Message: Science Fiction

By Peter Schüring

This is a different science fiction book as it does not deal with invading aliens, but rather with peace loving aliens living in a more advanced world. Via radio and TV waves they know everything about us humans. By radio they communicate with us from a not-too-distant planet. The Aliens provide us humans with very advanced technologies in the fields of energy generation, medicine, computer science and artificial technology. These represent a quantum jump to our current state of development.
This book also deals about how we humans deal with the impact of the introduction of these very advanced technologies and the politics which go with it. Therefore, this book is also a book of psychology of the human mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Aug 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9783347266391

Book preview

Introduction

This is a work of science fiction. Unlike other stories that deal with aliens invading and conquering our planet, causing great damage to our civilization and showing the aliens as monsters, in this story no aliens invade and change our world. This likelihood is small if not unrealistic for many scientific reasons and is perhaps incredible. But it is fear of the unknown that makes people see the alien as a threat; therefore, this type of science fiction has always been and will continue to be popular. An exception to this has been Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. Here, he succeeded to present aliens with their stunning capabilities in a friendly way. It is we humans who act aggressive.

This book does not try to scare people and achieve notoriety from this fear factor. This book presents a scenario of what could happen based on the current level of research of the universe, its stars and the discovery of planets. It is based on the likelihood that we will indeed be contacted by aliens using radio waves. Ongoing attempts to achieve such contact is being made by SETI, which was founded exclusively to achieve this goal. In their sixtyyear history using huge parabolic antennas and listening for radio signals from intelligent civilizations, they have not yet been successful. This task is difficult considering the thousands of different wavelengths they must monitor all the time and the enormous size of our galaxy and the universe. Stephen Hawking predicted that we are not alone in the universe but that there must be other intelligent civilizations, given the billions of planets which must exist with earth-like conditions. The problem we are facing is the enormous distances for such civilizations to reach each other and the speed of light as a limiting factor of communication. For example, our closest star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels within one year, 9.46 trillion kilometers or 5.88 trillion miles. Our closest neighboring star is over 24,000,000,000,000 miles away. This gives an idea of the distances we are talking about. While astronomers have identified sixty-four G-type stars (which like our sun convert hydrogen to helium using nuclear fusion) within fifty light-years of our sun, many stars in our galaxy alone are more than 1,000 light-years away.

This book deals not only with a possible contact but also with the reaction of humans. Many books have already been written anticipating such an event, for example Contact by Carl Sagan or more recently First Contact (Erstkontakt) by Daniel Gerrizen. My book selects one scenario out of perhaps millions of possibilities to describe how, when, and in what form such contact would take place and what consequences it would have for mankind. The described events are futuristic but lean on the current state of science on our planet. The way humans react to anything new and strange plays a key role in this book. Therefore, this is also a book about human psychology. Humans have the reflex to protect what we have and have great fear of anything new and strange. This trait is part of our DNA and stems from the experience of our ancestors who had to fight hard for their nourishment and livelihood to exist. This reflex manifests itself in many known ways and the politics involved throughout this book is part of what makes this scenario fascinating.

Can such a contact really take place? Given the state of our science and rapid understanding and exploration of the universe, I believe it will; this view is shared by many reputable astronomy and space experts. This belief is based also on our current state of technology and the rapid progress we are making to improve it. This book is an attempt to extrapolate the future state of our existing sciences utilizing the knowledge of the aliens. It is as Yuval Noah Harari describes in his book Homo Deus— an attempt to upgrade Homo sapiens and to change the world beyond recognition in this century.

Discovery

Sunday, March 23, 2025

John Simon was a ham radio aficionado, call sign VE8US. He spent his free time huddled in front of his radio, searching the ether for new contacts around the world. He had been invested in this hobby for many years, as shown by his collection of calling cards covering one wall. Crowning his saltbox house—one of the few on Foxhill Street in Westwood, Massachusetts, near Boston—was a huge antenna he could turn from inside his small studio.

John spent several hours in his studio listening to the waves in the afternoon and early evening. He had just finished talking to Javier, his friend from Cordoba, Argentina. Their conversations usually revolved around topics such as family, the highlights of their lives, the weather, and of course, politics. John was extremely disappointed and concerned about the politics of the nation in recent times. China had now surpassed the United States as the largest and most influential country in the world. This fact was hard to swallow for this proud nation that had led the world for so long. The current president had inherited an exceedingly difficult situation but had done well toward re-establishing the domestic normalcy of the United States since his inauguration in January. Javier concurred and complained about the growing inflation rate in Argentina and the continuing economic chaos in his country.

