Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

And yet, between our Earth and Alpha Centauri B (ACB) - the binary star system, somehow Sonification had emerged as the second major communication method for exchanging data between us and the newly discovered ‘Other’ intelligence apparently shown to be occupying the visible universe, with us.

Evidence of the ‘Other’ intelligence had been gathering since the first radio interactions with the habitable zone of ACB, around 11 years ago. When the first non-random signals were detected, Earth’s response was cleverly chosen to establish speaking cues — we wanted live communication.

“What we propose to send back to the intelligence is going to be very simple: a self-encoded acknowledgment of the transmission distance”.

Those were the words of Kassandra Milan, astrophysicist and spokesperson to the Belgrade Observatory. Thus to mark the beginning and end of our ““speech bubbles””, four pulses were now being sent every year to represent the four light years that our worlds were apart. And in acting so fast to introduce this convention from the outset, Kassandra & her team had single-handedly quadrupled the bit rate of communication with the ‘Other’ intelligence for the whole of humanity†.

†Albeit with the same 4 year lag, our signal exchanges could now occur on a year by year basis from the 5th year onwards. This arrangement was lauded by information theorists as being far more preferential to the alternative 4-year-blocks of communications.

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However that initial excitement had waned while frustration and impatience had grown. Over the 11years and 5 pairs of messages still little progress had been made to establish a baseline for meaningful interactions to take place. Obviously the goal was to collaborate; technology transfers, or the sharing and cross-checking of phenomena-logical discoveries. That seemed a long way off.

One reasonable suggestion had been to communicate in a language basis composed of atomic ‘facts’ — atomic immutables, but realistically nobody really knew how to do that (although that didn’t stop an avalanche of quacks from trying).

What was the answer to be? Would we just embrace the language of an earth-centric dialect of Mathematics and hope for the best? Growing pressure was mounting from all sides of the globe. Could we attempt to keep quadrupling the bitrate the same way as before and expect more messages would give more chances to find common ground? — Could we afford to confuse the “Other” intelligence in the process if we wanted to try that?

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It was around this time the rumblings of a proposal to combine sonification with entanglement were beginning to emerge. Like a child playing around with the depth sensitivity of a metal detector, two amateur scientists from Serbia had purported to stumble upon a subtle method for concurrent communication at a distance.

Sonification is a way to visualise n-dimensional datasets as audio soundscapes - for instance you would hear a different kind of ping every time the IPFS version of Wikipedia gets an edit, new entry, read or deletion†.

†IPFS or the InterPlanetary File System was originally setup to share files in a distributed / non-centralised manner with any future colony we might establish on Mars.

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“Imagine you are playing a chord consisting of 3 notes, A-C-E. In a sense each element in an atmosphere is contributing one of those notes, so from a chord we can pick out the individual notes. These are the basics for signalling we suggest. And as you know sounds may transmit to spontaneously cause other objects to resonate at those same frequencies.”

The Serbian duo largely responsible for proposing the system deemed it important for their theories become relatable to the public in order to gain momentum - although academics could not take them seriously yet as they had decided to withhold some important details in order to first secure exclusive rights with the Observatories to be the first ones to use it on ACB. The Method was beginning to make waves among some online communities.

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When I first heard about The Method through the comments section of a SpaceX livestream, there was an immediate and overwhelming sense of confirmation bias: “This is it! It must be true!”

It was conceivably true because of what was known to me about the Wolfram Physics Project. Although I was not particularly skilled in the field of computation and had not kept up to date, I had already gleaned and internalised some of the more notable results, namely that there was an upper bound on the Speed Limit of Entropy. Or in other words, the “spooky action at a distance” synonymous with Entanglement was not instantaneous, meaning that when it occurs there has to be some update function to the Universe; some propagation of information.

And yet this propagation of information is inherently non-local. The scientific community had already tested Bell’s inequality to the nth degree. There was very little room for doubt there.

It seemed somewhat paradoxical - how can you send information without sending it over a distance.

Once I had conceived this question it became my north star to guide me through my ensuing investigations of The Method, and the state of our attempts to quicken communications with the “Other” intelligence. I began to experience a renewed sense of purpose and wonder, there was a calling, out of necessity, to become the citizen scientist / journalist documenting the whole story just as it was unfolding before our eyes.

Was The Method already being used to communicate and being kept quiet? Was the science behind it even viable? Was the “Other” intelligence a whole civilisation like us, or was it artificial? And, if The Method was true, who’s to say the information signal wasn’t being routed from elsewhere?

I didn’t yet know, but I planned to find out.

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