Elizabeth Bear - Future Visions - Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

The trial was a fundraiser for the Interstellar Communications Society. Whatever verdict the jury reached wouldn’t be binding on anyone, but the event was certainly getting a lot of media attention, which is no doubt why Hannah’s opponent, Piotr Sudeyko, had agreed to participate. He was a historian who specialized in Earth’s own previous first-contact situations, including the arrival of Europeans in the New World; he’d long felt that the anti-METI arguments hadn’t been given sufficient publicity. Emily watched intently as Sudeyko rose from his chair; his probing would be the real test of Ursula’s programming.

“Good morning, Ursula,” he said, dolorous brown eyes peering over Ben Franklin glasses. He was bald with a high forehead that bulged out like that of a beluga whale.

Ursula’s twin eyestalks separated to their maximal extent, but both jade-green spheres faced intently toward Sudeyko. Like all of the intelligent natives of 47 Ursae Majoris, Ursula had six limbs—three for locomotion and three for manipulation—all sprouting from a central torso. A wasp-waist constriction in the copper-colored torso marked where Ursula’s ancestors had rotated their upper bodies ninety degrees when they’d risen up to stand on just three legs. The two thicker and longer legs were in front, and the shorter, thinner one was in back; that had the effect of tilting their bodies backward, as if the aliens were perpetually recoiling in comic surprise. The perfectly circular iris of a mouth located well down the torso just added to the astonished look.

Sudeyko continued: “Ursula, we humans have struggled with many vexing issues since the dawn of time. Perhaps you can help us.”

Emily had managed only a second-row seat today. She craned her head to see the monitor clearly. “I would be happy to try,” Ursula replied.

“Thank you,” said Sudeyko. “During the USSR era, Soviet SETI proponents had taken as a given that any advanced civilization would be a socialist Utopia run by an entrenched central authority. Is that, in fact, the case?”

“No. We govern by plebiscite.”

“Ah,” said Sudeyko. “So, each of your citizens gets one vote?”

“No,” said Ursula, splaying all her pincers in strong negation. “We would never be so limiting. Each of us, as you can see, has three hands—two on one side, and one on the other. Each hand gets its own weighted vote. The inside hand has a vote worth one point; the outside upperhand gets a vote worth two-thirds of a point, and the outside lowerhand gets a vote worth one-third of a point. For any proposition, each individual may cast a total vote worth two points, one and two-thirds points, one and one-third points, one point, two-third points, one-third points, or zero points. We may each assign whatever combination of our weighted votes we wish to any of the choices offered, but once all votes have been assigned, one can make no further selections. So, if there are four or more candidates or choices in a plebiscite, one may fractionally support no more than three of them. The winner is determined by simply summing all the factional votes; if there’s a tie, the candidate or choice receiving votes from the largest number of individuals wins.”

The mathematician in Emily couldn’t keep from trying to crunch the numbers in her head, wondering if this was an efficient system. But Sudeyko, it seemed, was on the trail of something else. “And so when it came to the question of whether to send the Reticulum to Earth, what choices were put forth?”

“There were four propositions. ‘We should send the Reticulum to every star system we’ve identified as being a likely harbinger of life.’ ‘We should listen to and observe each star system that appears inhabited, and if we detect an overture of contact from them, only then should we send the Reticulum.’ ‘While acknowledging that it would be a protracted process thanks to delays necessitated by the finite speed of light, rather than sending the Reticulum, we should instead send only a small tantalizing sampler in hopes of fostering an ongoing trading relationship, swapping portions of our knowledge and culture for portions of theirs.’ And, lastly, ‘Even if we’ve detected that another star system has inhabitants, and even if they reach out to contact us, we should neither initiate contact with nor respond to contact from them.’”

“And when the voting was held, what was the outcome?”

“The first proposition, namely that we send the Reticulum to every likely star system, was approved overwhelmingly. In fact, the total fractional votes it received exceeded the combined totals assigned to all three of the other options.”

“Really?” said Sudeyko, who presumably already knew this answer, or else he wouldn’t have asked the question here in open court. Nonetheless, he did a good job of sounding surprised at the degree of consensus. And perhaps if this had been a trial, the judge might have objected to Sudeyko striding over to the jury box and leaning in, but it certainly made for good theater. “And just to be clear,” he said, looking not at Ursula but at the women and men who had won the contest to be seated here, “how many of your people got to vote on these propositions?”

Ursula sounded surprised by the question. “Why, all of them, of course.”

It had sounded reasonable when Ursula said her entire species had voted on whether to initiate contact. But debate over this very issue had torn the SETI community apart for a decade and a half now. One camp had been pushing to upgrade the traditionally passive search for extraterrestrial intelligence to active messaging.

A possible answer, they said, to the eerie silence—the failure to detect any extraterrestrial transmissions—was that there are in fact no other life-forms currently extant. But another possible answer, they contended, was that we’ve misunderstood interstellar etiquette. Perhaps aliens don’t speak until spoken to. They could well be aware of our presence, thanks to our decades of leaking signals out into space, but it might be incumbent upon us to make a gesture that indicates we are beings of goodwill.

Just passively listening, they said, is plain lazy: It implies that we prefer for others to do the heavy lifting of composing messages and beaming them with great power at specific stars. Worse than that, it also shows that we’re greedy, expecting others to give things to us. Any civilization we could contact, they pointed out, will almost certainly be more advanced than our own; the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and we’ve only been a radio-capable species since 1895. Civilizations around other stars might well be thousands, millions, or even billions of years ahead of us. We could gain enormously in terms of knowledge through contact with them; they, on the other hand, would have relatively little to learn from us. Since we would have more to gain, they argued, perhaps it’s expected that we should invest more, by being the first to reach out.

But others had considered this to be dangerous naïveté. First, they said, the underlying assumption that any advanced civilization must be peaceful and altruistic could be wrong. And even if some were, surely, they said, it was possible that others were not. One possible explanation for the Fermi paradox—the fact that although our science suggests that the universe should be teeming with life, all SETI efforts have so far failed—was that there is a violent berserker race that makes it its business to wipe out any civilizations it detects. Whatever other races might still exist locally may have learned by observing this that remaining silent was crucial to survival.