John knew many of the thousands of ham operators around the world, some of whom he talked to on a regular basis, like Javier, if he managed to get a connection. Connectivity depended on atmospheric conditions, the time of the day, and the weather; it worked best at night. The many relationships John had built over the years kept him going with his station. Although such connections could easily be maintained via the internet, the sheer excitement involved in establishing a connection with another person via radio was missing from the Internet.

Using his master’s in electrical engineering from MIT, John had built his shortwave station as well as all the equipment himself. His station had a transmitter with a strength of 50 kW, an extremely sensitive receiver, the rooftop antenna, Morse code keys, a weather station, a signal strength meter, and clocks displaying times from around the world. He also rigged a tape recorder to record messages received during his absence. A collection of books with the call codes of shortwave stations around the world lined a shelf along one wall. These were updated every year, although online databases were the fastest way to learn someone’s QSL.

His wife Mary called him for dinner. Dinner on Sundays was always something special, and John was looking forward to the roast pork he’d been smelling all afternoon. Dinner time was almost always quiet, and the couple took their time enjoying a good glass of California red wine and light conversation. The Simons were progressive, politically. They had no children. In their thirty-plus years together they had lived an orderly life. Mary looked after the house and was responsible for their somewhat limited social life. She enjoyed a part-time position at a real estate office more as a reason to leave the house than for the money. As an engineer, John’s main interests were his work at Bell Laboratories and of course his ham station. They did not approve of the policies of Donald Trump that had ruined the international reputation of the United States. They had been ecstatic when Joe Biden had been elected president and the protests, riots, and divisiveness plaguing the country had ceased being headlines. America had resumed its somewhat normal state of being. After the meal, John spent another hour at his ham station while Mary cleaned up in the kitchen.

Upon reaching the top floor again, John switched on the tape recorder to see if there were any new messages for him. To his surprise, he heard Morse code-like signals. He listened carefully but could not identify the code. He was quite familiar with Morse, which had been the standard for communication in the past until voice modulation had taken over. It was rare to receive Morse messages except for emergency transmissions from shipping, sailing, or military vessels. However, these signals did not follow the regular pattern. It was a different code—one that he had never encountered before. He continued recording the incoming signals. The signal strength is good, he thought. He rotated his antenna to see what would happen. Normally, when he changed the antenna’s setting, the signal would disappear. However, to his great surprise, these signals continued transmitting with steady strength. Unusual; they have to be coming from space. It had to be a satellite sending them, and they were probably encrypted so that nothing other than the designated earth station could identify them. That, of course, was the simple answer, but why would the satellite transmit in the shortwave band designated for ham radio operators, in the kHz to MHz range organized in different channels The frequency within which these signals were now being received was well within the designated bands. John chewed on his cheek, somewhat frustrated that he could not figure out this code. He reviewed all his literature on Morse code, but this one looked different. He would call NASA tomorrow. Perhaps they could offer an explanation. Before going to bed, he put on a new tape to make sure the recording would last through the night. To his surprise, in the morning, the Morse-like signals continued to come in. He put in a fresh tape before going to work.

He took his usual train at 7:30 a.m. to get to Bell Labs. He had worked for them for thirty years and enjoyed working on different projects as an electrical engineer.

After reaching his office, he called NASA’s offices in Houston, Texas, and explained the phenomenon he had witnessed the night before. NASA confirmed that neither their satellites, the satellites of other nations, nor private operators known to them were broadcasting on the ham radio wave bands. They also explained there was an international convention preventing satellite radio traffic from using shortwave radio bands. There were several radio frequencies in use in satellite communications such as frequency C, X, Ku, Ka and even EHG and V-band. To prevent interference caused by multiple sites transmitting on the same frequencies, government agencies and private satellite operators around the globe had their satellite frequencies registered, and violations of the accepted regulations managed by the United Nations carried heavy penalties. According to them, this signal did not exist because it was regulated not to be. John thanked the person and hung up.

Arriving home in the evening, John went up to his station and was surprised to see he was still receiving the strange Morse messages. NASA had explained to him the effects of Earth’s rotation on signals from orbiting satellites. When the earth moved away from the source of the signal, it would stop. When the earth moved toward the source of the signal, it would be received again. The fact that this phenomenon was not taking place confirmed to him that the signals were coming from somewhere much farther away in space.

