Interrupt Read Online Free PDF Page B

Steve had only made the trip up from the San Francisco Bay Area because they’d discovered more junk noise than usual in their data during the past week.
    The noise was escalating.
    Marcus found that disturbing.
    “Look.” He opened a series of waterfall plots on his computer. Each plot—a square graph—was a cascade of color-coded lines, a snapshot image of the broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation analyzed by the array. “There’s an irregular but upward trend,” he said. “The electrostatic bursts in Earth’s magnetic field have hit one plateau after another.”
    “Why isn’t SWPC forecasting a solar storm?” Steve asked.
    “They’re still gathering reports from the satellites.”
    “The sats would record the flares.”
    “No.” Marcus shook his head. The Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, was where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitored solar activity, but Marcus had grown accustomed to the role of the devil’s advocate. He could be ruthless about proving his ideas. “These are microflares,” he said. “The satellites have inferior hardware, software, and data storage.”
    “I’m not convinced.”
    “We’re seeing something new. Something deeper than surface activity.”
    Most of Marcus’s self-respect stemmed from his career, which had begun with the SETI Project before he was asked to join ES2, an innovative new venture to explore the reaches of space. Unfortunately, a lot of people belittled the Extra-Solar Earth Search Program and everything associated with it. Science fiction had made sure of that. The public thought aliens were a joke. They expected bloodthirsty monsters. Steve’s caution was understandable. He wanted to make sure they didn’t embarrass ES2, whereas Marcus was more willing to trust his intuition.
    “If we could go further back, the trend would be obvious,” Marcus said. “It’s easy to extrapolate our readings.”
    “So everything you’ve said is just a hunch?”
    “No.”
    One of the challenges in radio astronomy was the sheer volume of incoming noise. The universe was unimaginably vast, although Marcus sometimes felt as if he could grasp a complete model of its ancient, busy clockwork in his head.
    Every day, tracking one hundred million frequencies in a tiny portion of the sky, the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field listened to 800,000,000,000,000 bits of data. Their computers discarded 99.999 percent. They didn’t have the capacity to retain so much information, much less analyze it. No one did. For the time being, the engineers who’d designed the array had leapt far ahead of the processing power ofany computer. It was like asking a blind old man to sort through the voices in a jam-packed football stadium.
    “I know this isn’t how you wanted the array to make its first big splash,” Marcus said. “Me neither. But even if the microflares stop, this could be an important discovery. And if the flares don’t stop…”
    Earth’s sun was a remarkably mild G-class yellow star. Life had flourished on their planet because of the sun’s benevolence, although the most tranquil star was still a star, a ball of hydrogen gas so massive it was collapsing under its own weight.
    As the sun burned, it crumpled and pulsed. Beneath its erratic surface violence, it maintained a slower, deeper cycle from stormy to simmering and back again, a cycle from solar maximum to solar minimum. The process took roughly eleven years—but eleven years ago, everyone had been astonished. The solar maximum hadn’t happened. Instead, they’d borne witness to the calmest period in recorded history.
    Given the abnormally long minimum, experts predicted the oncoming max could be severe. During a solar max, the sun was more likely to produce sunspots. From these spots came solar flares. Some were bursts of X-rays and radio noise. More lethal were coronal mass ejections, clouds of charged particles much larger than Earth. Fortunately, most CMEs