posted on Oct, 16 2013 @ 12:29 PM
The Dove
In terms of accidental discoveries, this has to be up there with the best of them. I mean, we're talking penicillin, X-rays, radioactivity and a host
of others as competition. But a new world – in fact, a new civilisation – well, how are you going to top that?
When the Kepler Space Observatory finally failed its primary mission a couple centuries ago (I think it was around 2013) it was left to drift,
searching out potential hazards by tracking and predicting meteor and comet paths to make sure they didn't have an unexpected rendezvous with Earth.
It did a good job by finding nothing of importance. Then, one ordinary day near the end of the millennium, something extraordinary happened. It found,
completely by accident, an Earth twin. Only 22 Light Years away was a planet just like ours.
It took a decade of intense study and research, along with the orbit of a new dedicated space observatory and the launch of a new NLS (Near Light
Speed) probe to confirm that this twin was in fact habitable and an almost verbatim duplicate of Earth. It wasn't until the NLS probe returned to
Earth 50 years later that we knew, absolutely and undeniably, that Earth 2 (as we called it) was also inhabited. Laser-etched into the probe's hull
was a picture of a bird; a Dove.
Forty years later saw the launch of my ship Columba, Earth's first Inter-Stella Class ship. It uses most of the systems of the successful Neptune
Class explorers, along with the added bonus of the as yet untested GasComa stasis chambers for myself, as Commander, and the crew – mostly science
and diplomacy ambassadors. Well, as I'm writing this, I'm pleased to report that the chambers work as described.
I've just skipped through the recorded replay of my re-fluidisation and I must say I've had better days. While in GasComa stasis you resemble a
bloated corpse, with the surprise and often violent addition of electrical stimulus for ten minutes in every hour. It takes, on average, 30 hours to
refluidise and regain everything you thought you had before you went in – like conscientiousness, memories and your mission objective, provided you
can remember who you are, of course.
During the 96 years between Earth 2's discovery and the launch of Columba almost every single scientist on Earth was involved in some way for the
preparation and planning for contact. We immediately started transmitting data to them in the hope that 'they' could receive and understand it.
Included in this was a simple mathematic decoding protocol. We transmitted something new every other day, slowly building a data record of who we are
and what life on Earth is like. Obviously, being so far away, it took 22 years to get a response. But we did get one.