Chapter 30 - Music Of The Spheres

The first self-replicating solar panel is the hardest. After that, it's just a race against time. Herein lies the history of our programme and the challenges we now face as an isolated Kardashev Type II civilisation.

You will recall that our planet-bound ancestors were not quick to realise the potential of direct solar power. We can only imagine how the development of our civilisation may have been altered if they had bountiful and pollution free energy but, alas, these things take time.

Our forefathers launched into the terrifying void of space and gradually conquered the dead worlds surrounding them. They explored, searching in vain for alien life. The other worlds contained no fossilised remains of life - and so there were no fossil fuels. Mining for radioactive elements was expensive and fraught with danger. It would have seemed that solar power was the obvious solution - but panels are heavy. Nothing can challenge the harsh Delta-V equations which govern the escape from a gravity well. The vast mass of solar panels which needed to be lifted into space, carried across the lonely expanse, and safely deposited was too great. It placed a fundamental limit on our species' ability to become an interplanetary society.

We do not know much about the person who invented the theory behind the self-replicating solar cell. No doubt their name became a blessing to many, and they expected future history books to sing their praises until the heat-death of the universe. But our civilisation is now ancient. Even if we could find the writings of that century, it is unlikely we could still understand them. Time is long, but history is short. As we are closing in on the end of our history, we wonder whether anyone will remember the sacrifices we made?

To us, this technology is a child's plaything. To those ancients it must have seemed like esoteric dark magic - the ability to conjure something out of nothing. A solar panel, when properly stimulated by a photon, spits out an electron. The universe is flooded with neutrinos and we all know the process for warp-accelerating both particles into a condensate foam that, when properly hyper-magnetised, spits out the requisite quarks, leptons, and other subatomic goop. From there, gravinometric isolation beams control space-time fluctuations which reconfigure the particulate matter flow. Long story short, a vast amount of electricity can be converted to a single atom which can be precisely placed into a matrix of other atoms.

The first prototype panel to be launched took half the planet's resources - and our erstwhile homeworld still bears the hideous scars from both the mining and what our archaeologists describe as "a cataclysmic war". The panel must have seemed impossibly vast to those primitives who dedicated generations of lives to see it fly towards the sun. Can you imagine their joy when the panel's impossibly complex computers, factories, magnetrons, yottacycles, and meson throttlers finally produced its first atom? It would have been like making fire for the first time. It was the dawn of a new phase of existence.

The panel gradually produced atom after atom until, several thousands of years later, the second panel was completed. The second panel set about repairing the colossal damage done to the first by constant exposure to the nightmare of space. And then, the two panels became four. And the four became eight. And the sacred sequence continued. Each panel repairing its siblings and generating new children. That first panel - now aeons-long dead - is still being preserved somewhere in the sphere by its descendants. A rare bit of sentiment from our notoriously modern society.

The conversion of energy into synthetic matter was not without problems. Micrometeor bombardment obliterated the radiation shielding and, in turn, the radiation bombardment corrupted the digital code which controlled the panels. Mutations arose and generated panels which were grossly deformed or which were overly productive. The efficient ones prospered and evolved while the defects were deatomised and replaced. In this way, our star-encompassing sphere grew and evolved and learned. The wizards of yore would undoubtedly be delighted to know that they created life eternal in an otherwise barren galaxy. And yet, even today there are heretics who deny the simple truth that our home is a living and intelligent being. But how could it be any other way? The evidence is literally all around us!

It would take millions of years for the sphere to be completed but, in the meantime, two interlinked problems needed to be solved. And it is the consequences of those choices which lead us to today's existential threat. The problem is one of heat. More specifically, the zettawatts of infrared radiation which is being pumped out of every panel every second of every day. Heat generation is inevitable and needs to be radiated away. The panels did this admirably and, in doing so, sealed our fate. From the perspective of distant civilisations, our star would begin to blink out and eventually fade away. That in itself is not unusual; we see stars die all the time. But our star would disappear from optical view while still appearing as a bright infrared glow from trillions of light-years away.

The very act of hiding ourselves announced our civilisation to the galaxy! Perhaps our neighbours are friendly? But what if they are foes? What if they are impossibly ancient and jealous? If they felt threatened by our civilisation, they may attack! We had no desire to conquer any further than our local solar system - but we were not naïve enough to think that everything felt that way. We could not fathom what weapons invaders would have, nor what defences would be available to them, or what form of warfare they might undertake. Our only logical option was to hide.

Our high priests sent emissaries to every panel to preach the doctrine of fear. Our home would hide in plain sight by storing up all its waste heat and releasing it in staccato bursts. We would, to any observer, look like a common pulsar. A gentle flash in the night like so many other failed stars. The few interstellar probes we had launched in a flurry of exploration turned their eyes back on us and reported that we were but another celestial beacon, indistinguishable from all around. We slept in peaceful obscurity.

Perhaps you have already had the insight that took our community a shamefully long period to discover. We had assumed that pulsars were a natural phenomenon; just an inevitable state of decay. But what if they weren't? What if the galaxy was flooded with civilisations who had made the same assumption and hidden themselves in the same way? Perhaps the very act of hiding that we were hiding had revealed that we were hiding?

The sphere listened.

We turned our attention outwards and, like the myths of the ancient hunter, listened to the sounds in the dark forest.

We surveyed the entire sky and strained to hear anything unusual. Most pulsars, it seemed, were just pulsars. But one pulsar pulsed like no other. The pulsing had an extremely unusual period and a spectral analysis showed a signal-to-noise ratio that was indicative of intelligent life! Was this the universe singing to us?

From a million light years away we tuned in.

The entirety of our star's power was dedicated to decoding the signal and interpreting the message that some intemperate species was pumping into the cold night. Our civilisation dedicated every resource we had to decode the alien language, unwinding its mysteries, and understanding the implications of this contact. Despite our magnificent power and complete mastery of physics, we have found no way to breach the light-speed barrier. All we can do is listen, learn, and wonder at their incredible technology.

Our universe feels a little less empty now.

And so, council, this is where we need your guidance. Should we reply? We can easily target our pulsar energy in their direction and we can stream great quantities of data across every wavelength. If their civilisation still exists, and if they are listening, they should easily detect our presence. We would be exposed, but perhaps a little less lonely. The message is prepared, the calculations have been made, we just need your consensus.

Our proposed message reads:

We do not know how long your "year" is - much less 20 of them - but after spending millions of generations thinking we were the only intelligent species in space, we would be delighted to join "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band".

Thanks for reading

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You can read the complete set of short stories in order.