Work Text:
09.02.1995
Dr Cyril Favre
Editor-in-Chief
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
Dear Dr Favre,
I would like to submit the manuscript entitled “The Size Distribution of Inhabited Planets”, to be considered for publication as a letter in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
So far, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has focused on the discovery of Earth-like planets. However, if intelligent life exists elsewhere, our single planet cannot be considered a fair sample. In this study, I have employed several mathematical models based on Bayes’ theorem to infer that a planet which harbours intelligent life should have a smaller radius than Earth. I show that this result holds not only for planets harbouring intelligent life, but those with primitive life forms as well. Furthermore, based on this model, other inferences can be drawn for any variable that affects population size.
I believe that this publication will be greatly instrumental for SETI researchers and of paramount interest to the readers of your journal.
I confirm that this manuscript is original, and is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. There are no conflicts of interest to declare, and there has been no financial support for this research that could have influenced its outcome.
Sincerely,
Dr Aurora Sinistra
University of Glasgow
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
“Rejected!” Professor Aurora Sinistra yelled and she slammed her hand on the table, rattling the breakfast crockery and startling her colleagues. Her other hand still clutched the letter that she had just opened. “This can’t be right!”
“Calm down, calm down, it’s not even half-seven yet.” Professor Bathsheda Babbling was used to managing her colleague’s eruptive temper. “What’s this all about? Here, have a cup of tea.”
“It’s the manuscript that I submitted a month ago,” Professor Sinistra replied, still seething. “I just got a letter from the editor. They’ve rejected it!”
“Did they say why?” Professor Babbling asked as she surreptitiously pushed a cup of tea into Professor Sinistra’s direction.
“‘Failure to accurately review and cite current climate models.’ In what universe is that a reason to reject a paper?”
“Can’t you just cite them and submit it again?”
“It’s not within the scope of the paper!” Professor Sinistra took a big gulp from the dainty china cup. “I would have done it all the same, of course, had they given me the chance to revise and resubmit, but no.”
Professor Sinistra knew of course that throwing a tantrum over a single rejected manuscript wasn’t mature or productive and that this was neither the first nor the last time. Still, a scientist is a passionate creature, and not taking a rejected manuscript to heart is easier said than done. So, Professor Babbling let her colleague mope over her temporary failure, and busied herself with the morning paper, softly smiling. Just give it some time.
A couple of months later, a different Professor Sinistra walked into the Great Hall, posture straight, shoulders square, pleased as Punch. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened.
“So, I guess we may safely assume that your manuscript went through this time?” asked Professor Babbling as she spooned buttered vegetables onto her plate.
“Am I that easy to read?” Professor Sinistra half-answered, grinning.
“I’ve just known you for a long time, my dear. I really admire your determination, you know. Being a teacher in a castle full of magical brats is more than enough for most of us. You, on the other hand, still make time for your research. That’s very commendable in itself.”
“Hush, you’ll make me blush. Anyhow, I thought we could take a stroll down to Hogsmeade after dinner and celebrate over a few pints. Are you in?”
“Am I? We should celebrate while we can, before you begin to sulk over the next rejection.”
Professor Sinistra lightly elbowed her colleague, feigning a scowl. They shared a few more laughs as they ate. Professor Babbling was right, after all, happy moments in science are to be cherished, all the more so because they are rare.
Nights were still chilly in late May, and thus the two colleagues huddled in their cloaks as they walked back to Hogwarts. It was past midnight, the Milky Way sprawled across the moonless, cloudless sky as if she owned it. Just the kind of night where one couldn’t help but gaze at the stars and muse about their place in the Universe.
“That paper of yours, you never told me what it’s about.”
“I didn’t?”
“Well, yes, you did tell me briefly, but not what it’s actually about.”
“Is this really a good time?”
“My dear Aurora, your astrobabble is much more bearable when I’m sloshed. Go on, tell me.”
Professor Sinistra drew a large breath of fresh evening air to clear her head. She was good at explaining complex science in simple terms, but explaining the work of others was somehow much easier than explaining her own. Cognitive scientists should look into that sometime.
“Alright, then, here we go. When astronomers search for extraterrestrial life, they look for Earth-like planets. The logic behind is that, because this is the only habitable planet that we know of, it makes sense to look for those which are similar.”
“Does it, though? I mean, we just have this single example to draw conclusions from. That doesn’t seem right to me.”
“You are right, of course, but you can make some assumptions, even if you have a single sample. Using Bayesian Statistical Inference.” Professor Sinistra paused to gather her ale-muddled thoughts. “Imagine, you are looking for a country. Any country. Although the majority of the population lives in very few big countries, the majority of the countries in the world are those with small populations. So, it is statistically more likely that most countries have fewer inhabitants than yours, even if you don’t know the population of any other country. Does it make sense?”
“I guess… so you are saying we can assume that other habitable planets have fewer inhabitants than ours?”
“Exactly! And this already tells us a lot. Using mathematical models, we can for example derive that the planet we’re looking for is smaller than Earth, and its inhabitants are larger.”
“Larger?”
Professor Sinistra nodded, dead serious. “As large as polar bears, in fact.”
