“It wouldn’t be fair to say Counsellor Grerbe was the one that discovered the first signal irregularities. It’s that the emission survey that first showed them wasn’t even looking for planets… Radio, as you put it. It was just trying to refine star spectra, and some scans had irregular peaks.”
“Mind you, there was no way we could get am radio signals at that distance. Carrier signals, like the charts had been… clawed up? Scratched.”
“It took a while to convince the scientific community that this was an unknown signal, a likely primitive and unintentional signal, including a mini expedition along one of our established trade routes to confirm this wasn’t gravitational lensing of some sort. It took even longer for the government to agree wheat the correct response was – or at least negotiate somthing that enough were willing to send
“The problem about coming here wasn’t the distance. It was the unknown route, the unknown receiver, the retreat. There are known routes for trade – free of interstellar debris, frequently traveled. The involvement of a Pathlayer was a given – its the fastest ship that could field a crew large enough to handle both study and… handle homesteading? Without decades of hibernation, which in itself leads people to question if something is worth it. But the two torus orbitals had to be constructed. And there was a question of non-government scientists.
“…oh? Yeah. People rather flat out die than risk finding everything they knew was gone decades ago. Honest problem with long-term space travel. Generational ships produce happier people. Much less of an issue with a Pathlayer’s FTL, that’s why the sibling count is so low.
“Even when we were close enough to pick up more than AM’s carrier – pleas realize, we were getting all of AM at once. All the daylight stations broadcasting on a frequency, a little bit of the nighttime. Somthing to do with your atmosphere’s layers and internal reflection. Think of moon phase, waning and waxing and whatever – but over an Earth year – and there was always a literal solar eclipse. We had calculated your year length before we knew how you count.
“…Radio station ID. One jump from your solar system, we finally had the resolution to listen. We got counting from that – where the 9+1 confusion started, but that’s not completely unprecedented – some language phonemes. Of course we had started to see Wifi by then, and a bit of FM, but we still can’t observe shortwave broadcasts. We can focus on antennas and reconstruct output, somewhat. Very inefficient use of equipment. So much easier to wiretap satellite communications.
“No, we are paying for service, when possible. Certain individuals paying for numbers. Coin things. Trivial calculations compared to the Jump drive. If it weren’t for the processing assignments, we could have easily crashed that market.
“We maintain legal representation. Humans to invest funds, well compensated. Mostly by electronic mail – sometimes by SMS. we’re about an equal distance form Earth as it is from it’s star, so 14… sorry, 16 minutes is an extremely fast back-and-forth. It does make it slightly easier to manage contacts, but with a… gross? hundred? Even if some have opted for hibernation, currently, there’s lots of potential for loose lips.”
“We pay for entertainment. We cache, we intend to stick with library standards. Those will be valuable rights for Earth some day. Any materials we harvest & refine aren’t brought on the ship until they are needed… presumably, some human will get a windfall some day.”
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