Challenge #02478-F288: Hope in the Dark Times

A distant planet has caught ancient radio signals from earth. They are visual images and audio of the chronicles of a exploratory ship and it's crew.
Over 200 years before humans figured out long-term space travel...
Everyone is confused. -- AmberFox

Filtering things out of the Hydrogen Line is an interesting task. Though it is a band relatively free of interference, there is still signal fade as it disperses through deeper space. Those listening for the echoes of the big bang regularly have to filter out the newer signals using the Hydrogen Line in order to do their research. The Archivaas, ever hungry for the lost information of Pre-Shattering Earth, always want to know what this signal is, and whether or not it is within their interests.

The process behind that is far more complicated. Removing noise from a faded signal is just as complicated as extracting the signal from the noise in the first place. Once one removes the relative noises of the stars, ancient or young, whatever remains must be the signal... most of the time. Some signals interfere with others, and filtering those from each other is an interesting exercise, starting with matching one or more of those with known signal patterns.

After all of that complication, the end result is similar to that of a decayed artwork, where every sound or frame is almost unrecognisable from the original. It takes an immense amount of interpretive untangling to restore a lost transmission from that faded work. Thusly, the results are contested by many other experts who have had many other ideas. Artificial intelligences are used to make certain the result an Archivaas may have obtained to what the signal is most likely to be. On this one, they agreed.

The Humans in the 2D representation were wearing primary colours. The general aesthetic of the setting was blocky and retro-futuristic. Typical of ancient Human science fiction. The technobabble was a mixture of pseudoscience and nautical terms. The word 'star' turned up in some of the technobabble terms. There was even a starship that looked logically impossible in the present day. There was technology that was still impossible in the present day. There were aliens that were clearly Humans in ridiculous costumes. Some of them no complicated than a thick layer of greasepaint.

It was set in the Terran twenty-fifth century. More or less in the era that the researchers were living in. As far as hitting the mark was concerned, it missed by light years. Hundreds of light years. Perhaps, thousands. Viewed in the present day, it was pointedly ridiculous.

Then the mathematical team informed all involved in this particular process when this particular signal was most likely launched into the endless depths of the stars. A date two hundred years before Humanity finally made itself known and acceptable to the Galactic Alliance.

They hadn't known that future would happen when they made it. They had guessed, with the best of their knowledge, what could happen with extant technology. They hoped, as only Humans were capable of hoping, that they would last that long against the forces of their own self-destructive tendencies. It was made in a time when the biggest threat to Humanity's continued existence were their own weapons of mass destruction.

The truth, learned by Humanity's pain, was the risk lay in their own lust for profit, and the few's power over the multitude, including their own political systems. Humanity's trial by fire was in their destroyed climate, not in their weapons of war... though it was a close race.

The issues were more transparent in some stories rather than others. Social issues, moral issues, even ethical ones. Sometimes, the evil wasn't being perpetrated by the alien of the episode, but rather those who had invaded its environment.

There was no other embodiment of Human hope like it.

Humans, re-introduced to the transmissions, pointed to it as a defining entertainment in Human history. The thing that lead to many of their ancestors to keep looking towards the stars no matter how bad things got. Those who kept working towards that better world no matter how hard it was to do so.

No other species can hope like a Human. Though the factual progress differed from the fictional, that seed of hope helped develop the future for themselves that they made. That was what made it the most popular set of archival files in the Archivaas' collected data files.

[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / rolffimages]

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