The first thing that the astronomers of the Mauna Key Observatory made clear to the public was that our solar system is in constant movement through the galaxy. Some of the general populace would already be aware of this, but the scientific community had long since learned to speak to the lowest common denominator when presenting new scientific discoveries. And so they explained that just as how our moon orbits the earth and it in turn orbits the sun, so also the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and it in turn orbits the far off center of the Virgo Supercluster. It was that last statement was the part that was a discovery, for all prior research had suggested that our galaxy orbited no central mass, only that it ever drew nearer to its neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy.
For the time being they had no explanation as to why this inter-galactic movement had never before been noticed, but cheerfully assured they would keep the public updated on this most fascinating of developments. The public, as a whole, were mildly entertained by the news but little further thought was given to the revelation.
Coincidentally, in that same year another discovery came to light which made far more of an impact on modern culture. In the midst of the ongoing Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, some seismic shifts had collapsed a large portion of their borehole and then filled it with a number of archaeological artifacts such as had never before been seen. What was most notable, though, was that these items featured unmistakable signs of synthetic materials, suggesting a community that possessed a technology which belied the age to which they must have belonged.
*
Seven years had passed since the first reports on the galaxy’s movement towards the center of the Virgo Supercluster, and each of the major astronomical observatories had confirmed the findings of the Mauna Key Obervatory. As each establishment published the results of their research, though, each claimed that the rate of the galaxy’s movement was slightly greater than that which had been measured by any of the preceding publications. By this pattern it soon became evident that the movement was accelerating, and doing so at a rate of that was greater than anticipated.
The full implications of this could not be fully extrapolated though. It was becoming abundantly evident that the scientific community possessed neither sophisticated enough models nor detailed enough data to predict future outcomes with any degree of confidence. The distances were simply too large and the rate of motion too great. Thus it was that mathematicians and physicists committed themselves to providing more robust systems for analyzing these extremes.
Meanwhile the archaeologists were facing steep obstacles in the case of the ancient relics uncovered by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. The first hurdle had to do with the fact that the IODP’s mission statement was solely to bore a hole to the earth’s mantle, a massive undertaking in and of itself. The research of ancient civilizations was simply not on the agenda. That did not mean that the program’s board was disinterested, but that all of their specialized drilling equipment was funded by a great number of investors whose personal needs had to be represented in their operational decisions.
The program did, at least, agree to halt all further drilling efforts for three months, while a conference was held for all interested parties to come to an agreeable resolution. The outcome of these proceedings was that the financial institutions behind the IODP agreed to a seven-year loan of their project, to any party conducting research into the ancient civilization, providing said party could raise sufficient funds. The exact quantity of those sufficient funds was never publicly disclosed, but it was public knowledge that several leading governments contributed significantly to securing the contract for a coalition of top archaeological institutions. All of the resources available to the IODP, including their drilling ship, the Chikyu, and all of its equipment and manpower were assigned to this new outfit.
The second challenge that the archaeological community faced was in identifying an approach for ultra-deep excavation. Securing pieces and drawing them up to the surface would destroy all by the sturdiest of the relics, and it was a physical impossibility to dig a large enough channel down to such an immense depth, thus ruling out more traditional excavation techniques.
*
Four years later all astronomers were in agreement that the momentum of our galaxy was accelerating at an alarming rate. It had even reached the point where backyard hobbyists were noticing their night skies changing by the slightest of degrees. Again, some acceleration had always been expected, but this large of a change was unprecedented. All projected trajectories and timelines for this orbit were updated, and the natural conclusion was that the orbit was not shaped like the wide, circular path of a planet around the sun. Instead it was more akin to the long, drawn out ellipsoid of a comet.
Under this theory it stood to reason that until just recently the galaxy had been in the most outer limits of that orbit. At that point its movement would have been so slow that it was virtually imperceptible, and thus had never been noted until this time. Of course the implication of this theory was that this orbit passed even nearer to the Virgo Supercluster’s core than originally anticipated. Indeed the proximity would be so near that its effects on the planet would be devastating.
It was determined not to share these speculations with the general public, given that they truly were speculations. Yet, as mentioned, even hobbyists were starting to see the rapid changes and it was not be long before they began to draw the same conclusions for themselves.
