We could see it coming for months. This black smudge at the edges of the solar system. Everyone with a telescope, no matter how small, had it pointed at the same coordinates as soon as it was announced that there was something out there.
This wasnt a conspiracy, or a bunch of internet idiots pretending that the government were hiding something either, this was actually real. There was no way to hide it – you could see for yourself.
It was one of the space telescopes that was able to render anything actually detailed. The press conference that was held was not one of celebration or achievement. Nor was it presented as a warning, or sombre time. It was presented as a series of bullet points. Facts, as best as could be established. The Five Ws, as was widely reported.
What? It was an object. Flat, oblong, black on grey. It measured more than fifty kilometres long, ten wide and three tall. The external surface of it was littered with objects of all sizes, like boxes glued to the side of a larger box. Someone made the comparison to a childs school project, and they werent wrong.
The first images of it came through with the press conference and while they werent the highest resolution, the conclusion was inescapable. There was an alien craft heading towards the Earth. Not fast, not by any stretch. Slowly. Almost deliberately so. But what really grabbed everyones attention was that there were no lights on it. Nothing to give away its presence until our sun lit it up. The mess of attached bits to the side gave it shadows reminiscent of a Hollywood horror movie. An air of worry and paranoia stretched over the world.
When? It appeared for the first time in early June. It was accidentally caught in a calibration sweep by a LEO space telescope. Not that anyone who was working on it knew what they had seen. Just that on the first time it had swept that part of space, there were stars off in the distance, shining away and the next time, they were blocked by something that shouldnt be there. They took it upon themselves to investigate and they found that there was something out there, moving towards Earth, that was blocking the starlight from their telescope. They quickly got as many other people as they could to do the same, and every one of them replicated their findings. From then, it was out of their hands.
That first press conference, and the first images of the object, was a month later. And it was during this conference that an approximate timeline was given. If the object maintained its current speed, it would be at the same distance from the sun as Earth – Earth would be on the far side of the sun at this point – in early January the year after next. We had around 18 months before we would have visitors. Some people thought it would speed up, others thought two years. The worst part was not knowing how or when this object would do anything.
Who? How could we know? Once it was made public that this was something that was from Somewhere Else, and the word alien was no longer relegated to science fiction, there was a moment of collective panic. Speculators and snake oil salesmen quickly plied their trades as everyone from the suburban mother whos most pressing issue before was who was taking the kids to soccer practice, all the way to the leaders of the worlds nations begged for answer.
Cooler heads, those who were unafraid to say ‘we dont know’ were also in the mix, but ‘we dont know’ doesnt drive traffic, so it was buried, hidden.
We all knew that we didnt know. Which was, in fact, the problem. We wanted to know. We wanted to know so badly. In a miracle of the modern world, governments put aside their traditional animosity towards each other, and worked together – mostly, but thats a different story for another day – to draft a message that we could send to the object. It was approved and sent, in every possible way, in the early hours of the first of September. Cynics everywhere rejoiced as they clapped themselves on the back and smugly said that the most meaningless action had been taken. That their respective governments would rather work together on a sanitised and mostly bullshit greeting to something that dwarfs any understanding of the universe we might have had but still cant work on making the world a hospitable place for each other, much less these supposed guests. As usual, the cynics were ignored as the world celebrated the anticipated reply and official first contact.
Where? When the dust settled after the initial rush of activity. When there wasnt an immediate reply to our message of welcome. When everyone calmed down and the object was just another part of the night sky. That was when The Question became important.
In a regression to the mean, each government removed itself from the coordinated and representative group that drafted and sent the message, and restarted their usual hostilities, conflicts and politicking that had driven the world before. Even so, they still had The Question in common: Where would this object land, or where would its inhabitants arrive when they came to the surface?
Each nation had its own opinions on the subject. The hardline view was ‘if it doesnt land here, then this is an act of war.’ The opposite was ‘it wont land anywhere, and just keep going. There will be no interaction with the world.’ Strangely, the middle ground was ‘so long as it isnt … well be happy.’