“You say?” Professor Babbling gasped. “How so?”
“For the same reason that there are more ants than polar bears on Earth. It is easier to sustain large populations of small individuals.”
“I see…” Professor Babbling scratched her head over her witch hat and thought of an intelligent question to ask, but couldn’t find one just yet. Luckily, her colleague didn’t need further encouragement to talk.
“Similarly, the energy that is easily available makes it possible to sustain larger populations, so we can expect a planet hosting intelligent life to be orbiting around a smaller, dimmer sun, or perhaps their atmosphere is hazier than ours, and doesn’t let through much sunlight. These models could improve our chances of finding planets with intelligent life.”
Their footsteps quickened as a cold wind hit their backs. Professor Babbling held on to her hat, and Professor Sinistra regretted having decided against a heavier cloak.
“Do you think anybody will use your findings? To search for intelligent life, I mean?”
“Who knows? It would have been better if the first journal hadn’t outright rejected it, but research impact is a fickle thing. I have sent letters to some academics I know, but there isn’t much I can do other than wait and see.”
Professor Babbling sighed, and placed a hand into the crook of Professor Sinistra’s elbow as they hastened back to the castle. Her colleague was many things, good things, but patient she surely was not.
And she was right, perhaps, but between the duties of a professor, the ever-present threat of unrest in the wizarding world, and the brief but tyrannical reign of Voldemort’s supporters at Hogwarts, Professor Sinistra didn’t have the time to mull over the impact of her paper in the academic world. When June 1998 came, and she finally managed to steal a moment to sit down in the stately University of Glasgow Library and catch up with the latest research, it became evident that her publication, the pride and joy of her career to date, hadn’t received much traction at all.
Damn.
It was her fault, though, wasn’t it? She should have been networking with other scientists in the field, attending congresses more often, giving lectures. She should have tried harder to increase the visibility of her research. When, though? During the semester, she barely had time to lift her head, and the war hadn’t made anything easier. Excuses that the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn about. Here it was, her research paper, with a handful of citations in other theoretical papers, and that’s it. Yesterday’s news.
No. No no no no no. I survived the war. So many didn’t. I still have a chance. I can start again. This is not over. She walked into the nearest ladies room, and Apparated to Hogsmeade from the privacy of the cabin. Her flight from the village to Hogwarts was fast, one hand clutching the broom and the other her hat, fuelled by frustration and determination, as if every minute wasted on the road was a minute less to work on her project.
Reality put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a sad, slow shake of the head as she walked into the castle, still very much in ruins. Entire sections of the library were closed, sign posts with dire warnings keeping watch: “Damaged Section! Do Not Enter! Danger of Death!” Her colleagues and other volunteers kept busy with the repairs, eyes tired, not a word shared beyond what was necessary. Her heart sank in shame. How could she even think of her research in this situation?
“It’ll just take a moment till the repairs are over." Professor Babbling’s warm hand slapped away the hand of Reality and covered her shoulder. "It looks worse than it actually is. We are witches and wizards, after all! Your equipment is unharmed, isn’t it?”
Professor Sinistra nodded, and put a hand over her colleague’s.
The next months went by with the repairs, so that come fall, the students had a school to attend without the hazard of falling rocks or broken stairs. A teacher’s main responsibility after all was to her students. In the meanwhile, ideas simmered at the back of Professor Sinistra’s head, formulae were scribbled on small bits of paper, on the blackboard in her office, but it wasn’t until the Christmas break that she was able to gather her hypotheses, actual data, and the outline of her research project around the same table.
She laid out the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues of stars to define targets which may have habitable planets. Stars had to be older than three gigayears and have sufficient heavy element abundance to enable the formation of rocky planets. No companion stars to disturb stable planetary orbits with their pesky gravity, no luminosity flares more than a few percent. Narrowed down to almost ten thousand stars. Narrowed down further by her own criterium, below one nominal solar luminosity. Observing multiple stars within each field of view was necessary, both to increase the search efficiency and discriminate against interferences. Setting the frequency to five Gigahertz, she could obtain data from six stars with potential inhabitable planets. Two of them were orbited by known exoplanets, all within the Milky Way, a bit less than a hundred light years away from Earth. Neither would have made it into a target list by the current, widely accepted “habitable zone” criteria. Yet there they were, on her list. They would have a chance to be heard.
Butterflies fluttered in her stomach as she wrote down the names of the stars and the observation frequencies. She closed her eyes for a moment and willed herself to calm down. This was silly, really, but what did she have to lose? Besides, although it most probably would fail, it was quite a fun project. Yawning, she stretched lazily and looked out of the window. Piles of snow had gathered on the window sills, faintly gleaming against the backdrop of the deep, black night. She considered making a cup of tea and working on her posterior probability model, but decided for a night cap and bed. Despite being an astronomer, she wasn’t a night owl.
“Heavens to Betsy, where did you get this thing?” Professor Babbling shouted to her colleague on the ground as she descended on her broom. On a rock not too far away from the Hogwarts grounds was a giant dish of metal mesh on a cylindrical base, with four long rods in its centre arranged into a pentahedron.
