further selections. So, if there are four or more candidates or choices in a plebiscite, one may fractionally support no more than three of them. The winner is determined by simply summing all the factional votes; if there’s a tie, the candidate or choice receiving votes from the largest number of individuals wins.”
The mathematician in Emily couldn’t keep from trying to crunch the numbers in her head, wondering if this was an efficient system. But Sudeyko, it seemed, was on the trail of something else. “And so when it came to the question of whether to send the Reticulum to Earth, what choices were put forth?”
“There were four propositions. ‘We should send the Reticulum to every star system we’ve identified as being a likely harbinger of life.’ ‘We should listen to and observe each star system that appears inhabited, and if we detect an overture of contact from them, only then should we send the Reticulum.’ ‘While acknowledging that it would be a protracted process thanks to delays necessitated by the finite speed of light, rather than sending the Reticulum, we should instead send only a small tantalizing sampler in hopes of fostering an ongoing trading relationship, swapping portions of our knowledge and culture for portions of theirs.’ And, lastly, ‘Even if we’ve detected that another star system has inhabitants, and even if they reach out to contact us, we should neither initiate contact with nor respond to contact from them.’”
“And when the voting was held, what was the outcome?”
“The first proposition, namely that we send the Reticulum to every likely star system, was approved overwhelmingly. In fact, the total fractional votes it received exceeded the combined totals assigned to all three of the other options.”
“Really?” said Sudeyko, who presumably already knew this answer, or else he wouldn’t have asked the question here in open court. Nonetheless, he did a good job of sounding surprised at the degree of consensus. And perhaps if this had been a trial, the judge might have objected to Sudeyko striding over to the jury box and leaning in, but it certainly made for good theater. “And just to be clear,” he said, looking not at Ursula but at the women and men who had won the contest to be seated here, “how many of your people got to vote on these propositions?”
Ursula sounded surprised by the question. “Why, all of them, of course.”
It had sounded reasonable when Ursula said her entire species had voted on whether to initiate contact. But debate over this very issue had torn the SETI community apart for a decade and a half now. One camp had been pushing to upgrade the traditionally passive search for extraterrestrial intelligence to active messaging.