If you are at all like me—and congruity has brought us at least this close in proximity—you have occasionally found yourself grappling with that fundamental question, “If I were lost in time and space and found by aliens, how could I give them enough identifying information that they could get me back to Earth?”
As the literature makes clear, any first contact scenario with advanced aliens must first establish the basic civilizational bona fides of humanity lest the aliens decide that the universe would be better off with us converted to feed stock, breeding stock, chattel for a joint stock company, or other forms of stock as yet undreamt of by Wall Street.
Unfortunately, first contact best practices are still very much in flux so I can only advise you to be charming but not sexy, fulsome but not tasty, helpful but not handy, and to circle back once you’ve convinced the aliens to help you get home. Under no circumstances should you become involved in alien politics unless they are relatively primitive in which case I advise you to review this essay’s companion series, “Pyramid Scheme: Six Easy Steps To TV and Air Conditioning.”
Now let’s assume you’ve made the initial inroads with the Glorkons and convinced them that humans are decent enough and they’ve agreed to open The Infinity Gate to drop you off at home; how do you describe our region of space well enough to have any chance of seeing the green hills of Earth again?
Let’s start with the basics. We’re looking for a yellow star about 4.6 billion years old with 8 regularly elliptical planets (4 small chunks of rock, 4 gassy monsters), an asteroid belt, and one dwarf that wanders in and out of the ecliptic. The star is expected to mature into red giant status down the line but for now is enjoying a comfortable middle age.
Of course, 4.6 billion years is meaningless if you don’t know how long a year is so we have to define that starting with a second. The formal definition of a second is how long it takes a cesium atom to do whatever it is cesium atoms do, but there’s just no way on (or off) earth that I’m going to remember that in a high-stress close encounters situation so let’s circle back to that.
The next astrofact is that our nearest celestial neighbor is Alpha Centauri sitting about 4.3 light-years away. Ah ha! The speed of light is a universal constant— at least it better be or I’m returning my copy of A Brief History of Time—so that gives a common point of reference but again how long is a year? Luckily now we can come at this sideways. The speed of light is 3e8 m/s and I might not have an official meter stick but I do have a literal human foot which is a static percentage of a meter so with a little math we can establish a common understanding of light-years and years. I encourage you to measure your foot now just in case.
So now we’ve established the age of our Sun, the rough structure of the system and the nearest stellar neighbor. Using our handy “light-year” measurement we can clarify that our galaxy is a spiral with a diameter of about 100,000 light years and two major arms, and we’re off in the periphery of one of those arms.
We’re assuming these are aliens with hella good star charts, of course, but it turns out that in this stupid big universe those traits still match hundreds of systems, so now we need to find more points of triangulation like galaxies and super structures. It might be worth mentioning that there’s a bloody great black hole sitting at the center of the galaxy spewing radiation like the eye of Sauron, but its honestly starting to look like the whole point of galaxies is to create black holes so that might not get you far.
This is usually where I give up on the process because when you start to look at galactic structures you find out that honored elder Edwin Hubble named the group of galaxies we’re most closely entangled with “The Local Group” and it would just be painfully embarrassing—having spent all this time endearing ourselves—to have to explain to these ultra-advanced aliens that we never got past calling our region of space “The hood” and at that point I’d go ahead and embrace my new life with the aliens.
