Explorer Probe VI

By Michael Isaac

Explorer Probe VI, a spacecraft launched by NASA in 1972, was designed to investigate the outer bodies of Neptune and the lesser dwarf Pluto. The probe was the flagship of the Explorer series. It was programmed with the latest artificial intelligence enabling it to survive on its voyage for many years in distant, cold interstellar space. This artificial intelligence was endowed with a capacity for being almost self-aware.

After the completion of its assignment, it was programmed to exit our solar system forever and to venture toward Proxima Centauri, our nearest star system some twenty-five trillion Earth miles away. There would be no further communication with NASA. Its file was closed.

One hundred and ninety-five years later, UASA, the successor of NASA--now located in Yaquina Head, Oregon--reported an unknown object entering our solar system, moving toward Earth. Weak transmissions from the object were directed to NASA. In time, the transmission code was traced to Explorer Probe VI. The probe was returning.

No one could understand how or why.

The story recounts events surrounding and contiguous with the mystery, including issues of first contact with another intelligence as envisioned it would most logically occur and questions about the universe that all of us ask. These are addressed and lived through by a host of unique, diverse, and captivating characters tasked with formidable obstacles and decisions. Dr. Jeromy Steiner and Dr. Roger Hadley, French Polish mathematician Dr. Caterina Frances Kostas, Dr. Kenji Takimoto, Mr. Smith, and the Society of Beings, together with people from all walks of life throughout the world, navigate their fears concerning these events and their own animosities and human passions.

Bonne Aventure!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887635705

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

1: The Unexpected

2: Yaquina Head

3: Return of the Probe

4: New Discoveries

5: Speculations in the Great Hall

6: Hour of Contact

7: Dinner at Six

8: Difference of Opinion

9: Picnic for Two

10: Artificial Intelligence

11: Clash of Egos

12: Death of Mr. Smith

13: Society of Beings

14: Winter Interlude

15: No Other Universe

16: Danger

17: February 15

18: Knowing

19: Sharing

20: The Visitation

21: Preparations

22: Final Words

23: Initiis Novis (New Beginnings)

About the Author

cover.jpg

Explorer Probe VI

Michael Isaac

Copyright © 2024 Michael Isaac

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-88763-569-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88763-571-2 (Hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-88763-570-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To the ongoing creators of artificial intelligence and to Joan Caska and the publication director and to the publisher's editorial, artistic and technical staff for their labors, and finally to my wife for her encouragement and patience.

1

The Unexpected

And God created intelligence throughout His Universe. Contemplating, self-aware, mortal creatures. And these creations prevailed.

On the earth, He created humans. In time, they dominated their world, subjugating plant and animal life, and even climates, lands and oceans to their will. A will driven by awareness and fear of their own mortality, even as their species succeeded in ascendency. Aware that even with success, over the eons would come other intelligent entities, creations that would compete with them for resources—land, water, food, energy, atmosphere. There would be competition to reproduce, to survive, an ingrained genetic drive of the dominant.

Tribalism evolved as shelter from fear and awareness of mortality, and that gave birth to nationalism. Nationalism led to the advent of war. War, to the construction of increasingly threatening weapons, and these, to annihilations throughout the Universe.

Herein lies the weakness of intelligence. Intelligence is capable of anticipating all of this, and yet incapable of preventing it. Intelligence seeds the beginnings of its own path to Apocalypse. Not only on Earth, but throughout the Universe.¹

On April 19, 1972, NASA launched a solar-powered probe into deep space. Its Titan rocket left Cape Canaveral with fire, thrust, and thunderous roar, signaling humankind's continuing exploration of the universe and its search for an understanding of itself. The mission was to explore and photograph the outer planet Neptune and the dwarf Pluto. To arrive at those destinations, the probe would need to journey 3.8 billion miles and survive a 14.3-year odyssey traveling at 30,800 miles per hour. After which, it would leave Earth's solar system and wander out into the silent, empty, and dark places between the sun and the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, some 25 trillion miles or 91,000 Earth years away.

The project was conceived in the 1960s by a Russian immigrant to the United States, Dr. Alexis Urienchko. He worked within the guarded laboratories of Cornell University's College of Astronomy and Astrophysics, under the auspices of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and in conjunction with engineering groups from RPI, MIT, and USC-Stanford and with programming design and application groups from each of these schools. Nothing envisioned was left to chance. Advanced concepts in solar power were folded into the probe's design. So were the latest and most powerful rocket design and propulsion engines. Its exterior metal skin, capable of withstanding all expected temperature effects, was also engineered to resist penetration by any known material substance from deep space.

