On Silence

Maybe there is a Great Filter. Maybe some strange, insatiable attractor drags all intelligence down into extinction. Then the silence of the skies is the unmarked blank of dead children's biographies and every galaxy is a haunted horror of unthinking loss. Just as well we have no instrument coupled ever so slightly to this field of sorrow: if the terror of death did not drive us mad on its own, the cosmological grief would make us hasten our exit from this flat cemetery of the barely born. (Perhaps some day we'll have those instruments and we'll hear all at once a cacophony of death rattles carried by particles we don't yet have the mathematics for; maybe there is a Great Filter.)