“Bathsheda dear, I wasn’t expecting you!” Professor Sinistra waved her wand about, causing the dish to tilt slowly. She looked pleased as Punch. “How wonderful that you came, I could definitely use some help.”
“Help? Surely not my help?” Professor Babbling removed a tartan-patterned thermos flask from the leather pouch slung over her shoulder. “I brought you lunch. You’ve been away all morning again, and it’s freezing. Here, leek and potato soup, will warm up your cockles.”
Professor Sinistra hugged her colleague briefly, planting a quick peck on her cheek, before gratefully accepting the soup. Professor Babbling was right, of course, early April in the Scottish highlands was still winter. She sheathed her wand, filled the thermos lid with the thick soup, and slowly sipped. Bathsheda had really thought of everything.
“My new project. Now that the construction is almost finished, I might even get a few project students to help me.”
“But what is it?” Professor Babbling managed to ask, still gaping at the enormous contraption.
“This, my dear, is a radio telescope. Sixty-four meters in diameter, a collecting area of 3,216 square meters, can detect radio waves down to a couple of millimetres. I’ve been working on extending the one we already had. It was a dinky little thing. This one can detect much shorter wavelengths. Isn’t it wonderful that Hogwarts happens to be the only radio quiet zone in the UK? I can conduct my observations without annoying interferences from muggle activities.”
“You built this thing?”
“Not exactly. Transfigured the one we already had, bit by bit, during the past year. It took a while, but wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought. Luckily, the rest of the hardware is perfectly usable with the new system.”
“Blimey.” Professor Babbling was silent for a while as she stared at the dish and listened to the wind that whistled through the mesh. She noticed, painfully, that even asking questions required some level of understanding. Where to start?
“I can explain how it works, if you want.”
“Do I need any prior knowledge to understand?”
“No, you just need to be very smart.” Professor Sinistra winked, grinning. Professor Babbling swatted her lightly on the shoulder. “Which you are!” she added, hands raised in a defensive posture. “The dish is the antenna, it collects the incoming radio waves. These are then channelled by the feedhorn into the receiver inside the focus cabin, see, at the top of the telescope,” she pointed to the metal cube at the top of the pentahedron, while still holding the mug of soup in the other hand. “These signals are then transferred and recorded.”
“Seems simple enough, I suppose.” Professor Babbling was sure that her colleague had massively oversimplified the whole process, but didn’t ask her to elaborate. “What I don’t get is, where do the signals come from?”
“From the heavens! Celestial bodies, stars, pulsars, but in our case, hopefully, extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“By Jove! You are not seriously going to listen to aliens?” Professor Babbling clasped a hand over her mouth. “And you want to recruit students to work with you?” she mumbled. Her heart sank. Professor Sinistra had always been a bit of an eccentric, the muggle scientist among witches and wizards, but openly advertising a project on finding aliens? That was sure to be gossip material.
Professor Sinistra saw the horror in her friend’s eyes, but remained unfazed.
“I need to try.”
“You believe in this, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“All right, then. How can I help?” Professor Babbling placed the now empty flask back into her pouch, and took out two sausage rolls. She handed one to Professor Sinistra. “Here, eat this, I baked it fresh this morning.”
“I need you to fly over the telescope and take some photos while I move the antenna for error checks,” Professor Sinistra said, and bit into the crispy pastry.
Professor Babbling nodded slowly. “That sounds doable.”
Although Professor Sinistra was far from embarrassed by her scientific efforts, she took the advice of her colleague and kept her research project to herself initially. The set-up proved to be a daunting task, made only slightly easier with magic. The spells that concealed Hogwarts from the rest of the world removed the need to use an interferometer. Criteria for detecting signals originating from extraterrestrial technology was the trickiest part, though, it wasn’t as if she had an extraterrestrial intelligence radio signal training dataset to use as a reference. She walked up and down her office, contemplating. Finally, she stood in front of the blackboard and aggressively reduced the scribbles on it to a cloud of dust with an oversized sponge. Grabbing a piece of pink chalk, barely large enough to hold, she began to put down a list.
The radio signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence would appear to emanate from a point source moving at sidereal rate in the sky. “What if it’s an alien spacecraft roaming our solar system? This would exclude those.” She chuckled to herself as she wrote the next points. Astrophysical objects were broadband emitters compared to communication signals, so narrowband signals would be more likely to originate from artificial sources. She would have to accommodate positive and negative drift in the signals due to the relative acceleration between Earth and the transmitter’s planet. A signal with a pulse period of less than two minutes would be clearly artificial, as opposed to the regular pulsed carrier waves with a period of tens of minutes that celestial bodies emitted.
Narrowband, slowly drifting, continuous or slowly pulsed signals. The unicorn. She was looking for the space unicorn.
The grandfather clock striking ten startled her out of her thoughts. There were never enough hours in a day. Probably not enough days in a lifetime, either, but hey. Space research was slow research.
The calibration of the system took months. Come summer, she spent every single day at her observatory. Hogwarts’ quiet zone was indeed a blessing, but over-flying and orbital transmitters were still a problem. A good while was spent with training her system to discriminate against these anthropogenic interferences, and on August 8th, finally, she aimed her antenna towards her target stars, and began recording.
