The rest of the crew rushed towards the spot where he was pointing and stared at an odd metallic object on the ground. One of them bent down to pick up an object, only to stop by me before touching it.
“Stop! We do not know if the item is safe for us to touch it,” I continued. “Neva, go get the scanner and identifier from the ship. I want to you to do an analysis before anyone touches it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!,” replied my crew in unison to the order.
Neva turned back and ran towards the ship to gather the equipment, and the rest stood still around the object. Our mission was to explore whether the planet can support humankind, and had less than 50 hours till the main ship arrived, so I had to gave the second order.
“We will not stand here and wait for Neva to be back, are we?,” I looked at the crew and asked with a smile.
They looked at each other in guilty looks and scattered around to look for more clues. Soon, one by one, all the crews had found bits and pieces of objects made by intelligent life forms. Neva came back with scientific equipment, and we examined the first piece behind the bush. We confirmed our suspicions after a few reports generated by the scanner. The object was non-natural, detected higher radiation than the natural background, but would impose no health risk to us.
It was the same for the rest of the objects found and soon we reached a conclusion. An ancient civilization made those tens of thousands of years ago, based on the carbon dating. They must have left the planet like we did to Earth to start a new life. Would Earth also would renew itself once we had abandoned it?
“Sir, look here. This seemed to be part of a signalling unit. If we can decode it, we can understand what happened here,” said Neva while examining an item.
“How would you do it,? Asked Dr Joseph, our chief medical officer. “An alien civilization made these objects thousands of years ago,”.
“Here, as on Earth, and everywhere in the universe, the most abundant element is Hydrogen, Dr. This would use the Hydrogen as the base for the communication if they were any intelligent,” Neva continued his explanation. “And we are only a galaxy away from Earth, which is like across the table if the whole Universe is the size of the Solar system. We have left nowhere at all,”.
“Give me a few minutes,” concluded Neva while looking for equipment in the bag.
Soon, we found out he was right. The technology wasn’t that different from our understanding of transmission and more important for us; it was receiving a signal from the planet. So where is the transmitter?