ASRAR · COSIMO VON BATIE MYSTERIES
003 — The Silence Above Us
Fiction, with a research-informed reflection on the search for life beyond Earth.
The lights went out halfway through the football match.
From the next compound came a shout, then laughter. Someone accused the electricity company of supporting the losing side.
Abdul carried two chairs outside.
His daughter followed with the biscuits she had been told not to open.
Without the security lights, the sky looked different.
“Have those always been there?”
“The stars?”
She nodded.
He pulled her chair beside his.
At school, she had drawn a planet with purple trees and a yellow sea. Her teacher had written Beautiful imagination beneath it.
“Could there be people up there?”
“There could be.”
“Do they know about us?”
“I don’t know.”
She considered this.
“Maybe they’re outside too.”
He looked up.
Somewhere, perhaps, a parent was answering a question badly. Perhaps a child had invented creatures who looked like them.
Perhaps there was nothing alive between this chair and distances he could not imagine.
He found that possibility harder to sit with.
We have not confirmed life beyond Earth. That remains true despite intriguing observations and confident headlines.[1]
And finding life would not necessarily mean finding someone to speak to. A living microbe and a civilization capable of sending a recognizable signal are very different discoveries.
Scientists search for signs of biology and technology. Radio signals are one possibility; other searches examine atmospheric chemistry or potential evidence of artificial energy use.[2]
But the sky’s apparent silence is difficult to interpret. A search depends on where we look, when we look and what our instruments can detect. Listening without finding a signal cannot, by itself, establish that nobody exists.[3]
That does not prove someone is waiting.
It means the question remains open.
And there are unanswered questions closer than the stars.
In the oceans’ depths and the rock beneath our feet, what lives beyond the places we have reached? What forms of life might we pass over because we do not yet know how to recognize them?
We look up and ask who else is there.
We can look down and ask it too.[4]
His daughter held out a biscuit.
“If they came here, would we give them something to eat?”
“We’d have to find out what they could eat.”
She withdrew it slightly.
“Not this one, then.”
He laughed.
Across the lane, their neighbour was trying to light a charcoal stove. A baby objected to the darkness. Someone’s radio found a station, lost it, then found it again.
The girl watched the stars.
“If there’s nobody else, who would we tell?”
“What?”
“That we’re here.”
He had no answer ready.
For a while they sat without speaking.
Then the neighbour called his name.
“Abdul. Have you got a match?”
He went inside to look.
When he returned, his daughter had moved the chairs closer together. She was guarding his biscuit against the ants.
He handed the matches across the fence.
Above them, the question remained enormous.
Below it, someone was getting the fire started.
What do you hope would change if we learned we were not alone?
Research behind the reflection
[1] NASA — Evidence of life beyond Earth
[2] NASA — Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: Technosignatures
[3] Wright, Kanodia & Lubar — How Much SETI Has Been Done? (2018; revised 2020)
Life beneath the seafloor is already documented. The questions here concern what remains undiscovered; they do not imply evidence of hidden civilizations.