Contact across the Solar System

Starting the Conversation

The message's invitation to respond caused additional controversy. Who would respond? What would their response contain? Could anyone reasonably speak for all of humanity? Politicians of several nations argued at length over it, though after a few months, they settled on a solution: have the United Nations handle it.

Then the question of who would do the actual work of composing messages, sending them, and waiting for replies. After a lot more argument and controversy, the UN decided to sponsor a Message Committee for managing the communication. Who would appear on it was yet more controversy, because having representatives of every major nation and interest would make it *very* large. So they decided on delegates from some United-Nations science and space organizations like UNESCO, and also some international scientific ones and some delegates from the UN Secretary General's staff.

Among them was astronomer Sheila McKenna, someone who had long advocated the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. But it was hard to get much of a career out of SETI, so she made a career out analyzing observations of radio pulsars, the closest thing to SETI. She often chuckled at what they were originally called: LGM-something, short for Little Green Men. But instead of being extraterrestrials' radio beacons, pulsars turned out to be neutron stars, with their radio emissions likely coming from their magnetic polar caps. She ended up becoming the head of the Message Committee.

Though Mark Schmidt and Joe Patel continued to get lots of questions about the SPO, its capsules, and the message, they felt that the Message Committee was not part of their professional competence. "I'm just an asteroid guy," said Mark. However, they kept in touch with Sheila.

After the Message Committee's composition was settled, the next tasks were to get commitments of radio-telescope time and to compose the messages to send. Getting commitments of time was not very difficult, along with financing of that time, because of the prestige value of talking to extraterrestrial visitors. Composing the messages was much more contentious. The Committee decided on a barebones sort of initial response, acknowledging the capsules' message and expressing interest in continuing. Using the metric system was a no-brainer, but which language was another story.

That caused more controversy, with some nations' politicians talking about pulling out of the effort if their nations' languages were slighted. Some people proposed using a constructed natural language for that purpose, to try to be neutral, but no such language had ever gotten very far. Not even relatively successful ones like Esperanto and Klingon. Eventually, cooler heads prevailed, endorsing English as the primary language, though with the option of using other languages as appropriate.

So, nearly four months after the capsule drop, the Message Committee sent its first message on its way. It said:

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We accept your invitation to start a conversation. We also accept your proposal to use English as the conversation's primary language and the metric system as its primary measurement system. We may, however, use other languages as appropriate.

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The message was sent to the Moon by radio telescope, and a little less than three seconds later, the SSC Moon base returned a message.

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Message receipt acknowledged.

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That became big news, the most positive result to come out of the effort in a long time.

A few hours later, Orthon decided on a response. It wasn't very controversial on Venus either.

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We are the Earth Contact Committee of the Solar System Community. We have received your message. We accept your decision to use the English language and the metric system, and we think that you made good choices. We invite you to ask questions about us. There are many things that you will likely want to find out about us, and we will answer questions about us as well as we reasonably can. We cannot promise quick responses, since we may have to do some research or consultation, and since we may be asleep, but we should be able to compose most responses within an Earth solar day. We will let you know if we need to take longer.