Technology invades the modern world

Chapter 491 The Day a Reply Came from the Universe

Let's turn back the clock to the night before last.

As an "important" space project, it is not considered particularly important by outsiders, as it is believed that a response will not be available for another 20,000 years.

Even though they capitalized on the professor's popularity, the media and various columnists continued to use the Great Filter and the Fermi Paradox to exaggerate the threat from outer space.

But that's still too far-fetched.

The invasion of Earth by an alien civilization from outer space is less frightening than the sudden appearance of a UFO.

But the staff at the Puerto Rico Observatory consider their work extremely important.

How romantic it is to wait for an echo from the universe, using civilization as a standard?

Coupled with the psychological manipulation (PUA) from NASA and project leaders, the staff here tend to have a certain idealistic streak.

Although more than a decade has passed since large-scale exploration of the universe began, and humanity has never received any regular signals from the universe, what if it does?
The launch ceremony has concluded, and all the VIPs have returned to their hotels.

The observatory has returned to its usual solitary rhythm.

Elliott Reeves is a young engineer at the observatory who is responsible for monitoring data streams and is currently on the night shift.

He is not a star scientist like Drake or Sagan, nor is he a professor who can stir up world events.

He is one of NASA's many cogs in the machine.

To ensure that NASA, this behemoth, can continue to operate without ever going down.

In his view, while the launch of the century at the end of 1970 was grand, major events would eventually come to an end, and he would still have to face piles of monotonous noise from space.

No matter the time or the place, the pull of reality is always so heavy.

Elliott never imagined that the launch was just the beginning, far from the climax of this grand space drama.

Elliott leaned back wearily in his chair, drinking his fifth cup of American dishwater.

The project manager's inflammatory speeches echoed in my mind:

"Our work is the most meaningful work in the entire NASA!"

"We are the first interstellar messengers of human civilization!"

"What we await is not a reply, but an eternal meaning!"

Elliott couldn't help but mutter to himself: The meaning may be eternal, but his salary and shift schedule are not.

He rubbed his sore eyes and turned his attention back to the rows of paper tape recorders and magnetic tape players flashing green lights in front of him.

At 3:15 a.m., Elliott routinely checked the noise curve printed out from the real-time data.

His gaze swept over a strip of paper that had just been ejected from the machine, usually an undulating, irregular jagged line representing random radio waves from the universe and the earth itself.

But he suddenly froze.

A highly unusual phenomenon occurred in a small segment of the graph.

It wasn't noise, it wasn't interference, but a clear and precise repetition of "silence-signal-silence".

This is clearly not random; its pulse width, time interval, and frequency are accurate to five decimal places, perfectly ruling out all known natural celestial phenomena.

Neither pulsars nor quasars are examples of this.

Elliott's heart raced as he pulled up the real-time data from the spectrum analyzer.

On the screen, an unusually narrow and stable peak is fluctuating in a specific UHF frequency band.

He trembled as he performed a preliminary counting analysis on the pulse data.

Elliott obtained a simple sequence of prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11
“This is a smart signal!” Elliott jumped to his feet, his heart pounding in his chest.

Sequence of prime numbers.

In human understanding, numbers are the universal language that proves the existence of intelligence in the universe.

He rushed to the control room, where Raymond, who worked the night shift with him, was sleeping on a cot. Elliott quickly shook him awake: "Raymond! Wake up, wake up!"

Raymond didn't even want to open his eyes, muttering, "My alarm hasn't gone off yet, it shouldn't be four o'clock yet for the shift change?"

Elliott growled, "What kind of time is this for a shift change? Aliens! Aliens have appeared!"

Raymond then opened his eyes and looked around the control room at the screens, blackboard, and desk.

"Where are aliens?"

Elliott wasted no time explaining and dragged Raymond directly to the spectrum analyzer in the duty room outside.

"Look here! In the UHF band, there's an unusually narrow and stable peak! And look at this!" He pointed to the paper tape. "A sequence of prime numbers! This isn't noise! ​​This is a regular pattern!"