“And now?” asked Professor Babbling after Professor Sinistra’s lengthy explanation of what she’d been up to all summer. After two months, the friends had met for a long overdue afternoon tea at Professor Babbling’s cottage in Surrey. The air was warm and thick, laden with the scents of ripe damsons and honeysuckle.
Professor Sinistra shooed away the wasp that landed on the pot of strawberry jam, and spread a spoonful on her scone before topping it with clotted cream.
“Now, we record the signals and have a peek every now and then to see if there are any interesting ones.”
“So we wait? Brilliant! You need some time off, my dear. Soon the school year will start, and we’ll all be cooped up inside that draughty old castle again.”
Professor Sinistra idly stirred her tea. She didn’t remember the last time she had a proper holiday.
“So, what do you say,” Professor Babbling said, a mischievous glint in her eyes, “you and I go to London tomorrow and tear it up on a Saturday night? It’s been a good while since we last did that. What do you say?”
“I say, my dear Bathsheda, that it’s a fantastic idea.”
For Professor Sinistra, the London girls’ night out was followed by a well-earned holiday with her old friends in Cornwall. When she returned to Hogwarts, it was with renewed vigour. She hadn’t quite fathomed the toll that the last years had taken on her until she’d had the chance to put some distance between her and everything. How right her friend Bathsheda had been! Upon her arrival, she tidied up her workplace and shuffled the furniture in her office and private quarters around for the first time in a decade. It felt good.
In her absence, the telescope had kept on recording. The waterfall plots revealed nothing out of the ordinary, yet. She put on her headphones, and listened to her star. The steady, deep, slowly vibrating sound of a giant space tuba. Goosebumps crept up her neck. Even if she never found any sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, if she never made a discovery of any kind, the privilege to listen to the sound of the universe from thousands of years ago had already been worth all the effort.
The school year rolled in with all its might, washing away most of her leisure time. Her students were very dear to her, but between classes and her chaperoning duties, she barely had time for regular monitoring and maintenance of her setup, let alone data analysis. Months passed in the blink of an eye, autumn left its place to winter.
“Feynman’s lost lecture, delivered in CalTech in the year 1964, was later turned into a book by David and Judith Goodstein. In this lecture, titled “The Motion of the Planets Around the Sun”, Feynman demonstrated Newton's solution to the question: why do planets orbit around the sun elliptically rather than in perfect circles? In the following lecture series, we will go through the solution. Pay good attention. The mathematics of the solution seem deceptively simple, and indeed require no other knowledge than fifth-year geometry, but quite a bit of concentration will be needed from your side. It ultimately arises from the inverse square law. Can any of you remind the class what it is?”
Professor Sinistra had only a small group of seventh year advanced astronomy students, but those that were in the class were bright, hard-working and made her job as a teacher so worthwhile. After a very lively class with plenty of maths and plenty of discourse, a very determined Miss Evelina Rodigari walked to the teacher’s desk while her classmates vacated the room.
“Excuse me, Professor Sinistra,” she started, her voice slightly trembling, “I know you haven’t offered any finishing projects that involve working with the new radio telescope, but I… I really would love to learn, Professor. I have decided to attend a muggle university after Hogwarts to get a degree in physics, and I’d like to learn as much from you as I can before the year is over. Please, Professor, it’d mean the world to me if you considered.”
Professor Sinistra looked at the young girl in front of her, eyes blazing, hands curled into fists, lips pressed together tight. Evelina was a very good student, and she could definitely use the help. Besides, she knew that this student was no busybody.
“Of course I’ll consider,” she smiled, and Evelina relaxed visibly. “Now off you go to your next class.”
“Thank you, Professor!” Evelina darted out of the classroom. Professor Sinistra chuckled to herself as she gathered her notes. The girl’s attitude was rather endearing.
Although the topic was by no means trivial, Evelina took to analysing the data like a duck to water. Still, come Christmas, Professor Sinistra firmly rejected her request to stay in school and sent her to her family with the rest of the students.
“But Professor–”
“Enough, I won’t hear of it. Science doesn’t happen in a day, or two weeks for that matter. You can’t start neglecting your family.”
“But you will be here.”
“Miss Rodigari, your wish to take up responsibility beyond your years is commendable, don’t get me wrong. But. There will come a time when responsibility will be laid upon you, and you’ll have to take it as an adult witch does. For now, enjoy your youth and freedom, and do not seek to burden yourself more than you need to. Now, off you go.”
“She’s right, though, what about you?” asked Professor Babbling later over lunch. “Tell me you won’t spend the entire holidays in Hogwarts.”
“Of course not. I’ll be visiting family like I do every year. I’ll return to Hogwarts on Boxing Day.”
“But you’ll be with us on New Year’s Eve, right? You promised, remember?”
Professor Sinistra grinned, “Only if you prepare that wicked punch of yours, my dear.”
The next couple of years passed with the usual Hogwarts hustle and bustle. Evelina kept helping her with the analysis of the data after graduating from Hogwarts and starting her undergraduate studies in the University of Glasgow, where Professor Sinistra held a lecture or two every semester.
