Sci-Fi: Sensors and Navigation

Sensors are often overlooked in science fiction. They're a tool that allows the plot to happen, and have whatever capabilities and author requires at the moment.

 In fiction:

"Captain, we've detected a ship at 100,000km."
"Onscreen."
[Image appears, crisp and detailed]
"Any life signs?"
"Negative."
"We're detecting high levels of applied phlebotinum in their hull."

In reality:

In the Bright Conference, sensors aren't magic. Let's see what is actually possible.

The Panopticon

Most civilized systems have a cloud of small telescopes and/or few very large telescopes to track asteroids, debris, in-system ships, solar flares, and traffic violations, linked to pattern-matching computers and live decision-makers. There's no stealth in space... if you've got a moderate budget.

But starships have mass restrictions. You can’t pack all the toys.

Large ships can, of course, pack quite a few toys. Distributed array telescopes are a plausible reason to carry a drone or two. But small ships, like the ~20 ton single-astronaut cans of the Bright Conference, can’t do everything. Their sensors need to be:

• Plausible using current technology. Off the shelf components are ideal.
• Low maintenance. Minimal cooling tech, and robust enough to survive thumps, bumps, and lurching.
• Low mass.
• Small enough to launch inside a faring. No boom arms or long aerials; a Bright Conference pod has to maneuver and dock, not just cruise.
  

The intention is not to collect space science. It’s easier just to ask the locals for their data. The intention is to navigate, take photos, and locate objects in a system.

Sensors in the Bright Conference

The Mk. 1.0 Human Eyeball

Also known as looking out a window. Pack a camera with a selection of expensive lenses and a pair of binoculars. This sensor is in your living area, which means you can use it as long as you’re alive, and it’s cooled and maintained by the most important systems in the ship at no additional cost. In an emergency you can navigate (badly) with nothing but a grease pencil, a window, a few bright objects, and a notepad.

The Mk. 1.0 eyeball is adaptive, which is annoying in some ways. It can't tell the difference between different stellar classes visually up close. If you're around a yellow star or a blue star, all light "seems" white.

 

Basic External Cameras

In an ideal world, a pod would have full coverage fixed cameras (at least one in every direction).  Cooling and power requirements mean that might not be viable. Cameras need to be toggled on. Each camera's shutter is connected to a simple lux detector so you don’t Bean your camera by pointing it at the sun. 

Instead of, or in addition to, fixed hull cameras, you could mount something like the ISS EHDCA (PDF link). This is not a highly precise automatically tracking camera. This is a basic look-around-the-hull camera. A periscope without a direct optical link. The more I look at the EHDCA, the more delighted I am by its design. 

You'll probably want at least one camera on the end of your robotic arm, for inspection and tool manipulation, and possibly one low-resolution fixed forward-facing camera for docking or maneuvering.

Alex Ries

Main Telescope

You want the widest and longest telescope possible. You can use tricks to fold the telescope’s length into itself, but you can't escape the laws of optics. 

Ideally, you want a rotating mount with independent stabilization. You can set it to track an object and it will, provided your spacecraft isn’t manuvering or you aren't throwing your weight around. Most space telescopes point the entire craft at their target; this is not feasible with a large heavy craft full of air, unpressurized liquid, cargo, and a wiggly human being. Independent stabilization is needed.

You can divert the telescope's image to a diffraction grating and spectrometer or a number of specialized CCDs (IR, visual, UV). You'll probably have a lower resolution conventional off-the-shelf full-colour option and a higher resolution black-and-white option for specific wavelengths that your computer can use to create a false-colour composite.

Ideally, you'll want to point the telescope 90 degrees from your direction of travel so you don’t chip your mirrors.

How big?
Given the mass, size, and complexity restrictions, let's say a Bright Conference pod defaults to an 8” reflector telescope. You could easily go with a 12”, but anything larger and I’d start to worry about stabilization and complexity. 

What can you see?
Conveniently, lots of people on earth have 8” reflector telescopes. We can use their images to calibrate our expectations. Yes, focal length and eyepieces and digital layering and all that will change the results, but we're eyeballing output, not calibrating an actual telescope.

Reddit user McTaSs

You can spot the shape of the ISS, but you can’t tell one satellite from another. A fleet of Star Destroyers could park next to Jupiter and you’d have no idea. Still, an 8" telescope is a lot better than the Mk. 1 Human Eyeball, especially when it's connected to an image-averaging computer. With enough time, you can smooth out the fuzziness of an image, or spot small changes and highlight them. 

For the purposes of Fermi estimates, ISS is 400km up and is 100m wide. So if you want to read a 1m license plate with the same blurry resolution as that ISS pic, you need to be within 4km. 

Spectral Analysis

Bounce incoming light off a diffraction grating, so that only one wavelength reaches the detector, then record the intensity. Slowly scan across all available wavelengths, then repeat several times, then do some math on the output. From this, you can learn:

• The main elements in the atmosphere of a planet... if you can point your telescope at it for more than an hour and if your software can peel signal from noise.
• What fuel a ship is burning (H2/O2, CH4/O2, etc.) and if the ship is using a nuclear heat source to boost fuel temperature.
• The spectral type of the nearest star (if your telescope is set up as a solar telescope; otherwise, do not point it at the sun.)

You cannot detect:

• Life signs inside a ship.
• The exact elemental composition of any given distant object.

If you can estimate the mass of a ship, you can work out all possible trajectories it can take. You might not know how full its fuel tanks are, or the type of engine, but the rocket is a tyrant.

The Magellan probe. The dual dish (top) and altimeter (cone-shaped thing, left) are probably worth including on a Bright Conference pod, in an updated form.

Radar

Tuneable, so you can listen to ambient radio waves bouncing off of planets and objects. Shielded from your own ship as much as possible. A dish works. The bigger the better, provided it fits in your faring and can be cooled. A forward-facing dish could also act as a debris shield, as a dish antenna is more resistant to damage than a telescope mirror. The same laws of optics apply, so a sensibly-sized dish won't give you magically more detail than your optical telescope.

Active radar (such as SAR) can provide fairly detailed results without implausibly complicated equipment. Resolution is unlikely to beat your optical telescope's resolution.

X-Ray Telescope

Useful for pulsars, useful for navigation. X-ray optics are getting smaller, better, and sturdier these days, so a dedicated telescope seems viable. You could possibly mount it on the same stabilization platform as your main optical telescope. Long focal lengths probably aren't viable.

