Chapter 10 10. Interplanetary aircraft

For a hundred years, people have been expecting this kind of event to happen, and have experienced many false alarms.However, when it finally arrived, humans were caught off guard. The radio signal from the Alpha constellation is so powerful that people at first mistook it for common channel interference.All the radio astronomers in the world have spent decades carefully searching for traces of civilizations other than the earth in the vast universe. Now they are so ashamed that they don’t know where to hide, not to mention that they have already ruled out Al The ternary system of Fa and Proxima Centauri.

All the radio telescopes in the southern hemisphere were immediately put into operation, and a few hours later, the whole world learned something even more shocking: the source of the signal was not in the Alpha constellation system at all, but somewhere half a degree away from it. point.Also, the signal source is moving. Everything is back to the way it was.The power of the signal no longer surprised anyone, because the source of the signal itself had already entered the range of the solar system and was approaching the sun at a speed of 600 kilometers per second.What humans are looking forward to and fearing so much has finally happened: there are visitors from other planets...

However, for a whole month, the guest from the universe has done nothing: it is flying past some planets in the outer solar system, neither answering the signal from the earth, nor intending to change its comet-like flight trajectory, but only heading towards space. It emits a series of identical pulses, as if to say: "Here I am!" Under the condition of constant flight speed, it will take two thousand years to get here from the constellation Alpha.This situation reassured some people because it proved that the alien was a working probe of the universe, while others, because they did not have the opportunity to see the climax of this "show"-the appearance of a living alien- — and disappointed.

All sorts of now-forgotten sci-fi genres have been seen and studied with great care—from benevolent "angels" descending on Earth to bloodthirsty demons invading our world .Lloyd's of London has thus made a fortune, as men are desperate to have their lives assured in the event of the most unforeseen twists of fortune. Then, as soon as the alien passed Jupiter's orbit, instruments on Earth got the first information about it.Immediately after the report that the flying object had a diameter of 500 kilometers, people were greatly panicked, fortunately only briefly.Will this colonist, who is now in flight, suddenly land on Earth in a hostile manner? ...

However, it soon became clear that the solid parts of this object from another planet had a total diameter of no more than a few meters.The halo around it appears to be a familiar phenomenon—it is a perforated parabolic antenna, much like the orbiting radio telescopes used by astronomers on Earth.Apparently, the extraterrestrials use this antenna to send back to their distant homeland what they discover as they carefully probe the solar system and listen for radio signals. Soon, another sensational news stirred up the whole world—that antenna, the size of an asteroid, was not aimed at the constellation Alpha at all, but another part of space.Obviously, the constellation closest to us is just the last relay station of the extraterrestrial, not its starting point.

The circumstances that allowed people to determine the origin of the extraterrestrials were discovered by accident: an automatic device for studying solar activity suddenly stopped sounding, and it took a minute for it to make sound again.The results of the analysis of the recorded data showed that various instruments had lost their functions for a moment under the action of strong radiation energy.The device intercepted the cosmic visitor's rays, which allowed the direction of its emission to be determined. In that direction, at a distance of fifty-two light-years, is a very faint and apparently very old red dwarf star, one of those inconspicuous little suns; They will also shine steadily throughout the year.Therefore, all the radio telescopes in the world, except those observing the space visitor itself, all aimed at its hypothetical birthplace.

The emitted signal is a clear centimeter band signal.The people who built the detector thousands of years ago are still in touch with it.It took only half a century for the information received by the detectors to reach there now. When entering the orbit of Mars, the visiting guests signal that they know the existence of human beings.He chose the most dramatic, but also the most reliable method-beginning to send 3075 scans of the TV film, and the accompanying sound part was a commentary narrated in fluent Earth language.This is how the first cosmic dialogue in human history began—the preparation time required for it was not decades as previously estimated, but only a few minutes in total.