The Object Is Not Silent

What we actually know

Almost everything we know about the universe arrived as information we had to go and take. Stars do not send us messages; they emit light, and we built instruments patient and precise enough to read composition, temperature, motion and age out of it. A signal is only one way for a thing to carry information. Shape, spacing, ratio, timing and stability carry it too. Whether a source counts as 'silent' depends entirely on which instrument you are holding.

Where the extrapolation begins

If you wanted to leave information somewhere and could not know who would find it or when, a transmission is a poor choice: it needs power, it needs the receiver to be listening at the right moment, and it decays. An object whose geometry encodes the information yields more of it the better the finders' instruments become. It does not need to know when they arrive. It only needs them to keep looking.

What the novel invents

In the novel the Nooitgedacht object is radio-quiet across nine decades of monitoring, and simultaneously the single richest data source on Earth. Every generation of instrumentation extracts relationships the previous generation could not resolve. Sophie Keen's private reading of this is not that it is speaking, but that it is screaming — patiently, in the only language that survives translation — and that humanity's limit has never been its hearing.

Where to read next

• — Introductory astronomy — spectroscopy and what starlight tells us
• — SETI literature on the assumptions built into radio searches