A Matter of Scope, A short story
A Matter of Scope
In the movies its always discovered at the last minute, and then there's a desperate race to save mankind. It didn't really happen that way, though for us. The Object was detected well beyond the cometary halo, and was being tracked for months automaticly before the systems decided to alert any of their human masters of any anomolous readings. They weren't anomolous initially, it was just a brighter than usual speck in a sky filled with bright specks.
It was only after independant triangulation telemetry was obtained from our still transmitting Voyager probe, now several billion km above the solar system's orbital plane that we were shocked and amazed by the readings. This brighter than normal object was much farther away and travelling much faster than the automated stellar tracking scopes had predicted. The reason for the erronious data was clear, once we had this more off angle view of the Object. It was huge. Vast. Incomprehensibly big. How big, it would take us many more months to refine and discover.
The public never found out, in those initaly years, as the object drew nearer and nearer our system. There was no military buildup, and no clandestine meetings of top governments. The Object, whatever it was, was not on an intercept orbit with the Earth, the Moon, or any other object of measureable note in the Solar System. Our only concern was that it might hit a larger asteroid or other when it came though the belt, but we wouldn't know the odds on that happening until it was right in our back yard.
As it approached, studies of course were performed. Estimates of actual size, dimensions, etc. Speculations of all types. Even some speculating that the object was not a natural, but artificial thing. Most, if not all, the experts agreed - if it was one thing they were sure of, it was that this thing could not be an artificial object. It was simply too big to have been built, grown or in any way made by anything, anywhere. Everything else was fluid. No one could agree on definate mass, speed, energy level, or composition. The most basic of measurements seemed to be returning data that couldn't be valid. And it was giving off radiation on several bands, across the spectrum, which made taking distance readings even more difficult.
By the time it came in past pluto we could have finally gotten more definitive data, but no one was excited, b/c we knew it was going to be on the opposite side of the sun for 11 months. When it once again hove into view, past the distorting cororna of the sun's vast radiation field, it was not much farther than Saturn. Finally we could get an accurate reading on this unusual stellar visitor.
It was impossible to describe the effect that the definitive results had on anyone with a clearance rating high enough to see them. It was bigger than huge, larger than possibility. It was simply - to most - unbelieveable. The Object measured roughly one million miles long along it's longest axis. This is the axis that was oriented towards the sun. If you took your frame of orientation from the plane defined by the orbits of the plantes (except Pluto) around the sun, then the Object from top to bottom was about five hundred thousand, (a half a million) miles high, and from one side to the other on the remaining dimension, it was approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand miles wide. While not strictly exact, the general symetry of the dimensions did cause further speculation as to the origin of this object. Some tentative voices did speculate that is was an artificial body, and not some naturally occuring object. The radiation the object gave off did not seem to conform to any pattern that was discernable by even the most powerful super computers set to task of interpreting the signals (if any) eminating from it. This seemed to bolster the view that there was no sentient presence or assembly that could have created such a remarkable object.
The sheer size of the object was phenominal, to put it in perspective, were the object hollow, one could stack, if they wished, the earth upon itself 50 times. One could fill the object with the earth 375,000 times over again. This huge object must be generating a massive gravity field of it's own, but again, not knowing what the composition of the object was (or if it was a solid or porous body we had no way of knowing for sure. Until this time no one had thought the object could be as large as it was, but now, frantic calculations were done trying to assess it's mass and what type of gravity impact it would have on our solar system's planets. Fine measurements of the orbits of the outter bodies were made, and while the object passed relatively far away from any of them, there was concern about it's possible affect on them. Each of the planets, upon close examination, did suffer a bit of orbital wiggle as the object swung by, and for some planets, earthquakes were most likely in their future. But - the wiggles weren't enough to really threaten any one of them significantly. Estimates of the orbital wiggle gave us our first indications as to the actual mass of this mysterious interloper. It couldn't have been solid, whatever it was. It was way too light. Still, it massed more than our Earth by about an order of magnitude. Which meant if it was made out of any of the heavier metals, it was over 90 per cent empty space inside.
