“Have you read any of these books?” Atlas asked, holding up three separate books for Icarus to look at. They were the books that made up the original Three-Body Problem trilogy.

Atlas and Icarus were both on the Rings of Titan, the planet Icarus was building, in one of the engineering laboratories.

“I listened to book one years ago but didn’t continue the series,” Icarus said. “The narrator’s voice reminded me of you—strangely familiar.”

“You need to read the second book in the series, The Dark Forest. It’s probably the most famous book about the Fermi paradox Earth has ever produced. It was the first fiction book I read focused on the idea.”

“I know what the dark forest is. It’s the idea that the reason we don’t see any aliens is because they’re all hiding. And whenever one announces itself to the world, another alien destroys them.” Icarus scratched the back of his head. “But it’s a moot point now, anyway, because, when General Walker attacked Trillion, it lit up that whole region of space, and anyone with a decent telescope would have seen it. And no one came out and one-shot killed the system.”

“We did have an alien show up to try to capture us.” Atlas shook his head, realizing he had gone off track. “What I’m trying to say is this new method for imaging planets that I’ve developed changes everything.”

“I still can’t believe you used the star to bend light so much that we can see clouds in the sky from hundreds of light-years away. We can look at it as if we were right next to it.”

“I wasn’t the first to come up with the idea; that’s why I’m calling the whole setup the Fraser Cain Observatory. It’s not just one telescope, either; it’s millions of small sensors designed for collecting light. They all combine to give us close-up images of planets like the one I showed you.”

Atlas projected a new image of a planet in his hands. He handed it to Icarus. Clearly visible in the image was Titan, the gas giant they were in orbit around. Atlas zoomed in on a region of space, and the orbiting platform they were on became roughly visible.

Icarus squinted at the image. “Is that where we are now?”

Atlas nodded.

“It’s like looking into the past; the rotating habitat looks so different to this now.”

Icarus was correct; the image Atlas shared was of Icarus’s planet from several years ago. Since light from his system took a few years to reach Atlas, they were looking at an image of the gas giant in the past.

“Spooky. Maybe I can send you a message,” Icarus said. “You can’t see the rings very clearly, but if I projected an image onto the gas giant, you would see something.”

“I won’t see your message for a long time, but if you did project a light show onto the planet, then I would see it,” Atlas mused. “That’s the point I’m trying to make. The dark forest is an almost impossible solution to the Fermi paradox. Because with telescopes like this, we will be able to identify every planet with intelligent life on it.”

“What?!” Icarus said. “Have you found any others out there?”

Atlas shook his head. “I’ve only just begun the process. I pointed the sensors at your planet as a test, but I plan on eventually taking an image of every planet in our nearby region of the Milky Way.”

“How long will it take until you can tell us which planets in the galaxy have alien life on them?”

Atlas had been trying to work out the answer to this question himself. He knew that there were more than one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. And each of those stars probably had at least one planet orbiting it.

Using the Fraser Cain Observatory meant he could look at multiple planets at once. Although given how the technique required him to send thousands of imaging probes to take an image of a planet, and he also needed to look at each planet for a few years at least. He realistically would still be limited in the number of planets he could truly catalog each year. “I think it’s realistic to aim for images of a hundred planets this year.”

Then it occurred to Atlas that the telescope method only worked when he knew the exact location of a planet in the solar system. “Actually, I think it will be a lot slower than that.” He started to bite his lower lip thinking about the problem some more. It took him over four years to take a high-resolution image of the aliens’ world. And that had required him to focus every single sensor he had available at the solar system. The whole of the Fraser Cain Observatory was focused on a single object. It wasn’t practical for him to do that again in the future. “I knew exactly which star to look at when trying to find the Atua star system. Ariana narrowed my options down to ten potential stars. And I narrowed it down further within six months of using this telescope. If we want to look for more life out there”—Atlas mimed pointing out into the sky—“then we need a better way to identify other candidates to look at.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“I thought you had an enormous amount of resources in this system?”

