This week’s Futures story marks the debut in the section for Rachel Reddick. She took some time out to explain what inspired her to write Missed message.

Writing Missed message

Missed Message is derived from what I consider to be the most tragic possible resolution to the Fermi paradox.

The Fermi paradox asks, essentially, if there are technologically intelligent aliens, where are they?  Why haven’t we heard their radio transmissions?

There are a lot of possible answers, but I wanted to explore what I consider the scariest: intelligent life tends to self-destruct.  In that case, it’s not that life is rare, or intelligence is rare, or that there’s some external civilization-destroying force we humans could potentially hope to fight against.  If a world goes down, the people on it did it to themselves.

Someone waiting for the end on such a world might have a chance to send a message out from a large radio transmitter, such as the ones at Arecibo or Goldstone that are more commonly used for performing radar observations of asteroids.  That unlucky, short-term survivor of a swift disaster wouldn’t have a lot of time.

All that person could do is throw a radio time-capsule into the void, and hope that someone out there picks it up.

And wouldn’t it be awful if we had a chance to catch that message and missed it?  This is another possible side of the Fermi paradox puzzle: we may have overlooked signals.  We’re less likely to be looking in the right direction at the right time to see a message that doesn’t last.  For something like the message in the story, receiving a small fraction of a single transmission isn’t enough to be sure if the signal is spurious, or whether or not it is artificial.

The real life Wow! signal picked up in 1977 is an example.  It was never seen again, and its origin is still unknown.  That sense of uncertainty is what drives the story’s end — what might we have missed?