Questions and Comments

If you have any questions or comments (e.g. ‘why did you write the story?’, ‘what happens next?’, ‘how can I kill the Examiners?’, ‘you are crazy.’), please put them here. Note: the last example is probably true, and the answer to the next-to-last is that you can’t. Criticisms of my writing are welcome, as is guidance on MIT slang.

The Twenty-Kilogram Test

This is a point in the story’s plot where the students’ reactions are critical. Many students at Caltech have endured my questioning them, but there are some subtle tricks to this test that I want to evaluate. To insure fairness, try not to read the comments left by others until you’ve made your own answer.

So: you are on a college campus, or in your car, or sitting on nothing, as you fly through space as described in the story. The Examiner has informed you that you and your fellow students must survive on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti for at least twenty-four years, that you have everything currently on the campuses of Caltech and MIT, and that you will be allowed 20 kg of anything that can be produced on Earth, with some restrictions:

I will not give you anything that you intend to use against other humans or yourself, because that would defeat the purpose of the test. No nerve gases, viruses, or nuclear bombs. I will also not give you any human. … Every other person on both campuses has the same decision. If you find someone else and agree as to what you want, you may pool your mass allocations.

Because I pushed the subjective time to Tau Ceti down to 2 hours, the subjects in the story had only 30 minutes to decide what they wanted. I’ll need to rely on you to police yourselves to that limit, as I am much less capable than the Examiners. So: what do you request?

2007, July 25: Results and a Loophole

I’ve had a fairly large number of responses to the Twenty-Kilogram Test, by email and verbally from the amazingly tolerant student body of Caltech. Some of the more interesting ideas, filtering out the large number of requests for weapons of mass destruction:

Keys to all locks on campus: get into everything. Privacy concern, but useful.

20 kg monofilament fishing line and hooks: reasoned as the easiest way to get a supply of local meat.

Three sets of especially durable wilderness wear: laundry machines won’t be on for a long while.

Modern atl atl and spears: can take down a woolly mammoth, so probably good enough for the zards and pedes I’ve set up.

10 kg fissile uranium, in shielded cage: you and a hundred of your closest friends get this, and you can make a suitably large power plant that would last a century.

The fourth story in the sequence shows a loophole in the Test, which only two people out of the 40 I asked saw. One of them was myself, which is problematic, and casual conversation is not the same as being awakened by an alien and finding yourself flying through interstellar space, but the loophole is catalytic once someone sees it, so I had two out of 1737 Caltech students see it.

To see the loophole, rephrase the 20-kg question: what is most useful, but has the smallest possible mass? The answer may come easier now: information. Several people asked for high-density storage media holding various data, but the Examiners aren’t limited to that. They can impress information directly onto a human brain. Yes, this is only possible in theory and requires outrageously good knowledge of neurochemistry and the particular brain concerned and incredible ability to adjust potential differences, synapses, and neurotransmitter concentrations, but the Examiners have all that so that they can communicate with the Techers and this is, after all, science fiction.

Once people see the loophole, a lot of weird things happen. Medical knowledge comes first, followed by all manner of other things: psychology, languages, literature (I had one subject ask to become Homer), skill with weapons, heightened perception, memory training, practical engineering, car repair. It is fortunate that only a few of the population think of this, or the Test would be completely broken. As it is, I have two characters being outrageously skilled, four being very good, and about forty others with the equivalent of extra doctorates.

I originally allowed this for amusement value, but it added a new dimension to the story: do the Examiners really want the Test to be fair, and if not, why are they running it at all?

Acknowledgements

Caltech:

Rachel Reddick for the original idea,
Daniel Thai for tactical advice (may he stop trying to kill my characters),

Ning Bao, Catherine Beni, Constantine Evans, Nicholas Heavens, Jamie Jackson, Sarah Marzen, John Sadowski, Karthik Sarma, W. Austin Webb, Dahvyd Wing, and assorted others who endured my incessant questioning while I was writing this.

MIT:

Kevin Riggle and Katherine Sniffen of the MIT Science Fiction Society,

The residents of pika – who provide the blueprints of their building on the internet. I apologize for having them turn into the mafia.

Maps

Here follow various properties of the planet Tau in the story. The real system of Tau Ceti is unknown, except that it does indeed have a dust disk at large radii. I have set up the fictional system to be below the detection thresholds of 2009 instruments. Obviously, any planets Tau Ceti actually has will be very different from the below (and Geoff Marcy of Berkeley has already noted a tentative Doppler signature of a hot Neptune, which would eliminate any habitable planets in the system). I am not concerned by this. All that matters is that the system and planet I have constructed is plausible.

Tau

Tau Ceti has six major planets near the star and a debris disc in the outer portion of the system. The largest planet, Skana, (with a period of ~50 years) is ~50 Earth masses, sufficient to block many incoming cometary bodies but nowhere near as efficient as Jupiter is in the Sol system. The second largest is somewhat smaller than Neptune and has a mass of 10 Me. The four inner planets are terrestrial. Three are quite small.

