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Fivemarks posted:I think that we should not operate from the assumption that any advanced alien species is going to be socialist, because that could lead to danger. I have a feeling this thread would get a kick out of the short story Missile Gap
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May 17, 2022 22:42
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I'm thinking more "Footfall"
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May 17, 2022 23:24
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I agree that we must trust our comrade LostCosmonaut and his crew's judgement. These are the people we selected for this. We must trust the work that everyone has put in. Attempting to micromanage at the greatest distance mankind has ever known would be the height of folly.
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May 17, 2022 23:34
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Fivemarks posted:I think that we should not operate from the assumption that any advanced alien species is going to be socialist, because that could lead to danger. This is reactionary backsliding, comrade! Please consult your handbook.
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May 17, 2022 23:48
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Fivemarks posted:I think that we should not operate from the assumption that any advanced alien species is going to be socialist, because that could lead to danger. I disagree because it will lead to goons backing us into an idealogical corner and result in people voting to poke the metaphorical anti-matter bear when we come across an advanced alien race that doesnt fit into our neat categories all while OP screams in disbelief at our self sabotaging nature as the aliens respond and grind us to dust. Like any good goon community run auroura lp this will be the height of the comedy. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 00:09 on May 18, 2022 |
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May 18, 2022 00:04
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Telsa Cola posted:I disagree because it will lead to goons backing us into an idealogical corner and result in people voting to poke the metaphorical anti-matter bear when we come across an advanced alien race that doesnt fit into our neat categories all while OP screams in disbelief at our self sabotaging nature as the aliens respond and grind us to dust. we have some video coming through! Main screen now, captain: 
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May 18, 2022 00:18
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sebmojo posted:we have some video coming through! Main screen now, captain: Honestly? Tring to ensure the longevity the game since it's one of the better written auroura LPs internet wide imo.
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May 18, 2022 00:25
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I think it's worth considering the chance that there could be abducted humans from Earth in this facility as well
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May 18, 2022 00:27
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Telsa Cola posted:Honestly? Tring to ensure the longevity the game since it's one of the better written auroura LPs internet wide imo. Oh yeah, was just a joke (those aliens are hyper capitalist in case you didn't know)
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May 18, 2022 00:33
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sebmojo posted:Oh yeah, was just a joke (those aliens are hyper capitalist in case you didn't know) Yeah I realize now that the joke just orbited above my head, haha. No worries.
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May 18, 2022 00:36
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paragon1 posted:This is reactionary backsliding, comrade! Please consult your handbook. Please, we're not a pack of coffee house intellectuals. We live in the real world, and we need to care more about the facts on the ground, not theory.
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May 18, 2022 09:19
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mossyfisk posted:Is it unusual or to be expected that we've seen no sign of anything starship sized burning around, sensors wise? One of them is, originating from the presumed 'spaceport' structure. LostCosmonaut posted:My thoughts: September 13, 1985 The Krusenstern, in a relatively-low orbit of Minerva, is far beyond the maximum range of any projectile weapon humanity could build, even your state-of-the-art railguns (Moon 7 orbits at a distance of 161,000 km). It is as safe a place as any to observe from. There is still no indication that anyone on the surface has detected the ship's presence, though there are signs of activity - radio transmissions begin and end, heat output fluctuates as certain parts of the complex warm up or cool down, lights on the surface flicker off or on periodically. It looks active, alive in a way not even the Mars ruins were. Why aren't they reacting? Even conventional, pre-TNE detection methods would have been able to detect the ship now. A message is sent to the Krusenstern making it clear that the Ministry trusts the ship commander's judgement and that they are empowered to act as a representative of the Comintern in this situation, which will arrive tomorrow. September 14, 1985 Before the outbound message could have possibly arrived, the Krusenstern, which has now been at Minerva for several days, sends back a message indicating that they have begun standard first contact procedures. There is a flurry of detectable activity as soon as the ship begins broadcasting the greeting signal. Surges of EM emissions, dozens of rapid-fire radio transmissions. The signals are modulated, there is clearly data being transmitted, but we still cannot decode it. Something is responding. Maybe they just weren't looking? Strange. One of the most unusual things the ship detects is a sweep by what they're pretty sure is a powerful, but very much conventional, radar. The Krusenstern herself is equipped with a radar, of course, nearly all spacecraft are; it's still a very useful technology even in the Trans-Newtonian era. XCOM's scientists still find it a bit odd that we've detected that, but no active grav sensor. After transmitting each number, the Krusenstern pauses, awaiting a reply. There is only silence for over an hour of this. Eventually they reach 21. Twenty-one pulses are sent out, and again they go silent, awaiting a reply. A scant few seconds later, they detect a high-powered radio transmission, far stronger than anything else they've detected from the surface - probably a directional signal, aimed directly at them. It's a carrier wave with a very simple modulation, pulses of noise. One pulse. Two, three, four, it continues. After the thirty-fourth pulse, it stops. Thirty-four. That's the next number in the sequence. On September 13, 1985, contact was made.
