Event Day minus Thirteen - Intervention & the Prime Directive

Intro, some Wow! signal mischief, & some unofficial Unofficial Katy background

[The original title, just for the record, was Event Day minus Fourteen, because I wrote most of this yesterday]

[Also, I’ve been experimentally liberal with the Great Image Generator, partly because I want you sci-fi fans to enjoy this - which you shall - or else]

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I already started writing this but as usual I didn’t get to the point and people find that kind of thing frustrating. So this time I’ll just jump straight in and try to be a little more self-disciplined than usual.

This little article I intend to be the first in a little series here in the Paschats section. It will start off with me talking about what I have called Event Day (for want of a better term), but then it will I hope naturally evolve into a lovely deep dive into the true nature of both this galactic sector which we call home, and indeed our galaxy as a whole. Psychohistory 101, you might also call it (that was, as it happens, the prospective title of a planned anthology of mine). This is the background, or ‘setting’ I suppose, in which most of my sci-fi stories take place (and trust me, I have lots of them for you). Specifically, we’ll be looking at the real Prime Directive, which is Intervention.

This, incidentally, is the missing variable in the so-called Drake Equation (a thought experiment attempt to get an idea of the number of other intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy; by ‘intelligent’ they mean ‘capable of communicating’ – translation: ‘people like us’), and its inclusion in the equation effectively demonstrates the validity of the so-called Zoo Hypothesis, namely that the galaxy is teeming with life (including ‘spacefaring’ life). The reality of this is what the likes of SETI are designed to cover up, because public knowledge of it would change the world for the better. Why? Because people would ask the obvious question, ‘what must the aliens think of us? And all the hurt that we have done?’. Shame, after all, is an exceptionally powerful emotion.

I shall leave those considerations there for the moment, although if you want an enticement (or semi-spoiler) you can do no better than to read Katrina’s DEXOS, specifically Part IV, which deals with the Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox, and the Zoo Hypothesis, and Part V, which examines the proof of this as contained in various SETI-type signals/messages. Rather than repeat all the links here in this article, I would strongly urge you to read both of those, which themselves contain all the required links for stuff like the Drake Equation and the Zoo Hypothesis, the so-called Dark Forest response to the equally so-called Fermi Paradox (see below for that). Call me lazy, but I really can’t be bothered to repeat all those explanations (I’m being even more lazy here by just giving you some Wikipedia links – they’re ok I suppose for a brief primer in this instance). As for the Prime Directive, you will probably be familiar with the Star Trek version, which is the opposite of intervention (it’s essentially non-interference in pre-spacefaring life) which, as we shall see, is quite possibly the most foolish thing you could ever do in a galaxy. The psychohistorical reality is the opposite.

As a further enticement for you, all of this works as essential background to most of the stories here in the Paschats section (and in my book, Rejected Messages), including some of the Unofficial Katy misadventures. This is especially the case for the story which is currently ongoing, namely Ciao, SETI!, which I know many of you are very much enjoying (I’m very happy about that, by the way).

So for those of you to whom that applies, this series of articles is going to present you with a whole load of real-life background to Ciao, SETI! and related stories. Many of you will have noticed that a central theme to this story is the reception of another ETI signal, with the basic plot being a struggle between good guys (Phoebe) attempting to make it public, and bad guys (the Professor and his coven of SETI, along with the sinister Alex) attempting to prevent it becoming public knowledge. That’s where we venture into the ‘conspiracy theory’ if you can call it that, about whether the real-life SETI does in fact exist not to facilitate ETI contact, but to actively prevent it (cf. The Brookings Report, which advocated concealing the existence of non-human intelligences from the public – interestingly this report dates from April 1961, which was one full year after Frank Drake’s initial SETI experiment, Project Ozma).

The other alternative being they are simply incompetent morons, and that I do not believe. In terms of the story, though, you really don’t need to be turned off by the term ‘conspiracy theory’ because we’re just talking about bad guys in a story, and, well, isn’t that what bad guys in stories are supposed to do?! It’s fun, after all. This was, as it happens, one of the objectives I wanted to do with the Katy stories – namely demystify so-called conspiracy theories, make a bit of postmodern fun out of them – or mischief, rather – whilst making a few salient observations in the process. The character of Katy, like me, is perfectly aware of what ‘conspiracy theorists’ look like to the general public, so the two of us here are being playful with it all. For this aspect especially see Katy’s McGuffin.

Anyhow, there is a little more to it than this SETI conspiracy. First, it’s the date and time of the message, which encodes my Event Day, namely 16 November 2024, at 11:26 UTC precisely. You will have probably noted that, although without any explanation from me you would not have thought it particularly significant, let alone been able to work out where I got it from. So in this article, the first thing I should really do is answer that question (you’ll get annoyed with me if I don’t). Once I’ve done that, then we’ll get to some good old-fashioned intrigue.

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So then, my Event Day stems from an interpretation of the famous Wow! signal. Some people might say it’s an arbitrary interpretation but I don’t think so. Given the importance of metadata (dates and times etc.) in this signal/message, and that specific metadata itself, this date somewhat jumps out at you.

Why don’t I just show you. Here is the image of the printout which contains the important bits of the signal. Look in particular at channels 3 and 4 (the channels are the columns, from top to bottom, starting at the left).

16-11-24 is what you’re looking for. That number 24 is reinforced as you can see.

What is commonly thought of as the ‘wow’ signal is the 6-number sequence circled in red in channel 2 (the alphanumerics translate into 6-14-26-30-19-5, if you want to play around with that; or see DEXOS Part V). This is where I start to get suspicious you know, because I simply can’t understand how anyone can fail to notice all the mathematics surrounding that sequence. Are modern scientists really that blind and stupid? I mean, maybe they are, given some of the absurd things they seem to believe in. Like ‘photons don’t have mass’ or ‘dark matter’, to name but two. The so-called Standard Model of Physics is just, well, it’s absurd so don’t get me started on that one.

Anyhow, you’ll want to also know where I get the specific time from. Well, this is the sequence 4344 lower down in channel 4. This is the bit where I do admit it’s a little arbitrary on my part, because you’d think the more likely specific time would be simply 11:43:44, which is pretty clear. Well, that’s something I’ve come to favour if I’m honest. When I wrote the Katy stories, though (and it also crops up in the Katrina story, which is envisaged to end at this precise date and time, after precisely three years since her arrival in Paris), I was still a little fixated on the 11:26, and it’s far too much work to edit it. Besides, that number 4344 is one of the important bits in the signal.

Ah – you are still mystified? Sorry. Ok, divide 4344 by the channel number, which is 4. You will then get 1086. 10:00 hours plus 86 minutes is 11:26. There. Oh, by the way, if you look to your left in that image to channel 3 you’ll notice the sequence 3111. Well, if this is base seven, then translating that into base ten will give you, *sly chuckle*, 1086.

Now what are the chances of that happening from random cosmic radiation hovering noisily around the hydrogen line, eh?

One option is that The Event could begin at 11:26 and end at 11:43:44, meaning it lasts precisely 17 minutes and 44 seconds. Or 1064 seconds, if you prefer. Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

You want some more wow signal mischief? Sure you do. How about the golden ratio? That’s definitely something you’d put into a message to show the recipient you have a sense of the aesthetic (a bit like the musical key contained in the channel 2 sequence – relate it to the harmonic series, not forgetting the missing C-sharp). You get the golden ratio from adding 61 to 2411, which gives you 2472, then you divide it by the channel number again (4) and you get 618. There, golden ratio.

There’s more, but for that I would refer you again to Katrina’s DEXOS Part V. It only suffices at this juncture for me to demonstrate the intelligent design behind the Wow! signal.

In a follow-up article, by the way, in anticipation of what some people are going to say, I will be addressing – and then debunking – the ‘conspiracy theory’ suggesting that SETI itself faked or hoaxed this signal. There are some hidden reasons why they simply could not have done that which are mainly to do with the metadata. But the more important point is that if they exist to prevent public awareness of non-human intelligences, as per the Brookings Report, and intended to hoax and then ‘debunk’ a message, then they would not have created a signal that looks like this one – precisely because they wouldn’t want people to believe it. I would imagine, in fact, that the intelligence responsible for this message would have anticipated that.

