I ask you to build tractors, but you build rockets?

presidential palace.

John put his arms on the table and typed quickly on Twitter with a hand speed that was inappropriate for his age.

"The earthquake was entirely caused by natural factors. The power of hydrogen bombs is nothing compared to nature. I sympathize with the people in the disaster area and will personally donate US$100,000 to compensate for their losses."

After editing the tweet, he also added a list of names, all of which were officials who were active on Twitter.

The day before yesterday, the Wyoming successfully carried out the last cleanup operation. It launched a missile from a distance of 5,400 kilometers and detonated it in the predetermined airspace. The yield was just higher than the Lucia missile, which was considered a passable result.

Fortunately, most of the power of this air-explosion hydrogen bomb was limited to the controlled area. It only caused two large-scale power outages and loss of communication signals outside the controlled area. Edo City was basically not affected.

However, four hours after the nuclear explosion, a strong earthquake of magnitude 7.6 occurred in the waters surrounding Hokkaido, causing some damage to four cities. Many people believe that the earthquake was caused by a hydrogen bomb.

This statement was of course extremely ridiculous in John's opinion, and he did not even intend to make an official response.

After closing Twitter, he skillfully opened TikTok. These two softwares, one blue and one black, have become important tools for him to understand the public sentiment.

Although the traffic is still very expensive, it cannot stop his heart of having fun with the people!

Reading official reports is much more painful than tweets and short videos. The result of the prevalence of bureaucracy is that reports are extremely complicated and complicated. There are often hundreds of pages of documents mixed with various conspiracies, especially when it comes to budget approval, with many various items. It's almost dazzling.

After finishing another viral video on TikTok titled "The Most Beautiful Nuclear Explosion Scene Mix", there was a knock on the office door.

"Please come in."

John put down his phone and subconsciously sat up straighter.

Robert and Claire came in. It should not be a trivial matter for the former and current director to come hand in hand.

"What's wrong, gentlemen, don't tell me there's something wrong with the moon program again."

"The Artemis 3 mission went smoothly and is in good condition."

Robert's words dispelled his biggest worry, but the former's expression was still serious, which made John a little uneasy.

Sure enough, the next sentence suddenly changed the atmosphere.

"Mr. President, we have intercepted an alien signal, very close to the earth, right around Mars."

"..."

The air fell into silence. Claire and Robert were cautious because of the serious stakes, while John didn't know what to say at all.

Even if someone told him that the Chinese planned to build a military base on the moon, he would believe it, but aliens...

After experiencing the repeated process of wanting to speak and then stopping, and then stopping and wanting to speak again, John tentatively opened his mouth and said:

"Lightfoot, if NACA wants to increase funding, I can approve more. You are the director of the space agency, so you should be more serious."

He actually didn't quite believe that the two directors of NACA came together just to deceive him, but once the topic of aliens got serious, it was so scary that he couldn't believe it at all.

"Sorry, I can understand your reaction. In fact, it is hard for us to believe it, but it is the truth."

Claire solemnly took out a stack of paper from the briefcase, placed it on John's desk, and recounted the whole story.

Things have to go back to the Mars rover team controlling Curiosity. It was a very ordinary afternoon nearly two weeks ago. Curiosity, which had been sleeping in the dark for more than 40 hours, had another good weather and was ready to launch its mission. Set a target and start surveying.

In order to observe whether the terrain of the destination can be passed safely, Boris applied for access to the MRO (Mars Ring Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005). It is equipped with a high-definition lens with a resolution of 0.3 meters, which is the current optical telemetry effect on Mars orbit. Best satellite.

MRO soon began its observation mission, but just as it was sending back a signal, a beam of radio waves passed by it, leaving a record in its log.

There is no shortage of electromagnetic waves in the universe. Whether it is the sun, planets, or satellites, all active celestial bodies emit electromagnetic waves all the time. There are countless electromagnetic waves outside the solar system. These natural signals will basically be processed as background noise.

But this signal is different. Although its frequency band is not within the spacecraft communication frequency band at all, and it should be filtered out, its signal strength is not normal. It does not look like normal attenuation across a long distance, but more like Mars. surrounding emission sources.