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May 18, 2022 09:26
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No grav sensor? That is bizzare. Could be it's being run by woken up humans. Could be that they just never figured out grav sensor stuff, which would be strange but technically possible. Could be that it just broke or something.
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May 18, 2022 10:11
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See? Proof that these aliens are socialist. Capitalists would have opened fire.
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May 18, 2022 10:13
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Perhaps they got stuck without access to TNEs and thus can't maintain grav sensors.
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May 18, 2022 10:47
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Hmm... if this was an outpost built by us, would we have included grav sensors? Don't forget this is just one of multiple facilities in this solar system, if they had grav sensors on those would it have been necessary to build one on this remote rock?
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May 18, 2022 10:53
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...is this a prison?
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May 18, 2022 12:42
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I can tell we're gonna be fast friends already 
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May 18, 2022 14:06
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Anyone who can generate artificial grav pulses can also detect them at interplanetary distances. It's possible that whoever's down there HAS gradar tech, but would rather not use it and announce their presence indiscriminately. Sometimes, people move to quiet remote places to hide, and Minerva is as quiet and remote as it gets
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May 18, 2022 18:17
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sebmojo posted:i propose Noctua for the largest moon, after Minerva's owl. Also because it is far off, in the night. This is a really cool suggestion, and I only wish it didn't conflict with the theme of mine. Since Minerva/Athena was a goddess with no children but was renowned as a guide to heroes, the proposal is to name the moons after heroes and other Greek mythological figures, with the largest one being named after Odysseus, arguably her favorite. quote:Minerva 1 -- "Atalanta"
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May 29, 2022 02:12
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September 15, 1985 Twenty-four hours have passed since you have made contact (technically 48 hours, because of the light delay). The 'messages' you're exchanging are still very simple - you've moved on from simple mathematical sequences to elements on the periodic table. The Krusenstern continues to harvest data and send it back, and, as of now, should be receiving the first suggestions and instructions from scientists on Earth - messages to send, methods to try, things to attempt to find out, data to attempt to gather. Mission Control attempts to filter it, keep it fairly concise, but everyone who knows it's happening wants in on this. That list is getting larger with each passing second. It's technically not public yet - the Krusenstern's radio transmissions to Earth are mostly encrypted, like nearly all MOSA spacecraft - but the Comintern is so large, and this discovery necessitates informing so many different people in so many different fields, that leaks are inevitable. Rumors are already flying, and an official statement will have to be made soon. The general reaction from those who have been officially informed is characterized by a lack of surprise. There were living aliens here less than half a century ago, there are cryo-preserved aliens on Mars as we speak, why wouldn't there be living ones? Everyone got over the 'aliens exist' shock over a decade ago. Now it is simply the way things are. They exist. They are here. What are we going to do about it? Right now, what we're going to do is talk. The linguists and social scientists looped in to the Krusenstern's ground support team are already getting to work, building off of untested hypothetical models people have been developing since the 1970s. They are attempting to do something that, as far as we know, no human being has ever done before. Now that we know communication is possible, we need to figure out how to impart information - and how to interpret information sent back to us. We must learn how to speak, and listen. September 16, 1985 There are a million variables to consider, and each one leads to more and more people being necessary, more and more experts in one field or another. What if the aliens aren't Roswells? What if they don't hear sounds in the same frequency range as humans, what if they can't perceive sound at all? What if they conceptualize language in some fundamentally alien way that is completely at odds with human understanding of how it's supposed to work? What if they don't even have a language as we'd understand it? What if, what if, what if. Every what-if is a fax or an email or a post in an Internetwork chat-room, and another person whose life is changed forever. Information control is completely impossible now. The cat isn't completely out of the bag yet, but it's pretty drat close. September 17, 1985 Sending beeps back and forth is thrilling in theory, but in practice it's slow, boring work. The Krusenstern crew have little else to do but observe, with their telescopes and their state-of-the-art scientific instruments. They observe everything they can. They watch the little moon with the little alien settlement, they watch the other moons, the rings. An actual geo-survey of this system will take weeks, but there is still much data they can collect. They take beautiful long-exposure photographs of the green ammonia clouds high in the gas giant's upper atmosphere, record observations of the alien facility in every spectrum they can possibly measure, search the entire Minerva system