Looking for Gordo

“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 well: 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.”

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.

A possible answer, they said, to the eerie silence—the failure to detect any extraterrestrial transmissions—was that there are in fact no other life-forms currently extant. But another possible answer, they contended, was that we’ve misunderstood interstellar etiquette. Perhaps aliens don’t speak until spoken to. They could well be aware of our presence, thanks to our decades of leaking signals out into space, but it might be incumbent upon us to make a gesture that indicates we are beings of goodwill.

Just passively listening, they said, is plain lazy: It implies that we prefer for others to do the heavy lifting of composing messages and beaming them with great power at specific stars. Worse than that, it also shows that we’re greedy, expecting others to give things to us. Any civilization we could contact, they pointed out, will almost certainly be more advanced than our own; the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and we’ve only been a radio-capable species since 1895. Civilizations around other stars might well be thousands, millions, or even billions of years ahead of us. We could gain enormously in terms of knowledge through contact with them; they, on the other hand, would have relatively little to learn from us. Since we would have more to gain, they argued, perhaps it’s expected that we should invest more, by being the first to reach out.

But others had considered this to be dangerous naïveté. First, they said, the underlying assumption that any advanced civilization must be peaceful and altruistic could be wrong. And even if some were, surely, they said, it was possible that others were not. One possible explanation for the Fermi paradox—the fact that although our science suggests that the universe should be teeming with life, all SETI efforts have so far failed—was that there is a violent berserker race that makes it its business to wipe out any civilizations it detects. Whatever other races might still exist locally may have learned by observing this that remaining silent was crucial to survival.

Nonetheless, the METI advocates pushed forward with amendments to the SETI protocol that would allow and encourage direct and immediate proactive transmissions designed specifically to signal our presence to other civilizations. This prompted a rash of resignations from the international commissions involved in drafting the protocol. These self-styled dissidents felt that no overture toward contact should be made without wide-ranging international and interdisciplinary consultation and consensus.

The debate continued to rage here in 2030, but those favoring active SETI had crowed victory when it became clear that the advanced beings at 47 Ursae Majoris had done precisely what they’d proposed humanity should be doing: Those aliens had boldly and deliberately announced their presence to the universe.

Many of the players on both sides had changed since the argument had begun—some had retired, others had died, a couple had even switched positions—but, at last, the opponents of active SETI had gotten what they’d wanted all along: Rather than a few individuals behind closed doors deciding a matter that could have a profound impact on the entire planet, broad public discussions were now occurring. The METI dissidents were finally getting their day in court.

“Ursula,” Professor Sudeyko said, “we humans have a history of considering ourselves special, so forgive the vanity, but is it safe for us to assume that ours was the only world you sent the Reticulum to?”

Ursula clasped her two right arms together. “I’m afraid not. We identified eleven other systems that might have intelligent life. They each got sent copies.”

“Was there anything special about us?”

“Well,” she said, “your star system was the furthest one we sent the Reticulum to. My home system of 47 Ursae Majoris and yours of Sol are forty-six of your light-years apart. But we also sent the Reticulum to 20 Leonis Minoris, which is just twelve of your light-years from us; SV Leonis Minoris AB, just fifteen light-years away; 61 Ursae Majoris, sixteen light-years away; Groombridge 1830, seventeen light-years away—”

Sudeyko held up a hand—and Ursula was as good now at interpreting human gestures as Emily and others were at understanding alien ones. “Thank you,” he said. “And have any of these other systems sent you a reply?”

“The short answer,” said Ursula, “is ‘not yet.’ But, of course, that is a slippery concept in these matters. We made all of the transmissions over a period of three of our years, with the one to you, seeing as it had the farthest to go, being sent first. I have no idea if a reply has been received since that transmission.”

“So,” said Sudeyko, again facing the jury, “you don’t actually know if there were negative consequences to, if I may phrase it this way, shouting in the jungle?”

Emily and her team had spent months combing through the ever-growing data set from the array of radio telescopes. She’d joked to one of the other data-mining specialists that it was like looking for a needle in an infinitely expanding haystack.

If there had been a blindingly obvious signal, such as the first five prime numbers repeated in a very powerful broadcast, the real-time scanners would have caught it as it came in. So, if there was something buried in here, it was likely both a weak signal and a subtle one. Still, there are ways you can tell if something has information content—Zipf plots were one such tool—and other ways, such as Shannon entropy scores, for determining how complex the content is, even if you couldn’t decipher a word of it.

