Serengeti: a Solution to Fermi’s Paradox

by Peter Cawdron

conclusion

“What? Now? It’s the middle of the night?”

“Yes, now,” Diana insisted. Her expression was priceless, simple innocence, impetuous and vibrant. Her face radiated life.

“Do you even realise what’s involved?” he asked.

“No,” replied Diana, looking curious. She really didn’t know, Anderson realised.

“We’ve got to deploy the inertial dampeners, drop into a sub-relativistic speed and deploy the array arm before we can even start scanning with the main probe.”

“But isn’t it an automated process?” Diana asked. Her tone of voice was inquisitive. “I thought it was all computer driven, a sort of set-and-forget procedure.”

“It is a complex process,” Anderson insisted. Without realising it, he was being stubborn in response to her stubborn refusal to drop the issue. “We only fire up the sensor array once or twice a year at most. And everyone’s asleep. The crew should be on stand-by when we initiate deceleration. This would be completely against protocol.”

“Oh, come on,” said Diana, pulling playfully on his sleeve, physically willing him into action. The gentle scrap of her nails, the warmth of her fingers, felt good, but still he resisted.

“This is not the time for joyriding.”

“Maybe it is,” Diana offered, thinking about it for a second, one of her hands resting intimately on his chest as she leaned up against him. “Maybe you’ve formalised the process too much. Maybe you need some spontaneity. Maybe you’re too busy looking simply for what you’re expecting to find and you’re missing what’s really out there.”

“It’s too much of a drain on the power cells,” Anderson began, but Diana cut him off with her soft, gentle voice. Her hand slid down and rested on the side of his hip.

“They’ll recharge. Stop thinking like The Commander for once. Stop thinking like some hereditary ruler, a king set in place by the divine right of some ancient wizard of a scientist, and remember who you really are.

“You’re a clone, just like me. Take off that uniform and we’re both the same. We’re both just people. We think the same. We walk the same. We eat the same. You have the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same doubts and questions. You’re looking for meaning too. And not just some theoretical recognition of an ancient mission goal, you’re looking for it in the depth of your soul just as I am. That’s why you’re up here, milling around in the middle of the night. That’s why we’re both here.”

She paused, lifting her hand away from him. Anderson was silent. He felt cold where just seconds before he’d enjoyed the soft warmth of her touch.

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” she said, leaning forward.

“What?” replied Anderson, stunned by her boldness. The whole conversation had made him feel distinctly uneasy. He’d gone from being confident and in control to a feeling of plunging headfirst into a spiral.

“You’re afraid, just like me. You’re afraid your whole life will somehow be negated if there’s actually nothing out there. You’ve looked in the past and not seen anything, and you’re scared that it means there is no life. But just because we can’t see something, that doesn’t mean it’s not there, right? Maybe the Serengeti principle is true, but our equipment just isn’t sensitive enough to pick up these bubbles even from out here in intergalactic space. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying, and it doesn’t mean that our attempts are failures, does it? Isn’t it valiant and worthy just to be a part of the endeavour?”

For a child, Diana-9 was a fast learner. She was using his own logic against him. On one hand, she wanted to challenge him, but on the other she was looking for him to lead. Did he really mean what he’d said earlier about life giving purpose and meaning to the universe, or was that just lip service to the mission, a cliché to satisfy the curiosity of a new-born?

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Anderson said, more to himself than to her. “Computer, prep the ship for deceleration. Start the inertial dampening harmonics.”

Diana sat there knocking her knees together with excitement as the computer responded, saying, “Yes, commander.” Its soft, feminine voice was deep and quietly reassuring.

Harmonics. Somehow that term awakened her memory, or at least the memories she’d been given. Although she’d never personally experienced it, she remembered the effect of inertial dampening. She remembered the stiff feel of the air, the thick sludge that congealed around her body, making ordinary movements feel like wading through water.

The fine hair on her arms began to tingle. She felt the air thicken and revelled in the realisation of what was happening. She stood up and walked over to the railing, looking up at the glowing ring of the galaxy shining like a halo above. Her steps were sluggish, as though her shoes were full of lead.

“Are you ready?” asked Anderson, his voice sounding deep and slurred in the thickening medium of the congealing air.

“Yes.”

Somehow, she remembered this too, the changing view when dropping to half the speed of light. Although she remembered it, she knew she’d never personally seen it. She was excited to see it again for the first time.