The second planet is now called Tau by the human inhabitants. Some physical data:

Density: 5.3 g/cm^3
Radius: ~0.82 Re
Gravity: 0.8 g
Mass: 0.52 Me
Teq: 245 K (top of atmosphere)
Surface Pressure: 1.1 bar, 19% oxygen
Rotation Period: 26.5 h
Year: 385 d, 349.8 local days.

There is a small solid core and a ~0.2 gauss global dynamo field. The planet has no large natural satellites, and the resulting oscillations in the planetary obliquity and hence the global climate have dominated the evolution of local lifeforms. Currently, the planet is five hundred years into a four-millennium warm period. There is a high impact rate of ~1 m particles from the debris disc, which causes impressive meteor activity but no major cratering (usually).

Tectonic activity on the planet is normal by Earth standards, with several major continental landmasses. Even in the warm periods, however, much of the planet’s surface is covered by ice: the permanent ice caps are at about 60º latitude. During winter, the northern ice cap moves as far south as 35º, aided by mountains. The southern cap advances over ocean, to about 50º.

Like any planet with a significant biosphere, Tau II has a dramatic variety of microbial lifeforms. However, the large plant and animal forms are the most important for the history of human colonization on the planet. The plant forms consist of tree analogues, ground cover, and various small plants. There are two major classes of large animals: the zards and the pedes. The zards are six-limbed, tailless, with pleated, scaly skin. They are most different from Earth’s vertebrates in that they have no spine as such, but rather two parallel lines of somewhat longer bones. The pedes are invertebrates, with multiply-segmented bodies. They can be very large: one phylum has evolved lungs.

Take-Away

2014 September 19 9:13 UTC

The college campuses of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century could seem isolated from the rest of the world. Students would get up, mostly before noon, go to class, eat at cafeterias, do problem sets or research depending on if they were undergrads or grads, stay up into the early morning, and check on the outside world electronically, using cell phones and email to learn what Google, Wikipedia, and TV streamed on iTunes, YouTube, and file-sharing servers could not tell them. Some students didn’t stray beyond the bounds of room, lab, library and lecture hall for a year or more.

And yet there were very definite connections. Electricity, water, food, caffeine, and lab equipment flowed in. Computer traffic, sewage, garbage, research papers, and innovations flowed out. The public derived amusement from the students, and occasional pride from the research. Thus there was considerable confusion and no little grief when the campuses of MIT and Caltech vanished in the middle of the night.

The vanishing was incredibly selective. In less than a tenth of a second, the Caltech student body and the campus, down to the deepest foundation, disappeared. The same happened at MIT, with the water of the Charles River restrained by a wall of rock that had not existed before. Professors and staff found themselves in pits where buildings had been. Those who were seated found themselves on chairs, not always those they started on. A postdoc was starting to drink a cup of coffee at MIT, only to have it disappear along with the all-night coffee shop. A concert outside the Beckman Auditorium at Caltech ended abruptly when the ensemble found that the building, stage, microphones and most of the audience were no longer present.

The faculty’s personal effects remained with them, along with a few older computers. Checkouts on the computers showed that all research-related data that had not been backed up to off-campus servers had been copied into their memories, including files with high-level copy protection. By then more worrisome reports had come in. Students not on campus were also gone. Apartments had been neatly cut out of buildings. A dozen airlines reported passengers disappearing during flight, and many missing pieces of luggage. At a karaoke bar in Boston, a graduate student had vanished in the middle of impersonating Aretha Franklin. His car was no longer in the parking lot.

No one with a doctorate had vanished. Students who had just passed their PhD defense remained; those scheduled to defend next week were nowhere to be found. One other group of students remained. Those who were married or engaged to people who were not also students, or who had children, saw, or did not see, their surroundings vanish while they remained. For a while, it seemed that two graduate students might have been skipped in the vanishing. The reason for their remaining became clear a little less than a month later.

Electronic signals from the colleges had dropped out within microseconds: emails arrived fragmented, gaming avatars froze. The vanishings happened with a complete absence of sound. No one saw buildings fly into the sky or disintegrate. US Space Command reported no unusual radar signals. Satellite imagery showed nothing out of the ordinary. The entire electromagnetic spectrum was clean, from gamma rays down to the Earth-sized oscillations of the magnetosphere. Grasping at straws, the neutrino and cosmic-ray spectra were also undisturbed. The LIGO gravity-wave detectors had switched themselves off ten minutes before the event due to a glitch in the control software, and stayed down for a half-hour, but they saw no gravity anomalies before or afterwards.

The precision of the vanishings, the absence of sound and the re-writing of computer memory ruled out the most obvious methods of making large pieces of matter disappear. This was probably not the result of a run-away arms race in pranks and hacks. Some radical theologians claimed heavenly wrath and enjoyed a temporary resurgence in popularity and revenue. A theoretical physicist proposed that a macroscopic system could suddenly transition to a much different energy state but was unable to explain how.