The tension in the astronomer circles was in stark contrast to the excitement in rippling through the archaeological community. At long last they were able to develop a process by which slices of deep earth could be flooded and then siphoned upwards to the surface for testing. What was extracted by this process would be greatly fragmented and somewhat homogenized, but not to such a degree that the separate elements’ composition could not be evaluated. In addition, the safe retrieval of some small and individual relics could be accomplished through the use of durable tunneling robots, which were to be lowered to specific areas of interest through specially drilled boreholes.
The flooding and siphoning process was completed first, and every component was passed through triage into categories of cultural, structural, and natural origin. A barrage of tests was then conducted on each category and the carbon dating estimates cast the entire project into deeper intrigue. Every sample, regardless of which category of it had been drawn from, dated to the same point of time several hundreds of millions of years ago. More than three hundred million at least, and quite possibly more than six.
This alarming result left the scientific community unable to resolve this ancient culture with any of the existing historical timelines of the earth. Either an inexplicably ancient and intelligent civilization truly did exist many millions of years before even the dinosaurs walked the earth, or else all of the scientifically approved methods for dating elements were fundamentally flawed and the entire prehistoric record would be called into question.
Added to these perplexities was the further analysis conducted on the synthetic materials which had been extracted. It was determined that the necessary methods for producing these composites was of such a sophistication as to put it on par with modern steel and titanium. This was irrefutable evidence that these ancient beings possessed a degree of intelligence and technology that rivalled even our own. A civilization much like ours on an earth so ancient that our evolutionary ancestors had not yet crawled out the ponds.
*
Another five years and the acceleration of the world had reached such magnitude that it was visible in the night sky. The appearances of “shooting stars” were constant, as another million tons of passing space debris burned in the atmosphere every second. A few degrees off of the equator a comet-like tail extended far out into space, formed by all of the evaporated moisture, each day growing ever longer and brighter.
Every estimate of the galaxy’s movement was outdated by the time it was published, and astronomers grappled with the fundamental problem of not being able to chart distant celestial bodies before they had already been passed by. This became known as the “train outrunning its own light conundrum” and the so the world flew blindly on.
Simulations were only capable enough to illustrate the “general” trajectory of this orbit, and there was a great deal of concern about what exactly would happen when the world reached proximity to the center of the Virgo Supercluster. This point now had been given a name: the Pericore. Similarly the point furthest from the cluster was now referred to as the Apocore. The general consensus was that as the earth approached this Pericore it would be subjected to unimaginable forces of acceleration, heat, and gravitational pull, but the specifics of how these would manifest was mostly speculation.
World governments tried to quell the ensuing panics, calling for order as they initiated construction of deep, underground bunkers. Though they promised that the best minds would find a way to preserve humanity, those same best minds knew that there was no possible hope. The most likely outcome was that the entire planet would to be scorched from its peaks to its core for centuries. The atmosphere would be disintegrated, all life would be destroyed, and the earth would be left as dry and empty as the moon.
Immediately before the astronomers broke their silence on the doom they saw ahead, the archaeologists claimed their ultimate prize in the form of ancient writing from the prehistoric civilization. The figures had been deeply engraved into a hyper-compressed cube of some glass-like material. It was too large to retrieve up to the surface, but after digging a series of additional bore-holes and flushing away the surrounding sediment, they succeeded in reaching the artifact with a team of robots. These were manipulated to rotate and photograph the entirety of the artifact for further analysis.
Linguistic experts and cryptographers alike were called on to collectively decipher the characters’ meaning, and soon a rough translation emerged. This accomplishment was greatly helped by the fact that this record had been designed for interpretation, as evidenced by how the piece was structured.
On the first face of the glass cube gave a sequence of numerical quantities, with corresponding representative symbols beside them. There then followed basic operations on those quantities to establish a shorthand for mathematics. These mathematical expressions included binary operations for ideas such as “and,” “not”, “all,” and “exists.”
The second face of the cube featured a series of pictures filled with geometric shapes. Though each of these was different in style from one another, it was realized they were all varied representation of the same concepts: those of planets, solar systems, and other celestial bodies.
With the foundation of those first two faces, the third could now be properly understood. This one defined a core vocabulary, by first defining objects and then operations and states that pertained to them. For example the scale of the planet defined on the second face was paired with a small fraction defined on the first face to give the dimensions of a much smaller entity, one which answered roughly to that of a humanoid. These entities were combined with the symbols established for mathematical addition and subtraction to communicate ideas such as birth, growth, and death, and again all of these combined ideas were then associated with a single symbol for the word that represented this.