Anderson spoke with distinct clarity, saying, “Computer, reverse velocity to half the EMR and then return to standard acceleration.”

Diana never heard the computer respond. The air around her thickened like a gel before going rock-hard. Sound no longer carried. For a few seconds, Diana couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t so much as flex her muscles, even her eyelids were held firmly in place. It was as though she’d been frozen alive. A moment of panic swept over her. She was suffocating, drowning.

But the moment passed and the dampening faded. Within seconds it was gone. As the harmonics dissipated, Diana moved her arms, feeling the heavy air rolling over her skin, and then it was over and normality returned. She felt electrified.

Before her eyes, in those few seconds as she stood transfixed, the distorted, compressed image of the galactic ring descended swiftly, the halo of light flattened and spread out smoothly before her as it fell below the craft. Diana felt a sense of vertigo as specks of light stretched out before her, unfolding and unravelling into the Milky Way.

From her perspective, it looked as though they had somehow passed through the star field from beneath the Milky Way and now sat above the plane of the galaxy. In reality, the craft had barely moved at all in relation to the galaxy. It had simply reduced its relative velocity, and the illusion generated by travelling so close to the speed of light had disappeared.

The Milky Way was massive. Whereas beforehand the Milky Way had appeared compressed tightly into a halo above them, the galaxy now appeared vast and flat. Instead of being curled into a glowing ring, it now lay stretching out into the distance as a disc below them. Diana was surprised to see just how huge the Milky Way actually was and how close they still were to the galactic plane.

Before, the glowing halo of stars had appeared so far away, so high above them, but now they’d dropped their speed, it was clear the Serengeti had barely broken the dust plane of the immense star field beneath them. The galaxy extended out before her at waist height. The galactic bulge rose up as a dome, reaching above eye-level in the distance. The centre of the galaxy sat well over twenty thousand light-years in the distance as an amorphous mass of glowing stars and interstellar gas dominating the horizon. It was a colossus among giants.

“That’ll wake a few people,” Anderson commented nonchalantly. “But it’s like a bout of apnea. They’ll probably just cough, roll over and go back to sleep.”

Diana was speechless. She’d never imagined anything like this in the few short months of her life. Even with all the midnight sessions, sitting there dreaming about the heavens, she never imagined the galaxy was so spectacular, so vast and so dominant.

“Computer, switch the main decks to auxiliary power and divert the main power cell to the large sensor array.”

“Yes, commander,” came the reply.

Anderson got up off the bench and walked over to a command console. His fingers rippled over the fine strands of fibre-optics set across the control panel. The fibres responded to his deft touch, lighting up in soft shades of blue, green and orange.

“Computer, run a standard sweep of the ten closest galaxies.”

“Yes, commander,” came the reply again.

Immediately above them, the clear dome shimmered. The dome changed from a transparent view of the universe to a series of images showing various galaxies in stunning detail, each one stretched out to cover an area up to thirty feet across, evenly spaced around the dome.

Individual stars within the galaxies were visible as fine pin-pricks of light in the swirling mass of gas clouds and dust lanes. The outer fringes were peppered with the birth of blue stars while cooler, older, yellow stars dominated the central hub of these spiralled and spiral-barrelled galaxies.

Andromeda, in particular, was radiant in its beauty. Shades of gold, strands of purple and orange, along with hints of blue turned the galaxy into a collection of jewels. Millions of diamonds, topaz, emeralds and rubies lay swirled, seemingly scattered across a black velvet backdrop.

Diana turned around to see the various consoles on the command deck coming to life, lighting up and chirping quietly as the sensor readings came in. But there was no life. Below each galaxy, a series of read-outs displayed row upon row of zeros.

Anderson didn’t even look. What would there be to see? He’d seen these results a hundred times. His mind wandered elsewhere, his eyelids growing heavy as the night wore on.

“Look for us,” Diana said. She seemed completely unfazed by the negative result.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what would you do to look for something like us out there, something like our ship?”

“Well,” thought Anderson. “We couldn’t see a ship like ours directly at this distance, but we might be able to see the exhaust bloom. An antimatter propulsion drive like ours would resonate in the 1500K range.”

He thought about it for a few seconds before he continued. “Although it’s thin, the exhaust trail would radiate outward as it dissipated, somewhat like the wake of a boat on a lake. It could stretch for several parsecs so I guess it might be visible.

