The New World Order

Friends, in our lifetimes we have seen mighty, unthinkable changes come and go. The world of my adulthood was radically different from the world of my childhood. Information technology, the end of the Cold War, the rise of the media, the internet... it used to feel like that was enough. Was, frankly, more than enough change for anyone to have to handle.

And now this.

In just the past month we've learned the answer to one of our oldest and most profound questions: "Are we alone?" We've seen the often-uneasy post-Cold War "peace" shatter into bitter and terrifying faction. As I type this, the nations of the world are on the brink of... something.

Japan, the United States, and the Latin American Union have formed what they call the "Machine Accord," a union designed to pool the resources needed to construct The Machine on time. This unprecedented openness of people, resources, funds, and technology seems poised to catapult the Accord nations into a new age of peace and prosperity. If construction (or the arrival of The Signal's senders) doesn't ruin them first.

Meanwhile Canada, the EU, Russia, and China have banded together into what they're calling The Resistors. United by no political system or economic ideology, but purely by their belief that The Machine must not be constructed, The Resistors are taking a variety of actions. Most are building their military forces for what they see as an imminent attack by hostile alien beings. Others seem most concerned for their domestic well-being, turning what appears to be a blind eye to the rest of the world, ushering in a new era of isolationism.

Just yesterday, researchers at the Atacama Observatory in Chile (one of the original discoverers of The Signal) have announced initial results from their Dark Energy Survey, stating that unequivocally there is a space-time distortion between the Earth and 55 Cancri. This distortion, they feel, acts like a wormhole, a "shortcut" through space that allows information and possibly even matter to travel from one part of the universe to another effectively faster than the speed of light. This explains the speed with which 55 Cancri received the Cosmic Call 2 METI signal, and how they could respond to us so quickly.

Elsewhere, Japan's science ministry, in a surprising show of openness toward even Resistor nations, announced a major breakthrough in decoding The Signal. The Signal's repeated patterns indicate not merely overlap, but a 3-dimensional structure. Three different image-patterns overlap to create each image, but each image is only complete when viewed as a cubical structure, like so:

With this new breakthrough, it seems clear that further breakthroughs are just around the corner. To what use Resistor and Accord nations will put them remains to be seen. We can only urge them to use patience, restraint, and wisdom.