On the fourth face the cube finally began to deliver its message in earnest. It described many people at great distance from each other spread all across the planet. It suggested that a portion of these people spent their time measuring the stars that passed by.
The fifth face described a galaxy shown to be moving along a massive, elongated orbit. It gave figures for the distance of that orbit and the time it took for the galaxy to transition through it. The record drew special attention to the point of the orbit where the galaxy grew nearest to a cluster of other stars.
The sixth face used depictions for many different forms of death. The death of “all” was specifically emphasized. After this mass destruction it illustrated the galaxy continuing along its orbit back away from the star cluster. At one point it passed through a cloud of some sort, the meaning of which was not explicitly defined. After passing through that cloud, though, there came many of the symbols representing the ideas of “birth” or “life.”
The general consensus was that the cube’s authors had spied a fertile cloud of elements and gas which stood in the latter half of the galaxy’s orbit. This cloud would be able to replenish the earth back to a state of supporting life, and that life would perhaps evolve and become an intelligent society. And by their intelligence that society could one day find this ancient record, the record of those that had been before. A record written moments before they were all blended into the ground with fervent heat in a burning that was destined to rise again.
***
As rough as I feel this week’s short story still is, things started for it in a far messier place! As mentioned in my post on Monday, every story’s first draft requires a multitude of cleansing passes and iterating to brush away all the noise and dirt until the true story finally shine through. It’s a process that takes a great deal of time, and is as important as any other phase of crafting a story.
In the case of these blog posts I do need to meet a deadline, one which I’m already late in meeting, and so my short stories do not have the full benefit of this process. That being said I do take time to refine these stories as much as I can within my constraints, and I would never dream of posting my initial rough draft out here for the public to see…well, aside from just this once!
In order to better illustrate the points I said in my Monday post I will not present my original first draft of this story and then the same draft with the edit marks throughout which ultimately led me to the final version you’ve just read.
ORIGINAL FIRST DRAFT
The first thing that the astronomers of the Mauna Key Observatory had to make clear to the public was that our solar system is in constant movement through the galaxy. Of course some of the general populace would already be aware of this, but you always tried to speak to the lowest common denominator when approaching new scientific discovering. And so they explained that just as how our moon orbits earth which in turn orbits the sun, so also the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn orbits the far off center of the Virgo Supercluster, of which it is a part. That alone was a very notable discovery, for all prior research had suggested that our galaxy orbited no central mass, only that it ever drew nearer to its neighboring Andromeda Galaxy.
For the time being they had no explanation to offer as to why this inter-galactic movement had never before been noticed, but cheerfully assured they would keep the public updated on this most fascinating of developments.
Coincidentally, other surprising news came to light in the midst of the ongoing Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. After some seismic shifts collapsed a large portion of their borehole, the researchers there discovered it had been and then filled with a number of artifacts of archaeological importance. What was most notable was that these items featured unmistakable signs of synthetic materials, even though they were found at a depth that would make them predate even the oldest of dinosaurs.
*
A number of years had passed since the first reports of the Milky Way galaxy’s movement towards the center of the Virgo Supercluster. Each of the other major astronomical observatories had conducted their own experiments in relation to the Mauna Key Obervatory’s findings and all agreed with the conclusions that had been presented. As each establishment published their confirmation, though, it became a pattern that each stated that the rate of movement towards the supercluster core was slightly greater than had been measured by each of the previous publications. It soon was evident that the rate of movement was accelerating. This was by no means unusual, only that the rate of that acceleration seemed greater than anticipated.
The full implications of this were yet to be fully extrapolated though. For the time being what was most evident was that the scientific community at large did not possess either sophisticated enough models nor detailed enough data to predict future outcomes with any degree of confidence. The distances were simply too large and the rate of motion too great. Thus it was that mathematicians and physicists were put under great demand to provide more robust systems for analyzing these extremes.
Meanwhile the archaeologists were only barely beginning to make any headway in the case of excavating the ancient relics uncovered by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. The first hurdle had, of course, to do with the fact that the IODP’s mission statement and basis for funding had nothing to do with the research of ancient civilizations. That was not to say that the members of the program’s board were disinterested, but that all of their specialized drilling equipment was the property of a great number of investors whose personal needs had to be represented in their operation decisions.