A scintillation detector consists of a shielded tube, a crystal, and a photodetector. Gamma rays and/or X-rays hit the crystal and make it sparkle, and the detector converts those flashes of light into a signal. No moving parts. Aside from spotting stars, a scintillation detector is useful for spotting unshielded reactors or other human-killing hazards... hopefully before they become hazardous.

In theory, you could pack a gamma ray or X-ray spectroscope, which could provide another method of elemental analysis. Watch cosmic rays hit an object, then analyze what bounces back. In practice, I'm not sure they're worth it. They need a lot of shielding compared to a simple rate-based "where are we and are we in trouble" scintillation detector and a lot of time to generate useful results. Still, if you can make a small one, you might as well bring it along.

Laser Rangefinder

Bright Conference pods have tiny lasers for docking. The larger the laser, the more complex the cooling system. Calibrated for distances below 500m. Not useful for long-distance signalling.

Gravity Detector

I've included this because gravity detectors are cool, but they're probably not useful. They're extremely fiddly to use on the ground. In theory, they can detect a spoon at 5m. In practice, you don't want them to detect a spoon at 5m, you want them to detect large and distant objects, which means you need a very stable platform, long observation periods, and a lot of noise correction. 

Neutrino Detector

Again, not useful. High mass, very little immediately useful information.

The Scale of the Galaxy

The Galaxy Song is still, 40 years later, accurate enough for RPG purposes. It's worth storing in the back of your mind for quick reference.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
In this amazing and expanding universe.

Thought experiment: You are Star Tyrant Ludicrous the 2nd. Your vast fleet of space warships can conquer an astonishing 100 star systems per second. Tick. 100 flags over 100 suns. Tick. Another 100 flags over another 100 suns. 

How long does it take your fleet to conquer the Milky Way?

100 billion stars / 100 stars per second = 1 billion seconds (1x10^9). We know that there are 3.2x10^7 seconds in a year (it's a handy number to memorize). So that's 32 years. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Similarly, if you imagine a line sweeping across the galaxy at 100 stars per frame and 60 frames per second, it'd still take 192 days for the line to reach the other side. 100 billion is a ludicrously large number. It boggles the mind. And that's a low estimate; some papers suggest 400 billion stars is more accurate.

The point is, if you're telling a human-scale story and you feel the need to include other galaxies, consider just how much sand is currently in your sandbox.

Lost In Space: Galactic Orienteering

Thought experiment: You are teleported somewhere in the galaxy. How can you determine your position?

In a Bright Conference scenario, you can ask the gate that you exited through where you are, and compare it to any number of moderately accurate maps of the network. The gate's automated system will give you all the information you need about your location in the galaxy and in the local star system. It's always acceptable to ask for directions.

But let's imagine that you can't ask. This is an interesting experiment, and one that doesn't seem to have any well-documented solutions. If you have a cunning answer, post it in the comments.

1. Broad Position
All the constellation are different. You can't expect a computer to accurately store the relative position of 100 billion stars and then, just by looking at a portion of the starfield, calculate your location. It's possible, but you'd need a very, very accurate galactic map and a very fast computer.

Instead of looking at all the stars, why not use a special type of star? Pulars seem like they're designed for celestial navigation. They're unique lighthouses. If you have a database of pulsars, you can slowly scan the sky with your X-ray telescope or radar dish, locate a few pulsars, and triangulate your position. The more pulsars you identify, the more accurate your position. Wikipedia claims +/- 5km but I'm skeptical.

2. Local Position
But before you determine your broad position, it's best to determine your local position.

First, turn on your navigation computer. Tell it to lock your pod's position relative to the starfield ahead of it. Basically, your computer can take a picture of the star and use your pod's reaction wheels to keep the stored image in line with what the camera sees. It's tricky to take celestial measurements if your ship is rotating or tumbling.

Once your INS is set, you can adjust your pod's attitude without fear of losing track of external objects.

Second, check your habitat dosimeter. If you're in a high radiation area you might not live long enough to do anything about it, but it's nice to know. Radiation can give your next steps a sense of urgency.

Third, try to spot the nearest star. The easiest method is to unlock the roll axis and gently spin your pod while looking through the windows. Spinning along a pod's long axis requires less energy than tumbling end over end. Within a system's heliosphere, the local sun is still probably bright enough to identify with the Mk. 1 eyeball.

If there's no obvious candidate for a nearest star, you might be in interstellar space. Proceed to the next steps, but if you don't spot any planets or bright objects, then your broad pulsar-determined position from step 1 is probably acceptable. Space is big and mostly empty. 

If you do spot a star, mark its approximate position in the computer. During the next phase, your computer will try to avoid pointing your ship's delicate instruments anywhere near the star.

Activate survey mode. Your navigation computer will use your ship's cameras to build a complete map of the starfield around your ship. This process takes approximately one hour. Your pod will alter its orientation using reaction wheels. You should avoid moving around the pod during this process. Bunk down or strap into your seat.

The survey may identify bright spots. These could be planets, ships, or stations. You can export the coordinates to your telescope system and take a closer look.

3. Velocity
Calculating your velocity is difficult. Your spaceship doesn't come with a magic speedometer.

The good news is that you can use your radar system to determine your velocity relative to any dangerously close planets or vessels. Eyeballing some existing projects, I'd say a Bright Conference pod could determine the relative velocity of any planet, moon, or asteroid within 500,000 km via active Doppler radar. Ships and stations might need to be within 5,000km.

But you can't calculate the orbits of distant planets if you don't know your relative velocity. You could be stationary, relative to the star, and falling like a stone, or you could be speeding through the system like a bullet. You can't tell if the apparent shifts in a planet's position are due to its velocity or your velocity.

You could potentially use the red/blueshifts of various pulsars to calculate your velocity relative to Sol, but that's not useful. You might assume that, if you can triangulate your position within the galaxy within +/-5km, you could just take multiple pulsar fixes and calculate your velocity that way. This is true, but it'd be your velocity relative to various pulsars, not relative to other objects in the system.

You could use red/blueshifts of local spectra to determine your velocity, but only if your relative velocity is alarmingly large. You only have an 8" telescope.

Also, you can't assume you're near the invariable plane of a system, so you'll need to take many, many measurements. Since a planet's moons typically fall along the same plane as the other planets, you can use them to quickly determine the approximate location of the invariable plane. Moons might also be more useful for the estimates above. I'm sure astronomers can do fiendishly clever things with transits and shadows. I've tried to work out a few basic calculations with the moons of Jupiter. The results suggest it's possible, but very difficult, and you'd need to know or estimate the size or mass of the moon to get any useful information.

