Though the discovery of sentient aliens electrified the general public, my selection as chair of the communication team was a personal triumph! I knew I’d be famous academically and to the general public.
My star-studded team of 30 experts in linguistics, anthropology, and communications, were the top scholars and practitioners in their fields. Our expertise was with human languages only, of course, but we were confident we could learn to “talk” with the aliens. Did they use sound waves? A written language? We were excited to be the first humans to find out.
When the alien transmissions were first detected, originating from the location of the New Horizons probe, the astronomers went nuts! The pulses were an extensive stream of Fibonacci numbers, impossible to be generated naturally. The astronomers knew that the alien source was not a star or a planet. Was it a starship? A colony ship? A robotic probe? The scientists alerted the general public, who clamored to establish meaningful communication with aliens for the first time in human history!
The time lapse between sending a message and receiving a message back was four days, so the work was challenging. Our first efforts were slow and unproductive: we received the alien signals and parroted them back; the aliens sent signals in a different pattern, we sent them back. This was basically “we hear you, we know you hear us.”
A couple of weeks went by with these elementary “handshake” messages, and the astronomers reluctantly turned to the us, the language experts.
The aliens started sending a literal boat-load of signals, all gibberish to us, unfortunately. Political leaders and the world’s populace became frustrated; the view of the populace was, can’t we just shout LOUDER to make the aliens understand?
At one point in this process, some bright person on the team sent a message in spoken English at the FM radio frequency of 98.7 mHZ, and the aliens immediately sent back the same words at that FM frequency. Communicating in sound waves works very well for humans, so we continued with that method. We sent spoken messages in German, French, Mandarin, and other earth languages, including Esperanto, an artificial language. The aliens copied back our transmissions using the same languages. It was nice to have a more direct method to communicate, but again provided no true information about the aliens or about Earth.
After more frustrating weeks, the aliens surprised us and showed they were becoming “fluent” in Esperanto. They constructed a new message with intelligible content: “We are [the name of their civilization], we want to send you a message.” The name of their civilization sounded like a leprechaun with a severe cold clearing his throat and simultaneously sneezing, while blowing bubbles underwater, with a pod of whales singing in the background. We were glad to use Esperanto, rather than have to learn their native language!
By this time my team was functioning. We spent several days debating what to send back to them. Since they exhibited an ability to surmise the structure of language, we decided to bombard them with data. We transmitted an abbreviated dictionary, the most famous speeches in history, a week of the New York Times, and a transcription of a soap opera (for the record, I was opposed to that one), all translated into Esperanto.
The aliens responded back with an Esperanto “thank you,” then went silent.
The general public expected, unreasonably, an answer in four days, the message round-trip time. After a week, the public mood was a mixture of anticipation, extreme curiosity, and fear. After two weeks with no message, world stock markets fell 50%. There were conspiracy theories that the entire thing was a hoax, that the aliens had already landed and were living in caves in Greenland, that they were conspiring with the Vatican, that the aliens looked like microscopic lobsters and wanted to enter each human’s bloodstream, and some even weirder ideas. There were riots in Memphis, Manila and Mumbai. When three weeks had passed with no message, there were revolutions in two countries and four other governments fell. There were marches and riots in cities across the globe.
Finally, after 24 days, a relatively short message was received. My team started parsing it and reported that it was a true communication from the aliens, rather than a handshake message. They huddled in a closed workroom to translate the message.
I was so excited I was unable to sit, relax, or even concentrate on anything else. For the first time in history, we had a real message from a superior sentient species!
Finally, our Esperanto translator emerged from the translation room. Her ashen face, agitated movements, and general distress telegraphed her hopelessness. She thrust a piece of paper into my hands.
“Dr. Turner! What’s wrong?”
“All is lost!” she croaked. She pointed to the translation, sat heavily in a chair, and lay her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably.
I read the message and my heart froze: “You have allowed artifacts from your star system to enter interstellar space. Discarding refuse from your star’s gravity is not allowed. Fines and penalties for littering are severe, up to and including the destruction of your planets. Retrieve your refuse immediately. Keep our galaxy clean!”