Radio Silence

Radio Silence, a short but very creepy story…

36,400,000. That is the expected number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, according to Drake’s famous equation. For the last 78 years, we had been broadcasting everything about us – our radio, our television, our history, our greatest discoveries – to the rest of the galaxy. We had been shouting our existence at the top of our lungs to the rest of the universe, wondering if we were alone. 36 million civilizations, yet in almost a century of listening, we hadn’t heard a thing. We were alone.

That was, until about 5 minutes ago. […]

Even if you recognise where it's going well before it gets there, very nicely done.1

[Via @kbiegel, via RT by @tomcoates2]


  1. Yes, you can quibble about the accuracy of that figure from the Drake equation given the number of approximations and ballpark estimates fed into it, or about how convenient it was that that last message was encoded as ASCII and contained a message expressed in English, but addressing those points would have lengthened the story to no great effect. At this length, it works well enough. 
  2. Credit to @owenblacker for posting a link to the text of the story.