The program did, at least, agree to halt all further drilling efforts for three months, during which a conference was held where all interested parties could hopefully come to an agreeable resolution. The outcome of these proceedings was that the financial institutions behind the IODP agreed to seven-year loan of their project, the drilling ship Chikyu, and all other relevant equipment and resources necessary to any party capable of carrying out research into the ancient civilization providing they could raise sufficient funds. The exact quantity of those sufficient funds was never publicly disclosed, but it was common knowledge that several leading governments contributed significantly to securing the contract for a coalition of top archaeological institutions.
The second challenge that the archaeological community faced was in identifying an approach for ultra-deep excavation practices. Grabbing pieces and drawing them up to the surface as had been done with the first discoveries would destroy all by the sturdiest of the relics, and it simply was not an option to dig any reasonably large channel down to such an immense depth for more traditional excavation techniques.
*
Four years later and all astronomers were in agreement that the momentum of our galaxy was accelerating at an alarming rate. It had even reached the point that backyard hobbyists were noticing that their night skies were starting to change by the slightest of degrees. Again, some acceleration had always been expected, but this large of a rate of increase had the scientist’s updating their projected trajectories and timelines for this orbit. The natural conclusion was that the wide circular pattern of a planet around the sun was not the correct shape for their movement. Instead it was more akin to the long, drawn out ellipsoid of a comet.
Under this theory it stood to reason that the last several hundred million years had seen the galaxy at the zenith of its furthest reaches in that orbit, the point where its movement would be so slow that it was virtually imperceptible and thus why it had never been noted until this time. Of course the implications of this theory were that at its nearest point this orbit were even nearer to the Virgo Supercluster’s core than originally anticipated. Indeed the point would by necessity be so near that its effects on the planet would be devastating.
It was determined not to share these speculations with the general public, given that they truly were only speculations. Yet as mentioned, even hobbyists were starting to see the rapid changes and it would not be long before the more insightful of them began to draw the same conclusions for themselves.
The tension in the astronomer circles was countered by excitement in the archaeological community. After a great deal of innovation and experimentation they were able to develop a process by which slices of deep earth could be flooded and then siphoned upwards with acceptable damage to interned artifacts. What would arrive would be greatly fragmented and somewhat homogenized, but not to such a degree that the separate parts’ composition could not be evaluated. In addition, individual holes would be bored into particular areas of interest, through which durable tunneling robots could be lowered for limited retrieval of smaller and more delicate relics.
By the nature of the two extraction methods the flooding and siphoning process completed first and every component was passed through triage into various assumed categories of cultural, structural, and natural. Separate tests were done on each category in order to ascertain whether the context of this ancient civilization was at odds to the culture itself. Or in other words, this discovery was so deep in the earth that it did not make sense for it to belong there naturally, yet there was no explanation for what sort of cataclysmic event could have been buried a community to such an extent.
Each of the tests returned and the carbon dating estimates did nothing to alleviate the scientific community’s complexity. The structural, cultural, and natural remnants all dated to the same point of time several hundreds of millions of years ago. More than three hundred million, that was clear, quite possibly more than six.
This conclusion led to more than one theory among the public that the archaeological community was attempting to pull some elaborate hoax. The scientific community meanwhile had no satisfactory way to resolve this news with any of the theoretical timelines for this earth and its creatures’ evolution. The implications were either that an unexplainably ancient civilization truly did exist since even before the dinosaurs walked the earth, or else all methods for dating the world were fundamentally flawed and all grounding for the entire prehistoric record was upturned.
Added to these complexities was the analysis on the synthetic materials which had been extracted from this ancient period. The methods of producing these composites was unfamiliar to any known chemical process, but the sophistication of it was on par with modern steel and titanium. Perhaps it was even somewhat superior. This seemed to suggest that even if these ancient beings were not humanoid in their original appearance, they were human-like in their degree of intelligence and technology. A civilization like us on a world so ancient that our ancestors had not yet crawled out the ponds. That news gave even the skeptics a moment of contemplative pause.
*
Another five years and the acceleration of the world had reached such speeds that it was visible in the night sky. The appearance of “shooting stars” were everywhere as millions of tons of passing space debris were burned up in the passing atmosphere. A few degrees off of the equator a comet-like tail was forming from all of their evaporated moisture and each fortnight it could be seen from another degree of longitude’s distance.
Every estimate of the galaxy’s progress through along its arc was long since outdated by the time it was published and astronomers still grappled with the fundamental problem of not being able to measure distant enough celestial bodies before they had already been surpassed. This became known as the “train outrunning its own light conundrum” and the result was that the world flew blindly.
