“What do we know about aliens?” asked Harlow to a lecture hall packed to the walls with students from every program MIT offered.
Harlow wasn’t a professor himself. He was a researcher and an occasional guest speaker in some small classes, but not a teacher. In fact, he didn’t like public speaking one bit; standing in front of such a large crowd turned his stomach and shook his knees.
But he knew some of these students could have brilliant ideas at times. He also knew the signal was a hotly discussed subject ever since the president broke the news. Despite his aversion to the task, Harlow was the first one to propose involving the students a bit.
That’s how he found himself in front of the whiteboard in the same auditorium he’d first learned about the message. John Cavanaugh stood at the far back, by the exit, and looked down at him. The man of ambiguous role in the project had approved the information that would be given to the students; Harlow was certain he was here to keep him in line.
A screen showed both symbols the message used, and the deciphered message was displayed on the whiteboard.
A student in the font row raised their hand. “They’re from TRAPPIST-1 and they use radio for communication.”
“Good starting point. But the message originating from TRAPPIST-1 doesn’t mean that these aliens evolved there. Our friends at NASA tell me the star experiences frequent violent flares. There are several planets in the habitable zone, so life could’ve evolved there, but there’s a lot of room for uncertainty.”
Harlow continued. “So what about their use of radio communication? Well, we can be certain they have the means to detect radio waves. It looks like they understood what came their way. So they probably use radio in some form or another. Or maybe they surpassed it and took old equipment out of storage just to talk to us.”
“So that’s two things we might know about them.” Harlow counted on his fingers for the whole class to see. “They were in TRAPPIST-1 when they sent a message towards us, and they can use radio for communication. We know both of these things because, well, they told us. Anything else?”
“They know prime numbers, Euler’s number, and binary,” came from different sections of the hall.
“All true. We get a glimpse at what their mathematical knowhow is.”
“Or they’re showing what they think we know,” added a student in the third row.
“That could also be true. Which leads us to a possibly better question: what do these aliens know about us? It’s likely they know we make extensive use of radio just because of what we sent their way. They don’t know we make bytes with eight bits and not twelve. Because, otherwise, wouldn’t they have formatted their message correctly? What else?”
Harlow’s question brought out a moment of quiet reflection from the hall. No answer came from the students.
“They assume we’re stuck on this rock,” came the voice of Cavanaugh. “They didn’t catch the whole solar system. The signal was beamed towards the inner solar system, specifically. They either took their chances with the unreliable assumption we started with. Or they can tell for sure.”
Before Harlow could answer, the same third row student spoke. “Their signal was magnitudes stronger than what ours would’ve been when it got to them. That could be proof to them we only live here.”
“And we can already spot exoplanets and capture details on our current level of technology,” followed John. “If they are more advanced, they probably have a clearer picture of our solar system than we do of theirs.”
The two of them combined into a well thought out argument. Harlow couldn’t deny the logic there. But even knowing that much didn’t help Harlow give meaning to the message.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“How, then, can we apply what we think we know of them and what we think they know of us to give meaning to the message?” He threw the question to the hall.
Harlow listened to the answers that washed over him.
The simplest feature of the message was the only part where the students could come to an agreement. The message was wrapped in a start-end package.
For everything else, the hall alternated between pragmatic and culturally influenced answers like a metronome. Students that had been firm in their position switched sides as discussion went around.
In the end, they didn’t reach a consensus. Best guesses were all anyone could offer on the ascending and descending orders of primes. But no one was ever certain as to the nature of the five primes, why the signal faded out, or the meaning of the long sequences of zeroes.
“We know the Ones are just copies of a pattern we sent them,” said the third-row student. “But the Zeroes are still unsourced. Maybe bringing attention to that fact is the meaning behind the long sequences.”
Harlow turned to look at the patterns on the screen. There was a certain familiarity to it that had piqued the interest of physicists before. A deeper encoding? Maybe. He could almost picture a transformation of the pattern in his head, like he knew the answer, but not the formula…
*
Days turned to weeks and turned to months. Logic and number-based solutions to the message turned to biologically focused ones and then turned into sociology and culturally oriented solutions, which looped back to logic and numbers. Every step forward had to be accompanied by two to the side, like a chess knight revisiting the same squares over and over again.
Harlow kept up his meetings with the students, though the attendance gradually decreased. He had regular discussions with Morgan and the other scholars of the university. Once a month, he had those talks with experts in social sciences instead. He even branched out of the United States to hear ideas from experts abroad.
But he was still spinning in circles like everyone else. As time went on, he thought of the enigmatic second symbol more and more instead of continuing his search for meaning. He couldn’t shake off that sense of familiarity. He’d remarked on it to several of his colleagues, but only a few experts in radio physics had the same gut feeling.
That gave him at least a shadow of a starting point. Potentially, he could—
“Hey dad, I think there’s a piece missing,” called Sean from across the dining table. He was busy building a new Lego set his grandparents had gifted him for his birthday, and Harlow was meant to help.
“Hmmm? Did you drop it?”
“I didn’t hear any piece drop.”
“Neither did I, but look for it anyway. It might’ve bounced away or out of sight.”
While his son searched, Harlow took the instructions and took count of the pieces. Geometry and 3D spaces had never been his forte as a kid, but he liked how the more or less abstract shapes in the instructions would all come together to make a recognizable final design.
Quickly paging through, he noticed the patterns more than the actual shapes. Often, the large scale would mirror the techniques used at the brick scale. Every piece was well identified, and you could easily tell if something was missing just by the way they fit together.
“It’s under the fridge,” groaned Sean, trying to reach the missing brick.
Repeated patterns and intuitive building methods let even children build something large on their own.
“I got it!” cried Sean triumphantly.
Every piece in the pattern not only has meaning in the final product, but can also serve as a means of figuring out more information.
Of course it does! Euler’s number served as a key to dig deeper into the message this entire time, but it might’ve just unlocked another set of keys.
So what was his new key, and did he have a starting point or a result to work with?
Numbers and equations raced in Harlow’s mind as he reached for a marker in his work bag and started scribbling on the fridge. His son watched the manifestation of his epiphany whilst Harlow scratched out parts, rewrote them, and continued his hypothesis.
He spent all evening and all night working, eating the bites and drinking the glasses that were handed to him. By morning, he was convinced of the plausibility of his idea.
He realized now that he would have to clean the fridge, but it didn’t matter to him just yet. He had a hypothesis that worked: the five primes would be his key, and the second symbol would be his end result.
Right here in his kitchen, he didn’t have the means to prove himself right or wrong. For that, he would need computing power. A lot of computing power.