Other than the astonishment and the brief scare over the possible effects of it's gravity field, things once again settled down, until it got as close as the orbit of Jupiter. That's when we had our first inkling that it was in fact an artificial body, and not a natural phenominon. Well, I shouldn't say inkling, I should say it blasted us all with it's heralding announcement that it was not some huge natural body about 15 days after it broke the orbital demarcation of Jupiter. Suddenly, it began to slow. It began a vector manouver that, if directed by euclid or newton was a new branch of their calculations hitherto unknown to the rest of the scientific community. In an act that was clearly a breaking vector, the object's speed, and direction drasticly began to alter, and many a super computing system was allocated to check and recheck the continually changing orbits of this now clearly most alien of vehicles.
Finally, the course vectoring ended and the initial results were alarming, it looked like she was aiming right for the Earth, a collision course. But - of course it was not a collision course, but a course that would put the object in the same orbit as the Earth, about a million miles ahead of us in the orbital arch. All the best minds, both organic and silicon agreed that at that distance and at the estimated mass of the object, that we would be fairly safe from ill effects due to either the radiation or the gravity field. Of course, some birds and fish who spawned by the tides might have some mating problems for the next few generations, but provided that this alien ship, being, object, what have you, was not hostile, we should survive the simple fact of it's presence relatively unscathed.
Over the course of the previous 10 months, the existance of the object became public knowledge. Initially there was some uproar, and excitement, but despite all the speculations in media and a wealth of phychological data deliniating the ways and means by which such an event would collapse society as we know it, not much of a ruckus was raised at all. Like most other extra-planetary events, inital excitement was high, but as things matured at a pace more in tune with the stately revolution of planets about a sun, public interest waned. When it became clear that the object was being directed and therefore of an Alien sentience, again a fuss was raised, suicide rates increased and lots of cults across the American mid west either attacked each other or government/public buildings, but they were quickly quelled, and the new media spent, as they oft do, more time covering those local and rather inconsequential spurts of activity, rather than the approaching object who spurred it. It was several months from the time the breaking manouver began to when it finished and we found it's ultimate and final vector. The uproar and public interest peaked less quickly and subsided almost immediately that time. Clearly the world population had much more important things on it's mind than some million mile long alien vessel intent on parking in our orbit.
Again, once the Object pulled into the same orbit as the Earth, and held it's position, a brief flurry of media activity, with no long duration of worthy note.
Several weeks passed with no activity from this curious Alien Ship. All the telescopes and satellites had taken their share of views and pictures. It was fairly non-descript. Large scorings from it's travels the only real markings on it's matte-charcoal finish. No visible portals of any type, no propulsion system, no venting. And - sadly for all the media writers of the world, it was simply and most aptly described as an unidentified cigar shaped object. Only it's vast, incomprehensible size was worthy of more than a few words.
Finally, it was decided to send some probes to the ship so close to our miniscule planet.
Days before the launch, it delivered it's message, and as it came, it left - on a mission we can only wonder at, wonder and fume at, more likely.
It was much later, during the rigorous investigation and analysis of the message that it became known that the entire message, spoken in American English, was a compilation of voices culled from the media and entertainment industry. Linguists and voice analysers identified the voices of Walter Cronkite, John Kenedy, Mel Gibson, Jack Nicholson, and John Wayne among them. Aparently they'd been recording it all, as they made their approach to our system. They must have interpreted our simple language and then cut and pasted the sound bytes from over 50 years of broadcasting into that one short, obnoxious message.
Their message, verbatim, that they left us with - transmitting on all channels of all frequencies to every device on the planet with a speaker was simply this...
"You can not imagine the scope of the universe. Ours is but a small probe in this large ocean, your world is only a grain of sand."
Then, as if to prove it's point, it slowly left our system, diving towards the sun to pick up speed and even at one million miles long, a lenght almost 100 times the diameter of our whole damn planet, it still had to traverse 93 of it's ship lenghts to get there.