Simulations were useful only to illustrate the “generally” perceived trajectory of this orbit and the current progress along it. There was a great deal of concern as to what would happen when the world reached proximity to the center of the Virgo Supercluster, a point which now had been given a name of its own: the Pericore. A name was naturally derived from the similar terms Perigee and Perihelion, and similarly the point furthest from the cluster was now referred to as the Apocore. The general consensus was that as the earth approached the Pericore it was destined to be subjected to unimaginable forces of acceleration, heat, and gravitational pull.
World governments naturally tried to quell the ensuing panics, calling for order and loudly initiating construction of deep, underground bunkers. Though they promised that the best minds could find a way to preserve their people and cultures, those same best minds knew there was no possible hope to be found. The best estimates were that the entire planet was going to be scorched from its peaks to its core for a duration of at least several centuries. If a material existed that could withstand the heat, which it did not, then food and other resources would shortly be consumed and any survivors would be left on husk as dry and empty as that of our moon.
Before the astronomers’ discoveries were brought to light, the archaeologists had successfully claimed an ultimate prize in the form of ancient writing from the prehistoric civilization. The words had been engraved deeply into a hyper-compressed cube of glass. After a series of digging additional bore-holes, and flushing away surrounding sediment they succeeded in using a team of robots to both turn and photograph the entirety of the artifact for research.
The photographs were shared publicly and linguistic experts and cryptographers alike collectively worked to decipher the characters’ meaning. It soon became evident that this record had been intended as a message to foreign beings, as the piece began by establishing core principles of the culture’s language.
On one face of the glass cube was a sequence of numerical quantities and operations on them with corresponding symbols that established a shorthand for basic mathematics. These mathematical operations included binary definitions for ideas such as “and,” “not”, “all,” and “exists.” The next face then featured a series of pictures, each determined to be a different representation of the same concepts: those of planets in a solar system.
With these established, the two faces’ information combined to bring meaning to a third, one where relationships between the celestial bodies and the scale between them were used to illustrate galaxies, planets, and even entities whose sizes answered roughly to that of a humanoid. These entities were illustrated in various interactions including birth, growth, and death, and again all of these ideas were then associated with a symbol for the word that represented this.
On the fourth face the cube began to deliver its message in earnest. It spelled out a statement of many people at great distance from each other spread all across the earth. It suggested that a portion of these people spent their time measuring the celestial bodies that they passed by.
The fifth face began again with pictures showing a galaxy moving along a massive orbit like a comet around some massive cluster of stars. It gave figures for the distance of that orbit and the time it took for the galaxy to transition through it. It drew special attention to the point of the orbit where the galaxy grew nearest the cluster of stars.
The sixth face showed numerous depictions different forms of death. The death of “all” was greatly emphasized. After the mass destruction it showed the galaxy continuing on its orbit back towards its Apocore. At that point it passed through a cloud of some sort, the meaning of which was not explicitly defined, but after doing so were symbols representing the ideas of “birth” or “life.” The general consensus was that the message suggested a fertile cloud of element and gas stood in the orbit of the planet and would replenish it back to a state of being able to support life.
Life that would perhaps evolve and grow over untold eons, perhaps even become intelligent. And by that intelligence that society may even one day be able to find this record of those that had been before, a record written moments before they were blended into the ground with fervent heat.
***
DRAFT EDITS
Bold text represents an addition, strikethrough represents a removal.
The first thing that the astronomers of the Mauna Key Observatory had to make made clear to the public was that our solar system is in constant movement through the galaxy. Of course Some of the general populace would already be aware of this, but the scientific community had long since learned you always tried to speak to the lowest common denominator when approaching presenting new scientific discovering discoveries. And so they explained that just as how our moon orbits the earth and it which in turn orbits the sun, so also the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which and it in turn orbits the far off center of the Virgo Supercluster, of which it is a part. It was that last statement was the part that was a discovery, That alone was a very notable discovery, for all prior research had suggested that our galaxy orbited no central mass, only that it ever drew nearer to its neighboring, the Andromeda Galaxy.
For the time being they had no explanation to offer as to why this inter-galactic movement had never before been noticed, but cheerfully assured they would keep the public updated on this most fascinating of developments. The public, as a whole, were mildly entertained by the news but little further thought was given to the revelation.
