Chapter Seven

Work, Rest and Play

By eight o'clock in the evening, British Summer Time, on Tuesday, May 6th 1997, everyone in the world knew that there was an alien spacecraft hovering over London.

Back in the late sixties the United Nations had agreed what would happen if mankind encountered alien lifeforms. The experts agreed that the "First Contact", as they called it, would be a faint radio signal from deep space. It followed that the First Contact would almost certainly be with a radio telescope facility somewhere in the world, or perhaps a military listening station. The alien radio signal might be many hundreds of years old: radio waves travelled at the speed of light, and so even those from the nearest star would be over four years old. That meant that the human race would have time to carefully compose its response - this wouldn't be a conversation with aliens, more like an exchange of letters.

So it was agreed: the staff of the radio telescope that picked up the message would pass it on to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. A team of experts would translate the message (any aliens trying to contact us would have considered the language barrier, and would keep the message straightforward - using basic mathematical or geometric concepts, perhaps, or a series of simple pictures). This translation would then be made completely public. The world would decide what response to send, and the world would send only one reply, leaving aside all cultural, political and economic differences.