And maybe they didn’t measure any signals that potentially originated from artificial sources, but they did uncover a great amount of information on the system that they’d been studying. Using a variation of an ancient vision-enhancement spell, they were able to increase the sensitivity and precision of their single telescope to that of a whole array of telescopes. This granted them the discovery of a new exoplanet, orbiting a cooling dwarf star with less than a tenth of the Sun’s mass. It took them a year to get a fuzzy photograph of their new exoplanet with the help of a similarly enhanced infrared telescope, keeping company to its similarly fuzzy star. Never had two people been so happy over two amorphous piles of pixels.
“Why vision-enhancing spells? I thought you were listening to sounds.” asked Professor Babbling as she hunched over the screen, flanked by the two ladies who kept beaming at her.
“Radio waves can be converted to sounds. But they are a kind of light. Light that travels through space in ripples,” Evelina explained, Professor Sinistra nodding to confirm.
“Blimey,” Professor Babbling pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose and looked again. “Well, at least now you have something that you can tell your relatives next time they ask about your projects.”
“I can’t wait,” Professor Sinistra replied, grinning. It was a wonderful feeling not having to be secretive for once.
“The images aren’t exactly sharp though, are they? Perhaps you can work your magic on them too?”
“Alas,” sighed Professor Sinistra, crossing her arms above her chest, “This is the best we can do with the equipment that we have. I don’t even think that the Hubble Space Telescope would be enough. I’ve heard news that they’re designing a new infrared space telescope, perhaps that could do better. In the meanwhile, we’ll continue gathering data.”
Sadly, data gathered using unknown, magic-enhanced telescopes in an undisclosed location were hardly publishable in the muggle world, so they opted to submit their discoveries to a wizarding journal instead. Despite the much smaller audience, the publication brought both witches considerable renown in the wizarding world. So much so that for the following years, they focused their research mainly on the study of their new planet, fondly named Burnell, aided by an influx of new, enthusiastic students. With the help of Evelina, who was an excellent tutor, Professor Sinistra’s research projects flourished and grants flew to Hogwarts. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, though not forgotten, became a quiet murmur in the background of her life, a thought revisited every so often but was overshadowed by fruitful experiments with tangible results.
It all changed one April afternoon.
Near the sixth anniversary of the setting up of the radio telescope, Professor Sinistra returned to Hogwarts after a short weekend trip to Cornwall. She found Evelina in the listening room, pale, livid, casting one furious spell at the instrumentation after the other. If the bags under her eyes were anything to go by, she hadn’t got much sleep recently.
“Evelina, what’s going on?” She raised a hand in a gesture to make Evelina halt her frantic movements.
“I am so sorry Aurora, I…” she started, but couldn’t finish her sentence. Professor Sinistra, now properly worried, made her sit down and summoned a cup of tea.
“We have received an odd signal on Friday. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going on. It fits neither the usual signal from the star, nor the planet that we’re observing. Or any star or planet for that matter. It’s just… weird.”
“Let me have a look.” Professor Sinistra examined the plots. There’d indeed been a signal with a rapid pulse period, which was clearly distinct from the astronomical bodies that they’d been observing over the past years.
“It stopped after a while,” Evelina said, a little twitchy. “But then, the same signal came again, exactly eight hours, six minutes and four seconds later. That’s the length of a day on Burnell.”
Anthropogenic interference?
“It’s not interference,” Evelina read her thoughts, “it comes from the planet and nowhere else. We’re doing multiple observations all the time. I’ve checked, I swear. This is so bizarre. Listen.” She summoned the pair of headphones, handing it to Professor Sinistra with slightly trembling hands.
What Professor Sinistra heard that afternoon in the listening room would forever be ingrained in her memory. It was a song, with alternating pitches, like skates gliding over thin ice, like lasers shooting, it was almost like it had a metre, a rhythm, rests, crotchets, quavers. She listened again, and then listened to the following broadcasts. Identical. She checked their time of arrival. If it was indeed a daily event in Burnell terms, it was due in twenty-eight minutes.
The two women sat on adjacent chairs and said not a word. When the time came, they each set on a pair of headphones, adjusted the frequency, and with bated breath, waited. Punctual to the second, the song started. Evelina fixed her glassy-eyed stare at Professor Sinistra while her teeth dug into her lower lip.
It lasted forty minutes and some seconds, just like the previous recordings.
“We need to run more tests,” Professor Sinistra said after a brief moment to compose herself. We have to make sure that it’s not an artefact.”
It wasn’t an artefact. After weeks of rigorous testing, the women had exhausted all other possibilities.
“Even if it is a technosignature,” Evelina said, “even if it’s our colleague from Burnell sending us these messages… I don’t know. What do we do with it?”
Good question. Even if this was a message, how could they even go about deciphering it? They’d now been listening to the message over and over. How they possibly hope to decipher an alien signal? Without any reference, it hadn’t even been possible to decipher languages like Etruscan, Linear A or the Indus Valley script for centuries.
Without magic.
“You need my help?” Professor Babbling raised her head from the manuscript she’d been examining. The library was quite full, despite it being Sunday evening.
“Can we go somewhere else?” Professor Sinistra whispered.
