InterstellarNet: Origins Read Online Free PDF Page B

economics? Even without knowing how ET allocated resources, it stood to reason ET had made a major investment to contact Earth. His transmitter and its power requirements had to be enormous. For how long would ET’s society, whatever the form that took, be willing to operate it? Was that why ET had gone off the air?
    Congress had canceled NASA’s SETI program in 1993. At the time, the agency was spending about a nickel per taxpayer on the effort. Luckily, private institutions had ponied up the money to keep the effort alive. Now many of the developing countries were objecting to UN funding of the Lalande task force.
    Would ET’s society work any differently?
    There was a new urgency to decoding ET’s full message. They had to answer while—Dean fervently hoped—ET continued to listen.
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    With intellectual discipline that many found intimidating, ET’s message continued to build a common vocabulary. Some speculated that much of ET’s delay in responding had been time spent formulating the elegant reply.
    Animations of motion introduced mechanics and ET’s notation for the calculus. Cartoons of atoms with emission spectra identified elements and ET’s symbols for them. Cartoons using the element symbols showed simple molecular representations, which were used to illustrate a simple chemical reaction. An image of a simple wet cell labeled with its chemical reaction provided a symbol for voltage, beginning a review of electrical engineering.
    The purpose for all this common vocabulary was still unknown when the task force was summoned to present its status to a philosophically divided COPUOS.
    ■□■
    “The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will come to order,” the chairman announced, his amplified voice booming in the crowded UN meeting room.
    Ambassador and chairman Juan Roderigo, although Harvard-educated, had spoken in his native Spanish—and Charise approved. English was the worldwide language of technology, trade, and air traffic control, but diplomats should not—and she was pleased to see, in this case did not—succumb. That Belize had once been British Honduras in no way altered her opinion.
    Of course Spanish was the conqueror’s language in Argentina. She sighed inwardly. There was no escaping cultural imperialism.
    Charise sat with the COPUOS members rather than among the task force. While a technician adjusted the sound level, she surveyed the audience.
    Only the task force’s Steering Committee had been invited, but someone had gotten Dean Matthews a guest pass. The Satterswaithe woman, Charise supposed, perhaps on the basis of the scientist’s liaison duties. Charise did not approve; Matthews was too often impulsive and insensitive at Media group meetings. As a COPUOS guest, she expected him to observe silently.
    Undersecretary-General Kim spoke for his task force. In brief: ET heard us; after an unexplained delay, he answered; he was now building a common vocabulary with us.
    Nods all along the dais suggested that the summation had been understood. Roderigo paid the task force the obligatory compliments for their hard work. The ambassadors from the US, Japan, Peru, and several western European countries followed suit.
    Then Maurice Mbeke of Congo spoke. Charise’s colleague and friend spoke in fluent French, but his message, like his dashiki, was distinctly Afrocentric. “I think—no, I know—that I speak for many others in asking why the aliens have expended so much effort in communicating with us. We will resist interstellar colonialism, physical or cultural.”
    Charise would have been astonished had Mbeke spoken otherwise. A pleasant surprise was the level of support Mbeke’s words engendered. Speaker after speaker, especially from the nations who had most recently joined COPUOS, endorsed his comments. Even a few industrialized countries voiced anxiety about ET.
    The Russian ambassador, Anatoly Shuskov, took the floor. “I ask the indulgence of the committee to have a