In 2459 two university astronomers discovered something unusual in the sky. It was a head-scratcher. It looked to them for all the world like a faint gamma ray star, even though gamma ray stars don't exist in the real universe, not even in theory. It looked like a gamma ray star because in visible light it looked blue-white, it was dimmer in infrared, brighter in ultraviolet, and even brighter in the X-ray range. It was, for those astronomers that bothered to examine it, a most energetic and most unusual object. For the lay sky observers around the Solar System, it was nothing to notice because it was too faint to see. The interested astronomers checked their records of that part of the sky, and it had not been there two years earlier. But it was there, faintly, six months ago. The object was brightening, which made it even more curious to those who cared at all.
For another three years it remained a curiosity: a small mystery of the big sky. Then in 2462 John Foursmoots, an astronomy graduate student at that time, published a thesis saying that the radiation spectrum of this small gamma ray star matched what would be expected to be coming from the exhaust of a starship engine -- an engine that was headed for our system at near light speed, and decelerating at about 1G (one gravity). He went on to predict how the spectrum would change in frequency range and brightness as the ship continued its approach to our solar system. For another year astronomers watched the object, and it brightened and frequency shifted as predicted by John Foursmoots, and it became visible to the naked eye of Earth observers. As GO-1 (Gamma Object 1) became visible to the naked eye, John Foursmoots himself became highly visible to a curious public.
"What can you tell us about this starship?" asked a prominent afternoon media spokeswoman.
Foursmoots replied, "We can tell that the engine is powered by nuclear fusion, and that the space ship is a constant acceleration craft, which is currently decelerating. This means that it is headed for our Solar System, and planning on stopping here. We can also tell that it is ten light years away from us, and that it will arrive in eleven years."
"You learned all this from simply looking at a dim star? Amazing! Do we know what the aliens will be like?"
"Well, since we can't build this kind of ship yet, we know they are more technologically advanced than we are. However, we can recognize that it is a ship -- it doesn't look like some kind of God Magic to us -- so they are only modestly more advanced than we are. I have talked with some of the technologists at our university and they estimate it should be possible for us to build this kind of ship in large quantities, the quantities required for space commerce, in, say, three hundred years. If these aliens don't have other surprises in store for us, they should be one-to-five hundred years more advanced than we are. Considering that there has been life on our planet for three billion years, and we have been the species we are today for forty thousand years, these visitors are practically twins.
"Will they be peaceful when they come?"
"At this stage all we can know is their starship engine technology. We have no way of knowing their other technologies, or their intentions."
That was the heart of the interview. What followed was a lot of speculation and interest.
And speculation and interest ran wild around the world. On the Internet there wasn't a point of view that couldn't be heard.
The bigger governmental organizations reacted by militarizing, and calling for conferences on what to expect and how to coordinate Earth's response. The bigger supra-government organizations also convened coordinating conferences. But getting these big conferences organized was slow and cumbersome compared to virtual and video conferencing, so the big conferences became places to ritually approve the plans formulated and agreed upon earlier in the informal Internet-based conferences. It was good that these big conferences took a while to get organized, because agreement on a course of action didn't come easily.
The "realists" among the military argued that what was coming was some form of "War of the Worlds" space invasion. The "pessimists" among the realists argued that since the space invaders had a 300 year technology lead, we had already lost, and we should concentrate on hiding and hunkering down. The "optimists" argued that ten billion people and a whole solar system was a lot of people and resource. If the invaders chose to set foot on Earth, we should throw bodies at them until the last man and woman died... on their side, of course! The cost might be high, but we would win. The "dessert" the optimists offered was: once we won, we would have access to their wonderful technology!
The "mercantilists" said the ship was coming here to trade, and a lot of the business community truly and deeply hoped they were right. The Mercantilists said we needed to build up our security, but build it up on the presumption that trade would happen, not conquest.
Some of the "religionists" warned that Jesus or Allah or some other deity was on the ship, and it was time to repent. Other Religionists warned that Lucifer or Magog or some other devil was on that ship, and it was time to repent. And then there were the NGO's from every other spectrum, too, who offered their slant on the upcoming arrival. The animal rights people ponied out that old Star Trek film with the avenging whale people, and the Flat Earthers argued that the whole business was a hoax being conducted by the real aliens, who were on Earth already, and holed up in Area 51.
Shortly after the excitement started, astronomers identified which star the ship had come from. It was Gliese 581, a red dwarf star 20 light-years away that astronomers had already identified as planet-supporting.
"They are puddle-jumping." was the conclusion reached by many of the newly-created xenoculturalists -- the instant experts in aliens. "Gliese 581 is one of the Solar System's closest neighbors with rocky planets. They are moving from close star to close star. And it's only one ship. This is clearly not some invasion armada."
"The ship could still be equipped with God-like technology, and the aliens could be bringing God-like terraforming equipment. They could be coming to make Earth into a Mars or Venus." argued the pessimists.
"If they are, we are screwed no matter what we do." argued back the optimists, "We should plan for trade, not conquest. If they have god-powers and they want to exterminate us, they will, no matter what we plan."
In the end, the big organizations that controlled the big resources decided to plan for both trade and invasion. And the smaller organizations all planned for whatever they felt like. The world was definitely in a panic, and there was a whole lot of "end of the world" mentality being thought and spouted. What people came to blows over was how the world was going to end. Was it going to end heavenly, or going to end hellishly? Guessing the answer to this turned out to be something worth fighting for -- mostly in backwater places that were not coping well with modernizing, anyway.
