Twelve thousand years had passed since primitive man had first set foot on their Moon. The progress of man had been inexorable since then. Earth was once his cradle—a place he resided in during the infancy of his reasoning; a place where the bawling and mewling of primitive superstition resounded around the planet, from the plains of the Serengeti to the islands of Polynesia. It was a discordant sound that was redolent of fear and helplessness; a sound that inspired greed, violence, and a paltry, petty, parochial existence in the tribal minds of a tribal species.
But somewhere in the psychological development of these primate creatures, things took a radical turn. The invention of the alphabet, the ability to calculate infinite numbers, the decoding of their genome, and the invention of binary computing was the start of their eventual leap to universality. The eventual triumph of the values of the age of enlightenment, together with the unmatchable supremacy of the scientific method, saw humans leave their home planet and explore the rest of their solar system.
By the late 21st century, information was seen as supreme—those in power saw that the fundamental aspect of reality was information: encoded initially in the atoms and molecules at the start of the universe, and then in the genes and brains of living organisms, and finally in artificial devices.
The merger of human brains and artificial intelligence had been a swift process by any standards. Instead of outsourcing his cognition to gizmos and gadgets, man realised how convenient it would be to integrate with them and experience the full immersive power of virtual reality.
Exabytes of information, unlimited biological memory, genetic modification, and nanotechnology had changed everything. By the mid-twenty-first century, computers exceeded human-level intelligence and were programmed to create even more ultra-intelligent computers that performed operations millions of orders of magnitude more complex than the unaided human brain was capable of. However, it was the year 2115 that saw a watershed event in the history of humans; for that was the year when the first humans uploaded their consciousness to quantum computers. The technological singularity had arrived. Man had finally found a solution to the problem of death.
*** *** ***
In the year A.D. 13,945, Earth was deep in the throes of an ice age. Continental sheets of ice covered large portions of the earth’s northern and southern hemispheres. Alpine glaciers met a frozen Mediterranean sea. The Siberian tundra extended well into the Tibetan plateau. Sea levels had dropped dramatically and the global climate was cold and dry.
This glacial age was not the worst the planet had been through. That distinction goes to the event that took place nearly 800 million years ago in the Cryogenean period, when even the equatorial regions of the planet were frozen over and earth was a white snowball floating in space.
Nothing much had changed on the planet in the twelve thousand years since man first landed on the moon. The continents were all more or less in the same position. The Himalayas had grown by a few inches. There were no dramatic transformations in the indigenous flora and fauna species. Lions, zebras, and wildebeest were still around in small pockets around the Serengeti. Penguins still populated the Antarctic shelf. Camels wandered the deserts of Arabia. Of course, in the last few millennia several hybrid species were also created—as were bionic species. New biological species also saw the light of day—created lovingly by a new generation of bio-poets who wrote genomes instead of verses.
But the one thing that hardly changed at all was the night sky. With the exception of the wandering planets, the stars seemed to hold almost exactly the same position they did when man first ventured into space; even though they were hurtling at thousands of kilometres an hour relative to earth. The distances were too vast and twelve thousands years too brief to make any perceptible difference. An informed stargazer from the 20th century could look up at the 14th millennium night sky and not notice a difference.
*** *** ***
The flat, ice-covered landscape stretched into the distance. There was no moon to throw any shadows, but the light from a billion stars streamed through the rarefied atmosphere and threw a bluish-grey glow on the frigid landscape. The constellation of Orion gradually rose over the Eastern Horizon, with its blue Super Giant star Rigel, followed by the Red Giant, Betelgeuse. The slow haunting whistle of the wind murmured secrets from the past and hinted at wonders of the future.
The air was crisp and free of dust or humidity. Phaeton looked up at the night sky. An explosion of stellar lights met his gaze. But the chaotic scattering of stars was no puzzle to Phaeton’s expert eye—trained and honed as they were over centuries of observations and compilation of cosmic data. There was Aldebaran, the bright yellow star in the constellation of Taurus. And there, to the right of it, was the Pleiades, the famous asterism of seven stars.
Phaeton’s catadioptric telescopic optical system auto-focused on the blue star that hovered due north. A cursory firing of a few silicon hybrid neurons in the astro-cortex of his synthetic brain informed him that the star he was viewing was the pole star, Vega.
*** *** ***
Vega hadn’t always been the pole star. Back in the ancient days when man took his first baby steps into outer space, Polaris used to be considered the pole star. But the precession of the Earth’s rotational axis slowly changes orientation over a 26,000 year cycle. Within a few thousand years, Polaris was no longer the star directly above the axis of the Earth’s North Pole. Its name reverted to Cynasura – as it was known in the age before it became pole star.