Given this situation, he began a log on this most unusual event so he would have a detailed record if asked later. He also wrote down parts of the signals on paper so he could analyze the strange code.

The first transatlantic radio communication had been in 1901 from England to the United States at Marconi Beach, Cape Cod. Regular radio signals were bouncing around Earth by 1906.

Theoretically, since that time, aliens—if there are any—have known exactly where we are and what we have been up to. John became preoccupied with the disquieting image of broadcasts billowing away from Earth for a good part of a hundred and fifteen years. Hundreds of star systems were within range of TV and radio signals that had been emitted during the past hundred and fifteen years, considering that radio signals traveled at the speed of light in the vacuum of space. Some of the signals could certainly have reached other stars and planets in the galaxy.

Samuel Morse developed Morse Code in 1833 and it had been the standard for global communication for several decades. The code …---… was the well-known universal emergency signal SOS. John wrote down several pages of the dots and dashes, but none represented a letter or number intelligibly. The message did not repeat itself but some of the dots and dashes did. It became clear that like Morse code, there was a pattern. The signals had continued for twenty-four hours, uninterrupted. This meant that they had to come from somewhere in space in the Northern Hemisphere—at an angle not affected by Earth’s rotation.

This was a huge puzzle. It dawned on him that the electromagnetic signals he was receiving were most likely indicative of intelligent life somewhere in the universe and that it was possibly the first time such signals were being received and recorded on Earth. If this was true, the implications for mankind would be life changing. It would be the most significant technological development in modern times and would have unthinkable consequences. It would mean that humans were not alone in the universe and that there were other intelligent—perhaps also more advanced—species out there trying to contact the inhabitants of Earth. These implications sent shivers down his spine.

John searched the Internet for information concerning the attempts to contact extraterrestrial life. So far, mankind had been unable to establish any contact despite several past and ongoing efforts and the creation of special private organizations such as SETI. Created by the University of Berkeley, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had numerous followers the world over. He read that the nearest star was a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, which was 4.24 light-years away. It could or could not have planets; no one was sure. Sending a spacecraft there would take thirty-five years at the current speed of spacecrafts. Crossing the Milky Way at one tenth the speed of light would take four million years. The Milky Way itself could be awash with civilizations older and more technologically advanced than humanity. It was estimated about 100 to 300 billion stars comprised our home galaxy. It was also assumed that about half the stars were orbited by planets. Scientists were concluding that the lack of extraterrestrial visitations could be due to the huge distances involved in interstellar flight; it was virtually impossible to reach Earth. But if they were not going to come calling, how were humans going to encounter them? The answer: radio waves traveling at the speed of light from them to us.

The next evening, John began to identify all the dots and dashes that repeated themselves and wrote them down on a separate piece of paper. There were several of them, perhaps hundreds—and these were only what he had identified so far. Morse code consisted of only forty-one different combinations of dots and dashes. Was this a foreign language written in a new code? Or what was it? Even if it was an encryption using only numbers and letters, it had to be based on the Morse code, and this was clearly not the case here.

John noticed that the tape was running out and he quickly replaced it, missing only a few of the signals. Until he solved the mystery, he decided to continue recording the incoming signals.

That night, as he lay in bed, he wondered whether he should involve other people to help him identify the signals or attempt to do it himself. If he advised NASA and the government of the signals he was receiving, the magnitude of this news could threaten the tranquility of his life and perhaps even endanger him. He would have FBI and CIA officials crawling all over his house and investigating everything. The media would pick up the story and TV stations from all over the world would park in front of his house. He would suddenly become a well-known public figure. He wanted to avoid all this, so he decided that for the time being, he would keep quiet about this discovery and not even tell Mary. She hated even the idea of public attention and was a rather shy person. The received signals would not be lost, as he was recording it all. He concluded that he had plenty of time to deal with this mystery himself.

Understanding the message would require learning its new language and this, he realized, would take a significant amount of time and skill.

He started by filtering out identical combinations of dots and dashes from all the combinations of codes he was receiving. He then counted how often they were repeating themselves: this was several times, in fact. This suggested that perhaps these could be letters like the alphabet or numbers as in the decimal system. These combinations had to be words or numbers in a foreign language or perhaps even in English. Now, how was he going to decipher all of this without expert help? He had zero experience with this kind of research. He had only recently read the book on the Enigma machine, which had been used by the British to decipher German war codes. It had taken mathematicians several years to break the German code, and this had required a special machine. He also needed to study the history and methods used to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians and the language of the Mayans. He would buy books on the subject the next day.