For several years afterward, conspiracy theorists brought forth “evidence” linking one or another government agency to the disappearances. This was always an obviously fake photo or memo or an ‘I said so’ from someone of doubtful sanity but past government employment, usually referencing short individuals with large eyes and grayish skin and crop destruction in the Australian countryside. The only effect of the conspiracy theories was the revival of two or three publications sold largely at supermarket checkout lanes and an increase in traffic to a few websites. More serious were the small groups of political extremists that falsely claimed responsibility for the Vanishing. The US military went through a phase of shooting first and then asking questions.

Eventually, the problem was effectively deemed unsolvable. Most of the faculty and remaining students went to other schools, the pits were made memorials, and students elsewhere were given strict instructions to not experiment with dangerous substances except under close supervision. The musicians who had been playing at Caltech enjoyed brief fame with their next few recordings. The Institute’s endowments were made into a research foundation; JPL re-negotiated its contract with NASA; the observatories at Palomar and Haystack were taken over by the NSF; and the human race went about its day-to-day business. Physicists mused about possible extensions to physical laws, and gave increasingly difficult-to-test predictions, but that was considered completely normal.

2038 June 28

The latest SETI Array is in the Atacama Desert. Five hundred robotic dishes constantly scan the visible sky over three orders of magnitude of frequency; all are controlled by a central AI and a cluster the equal of the Internet of three decades ago. One building houses the cluster, a control room, and quarters for an operator. Operators alternate two-week shifts at the array, one at a time. There have been proposals to spend the money for extra fiber optics to pipe all of the data and run the array remotely, but the Roswell Union of Hackers believes that faking an alien signal is the highest achievement of their art. After the second picture of Yoda apparently coming from the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Allen Trust decided that it is safer to electronically isolate the array at almost all times, so that it must be operated onsite, and then have the operator telecommute back home.

Kalpana Sarswati, the present operator, was sitting in an armchair, listening to Javanese music while musing on what review to give a proposal for using the wide-field millimeter array, located a hundred kilometers north, to measure the n+1-th correlation coefficient of the microwave background. Then the AI paused the music and played a ringtone.

Sarswati stood up and silenced the computer with a gesture. A glance at a series of ancient flat-panel displays caused her to pick up an even older analog telephone. She dialed the millimeter array and began speaking rapid Spanish.

“Evo, it’s Kal. Can you get Tau Ceti in the hydrogen band? … Now, or as fast as you can slew over and switch the receivers. … Take it out of my disc observations. Ten for one. … If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. If you see the same thing, I just might believe it.” The astronomer hung up. The millimeter array would use their back-up low frequency receivers to observe the star, completely separate from the AI’s control and the rest of the SETI system, in case this was a hack.

The array had been scanning Cetus. The search pattern covered the entire visible sky daily, but had not yet seen anything convincingly like an alien civilization. Ten thousand pulsars, a few hundred exotic variable stars, but nothing resembling a signal that had not been traced to human-made inference. Then, as Tau Ceti came into view, the AI had noticed something very strange.

Over a one-megahertz bandwidth a little off the 1420-megahertz hydrogen line, the star was far brighter than it should have been. It was not currently prone to outbursts and those would have been broadband. There were no spacecraft in positions that would cause interference. The signal went up in priority. Then the computer measured modulation of the signal, from full strength to the normal background, in an at first random pattern with a frequency of a few hertz. The AI triggered a massive sequence of check-sums and non-standard test measurements. Everything in the system seemed normal. If this was a hack, it was very very good and had hidden itself for the six and a half months since the array was last connected to the net. Ten seconds after first seeing the signal, the AI had passed it to the processing cluster, which usually ran more mundane data analysis, programmed a subarray to monitor the star, and told Kal.

After placing the call to the millimeter array, the operator ran a sequence of hardware checks, including impedance testing of the cabling from the dishes to make sure they hadn’t been tampered with, more radio interference measurements, and low-level tests on the AI and the rest of the cluster. Everything checked out. As she finished, the computer rang her again.

“Subarray confirms that the source is tracking with the star. Suggest that we activate the follow-up arrays and perform VLBI.”

There was a hardware switch to be thrown. This switch connects the Atacama array to other radio telescopes in California and Asia via real-time fiber optic links. Between them, the dishes have sufficient resolution to establish if a signal comes from near any of a stellar system’s planets, if star is within about a hundred lightyears. In 2025, Wiktorowicz’s interferometer found six planets around Tau Ceti, one of which is only a little smaller and colder than Earth and was the object of the Astral Mining’s Gamble of 2034. Kal threw the switch.

Two minutes later the signal-processing computer also began to call for attention. “The signal parses as English Morse, and the slight variations in frequency and amplitude are consistent with a hand operator. None of the interference monitors detect any such signal. The archived signal is transcribed and the continuing data reduced in real-time. Do you want to hear the transcription?”

Kal carefully ran through one more sequence of checks, to insure that the signal-processing software was not compromised. Then she sat down again.

“Play it.” She more than half expected to hear the computer repeating a hacker’s victory oration. But that was not what she heard. Only two things distracted her as the computer recited the message: the AI’s report that VLBI put the location within a twentieth of an AU of the Earth-sized planet and the call from the millimeter array that they heard what she heard. Those only did so briefly.