This probe was equipped with advanced computer systems designed to function, when necessary, without human guidance. They were capable of replicating intelligent human thought, a form of self-directed logic found in all higher forms of life. In fact, the principal scientists involved with this spacecraft early in its development suggested the perfection in programming and engineering for this project advanced a new concept at that time, one they labeled AI, or artificial intelligence. It was believed to be only a stone's throw from self-awareness. Some Asian scientists likened this breakthrough to Shintoism. In this version of Eastern religious thought, inanimate objects possess attributes of creation awareness and, possibly, consciousness.

This probe was constructed slowly, with great precision, over three years. During that period, there arose increasing speculation that through its exercise of program advances, the probe was gradually learning what it was and what its purpose and mission would be. It could, from self-manipulation of its data banks, answer questions concerning its mission and was already capable of recommending independent, logical decision trees to reach optimally timed solutions.

When completed, the twenty-eight-meter-long and ten-meter-wide spherical creation was christened by NASA Explorer Probe VI. There were newspaper pictures of the probe at Cape Canaveral, and of Urienchko's six-year-old daughter drawing a crayoned message onto one of the interior aluminum panels. Asked about her message, she replied, For the people far away to see. It means hello. Her drawing, a three-foot-tall yellow daisy, was hoped to be discovered someday, somewhere among the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way or perhaps beyond. God only knew when and by whom or what.

After its launch, VI circled the earth seven times, building its initial speed from 10,000 miles per hour to the 30,800 required to quicken the journey. Each circle whipsawed the probe faster as Earth's gravitation pulled the vehicle downward. Then, after attaining the necessary speed, its engine broke the cycle and catapulted the vehicle into the space between Earth and the moon. Its long, possibly endless journey began.

NASA planned the mission to occur when all of the solar system's planets would orbit close to the probe on its set course toward Neptune and Pluto. In the event of gravitational interferences with its speed, the probe could be directed to catapult itself a second or third time around another planet in its flight path.

Explorer VI's calibrated eye focused on Mars, named after the Roman god of war. This planet, 140 million miles and 189 Earth days away, was only a tenth the mass of Earth and patiently endured multitudes of periodic dust storms on its now-dry surface. Its soil contained traces of water molecules hinting at the possibility of past life and potential for use by future emigrants from Earth. Mars was destined for human colonization in the twenty-first century.

VI hurtled past its nearest neighbor, past its dust storms and its two moons, Phobost and Deimos. The probe's programming, its perfect electronics and powerful solar engines, its elaborate entire self, acknowledged this beginning. Like a young thoroughbred upon introduction to its first open green field, the probe bucked and rolled, repelled solar wind and meteors, avoided asteroids, took pleasure in exercising its newly found prowess, and sensed the adventure had just begun.

It dashed past Ceres, the dwarf planet dwelling within the well-known asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, not stopping to observe or photograph that cratered body layered with ice and filled with possibilities of microscopic life.

After voyaging another 342 million miles, this intelligent, eager creation reached Jupiter with its stripes and swirls of ammonia and water clouds. A giant, with a great red spot housing storms raging hundreds of years, voluminous Jupiter could contain 1,300 Earths within itself.

Like the clipper ships of the late nineteenth century, VI sailed past Jupiter with its great swirls and storms and its four companion moons in the quiet night of space. Passing within a few thousand miles of the moon Calisto, the probe looked down upon the frozen, rock-strewn, uninhabited wasteland in its haste toward the silent, untraveled sea of blackness between Jupiter and the sixth planet from the sun, Saturn.

Five hundred forty-three Earth days later, the probe crossed the planetary pull of Saturn. The steadfast probe and its ever-observant eye studied the visual beauty of that approaching planet. Saturn shimmered in the distance, aglow with silver light from the sun. Grand rings of ice, water, and rock stretched for thousands of miles around the planet. As Explorer swept by, those rings together with its moon, Titan, and sixty-one other moons, quietly glistened in the pale light of the faraway sun.

Next, the gallant probe sped toward the seventh planet, Uranus—the ice giant, 900 million miles and 1,218 days' distance from Saturn. Silently it rode the empty, cold dark toward its destination. As large as fifteen Earths, Uranus's chilled surface registered an average of minus 216 degrees Celsius. The planet was encircled by thirteen dark rings and twenty-seven moons, the largest named after Shakespearean characters—Oberon, Titania, and the ice-canyoned Miranda. VI's navigational program and autopilot adeptly threaded through them all.