There’s an equally intriguing ancillary to this, as it happens, which is that I do believe there was some messing around with the SETI computer so it recorded the time an hour later than it actually was, in order to prevent accurate analysis of which star the signal originated from. If you look at Jerry Ehman’s write-up of his analysis he is convinced the signal was received not at 22:16 local time, but 23:16. If that were true then not only is it the wrong sidereal time (which was 18:21 – i.e. the Waterhole – they lied about that too, by the way), but the metadata numbers (relative to the launch of the Voyager One probe) don’t work (it’s not believable that an advanced intelligence of this magnitude would get the timing wrong by an hour – that would be farcical). Intriguingly, though, if you look at the Wikipedia article on the signal it clearly states 22:16 (which was 02:16 UTC, i.e. the following day, the 16-8-1977 – 1+9+7+7=24). I would not be at all surprised if someone amongst the bad guys has attempted to change that Wikipedia entry to say 23:16, but has encountered some ‘mysterious block on the edit function’. Now that would be mischievous.

Ah – I should explain the Voyager reference. Notice the metadata for the signal first of all. 16-8-24 reduces to 2-1-3. At 02:16 UTC, or 2-1-6. The Voyager One craft’s exact time of launch was 05/09/1977 at 12:56:01 UTC. In other words, 20 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes and 1 second later. Remove the zeroes there and you have 2-1-4; add your 1 second remainder and you have 215, which completes the numerical sequence (this, by the way, is where all the time-travel stuff comes in). Voyager, remember, contained a golden record with a load of music and images on it, as well as a signed letter from President Carter, in which he expressed the hope that ‘we too might one day join a community of galactic civilisations’. Yeah, right. As if the American Empire would ever be allowed to leave this solar system. Request denied, Mister President.

What happens to President Carter on Event Day is, well, let’s just say he’s in a hospice at the moment and doesn’t have long to live. It wouldn’t be the ETI which terminates his existence, I hasten to add. It’s more likely the other way round, and that it’s the ETI which has been keeping him alive until the appointed time. He did, after all, have some metastatic brain tumour some years ago. At the age of, what, 90-odd, you don’t achieve complete remission of a metastatic brain tumour without some kind of advanced medical technology. Like nanobots, for example.

So don’t blame me if you hear a prominent news report on that day in which the death of the former President is announced, ‘peacefully during the night with his family around him’ (which is a more dignified death than he granted America’s chosen victims, like the women and children of Afghanistan or various South American countries). And I do hope, for their sake, that the doctor does record the correct time of death, for the historical record – that’s important. It will be during the night in America, remember, at 11:26 UTC. Whether the full moon is still visible in the sky or not I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the astrological chart yet, which has been somewhat remiss of me and I shall do this, with an accompanying analysis, in due course.

As for Voyager, well, one option for what is going to happen on Event Day, which I should get out there right now at the outset (just in case, you know) is the simultaneous final end of transmissions of both Voyager probes and the two Pioneer probes. This simultaneity of course wouldn’t be noted straight away, as those transmissions are not only from varying distances, but are taking some 20 hours or so to travel back here from just outside the system (this is why Katy says ‘you might not notice the event straight away’).

I’m sure some sassy young astronomy postgrad will notice, though, and blurt it out on social media before the bad guys can stop her. Or him, if you’re anxious about feminism.

Which is where the obvious other intervention option for Event Day comes in, which is simply another SETI-type signal, but one which doesn’t get covered up and can’t be denied or explained away with ‘electronic radiofrequency interference’, or some other bollocks of that sort.

Bollocks is a proper technical term, by the way. I tend to use it a lot these days.

Again, that’s an option which would not be discovered on the actual day. The BLC-1 signal, for example, wasn’t noticed for about six months or so, if I recall.

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One postmodern aspect to the story which you may not have spotted is the bits when Katy talks about having predicted both the ETI signal, and what actions the bad guys will take to try and suppress it. Being a sci-fi writer, Katy wrote this in a story. The irony of course being that the story in question is, well, Ciao, SETI! itself. I like this postmodern mischief because there’s a lovely whiff of logical time-travel type paradoxes going on. You will find with the other Katy stories that this playful element continues, especially with the fact that we often delve into parallel worlds, in which you meet different incarnations or versions of all the characters, but the only character who is aware of the parallel worlds is Katy herself. As such, you’ll see her making a few funny quips about it here and there (often at the expense of the other characters).

