Black Rock, or: Goodbye, Twentieth Century

In 1959, Nicolai Kardashev imagined streams of parallel lines coursing through deepest space. They moved at the speed of light, bouncing along the electromagnetic spectrum and emitting a high-pitched banshee howl. When slowed down, they sounded like clusters of thundering, massive open chords played on an interstellar organ, a ghost symphony from the edges of the cosmos. These lines were different from the ones Bavarian physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer discovered in 1814—lines that appeared as black parallel streaks in photographs of the solar spectrum. Kardashev knew about Fraunhofer’s lines, telluric stripes made when the earth wandered into the path of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. The lines Kardashev heard in 1959 were not traces of elements in deep space. They were emanations from a single source, a quasar tucked between the stars Zeta Pegasi and HD 212989 in the constellation Pegasus some 8 billion light-years away. A group of radio astronomers cataloged the quasar using the name “CTA-102,” a terribly ordinary name for something that, at least for Kardas…