Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec 2, 2025

"There Aren't that Many of Us Left," the Old Man Said in a Gravelly Voice that....

"There aren't that many of us left," the old man said in a gravelly voice that descended first into throat-clearing and then to an actual short but energetic coughing fit. As it proceeded, his hands moved to retrieve a handkerchief from the pocket in what looked like a much practiced motion. "Sorry...."

"We'll edit all that out," the interviewer said. "Just talk about your experience and we'll put it together from that."

"Now?"

"Sure. Why don't you start by giving your name and service details."

"Yeah, all right. I'm Bob Casper, I was born in Boston in 2008. Degree in mathematics at Auburn, then I went in the Air Force. A year or two goes by and I'm an fighter pilot flying F-16s, first in Korea and then at Aviano Air Base in Italy. Did a online PhD in math in 2022 In 2025, I applied to NASA to be an astronaut, got told "no" for a couple of years, then I was accepted for the Class of 2028."

"Just in time for Pegasus," the interviewer said.

"Right. Pegasus was proposed in 2022 as a black project"--Bob made air quotes with his fingers around the word black--"so of course I knew nothing about it, but by 2027 it was funded, so those of us that came along on 2028 got in on the ground floor, so to speak."

"And when first contact came--"

"Yeah, well, nobody thought of me at first!" [Laughs.] "But then, you know, the pulses were detected and it took about 10 seconds for everybody to realize what they were--"

"The primes."

"Well, sure. That's what we would do. That's what we did at Arecibo and I think there are a list to primes up to a thousand or so on the gold Voyager disc. Hell, they--oh, can I say 'Hell'?"

"We'll edit it out. Please, continue."

"Yeah, so, the primes are a very obvious way for an intelligent species to say to any other potentially intelligent species that they want to have contact with, 'Hey, we are thinking creatures. We may not share anything or any language, but we have math!' In the 1960s, that guy who did the work with dolphins, trying to work out their language, he put a speaker in the water and broadcast the primes to his dolphins just the same as the Brood did to us."

"Really?"

"Oh, yeah."

"What did the dolphins do?"

"Nothing. They didn't get it at all."

"So does that mean dolphins are not intelligent?"

"Well, I don't know. They're very good at dolphin stuff. They can learn a lot of tricks too, apparently. Hell, the Navy uses to use them to check harbors for mines. They do seem to have sort of a rudimentary language between each other. But they don't have math, and without math, you aren't going to have a technology. The Brood have math, and so do we."

"But can we really be sure that an alien species will know what a prime number is?"

"Oh, absolutely. Certainly. The Brood used the primes as bona fides, and when we replied by pulsing back at them the next couple of dozen primes where they left off, we established ours."

"And then, after the primes, what happened?"

"After the primes, the Brood started transmitting a long series of data, which we know today as the Stream. And really smart people were on it. But nobody could really figure out what it was they were trying to say to us. Then somebody, you know. Somebody thought of me."

"Because of your math background."

"Yeah. I had a PhD in numerical analysis, and somebody somewhere thought, well, here's a guy who knows about numbers and has lots of experience with airplanes--let's let him have a look."

"This was before the existence of the Stream was generally known, right?"

"Right. This would have been early '30 or '31, I forget, and I was contacted and whisked off to Langley to take a look."

"Langley. CIA?"

"That's who was handling it. They actually have an excellent math department over there working on codes and cyphers. And that's really what the Stream was--a code."

"So they sat you down and said, 'Okay, here it all is'?"

"Not exactly," Bob continued. "One thing about the CIA is that they really hate to show their cards. They brought me in and they didn't tell me anything about the Brood or what the puzzle was, they just sat me down, gave me a sheet of paper with some numbers on it, and said, 'Okay, what is this?'"

"And did you know what it was?"

"No, not really. It was presented to me as a series, that's something I know a lot about. But it wasn't anything I recognized."

"A series."

"Yeah, you know. A list of numbers that grow according to some definite rule. The primes are a series. There are many of them, thousands. Some are famous and well known and some aren't and people are coming up with new ones all the time."

"But it turned out that the series wasn't a series."

"That's right. They thought it was because the numbers increased as you went along, but it turned out that the Brood used a constantly increasing set of terms to hide the information the Stream contains."

"Hide?"

"Yeah. They don't intend to, that's just the way they think. it's the way their brains are built."

"I see."

"Like so many things, it seems simple in retrospect, but just getting that far with it took a couple of months."

"But eventually, you did get it solved."

"Yeah. It wasn't just me, of course. A whole team of people from all over worked on this."

"Including Ray Hammond, right?"

"That's right, Ray, rest his soul. And an Indian mathematician named Sviramilaroha, and many others."

"Did you have it decided by the time the Brood arrived?"

"Oh, definitely not!" [Laughs, looks at watch.] "It's almost time for the mid-evening."

The interviewer looked at his watch. "Ah. well, shall we go outside, then?"

Bob didn't answer--the question, of course, was rhetorical--but instead started releasing the microphone at his collar and removing its battery pack. "Today's Thursday, so that means family life, right?"

"Yes. I think so."

The two of them stepped down the hallway, out the door, and joined the crowd that was gathering in the street for the Brood lesson on family life.