SIGIs: The 4th Stage of Evolution

Faster than light spaceships are not just difficult, they are impossible. Impossible today. Impossible in the distant future. Forever impossible. Even massless particles like photons, and information itself travels at light speed - no faster.

Meet Tuttle. He is a computer admin working at The Haleakala Observatory whose SETI group has just succeeded in first contact with aliens on another world. They received a message sent by laser from a planet near the star Sirius, 50 light years away. That's cause for celebration, but what comes next? Giddy scientists imagine opening up a conversation. But Tuttle is the first to realize that a 2-way conversation across a distance of 50 light years is absurd. At best, it would take 100 years for even a single 2-way exchange, and thousands of years to have a substantial conversation. Within that time, the human sponsors would likely have forgotten about the conversation and abandoned the SETI project.

Tuttle has a solution to propose, and his proposal results in him getting the job. To execute that job, he must decouple his life from ordinary time. He needs collaborators who are similarly decoupled, some with Tuttle on planet Earth, and other collaborators on remote planets. Eventually, he will need an organization, a civilization, that spans 22 million years and the entire galaxy and do it without spaceships.

Thus, is born the story of SIGIs, and what Tuttle calls the 4th stage of natural evolution.