I have grown very fond of you, Julian, of your enthusiasm, your doubts, your aptitude to love the way you humans do, which is far superior – and how much more intriguing – to our intellectualised feelings. I wish those of my species, and we are legions, could see you, or Melissa, or Sarah, the way I see you now: creatures of infinite weakness, and yet so full of warmth and intelligence.

It was around 1950, at Los Alamos, that a group of your brightest physicists discussed the question of “us” – the “extraterrestrials.” Edward Teller, just fresh from working out the Hydrogen bomb, and Enrico Fermi, expressed the paradox in those terms. “They” should be everywhere by now – meaning intelligent space-faring civilisations – but, if so, where are they? Later, Frank Drake expressed the question mathematically, the “Drake equation”.

Not all civilisations wish to colonise. We were, for a long time, and are still, determined not to disrupt any other intelligent life form, for their sake and for ours. Yet the paradox is only a paradox for short-lived intelligent species. For us, who collectively live for thousands of human millennia and are therefore near immortal, the question is one of ethics, not of physics. Of course, as soon as one accepts the feasibility of inter-galactic travel the paradox itself disappears. Among the billions of billions of star systems life abounds, and so does intelligence. 

Once, I explained all this to Melissa, who was still a child. I have shown you “pictures,” or rather, I invited you to take a glimpse, all the way to my “place”. There is no violation of physical laws, just a finer exploitation of them. So now, I invite you to look around you. You are still on the edge of our galaxy, the one you call Andromeda, a neighbour of yours. You call yours the Milky Way, a name that has puzzled us for a long time. Of course we had to see it as you do, for us to understand at last. Your star is very much on the edge, at the periphery of your galaxy. At the centre of all spiral galaxies, the ones that are most welcoming to planets and life-spawning stars, like yours and ours, is the singularity you describe as “black-hole.”

They are the solution to the paradox. Singularities are, if you like, teleports, just a little more difficult to “handle” than in your fiction. They are the gates to long distance space travel. All space faring civilisations had to attain that knowledge, and the technology to use it, before considering their own solution to the “paradox.”

I see you are beginning to understand. The singularities are short cuts through the intimate structure of space-time. Mastering the mathematics necessary to exploit their properties took us eons. 

On Drake equation

Project Ozma

Picture: The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) Located in Hat Creek, CA. The SETI Institute.

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