This abnormal record was immediately noticed by the staff responsible for regulating the MRO. She didn't think much about it at the time. This situation was not uncommon. She just recorded it habitually in accordance with NACA's requirements and handed it over to "Team A" for analysis.

Group A, Group A, is a very mysterious but actually better than nothing department. It is not even a formal work department.

A comes from Alien, which originated during the rise of the space race in the 1970s. At that time, the Alliance gave up its Mars plan and bet on Venus. Scientists at that time believed that the environment of Venus was similar to that of the Earth and that there might be aliens. When Venus 4 hit, Before entering the atmosphere of Venus and discovering that it was hell, people had many beautiful fantasies about it.

At that time, the competition was at its most intense. With both sides investing huge resources in researching even superpowers, it was understandable to establish research on aliens.

However, the research on superpowers is slightly different. It originated from Ami's doubts about the extremely loyal and even subversive behavior of those alliance spies, believing that they were controlled by some powerful brainwashing technology, so he began to study mind control and even comprehensive research. Superpower research.

The foundation of alien research is much weaker, so even the "Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Association", the predecessor of Group A, did not have much influence when it was established. It has continued to decline since then, and now it is almost just a name.

Employees who have free time will regularly take turns to serve as Group A employees, summarizing some messy alien clues. The biggest meaning is to have some fun or let the nascent marketing account make up videos.

After this abnormal signal was given to Group A, they also processed it according to regular steps, that is, splitting, spectrum analysis, etc. according to certain rules. This is a method that cryptographers and astrophysicists have long established, mainly To determine the "amount of information" in the signal.

Although those seniors at that time did not know what encoding the aliens used, one thing was absolutely correct: signals were used to carry information, and they must be regular, that is, repeated.

Based on this basic principle, it is more accurate to judge whether it is a smart signal, and according to certain conditions, it can also be divided into five levels ABCDE. Levels below C are basically meaningless, and level A can truly determine the content.

The biggest doubt about the unknown signal this time was actually the intensity, which was not very special in itself. James, the engineer on duty at the time, analyzed it step by step when he had time.

The answer, of course, is that there is no result. After several attempts, no matter how you split it, there is no pattern, and the conclusion has been reached.

At this time, one of the engineer's colleagues, Itarriano, passed by. He was very interested and sat down to try it. As expected, the same result was obtained.

But Itarriano was not discouraged, always having an intuition that there must be something.

James mocked him as delusional at the time, because UFO enthusiasts around the world also had this intuition and were unwavering in it.

In the end, Itarriano took the recorded signal spectrum home and analyzed it himself, and half a month passed by in a flash.

James had almost forgotten about it, but Itarriano suddenly came to him excitedly and said he had made a big discovery.

The disheveled Itarriano told his own experience: In the first week, he had no clue at all, and once suspected that it was his delusion, but one afternoon he was doing his own job - his current job is communications Department, when I habitually read the latest communication patents, I saw a ternary modulator patent filed by XAP.

It is well known that XAP and Huanghehuang Semiconductor have an unclear relationship. As promoters of ternary chips, they have been trying to improve this ecological chain and avoid the troublesome translation problems at this stage.

In their description, ternary signal modulation can compress the information volume and enhance anti-interference capabilities, which is very helpful for interstellar communications.

Itarriano seemed to have grasped something and tried it with a last ditch zeal.

This time he tried more than a hundred combinations and finally found a clue.

After another whole day, he got a compiled radio map.

The dense and regular fluctuations not only indicate that they carry information, but also contain a lot of information.

The analysis results were returned to Boris, who immediately found colleagues in related fields to verify the calculations, and the results were correct.

This time they went a step further, using ternary and octal interpretations respectively to obtain content that was highly suspected of being valid information. Although it could not be deciphered without the corresponding password, it was 100% confirmed that the signal was sent by an intelligent entity.

As for the issue of whether other satellites were launched, it is easy to rule out. In addition to several Aramco probes, the only ones currently orbiting Mars are ESA's "Mars Express", India's MOM, and the United Arab Emirates' "Hope".

