The Fuck!
‘What are the odds we will get the green light?’
‘I would put them at 70/100,’ the secretary of foreign affairs said.
The President thought for a moment. ‘What makes you say so?’
‘Well for starters, they could think that it is an elaborate plot to sabotage their computing prowess. We need them to hand over 15 of their top 50 supercomputers. They have every reason to not do so.’
‘I see, will 15 be enough?’
‘We are looking at something of the order of 300 thousand petaflops of computing power. Combined with the supercomputers of Japan, EU and Canada, it should be enough to analyse the entire data in about a week’
‘Alright,’ the President said. He picked up the phone and said, ‘Place a top security call to the Chinese Premier. Right away. I don’t care what time it is in China. Do it urgently.’
Fifteen minutes later, the Chinese Premier was awake, and the english translators were arranged. The call was made.
‘Mr Keqiang, sorry for disturbing you this late,’ the President said. ‘It is a matter of absolute urgency which forced me to contact you at this hour’
On the other side, Beijing translators quickly translated the message and passed it along.
‘No worries, tell us what has happened,’ the Chinese premiere asked in Chinese.
‘If you might know, NASA’s Space Network has recently identified signals which we believe have come from extra terrestrial life forms.’
‘Do you mean aliens?’ there was a distinct murmur on the other side of the phone.
‘Yes, precisely,’ the United States President said. ‘We have been receiving Quantum data for about 2 hours now. We believe that the total size of the data exceeds 100 exabytes.’
‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Yes, I’ve already spoken with the EU and the Japanese head of state. We’ve made arrangements to analyse and store the data as quickly as possible’
The Chinese premiere didn’t speak anything.
After a while, the President continued, ‘As I’ve been briefed, the computing power of all our nations combined in not enough to analyse the entire data. We’ve been working hard to find a work-through. We have every reason to believe that the extra-terrestrial life forms are super-intelligent.’
‘I see. What do you need from us?’
‘We need more computing power, more storage space to analyse the entire data. We need your help.’
‘We would be ready to help. Can you talk about the exact details?’
‘That is good to know, Mr Keqiang. We need 15 of the Chinese top Supercomputers and an additional of 50 exabytes of storage space. NSA and NASA scientist will get in touch with the Chinese scientists shortly.’
‘We will look into what we can do. We are not promising anything. We will do everything in our capacity to help.’
‘Okay. Once you talk with your technical advisors, I think you will more than agree to our terms. The danger we are talking about is huge.’
‘I see.’
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Five hours later, national emergency was declared in the United States. Shortly afterwards, EU and China followed suit. Couple of hours later, India Australia and other nations did the same.
The official message released by the White House was short and curt: ‘NASA had earlier today received extra-terrestrial signals. We need to analyse the data and then decide on the course of action. The public needs to remain calm.’
The government took over the data centres of Google, Microsoft and Apple. Social networking sites Facebook, Twitter were taken over. Chinese companies of Baidu, Tencent were shut down. The internet service providers in 150 countries were closed. Internet was used only by the government agencies. All non-government IP addresses were banned.
All space networks; Deep Space Network, Space Network, Indian Deep Space Network pointed at the star of AD Leonis, the point where the signals seemed to originate from. The data was passed on to the nearest servers.
A mechanism was hastily arranged which together combined, gave over 1 million petaflops of computing power. The satellites, Ground receivers, servers, supercomputers, data centres all worked together in the biggest singular network world had ever seen. Over 190,000 scientists and engineers worked together; 18 hours a day, with one purpose: to find out the head and tail of the alien signal.
———————————————————————————————————————
One week had passed since the signal was first received. The data had been completely analysed.
At the third combined meeting of the United Nations Committee for extra-terrestrial life, US President spoke.
‘One week ago, we received a quantum signal from alien civilisation based in the star system of AD Leonis. The signal lasted for about eight hours. We received a total of 130 exabytes of data. We’ve now analysed the entire data. Computing power from over 20 countries were pooled together to achieve this feat.’
The conference room was filled with the heads of state from over 50 different countries. Each of them wore a headphone, while the translators on the second floor were busy translating the words of the President, in real time.
‘We have come to the conclusion that the signal sent by the Aliens, who call themselves ‘Pyrusie’ is actually a dictionary of their entire combined knowledge. The data accumulated during the entire species’ lifespan has been sent across to us. This data, is what they call ‘Kitomuri’.’
‘In naive terms, it would same as if we sent the contents of Wikipedia in all languages to some other alien civilisation.’
‘After analysing the data, we have every reason to believe that their civilisation is much advanced than ours. They have perfected the method to extract energy directly from the stars. They also have the means to travel interstellar distances. We’ve found out that they had pinged the same information to us fifteen times in the past millennium. This is the first time we’ve ever had the capability to analyse and understand their signal in the history of mankind.’
‘They have built and have been using almost every technology that we have been dreaming of. The compute using quantum states of matter. They have been using anti-matter propulsion techniques which enable them to travel at 0.5 times the speed of light.’
‘The aliens we speak of look something like this,’ the president said, pointing at the projector screen behind him.
A black blob of gooey material showed up on the screen. The shape of the organism was irregular. The appendages of the alien were made of different material than its body.
‘We belive that they evolved in the same manner as life on earth did. Chemical based life forms, they were, around 15,000 years ago. Since then they’ve turned, or rather evolved themselves into nanotechnology based lifeforms. They can self replicate. They do not age. They do not have to eat or consume anything. They can transform into any shape and any size they wish. They are immune to radiation, gravity; or its lack, anything. They are effectively immortal.’
The gaping mouths of the other dignitaries greeted him. He allowed that information to seep through.
‘Also, they are super intelligent. We cannot fathom what they understand nor can we think the way they could. On evolutionary scale, their intelligence is as high up from ours as is ours from a small bacteria.’
Murmurs ran through the hall.
‘Moreover, from the signal we received, large part of the data focussed on the star map of our galaxy. Much of the data there did not match our understand of their lifeforms. It was sort of a different file-type. It was compressed dictionary of data in the dictionary itself. Kitomuri within kitomuri.’
‘The AD Leonis civilisation had made contact with and had researched more than 290 million star systems in our Galaxy. they have catalogued and researched them extensively. They have sent their Kitomuri within their own kitomuri.’
A hand was raised. ‘But why would they do that, why would they send us all their data?’ The president of France asked.
‘Our understanding is that this is the standard greeting message from their civilisation. They send their entire data, their Kitomuri, as a handshake message. They want us to know who they are, what they do, how far they’ve progress, their shortcoming, everything.’
‘How many more alien species are their in their database?’
‘About 50,000. Almost all of them are intelligent. Most of them have achieved intelligence similar to them.’
‘However,’ the President said. ‘The most important findings of them all was the fact that their species, and infact, none of the ones in their databases, have the capability to ‘lie’.’
‘It turns out the evolutionary functions of lying are so limited that they are very very rare. None of the species are capable of lying. None of the 50,000 alien species. Moreover, some of our scientists believe that to them witholding information is the same as lying. This might explain them sending us the entire Kitomuri.’
‘Just to be sure, you mean to say that they are rational, super-rational even, but they do not have the capability of lying?’ the President of India asked.
‘Yes, that is precisely my point.’
The Prime Minister of United Kingdom asked, ’What about the technologies you spoke of, the alien technologies. If they have sent their entire data, should all the inventions, discoveries, theories, be there in it?’
‘Yes it is all there. As you can understand, all the information is extremely vital and highly volatile. We cannot trust it enough not to fall into wrong hands. God forbid if some terrorist organisation knew how to built the anti-matter bomb.’
‘Agreed,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘But how will this information be distributed amongst us? Which country will get what data?’
‘We will have to work that out in the next few days.’
————————————————————————————————————————
20 light years away, two blobs of nano-silicon, on a desolate moon in the AD Leonis system talked, or rather telepathied to each other.