He used his lunch break to go to one of Boston’s best bookstores, where he bought not only books on hieroglyphs and the Mayans but also some books about cryptography. While the messages from space continued to be recorded, John began to study his new books to figure out how he could decipher them.

He started with the history of writing. He learned that the Sumerians first invented writing as a means of long-distance communication, necessitated by trade, as early as 35,000 BCE. Later, Egyptians developed hieroglyphs which they carved in stone still visible today. Creating a gateway to the rich meaning of the hieroglyphics was the crucial part that the Rosetta Stone had played. It had the same message written in both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Ancient Greek, which was translatable to the modern explorers who found it. Without knowing the content of at least some parts of a message, there was no way to decode it. When talking to aliens, what would people use for a Rosetta Stone?

John read and studied as much as he could on the methods used to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs. He then turned to the civilization of the Mayans. Once considered an unsolvable enigma, recent advances in deciphering the Mayan writing system had not only shed light on the mechanics of the script but also on the socio-political, artistic, and historical aspects of the Mayan civilization. This rabbit-hole of information occupied him for hours.

Upon reading how long it took for people to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians and the Mayans, and how long it took Allen Turing to crack the German code during the Second World War, John was daunted. How difficult would it be and how long would it take him to decipher the code he was receiving from space, especially if he wanted to tackle this task by himself? It could maybe take him years, and even then, he was not sure whether he would understand the message.

Despite all these issues, he nevertheless decided to refrain from revealing his discovery before working on the problem himself. Perhaps it would be much easier than it seemed if the message was in English or another known language. He also thought about the consequences of this message for mankind if it had indeed come from another civilization. Is this civilization more advanced than ours? Are these people peace-loving or a threat to our civilization? How many light-years is this civilization from Earth? Can we identify the star that is their sun? What will these aliens look like? And to whom can I reveal the messages? Is this the property of the United States or does this discovery belong to the entire world? Can I rely on the FBI or CIA for my protection?

Thursday morning, on the train to work, John decided to focus on available systems of cryptography first. These, he thought, might be helpful in understanding the messages he was receiving. First, he had to decipher the Morse code. This meant that he had to identify the letters and numbers corresponding to their alphabet and numeric system. Once that was done, he had to understand the meaning of the combination of their letters and numbers. This would most likely be in their language, which he could not understand. Therefore, the third and perhaps most difficult task would be to understand and interpret the language of this civilization.

John had also read articles regarding Project SETI. The organization had tried to receive signals from other civilizations in space for several decades. Although it had several large radio telescopes in locations like Arecibo in Puerto Rico, Cheshire, England, and the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, USA, these large radio telescopes focused mainly on the one billion stars in the galaxy. Despite the fact that technology had improved a great deal to include an ever-growing spectrum of radio channels, they had not helped. Except his radio, no other radio telescopes had captured a single meaningful signal. The task was formidable if one considered the size and the distances of the universe with its several billion stars and their planets.

Serious scientists such as Stephen Hawking considered it virtually impossible that humans were the only intelligent civilization in the universe. The problem seemed to be more the enormous distances from one star to another counted in light-years, and the same from one galaxy to the next. Through the Internet, thousands of aficionados followed the SETI project with the great expectation that the human civilization would receive an intelligent signal from outer space one day.

When John had been an aspiring electrical engineer, he had studied at MIT and attended many lectures conducted by the mathematics department. It was considered one of the best in the world. MIT was also renowned for its work in information technology. In fact, while working for Bell Labs, John regularly contacted professors at various departments of MIT. The university was also not too far away from his workplace.

John called on his friend John Adams, the head of research for telecommunications at MIT. After catching up on personal news, John stated the reason for his call. You know I’m a ham enthusiast.

Yeah.

The other day, I received a long, coded message that looked like Morse code. I can’t ID the sender but I’m curious about the content of the message. Maybe it comes from Russia or from someone who needs help. Can you help me decipher it? You have the best mathematicians and computer scientists at your disposal—this should be a piece of cake for you.