Professor Babbling shot both of them a “Do I even want to know what this is all about” glance as she folded her spectacles and gathered her things, slightly unnerved by the antsiness of the two women. Even then, she could not have anticipated the outrageousness of the request that was made to her.
“What… What… All right, wait, wait a minute. I need to sit down. Is this what you two have been up to the past weeks?”
“We needed to be sure,” replied Professor Sinistra, nodding sternly.
“And are you?”
“Positive,” Evelina said. “You can hear it if you like.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have to now, won’t I?”
Having listened to the recording, Professor Babbling didn’t need much convincing that the sounds weren’t random space sounds, not that she knew what space sounded like, but still. She just knew.
“This is most curious,” she said as she removed the headphones. “You said it's being transmitted daily?”
“Burnell-daily,” Professor Sinistra verified. “Definitely periodic, each one identical to the rest to a T. It occurs to be an automated transmission.”
“But to what end?”
“Who knows? Perhaps it is a leaking signal from their in-world broadcasts. Or it’s just a message in a bottle, cast into the universe.”
“And, will you send anything back?”
“Before we do, we need to find out what technology they used so that their radio signals were captured by the telescope and not just diffused out into the space. And, we need to decipher their language so that we can communicate with them in a way that they’ll actually understand.” As Professor Sinistra finished her words and looked at her colleague with a glint in her eye, the reason why her colleague had sought her out to share the news finally dawned on Professor Babbling.
“You want me to decipher it.”
“Yes.”
“The message.”
“If you are so inclined. It’s a privilege!”
“It’s madness, that’s what it is!” Professor Babbling jumped to her feet. The ladies were surely taking the mickey. Professor Sinistra stuck her hands into her pockets. It seemed like Professor Babbling did not share their enthusiasm to decode the alien language. Time to bring out the heavy guns.
“But who else could we ask? You’re Bathsheda Babbling! The Ancient Runes mistress who deciphered the Dispilio and Tărtăria tablets. You are the world’s leading expert on –”
“Oh spare me,” Professor Babbling interrupted. “How can you even compare those to…this!” She pointed at the recorders. “Those were made by humans! And they were writings, not just sounds!”
“Well, to be fair, every writing originated from sounds.” Evelina, who’d been quiet up to that point, alternated her gaze between the two friends. “I agree that this is a big ask, and will most probably fail. We’re of course not asking you to make this a full-time project. But… the matter being this delicate, we’re reluctant to go seek collaboration elsewhere when we have an expert so close to home. But we know you’re busy, and will surely understand if you refuse. Still, it would be great if you considered. This project is so close to our hearts.”
The girl’s honest plea softened Professor Babbling into submission. Some years later, when reminded of her initial aversion towards the project, she would deny any claim that she’d ever needed to be persuaded in the first place.
Professor Babbling spent much of the rest of that year developing an alphabet for the alien song. It seemed like the space neighbours spoke with pauses as much as with sounds, the song was dotted with rests of varying lengths. Were these breaks meaningful in their own right? Were they syllables, conjunctions, punctuation marks? Did these terms even apply to the alien tongue? Doesn’t matter, she decided, each pause of a certain weight will get an own symbol. Depending on alternative ways the sounds could be broken down into words, she developed six different versions of the alien alphabet.
Now, we can finally begin, she murmured to herself as she wrote down the final symbol. Sounds may be the origin of the language, but her realm was the written word.
The next step was even more complicated. The decipherment charms that she’d developed over her career relied heavily on parallels between the undeciphered language and its nearest deciphered relative. She had no such reference material for an otherworldly language, but throwing away all constraints would leave her with a five-thousand-piece puzzle of a clear blue sky. Therefore, initially she opted to just relax the assumptions about parallels to known languages, but not abandon them completely. Human languages were so rich and diverse, if she was lucky, she would find an anchor somewhere. Human languages were also many, and even with streamlined, self-running charm work, the analyses turned out to be slow, labour-intensive and mostly fruitless.
“I give up,” she said to Professor Sinistra one morning, just a few days before the Christmas break the same year. “I tried everything, it’s not working. It’s still the same transmission you’re getting, right?”
Professor Sinistra nodded to confirm, and put a hand over Professor Babbling’s forearm. She had kept busy with other projects and not bothered her colleague for updates in the past months, already more than grateful that she had taken over this mammoth task in addition to her teaching duties.
“I need more data. A bigger sample size. Just one of these recordings is not enough. We need more. I need… something, Circe help me.”
“Let’s keep listening,” Professor Sinistra tried to console her, noticing how personally invested her colleague had become in their collaboration project. “Who knows, perhaps our luck will turn.”
A sense of defeat etched into Professor Babbling’s belly like acid. It was an impossible project, she tried to remind herself. A fool’s errand to begin with.
For a while, both professors busied themselves with teaching and their private lives. The transmission came, four times every single day, and recorded over and over again, but Professor Sinistra grew to ignore it over time. It turned out that even the possibility of aliens inhabiting a neighbouring star system took second place to the everyday grind. Professor Sinistra tried to juggle her relationships and teaching duties, Professor Babbling was elated by the news of twin grandbabies, and Evelina accepted the offer to start a graduate degree in Princeton and left for overseas. Professor Babbling’s decoding charms kept on comparing the patterns and sounds to the known human ones, terminating endless times with errors and too low confidence values.
