I’ve been talking about writing, time to put up or shut up. Alien Battlestar Galactica style of refugee fleet alters course for Earth and arrives in the present or near future. They have fantastic but not magical technology, and we want it…

What would aliens who can travel from their destroyed homeworld to Earth be like? How far out could we potentially detect their STL starships, plural? At some point as they approach they will become the brightest objects in our sky, there’s no way a whole fleet of starships can decelerate down from a decent fraction of lightspeed, even 1%, and not have to expend vast amounts of energy. If they decelerate with a magsail against the interstellar medium, they will be detected, and even if it’s a slow deceleration with a lower amount of energy, it’ll start earlier and take longer.

Arbitrarily going with 7%, they were 7 light years out a hundred years ago in 1921, so they possibly could have detected our early radio signals, maybe, but they likely could have detected life and early industrial pollutants. Fifty years ago and 3.5 lights out, they would certainly know we were here and causing trouble amongst ourselves. That might have been attractive, a civilization they could trade with and a planet they could make more like their homeworld. These are people who held their worlds together for decades or centuries in the near empty, the ‘Big Empty’, and they either survived and prospered or they didn’t and I don’t have a story. So I think that there is a chain of interstellar settlements in their wake, starting with some infrastructure they set up to help them make a radical course correction at speed, and that possibly, probably, could have been seen. Since we haven’t, why?

The alien fleet had to make several course corrections, they couldn’t do it all in one go, or stray radiation from the lasers is not pointing at earth, which is what I’m going to go with. At these distances, even a little bit off is a miss by thousands of AU, but we would see chatter and the effects of deceleration just outside of the solar system. About 21 million meters per second at 1 m/s^2 is 21 million seconds, about eight months. It’s also about a quarter of a billion kilometers, less than 2 AU, so actually very close. If the whole thing involves a terminal ‘suicide’ dive not quite into the sun and an array of millions of solar lasers deployed just ahead of the fleet, they will arrive in force, making quite the show and scaring the shit out of the population, but more importantly the powers which be, and they don’t like that…

About eight months ago the astronomers got very busy but close mouthed, at least some of them. There was something happening out beyond the asteroid belt, but off in the general direction of Cetus, The Whale, so people started to call it the Cetus Anomaly and made jokes about it being a whale of a tale… which it was and is.

This time, this time, it was aliens.

I was out of work on account of the recent and ongoing unpleasantness and fortunately had a place to crash until I bounced back… I assumed I would bounce back and I was one of the lucky ones. I had time to consume vast quantities of media feeding frenzy as it unfolded and while I looked for work, online and from my married sister’s basement. For various reasons I tried to keep to myself, but in the spring I got my good old telescope out of storage and had a few stargazing parties which were a hit in the neighborhood. Then I had a buyer and mailed ‘Fred’ off. I miss that old thing, I’d had it since high school, but it brought in good money even though it was so old and the household needed groceries…

(Don’t know where I’m going with this)