:07:04
Come in.
:07:06
Good afternoon, John.
:07:09
Come in, sit down.
:07:14
A certain matter has come to my attention.
:07:16
John, about the student, right?
:07:20
I've been meaning to talk to you about her.
:07:22
I don't think I want to know about that.
:07:24
No, look, do you know
who Alexie Gierach is?
:07:29
Stanford Genetics.
:07:31
Yes, I met him once
at a faculty thing when I was there.
:07:34
Two years ago, he went to the Antarctic
to head up a new research project for NASA.
:07:39
Yesterday, I received this from him.
:07:43
A satellite imaged an unidentified mass...
:07:48
in the ice shelf down there.
:07:51
It appears to measure approximately
6 meters long by 3 meters wide.
:07:56
At first, they thought
it might be a rock slag...
:07:59
or a fossilized whale.
:08:01
But now they're not so sure.
:08:03
Why?
:08:04
Well, station telemetry
identified some sort of radio signal...
:08:09
- being emitted from it.
- Really?
:08:12
They burned a spectrogram of it on this CD.
:08:16
I thought you might like to look at it.
:08:19
- Plain or with cheese?
- I don't care.
:08:21
- Look at this.
- What have you got?
:08:24
Look at that.
:08:26
- Nonrandom?
- Definitely.
:08:28
Fixed-length pulse groups,
discriminate text...
:08:31
consisting of prime numbers
repeated over and over.
:08:35
What about a meteorite?
:08:36
A meteorite as big as this would've
left a mile-wide crater in the ice shelf.
:08:40
It would explain an electromagnetic pulse.
:08:42
Not a nonrandom signal. Check this out.
:08:48
That's a kickass frequency.
:08:50
The dish transmitter at Arecibo
is 1,000 feet in diameter.
:08:53
The most powerful on earth.
:08:55
This signal's stronger and it's coming
from something the size of a pickup truck.