Emily knew the chances of finding anything were slim, but, nonetheless, she kept designing new techniques, tweaking algorithms, modifying filters, and—

—and there it was.

My God.

She’d found it.

She’d found Gordo.

And just like Gordo—just like sauropods, by far the largest land animals ever to exist—it was huge. Gigantic. Not just terabytes. Not petabytes. No: more even than that. Exabytes—quintillions of bytes. She double- and triple-checked, ran some more tests, and then checked again, just to be sure. There had, after all, been numerous false alarms related to SETI signals. The first pulsar discovered in 1967 was dubbed LGM-1 for “Little Green Men One,” because it appeared to be an extraterrestrial beacon, and, in 2015, a signal candidate from the Parkes Radio Observatory in Australia turned out to just be noise from the microwave oven in the lunchroom.

But, when Emily was totally sure, she picked up her phone and said, “Call Hannah Plaxton.”

“It’s after 2 a.m.,” the phone replied. “Are you sure you want to call so late?”

Emily was surprised at the time. Still: “She’s an astronomer. She’s used to being up at night.”

“She’s a radio astronomer,” replied the phone. “She works during the daytime.”

Well, the phone had her there. “All right. But if Hannah comes online overnight, wake me. And book me a flight for tomorrow morning to go see her.”

In 1980, Carl Sagan had popularized the idea of an Encyclopedia Galactica, opining that aliens might someday be so kind as to beam such a thing to us. Back then, Sagan probably considered the Encyclopedia Britannica the pinnacle of human knowledge, and not just because he was a contributor to it. But for all his forward thinking, Cosmic Carl was a product of his time; no encyclopedia could properly systematize all that humanity had learned, although the few remaining Wikipedians still gamely tried.

In 2009, SETI pioneer Seth Shostak started advocating that if humanity were to transmit anything to the stars, it might as well transmit everything, broadcasting the whole World Wide Web. The modern Web would take months to send via microwave, but the whole darn thing could be beamed to a specific target via optical broadband in less than a day.

But, it turned out, the denizens of 47 Ursae Majoris had beaten us to the punch, sending what had been dubbed the Reticulum—their alien counterpart of our World Wide Web.

“My predecessors at my lab pioneered automated picture captioning,” Emily said. “It’s such a common feature in cameras now, we tend not to think about it. But the techniques they developed are a big part of what’s letting us make sense of the Reticulum.” She was standing next to a wall monitor at the Interstellar Communications Society, an image of three of the aliens filling it.

Hannah Plaxton looked down at the caption. “‘A doctor treating a patient,’” she read aloud.

“That’s right,” said Emily. She gestured, and text labels appeared over the image, identifying the specific objects in it: Doctor. Patient. Individual. Tray. Equipment.

Hannah pointed at the “individual.” “Why isn’t this guy mentioned?”

Emily nodded. “The captioning is done with neural networks; they learn as they go along. The more pictures they looked at, the better they got at picking out what was relevant. Look at the eyestalks on the two aliens who are mentioned in the caption. On the doctor, they’re facing toward the patient. She is looking at the patient; the patient is the focus of her attention. And see the patient’s eyestalks? They’re turned toward the doctor. Those two aliens are regarding each other. But the third guy? The one not mentioned in the caption? Sure, the software realized that he’s there, but he’s not looking at either of the other two; his eyes are turned to look at something out of frame. And so the algorithms decided he was just a bystander accidentally caught on camera, not part of the action being depicted.”

“Interesting,” said Hannah. “In most of our own pictures—ones taken by humans—the people in the frame are looking not at each other, but at the camera.”

“Right. Which is so artificial, when you think about it. In fact, if that ever happens on a TV show or in a movie, we’re freaked out; an actor almost never turns directly toward the camera. But it doesn’t seem that any of the pictures in the Reticulum are posed photographs. And that says something about their society, I’m sure. In any civilization, cameras are going to become dirt cheap—they’ll be everywhere. And storage will become so cheap, as well, that you’ll record everything.”

“But what happens to privacy?” asked Hannah.

“Maybe the aliens never valued it in the first place. Look at what little clothing they wear. It’s all functional: sometimes a sash with storage pouches, protective gear, ornamental ribbons. No one part of the anatomy is always covered, so there are clearly no nudity taboos. And there are plenty of photos in which the individuals in the background seem to be having sex.”

“And they don’t desire privacy for that, at least?”