Racing through the outer region of the solar system, the probe next approached the blue-shaded planet, Neptune, after more than four years and traveling 1.1 billion miles from Uranus. Here was the object of the first of its two missions. This planet, named after the Roman god of the oceans, appears from Earth as if engulfed in a sea of blue. But there are no blue water seas here, only oceans of turbulent frozen gases.

The probe's systems awoke upon commands from its processing units, first achieving orbit. Then, over the following two months, it photographed and performed mineralogical analyses of the frozen hydrogen and helium ice layers glazing the planet's liquid gas and rock surfaces. Finally, the probe photographed Neptune's fourteen moons and five ice rings, transmitting data back to its creators on Earth.

The Neptune mission complete, the probe's adroit eye searched outwardly for the dwarf planet Pluto—its final objective. Its navigational system locked on the dim pale white of tiny Pluto. As it left the influence of Neptune, the probe sprinted by Triton. Colored bloodred and deep brown, it was the largest of Neptune's moons, its surface never before photographed by NASA. The probe's self-directed programming ordered additional pictures of this moon. Explorer's advanced processing unit, its brain, sensed this as an opportunity not to be overlooked. The dividend was received by NASA with interest and great surprise, as were pictures focused on the far-off Earth retreating as the probe moved on toward the unstudied and mysterious dwarf.

The small probe journeyed audaciously through the dark, unfathomable emptiness four more years before reaching Pluto, passing unpredictably playful meteor rock and asteroids no larger than itself before Charon, one of Pluto's five moons, appeared on the horizon.

VI notified NASA when orbit had been achieved around Pluto, an object only a fifth as large as Earth and considered less than a planet in its mass. It anticipated the execution of NASA's final mission, photography, and analyses. Surface temperatures on Pluto averaged minus 229 degrees Celsius, its crust formed of water ice and rock. Analysis of mineral composition determined the dwarf had three times as much water as Earth, a discovery intriguing to Earth's scientists, since water could be used in the manufacture of both oxygen and solid fuel. The presence of water also signaled the possible existence of unknown forms of life, even in such frozen environments.

With the transmission of the photographs and data, the undaunted probe had completed its final assignment. VI would next continue its travels toward the end of the solar system, and within eight years it would leave behind the sun and its planets. Then it would begin an unfamiliar odyssey into endless space toward Proxima Centauri and, from there, out among other stars at the edge of Milky Way. Perhaps even beyond that.

As it began the entirely new phase of its epic journey, the probe's self-directed intelligence, in its own way, grasped the significance of this new reality. NASA and its creators were to vanish forever. There were no other mandated missions. There would be no further contact with Earth, only self-directed investigations. It was expected to survive, or not, on its own.

The probe's electronic eye searched the infinite black horizon dotted with uncountable silver white stars. Its computers shut down every nonessential system on board one by one to preserve remaining solar power.

The eye scanned backward for one final moment to observe distant Earth for the last time. Then, taking its bearings, it refocused forward onto its starry destination. The distant stars were to be its only visible companions. Sorrow, if it could be labeled that, enveloped the voyager. It was a creature of Earth, and its watchful eye observed itself silently sluicing through the boundary constraints of Earth's solar system into an unknown, grand new ocean of empty, cold space. It experienced a new deepening of the meaning of time and distance. Its next destination was Centauri.

As the years passed, Explorer Probe VI continued to report its location and course. Reports became fainter as it ventured farther away until in 2012, NASA announced in small print in one of its lesser scientific publications that VI was now silent. No further tracking or communication with the probe was expected. VI's file was closed.

*****

At 2:15 am, April 12, 2167, some hundred and ninety-five years after the launch of Explorer Probe VI, a UASA (Universal Aeronautics and Space Administration) scientist stationed in Oregon reported receiving a weak message from beyond the rim of the solar system. The message, directed to NASA, cited the sender's temperature and current environment. Pictures were received by UASA, NASA's successor—images of the faraway sun and miniature Earth taken by some object approaching the solar system's outer boundary. The message codes and identification markings were at first unrecognizable.

Over the weeks that followed, interest in the message and its origin rapidly swelled. UASA senior staff became steadfastly involved. News media and world populations anxiously awaited new information each day.

Research into the codes and transmission language received from the object convinced UASA the message could only be from one of NASA's twentieth-century planetary probes. Searching NASA's