Chapter 5. Argument.

With the probe repaired and the crew assembled in the command center, it was time to determine what the next step was.
"Activate the bottom view, Tog," Jack said.

Lorrie and Natalie's eyes grew large as they viewed what was displayed on the main screen.
"What the hell! "Natalie exclaimed. "It looks like a futuristic city."

"Yes," Jack said. "And it's solid proof that intelligent aliens are out there in the galaxy and we're not alone."

"If NASA was aware of this, why didn't they send the experts out here to verify it?" Jessica asked.

"That's a very interesting question," Jack replied. "Obviously, there has to be a reason that we're not aware of."

"Like you said," Lorrie piped in. "It could be a danger that they decided not to reveal to us."

"There's only one possible explanation as to how this planet exists out here in the Kuiper belt," Natalie said. "It had to have been captured by our sun from a passing solar system, probably one that had a M-class red dwarf star as it's sun. Our sun is a G-class star and much larger. The fact that it's in a retrograde orbit is positive evidence that it was captured."

"That's one possible explanation," Lorrie said. "Another is the possible interference from a black hole. In any case there is no way that there are any aliens still alive on the planet."

"Is there any way we could detect the age of this planet?" Jack asked.

"We would need to obtain samples of rocks," Jessica said. "There would be no way to determine the age from any artifacts, unless they contained material made from the planet's rocks."

"I assume that you're referring to using a radiometric measurement. Do we have a mass spectrometer?"

"Yes."

"If that's the case, they must have realized that we would be measuring the age of rocks taken from a planet."

"Could be. In any case we need to measure the residual radioactivity to determine their ages, and even that's not necessarily a positive method. We have no proof that habitable planets evolve the same way that our Earth did."

"We also need to determine what sort of aliens built this city," Jack said. "We might be able to send probes down there to collect rocks and anything else we could use to find out where this planet came from."

"If it's a captured planet," Lorrie said. "It would have to be billions of years ago, probably right after our solar system was formed out of a stellar cluster. Since this planet has evidence of an advanced alien civilization, it would suggest that it came from a stellar cluster closer to the one that our star evolved from or possibly an adjacent galactic arm that was torn apart by a black hole."

"Are we ruling out a planet that formed in our solar system?" Jack asked.

"If it were a planet that formed in our solar system, it would have had to have been ejected into the Kuiper belt after it formed. There's no way that an advanced civilization could have formed on it that soon before it was ejected into the Kuiper belt."

"So, this alien civilization is probably much older than ours," Jack said.

"Yes. That would be a reasonable possibility. They probably formed millions of years before ours did, and then suffered a catastrophe that sent their planet into our solar system."

Jack rubbed his chin. "Okay, let's not make conclusions before we have evidence to back them up. We'll begin sending the probes down tomorrow."

They had no idea what they would find.