“Maybe the reason we started desiring it was because, while doing it, we’re particularly vulnerable to sneak attack. But with cameras recording everything, you’re probably perfectly safe all the time—so, what the heck. For us, any picture in which people were having sex, whether it was the foreground of the image or the background, that’d be the thing we focused on. But it’s clear from the eyestalks that that particular act is given no special importance. It’s not ignored—it’s not that every alien demurely swivels his eyestalks away whenever he sees a couple of others going at it; there are plenty of pictures in which others happen to be looking at what’s going on. But it’s not disproportionate.”

“Well, that explains why the Reticulum is smaller than our World Wide Web: no nudity or sex taboo equals no pornography. You could shave a zettabyte off our own Web if it didn’t have all that stuff.”

“Exactly. And there’s more. The aliens have three arms. Males have two on the left and one on their right, and females have the opposite configuration. It’s a weird dimorphism, but you can almost see how evolution selected for it. They sent us numerous pictures of family groups walking as woman-child-man. They don’t hold pincers, but the woman puts her left pincer on one of the child’s shoulders, and the man puts his right pincer on the other, and the child is protected, while the adults each have two arms on the outside to do things with, right?”

“Ah, Okay,” said Hannah.

“The algorithms were able to divine some additional meaning from that. Whether it’s conscious or not, the aliens clearly place things that are precious to them adjacent to their single hands. We’re calling them ‘twoside’ and ‘oneside,’ and anything that’s of great value or needs protection seems to be on the oneside.”

“The algorithms did that? Starting with nothing?”

“They didn’t start with nothing. They started with hundreds of millions of images, and looked at each one with a patience and a depth that no humans could have.”

“Data mining for the win,” said Hannah.

“Exactly.”

It was finally Emily’s turn to take the stand. Hannah Plaxton asked her a series of rehearsed questions about the data mining that had discovered the Reticulum. But then it was Piotr Sudeyko’s turn to cross-examine her.

“Dr. Chiu,” he said, “I’ve been very impressed by the naturalness of Ursula’s speech.”

“Thank you.”

“You really have done a remarkable job, producing an alien AI avatar that makes the Reticulum as easy to query as our own World Wide Web.”

“Thank you. It was a team effort.”

“It’s astonishing, really. I was given to understand that the sort of universal translation Ursula performs is impossible. Can you explain to the good women and men of the jury how it was accomplished?”

“Certainly. We had our first big breakthrough in spontaneous speech recognition in 2010, using fully connected deep neural networks, or DNN. For deep learning, you keep throwing more and more samples at the neural nets, and, by comparing one to another, the nets eventually figure out word semantics, sentence semantics, and knowledge modeling.

“One of the keys was realizing that semantic intent is better defined at the phrase/sentence level, rather than at the word level. After all, the meaning of a single word is often ambiguous—is a bat a flying mammal or a sporting club? But a phrase, or a sentence, or even a whole document, contains rich contextual information that we leverage. And, of course, the whole web, whether it’s ours or theirs, contains countless Rosetta stones. There are only a handful of ways to lay out the periodic table, for instance, and any technologically advanced civilization is going to have some sort of representation of it.

“So, our neural nets just kept looking to see which alien words were juxtaposed frequently with which objects in accompanying illustrations. It’s a statistical game, but if you play it long enough, you win.”

“I see. And I suppose for simple things it was fairly easy to come up with a translation table, no?”

“That’s right. For instance, they sent thousands of pictures of mineral specimens, and by examining text linked to those pictures, not only were the neural nets able to figure out the alien words for specific types of minerals—their term for ‘quartz,’ say, or for ‘diamond’—but eventually to figure out general terms, including ones with fine distinctions that even most humans are unaware of, such as the difference between a ‘rock’ and a ‘mineral.’”

“I confess that I myself don’t know the difference.”

“A mineral is homogeneous, with a specific crystalline structure; a rock is made up of multiple minerals.”

“Ah,” said Sudeyko. “And so, I suppose, by the same technique, your algorithms divined the alien words for, say, ‘stream’ and ‘river.’”

“That’s right.”

“And for ‘pond’ and ‘lake.’”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“And ‘sea’ and ‘ocean.’”

“Well…”

“Yes, Dr. Chiu?”

“Of course, our technique can only translate things for which there are terms in both languages. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures and maps of their world they sent us. It’s a much drier planet than our own. There are no seas or oceans—and so no continents or large islands. A map of their world’s surface looks like a slice of Swiss cheese, with the holes being lakes.”