The good news was: the world had ten years to indulge in a lot of foolishness before the steadily brightening star did anything but steadily brighten. By the time the ship did something new, a lot of silly things had been done, but their silliness was being recognized as such, and the solar system community was starting to recover its "coolheadedness." Starting to... but process was far from complete.
In 2473, when the starship was six months away and closing at about 40 percent of light-speed, it's behavior changed. To Earth observers the ship simultaneously got ten thousand times dimmer, and started oscillating in brightness. The astronomers reported that this was because the ship was now coming in like a corkscrew rather than on a simple linear trajectory. They also reported that after the dimming they could detect a communication signal coming from the ship. There was a huge surge of interest. "What's in the signal?" the public asked.
Scientists, and everyone else, jumped right in to analyzing the signal. It was fairly strong, so the raw feed was put out to the whole Solar System community real time, as well as comments about what was discovered. Within hours of the signal being picked up, it was determined that there were actually four channels of information being sent. The first channel to be successfully analyzed was a basic "1+1 is 2.... 1+2 is 3..." mathematical sequence, followed by a "galactic language" equivalent of "A... B... C..." It was a "learn Galactic" channel, and people ate it up. It cycled and started over about every twelve hours.
Using the first channel information, the code for the second channel was broken quickly. The code was broken quickly, but the material of the second channel was not quick to digest. It started out describing more about "technical Galactic" language, and went on from there to describe how to build a new style of transmitter/receiver. This channel cycled over in about four days. Once it was clear what the information was, the debate began on whether or not to actually build the device.
"We are playing into their hands!" warned the pessimists.
"Look at this communication technology! We've learned so much and we haven't even said, 'Hello.'" said the optimists, "Of course we are playing into their hands! They want to trade. To trade you have to communicate, and the better you communicate, the better the trading is for both sides."
The argument over whether or not to build the transmitter was intense for about six weeks, but was decisively won by the "Lets build it" side. The insurmountable justification: Build or not, the aliens would be here in six months... make that five months, now! For the same reason, it was decided to build the transmitter/receiver on the Moon rather than some remote asteroid. If it was done on a remote asteroid, it would be finished well after the ship arrival.
Imagine building a 1960's-style FM radio from an instruction manual when your current state of radio technology transmission is doing electric arc telegraph similar to what the Titanic had in 1912. You know some of the theory of what's going on with this advanced device, but according to the manual you need roughly a thousand components that you don't have. Fortunately, the manual has the technical specifications for those components, and fortunately, they are all purely electronic components, not some mix of electricity and some mysterious "Force X", but still the components are different, advanced, and not Solar System standard. This is what Earth designers were up against. Amazingly, they got a working transmitter/receiver up and going by the time the ship was one month away. Now the scientists listened successfully to the two remaining "mystery channels" -- they were mysteries because before the new receiver/transmitter was operating, nothing could be deciphered from them. Listening to them was like listening to a Single Sideband Channel with a receiver set to Standard Band -- you know there's a signal, but you can't make out what it's saying. The two mystery channels turned out to be sixty four channels each. One was sixty four channels of "Galactic Educational Channel" and the other was sixty four channels of "Galactic Shopping Network." The educational channel talked non-stop about Galactic history, social studies, science and culture, and the shopping channel talked non-stop about advertising things that the ship was offering to sell Earthlings and other Solar System members. Both channels also had text channel equivalents that were downloading encyclopedia and sales catalog equivalents.
A month and a half after an Earth delegation sent back a "Hello" message, the two beginner channels changed to the Standard Galactic formatting of channels Three and Four. Both were now available for two-way conversations. The aliens were, in effect, opening up two high bandwidth Internet connections, but connections with weeks-to-hours of lag time. Humans were familiar with this lag, there had been "Internet" to Mercury, Mars and Titan for years now, called Spacenet, so the alien channels were quickly integrated into Spacenet -- the solar system-wide communications net. The transmitter/receiver was the focus point: data from Spacenet was translated into Galactic there, and vice versa.
By this time it was also clear that the ship was going to end its initial approach at the orbit of Neptune, not somewhere in the inner solar system. The military had had ten years to prepare for this moment. The fleet was in top shape: the best shape it have ever been in. When it became clear that the aliens would stay "coy", it was decided to take a "watch and wait" stance rather than launch a defensive armada to surround the incoming ship and escort it. The main fleet would stay at home, but, in spite of yells and screams from the extreme pacifists, a few fast, lightly armed scout ships were sent to get closer to the alien.
The alien ship replied to the Earth "Hello?" with their own "Hello!" on Channel One of the reformatted beginner band, and went on to explain that they were delighted to encounter a new civilization here, and that they wanted to trade. They continued on with an hours-long monologue asking questions about Solar System resources and explaining their trading policies. They were clearly used to long distance communication, so they expected that Earth people would be formulating replies and their own questions while they listened to this inbound message. They expected that the Earth people would begin broadcasting their reply on Channel Two as soon as they were ready, not waiting for the aliens to end their message. In Earth-Earth communication this would be rude, but this is the way of long distance communication.
Oh... and it turned out "Galactic" was a misnomer for the communication protocol. According to the education channel, these people were Mirondians, and the Solar System was on a distant edge of their cultural area, which was about 300 light years across, and there were other civilizations that the Mirondians were in contact with. The center of the Milky Way is about 30,000 light years away from the Solar System, so Mirondian culture looked like "Galactic" only to Earth people who were making first contact. And, the Mirondian language that was being used between Earth and the spaceship was a scientifically designed, easy-to-learn "Pidgin Mirondian" rather than a full language. Usage around the Solar System was quickly updated from calling them Galactic to calling them Mirondian protocols.
Now that the Solar System community and the space ship could talk, it was time to see if fighting or trading would come next.