as thoroughly as they can without actually moving from their current orbit. They already think they've found evidence of artificial construction on the tenth and third moons, regular shapes that stand out from the surrounding natural rock and water ice, but it could just be pareidolia, there's no way of knowing for sure from this far away. The aliens send back iron, we send cobalt. We've established pretty well that we both know the periodic table by now. The Director of MOSA imagines the aliens, just like us, wondering what else to say, wondering how to say it. September 18, 1985 They haven't launched any ships. Can they even launch ships? There is no way they evolved here, they must have been brought here, surely they must have some means of leaving. To a human eye the alien city looks like an inelegant construction; it reminds the crew of the shanty-towns of Luna, all utilitarian prefabs, simple and rough and functional. It is difficult to assess condition or damage - after all, we don't know what it's supposed to look like, and we're also very far away. The Krusenstern notes that the objects - presumed spacecraft - on the flat 'spaceport' structure are extremely cold, barely warmer than ambient, and measurably less reflective than the structures in the main complex. It could just be the material they're built out of. Hell, maybe they're just painted. It could also mean they're covered in a layer of dust. It could mean that no one has been maintaining them, that they've been sitting there a long time. It's speculation, guessing, but so is everything else right now. The Ministry of Outer Space Affairs slams its foot down on the Comintern's scientific community. They want specific, concise instructions they can give their cosmonauts. No more making this up as we go along. We must know what to say. We must have a concrete plan. We must also decide what to tell the public. If no official statement is released - and soon - any possibility of controlling the narrative here will be lost. Seventeen people are killed in an airlock cycling accident in Lunagrad city, the worst such disaster in history. A day ago, around Minerva, the Krusenstern has moved on to the rest of the standard greeting messages. L'Internationale goes out over the airwaves, heard by alien ears (if they have ears) for what is probably the first time. A hundred languages say hello. We send beeps that, if interpreted visually and put in a rectangular grid, would resolve into an image of a little stick-man, a smiling face, a simple diagram of the solar system. There are almost four hours of silence before a response - a long, continuous, modulated radio signal, lasting nearly ten minutes. The Krusenstern records it and forwards it to Earth, while their own team attempts to interpret it. September 19, 1985  Tooling for the new Barsoom transport is complete, and the keel will be laid down immediately. It isn't long ago at all that this station was nuked. Thousands of people died here, and the debris lit up the night sky for months. Now the workers swarm over her, the cargo shuttles cycle around the clock, as they build a ship of discovery, to carry humanity's scientists to the Red Planet, right here where the Enemy sought to bar our way. Several times a day, the melted, ruined remnant of the lost slipway casts a long shadow over the work, a shadow pierced with floodlights and bright welding arcs. The Krusenstern, which thanks to Minerva's highly inclined orbit is well above the plane of the ecliptic, sends back what will one day become one of the most famous photographs in human history - the 'Family Photo'. In it, the Sun and every single planet from Mercury to Neptune (Pluto is technically in the image but not visible), as seen from way, way, way out there. From the perspective of the viewer, the rest of the Solar System - which, from this far away, just looks like more stars; they have to be labelled when the image is published - has just risen from behind Minerva, which looms, dark blue and green, at the very bottom of the image. The most obvious first possibility is that the Minerva signal is audio, and your team immediately attempts to convert it back into sound. You imagine that, yesterday, the Krusenstern did the same. It is indeed audio. The tones, some long and slow, others short and quick, vary in pitch and volume. It sounds like no language you have ever heard; there is nothing that a human would understand as a word - but there is a pattern to it. There is rhythm to these sounds, and there is something hauntingly beautiful about it. Is this music? Are we hearing alien music? Your scientists have a number of suggestions for what to say and how to say it. Some of them have suggested audio - music, or voice. Others have suggested trying to send a video signal, or combination audio-visual. Still others have suggested using binary, attempting to send simple bitmap images. There is of course nothing stopping you from doing all of them - but what to say? And what to say to the public? How do we handle this? What do you do? Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 06:20 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 05:38
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First of all acknowledge publically that we have made contact with a staffed Minervan facility and that attempts to establish communications have began and are slow but positive.
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May 31, 2022 06:38
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Attempt to open a video feed, with audio, to the Minervans, if our communications with them have advanced to that point. If the connection is successful, the captain of the Kuiper Belt Explorer should appear on video, and (1.) give his greetings (accompanied by subtitles in the Minervans language if we have decoded it, in the captain's native language otherwise), (2.) explain that the Explorer hails from Earth, the third planet around the Sun, (3.) that we would like to establish peaceful relations, including the exchange of scientific and historical data, and (4.) that we hope the Minervans will reciprocate our goodwill.
