VOICE-OVER:
A rough map of the
disk. Here is the area we have explored to date, using the NP-101
program.
(A dot little larger
than a sand grain lights up on the face of the
single.)
That dot of light is
a million kilometers in radius—five times the distance that used to
separate our old Earth from its moon. To cross the radius of the
disk, an NP-101 would have to fly at Mach 3 for almost ten years.
We aren’t even sure exactly where the center of that dot lies on
the disk: our highest sounding rocket, the Nova-Orion block two,
can barely rise two degrees above the plane of the disk before
crashing back again. Here is the scope of our knowledge of our
surroundings, derived from the continental-scale mapping cameras
carried by Project Orion:
(A salmon pink area
almost half an inch in diameter lights up around the red sand grain
on the face of the single.)
Of course, cameras at
an altitude of a hundred thousand miles can’t look down on new
continents and discern signs of communist infiltration; at best
they can listen for radio transmissions and perform spectroscopic
analyses of the atmospheric gases above distant lands, looking for
contaminants characteristic of industrial development such as
chlorofluorocarbons and nitrogen oxides.
This leaves us
vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Our long-term strategic
analyses imply that we are almost certainly not alone on the disk.
In addition to the communists, we must consider the possibility
that whoever built this monstrous structure—clearly one of the
wonders of the universe—might also live here. We must contemplate
their motives for bringing us to this place. And then there are the
aboriginal cultures discovered on continents F-29 and F-364, both
now placed under quarantine. If some landmasses bear aboriginal
inhabitants, we may speculate that they, too, have been transported
to the disk in the same manner as ourselves, for some
as-yet-unknown purpose. It is possible that they are genuine
stone-age dwellers—or that they are the survivors of advanced
civilizations that did not survive the transition to this
environment. What is the possibility that there exists on the disk
one or more advanced alien civilizations that are larger and more
powerful than our own? And would we recognize them as such if we
saw them? How can we go about estimating the risk of our
encountering hostile Little Green Men—now that other worlds are in
range of even a well-equipped sailboat, much less the
Savannah-class nuclear-powered exploration ships? Astronomers Carl
Sagan and Daniel Drake estimate the probability as high—so high, in
fact, that they believe there are several such civilizations out
there.
We are not alone. We
can only speculate about why we might have been brought here by the
abductors, but we can be certain that it is only a matter of time
before we encounter an advanced alien civilization that may well be
hostile to us. This briefing film will now continue with an
overview of our strategic preparations for first contact, and the
scenarios within which we envisage this contingency arising, with
specific reference to the Soviet Union as an example of an
unfriendly ideological superpower . . .