The Final Regulation
It has been 60 years since our probe had been intercepted by the (presumed) automated drone. Cameras detected the drone shortly after our own interstellar probe had reached TRAPPIST-1 — it approached us on an intercept path and interacted with a number of frequencies along the electromagnetic and radio spectrum. We were unable to decode or discern any transmitted data in these interactions, we presume they were some sort of scan. Our own scans of the probe revealed it was opaque to most frequencies of light and emitted no abnormal amount of radiation for it’s contents, which seemed to be mostly iron metal alloys. It used an ion drive to reach our probe and, upon reaching it, docked with metal “arms” designed to “catch” an item of roughly it’s own mass. It remained docked with our probe, and our cameras can currently still show the partial view of the probe as it has sailed out of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
Nearly 40 years later, another probe was detected. Roughly the same size and shape as our own, but mostly unlabeled except in what must have been the barest of technical designations needed by engineers. It was detected in the outer reaches of the Oort cloud, headed inwards towards our solar system. It traveled roughly the same speed as our own probe, so it took 50 years to reach us. It means it took them a year to decide what to do, and launch a probe. That means they are a little more advanced than us, but not entirely so advanced that turnaround was instant- or, they are impossibly more advanced than us, and their deliberations took nearly a year. In any case, their probes thus far haven’t been miracles of engineering — there are a few differences and variations in materials, but as far as we can tell there isn’t a great deal of difference between our engineering capabilities and theirs.
The world was shocked, of course. Verifiable, unquestionable evidence of not only alien life, but similar alien life. Close by.
Questions were raised. Why hadn’t we detected signals? Hadn’t they detected ours? We’d been shouting at the stars for years, programs like SETI and a number of astrophysicists had teamed up to send signals into space. We even once beamed a Doritos commercial at 47 Ursa Majoris, a nearby star system. Clearly we’d been sending signals, but hadn’t been receiving any.
We got together our own advanced probe as soon as we noticed the probe headed towards us. It’s mission was to capture and bring down the probe in three stages- pulling it into orbit around our sun, pulling it into an orbit around earth, then launching a shuttle up to collect the probe and the one we’d sent up along with it.
The world watched with bated breath as nations collaborated to barely scrape together the combined space resources to capture the probe. Our own space capabilities were very specialized- this kind of generalized technology resided in theoretical patents and not prototypes. Spaceflight remains a highly specialized thing, and orbital mechanics are difficult to time correctly. Fortunately we had the computing resources to throw at the problem in the mid 2140s.
Because of advances in AI technology, there were plenty of resources to throw at xenolinguistics. The first xenolinguist was of course, an AI inside of Google. Once the probe was safely down on earth (or really, beforehand, once cameras got a look at the probe) the AI set to work creating a common language in order to translate between the two.
It took 46 minutes once the probe was on earth, in a sealed safety dome, before the message was decrypted. The work had been churning in the background once the first photos were snapped by the first probe for Google to decipher. It took 8 months of computation to do it, but as luck would have it, the arrival of the message was timed nicely with the arrival of the first alien spacecraft on Earth. We had no idea when it landed that it would also be the last.
The first part of the message was a lot of dictionary-type and contextual information. It conveyed no meaning, only served to provide enough words for our AI to construct the actual gist of the message, which was only this:
The Final Resolution Of The Galactic Government:
Interstellar Communication Has Been Permanently Banned
And then an amount of legal jargon prompting the receiver of this message to respond to any attempts to communicate by forwarding the message along. No mention was made of the penalty for disregarding the message, but the aliens had clearly expended nontrivial resources into a probe to send only this message. We are left to wonder what, or if, to reply?
