Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings Read Free Book Online Page B

features such as rivers, forests, and city lights. Put another way, a gravitational lens at Alpha Centauri could easily see the coastline of Monterey Bay, its tree-covered hills, and the bright lights of nearby big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
    “One of the beauties of gravitational lenses is that since the lensing object bends space, all light traveling through is equally affected,” Drake said, squinting into the sunlight beneath one of his lemon trees. “Gravitational lenses are achromatic—they work the same for optical light, infrared, everything. I like to think of what they could do for radio. If you had two civilizations around different stars in communication and aware of each other, they could use gravitational lensing to set up transmission and receiving stations on each end. You look at the numbers, and at first it seems totally insane, but this is real. You could transmit, let’s see, high-bandwidth signals from here to Alpha Centauri using only one watt of power. . . .”
    He looked at me expectantly, but I could think of nothing to say.
    “That’s the transmitting power of a cell phone,” he finished. “There’s a quote I sometimes use when I talk about this, from a French play called The Madwoman of Chaillot : ‘I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us—and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star.’ The capabilities of gravitational lenses make that sort of paranoia almost justified. If there’s enough capability out there to build these things, you could have a kind of ‘galactic internet,’ with everyone monitoring and talking to each other, all with very high bandwidth and very low power.”
    •   •   •
    A fter a half hour of outdoor ambling, we found ourselves standing before Drake’s trio of greenhouses. They were where he spent much of his time when he wasn’t caught up in his SETI work. He opened the door to the nearest one, and the hum of ventilation fans and a blast of humid, loamy air flowed out over the grass. Stepping inside, he let out a peaceful sigh. Like the other two greenhouses alongside it, this one was filled with orchids. Orchids hung from the translucent roof in pots of sphagnum moss, orchids stretched in rows on long wooden tables strewn with watering cans, and orchids sprouted from plastic buckets beneath lamps and irrigation tubes. Drake said he had about 225, but most were dormant. I counted only about a dozen blooms across the three greenhouses. He had picked up the hobby in the 1980s, about the same time he began seriously thinking about using the Sun as a gravitational lens. He did it for the challenge, he said, of nurturing the sometimes temperamental plants into full bloom, and for the satisfaction of seeing beautiful new morphological varieties emerge. Over millions of years, natural selection had shaped orchid flowers into a rich diversity of shape and color, each variety typically tuned to one or two species of pollinators. “Insects, mostly beetles,” Drake said. “They blindly shape the flowers. But the hybrids, of course, are chosen and bred by humans.”
    Drake flipped on a grow lamp overhead, and in its pinkish light showed me a few blossoming hybrids, some cultivars he had cross-pollinated by hand. Each was wildly different from the others. One bore tiny flowers with trailing white petals and anthers heavy with yellow pollen. Another had five tubular, drooping purple blooms, each surrounded by a starburst of red-tinted curly leaves.
    Drake turned to what he said was his current favorite, a single orange bloom with three angular petals that tapered to sharp, blood-redpoints. They looked like fangs. “This one’s a hybrid of two different genuses, Dracula and Masdevallia ,” he said. “Cold-growers from the Andes. No one’s seen one like this before, with this red. It wasn’t blooming yesterday. Some of these only blossom one day out of the year, and the next day