One of the most important aspects to the Katy stories is when we consider the Prime Directive being Intervention. Part of Katy’s essential purpose in incarnating on this planet is to help people overcome the fear factor of realising the truth of the Zoo Hypothesis, and its associated ‘first contact’. You shouldn’t need to think hard about this to appreciate that humanity has been effectively traumatised with this ‘fear of the other’ throughout the entire Age of Pisces (the previous two thousand years or so, that is - we could call it the Age of Empires, actually). It’s not just imperial invasions (starting with the Romans) accompanied by colonialism, genocide, slavery and subjugation, and trauma, it then becomes encapsulated in so-called Judaeo-Christianity and Islam, which have been forced on most of the world’s population. I’m not being -phobic about these ideologies, by the way – quite the opposite – it’s actually these related ideologies themselves which are -phobic. And by projecting that phobia on to the general population, especially at the point of a sword or an inquisition, these ideologies have hurt humanity more than anything else in the entire history of the species.

Humanity, in other words, is suffering from a collective complex PTSD.

Today, this xenophobia has reached its absolute zenith. Or should that be nadir? I don’t know, I’ll leave the reader to choose that one. Xenophobia is everywhere in this world right now and it is continuing to inflict unspeakable trauma on everyone. Especially children, who are effectively indoctrinated with this fear-based view of the world from an early age. In light of that, I’m sure you can imagine how ‘first contact’ would be the ultimate version of this ‘fear of the other’. Perhaps you, dearest reader, if you’re into science fiction, have developed a certain immunity to this, and rather than face first contact with utter terror, you would actually embrace and enjoy it. In fact you would probably think it was the best thing that ever happened to both you and your species. And you’d be right in thinking that. It’s one reason why I am such a big fan of sci-fi, because it does help to create that beneficial effect.

And this series of essays, as it happens, will help to reinforce that for you. Because I will indeed be explaining precisely why you really do have nothing whatsoever to fear from either first contact or the acceptance of the reality of the Zoo Hypothesis. And maybe that’s my real ambassadorial purpose in this life. And this – I sincerely hope – is where Event Day comes in. But I’ll get to that later (sorry for the teasing by the way – I’m far more like Katy than you realise right now).

Well, the absolute epitome of this horrific xenophobia comes in the form of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which is all based on the utterly awful Dark Forest solution to the so-called Fermi Paradox (which is stated as something like ‘if the galaxy is teeming with life then why haven’t we seen evidence of it’ – See Katrina’s DEXOS Part IV for the answer to that error). I say this is the epitome of xenophobia because, well, it quite frankly is born out of a terrible racism, projected on to all those other intelligences. Note, by the way, that this kind of attitude also applies to any other non-human intelligences native to this planet – this includes ‘the supernatural’ if you want to call it that. It includes ‘spirits’ and ‘faeries’ and so on. It even includes the planetary intelligence, Danuih, herself.

Ironically, by the way, apparently the Wow! signal is cited in these books (or at least the Netflix adaptation). Clearly it wasn’t deciphered though. Which doesn’t surprise me.

If you are not familiar with the Dark Forest hypothesis then you might not get what I’m trying to say here. The hypothesis suggests that although there are intelligent lifeforms out there they all choose to remain silent because for some inexplicable reason whenever they encounter another intelligent lifeform they are suddenly transformed into a murderous, xenocidal rage, in which the one and only objective is to exterminate the other lifeform. This goes way beyond the idea that extraterrestrials ‘might be hostile’, as you will also have seen in a whole load of sci-fi movies (visidramas, as we call them). Naturally, however, in this series of books the humans are somehow the one exception to this absurd rule. If that’s not ultimate arrogance and racism itself I don’t know what is.

There are so many logical absurdities in this hypothesis it’s hard to know where to begin. First, without actually discovering any other intelligent life how do they all just somehow know that all the others are hostile and so they should remain silent? Who told them?! See? It’s stupid! Again, apparently humans are the only ones who didn’t get this memo, and thus foolishly make their presence known to this other lifeform, at which point this other lifeform, the ‘Trisolarans’ suddenly turn into a bunch of rage zombies armed with Star Destroyers and such like.

Actually, I don’t know if that’s especially true because I have not, I confess, read this series of books, although I am familiar with the basic plot. And if I’m honest I have zero intention of ever reading them, precisely because the premise is so, well, not only absurd, but frankly insulting and racist (or speciesist, rather). It’s simply not psychologically realistic, and any narrative that isn’t psychologically realistic is useless. I don’t care how well written these books are supposed to be. The central, not-so-subliminal message is clearly reinforcing the fear of the other. It is, perhaps, normalising xenophobia. And it doesn’t matter a jot if it’s just a thinly disguised allegory of human geopolitics.