Sometimes, when a person solves a riddle with great thought and effort, the solution might seem so obvious, that they cannot comprehend why it took them so long to find it in the first place, and might even reprimand themselves for it. This sentiment, which is familiar to many, came crushing upon Professor Babbling as one Saturday night she lay down at night, and unable to sleep, put on her headphones hoping that the space song, which she’d grown quite fond of in the meanwhile, might clear her mind. As the highs and lows and all the quiet spaces in between flooded into her ears and brought her to the edge of sleep, she all of a sudden sat up in her bed, gasping, not quite conscious yet of the realization which prompted her reaction. She spelled the lights on, pulled on her dressing gown, and rewound the recording while hectically searching for a pen and paper on her cluttered desk.
How could she be so blind?
“I am an idiot. A blithering. Idiot,” she announced as she barged into Professor Sinistra’s quarters at an ungodly hour. “How could I not see?”
Professor Sinistra looked at her friend, dressed in a pink, fluffy dressing gown, pink slippers, grey curls barely held together with a hair tie, and a pile of papers in her hand. Annoyed as she was at having her sleep disrupted, she couldn’t help but be amused.
“Should I make some tea?”
“They’re numbers!” Professor Babbling exclaimed. “They must be! Look!” She laid out the papers on the floor. “If you split the sound pattern this way, you’ll notice that each building block repeats a certain number of times. This one, just once. The next one, four times. This, twelve times. The next one, fourteen times. And the final one, twenty times! So the building blocks must be the corresponding numbers!”
“That indeed may be,” Professor Sinistra squinted at the drawn symbols and the minute marks, which presumable noted the beginning and end of each pattern in the recording. “I wonder why these numbers, though. It’s an odd bunch.”
Professor Babbling shook her head. She didn’t know.
“Wait. What if these aren’t just numbers, but elements? It fits actually, the most abundant element in the Solar System is hydrogen, with the atomic mass of one, repeated once. Next, helium, atomic mass of four, repeated four times. The one that repeats twelve times must be carbon.”
“Slow down, I understand nothing of your gibberish. You’ll have to write those down for me. In any case, just elements isn’t much of a message, is it?”
“No… maybe it’s a code? A cipher? Maybe we need it to decode something bigger that they’ll send us. It is a clever one, though, elements are after all, well, universal.”
“What’s the point in sending the same message over and over again?”
Professor Sinistra handed her colleague a cup of Darjeeling, with a slice of lemon and dash of honey, just how she liked. “Perhaps they want to make sure that we get it. It must be important, somehow. Maybe it is what we need to decipher their next message.”
“Well, they’d better hurry up, then.” Professor Babbling stifled a yawn in between sips of tea. “I’d better go. Sorry for waking you up at this hour. I just…”
“It’s all right Bathsheda.” Professor Sinistra lay her hand over Professor Babbling’s. “I understand perfectly, and you’re most welcome, any time.”
One Sunday afternoon, a couple of weeks later, Professor Sinistra, upon returning from a prolonged weekend holiday noticed a much shorter disturbance in the waterfall plots than the usual, just under thirty minutes. Puzzled, she took a seat listened.
An hour later, Professor Babbling descended into the lawn around the telescope. Professor Sinistra was already waiting for her, radiating excitement. She waved her hands about to her flying colleague.
“Calm down, I can see you.” She laughed as she dismounted her broom. “I got your Patronus, what happened?”
“We have a different transmission.”
“You say!”
They rushed into the listening room. Professor Sinistra could hardly contain her grin as she saw Professor Babbling’s eyes widen as she listened.
“I guess you don’t mind me borrowing a copy,” she said as she removed the headphones. “This is…fascinating. It’s so beautiful.”
“By all means.” Professor Sinistra handed her the small cassette.
The thought that they might be receiving their first real communication with their Burnell colleagues evoked too many emotions for her to process all at once. Later that night, she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking, too excited to sleep, while at another corner of Hogwarts, Professor Babbling sat at her desk, headphones on her head, filling stacks of papers with symbols. They both knew that the puzzle wouldn’t be solved in one night, but the exhilaration of a possible new discovery after so long a stagnant period was too strong to fight against.
The new signal continued to transmit, steady and periodically. In the meanwhile, Professors Babbling and Sinistra worked slowly and steadily on the decoding of the first message, which proved possible if not exactly easy. Their Burnell colleague had come up with an astonishingly thoughtful message. From the hydrogen and oxygen formed the word for water, from carbon formed life, from carbon dioxide, methane, oxygen and nitrogen formed the air of Burnell, whose composition Professor Sinistra had already discovered. Hydrogen and helium formed a star, and light. Using the handful of words, Professor Babbling made a comprehensive list of syllables, sounds, and possible meanings which she fed to her decoding charm.
Some six months into their efforts, the transmissions from Burnell came to a halt, abruptly and suddenly as they’d started. Rigorous checks revealed no errors from their side.
