"The Albian Message" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morton Oliver)

Morton, Oliver - The Albian MessageThe Albian Message
OLIVER MORTON
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)
Oliver Morton lives in Greenwich, England. He is a writer and editor who
concentrates on scientific knowledge, technological change, and their effects,
and has recently become the Chief News and Features editor at Nature, one of the
world's leading science journals, "where I oversee the journalism in print and
online." He has had a substantial career as a science journalist: he worked on
the science and technology pages of The Economist, was editor-in-chief of Wired
UK, and has been anthologized in both Best American Science Writing and Best
American Science and Nature Writing. His first book is Mapping Mars: Science,
Imagination and the Birth of a World, and he is working on his second, Eating
the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, a look at photosynthesis. Asteroid 10716
Olivermorton is named after him.
"The Albian Message" was published in Nature. It is an intriguing hard SF
rethinking of what alien artifacts might reveal. It is one of those SF ideas
that is so obviously reasonable that it should have been evident all along.



To: Eva P.
From: Stefan K.
Re: Sample handling facility
March 4, 2047
I thought I ought to put into writing my concerns over the sample-return
facility for Odyssey. I think that relying on the mothballed Mars Sample Return
lab at Ames is dangerously complacent. It is simply not flexible enough, or big
enough, for what I think we should be expecting.
I appreciate that I am in a minority on this, and that the consensus is that we
will be dealing with non-biological artifacts. And I don't want to sound like
the people from AstraRoche slipped some egopoietin into my drink during that
trip to Stockholm last November. But my minority views have been pretty well
borne out throughout this whole story. Back when Suzy and Sean had more or less
convinced the world that the trinity sequences in the Al-bian message referred
to some sort of mathematico-philosophical doctrineЧpossibly based on an analogy
to the aliens' purported trisexual reproductive systemЧand everyone in SETI was
taking a crash course in genome analysis, I had to pull in every favor I was
owed to get the Square Kilometer Array used as a planetary radar and scanned
over the Trojan asteroids. If I hadn't done that we wouldn't even know about the
Pyramid, let alone be sending Odyssey there.
I'm not claiming I understand the Albians' minds better than anyone else; I
haven't got any more of the message in my DNA than anyone else has. And it's
always been my position that we should read as little into that message as
possible. I remain convinced that looking for descriptions of their philosophy
or lifestyle or even provenance is pointless. The more I look at the
increasingly meaningless analyses that the increasingly intelligent AIs produce,
the more I think that the variations between phyla are effectively random and
that the message from the aliens tells us almost nothing except that there's a
radar-reflecting tetrahedron ir/3 behind Jupiter that they think we may find
interesting.