Rohit Nalluri

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. – Carl Sagan.

“On September 5th, 1977, Voyager 1 launched into a dream. More recently, we grappled with incoming data from the space probe, and after weeks of analysis we determined that, on August 25th, 2013, Voyager 1 had breached the Heliopause and entered interstellar space, becoming at once the first spacecraft to do so and the farthest man-made object from Earth. Voyager 2 wasn’t far behind. At the time, I was a junior scientist assigned to the Voyager missions, and the way the two probes were speeding into the great void beyond the Heliosphere, it looked like my job would be relegated to receiving increasingly weak signals from the dying satellites. Beyond 2025, the future of the Voyager probes looked bleak.

In 2021, I was assigned to lead the aging Voyager missions, and I settled into the comfort of knowing I wasn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future. But in December of 2023, the Deep Space Network at Canberra received a strange set of signals from Voyager 1. At the time, Voyager was 16.7 billion miles from Earth, and the signal had taken an entire day to reach us. I remember being in bed asleep, and remember being woken up by Scott Stone of JPL. But most of all I remember the panic in his voice. For a second or two, I thought something bad had happened – in Scott’s family, perhaps. I knew his wife had been unwell. When he said something was wrong with Voyager 1, it took me a minute to absorb that. What could have gone so drastically wrong with a fifty-year old spacecraft that needed my supervision at that hour?

I reached the lab to find my team utterly silent. Nobody spoke. So I went straight to the data. The figures we were receiving from the probe were mind boggling, to say the least. The readings suggested an unusual rise in magnetic field intensity – an unprecedented 17% increase. Second, the probe was skidding and jumping over thousands of tiny waves formed by the clash of solar winds and interstellar medium. The reason for this was immediately apparent, but disturbing – the probe was now traveling perpendicular to the waves, as opposed to with the waves, like it was supposed to be doing and had been doing all this time. What was most frightening was the fact that the probe had performed a course correction. Automatically. Without the aid of its hydrazine thrusters, and without receiving any commands from JPL or DSN. It was as if something had pushed the probe into another direction, while it was traveling at a velocity of 62,000 kms per hour.

We entered the data into our simulators, and finally the bigger picture became clear. We didn’t know why, but Voyager 1 was now in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, 37 degrees above the ecliptic plane, cutting through the interstellar medium. Prediction models showed that it would continue to travel in a narrow band around the Heliosphere, indefinitely. We had no idea why or how this was happening. So our first response was to modify the antennae specifications at all three locations of the DSN to maintain contact with this new, orbiting probe. On an impulse, we checked what Voyager 2 was up to; the craft looked to be fine. And then we informed the President.

When the news was released to the world, there was absolute chaos. My team at JPL was under enormous pressure to come up with a plausible theory based on the data we had. I think it was Scott who first thought of the Heliosphere Lock. You have to understand that the Sun is a powerful entity in our local, interstellar neighborhood, and it is screaming through a thin and flimsy layer of clouds, known as the Local cloud, pulling all the planets with it. The sun’s gravitational pull extends all the way out to the Oort Cloud, an area that generates many of the long-winded comets that occasionally grace our skies. It would take Voyager 1 300 years to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud – it’s that far out. Now, between the last feeble ebbs of the Heliopause and the beginnings of the Oort cloud is a mysterious band of interstellar space. This is where the Voyager 1 decided to take a sharp left. In this narrow band, our prediction models indicated the possibility of a phenomenon we called Heliosphere Lock. Simply put, the theory states that an object larger than a certain mass (known as the Fixian Limit) cannot escape the gravity of its sun. Stay with me here – this was pure theory at the time, and we were extrapolating fast from the data available. Based on this theory, it was impossible for the Voyager 1 to escape the Heliosphere Lock. In short, we were trapped inside our solar system.

But for the Fixian limit, we should have seen a massive accretion disk of spinning matter around the edge of the Heliosphere, like the rings of Saturn. But we don’t see it, because Fixian limit proposes that only objects above a certain mass are heliospherically locked. Succumbing to pressure, we released this theory to the press, and of course, the collective public mind ripped the theory into pieces (I remember seeing a meme on the internet of Elvis Presley heliospherically locked right next to an image of Voyager 1). We recognized the flaws in our theory about the same time the rest of the world did. The argument was quite simple – if Heliosphere Locking was valid, then why are comets and asteroids allowed to enter and exit the system at will; why are outer planets like Sedna and Eris allowed to enter a perihelion of 76 AU to 97 AU – why are they allowed to approach the sun from their ridiculously elongated orbit? This was a gaping hole in a flimsy theory, and the pressure was back on us to find an answer.

As the full meaning of this incident began to sink in, my team and I had many discussions as to the nature of this ‘wall’ that was blocking the probes. I think the second or third outspoken thought placed in us the idea of an ‘outside intervention’. Had the probes been intercepted by an alien scout? Had they been ‘hijacked’ and now functioning against us? Or had they merely reached the physical boundaries of our Solar System? Was it possible that, in painful irony, we were allowed to merely view the endless cosmos but not visit them? What was the purpose of this boundary? Why keep us locked in? How? The idea that we couldn’t explore beyond the reaches of the Heliosphere was frustratingly claustrophobic. After all the exhausting dialogues, we settled down to wait. We had one final card up our sleeves. Voyager 2.

Yesterday, roughly three years after Voyager 1, Voyager 2 entered the Orbit Trap, at 30 degrees south of the ecliptic. It is now safe to assume that the crafts Pioneer 10 & 11 – the other two most distant man-made objects – are also in Orbit Trap, somewhere in the darkness. And just as on the Pioneer probes, the batteries on the Voyager crafts will soon be dead. We have little time to obtain as much data from them as possible. We have done a couple of things to ensure we find answers. Both probes have been slightly angled to face outside the solar system. The thinking is that if there is a break in the trap – a gap wide enough for a spacecraft – then the probes would break free. We are not hopeful that this will happen, but it’s an idea. Data tells us that the probes are shuddering right up against this invisible wall, repeatedly breaking upon them. They are taking a beating but are unaffected. We have tested the wall using what remains of the on-board sensors. The results are not encouraging – we don’t know what the wall is made of. It is a material of a kind never encountered before. One strange fact appears from our research on the wall – at room temperature, on Earth, the material would behave like liquid water. This astonishing fact does more, I feel, to push us farther away from the truth, although it answers some questions, like how both the probes were undamaged after shifting direction at such sudden speeds (Voyager 1 was rushing at 17 kms per second towards the Oort Cloud). The wall is soft, if not porous, almost elastic in nature. When we shot a radio wave at it, the wave was deflected back 100%. Nothing man-made escapes it, and this is why we began thinking of another speculation.

The Voyager probes are man-made objects traveling at mind-numbing speeds across stellar boundaries. Keeping this in mind, and considering all the facts on hand, we are starting to believe that the wall – the Orbit Trap – is of intelligent design. Some higher intelligence made it, and placed it around us. Who? We don’t know. A technologically superior civilization far more advanced than we are, for sure. Why? Our first guess was pessimistic – to contain us. But now we think they did this to protect us.

Understand that we are new to our own neighborhood. We are just now awakening as a species to the possibilities of our immense potential. We are sending out satellites and probes and rovers towards the unknown with the brash excitement of explorers, without knowing what dangers exist beyond our line of sight. For all we know there may be an intergalactic war going on. Perhaps there exists a race of grandfathers, a watchful presence that has placed this protective shield around us, so that we don’t inadvertently send out feelers towards a civilization of especially evil intent. We are mature enough to admit the existence of evil – we have seen it repeatedly rise on our planet in the last century alone. We have risen again and again to defeat it. What is to say that a similar evil does not exist beyond the veiled reaches of the cosmos? And what is to say that a similar goodness does not exist that can place a force field of benevolent intent around an emergent, eager civilization?

In many circles, we have been laughed at for proposing the ‘Guardian’ theory. It is not, to be clear, a scientific theory but a conjecture. But what we find surprising is that the mirth is not directed at the idea of an alien benefactor, but at the very idea of alien existence itself. Journals and scientific magazines mock us for proposing that aliens exist, and not just any aliens but aliens far more technologically advanced than us. I don’t know what has changed in the intervening generations between now and the launch of the Voyager missions, but we seem to have forgotten a poignant fact – both probes carry a gold-plated copper archival disc containing glimpses of Earth’s humanity and our hope for contact. The faith with which we sent the voices of humanity across such distances rested on the belief that an alien being at least as technologically advanced as we were would intercept them, and then proceed to read them. The probabilities of this happening were miniscule, but we took that chance of remaining hopeful, and I think that is our saving grace. The disc contains, among other things, the sound of surf; of waves crashing against unnamed shores. It is but fitting that the Voyager probes now crash against a different shore, trying to break through. The record also contains these words by the then President Jimmy Carter, “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

Is it that hard to imagine an alien species attempting to help us survive our time?