Perhaps now you are beginning to get an idea of where I’m going when I say intervention is the prime directive. What would happen, after all, if the human species as it currently is were to get hold of advanced spacefaring technology? On past form, would that not constitute a monstrously serious threat to all the other lifeforms in our galactic sector?

Yes, it damn well would. So what would you do, if you discovered and then monitored and learned all about a pre-spacefaring species like humanity? Would you just say ‘oh well, best not intervene, eh. Let’s just let them develop interstellar travel and Death Stars and indulge themselves in imperialistic colonialist crusades against us’. No, of course you wouldn’t. You would intervene before it ever got to that point.

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Actually, perhaps now is the time to explain to you the how and the why this ubiquitous intervention policy came about. You’ll like this one, trust me.

It’s all to do with ancient galactic history and, ironically, the earliest answer to the so-called Fermi Paradox. You see, what Fermi and the Gang didn’t comprehend was how the answer to the Drake Equation evolves over time. The pessimistic solution to the equation was, in fact, true when life first evolved in this galaxy. If we’re talking the galactic disc here then we’re thinking of some 7-8 billion years ago. So let’s take 7 billion as our starting point. At that time, intelligent life truly is few and far between and therefore there really is nothing whatsoever to stop a murderous, evil interstellar empire from forming. I love the way Star Wars starts with ‘a long, long time ago’ – I wouldn’t be surprised if that ‘memory from the galactic archive’ was somehow implanted into George Lucas’ brain. That kind of intervention, after all, is not impossible (see also Asimov’s End of Eternity, which is arguably the only decent book he ever wrote, IMO, which is suspicious). Either that or he ‘remembered’ it from some past life.

So, in those early years you have an evil empire, which, from a certain point of view is logically, or psychohistorically, inevitable in every galaxy. Fortunately, however, partly due to the limitations of the laws of physics, that evil empire can never truly win, because creating and maintaining that empire takes too long over those distances, and then there are the logistical limitations of the social cognition number (Dunbar’s number), which is the most important number in psychohistory. During that empire-building time other species will have evolved. Some of them encounter the edge of the empire, escape and report back on this hostile species, communicate with all the other species, send warning messages all over the place, and before long you have a rebel alliance. Given how thinly spread the empire would be, and partly through sheer overwhelming weight of numbers, the rebel alliance always wins.

Makes a damn good space opera though, for sure (notwithstanding Disney’s atrocious and insulting Episodes 7-9, that is; they should be paying reparations for that travesty).

In our galaxy, this period of history is what we call ‘The Ancient War’. And this is what led to the obviously sensible Prime Directive of intervention. Precisely, intervention to prevent another murderous evil species from ever getting out of their own solar system.

If you want to know how this is enforced and passed down from one species to the next over 7 billion years then this is where QAI-TI and the Galactic Archive comes in (the galactic AI, that is). That should be somewhat self-explanatory. Indeed, a lot of the monitoring of tool-making species can be fully automated. Most of the time, no intervention is in fact necessary, and the species in question evolves to be emotionally and psychologically mature, at which point if they decide to go spacefaring (many don’t, interestingly enough) they soon make contact and are welcomed into their little sector of this vast and awesome galactic family. But sometimes, alas, intervention does prove to be necessary.

Question for you – do you think it is necessary in the case of the humanoid species on this planet?

Yeah – that’s a rhetorical question.

Now think of what level of technology the species is approaching. At some point, a red line approaches, and intervention becomes unavoidable.

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So then, would you like to talk about Event Day? Yeah, I thought you would.

But I am such a big mischievous tease that you’re going to have to wait till next time for that one.

But if it helps you to sleep better between now and then, please bear in mind from what I’ve said already that intervention is, clearly, logically borne out of not being hostile…

And equally clearly, precisely because of this intervention policy, there are no hostile aliens…

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There’s a countdown afoot, so there’ll be a link to the next one here soon…

Next one here - Event Day minus Eight… given there’s time travel involved here. Or you can skip that one and go to the Wow! signal decipherment…