Scientists and mathematicians worked day and night to work out every possible scenario. Calculating where in its orbit Earth would be when it arrived, which face of the Earth would be pointed towards it as the planet spun around to meet the object. A table was published that showed every possible outcome if the object – no one called it a ship – accelerated or slowed down. But every measurement of the objects motion – taken daily – showed no change at all. It travelled at a constant speed, in a constant direction. A black smudge that blocked out the starlight ominously as it approached our little world.
Why? There is no answer. To even begin to try is to suppose you know the thoughts behind who or whatever built that thing, set it on its course and, presumably, monitored it. That isnt to say people didnt speculate on why. Everyone had their thoughts. Some reasonable – so far as the idea of reasonable goes in this scenario – others not so much.
To say that we were obsessed was not untrue, but as the days passed and no new information was learned, we sort of just went back to our daily lives. The object was never far from our minds, of course, but actively thinking about it was for other people. People who would know more before the rest of us.
But every time a new article or video came out that had new speculation on why the object was here, we all read and watched it. It was a trigger for us. We had to know. Knowing why, so the psychologists said, would help us to understand whoever was inside the object.
But it would also help us to resume our own lives. Despite everyone – from an individual level all the way to the nation level – trying to get back to a normal routine, it wasnt rare for people to just stop whenever some new thing about the object was published. We didnt want it to, but it consumed us. We did what we could to force those impulses beneath the surface, but we couldnt hold them there for long. Not Knowing Is The Worst Part, as that one essay said. It was a facile, surface level analysis of the situation, but it wasnt wrong. We all knew it.
The general population accepted the existence of the object itself as easily as accepting any other mega structure. In principle, they were the same. Something big that engineers designed and workers built. The idea that there were non-human workers somewhere out there in the wilds of space was not something that was hard for the everyday person to understand and absorb into their bank of existing knowledge.
Even the idea of building a spaceship was not hard to reconcile. We had been doing it for nearly a century at this point. Sure, ours were conceptually different, but it was the principle that was important.
Slowly the idea that whoever the creatures were onboard the object were, in principle, the same as us was accepted as mainstream. They would not be so radically different from us that common ground could not be achieved.
It was a nice thought, but it was dangerous. It left out the idea that these beings were radically different from us at a fundamental level. That not only could common ground not be reached, but that there was no possible common ground to reach.
No one suggested the elephant in the room. No one wanted to accept the reality that a species, or a society, that could do what these beings had done, may be here to harm us. But, quietly and without fanfare, developed nations removed themselves from armament treaties, and importantly, the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. The nuclear nations started to ensure their bank of weapons were in good condition and helped the others do the same. That usual undercurrent that hid beneath a veneer of peace was starting to roil and spin just that little bit more roughly.
How? This kept me up at night. This was the one question people had slept on. We have massively powerful space telescopes that point in every direction and gather light from everywhere. Our sky is almost entirely mapped out because of these telescopes, with each segment of the sky being refreshed every month or so.
How, then, could something that big, that slow moving, be discovered accidentally when it was already that close.
Sure, it could have come in via the few blind spots that our coverage has. But that would imply that whoever was onboard that object knew how to calculate those blind spots and then deliberately chose to fly in them. Thats worry number one.
Worry number two is the larger scale how. How are they able to fly, if fly is the right word, in interstellar space? We know, in principle, – theres that term again – how to do it, but actually being able to execute it? Thats something entirely different. Especially since they came from somewhere that is beyond our immediate neighbourhood. Do they have some scifi-esque faster-than-light engines that allow them to just skip the middle bit? Or did they do things like long way? More importantly, what does that mean for the inhabitants inside the object? Are they long lived? Is this a Generation Ship? Is there even anyone onboard? What do the answers to any of those questions mean for us?