Raymond's sleepiness vanished instantly, his gaze fixed on the data on the screen.

His engineer instincts were awakened, and he immediately began to perform a deeper analysis.

"Wait, the peak intensity is too high, but the frequency is a bit off." Raymond quickly pulled up the Doppler drift analysis chart.

On the screen, the analysis results popped up: the signal is moving away from Earth at a speed of 20 kilometers per second.

Elliott and Raymond exchanged a glance.

“How could this be?” Raymond muttered to himself. “This doesn’t fit the characteristics of any near-Earth object.”

The moon? Impossible, its speed and time delay should be stable.

Elliott's voice was hoarse as he quickly recalled all the knowledge he had gained about astronomy during his doctoral studies: "The data exhibits multiple echoes and complex time delays, as if the signal were being scattered by a distant interstellar medium. This must be a signal from deep space."

Raymond shook his head: "No, if it were a signal from deep space, it shouldn't be this clear in terms of intensity."

It's too clear. No, we need to call the doctor right away.

The doctor here is not Aldrin, but Dr. Drake, the project leader.

“Could it be a prank from Soviet Russia?” Elliott’s voice was full of uncertainty.

Even the most devout UFO enthusiast, upon witnessing a UFO crash in the jungle and then finding the wreckage himself, would likely have the same first reaction: "This is some cheap product from some amateur tech enthusiast."
This "Ye Gong's love of dragons" mentality is widespread among human groups.

Elliott was no exception.

"Elliott, observe the power and frequency accuracy of the signal."

What would they need to transmit a signal from the other side of the Earth, namely the Soviet Union, with a strength sufficient for Arecibo to clearly detect and to fully simulate deep space scattering and Doppler drift?
What they need is a radio telescope with a diameter similar to Arecibo, and then to fire at us with at least five megawatts of power!

More importantly, they had to ensure that this signal maintained such an amazingly narrow bandwidth and frequency stability amidst our atmospheric and horizon noise!
"This level of precision is beyond the capabilities of the Soviet/Russian engineering system, which is known for its large-scale and rudimentary approach." Raymond flatly refused.

Elliott then asked, "And what about China?"

"Impossible. China excels in the semiconductor field and also has considerable expertise in electromagnetic waves related to radar. But the technology required is beyond America's capabilities, let alone China's."

Moreover, such pranks would be meaningless if they were done by countries on Earth; there needs to be a reason for doing such things.

Wasting enormous amounts of money, manpower, and time just to generate a sequence of prime numbers?
"Then you might as well say it was a joke the professor played using NASA resources."

As Raymond answered, his fingers flew across the keyboard, trying to pinpoint a fixed, narrow "point" using triangulation to see where the signal was coming from.

"The angular resolution is too low! Elliott, our machines tell us that the source of this signal is wide, covering almost the entire sky!"

This is very strange. The signal itself looks like a weak, scattered signal from a distant galaxy, but its strength is completely contrary to this conclusion!

In terms of intensity, it was at most sent from Mars.

Elliott grabbed the emergency phone, his hand trembling: "We must wake Dr. Drake immediately."

"Control Center! Wake up Dr. Drake immediately! I repeat, wake up Dr. Drake immediately!"
We've intercepted a smart signal! A regular pulse sequence!

Source unknown, source unknown!

The alarm blared instantly in the quiet of the observatory in the dead of night, shattering its silence.

The engineers and technicians stationed in the observatory's living quarters were awakened. Dressed in brightly colored pajamas and coats, and despite their sleepiness and immense confusion, they rushed to the underground data processing center.

In the corridor, only the rapid thud of leather shoes and the engineers' incoherent questions could be heard:

"What happened? Is there a problem with the main feed platform?"

"Signal! Really signal! Prime number!"

"It comes from deep space, but its intensity is strange."

As engineers squeezed into the cramped control center, two conflicting data charts were passed from hand to hand.

