![]() ![]() The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. In Chiang’s story, the Great Silence is finally coming home.Īuthor of We Are All Completely Beside OurselvesĮditor of the 2016 Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy But sometimes, and with increasing frequency, the non-humans are all the other animals with whom we share our planet and about whom, for all our centuries of co-habitation, we still know so little. Sometimes the non-humans are aliens with their own inexplicable extraterrestrial agendas. Humans can be assessed directly through comparison with non-humans. Science fiction is well suited to thought experiments and philosophical questions regarding the Other. Every line unfolds into its own philosophical and heartbreaking space. ![]() Every line rewards further consideration. Using some of the standard tools of poetry - brevity, compression, language - Chiang achieves the poetic effects of complexity, scope, and resonance. But even on its own, Chiang’s story has enormous power. I regret that I haven’t been able to experience Chiang’s words along with those images, as was intended. Why, he asks, are we so interested in finding intelligence in the stars and so deaf to the many species who manifest it here on earth?Īnd also: why have we demanded that, as proof of intelligence, non-human animals communicate to us in human language, and then dismissed those creatures that actually do so?Ĭhiang’s story was written in collaboration with the visual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, as an accompaniment to a video installation that juxtaposed the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico with the endangered parrots in the forests nearby. Ted Chiang’s very short story, “The Great Silence” adds another set of questions to these speculations. As any long-time reader of science fiction can tell you, “The Great Silence” is another name for the Fermi Paradox, and the Fermi Paradox is a meditation on two contradictory truths: 1) the idea that we represent the only intelligence in the universe is preposterous and 2) despite the increasing range of our extraterrestrial search, we have found only silence. ![]()
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