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May 31, 2022 07:18
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Perhaps it's time to plan defrosting a couple of the Roswells from Mars, it would be nice to cross reference things.
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May 31, 2022 07:50
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NewMars posted:First of all acknowledge publically that we have made contact with a staffed Minervan facility and that attempts to establish communications have began and are slow but positive. Seconding this, full honesty is the way to go here. I also agree with full audio/video feed contact, but until more progress is made deciphering their language less grand speeches and trying to teach/establish basic concepts. Maybe quickly throw together and send them an image pack of basic objects and concepts if they don't have one onboard or if it's lacking.
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May 31, 2022 08:01
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NewMars posted:First of all acknowledge publically that we have made contact with a staffed Minervan facility and that attempts to establish communications have began and are slow but positive. Agreeing with this Otherwise, an audio/video feed, and if possible, a morse code reference in binary, in whichever language is majority for the Krusenstern crew. Communicating letters via simple audio cues might make it easier for them to decipher language. And make sure theres a tone for breaks between words!
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May 31, 2022 08:15
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Sending them hundreds of languages is very nice, but probably immensely unhelpful. The Krusentern's crew should be familiar with the artificial MOSA language that got developed some time back, I think? It's either that or start a fistfight over whether to use French, Russian, Mandarin or whatever.
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May 31, 2022 09:41
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Depends, some form of humanity must've been present when they arrived in-system. Send them different languages, somehow marking which is which? Try archaic and dead ones too, like Latin.
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May 31, 2022 09:57
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International Morse Code, maybe?
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May 31, 2022 10:37
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Maybe try something with pictographs? We're pretty sure at this point they see in a similar spectrum to us, right? Concepts like where we came from, what we breathe or eat, that sort of thing, might be easier to communicate with pictures NewMars posted:First of all acknowledge publically that we have made contact with a staffed Minervan facility and that attempts to establish communications have began and are slow but positive. Big agree.
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May 31, 2022 10:48
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Send the entire body of the work of Marx and Engels to make sure they know we're the good guys 
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May 31, 2022 13:08
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Let's not get too fancy with this, we're about at the stage of understanding simple mathematical concepts and chemical elements in common with these people. At this point it's just a good sign they consider us fellow sapient beings worth talking to. I advise taking the Voyager approach and sending them a package of images of Earth and common human concepts. You know, human anatomical diagram, forests, oceans, cityscapes, all appropriately labeled in Comintern space conlang. NewMars posted:First of all acknowledge publically that we have made contact with a staffed Minervan facility and that attempts to establish communications have began and are slow but positive. Also this
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May 31, 2022 13:16
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Play them The Beetles mossyfisk posted:Perhaps it's time to plan defrosting a couple of the Roswells from Mars, it would be nice to cross reference things. Do NOT try and gently caress with cryorestoration on an alien species whos biology we still have little (no?) understanding of in the middle of first contact. "Hey we tried to rez some of your buddies over here on mars but botched it and killed them, sorry!"
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May 31, 2022 13:21
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GunnerJ posted:Send the entire body of the work of Marx and Engels to make sure they know we're the good guys I think we should open with the Communist Manifesto.
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May 31, 2022 13:28
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Send them pictures of people and forests and mountains and so on but in every photo there’s somebody holding up a copy of Das Kapital.
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May 31, 2022 13:36
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Play them The Beetles They did it first, to be fair.
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May 31, 2022 13:46
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mossyfisk posted:They did it first, to be fair. I think these may be prisoners marooned here. Why else would they have nothing capable of launch, no gravity sensors?
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May 31, 2022 13:55
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The Lone Badger posted:I think these may be prisoners marooned here. Why else would they have nothing capable of launch, no gravity sensors? Dunno if I'd jump straight to 'prisoners' tbh, my first guess is they're analogous to those Antarctic stations we just encountered who managed to remain off the grid when the nukes dropped.
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May 31, 2022 18:03
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A thing to consider with this initial communication is that whatever information we try and convey to them, they will likely try and respond in kind. For a good example, if we send them a picture of a human being, they might respond with an image of what they look like, and we can confirm if they're Roswells or not. They very probably are, just by Occam's Razor, but it should be double checked, what with the wildly different architecture. It's likely just a matter of geology (can't really build a comfortably warm underground compound into a crust of volatile ices like you can with rock) If they are, it might be worth showing an image of the Martian Face structure and seeing how they react. If this was some civil war, it would be very nice to know what side everyone was on.
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May 31, 2022 18:26
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Communication should occur in MOSA-conlang, but start by establishing the means of transferring pictures. that is one of the reasons we actually started this idea. A simple, unambiguous and perfect regular language is our best candidate for communication.
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May 31, 2022 18:34
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