Member-only story
Is There Anybody Out There?
The First Alien Communication Wasn’t A Warning Or A Threat. It Was A Recipe.
Is There Anybody Out There? The First Alien Transmission.
After ten sleepless nights decoding the first alien transmission, I expected a warning, a greeting, or a quantum theorem.
Instead, I got a list of ingredients.
It came through the radio telescope at 3:17 a.m. GMT, a tight-band signal from somewhere near Epsilon Eridani, wrapped in enough noise to give our decryption algorithms an existential crisis. The message was structured, deliberate, and — once filtered through enough machine learning, human intuition, and far too much coffee — it resolved into something unmistakably linguistic.
There were verbs. Units of measure. A peculiar obsession with temperature precision. And one term we could only translate as “plasmic emulsification.”
I remember the moment the pattern clicked.
Not a manifesto.
Not a threat.
Not even a hello.
The first contact from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization was a recipe.