Coincidentally, in that same year other surprising news another discovery came to light which made far more of an impact on modern culture. In the midst of the ongoing Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, After some seismic shifts had collapsed a large portion of their borehole, the researchers there discovered it had been and then filled it with a number of archaeological artifacts such as had never before been seen. of archaeological importance. What was most notable, though, was that these items featured unmistakable signs of synthetic materials, suggesting a community that possessed a technology which belied the age to which they must have belonged. even though they were found at a depth that would make them predate even the oldest of dinosaurs.
Many of the general populace received that news with complete skepticism, assuming the Drilling Program was having a joke at their expense. Every scientist involved in the ongoing investigation and extraction, though, considered this find to be the most significant of the last two or three centuries.
*
A number of Seven years had passed since the first reports on of the Milky Way galaxy’s movement towards the center of the Virgo Supercluster., and each of the other major astronomical observatories had conducted their own experiments in relation to confirmed the findings of the Mauna Key Obervatory’s findings and all agreed with the conclusions that had been presented. As each establishment published the results of their research their confirmation, though, it became a pattern that each stated claimed that the rate of the galaxy’s movement towards the supercluster core was slightly greater than that which had been measured by each any of the preceding previous publications. By this pattern it soon became was evident that the rate of movement was accelerating, and doing so at a This was by no means unusual, only that the rate of that was acceleration seemed greater than anticipated.
The full implications of this were yet to could not be fully extrapolated though. It was becoming abundantly evident For the time being what was most evident was that the scientific community at large did not possessed neither sophisticated enough models nor detailed enough data to predict future outcomes with any degree of confidence. The distances were simply too large and the rate of motion too great. Thus it was that mathematicians and physicists were put under great demand to committed themselves to providing more robust systems for analyzing these extremes.
Meanwhile the archaeologists were only barely beginning to make any headway facing steep obstacles in the case of excavating the ancient relics uncovered by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. The first hurdle had, of course, to do with the fact that the IODP’s mission statement and basis for funding had nothing to do with the was solely to bore a hole to the earth’s mantle, a massive undertaking in and of itself. The research of ancient civilizations was simply not on the agenda. That was did not to say mean that the members of the program’s board were disinterested, but that all of their specialized drilling equipment was funded by the property of a great number of investors whose personal needs had to be represented in their operational decisions.
The program did, at least, agree to halt all further drilling efforts for three months, during which while a conference was held where for all interested parties could hopefully to come to an agreeable resolution. The outcome of these proceedings was that the financial institutions behind the IODP agreed to a seven-year loan of their project, the drilling ship Chikyu, and all other relevant equipment and resources necessary to any party capable of carrying out conducting research into the ancient civilization, providing they said party could raise sufficient funds. The exact quantity of those sufficient funds was never publicly disclosed, but it was common public knowledge that several leading governments contributed significantly to securing the contract for a coalition of top archaeological institutions. All of the resources available to the IODP, including their drilling ship, the Chikyu, and all of its equipment and manpower were assigned to this new outfit.
The second challenge that the archaeological community faced was in identifying an approach for ultra-deep excavation practices. Grabbing Securing pieces and drawing them up to the surface as had been done with the first discoveries would destroy all by the sturdiest of the relics, and it simply was not an option was a physical impossibility to dig any reasonably a large enough channel down to such an immense depth, thus ruling out for more traditional excavation techniques.
*
Four years later and all astronomers were in agreement that the momentum of our galaxy was accelerating at an alarming rate. It had even reached the point that where backyard hobbyists were noticing that their night skies were starting to change changing by the slightest of degrees. Again, some acceleration had always been expected, but this large of a rate of increase change was unprecedented. had the scientist’s updating their All projected trajectories and timelines for this orbit were updated, and the natural conclusion was that the orbit was not shaped like the wide, circular pattern path of a planet around the sun was not the correct shape for their movement. Instead it was more akin to the long, drawn out ellipsoid of a comet.
Under this theory it stood to reason that until just recently the last several hundred million years had seen the galaxy at the zenith of its furthest reaches in had been in the most outer limits of that orbit. At that the point where its movement would have been so slow that it was virtually imperceptible, and thus why it had never been noted until this time. Of course the implications of this theory were was that at its nearest point this orbit were passed even nearer to the Virgo Supercluster’s core than originally anticipated. Indeed the point proximity would by necessity be so near that its effects on the planet would be devastating.
It was determined not to share these speculations with the general public, given that they truly were only speculations. Yet, as mentioned, even hobbyists were starting to see the rapid changes and it would was not be long before the more insightful of them they began to draw the same conclusions for themselves.