A gravity gradiometer might be useful here, but, as stated above, they seem very fiddly and slow. A gradiometer can, as the name implies, only measure a gradient, so it's a bit like trying to navigate a city by only looking at the pavement under your feet.

Best Guess

Also known as doing a lot of estimates and averaging the results.

• You can determine the type of the star by its spectrum, and can estimate its mass.
• You can determine temperature of gas giants or atmospheric planets by their spectra. You can use that, plus the stellar type, to estimate their distance from the star.
• You can estimate the mass of a planet by its type. That, plus its distance from the star, can be used to calculate its orbital period via Kepler.
• You can then compare the estimated velocity to the observed velocity to get your own orbital velocity.

If your trigonometry is rusty, have an analogy. Imagine you are standing and watching a street through a camera. A car drives in front of you, perpendicular to your camera. You take two photographs of the car. 

By comparing the two photographs and the time between them, you can calculate the car's velocity. If you know the length of the car you don't even need to know how far away the road is. With some slightly trickier math, you can even tell if the car is moving away from you ("changing lanes") as well as moving past you.

In a second experiment, you walk by a stationary car and, while in motion, take two photographs. If you know the time between the photographs, you can calculate your velocity.

In a third experiment, you walk past a moving car. If your velocity is known or the car's velocity is known, you can calculate any missing information. But if you and the car both have unknown velocities, calculations are no longer possible. You can't tell if the apparent shift in the car's position between the photographs is because it's moving, you're moving, or both.

Nevertheless, you know the the bounds of the velocities, and can use them to estimate possible unknown values. You know the speed limit on the street. You know the car isn't stationary. You know that you probably can't run faster than 12 km/h. You know that cars come in a relatively narrow range of sizes.

Why Is Velocity Important?

You want to avoid crashing into things. Space isn't about up. It's about sideways. You can get near space with a hot air balloon or a cannon. You can't stay in space without a whole lot of sideways.

The further you are from a gravity well, the cheaper it is to adjust your path relative to that gravity well. This is why probes that want to look at the sun's poles travel deep into the solar system before swinging back towards the sun. The smaller your relative velocity, the easier it is to adjust your vector. 

So figuring out where you are, how fast you are going, and if you need to adjust your velocity is a very important part of stellar navigation. And since Bright Conference pods have very limited delta-v, it's important to know when to burn.

In the Bright Conference, gates are usually parked in stable orbits. Earth's gate is parked near Earth-Moon L1. You have time to figure out where you are.

In the real world, space navigation relies heavily on dead reckoning. You know where you were, you know what changes you made to your velocity, and you can check your current position against a number of known observations. Apollo 13 wasn't able to take see the stars through their debris cloud, but they were able to use the position of the sun, the earth, and the moon (and some frantic ground-based calculations) to check their position and velocity. 

In the Bright Conference, you need to reset your dead reckoning system every time you travel through a gate. Most systems provide standardized (or at least comprehensible) information. 

But the map is not the territory. Knowing where you are and how fast you're going won't help if you're six months from any interesting destination. Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space, and he's a persistence predator.

Sci-Fi: Unexpected Desirable Outcome

Paul Pepera

Unexpected Desirable Outcome

They’d let him name his ship. He picked “Hope”, after the virtue and after his sister. Translating Hope into Galactistandard was difficult, but they’d settled on “Unexpected Desirable Outcome.” A few alien consultants politely pointed out that if you didn’t expect an outcome, your prediction system was poor. Why would you admit that? But Wyatt liked the self-effacing implications.

UDO, his custom-trained voice assistant, woke him up three hours early with a non-emergency tone. He stuck an arm out of his sleeping sack and tapped at the nearest screen. A long transmission in Galactistandard appeared. An open broadcast, but it specifically named his vessel, along with every other vessel in system. The automatic parser had run into real trouble. Large portions of the message were highlighted in speculative yellow, and a few clauses weren’t translated at all. Wyatt switched to the raw Galactistandard, sighed, and got to work.

‘Hzoc’ is the species name. “Explorer Individual Hzoc Letien” right, that’s odd. Starts with a disclaimer, Request, no consequences. So even reading this doesn’t require a response of receipt. Dum dum dum dum... Request assistance... what’s this word? I’ll come back to it. Request assistance something something something manipulator size.... under 154cm total... I think that’s followed by...

Thirty minutes later, with a great deal of cross-checking, Wyatt worked it out.

“Medical assistance. Hzoc Letien is in medical distress and needs help. The issue is on the upper side of its body. The issue is physical in nature. The issue will kill them. The issue is not complex. Further instructions can be provided,” Wyatt summarized aloud.

The Orlo vessel Large Reflective Grub, the scout ship that had picked up his Hitchhiker Waiver and hauled him into this system, had already responded. “Reply: unable to assist. Clarification: regret.” Wyatt stared at the word.

Galactistandard did not make regret easy. If you took the time to respond to a message that did not ask for a response, said you were not going to help, and did not clarify why, then the regret was built into your response. To state it again was, as far as he could tell, an intensifier. Galactistandard was a language, not a physical law, and species used it in different ways. Even if the Orlo could help, the Large Reflective Grub was several thousand kilometers away, coasting towards another station in the ring of factories and solar collectors dotting this system's asteroid belt.

Could anyone else help? The Orlo were too far away, and the only other non-automated ship at this station was occupied – or, more accurately was – a hibernating Downlink Ball, waiting to be picked up by another ship in a few decades. Maybe he should have spent some time greeting the Hzoc, but he’d been enjoying a long conversation with the Orlo.

Wyatt opened the file on everything Humanity had recorded about the Hzoc. It wasn’t much. No images. No recorded contact. No connections. No rumours. Their habitability code listed a methane and nitrogen atmosphere at 0.3 bar and 45 degrees C. Not breathable... but workable. He could stick his bare arm into that without any issues, not that he wanted to.

“Reply: Human Explorer Individual Wyatt Anvar. Acceptance: tentative. Request clarification procedure. Request: tutorial. Request: images.” He copied in the standard human wavelength and resolution codes and sent the message. It wasn’t good Galacticstandard, but he hoped it would do.

“Fuck it,” he said out loud. He had no idea how long Hzoc Letien’s medical distress would continue before death, or its equivalent, intervened. They could already be dead. But it was him out there, he’d want to know that someone was at least trying to help. Wyatt brought up a system map. Hzoc Letien was docked to the station, on the same shadowed side but further down. Over a kilometer away. Invisible, at least to his eyes. Wyatt switched to the flight control panel, tapped the “undock and reposition” button, scrolled through the checklist, and confirmed.  

UDO turned off the magnetic plate and automatically pulled through the mooring wire. Wyatt thought about how lucky it was that hadn’t set up umbilicals or a more permanent connection. In under a minute he was free, typing a flight path frantically into the console. Slow, steady, and radar-guided. He locked rotation and distance to the station’s arm and puffed sideways at just over 2 metres per second. Above, blinking through the window, he could see UDO’s navigation light pulsing a general warning signal in Galactistandard. The randomized pause between code-pulses made it impossible to mistake the pattern for light glinting off a rotating ship.

A reply from the Hzoc, and it was a complicated one. Wyatt watched the parser chew on the files. A video! This was something new. He opened the file. The video was low resolution, around twenty seconds (if the parser had calibrated it correctly), and had no sound. A blurry blob in darkness. He fiddled with contrast and brightness settings, then replayed the file. Much better. Hzoc Letien was a green-grey... lump.

What’s the scale? If that’s the interior of the ship, it’d be about the size of a cow. Four limbs? The pod looked just as crowded as UDO, with curved metal panels and soft bundles of who-knows-what. He watched the creature move around the pod, brace itself against the walls, and loop two limbs around something unseen. Whatever it was pulling came free suddenly. The alien flew back. It collided with the edge of an open panel and flung its limbs out in a gesture that Wyatt interpreted as agony. The sharp edge of the panel had gouged a deep wound in the Hzoc’s back. No matter how it positioned its limbs, it couldn’t reach the wounded spot. Wyatt watched the video again. Pull a little too hard and something snaps, he thought. Could happen to anyone.

The message also contained a sequence of black-and-white images, presumably copied from the equivalent of Hzoc anatomy textbook. Lines, diagrams. Instruments. A clamp-like thing with grips like the end of a whisk. A blade. And, astonishingly, what seemed to be sutures. From the images, Wyatt finally acquired a firm sense of the Hzoc’s form. Six limbs, not four. Starfish-like. Two limbs, what Wyatt decided to call a “head” and “tail” were unique. The other four were identical. The four main limbs ended in filaments or ribbons. The underside of the Hzoc’s body didn’t contain a mouth. Not a starfish then, a plesiosaur, with fat flippers and a very short neck and tail.

The creature had no skeleton, just a series of plates along its back, under its skin... or its suit? One or more of those plates had shattered. The sharp edges were, presumably, digging into its flesh every time it moved. Was it just in pain? No, it had mentioned death. Perhaps the injury threatened the bladder system that ran through the creature. A few phrases from the initial message made more sense. The Hzoc were vacuum-adapted. If its skin couldn’t seal, it couldn’t leave its ship. All he needed to do was remove the broken plate or plates, then ladder-stitch the outer layer shut.

Wyatt flipped back through the messages, then spotted a little red warning dot at the end of the Hzoc’s atmosphere list. Methane, nitrogen, formaldehyde, not great, hydrogen cyanide, very bad, and in bright red, chlormethine. He tapped to expand the entry and was greeted with a wall of red text. Blistering. Death. Slow death. Fast death. Horrible full-body symptoms. What sort of insane biology produced chlormethine? The atmosphere code doesn’t list a percentage. Was it trace? A temporary product? Could he count on that?

“No leaks,” he mumbled. “And even if I could get my EVA suit into the Hzoc ship, and it didn’t dissolve or explode, I can’t do surgery with those thick gloves. The robotic arm? Maybe, but it’s not designed for atmospheric use either. I could wrap it in a bag, but then...”

Wyatt sent off another message. “Acceptance: continuation: tentative.” The grammar check lit up in yellow, but he hit the override and plunged on. “Request: time to death.” Galactistandard did not have a lot of room for bedside manner. “Request: tutorial: airlock Hzoc Letian vessel.”

The Hzoc vessel was visible now in the faint glow of UDO’s navigation lights. A long cross-braced arm covered in radiators, and fuel tanks and a nuclear reactor at the far end, with a pressurized grey cylindrical module attached to the station. It was hard to gauge its scale visually, but the screen showed that the pressurized segment alone was three time the size of the UDO. No windows, just the usual collection of lumps and aerials and ports.

“Reply: imprecise estimate: time to death [3 hours],” appeared on the screen, followed by a series of images. Hzoc technical drawings were even less comprehensible than their anatomical drawings, but the airlock seemed to be a sort of sheet or membrane. He’d seen a similar device in training; other species apparently used similar technology. An inch-thick sheet of goop with reinforcing strands running along one direction. Objects could slowly push their way through a sealed slit in the middle of the goop. Contiguous objects only; a pipe would still let all the air out.

The autonavigation system chimed, nulled velocity, checked for anything that might the hull, and carefully swung the UDO’s stern around, dropped and locked the magplate. The suitport was less than 10m from the Hzoc airlock.

“Not bad,” Wyatt said. “I’m here. Now to do something useful. Come on, brain.” He didn’t feel like a steely eyed missile man. He felt helpless and tired and stupid. In order to help, I need to get my arms into that capsule. The airlock design will help. Option 1, I use the EVA suit. Can’t use delicate tools. Wait, I can’t use the Hzoc tools at all, I think. Wrong finger shape.

He tapped out another message. “Inquiry: Hzoc atmosphere biology general react polytetrafluoroethylene, [stainless steel]?” and let the auto-parser chew on the statement for a few moments, converting English nomenclature to grammatical strings of Galactistandard. If Hzoc biology ate teflon, there wasn’t much he could do. Luckily, the response came back negative across the board.

Option 1, he mused. EVA suit arms in a Teflon bag. No dexterity. Option 2, robot arm in a Teflon bag. Even worse. Option 3. Give up. Option 4...

Teflon bag. Why had that popped into my mind all of a sudden? Teflon bag...

“Oh that is dumb,” he said aloud. “That is very, very dumb.”

He opened up the life support menu and initiated a depressurization program, from 1 bar down to 0.6 bar, and with extra oxygen cycled in. He set his EVA suit’s baseline values identically, but with a pure oxygen mix, even though the suit’s systems were currently dormant. As UDO’s fans spun up, he popped open the surgical kit, took out a handful of stainless steel instruments, and stuck them in a plastic pouch.

Sutures, he remembered. What are the chances human surgical thread is compatible with Hzoc biology? Zero. He opened the image of the Hzoc surgical tools, added a marker and boundary box, and sent it back with the note, “Request: make this.” He stuck the bag of instruments in the small sample airlock and cycled it to vacuum.

“Ok, Hzoc Letien, I have a plan,” he said. “Let’s see if I can describe it to you.”

Explaining a plan in Galactistandard had several advantages. It forced Wyatt to examine his assumptions, to check for ambiguities, to go through a procedure step-by-step. He gulped down oxygen-rich air as he typed, trying to push nitrogen out of his body. The plan made several assumptions, including that a species that put a nuclear reactor far away from their living space didn’t enjoy casually bathing in ionizing radiation, that a species that sent over diagrams and videos was, to some degree, sighted, and that Hzoc Letien wouldn’t do something violent or foolish. 

Hzoc Letien accepted, tentatively.

 

Wyatt opened a storage pouch and drew out one of the extra-large teflon bags stored inside. The bag was milky white, but still translucent between bands of with high-tensile polymer wires. In training, he’d seen one of these bags hold 1 bar of pressure in vacuum. Sealed with the locking plastic flaps and with tape, of course, but it held. If an alien wanted an in-situ sample of something from a pod, but the sample didn’t fit in a vial or jar, then a bag could, in theory, work.

He also grabbed a roll of sealant tape, slapped an anti-nausea patch on his arm, and started UDO on the pre-EVA checklist.

The suitport was a small airlock, bigger than the breadbox-sized sample airlock, and just large enough to fit one very uncomfortable human. The inner door was a plug door, designed to seal under the pressure of air in the pod. The outer door was locked against the back of the EVA suit, and opened inwards, into the tunnel.

Wyatt stuck his head into the space, opened the outer hatch, and began carefully taping the bag to the top of the ring of metal on the back of the EVA suit. He carefully creased the tape with his thumb. No gaps, no air bubbles.

After ten minutes, he retreated, then entered the tunnel and EVA suit feet-first, the correct way, sealing the inner door behind him. Working blindly this time, he taped the rest of the bag to the edge of the suit’s entryway, leaving a gap by his left kidney. Slowly, letting air escape through the gap, he pulled the bag in behind him until it was wedged in the small of his back, then closed the EVA suit’s door. He sealed the last bit of tape, rearranged his arms into their arm-holes, and checked his helmet displays. Everything looked good. Suit pressure of 0.6 bar, pure oxygen mix. “UDO, EVA door seal check,” he said. Servos whined as the door flexed inwards.

“Sealed,” UDO reported. 

“Decouple suitlock,” he said. The bolts around the back of the suit retracted. The inner plate of the door stayed attached to the ship, while the outer plate was attached to his back. He reached over and gently undid the clamp connecting his backpack to the ship, then, with great care, swung it closed. It clicked against his back, and a new set of lights blinked green in his helmet.

He turned and carefully opened the tiny sample airlock and removed the bundle of surgical instruments. Finally, he unclipped the safety line and, with one hand always clinging to part of his ship, climbed down to the enormous trusses that composed the arc of the station. The Hzoc ship isn't to port, he thought, it's up. And up he climbed. He could have pushed off and drifted, but what if he missed, or started to tumble? Even with the gyro in his backpack, it was too great a risk. His maneuvering pack could have puffed him over instantly, but it was another system that could easily fail. Best to minimize the risks, not compound them.

“UDO, cycle the air in the suit. Maintain pure oxygen mix, 0.6 bar,” he said. Better to lose some air and try to get the last bit of nitrogen out of his blood than to die in of a stroke. He could see a faint white cloud in his rearview camera as UDO flushed the suit, the hiss of new air entering, then silence.

The Hzoc ship was lightly textured, as if the outer shielding had been knit from thick wool and then sprayed with white paint. The airlock, or gooplock, was just above the station’s scaffolding, surrounded by the half-embedded rings he’d seen in the diagram. The outer protective door was open, as, to judge by the extremely faint light visible through the rubber-like sheet, was the inner door. Wyatt could see nothing inside the ship.

“UDO, switch radio to band 44,” he said. He could try tapping on the hull, but transmitting on the Hzoc’s frequency seemed quicker.

He clicked the press-to-talk button on the front of his suit. “Greetings: formal: Human Wyatt to Hzoc Letien” he said in rapid but carefully enunciated Galactistandard. “Declaration: location of this one is adjacent to airlock. Request: this one enter.

The Hzoc transmitted back and UDO read out the text. “Acceptance.”

Wyatt was surprised to feel a brief flicker of anger. He realized that part of him had hoped the creature would deny entry, or be dead already, or have come up with a better plan, or revealed that this was all a test put on by the Orlo or some other species. He knew it was just part of his mind looking for a way out. No way out now. He could always leave, of course... but who would he be if he left?

He pushed the bag of surgical tools into the goop, marvelling as they sunk through the layer of mysterious gel. Was it biological? Some extremely fancy polymer? The shadows inside the pod shifted.

“Tools,” Wyatt transmitted. No time for grammar.

He turned around carefully, facing his backpack towards the airlock. “UDO, unclip backpack lock,” he said. He swung the backpack away from the suit, locking it to his left in the position normally used for maintenance or docking.

“UDO, hold command. Set the desired pressure of the suit to 0.3 bar pure oxygen, but do not depressurize,” he said. “Repeat that back to me.” UDO dutifully repeated the instruction. “Perform command,” he said, and watched the indicator on his display reset, while the measured pressure remained constant.

Reaching to the bundles of tools on either hip, he clipped his left safety line to one of the rings around the airlock, clipped his right safety line to the opposite side, then repeated the process with his two utility lines.

“UDO. Hold command. Open EVA suit door.”

“Invalid command,” UDO said, “EVA suit is not docked. Opening the EVA suit door will cause the suit to depressurize.”

Oh no it won’t, he thought, because I have a teflon bag. Assuming the tape holds, and that it expands into the airlock, and that the bag doesn’t pop. What a stupid way to die. Here are the mummified remains of Human Explorer Wyatt Anvar. He stuffed himself into a trash bag. We don’t know why. Heh. Heh heh heh. Is this nitrogen narcosis? No, wait, the pressure is dropping, not rising. Get it together.

“Override. Hold command. Open EVA suit door.”

“Override accepted.”

“Request: Imperative: position Hzoc Letien to airlock increase to maximum. Position tools to airlock increase to maximum,” he broadcast.

“Acceptance,” came the response a moment later.

Wyatt pulled his arms out of the gloves and wedged them against his sides, then pulled his head down and hunched over. He wiggled to line himself up with the rearview camera, just barely visible if he looked up and into the helmet. “UDO, perform command,” he grunted.

The door swung open and slammed into the backpack, hard enough to rattle Wyatt’s teeth. He stretched backwards, like swimmer bouncing off the wall of a pool, pushing the bag towards the airlock. Alarms beeped frantically as the pressure dropped like a stone. Wyatt’s left knee flared in agony.

Directed by Wyatt’s arms, the bag slid into the airlock. “UDO override retract all lines,” he said, and the EVA suit’s servos began cranking the braided steel lines back onto their drums, forcing the suit’s entrance flush with the gooplock. “UDO lock lines,” he said, when he felt like he was close enough.

Well this was a fine place to be, he thought. Half in and half out of an EVA suit, bent over backwards, in a bag, in the dark. At least there are no leaks. And I’m alive. Somehow. He could see the Hzoc ship only dimly through the bag and his new mildly bloodshot eyes. Hzoc Letien was flattened against the opposite wall, with the bundle of tools clutched in one set of tendrils.

“Greetings,” Wyatt said aloud. Just in case, he signed with one hand. He suddenly realized that this was probably the first time Hzoc Letien had seen a human. What an awful first impression.

The alien gently cartwheeled around the craft and touched part of a bulkhead. Wyatt couldn’t see what it was doing, but a moment later, a screen lit up, flickered, and settled on a black-and-white Galactistandard pattern. “Greetings.”

Non-vocal then. It might still be able to hear me, since it was able to understand and reply to my radio transmissions. But I can’t help if I can’t see, he thought, and those bumps looks like lights.

 “Request: Increase radiation... blackbody full.” Wyatt said and laboriously signed. I hope that gets the point across.

The soft yellow glow slowly increased. When the pod was bright enough to see details, he said “Acceptance. Inquiry: acceptance.” Best to check if the Hzoc was comfortable.

“Acceptance,” flashed onto the display.

“Request: position Hzox Ld...” he signed, stumbling in his haste, “Request: position Hzoc here.” He wiggled his arms to show his limited range of motion, pinching his fingers together.

The Hzoc was larger than he’d expected, and as its bulk swung over him, he saw that its skin, or whatever coated it, was textured like asphalt. The cluster of red filaments on the end of each of its four legs, or what Wyatt had chosen to call legs, had a metallic sheen and square white tips.

And what was it using as an input device? A keyboard? He squinted at the bulkhead. More like an abacus or the volume dials on the front of my EVA suit. Strings of cylinders, rotating under the tendrils.

There’d be time for questions later. Hzoc Letien carefully positioned itself next to the bag. With the pressure inside the bag the same as the pressure inside the Hzoc vessel, Wyatt could, with great care, pinch and fold the bag enough to use the tools he’d brought over.

One of the Hzoc’s limbs passed over the bag. He saw, but did not feel, the filaments, move across the surface. Incredible control. Wyatt looked again. There was a black globe embedded in the softly tapered end of the limb, just above the tendrils. An eye? And was that little groove a mouth, a chemical sensor pit, or something else? He realized he’d have to revise his mental view of Hzoc anatomy yet again. Focus. Don’t anthropomorphize. See. Don’t project.

The Hzoc positioned itself very carefully, brought the arm with the tool bundle around, disassembled it, and handed a clamp to him. It was clearly reasonably intelligent and able to extrapolate. Wyatt stared at the jagged wound in the creature’s back tried to remember every step of the procedure. He was already sweating in the heat. The suit’s thermal system kept his legs cold, but his face was squished against 45 degree plastic.

It wasn’t difficult, just tedious and slow. The Hzoc’s skin had three layers: leather over rubbery sponge cake over a broken porcelain plate. With claps, forceps, and carefully drilled patience, Wyatt extracted splinters of glass and pushed them towards a waiting arm. Red tendrils caught the pieces and stowed them in a wall pouch.

Another arm passed him a cube of blue fibres, while yet another arm tapped out “Request: to liquid.” Assuming it was a sponge, Wyatt dabbed it along the wound. It seemed to absorb the clear oily fluid and leave behind blue flakes.

In training, he’d performed tasks like this (though perhaps not quite as difficult). He’d trained for frustration. Moving greased marbles with chopsticks. Rewiring a console in a vibrating, tumbling simulator. Mild torture. A hundred tedious, pointless, personalized tasks and tests designed to find and exceed his limits, so he’d learn to recognize and control fatigue, impatience, and fear. 

“Request: tool. Clarification: sharp with long long...” but the alien was already handing him the pre-prepared Hzoc needle and thread. Brass, or maybe a gold alloy? The scale was wrong. It was smaller than expected, and he struggled to use the steel needle holder. His eyes burned with sweat. At least the stitching was easy. The outer skin layer didn’t tear or stretch. All the while, the Hzoc watched with one or more arm-eyes. 

And then, finally, he tied off the last suture and passed back the needle. “Request: inspect this,” he gestured.

“Acceptable,” flashed the display panel. Then, more characters. “Request: place hexagon here.”

What hexagon? But the Hzoc was already extracting a package from a wall pouch. It carefully peeled a large hexagon covered in brown slime from a protective case, handed him a clamp, and positioned the sheet above the wound. Simple enough, he thought, as he did his best to position and smooth the dressing. 

“Request: time to death,” he signed.

The Hzoc shifted away from him. “Reply: unknown,” appeared on the panel.

“Reply: Desirable outcome,” Wyatt signed back, grammar be damned. The Hzoc’s tendrils waved all at once. Wyatt had no idea what that signified.

 

He caught his breath and considered his next steps. Suddenly, despite the heat and the exertion, his blood turned to ice. He felt sick. He’d made a terrible miscalculation.

With the bag inflated, he couldn’t close the back hatch, and if he couldn’t close the back hatch he couldn’t dock to the suitport. Even if he had the strength to pull the bag back into the suit, it was coated in who-knows-what horrible chemicals from the Hzoc and its atmosphere.

This really had been a stupid idea. He stared at the Hzoc, and it, uncomprehending, stared back at him.

He’d have to leave the bag behind, but the bag was the only thing keeping air in his EVA suit. If he squeezed the door mostly closed, and then disconnected the bag... He was glad he’d laid down the tape stepwise, so it could theoretically be removed in one pull. He’d still have to pass it hand-to-hand, behind his back. Not ideal.

“Request: imperative,” Wyatt signed, after what felt like an eternity. “Grip this.” He pushed a fold of bag towards the Hzoc. With one set of tendrils, it cautiously grasped the folded plastic.

