Like a lot of drastic, world-changing events, this one started with a simple thing that should have been a normal, every day occurrence. Deep in the heart of the most boring, everyday systems running the Jansky VLA in New Mexico a little beetle had managed to find shelter within the control module of a radio telescope dish. Something unexpected in a replacement part must have called out to the insect, making it believe the dull green wire was delicious and needed to be consumed, which happened when it crawled deeper into the module in search of relief from the sweltering heat of the desert. Because at the right hour, in the right minute, even down to the correct second, the beetle’s powerful mandible cut the wire and killed the forward motion of the dish before it could properly swing to the designated position.
Back in the control room an alarm sounded, spooking whatever low-level grad student had the unfortunate duty to watch as a computer guided and checked the quadrant of open sky specified for that day. Her name would be lost to time, forgotten in the grand scheme of things, but one could imagine her disappointment at the sight of a fault alarm interrupting a day better spent studying for an exam or grading papers from a class where she served as TA. Equipment broke down rarely, but when it did there was usually enough paperwork to kill a small part of the rain forest and it meant weeks of downtime until the proper calibration could be performed. And it meant driving out to the remote antenna in the sweltering heat of the desert to try and find exactly what went wrong on a hundred million dollar maze of cables and circuit boards.
Part of the reason her name was forgotten in the passage of time is just how efficient she had been, already in her car on the way to the array just as the computer recognized a pattern in a signal to the receiver. That was the alarm every member of SETI dreamed of, the alarm that showed intelligent life detected in space by the supercomputer watching every minute of every day. But she wasn’t there, couldn’t see the notice or act on the obvious safeguards needed before one could declare alien life had been found. Instead it fell on her supervisor, renowned astrophysicist and historical figure Dr. Elizabeth MacAllen of CalTech. She received the text message from the automated system and drove to the office in record time just to confirm the message.
By the time telescope number fifteen was correctly diagnosed and the cut wire identified and cataloged with proper photos, the assistant returned to the office to find half of the staff of SETI working furiously to align the telescopes toward the sound deep in space. Using calculations based on the angle and trajectory of the signal they placed it near Lamda Aurigae, or Al Hurr, not only a star with the same characteristics as Sol but one in a solar system thought to be much like Earth’s own. Not much else was known about the region of space or the star itself, just what could be told from infrared scans and basic observations, all of which placed it well in the same range as Sol and an excellent candidate for life. The only reason it had not yet been scanned was the poor visibility from North America and the rare times when the Epsilon Indi moving group was in range, limiting the number of ways it could be observed; a happy accident indeed.
Before the end of the day Dr. MacAllen had roped in her counterparts from several other countries, needing the input of various other points of reference to confirm not only the distance and location, but to track the signal once they were no longer in line-of-sight to New Mexico. Australia was the first to pick up the signal once they were clued in on the location, and while they lacked the second point of reference to ensure the distance of the signal, they did receive it from Al Hurr or as close as they could tell. It wasn’t until the array in Nepal picked up the signal several hours later that the distance and the location were confirmed to within one tenth of one percent; Al Hurr was the source of the signal and it was repeating.
All of the staff had stayed awake overnight to watch the repeating pattern on screen as it was broadcast from one location to another, listening to the cheers as their brethren on every continent were sharing in the successful first contact with alien life. It went without saying that it had to be intelligent life, the signal was a loop of the first hundred primes sent in order hovering in the AM frequencies. In some way it made sense, the first human experiments with radio were performed in the early part of the twentieth century, and even those crude and often basic forms of audio broadcast grew regular enough to escape our solar system and attract an advanced society.
With the distance of a bit over forty light years, it would have taken almost a century for a round-trip signal to make it from Earth to Al Hurr and back again. What was appearing now was sent only forty-one years earlier, a time when mankind was still engaged in war and still torn apart by the upheaval of the world order. Not that much had changed in that time, but here the team at SETI held what would unite all of Earth together and prove that humanity was not alone. At least that was the opinion of Dr. MacAllen as she pondered what to write in her Nobel acceptance speech. Bridging the gap between mankind and the stars filled her thoughts as she realized there was no keeping this under wraps for long, no hiding the fact that they’d found a signal and needed to go public. The day she changed the world was the day she went to Twitter and posted the audio of the signal and invited humanity to the stars.
History remembers her, remembers the first step to embracing a future of space travel when NASA or the ESA or any of their counterparts were show pieces of science and technology, but actual steps into the heavens to pursue the source of our new friends. She did win the Nobel Prize, and went on to chair the committee appointed by the President to build our reply, but that was only the first step, the first happy accident, along the road to a shared doom so vast and frightening that some still curse Dr. MacAllen today.