The problem there being that you would have to know what the aliens alone would understand…which, being a human, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t even ask Gharr for help, because you couldn’t be sure that the army wouldn’t also know it.

The army can only know what the other shuttle crew members knew/know. They weren't privy to, for example, Gharr's conversations with Zane, or a number of other crew who are still aboard the fleet. Heck, Gharr could simply ask for the name/number/coordinates/shortscent/... of the exact room page 8 took place in.

They wouldn’t have to know anything, just where the message is coming from. If it’s coming from the area near where the shuttle crashed, they’d be interested.

No, they could authenticate using Gharr. He and the Trio Upstairs are old friends, which means they likely have all kinds of old in-jokes, media references and anecdotes they could call on. If Gharr asks for a selection of those, the military would have no way of knowing the answers, even in a worst-case scenario where they had fully interrogated multiple prisoners and cracked the shuttle's computer.

Methinks you underestimate the Army…on top of that, there’s always the likelihood that the government is keeping an eye on the Web for anything that might help them find Gharr, and they’d probably be able to reach him before his friends did.

Okay, this I gotta hear. How exactly will the Army divine the answer, if Gharr asked "We Are Aliens" what was that funny line Ahshu's character said during a space-D&D game two years ago, or asked them to summarize an obscure Iss novel Hekaht introduced him to?

The army wouldn’t have to divine an answer. They’d just have to determine if the message is referring to Gharr (which it is) and determine its point of origin (which probably wouldn’t be too hard to do). They would then see that it was coming from a location not too far away from the crash site. Mind you, this wouldn’t tell them Gharr was actually there, but it would likely attract their interest and warrant a closer look.

Oh, I see what you mean. I was thinking in terms of social engineering, not hardware tracing.

On the other hand, I didn't think about hardware tracing because it's actually almost impossible (unless they get a gimme like the forum IP-stamping posts), and becomes exponentially harder if Dan's using a VPN, which he probably is since that's Paranoia 101.

Governments constantly find things online that make them want to hunt down the author (everything from unlawful spam to hacker ransom notes to actual forums for criminals), and they almost never manage it by tracing the post itself, unless it's already linked to a personally identifiable account. They really do have to trick the target into making a mistake.

(Phone tracing now, that's quite easy if you've got a warrant, unless VoIP is involved)

Oh yes. Be prepared for the awesome power that is Army Intelligence! (That's a joke!)

Gharr: [counters the amassed military intelligence by quoting the first line of the dumbest Raharr joke he can muster]

That could keep them busy for weeks (or months.)

They wouldn’t have to know what it meant. They’d just have to be suspicious of it and know where it was sent from, which is not a hard thing to figure out.

wdym? He clearly is totally weirded out by this, but it's just too specific to write off.

What are the odds that an ALIEN RACE with NO prior knowledge of humankind would be able to identify the Internet, discern the purpose of the Internet, discern the purpose of a chatroom, learn to use it, and flawlessly communicate on it using the ONE language (out of THOUSANDS) that he happens to understand? This kid is either giving them WAY too much credit, or is just plain gullible.

What are the odds that a spacefaring race would not already know all about Internet and chatrooms, by virtue of having those things themselves? As for language, Quantum has already reported creating "adequate" translation modules, this post's language was selected simply by being the language of the forum, and Internet chatrooms are designed to be simple and user-friendly.

Once you eliminate transferable knowledge from their own culture, and stuff that's of general utility for examining humanity, there's really not much to do for this specific effort; just finding fringe/paranormal/alienist websites, writing the post itself, and monitoring for replies. And that's stuff you could write a bot for, only jumping in yourself when one of the bots pings you with news that someone has replied to it.

Pretty long odds, I’d say, since there’s no guarantee that they WOULD have such things, or that they’d be in a form similar enough to ours that they could recognize our version of them for what they are.

At least as far as the language barrier is concerned, you might want to remember that there's one of them aliens on the other floor who mastered the local language (might not be English) to almost the same level on his lonesome within what, hours? Couple days?, right in front of Dan's ears. (And, seen from our perspective, the fleet has been working on connecting to our nets since before he even set out planetward.)

Gharr isn't nearly that fluent, and it took him two weeks to get that far, but your point stands. Unlike the fleet, Gharr is actually having to learn the language with his meat brain, rather than crunching it on giant supercomputers, building an auto-translate program, and then just running their comments through that.