The mantle of pole star had been steadily passing from one star to the next. Gamma Cephei officially received the title in the year A.D. 3048. Iota Cephei took over as the star directly above the rotational axis of the North Pole in the year A.D. 5200.
It was A.D. 13,824 when Vega was officially classified as the pole star. But that was over a century ago. Its reign would not be for longer than a few thousand years.
*** *** ***
Vega was nearly twice the size of the sun. It scintillated with an almost electric blue light. Switching back to infrared, Phaeton immediately noticed the excess infrared flux coming from the blue star. The scientists of the previous age had wondered whether the accretion dust disk that caused the flux was due to the coalescing of a planet. That answer had been settled for several millennia. Switching to high-resolution mode, Phaeton’s eye could clearly see the black body that revolved around the blue star. It was still in its earliest stages of formation. Readings from the Sigma.3 outpost, 80 Astronomical Units away from Vega, had been constantly streaming back live images of the development of the planet.
Phaeton-113 was the current Astronomer Royal for the Royal Observatory Greenwich. He was the latest astroborg in an ancient line of post-human astronomers charged with cataloguing the numerous exoplanets scattered within the Milky Way galaxy. King Charles II, who founded the Royal Observatory Greenwich in 1675 instructed the first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed “forthwith to apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so-much desired longitude of places for the perfecting the art of navigation.” Phaeton would have liked to stay true to that original injunction; however, the problem of longitudes had long since been solved and the role of cataloguing stars and mapping the heavens had been taken over by space-based, computerised bio-telescopes for over ten millennia.
The Astronomer Royal’s responsibility now consisted more of house-keeping than anything else. He was to oversee neural protocols; supervise effective streaming and sharing of data between the various celestial outposts scattered across the galaxy; encrypt and decrypt all the information arriving from the far corners of the galaxy; and filter and sub route statistics to appropriate hubs and command centres around the planet.
Of course, all the brontobytes of quantised information streaming through his neural circuits every microsecond was being simultaneously backed up in holographic parallel servers located not just in various nodes on planet earth but also on nodes right across the farthest outposts of Earth’s Greater Celestial Empire.
*** *** ***
In the centuries following the initialization and development of the Internet, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia saw an explosive growth in the number of entries of confirmed planets around stars. In the first days of the space age, astronomers had little evidence for exo-planets. All humans knew then were the eight planets around their sun. But by the early 21st Century hundreds of planets had been discovered and the number grew to millions in a few decades. In the beginning, scientists had difficulty differentiating between giant gas planets and brown dwarf stars—which are essentially stars that don’t have enough mass to fire up and become stars. But that was just a momentary setback and the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia saw its official one billionth entry on 21st February A.D. 2140.
Since those early days, The Celestral and Inter-dimensional Space Management Systems (or, NASA as it was formerly known) had invested enormous amounts of time, resource, and computing power into investigating these exo-planets.
From merely detecting molecules in the atmosphere of the exoplanets and cartogograhy of their surfaces they moved on to taking direct gigapixel images of the planets in all their wondrous detail.
The burgeoning list of planets was overwhelming at first: azure worlds of iridium and molybdenum; carbide worlds made of pure carbon—diamonds in the sky; cimmerian worlds with deposits of methane and lithium, their red and purple surfaces glowing hauntingly in the images collected by the growing array of space telescopes…
Then there were the proto planets that were still in the process of formation: lakes of lava and molten rock covered their surface; and the rogue planets that drifted like cosmic nomads with no star to call their own—destined to wander the blackness of intergalactic and interstellar space till they were one day captured by a home star.
These exotic images of distant planets wandering around alien stars fired the imagination of people all around planet earth. They marvelled at the infinite possibilities on these worlds. What wondrous civilisations flourished in the watery worlds? What bizarre creatures were to be found on the gas giants? What weather systems on the terrestrial planets? What secret oceans lay under the ice orbs? The potential philosophies, ideas, technologies, religions, languages, inventions, and infinite forms that were just waiting to be discovered kindled the imagination of young and old on planet earth. The images of these planets were plastered on billboards and magazine covers; they adorned the walls of classrooms around the world; science fiction movies were released by the dozens every year—each set on one or the other of these far flung worlds.
A new generation of techno-philanthropists and billionaires grew up with these worlds impinging on their consciousness. All that they and the rest of the world thought about was how to get to these planets. How to build technologies that can get us there. But above all, they wondered about what making first contact would be like. Astronomy and space exploration became a priority for nations all around the world.
*** *** ***
The first manned missions to Mars took place in the third decade of the 21st century. By then several dozen probes and rovers had already confirmed that there was no life to be found on the planet. But that didn’t deter Man.
