La Voz de Galicia – 11 de abril, 2025 →
There’s a short science fiction story by the American writer Ted Chiang that I’ve found myself returning to lately. The story is called “The Great Silence”, and it’s told from the perspective of a parrot living in the jungle near the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. The parrot wonders why humans invest so much time and energy trying to listen for and communicate with possible extraterrestrial life, when they still haven’t learned to listen to or understand the non-human life on their own planet. This “great silence” is also a metaphor for the “Fermi paradox,” the classic contradiction between the idea that we are not alone in the universe and the fact that we have no evidence of life beyond our own.
The parrot says that “humans like to think they’re unique,” and that “one proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.” And that idea of hiding has been circling around in my head for a while now: how can we protect ourselves from all the things that are threatening our existence?
My sister Yoly says it’s better not to watch the news— “they’re all bad anyway.” And my mother, frightened by international conflicts, often asks with a worried face, “Will they ever come to an agreement?” The truth is, just as the parrot in Chiang’s story says, we don’t listen to non-human species—but we also don’t listen to ourselves, the humans. And despite how easy it is to communicate in modern times, it seems we are more doomed than ever to misunderstand one another. And that is a paradox with no solution—the paradox that is leading us down an increasingly complicated path.