The suspicions of these three can be completely eliminated, so the result is that there is an unknown emission source within tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of kilometers around Mars, emitting signals in unknown directions.

Of course, they have not forgotten the "Lihuo" launched by XAP, but it will take at least half a year for the detector to arrive. It is probably still rushing in the vast deep sky, so it can be ruled out.

After listening to this, John was greatly shocked, but so many experts had studied it together, making it almost impossible to make mistakes.

"Can't you tell where the signal is going?"

Robert shook his head and said helplessly:

“The signal is too short, and we can only infer that the receiver range should be within the solar system based on the emission intensity, but this does not mean that aliens are in the solar system, and it is not absolutely accurate. We cannot use human thinking to speculate on what they do. "

"But the basis for our exclusion of it being a human launch is the encryption method. The way Itariano finally tried to successfully parse it was so weird that even the most senior cryptographers couldn't find the origin.

And they obviously hope to disguise themselves as natural signals to avoid detection. The solar system is too vast. If MRO hadn't caught up with an irreproducible coincidence, we would never have noticed it elsewhere. "

Claire then explained that although the attenuation of electromagnetic waves in vacuum is much smaller than that on earth, for example, the antenna power of Voyager 2 is only 20W but can span more than 20 billion kilometers, but this does not mean that it is difficult to find the signal. easy.

After the 20W power reaches the earth, it will attenuate to one trillionth of its original value. Not only does the transmitting antenna need to be aligned with the earth through an ultra-high-precision gyroscope, but it also requires a high-gain antenna with a diameter of more than 70 meters on the ground and a global receiving array for amplification. Hundreds of millions of times, the signal will be lost if you are even slightly dissatisfied.

What if the alien's receiver can amplify tens of billions of times, billions of billions of times? Maybe this signal will be forwarded elsewhere, maybe...

Everything else inferred based on the current information alone is inaccurate. The only thing that can be determined is that it does not belong to all known human detectors, but this is enough.

John fell silent again, but this time his brain was working rapidly and he really began to think rationally about this extremely absurd thing.

I don’t know how long it took, but he suddenly raised his head and said thoughtfully:

"The Chinese have announced four simultaneous Mars landing exploration plans. Do they know anything?"

The sudden change of topic made Robert somewhat unresponsive, but Claire had obviously thought about this question before and answered without much hesitation:

"It is possible that if the moon has minerals or a strategic position that attracts them, then Mars is too far away to have no practical value at all. The competition between us is not so urgent that we need to land on Mars immediately to prove ourselves."

Although the Tianwen plan to launch four at once is indeed amazing, considering their radical strategy, it is still normal. Claire does not think there is any conspiracy.

John naturally heard the disapproval behind the agreement, crossed his fingers and thought about it again, and then slowly proposed his own response strategy:

"First of all, we have to collect as much information as possible and mobilize all our forces for monitoring. We must not rule out the possibility of man-made... humans. This matter deserves our highest vigilance to investigate.

I will ask the Hexagon to work with you to establish a secret research team, and conduct secret activities as the top secret of the United States, and give it the highest authority until the investigation is clear.

Second, call in experts to conduct analysis on the premise of aliens, determine their purpose, whether they are... friendly, and try to decipher the signals.

Third... this can be semi-public, studying how to carry out interstellar defense. I believe that we are not turkeys without threats.

Finally, this matter needs to be kept secret no matter what. The Bureau of Investigation and the Intelligence Bureau will conduct cross-investigations and closely monitor all insiders.

I will also call on others, and the Presidential Palace needs a dedicated interim agency to take charge of this matter. "

Claire agrees with these decisions, and they are all safe choices under the current circumstances.

"We will follow up immediately, but... I think you haven't forgotten Christina. There is no answer to that matter so far. Maybe we should also recall her secretly.

If there is really a connection..."

Claire took a deep breath and tremblingly said the answer he least wanted to see:

"If both times are not coincidences, then there is a 99% chance that we will start an interstellar war."