Korridorium

♫ Rewrit­ing His­tory ♫

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I enter the cor­ri­dor lead­ing to the crew quarters—and even though we’ve been on this jour­ney for many years now, I still can’t quite grasp that I am on a space­ship bound for a dis­tant solar sys­tem, an alien planet, and an extrater­res­trial civ­i­liza­tion.

Just stand­ing firmly on the metal floor with my own feet is—in the vac­uum of space, far from any­thing that could exert grav­ity on us—actually unfath­omable: The ship rotates, pin­ning me to the outer hull, much like water is pressed into a bucket when you swing it around in a cir­cle.

*

It was Decem­ber 21, 2012, that changed every­thing. Today marks ten years to the day since we humans—every sin­gle per­son on planet Earth—heard the voice in our heads. Every­one per­ceived it dif­fer­ently: some as a clap of thun­der, oth­ers as a whis­per, some as a female voice, oth­ers male, or even that of a child. But the word­ing was iden­ti­cal for every­one: “This is the Galac­tic Fed­er­a­tion.”

It was eerie. Some­thing like this had likely never hap­pened in human his­tory. It felt threat­en­ing and lib­er­at­ing all at once. I felt the same as most peo­ple: after that, I could­n’t just go back to busi­ness as usual. As it turned out, it was another Coper­ni­can rev­o­lu­tion for human­ity. Not only was Earth never the cen­ter of the uni­verse, but we humans also turned out to be just one intel­li­gent species among many—one civ­i­liza­tion among count­less oth­ers.

“The quar­an­tine that existed for your pro­tec­tion is lifted, effec­tive imme­di­ately.”

Every per­son on our planet heard this brief mes­sage in their own native lan­guage, wher­ever they were, what­ever they were doing. I belonged to the one-third of human­ity that was asleep at the time. The voice spoke to me—it was female and gentle—and I woke up instantly, with­out the slight­est doubt that this had been no dream. It was the same for bil­lions, I later learned, just as I soon found out what this quar­an­tine was all about.

*

For over half a cen­tury, astronomers had been search­ing for sig­nals from extrater­res­trial civ­i­liza­tions. I had never even heard of SETI, because the research pro­gram had yielded no note­wor­thy results—except per­haps the mys­te­ri­ous Wow! sig­nal. It was aston­ish­ing which fields of knowl­edge sud­denly made the front pages, and equally sur­pris­ing were the top­ics I sud­denly found myself engag­ing with, the entirely new ques­tions I was now grap­pling with.

Many felt the same. On some level, it made total sense: the expe­ri­ence of feel­ing some­thing for­eign inside one’s own mind would­n’t let go of us, even if there were peo­ple who tried to dis­miss it as mass hal­lu­ci­na­tion or an elab­o­rate stu­dent prank.

In any case, the tele­pathic mes­sage broad­cast world­wide on Decem­ber 21, 2012, made it clear why SETI had been unsuc­cess­ful for so long and had failed to dis­cover alien civ­i­liza­tions: our solar sys­tem had been shielded from all intel­li­gent radio sig­nals, mean­ing they could­n’t reach our sen­sors at all—save for the Wow! sig­nal, which was likely thanks to a brief mal­func­tion of the quar­an­tine fil­ter.

Sure, the exis­tence of extrater­res­trial life was debated, but as far as I had gath­ered, experts ruled out the pos­si­bil­ity that it could cross the vast dis­tances of space. With the voice, every­thing sud­denly changed: there is life in other star sys­tems, intel­li­gent life, and it knows about us.

How­ever, who the “Galac­tic Fed­er­a­tion” actu­ally is, and whether the civ­i­liza­tions in our galac­tic neigh­bor­hood belong to it, remains unknown to us. The voice in our heads—which some say was an auto­mated record­ing played when the Voy­ager 1 space probe reached the outer bound­ary of our solar system—did not speak again for the time being. No fur­ther mes­sage fol­lowed. Our radio tele­scopes, how­ever, were sud­denly flooded “with imme­di­ate effect” by sig­nals of an appar­ently intel­li­gent nature from our galac­tic neigh­bor­hood, even if none of the mes­sages our newly dis­cov­ered neigh­bors were beam­ing into space could be decoded at first. The galac­tic radio fre­quen­cies were sud­denly filled with an incom­pre­hen­si­ble bab­ble of a thou­sand voices, which came as a shock to many—and per­haps even a healthy one.

*

The expe­ri­ence of hear­ing a for­eign voice inside one’s own head was a trans­for­ma­tive event for most peo­ple, and in its wake, things hap­pened that many—myself included—had thought nearly impos­si­ble: human­ity pulled together and, with a shared goal in sight, worked unbu­reau­crat­i­cally to solve our press­ing global prob­lems. I, too, was quickly swept up by the new enthu­si­asm. New hori­zons had opened up, and terms like “exoso­ci­ol­ogy” or “Kar­da­shev scale” soon rolled effort­lessly off my tongue.

Of course, almost every­one wanted to know who was behind this tight-lipped “Galac­tic Fed­er­a­tion” that had pre­sumed to put us in quar­an­tine for cen­turies. And nat­u­rally, we were curi­ous about the alien civ­i­liza­tions we were sud­denly lis­ten­ing in on with our radio tele­scopes.

The quar­an­tine was lifted, but nobody said hello. So we decided to reach out and greet our cos­mic neigh­bors our­selves…

The Wow! sig­nal:

The position of Voy­ager:

Exoso­ci­ol­ogy:

The Kar­da­shev scale: