Space Signals
Illustration by Keira Sainsbury
The sun crawls over the horizon and scares away the night. The early morning light bathes the desert in a rich orange as the memory of the stars fade away. As the sun's golden glow is cast over the landscape it catches something, here in the desert there is a singer standing tall. Her head is held high to the heavens, through the starry nights and sunny days she sings her song. It is one of the grandest songs ever sung on Earth, she sings of beauty, peace, life, and love. She paints pictures of green meadows and blue seas, orange deserts, and yellow fields. Her songs are a deep sleep filled with pleasant dreams and her voice could fill your heart with intoxicating hope. Her song should be sung on stages for all to hear but it is only in the desert that she can perform. It is only in a place so hostile that something so beautiful can exist, it is only in the stillness of this place that something like her can be built.
If you visit her you will be met only with silence, her song is not meant for us. In the time between day and night when the sun bounces softly off of her curves you will catch a piece of it but in the overbearing light of midday you will see that man has only built a mirror of himself. Her song is sung in megahertz and she sings for the audience of a small star lightyears away.
We are alone. No matter how hard we try to fight it there will always be a place where I end and you begin, a space between us all. It is easy to come to this realization and become lost in it, to let it consume you so much that you become embittered to the world and blind to its beauty. Loneliness is a beautiful thing, or rather it is the catalyst of beauty. We are all born screaming, we are thrust from the wholeness of nothingness into the loneliness of existence, but then we are soothed. Swaddled in blankets and cradled in loving arms, our first memory is of violence but our second memory is of love.
As we grow we build our walls, we become lost in ourselves, forever becoming lonelier in the labyrinths of our own construction. The space between us grows and the moments of true all encompassing love become fewer and further between. It seems hopeless, but it is in the heart of these labyrinths that something beautiful happens.
Why is there a multimillion dollar radio telescope in the New Mexico desert that sings into open space? Why do we create anything in the first place? Because it is human. In the centre of our labyrinths, surrounded on all sides by walls of our creation, we sing, we dance, we paint, we write. We shoot these little pieces of ourselves out so that others may see them, so they may see us. It is in these messages that we tell the universe that we are here, and tell each other that we are not alone. These messages may not reach listening ears, but eventually they will float towards the core of a dying star and for a moment that star will burn a bit brighter having known there was an audience that it burned for.
It is late at night, I stand at my stove, bathed in its yellow light. I sing a song into the emptiness of my kitchen. In the evening sun halfway across the continent a radio telescope sings a song to the stars. Across the globe thousands of poems, paintings, and plays are composed, all signals into the unknown made with the hope that someone will be there to receive it. There is a pale blue dot somewhere in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy. If you get close enough you can hear it sing of blue skies, green hills, orange forests, and the quiet dreams of the billions that live on it. It is the loveliest song in the universe.