“Maybe they had an accident or so, and are trying to fix it. It can happen to anyone, right?” Professor Babbling knew that her colleague was worried, and to be honest, so was she. The transmissions had been such a steady part of their lives in the past years, that their sudden lack was almost like losing contact with a dear friend.
“I suppose.” Professor Sinistra gazed at the sky, brows knit.
“We can decode the last message in the meanwhile. We’re almost done with the first one. Who knows, maybe they’re preparing for yet another new one.”
“Hmmm… maybe.”
“Perhaps we should try to send them something as well? You said you wanted to.”
“We can, but it’ll take a hundred years to get there.”
“Well, it never will, if we don’t send it. You know what, let’s stick to the original plan and wait till we figure out the last one, then we can compose them a message in their language. Deal?”
Professor Sinistra couldn’t help but smile at Professor Babbling’s infectious enthusiasm. “Deal.”
The final message, it turned out, was the same phrase repeated again and again.
“I couldn’t translate it very well. The closest I could get is ‘Last big light group give.”
“Well, big light are probably radio waves, since they’re bigger than visible light. Group could be a group of waves, maybe the message? And give? Maybe send? This is the last radio transmission they’re sending.” Professor Sinistra felt her hands shake. It had been months since they’d got the last message, but she hadn’t lost hope. Yet. Losing hope was the worst.
“There is one more syllable,” Professor Babbling said, her voice forlorn, “A high note followed by a long pause. I am not sure what it means. But my charm returned to me… a bunch of possibilities in different languages. They all mean goodbye.”
“Maybe the person who sent these is dead. Or maybe…” I should have studied the atmospheric models better, Professor Sinistra was so angry at herself. It had been right there in front of her all this time. The elevated methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sign of organic matter decomposition.
“You don’t seriously think that they are all dead? It’s been not even ten years since we got the first message. A race of living creatures doesn’t just go extinct like that!”
Professor Sinistra fixed her gaze on the wilting lawn outside her office. The young trees were shedding their leaves, although it wasn’t nearly autumn yet. Too dry, she thought idly. Too dry for this time of the year.
“I guess we’ll never know,” she said to her colleague. “Thank you, Bathsheda. For everything. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
“That’s it, then? Don’t you want to tell someone about it? This is an era-changing discovery!”
“Do you think anyone will believe us?”
“Why of course! We have evidence, don’t we?”
“Evidence that we can’t present to the muggles, and the wizarding community… well, I doubt that anyone will understand any of it.”
Professor Babbling didn’t reply. The two professors sat by the open French window, watching the clouds pass by, while their tea got cold untouched.
More than a decade had passed after they got the final message. Professor Sinistra gradually reduced the number of her extracurricular projects, shifting her free time to her personal life, and within a few years, used the radio telescope only for educational purposes. Professor Babbling very much did the same, eager to see more of her grandchildren. On the 13th of July 2022, she was enjoying one of her final breakfasts in the Great Hall before her retirement when her dear colleague entered with a skip in her step and took a seat next to her. She was carrying one of those bright screen things that she could never remember the name of.
“What is it now?” she asked, curious and slightly scared.
“These, my dear, are the first images of the James Webb Space Telescope. The pinnacle of Human achievement. Gorgeous, aren’t they? Unbelievable.” She turned the screen to Professor Babbling. It was indeed a very pretty image, stars and galaxies against a pitch black background.
“It is very pretty indeed, but what are we looking at?” Professor Babbling regretted the question as soon as she asked it. She still had to prepare for her class after breakfast.
“A galaxy field called SMACS 0723, located 4.6 billion light years away. Not only that, because of the orientation of the foreground galaxies we get to see the gravitational lensing of light from galaxies much further away in this field. About 13 billion years, to be precise! So these are all very young galaxies, all formed just shortly after the Big Bang. Incredible!” She pointed to a few white dots on the picture. “The ones that appear to have white light are the ones creating the lensing, about five billion light years away. The reddish ones are the lensed ones.”
“Wait, wait. What do you mean “lensing?”
“It means that their gravitational fields are curving the light from the older galaxies behind them, thus enabling us to see those! Like a lens.”
“Gravity is bending the light.”
“Precisely.”
I’m too old for this, thought Professor Babbling. Still, she couldn’t help but point out the elephant in the room.
“Do you think they’ll be able to see Burnell?”
The grin vanished from Professor Sinistra’s face, and was replaced with a nostalgic expression that Professor Babbling was sure was reflected on her own face. “Who knows? I’ve talked to Evelina, she since then took over the Burnell project, you know, and was planning to write a proposal for some telescope time. We’ll have to wait and see if she succeeds. She’s brilliant, of course, but there’s so much competition.”
Professor Babbling sighed, “Well, it’d be splendid if it worked, of course, but let’s not get our hopes high. Either way, our lifetimes won’t suffice to uncover all the secrets of the universe. Still,” she continued quietly, looking Professor Sinistra in the eye, “I believe that we are not alone. No matter what happened on Burnell.”
Professor Sinistra covered Professor Babbling’s hand with hers, as she always did, and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“I believe it too, Bathsheda,” she said. “Actually, I don’t believe it, I know it. We are not alone.”