“We do,” Atlas said, nodding his head. “But there are probably hundreds of millions of planets close enough for us to reach in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t have enough resources to look at all of them at the same time.” Atlas pondered over it a little longer. “What I need to do is develop an algorithm for identifying candidate planets. I can use a traditional telescope for identifying potential planets, then use this new telescope”—he decided to call it by an acronym as its full name was becoming too long—“then focus the FCO at the most promising planets.”

“How long will it take to gain a complete picture of what’s out there?”

“It will be slow at first. Maybe we’ll take images of ten planets in the first few years. But as I collect more data and get better and better at picking candidate planets, I should quickly scale that to a hundred planets a year.”

Icarus’s face looked slightly disappointed. Atlas could tell moments ago he was starting to believe all alien worlds would be identified in a few years.

Atlas thought about how best to explain the predicament. It was a different kind of telescope than most people were used to. “It’s the difference between spearfishing and catching fish with a net. With a traditional telescope you’re passively scanning the skies and collecting a lot of data on many different star systems at once. With this method”—Atlas mimed firing a gun—“you can only look at one object at once. Actually, it’s worse than that. I can only look at one area of space at a time. I could completely miss and look at an area in space without a planet at all.” Atlas thought about the complications involved; it was much more complicated than he made it out to be. “To explain things a little more, I might look at the right location but judge the planet’s distance from us wrongly, and the whole image of the planet is out of focus. It’s definitely a powerful tool, but it’s a lot slower than a traditional telescope.”

“I can’t wait until we have a complete list of all the planets near us with aliens on them. I can’t wait to have a list of all the planets we need to go visit.”

“Me, neither. Speaking of which, you want to visit the Atua home world, right?”

Icarus nodded.

“I’ve started working on an android that looks like them.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I’m assuming you need it to look and feel like a real alien. So I’m first trying to replicate something that would pass through an airport checkpoint on Earth. So no metal frame, similar temperature to most animals on Earth, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“I don’t get it. Why are you building it for passing through security on Earth? Why not an alien one?”

“We don’t actually know anything about these aliens. We don’t know what they look like, other than the videos we have. We don’t know what temperature they are. We don’t know how heavy they are. But I’m assuming, through convergent evolution, we both evolved in a similar way. And I’m assuming if we can build something that passes through checks on Earth, then we can build something that passes checkpoints on that alien world.”

Icarus appeared unconvinced, so Atlas pushed his point further. “Take body temperature, for example. Did you know most warm-blooded animals, including us, naturally sit around thirty-seven and thirty-eight degrees Celsius? You would think we’d have wildly different body temperatures from dogs or chickens, but evolution has figured out that this is the ideal temperature for running body cells efficiently. Different evolutionary paths converged around the same temperature.”

He continued. “Convergent evolution was the idea that as animals evolved in similar environments they converged toward a similar design. That’s why dolphins and sharks had a similar body shape for moving through the water. In early human history, it was believed that these two animals must have had a similar ancestor. But the truth was quite different from that. Dolphins were mammals and breathed oxygen. They were closer to an elephant than to a shark. Sharks filtered oxygen out of the water through gills and evolved from fish. It was theorized that on alien worlds similar to Earth, alien life would evolve similar features—after all, there was only a limited pool of designs ideal for flying, swimming, or running long distances.”

Icarus nodded, in agreement. “Are you making artificial skin and bones?”

This was the point Atlas wasn’t meant to be sharing too widely. While they were back on Juniper, he’d created a copy of all the research and science Angelique had provided to the planet. There was a lot of new inventions, one of which was printing an artificial-human robot. It was one of the tech designs for the new body for the Ange’s Angel. All he needed to do was tweak things for a penguin body shape. He wasn’t sure if Angelique would mind if he told other people about the technology. He decided that Angelique would be happy to share, otherwise she wouldn’t have let him create a copy of the database. “It’s a branch of bioprinting that I learned about when I was on Juniper. It’s really amazing tech and means we could print an Atua body once we gather enough information about them. Assuming they aren’t fundamentally different from what I imagined.”