“Request: imperative: maintain position of this,” he signed. “Request: imperative: not inside airlock.” He gently slid back into the EVA suit while the alien held onto the bag with a firm grip.

“UDO,” he said, “unlock lines.” The four wires connecting him to the Hzoc hull flexed slightly, but friction on their drums held him in place for now. He turned to the right, twisting gently, cautiously, to give him enough room to shut the rear door. Not enough. He unclipped two of the lines.

“UDO, switch to override mode, and close rear door to 5 degrees.” 0 degrees was locked, 5 ought to be enough. Servos droning, the door slowly swung closed. Wyatt twisted gently to keep the bag from tearing away from the suit prematurely. He could hear air hissing through a few tiny gaps in the tape.

“UDO, hold command. 5 second countdown, then close and lock the rear door.”

While he’d never experienced decompression, it had been part of his training. He breathed rapidly, then said, “Perform command,” and exhaled hard.

“Five, four, three,” UDO dutifully counted. Wyatt swung his arms and legs back and tore away from the Hzoc ship. He couldn’t tell if the bag tore free or not. Air rushed around his ears. The door pressed against his back. The bolts clicked closed. Over the frantic beeping of alarms, he could hear the life support system trying to restore pressure. He opened one eye and checked the pressure gauge. It was holding. His ears ached, but he otherwise felt no worse for wear. He turned slowly. The bag stuck out of the Hzoc gooplock like a tissue in a tissue box, flat, deflated, and detached, with a ring of tape around the edge. Wyatt whooped with joy.

“Statement: Human Explorer Wyatt Anvar is alive,” he shouted into his mic. He spent a few moments catching his breath and satisfying himself that his suit was truly sealed.

“Reply: desirable outcome,” Hzoc Letitan replied a moment later.

“Request: imperative: release thin white object,” he said, tugging on the bag. It slowly emerged from the gooplock. He debated what to do with it. He couldn’t bring it back inside the UDO, but if he let it go his hosts would probably be annoyed. He decided to postpone a decision.

Half an hour later, he was back inside his ship, exhausted but alive. His EVA suit was down to less than 20% stored air, but he could top up the tanks in a day or two. It didn’t seem to have taken any permanent damage, save for a few scrapes on the titanium frame. The pain in his knee from his less-than-optimal decompression routine was slowly fading. Air mix in the living module was back to normal.

“Request: informal: conversation in [four hours],” he typed. He had a thousand questions for the strange being he’d just met, but he needed to rest, to check his own systems just as carefully as he’d checked the UDO’s systems.

“Reply: acceptable.”

 

Three weeks later, Hzoc Letien emerged from its ship, which Wyatt had learned was also named Hzoc Letien, and carefully trundled down the station truss, gripping with two limbs at all times. One of its non-eye limbs was half-embedded in a bucket-like device which served as a radio transmitter, light source, manuvering unit, and toolbox. Currently, it contained a bag full of carefully cleaned and sterilized human surgical instruments.

The Hzoc crept its way along the Unexpected Desirable Outcome’s hull and peered into the window with one black eye. Wyatt waved. The red tendrils, like a fringe of hair or a bushy eyebrow, waved back.

Sci-Fi: Plot Seeds for the Bright Conference

If the Bright Conference ever gets made into an RPG book, I’d like to have a cutaway illustration of a pod and its contents. Like this, with much more detail, and actually good:

Here’s what you’ve got. Now solve your problems.

In the 1995 film Apollo 13, there’s a great deal of dramatic panic and shouting and flailing around while problem-solving. In reality, everyone behaved far more sensibly and professionally. Very few of the situations encountered were outside the realm of training. A lot of very clever people worked out possible scenarios, tested them, refined them, and filed them in case they were ever needed. Using the LEM as a lifeboat, using its engine to boost both vessels, and even connecting the mismatched CO2 scrubbers, were not entirely improvised procedures.

In the real world, the problem is figuring out what is happening, and then deciding what to do. Not guessing. Just math. But in the Bright Conference, guesswork and improvisation are required. Without live access to the collective brains of Mission Control, a lone astronaut/ambassador in the Bright Conference has to think, improvise, and set their own objectives. There is a mission, but there is no mission plan.

Before launch, an astronaut can drill for known problems (a failure of one or more of the pod’s many systems, a solar storm, first contact in general), and for scenarios dreamed up by instructors and ambassadors, but no training can cover every scenario. The computers in a pod contain thousands of plans, procedures, and contingencies (and a lot of backup info), but sorting through them under pressure isn't easy. 

Compressed Plot Seeds

In a boring, bare-bones format. The seeds assume that you are a human in an exploration pod on the far side of a gate. These aren't the only plot seeds, or even the best ones. They're on the level of "there's a dungeon full of gold" or "bring me six wolf pelts". 

 

Plots need to follow the rules of the Bright Conference. No magic technology. No floating alien obelisks, zombie rays, reactionless drives, precurors, nanomachines, or bottled genetic engineering. 

1. Plenty Of Time For Caution

A nearby spacecraft is rotating uncontrollably. Cause:
1. Gyro failure.
2. Power loss.
3. Propellant leak.
4. Life support leak.
5. In a strong magnetic field.
6. Abandoned and adrift.

If you can rendezvous with the ship and line up with its axis of rotation, you could use your ship’s gyros or reaction control system to stop it.

Complications:

• Your ship doesn’t have a docking port (and even if it does, docking ports aren't universal). You’d need to move your ship’s magnetic plate to the very front or grab it with your ship's robot arm.
• Electrostatic discharge. Your ship can take care of itself (hopefully!), but the other ship may have built up a huge electrostatic potential. It might spot-weld the first piece of metal to touch it.
• You have enough delta-v to catch the ship, and enough delta-v to return (to a station or safe orbit) on your own, but you don’t have enough delta-v to catch the ship and haul it back, unless you can use its fuel and engines.
  

2. Space Madness

An alien reports that a human is behaving oddly. They’re telling you out of politeness (because you are also a human), not demanding/requesting that you take action. The human ship isn’t transmitting.

The human is:
1. Depressed after an equipment failure. Might be possible to repair.
2. Celebrating a holiday.
3. Drunk (also see 2.).
4. Impaired due to slow carbon monoxide (or another toxin) buildup.
5. Ill and contagious.
6. Violent. Prepare to avoid EVA axe murder.

Complications:

• Do you believe the alien? The description isn’t clear.
• Do you want to get involved?