“Aha,” said Sudeyko, smiling in a way that, to Emily, looked triumphant. He turned to Judge Weisman. “Your honor, I’d like to recall Ursula to the stand.”

Weisman announced a fifteen-minute recess. Once it was over and everyone was reseated, Piotr Sudeyko said, “I have a few more questions for you, Ursula.”

The avatar’s eyestalks swiveled to follow him as he paced in the open area in front of the judge’s bench. “I’ll do my best to answer them.”

“I spent a lot of time looking through some of the photographs that were included in the Reticulum. Naturally, many of them were unrecognizable to me. I was very grateful for the automatic captioning; otherwise, in most cases, I’d have had no clue what I was looking at. But there were some photos that were startlingly familiar. Both your people and mine seem to have a fondness for sunsets.”

“Sunsets are beautiful.”

“Indeed they are. And both your sun and ours are very similar, what we call class-G yellow dwarfs. In fact, I’d have a hard time telling in a lot of cases whether a picture was of one of your sunsets or one of ours.”

Ursula’s eyestalks rippled in agreement. “I imagine it could be difficult.”

“But, of course, after the sun finally sets, things are different. Your system is forty-six light-years away from ours.”

“Forty-six of your light-years,” said Ursula amiably. “One hundred and two of ours.”

“Right, right. But, no matter which way you reckon it, it’s enough to shift the arrangement of stars. I’m not an astronomer, like Dr. Plaxton over there, but, if I understand correctly, the brightest star in our nighttime sky is the one we call Sirius, whereas in your sky, it’s the one we know as Canopus.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Of course, here, the moon outshines any star at night, especially when it’s full.”

“True.”

“And I suppose the same thing happens on your world.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Sudeyko stopped his pacing as if startled. “Why not?”

“My world has no moon.”

“Really?” said Sudeyko, raising his eyebrows dramatically. “But then how do you know what a moon is?”

“There are two gas-giant planets in our system; each has several moons that we can observe through telescopes.”

“Ah, I see,” said Sudeyko. “And these gas giants—do they show visible disks to your unaided eyes, or are they just pinpoints of light like the stars?”

“The latter—though of course they move from night to night against the stellar background.”

“And, just to be clear, your world is a rocky planet, like ours?”

“More or less. It’s a little larger, and about two billion of your years older.”

Sudeyko waved those irrelevancies away. “Fine. But, again, to be clear, it’s not, in itself, a moon; that is, the object it orbits around is your sun, not a larger world.”

“That’s right.”

“I imagine on a clear night that you can see what we call the Milky Way, the band of stars visible when you look in toward the galactic center.”

“Yes. We call it the ‘Sky River.’”

“And perhaps, if you’re at the right place on your planet, you can even see our two satellite galaxies—the ones we call the Clouds of Magellan—or the tiny smudge of the nearest separate galaxy, Andromeda.”

“If one’s eyesight is normal, yes.”

“But there are no solid objects—nothing that shows as a disk; nothing that shows visible surface features—in your night sky, correct?”

“That’s right.”

Sudeyko seemed to consider for a time, but of course he was simply letting the impact of this register on the jurors. “Huh,” he said at last. “And, before the recess, Dr. Emily Chiu told us there are no seas or oceans on your world. So, perhaps you could tell me a bit about your previous experience with first contact.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

Someone had stolen Emily’s seat during the recess; she was now four rows from the front. She shifted uncomfortably: Ursula was giving the correct answer, but Emily was afraid the journalists would misinterpret it as a failure on the software’s part.

“Oh,” said Sudeyko, as if a great mystery had been solved. “Right. Your planet is all one big land mass. So, there are no populations that were geographically isolated for millennia, correct?”

“If I follow your meaning, yes, that is correct.”

“So you never underwent anything like, say, what happened here when Europeans came to the Americas, or to Australia. You never had the devastation, the disease, and the decimation of populations that we experienced time and again when formerly isolated cultures came into contact, especially when one was clearly technologically more advanced than the other?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Well,” said Sudeyko, “the past’s the past. Let’s turn to the present. Tell me about your space program.”

“Pardon me?”

“You know: your astronauts, your spaceships.”

“I don’t know the words ‘astronauts’ or ‘spaceships.’”

“So you don’t have a space program?”

“Apparently not.”

“Why not? Judging by the material in the Reticulum, your civilization is substantially more advanced than ours, and we’ve been putting people in space for almost seventy years now.”