“Computer, amplify and enhance trace emissions in the infra-red range, focusing on narrow, triangular but elongated structures up to five parsecs in width and correlate the results. Targets will bear sub-planetary radiation signatures.”

“Yes, commander,” the computer dutifully responded.

What were you thinking? Anderson thought, chastising himself. The little head, always thinking with the little head. When will you ever learn? You always were a sucker for a skirt.

Anderson’s interest was waning. He was tired. As contagious as Diana’s enthusiasm was, Anderson was starting to regret inviting her to join him. He began thinking about how he could wrap this up and go to bed. Lieutenant Philips would have a field day when he checked the logs and realised what had gone on after midnight. What a headache that would be, he thought as he turned to look at Diana.

Her eyes had lit up. Her cheeks were flush and her face was bright. She simply stood there speechless, looking up at Andromeda with one hand stretched out pointing at the heavens.

Anderson turned and looked. There, overlaid on top of the galaxy, was a mesh of thin red lines. As his eyes adjusted and took in the light, he realised the lines were broken strands, dotted segments stretching in three dimensions throughout the spiral arms. They clumped together in a few dense spots. In other areas there were vast tracts with only a few thin strands. It was as though a spider had weaved a web over the heavens.

As the realisation swept over him, he started counting the major nodes, those areas where the thin points of light accumulated into thick red dots. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. For these to be the emission signatures of an interstellar drive there must have been vast corridors, traffic lanes stretching between star systems.

Multiple thoughts struck Anderson at once. Their means of interstellar travel was similar; they were bound by the same laws. There must be exploration, trade, migration, remarkable medical opportunities for learning about diverse xenoforms, cultural exchanges, technological exchanges, perhaps even physical biological exchanges where one race cultivated desirable traits from another, dicing and splicing whatever their equivalent of DNA happened to be. His mind was swimming with possibilities.

Anderson turned back to look at Diana. She was looking at another galaxy, this one displayed over above the side of the bridge. It too was a network of thin red strands and clusters of thick dots. The clusters dominated one side of the galaxy but not the other, as though some alien race was still just emerging from its stellar infancy and was now in the throws of galactic conquest.

He wondered just how far that galaxy was away from the Milky Way. How far back in time they were looking? And, he wondered: Where were they today? How much of their galaxy had they actually explored by now?

He wondered what sorts of life they had found within their distant galaxy and whether they too had launched an intergalactic probe, something similar to the Serengeti, something that for them answered the question of intelligent life in outer space. If they were looking at the Milky Way, what would they see?

Depending on when they looked they’d see nothing, just a sterile waste and then, slowly, over thousands of years, a slowly emerging intelligence exploring its local area. And then, in the future, perhaps they’d see mankind spreading out through the galaxy in the same way they had. Would they ever contact each other? he wondered. Would there ever be a technology that would allow life to span the infinite void of galactic space? Or was life forever bound to these galactic islands?

Anderson was speechless. He turned again and looked at another galaxy, and then another and another. They all lit up with unique patterns revealing advanced interstellar civilisations. It truly was the Serengeti, teeming with life.

He spotted a pinwheel galaxy high on the dome above. It too lit up with red lanes and nodes peppering the outer rim. The various clusters in the pinwheel, all in similar stages of complexity and development, made it clear there had been multiple points of origin. Life, it seems, had appeared spontaneously in multiple parts of that fertile galaxy. How remarkable, he thought, that there were multiple forms of intelligent, interstellar life in a single galaxy.

How similar would they be? he wondered. Would they share the same values? Would they wage war against each other? Or would they freely share their vast expanse?

Diana came up behind him and slipped her hands around his waist. She tiptoed and kissed him gently on the cheek, whispering softly in his ear, saying, “You were right. Life gives meaning to the universe.”

He turned to face her with tears running down his cheeks.

“So,” she asked, draping her arms around his neck. “Where to from here, Commander? Do we head home? Do we take our new found knowledge of life in the universe back to Earth?”

“We’d never make it,” he replied, holding her by the shoulders and looking deep into her eyes. “Not you and I, anyway. Our lives would expire long before we made landfall. No, we transmit the results back to them and they’ll wait a millennium to receive the news.”

“And us? What about us?”

“We go on. And one day, millions of years from now, our descendants will set foot in the Serengeti.”

And with that their lips touched again, for the first time.

to Challenge 364...