One is a precise sequence of prime numbers, the other is a chaotic Doppler drift and a broad source of signals.

The highest-ranking person on the scene was a woman named Maria González, who quickly took over the situation.

She asked the team to immediately conduct three cross-validations:
Independent decoding, antenna pointing, and background comparison.

This process is an emergency verification procedure established by NASA.

In the event of a signal from outer space, this method will be used for the first level of confirmation.

In the original timeline, contingency procedures that had not been used for decades were put to use in the present day after only two years of development.

Three different engineers, including Elliott, were isolated in front of different terminals.

They performed repeat counting and sequence analysis on the raw data from paper tapes and magnetic tapes.

Elliott exclaimed excitedly, "They're prime numbers! Without a doubt! They appear at a constant bit rate, with an error of less than a millionth of a second! This isn't a coding error; it's a mathematical signature!"

Other engineers subsequently confirmed this.

Maria calmly said, "Very good, we have confirmed the intelligence. The next step is to confirm its source."

This is the second confirmation: fine-tuning the Arecibo antenna to rule out the possibility of a point-like deep-space source.

This is the most crucial step.

Arecibo’s giant antenna is designed to focus weak signals from the universe onto the feed receiver.

If the signal comes from a distant galaxy, the signal strength will decrease drastically if the antenna deviates from the target area by even one-thousandth of a degree.

Raymond was in charge of operating the control console. Following Maria's instructions, he shifted the antenna's main axis 0.05 degrees south from the initially captured sky area.

Everyone present held their breath, waiting for the green peak representing signal strength on the screen to quickly collapse.

However, contrary to expectations, the peak value on the screen hardly changed.

Incredibly, Raymond moved the antenna another 0.1 degrees north.

Raymond's voice trembled: "Report, signal strength remains at a stable peak!"
We have deviated significantly from the initial direction, but the intensity remains unchanged!

This indicates that the signal did not originate from a single point, but rather from a sector covering a very wide area!

Maria looked thoughtful: "This means it's a wide-area launch! It also means this civilization doesn't want us to find it through triangulation."

Its signal was like a giant blanket, covering our field of vision.

Raymond added, "This means that our Soviet counterparts, our European counterparts, and even our civilian counterparts will receive this signal."

The final step is to eliminate Earth's noise.

This step involves a team of experienced noise analysts comparing the signal characteristics against all noise databases recorded by the observatory.

"Interplanetary flicker has been ruled out; the signal is too stable and there are no signs of interference from the solar wind."

"Without human interference, the signal frequency and bandwidth are as clean as a vacuum, without the 60 Hz harmonics of alternating current or the side lobes of radio stations. It is completely isolated from the pollution of the earth."

"We ruled out all possibilities: it's not a pulsar, not a quasar, not a Soviet trick, not Earth noise."

It is a physically contradictory signal.

"Intensity suggests it comes from within Mars, but Doppler drift and breadth suggest it comes from deep space thousands of light-years away."

At five o'clock in the morning, as the sky began to lighten, several rented cars sped up the hillside of the observatory at breakneck speed.

Dr. Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and several key project scientists, their hair disheveled and suits wrinkled, stormed into the control center.

Drake took their analysis report and data charts from Maria, his expression quickly shifting from shock to focus.

“Doppler drift,” Drake muttered to himself, tapping his fingers on the table.

"This means that the signal source is moving away from us at an extremely fast speed right now."

Carl Sagan said:
“They don’t want us to know who they are, Drake.”

They don't want us to know where they are.

They sent evidence of wisdom, but concealed all their identity information.

"The speed is too fast. This must not be related to the Arecibo message. We received this response as soon as our signal was transmitted."

"So what is the purpose of this civilization? Where exactly are they located?"

At the observatory, engineers and scientists from diverse backgrounds had endless speculations.

"Gentlemen, what we need to do right now, in any case, is to report this to NASA and to the professor, right?" Maria González reminded him.

(End of this chapter)