Yeah, but he’s had the advantage of being among us, and he still can’t speak the language very well at all. Although it is true that the fleet was connecting to our communications, there’s no reason for them to be using them in this way, and no way for them to know what the right language to use would be, and there’s no way they’d be able to speak it any better than Gharr would at this point. Everything about this message is a red flag.

While I agree with your last sentence (but for entirely different reasons!), the ability to read this board should readily answer a) what language is used on it, b) what it is about, and c) how to peruse it (since we tend to provide direct links to instructions for our own kin on those).

(And don't let Nea hear your statement about "advantage of being among us", lest she removes parts you didn't know you have. :-S )

Pretty sure message boards can host multiple languages. Also…actually, no they wouldn’t need to know which board to use, would they? They could just blanket them all.

They know the crash site and can quite likely derive the most common languages, if not the most popular social media, from that. Kibozing, on the other hand, would be far from inconspicuous ...

You're right that the Trio Upstairs aren't likely to speak Protagonese even as well as Gharr, let alone better, but they are not in fact speaking it. They're using translation software, created using a starship-grade computer grid and an all-you-can-eat stream of sample text in every language spoken online. Gharr is skilled, highly motivated, and working exclusively on Dan's language of choice, but there's just no substitute for having enough bandwidth* and computing power to download and analyze entire libraries' worth of data in hours.

*No, I have no idea what the bandwidth of Quantum's leech-sat is, but my own personal Internet connection has a bit rate over a million times higher than speech, and theirs is surely orders of magnitude faster.

True…though that still leaves the question of how they know which language to use. They only seem to be using English, when the more likely thing to do would be to post the same message in multiple languages on the same site. The fact that they only use English suggests to me that they know Gharr crashed in an English-speaking country (which they’d have no way of knowing), and is in a predominantly English-speaking area (which they have no way of knowing). All in all, it’s much more likely that this is a human sending these messages.

While Protagonistan isn't fully nailed down, there are no majorily English-speaking nations in the general area; Russian stands a better chance. The English you see here is for the readers' benefit.

…interesting. I didn’t catch that.

I have no idea what the bandwidth of Quantum's leech-sat is

Laser link, you wrote below? We user lasers for long-distance data communication, too, only that we point very weak beams into optical fibers. That's gotten us to several hundred Gbps per (fiber and) wavelength channel for distances of thousands of km so far.

Not having relay stations between Earth and Jupiter would do a number on their bandwidth, though (the bandwidth-distance product being the actual ceiling).

We know that, but that's because we know Pronin. All Gharr knows is that the human military shot down his ship (expected behavior if they saw it, but still), and Dan thinks they're all professional psychopaths.

Probably true. Unfortunately for Dan, Dan is a bit of an idiot where such things are concerned, and so probably regards that as the wrong course of action.

Ask for their names.

78 minutes two-way = 39 light-minutes = ~700 million kilometers, which is well within the range of Jupiter's distance from Earth (588-968 gigameters)

AI alien doing the interfacing with human internet, and likely faster than light travel... that also gives way more flexibility if required. A tiny probe could be located closer than the main fleet with enough of AI to do the conversation, and/or act as a relay to main fleet in some sort of faster than light communication. (If you can travel faster than light you might be able to communicate faster too).

[Its a lot easier to interface with human internet from much closer to earth than jupiter... with something similar to a human microsatellite, being so tiny it could be as hard for humans to spot as the main fleet at jupiter]

They have a probe closer by, but FTL communication is effectively reduced to sending messengers by FTL travel, because reasons.

They don't have FTL comms, they're using laser links. Quantum attached a parasite probe to one of our biggest telecommunication satellites, and has been working through that. I imagine that it's a pretty powerful computer in its own right, and semi-autonomously exploring the Internet using a variety of software bots. For communicating with the fleet, it's probably sending back both the results of specific jobs Quantum gives it, and a stream of "big data" for things like language-crunching and trend analysis. Quantum in turn would be sending back updated translation modules so the bots can actually read what they see, and orders to check out specific things, as well as new customized bots.

Not necessarily. It can take up to 50 minutes for a signal to travel from earth to Jupiter. The average time is actually 42 minutes.

...yes, 39 light-minutes is "within the range" of 32 to 53.

Actually, Jupiter is probably a bit closer than 39 light-minutes at the time of this exchange, since whoever's typing probably took at least a couple minutes to get back to their keyboard and compose a reply. Unless it's Quantum.

If it’s the Raharr, it would probably be Quantum.