“It never occurred to us that such a thing was possible.”

“You didn’t dream from ancient times about going to other worlds?”

Ursula twirled her inside arm in baffled negation. “No. Why would we?”

“Well, that’s an interesting question,” said Sudeyko. “I suppose it’s possible that if we didn’t have a large moon ourselves—if we didn’t have another world hanging over our heads since the dawn of time, tantalizingly just out of reach—perhaps we wouldn’t have been inspired to venture into space, either.”

“That’s an interesting supposition,” agreed Ursula.

“You said earlier that an overwhelming majority of your whole population voted to send the Reticulum to planets in other star systems.”

“Yes.”

“Which means presumably most of you considered it a safe thing to do.”

“Of course.”

“Because, after all, if it never occurred to your people to travel even within your own solar system, it presumably never occurred to you that beings in other star systems might physically bridge the gulf between their world and yours.”

“What a novel suggestion! Yes, you’re right: That never occurred to us.”

Sudeyko moved over and began pacing back and forth in front of the jury box. It was hard to get anyone to take their eyes off Ursula in all her surrealist glory, but the historian wanted to be sure that everyone was looking at him, so his point would land with maximum force. “And so,” he said, “when your people voted, they were not considering the possibility that beings from another world, or their automated probes, might come and enslave, plunder, or destroy your world, isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “That is so.”

“And, because of your planet’s specific circumstances, you blithely went ahead shouting your existence to neighboring stars, without the slightest thought you might be endangering your existence.”

“Yes.”

“But we, who have a history of disastrous first contacts even among our own people, and who have a space program and recognize that others might, too, do understand that attracting attention to ourselves on the galactic stage might in fact bring on unwanted, indeed dangerous, visitors.”

“Objection!” said Hannah, rising to her feet. “Your honor, opposing counsel is arguing his case!”

“Yes,” Judge Weisman said. “He certainly is—and very effectively, too, I might add. Court is recessed until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Emily and Hannah had gone for dinner at a sushi place near the courthouse. “You know,” Hannah said in a derisive tone, “if Sudeyko is right, it could already be over for Ursula’s people. Remember she said they sent their Reticulum to eleven other star systems besides ours? If, say, the beings at 20 Leonis Minoris—just a dozen light-years from them—were his dastardly berserkers, even if their battleships could only manage a third of the speed of light, they’d have had time to show up and annihilate Ursula’s world.”

“You’re sure he’s wrong, aren’t you?” Emily said.

“No,” said Hannah, “I’m not. You can’t prove a negative; you can’t prove hostile aliens don’t exist. But, thanks to you and your team, we now know for sure that peaceful ones do exist.”

The closing arguments went pretty much as Emily expected them to. Hannah Plaxton extolled the virtues of altruistically sharing our art and culture, our science and our spiritual writings, not just with the people of 47 Ursae Majoris, who, after all, had already reached out to us, but also with as many other likely star systems as possible.

And Piotr Sudeyko reiterated his belief that no such actions should be taken without a broad international consensus—even though, as a historian, he doubtless knew that such a thing likely would be impossible to attain.

Judge Weisman gave instructions to the jurors and sent them off to deliberate; their verdict, whatever it might be, would further fuel debate. In that sense, by bringing the matter to wider attention, Sudeyko and the moratorium crowd had already won.

People filed out of the courtroom, but Emily stayed behind. The staff had shut off the giant monitor standing next to the witness dock, but Emily touched the control that turned it back on and Ursula appeared on the screen. Emily regarded the avatar, and the avatar regarded her. At last, Ursula said, “May I be of assistance?”

“Perhaps,” said Emily. “Suppose instead of us composing a reply, suppose we were to ask you to do it. If we gave you access to a powerful radio telescope or messaging laser, what message would you send back to your people about us?”

Ursula’s limbs moved precisely as Emily’s team had programmed them to, mimicking what the neural nets had divined to be gestures of thoughtful reflection. And then the little round mouth irised opened and closed. “I’d tell them we made a mistake.”

Emily was surprised by how sad that made her feel. “You wouldn’t have sent the Reticulum, if you had it to do over?”

Ursula’s inside arm twirled. “No, no, no. That’s not the mistake. The mistake was not realizing that travel between worlds is possible. I would propose to my people that some of them should come here in person.”

“And do you think they would actually do that? Come here? Come to visit humanity?”

“I have no idea,” Ursula said. And then she raised all three arms. “But I know how I’d vote.”