![]() ![]() 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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