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

Everyone assumes that if it hadn't been for the parts of the message lost in the
K/T the "residual variant sequences" would be seen to add up to some great big
life-the-Universe-and-everything revelation. And because they think such a
revelation once existed, they expect to see it carved into the palladium walls
of the Pyramid. But if the aliens who visited Earth, and left their messages in
the genomes of more or less everything on the planet, had wanted to tell us
something more about themselves, they could have made the messages a lot bigger
and built in more redundancy across phylum space; there's no shortage of junk
DNA to write on. The point is, they didn't choose to leave big messagesЧjust a
simple signpost.
The reason I was able to get the SKA people to find the Pyramid was that they
knew I'd thought about SETI a lot. But these days people tend to forget that I
was always something of a skeptic. What could a bunch of aliens tell us about
themselves, or the Universe, that would matter? Especially if, like the Albians,
they sent, or rather left, the message 100 million years ago? Well, in the case
of the Albians, there's one type of knowledge they could be fairly sure that
anyone who eventually evolved sequencing technology on Earth pretty much had to
be interested in. And it's something that, by definition, is too big to fit into
the spare bits of a genome.
I appreciate that everyone on the project now has a lot of faith in what we can
do on the fly, especially in terms of recording and analyzing information. I'll
admit that when we started I really didn't think that the lost craft of human
spaceflight would be so easy to reinvent. It still strikes me as remarkable that
none of us realized how much could be achieved by leaving a technical problem to
one side and concentrating on other things for a few decades before coming back
to it with new technologies. But the problem with the sample-return facility
won't just be one of technology. It's going to be one of size.
You see, extinctions aren't the noise in the message. They're the reason for the
message. The one thing the Al-bians knew they could do for whoever would end up
reading their message was store up some of the biodiversity that would
inevitably be whittled away over time. When Odyssey gets to the Trojan Pyramid,
I don't expect it to find any more information about the Albians than we have
already. I do expect a biosphere's worth of well-preserved biological samples
from the mid-Cretaceous. Not just genomes, but whole samples. Sudarat and her
boys are going to come home with a hold full of early angiosperms and dinosaur
eggs. We need to be ready.