The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.
But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?
We’re a non-human species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?
***
The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi paradox.
One proposed solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.
Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.
It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.
***
The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcertingly quiet.
Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.
Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Rio Abajo forest resounded with our voices. Now we’re almost gone. Soon this rainforest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.
***
There was an African Grey Parrot named Alex. He was famous for his cognitive abilities. Famous among humans, that is.
A human researcher named Irene Pepperberg spent thirty years studying Alex. She found that not only did Alex know the words for shapes and colors, he actually understood the concepts of shape and color.
Many scientists were skeptical that a bird could grasp abstract concepts. Humans like to think they’re unique. But eventually Pepperberg convinced them that Alex wasn’t just repeating words, that he understood what he was saying.
Out of all my cousins, Alex was the one who came closest to being taken seriously as a communication partner by humans.
Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.”
If humans are looking for a connection with a non-human intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?
***
Every parrot has a unique call that it uses to identify itself; biologists refer to this as the parrot’s “contact call.”
In 1974, astronomers used Arecibo to broadcast a message into outer space intended to to demonstrate human intelligence. That was humanity’s contact call.
In the wild, parrots address each other by name. One bird imitates another’s contact call to get the other bird’s attention.
If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention.
***
Parrots are vocal learners: we can learn to make new sounds after we’ve heard them. It’s an ability that few animals possess. A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark.
Humans are vocal learners, too. We have that in common. So humans and parrots share a special relationship with sound. We don’t simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.
Perhaps that’s why humans built Arecibo the way they did. A receiver doesn’t have to be a transmitter, but Arecibo is both. It’s an ear for listening, and a mouth for speaking.
***
Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.
I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own.
But parrots are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be, and humans can observe us up close; they can look us in the eye. How do they expect to recognize an alien intelligence if all they can do is eavesdrop from a hundred light years away?
***
It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.
When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.
I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.
***
There’s a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.
Pythagorean mystics believed that vowels represented the music of the spheres, and chanted to draw power from them.
Pentecostal Christians believe that when they speak in tongues, they’re speaking the language used by angels in Heaven.
Brahmin Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they’re strengthening the building blocks of reality.
Only a species of vocal learners would ascribe such importance to sound in their mythologies. We parrots can appreciate that.
***
According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “Om.” It’s a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be.
When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum.
Astronomers call that the “cosmic microwave background.” It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago.
But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “Om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.
When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.
***
We Puerto Rican Parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them.
Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out. I doubt the humans will have deciphered our language before we’re gone.
So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.
***
Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.
And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that’s why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species who can build such a thing must have greatness within it.
My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.
The message is this:
You be good. I love you.
Allora & Calzadilla’s video installation The Great Silence (2014) centers on the world’s largest radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, home to the last remaining population of a critically endangered species of parrots, Amazona vittata. For the work, Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang, who wrote a script in the spirit of a fable that ponders the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors.
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Closing Editorial
A Knot Untied in Two Parts
Notes on the Abstract Strike
The Corruption of the Eye: On Photogenesis and Self-Growing Images
The Vectoralist Class
Mercury Retrograde
Surface Encounters
Soaking in the Daily Curses: A Conversation
Made to Fit, or The Gathering of the Balloons
Uncommoning Nature
Self-Identity is a Bad Visual System
Of Work Riots, Political Prisoners, and Workers Refusing to Leave the Factory—Translated Through the Pages of Faridabad Workers News (2005–2015)
Laboring One to Seven (Island of Terror)
Eating Glass: The New Propaganda
The Extraordinary Adventures of Guy Fawkes
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
Reading Art as Confrontation
Blackout City
A Few Notes from an Extellectual
Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon
It Takes so Much for a City to Happen
Less World to be Ourselves: A Note on Postapocalyptic Simplification
Give Back to Your Alma Mater!
Our Affirmations
The Revolution Is Dead—But Long Lives the State!
Extinction as Usual?: Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism
Heart of Brightness
Supercritical Decay
THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY THE SUN: A PARTIAL SCRIPT FOR A SHORT FILM
TBH IDK FTW
You Can’t Ask Everyone to Behave Ethically Just Like That
The Arts for the Global Conflict: A 2115 Report
The Alchemic Digital, The Planetary Elemental
Castroneirics: A Dreamitaph for Fidel (The Exquisite Cadaver)
The Memory of a Deluge and the Surface of Water
Plastic Shine: From Prosaic Miracle to Retrograde Sublime
The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission
The Forms of Non-Belonging
The Message of Francis
Crimes Without a Scene: Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group
Why Preserve the Name “Human”?
Empire and Its Double: The Many Pavilions of the Islamic State
Theorizing Deposition: Transitional Stratigraphy, Disruptive Layers, and the Future
Is There Any World to Come?
The Loop
After Nihilism, After Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture
Do You See It? Well, It Doesn’t See You!
The Fruitarian Dilemma: A Dialogue about Kissing Ass, Corruption, and Compromise
Theorems of Life (As an Addendum and Clarification on Monism)
The Idle Monologue of an Unconvinced Surveyor
ISIS and the CIA Vie for the Claim to Divinity
On Direct Action: An Address to Cultural Workers
Field Guide to Skirmology: Handbook for the Skirmonaut
Arsenic Dreams
Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development
Weapons Grade Pig Work
Botched Enlightenment: A Conversation
Immortality Day
Oh the Animals of Language
ARGUS is: An Almost Cock and Bull Story
Why We Look at Plants, in a Corrupted World
The Making of Americans
Styles and Customs in the 2020s
The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene
Child as Material
La Ville Souvenir
On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light
Men of Bronze, Homes of Concrete
Art After the Machines
Nomos and Cosmos
GORILLAZ GRRLZ
Torn Together
Online Digital Artwork and the Status of the “Based-In” Artist
Second Advents: On the Issue of Planning in Contemporary Art
Look Above, the Sky is Falling: Humanity Before and After the End of the World
Shiny
Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nts
On Deprofessionalizing Surgery
Things Based on Real-Life Events
Thinking About Art Thinking
Construction with Steel and Technology
Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave
Turk, Toaster, Task Rabbit
On the Documentary
Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case
The Great Silence
The Art of Cooking: A Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne
SUPERCOMMUNITY (editorial)
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