3. Requiem for a Dingbat

An alien reports that a human on a Hitchhiker Waiver died some time ago. They want to observe our funeral rights (and are willing to pay/trade for the privilege, something that mission control has put).

Complications:

• Another alien contact/previous info hints that the alien might be obsessed with death (a personal or cultural quirk). They might have killed a human on a Hitchhiker Waiver just to arrange this situation.
• Or were they framed?
• Is the ship safe to approach?
• What rites would you consider appropriate? 

AEdwardBaker

4. Sargasso Sea

“What’s a Sargasso?" "There was this... manuscript. I think. They made a film of it which was very influential. A sort of nested story thing.”

Recycling dead or abandoned spacecraft is too much trouble for some highly developed species. Shipping junk between systems isn’t energy efficient. Dead ships are not just boosted to a graveyard orbit, but manipulated into a graveyard lump, typically in deep space or behind the heat shield of an asteroid. This minimizes tracking and the chance of debris.

These agglomerations can be a gold mine for low-tech species, but also pose significant risks.

Complications:

• Nuclear reactors are hard to disable temporarily. Expect (and avoid) radioactive lumps.
• What does it say about humanity that we resort to picking over the remains of the dead?
• If you loot something from another species, can you explain it later. Will they care?
• Is this an alien politely saying "dig your own grave before your ship fails?"
  

5. Shooting War

Go to bed, everything's quiet. Wake up, it's a civil war. Beaming power from solar collectors near a star to manufacturing stations near asteroids is common, but beamed power can easily become a weapon. Microwaves and lasers burn across the system. Clouds of debris flash and sparkle. Who’s shooting? And why?

Nobody’s aiming at you. In fact, they'll probably try to avoid collateral damage and transmit warnings about dangerous zones or lines of fire. The gate, or anything near the gate, is also probably safe. 

Complications:

• The species controlling the system has transmitted a blank cheque to use the system's gate, possibly to prevent anyone else from entering. A free ticket anywhere in the galaxy. That legendary destination you heard about? Or home?
• Or play chicken. You probably shouldn’t lie, but you don’t have to tell anyone about Earth’s capabilities for messy revenge. Can you help (in more ways than just being a diplomatic wildcard/shield)?
• A sweeping beam fried a number of your pod's surface systems. Now you've got to do whatever you were going to do, but also fix your ship.
  

6. Landing Not Advisable

An ambitious human program attempted to land an astronaut on an alien world (with permission and with plenty of on-Earth mission planning). The world has a thin atmosphere atmosphere, low gravity. The plan was for the astronaut to land, shake hands, deliver gifts, walk around, then back to orbit on an alien rocket (pod and all). 

The landing worked, the contact mission went well, but the human ship in orbit – the crewed lifeboat – suffered a catastrophic failure. The aliens picked your pod as a backup.

Complications:

• Delta-v, for once, is not a problem. The aliens can tow you around the system. But they can't keep a human alive.
  
• Contamination and sterilization issues. The original plan involved a full and complex decontamination procedure. You could rig up umbilicals and use the lander pod as a separate “room”, but that's not a permanent solution.
• The landed astronaut is from a very different ideology/program/background. Trust and language issues.
• Dust. Dust is a terrible thing in space.
  

Maciej Rebisz

Resource Requirements

"You're out of X resource, what do you do?" is a fairly basic problem. Solutions can still be interesting, until the last variable in the Cold Equations falls into place.

Fuel (delta-v)

• Controlled atmosphere release. Very low thrust. 
• Ask for a pickup. 
  

Power

• Run out a long loop of conductive wire. If there's a local magnetic field, you might be able to pick up eddy currents. Spinning might help. Might be enough to keep the lights on.
  
• Shut down everything you possibly can.
• Some tech (flashlights, in particular) have independent power sources. At least you can read the printed manuals.
  

Water

• If your recycling system is working, then there's very little you can do. Any system you rig up is unlikely to be more efficient than that.
• If it's not, break out the emergency procedures manual.
  

Oxygen

• If you're lucky, your ship has an emergency water-splitting system. 
• If not, you might have an oxygen candle. 
• Or you can try and make an open electrolyzer, but filling your ship with hydrogen is, traditionally a bad plan.
  
• If not, any ship that uses oxygen as an oxidizer can top off your tank (assuming you still have a tank) if you have the right adapter, or if you can make an adapter.

Food

• It's hard to unexpectedly run out of food.
  
• If you're lucky, you've got refining microbes that can turn The Vital Ingredients into starches and sugars, which will keep you alive (but malnourished). You can stretch them using nutrient pills and your remaining food.
  
• The emergency procedures manual has a section on cannibalism. It's not a fun section. If you find another human out there, and it's a dead human, then Mission Control feels you should have all the options.
• The emergency procedures manual also points out that if you find a dead human, you might find that dead human's food.Check all your options.

Communication

• Galactistandard uses visual patterns (glyphs, gestures), frequency patterns (sound, radio), sequence patterns (binary, Morse code), etc. If you want to talk, you've got options.
  
• If your radio goes down, you can rig up a very simple transmitter as long as you've got power. 
• If you've got a laser, point it at something and blink out a message, then write down the reply (if there is one).
  
• If you don't have a bright light, use the big free fusion reactor in the sky. I.e. a mirror on a stick. Ideally you'd want this on a motorized control, like the end of a robot arm.
  
• If you can point a camera or a detector in the right direction, a computer program can automatically parse incoming pulses into Galactistandard. If you can't, writing them down and converting them is possible; it's not easy for humans to gain casual fluency in pulse-patterned Galactistandard.

Alex Ries

Surveillance

You are not solving problems in a vacuum. 

Well, you literally are, but not in a metaphorical vacuum. You have to assume you are being watched and evaluated. Every action is part of a pattern. Not just an ethical dilemma, but potentially the only data point any observers have on how humans solve ethical dilemmas.

"Remember that time we picked up a Human and they immediately exploded?"
"Urgh, yeah. Let's not do that again."

If you rush in, are you saying humans are bold and selfless, or terrible at statistics and incapable of thinking quickly? If you avoid interaction, are you cold, pragmatic, aloof, ignorant, or hibernating? Greedy, desperate, or ambitious? 

Should you modify your actions based on the preferences (or perceived preferences) of potential observers? 

If and when you return to Earth, your communications and actions will be scrutinized and evaluated. Programs have to balance trust with a desire for knowledge. If you make a mistake, and you know you'll be evaluated on it, why come back at all? Sensible programs offer a blanket amnesty and untouchable benefits.