By mid-21st century, manned missions had been sent to all the Galilean moons. Europa had proved of singular interest. The challenges were immense. Any possible life on Europa would only be found several kilometres deep beneath its scarred and icy surface—in the dark and hidden water oceans. It was a puzzle initially why Europa had liquid oceans even though it was so far from the sun, and was too small to have any substantial atmosphere. But the answer proved to be fairly straightforward: the tidal pressures from the powerful gravity of Jupiter was heating Europa’s core and keeping its underground oceans from freezing.
After years of careful exploration it was announced that Europa’s oceans were sterile with the exception of a few organic compounds and strings of amino acids.
That didn’t stop the humans: on they went, exploring Ganymede, Io, and Callisto—and farther still to the moons of Saturn: Enceladus, Tethys, and Titan. The challenge after that was to explore planets around other stars.
After the invention of star drive, it was possible to send probes at nearly the speed of light. The obvious first choice was to travel to our neighbouring Centauri triple star system—to the earth-like planet, Alpha-Centauri Bb, that had been discovered on 15 October 2012. It was a long-shot by any means. No one was really expecting to find life on Alpha Centauri Bb—for even though it was a rocky planet and only slightly larger than earth, it was much too close to its parent star—closer than Mercury was to the Sun. It was no surprise when the first astronauts discovered that the planet was baking hot and zipped around its parent star once every 3.2 earth days.
From then on probes were routinely sent to planets around all the earth’s neighbouring stars: Tau Ceti, Barnard’s star, Procyon, Ross and a host of other stars…
*** *** ***
Since those early days of planetary exploration the citizens of earth had spread across the local arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Great bio hubs lay sprawling around Sirius, Vega, and hundreds of other stars. The colonies of the Greater Celestial Empire of Earth dominated space for well over three thousand years. Terraforming of planets became a matter of routine, almost as straightforward as constructing tarmac roads and laying down railway lines had been during earth’s Industrial Age. Quantum entangled communication and integrated neural networks allowed instantaneous sharing of ideas and information across all these various astral settlements.
Science labs and observatory stations numbering in the millions had been set up around stars all around the Milky Way galaxy. The first probes had already been sent out to cross the vast vacuum of intergalactic space and were well on their way to the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, 2 million light years away.
The progeny of earth had kept themselves busy. There was no stopping their exploratory spirit and no binding their zeal for discovery.
*** *** ***
Back on Earth, Phaeton continued to focus his UBV photometric systems on Vega. The bright blue star in the constellation of Lyra had been a source of wonder and fascination for years. Its orientation with respect to the earth meant he was looking straight at the star’s top half or its pole.
With little to do, he decided to randomly cross check the energy flux from Vega and was satisfied to note that at 5480 Å, the flux was 3,650 Jy—precisely what it was supposed to be. He decided to switch on the virtual simulation network, and connect to the constant visual stream of images available on the Stellarnet.
It took barely a second for his cortex to synch with the visual signals from the information nodes stationed in Vega. He could see the star almost as if he was there. It pulsated with a fiery bluish-white burst of light and energy. His integrated spectrometer systems indicated the presence of ionized magnesium, iron, and chromium in the star. He turned to the right and could see the black proto-planet whose progress he’d been tracking for several hundred years.
Not for the first time he wondered whether life would develop on this mysterious proto-world. And Phaeton was not alone. In the thousands of years since man first took to space and then colonised the Milky Way galaxy, the driving force behind his curiosity—the breeze that constantly wafted his exploratory sails—was the desire to find new life.
Phaeton de-phased his visual cortex from the Sigma.3 node on Vega. He stared at the incredibly complex array of bio-machines and silico-neural networks dedicated to exploring the universe—programmed with its primary instruction to discover planets and seek for signs of life. The counter on the screen indicated the number of planets being discovered in real time. It was well into the trillions: 4,760,800,767,919 planets discovered thus far. The counter kept ticking over:
4,760,800,767,920
4,760,800,767,921
4,760,800,767,922
4,760,800,767,923…
Phaeton stared in silence at the numbers and knew that sooner or later probes would resolutely be sent to each one of these worlds to search for signs of life. He looked back up at the night sky and contemplated the millions of colonies scattered around the galaxy. Each one of them owed their origin to denizens of earth.
He wondered not for the first time about their bewildering inability to find living creatures on any planet so far. He wondered if indigenous life would ever be discovered on any planet in the universe. Even after twelve thousand years of futile search, the children of Earth had not given up their desperate hope of finding alien life for the first time.
The solitude was unbearable; the silence deafening. But above all, the absence of any non-earth-origin life anywhere was simply… inexplicable.