The tension in the astronomer circles was countered by in stark contrast to the excitement in rippling through the archaeological community. After a great deal of innovation and experimentation At long last they were able to develop a process by which slices of deep earth could be flooded and then siphoned upwards with acceptable damage to interned artifacts to the surface for testing. What would arrive was extracted by this process would be greatly fragmented and somewhat homogenized, but not to such a degree that the separate parts’ elements’ composition could not be evaluated. In addition, the safe retrieval of some small and individual relics could be accomplished through the use of individual holes would be bored into particular areas of interest, through which durable tunneling robots, which were to could be lowered to specific areas of interest through specially drilled boreholes. for limited retrieval of smaller and more delicate relics.
By the nature of the two extraction methods The flooding and siphoning process was completed first, and every component was passed through triage into various assumed categories of cultural, structural, and natural origin. Separate A barrage of tests were conducted done on each category, in order to ascertain whether the context of this ancient civilization was at odds to the culture itself. Or in other words, this discovery was so deep in the earth that it did not make sense for it to belong there naturally, yet there was no explanation for what sort of cataclysmic event could have been buried a community to such an extent.
Each of the tests returned and the carbon dating estimates cast the entire project into deeper intrigue. did nothing to alleviate the scientific community’s complexity. The structural, cultural, and natural remnants all Every sample, regardless of which category of it had been drawn from, dated to the same point of time several hundreds of millions of years ago. More than three hundred million that was clear, at least, and quite possibly more than six.
This conclusion led to more than one theory among the public that the archaeological community was attempting to pull some elaborate hoax. The This alarming result left the scientific community meanwhile had no satisfactory way unable to resolve this news ancient culture with any of the existing theoretical historical timelines of the earth. for this earth and its creatures’ evolution. The implications were Either that an unexplainably inexplicably ancient and intelligent civilization truly did exist since many millions of years before even the dinosaurs walked the earth, or else all of the scientifically approved methods for dating elements the world were fundamentally flawed and all grounding for the entire prehistoric record was upturned would be called into question.
Added to these complexities perplexities was the further analysis conducted on the synthetic materials which had been extracted from this ancient period. It was determined that the necessary The methods of for producing these composites was unfamiliar to any known chemical process, but the of such a sophistication of it was as to put it on par with modern steel and titanium. Perhaps it was even somewhat superior. This seemed to suggest was irrefutable evidence that even if these ancient beings were not humanoid in their original appearance, they were human-like in their possessed a degree of intelligence and technology that rivalled even our own. A civilization much like ours like us on an world earth so ancient that our evolutionary ancestors had not yet crawled out the ponds. That news gave even the skeptics a moment of contemplative pause.
*
Another five years and the acceleration of the world had reached such speeds magnitude that it was visible in the night sky. The appearance of “shooting stars” were everywhere constant, as another millions of tons of passing space debris were burned up in the passing atmosphere every second. A few degrees off of the equator a comet-like tail extended far out into space, was forming from formed by all of their evaporated moisture, each day growing ever longer and brighter. and each fortnight it could be seen from another degree of longitude’s distance.
Every estimate of the galaxy’s movement progress through along its arc was long since outdated by the time it was published, and astronomers still grappled with the fundamental problem of not being able to chart measure distant enough celestial bodies before they had already been surpassed by. This became known as the “train outrunning its own light conundrum” and the result was that so the world flew blindly on.
Simulations were useful only capable enough to illustrate the “generally” perceived trajectory of this orbit, and the current progress along it. and there was a great deal of concern as to about what exactly would happen when the world reached proximity to the center of the Virgo Supercluster., a This point which now had been given a name of its own: the Pericore. A name was naturally derived from the similar terms Perigee and Perihelion, and Similarly the point furthest from the cluster was now referred to as the Apocore. The general consensus was that as the earth approached the this Pericore it was destined to would be subjected to unimaginable forces of acceleration, heat, and gravitational pull, but the specifics of how these would manifest was mostly speculation.
World governments naturally tried to quell the ensuing panics, calling for order and loudly initiating as they initiated construction of deep, underground bunkers. Though they promised that the best minds could would find a way to preserve humanity their people and cultures, those same best minds knew that there was no possible hope. to be found. The best estimates were most likely outcome was that the entire planet was going would to be scorched from its peaks to its core for a duration of at least several centuries. If a material existed that could withstand the heat, which it did not, The atmosphere would be disintegrated, all life would be destroyed, and the earth then food and other resources would shortly be consumed, and any survivors would be left on a husk as dry and empty as that of our the moon.
