Ode to the Fermi Paradox

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
High desert lunch. The year is 1950.
The clatter of government-issue trays in the Los Alamos cafeteria.
Herbert York remembers it this way.
Emil Konopinski, too.
And Edward Teller, laughing about the little green men in the morning papers, the flying saucers over Roswell.
And you, Enrico.
Quietly, you did the math in your head.

[Chorus]
A hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone.
Billions of galaxies we can see.
Thirteen billion years of chances.
All that time, all that real estate.
You looked up from your plate and you asked it.
So... where is everybody?

[Verse 2]
Carbon is not a miracle. It's promiscuous.
Life is tenacious.
It fills every boiling vent, every frozen crack.
It finds a way.
The numbers say the sky should be loud.
A cosmic conversation.
A marketplace of signals, roaring from Andromeda, from Kepler-186f, from every stable G-type star with a rocky world in the liquid-water zone.
Our radio telescopes drink from an empty river.

[Chorus]
A hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone.
Billions of galaxies we can see.
Thirteen billion years of chances.
All that time, all that real estate.
So... where is everybody?
The only answer is the Great Silence.

[Bridge]
Is the Great Filter behind us?
A one-in-a-trillion fluke of abiogenesis that made us first?
Or is the filter still ahead of us?
The test that every tool-making civilization faces, and every single one fails.
The fire we invent to warm our hands, that ends up burning the whole world down.
Is that the silence, Enrico?
Is that what we're hearing?
The sound of everyone else failing the test?
The sound of the trap closing?

[Outro]
The plates are cleared.
The conversation moves on to hydrogen bombs.
But your question just hangs there.
In the dry New Mexico air.
A radio tuned to a dead channel.
Static between worlds.
The sound of nothing, forever.
Where is everybody?