John clucked his tongue for a moment. We don’t normally entertain requests like this, but I’m willing to try it for you. By the way, there are some great free programs on the Internet for that. Christopher McDonnel wrote an excellent program called the ‘Secret Code Pattern Word Program.’ He was one of our best Math and IT students. I’ll email you the info. You can download it for free. If you have difficulties with it, call Christopher or me. If it doesn’t work, call me again, and we’ll get our IT students involved. Be a nice challenge for them.

In the evening, John received the promised message from Bill:

Here is the program description from Christopher McDonnel and the download instructions. I hope it works.

This is a free ZIP file download that contains a Windows program (instructions can be found in the Help menu) and a set of Word Pattern files for words up to nineteen alphabets long. The program looks up words based on patterns of encryption. There is also a crib function for cases in which one or more letters of the unknown word are known, thus narrowing down the possible results. This program was written for"Secret Code Breaker by Christopher McDonnel.

www.secret-codebreaker-pattern-wordprogram.com

Regards,

Bill

That evening, after returning home and after dinner, John downloaded the program Bill had sent him. After carefully reading the instructions, he began typing the beginning of the code he had received. It took a few minutes, and then to his total astonishment, his laptop started to display English text. His heart began to pound. In front of him was the last thing he had ever expected.

The Message

The text said the following:

WE ARE AN INTELLIGENT CIVILIZATION LIVING ON A PLANET 53 LIGHT-YEARS AWAY FROM YOUR EARTH. WE ARE SENDING THIS MESSAGE IN YOUR EARTH YEAR 1972 AND EXPECT YOU TO RECEIVE IT IN YOUR YEAR 2025. PLEASE FORGIVE REPETITION OR DISORGANIZATION IN THIS FIRST MESSAGE AS WE ARE STILL LEARNING HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU AND WE HAVE SO MUCH TO SHARE.

WE LEARNED ABOUT YOU WHEN WE STARTED TO RECEIVE YOUR MORSE CODE AND LATER RADIO AND TELEVISION SIGNALS. THEY HAVE TAUGHT US SEVERAL OF YOUR LANGUAGES, YOUR MUSIC, PHOTOGRAPHS, FILM, AND TELEVISION. YOUR FIRST RADIO SIGNALS REACHED US IN OUR YEAR 30462 AND IT HAS TAKEN OUR CIVILIZATION 10 OF OUR YEARS 5 OF THEIR YEARS TO UNDERSTAND YOUR SIGNALS AND STUDY YOUR LANGUAGES, CIVILIZATION, AND HISTORY. FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHS, FILM, AND TELEVISION PICTURES RECEIVED, WE KNOW HOW HUMANS AND MOST OF THE OTHER SPECIES IN YOUR WORLD LOOK LIKE AND BEHAVE. WE HAVE ALSO STUDIED YOUR MATHEMATICAL, MEASUREMENT, AND COUNTING SYSTEMS AND HAVE MANY OF OUR PEOPLE SPENDING TIME TO UNDERSTAND HUMANS, YOUR WORLD, AND HISTORY. WE HAVE READ AND STUDIED MUCH OF YOUR LITERATURE. YOU WILL THEREFORE BE SURPRISED HOW MUCH WE KNOW ABOUT YOU. WE HAVE ALSO STARTED A UNIVERSITY PROGRAM CALLED EARTH SCIENCE WHERE MANY OF OUR STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT HUMANS, THEIR CHARACTER, HISTORY, AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT ON YOUR EARTH. WE HAVE A FORMAL EDUCATION SYSTEM IN OUR CIVILIZATION VERY SIMILAR TO YOURS.

FROM THE ANALYSIS OF ALL THIS DATA SO FAR, WE HAVE REALIZED THAT WE ARE SUBSTANTIALLY MORE ADVANCED THAN YOUR STATUS OF DEVELOPMENT IN TERMS OF YOUR LEVEL OF INTELLIGENCE, TECHNOLOGY, LIFESTYLE, AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR IN YOUR YEAR 1975. BUT IN OTHER WAYS YOU ARE MORE ADVANCED THAN US AND WE LEARN FROM YOU.

FROM SOME OF YOUR LITERATURE, WE UNDERSTAND THAT HUMANS ARE FEARFUL THAT A MORE ADVANCED CIVILIZATION LIKE OURS WILL BE HOSTILE TO HUMANS AND MAY COME TO DESTROY YOUR WORLD. WE ARE NOT HOSTILE TOWARD YOU AND HAVE ONLY PEACEFUL INTENTIONS. WE DO NOT HAVE