Immediately before the astronomers broke their silence on the doom they saw ahead discoveries were brought to light, the archaeologists had successfully claimed an their ultimate prize in the form of ancient writing from the prehistoric civilization. The figures words had been deeply engraved deeply into a hyper-compressed cube of some glass-like material. It was too large to retrieve up to the surface, but after a series of digging a series of additional bore-holes and flushing away the surrounding sediment, they succeeded in reaching the artifact with using a team of robots. These were manipulated to both turn rotate and photograph the entirety of the artifact for research further analysis.
The photographs were shared publicly and Linguistic experts and cryptographers alike were called on to collectively worked to decipher the characters’ meaning, and soon a rough translation emerged. This accomplishment was greatly helped by the fact It soon became evident that this record had been designed for interpretation, as evidenced by how intended as a message to foreign beings, as the piece was structured. began by establishing core principles of the culture’s language.
On the first one face of the glass cube was gave a sequence of numerical quantities, with corresponding representative symbols beside them. There then followed and basic operations on those quantities to them, with corresponding symbols that established a shorthand for basic mathematics. These mathematical expressions operations included binary definitions operations for ideas such as “and,” “not”, “all,” and “exists.”
The second next face then of the cube featured a series of pictures filled with geometric shapes. Though each of these was different in style from one another, it was realized they were all varied determined to be a different representation of the same concepts: those of planets, in a solar systems, and other celestial bodies.
With these established, the foundation of those first two faces, information combined to bring meaning to a the third could now be properly understood. This one defined a core vocabulary, by first defining objects and then operations and states that pertained to them. For example the scale of the planet defined on the second face was paired with a small fraction defined on the first face to give the dimensions of a much smaller entity, one which one where relationships between the celestial bodies and the scale between them were used to illustrate galaxies, planets, and even entities whose sizes answered roughly to that of a humanoid. These entities were combined with the symbols established for mathematical addition and subtraction to communicate ideas such as illustrated in various interactions including birth, growth, and death, and again all of these combined ideas were then associated with a single symbol for the word that represented this.
On the fourth face the cube finally began to deliver its message in earnest. It spelled out a statement of described many people at great distance from each other spread all across the planet earth. It suggested that a portion of these people spent their time measuring the stars celestial bodies that they passed by.
The fifth face began again with pictures showing described a galaxy shown to be moving along a massive, elongated orbit like a comet around some massive cluster of stars. It gave figures for the distance of that orbit and the time it took for the galaxy to transition through it. It The record drew special attention to the point of the orbit where the galaxy grew nearest the to a cluster of other stars.
The sixth face showed numerous used depictions for many different forms of death. The death of “all” was greatly specifically emphasized. After the this mass destruction it illustrated showed the galaxy continuing along on its orbit back towards its Apocore away from the star cluster. At that one point it passed through a cloud of some sort, the meaning of which was not explicitly defined. After passing through that cloud, though, but after doing so were there came many of the symbols representing the ideas of “birth” or “life.”
The general consensus was that the cube’s authors had spied message suggested a fertile cloud of elements and gas which stood in the latter half of the galaxy’s orbit. of the planet and would This cloud would be able to replenish it the earth back to a state of being able to supporting life, and that life that would perhaps evolve and grow over untold eons, perhaps even become an intelligent society. And by that their intelligence that society could may even one day be able to find this ancient record, the record of those that had been before. A record written moments before they were all blended into the ground with fervent heat in a burning that was destined to rise again.
***
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Did the number of edits surprise you? I don’t usually visibly mark my corrections, so I personally was pretty amazed at how many of them stacked up by the time I was done. And as mentioned before, “done” in this instance is actually far more limited because of the blog deadline, for my more personal stories this would merely be the first of many transformations. I think you can really get a sense that the story you first write a draft of and the story you finally publish are two entirely different creations.
Now obviously in today’s little fiction I have invoked the name of science while presenting a story whose details boldly defy scientific reason. For example, there is no rational explanation for how any remnants of an ancient civilization could have survived the long march of time, let alone the complete devastation that I describe the earth being subjected to.
Obviously I had to make a decision where the line between realism and suspension of disbelief fell, and this is where it left me. This is certainly a question that often comes up when writing a story, and I’ll look into the topic in greater detail with my next blog post on Monday. Until then, have a wonderful weekend!
Give Me Pen and Paper 