The Great Filter

The Great Filter

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window, in the soft flickering light of the flame a man could likely be seen, either pacing back and forward on the deteriorating hardwood floors or sitting head in hands at the old oak desk which held the slowly withering flame and melting wax.

The cabin is not where this story begins; but where, for this man, the story will end.

Like so many great stories this one begins over lunch, in the summer of 1950 Astro physicists took a break from their work on the Manhattan project, which aimed to turn the most lethal and destructive weapon mankind had ever conceptualised into a more refined and deadly atom bomb.

Among these scientists sat Enrico Fermi who after a long discussion with the others about the almost definite probability of alien life existing somewhere in the expanse of the universe, proclaimed; “if these aliens exist, where is everybody?”.

Questions like these prompted the rise of many thoughts but none so prevalent to our predicament today as the idea of The Great Filter, it arose in part to explain Enrico Fermi’s question.

The basis of The Great Filter is that if there are so many viable options for life out there in space and we can’t find a trace of them, or they haven’t found us then there must be something stopping them.

An evolutionary step that prohibits civilisations from reaching further than their back doors in terms of their own solar systems and the wide expanse of the milky way galaxy.

The prevailing ideas for why life might not be able to make it past a certain step in the evolutionary process is vast, from; nuclear war, run away artificial intelligence, physics experiments that could destroy the entire home planet, genetic engineering or climate change, the possibilities are endless.

However, this didn’t stop us from trying our best to reach out into the void and contact what may lie there, from 1974 we humans have been beaming messages into outer space in the hope that they reach others, from interstellar messages of “hello” imbedded in radio waves travelling at the speed of light, to space shuttles holding golden records engraved with messages, maps and music. It was thought for a long time that these efforts were in vain and largely ceremonial until exactly 51 years after the first message was sent; We got a response.

The Message was picked up all over the world almost simultaneously, it was sent in binary, the language of 1’s and 0’s, how the aliens who sent it knew that we humans would be able to decode this message was impossible to know, but our best guess was that they had been intercepting radio waves that were beamed into space for years. It didn’t take long for The Message to be leaked to the press and for it to spread throughout the world like a wildfire, fuelled by panic and fear.

“People of Earth, we are sorry, we are too late. They heard you. They are coming”

The world was thrown into turmoil. Some nations succumbed utterly to anarchy while others immediately entered martial law and lockdowns begun, reminiscent of the early days of the Covid19 virus. Windows were boarded up and doors barred. In some areas gangs roamed the streets praying on the weak and vulnerable. Those that were capable and acted quickly were able to leave the major cities for ‘safer’ less populated areas.

Which brings us back to the lonely cabin in the lonely woods, which housed a very lonely man, me.

It has been 6 months since she was taken from me, the love of my life the mother of our unborn child, the sweetest most caring kind natured woman to ever grace the world with her presence.

I was a scientist working for NASA when the message came, my team and I were some of the first people to process and decode The Message and it didn’t take me long to realise what would result when it was inevitably leaked to the masses. We left Seattle that night, headed for Mt Rainer national park in a hope to lose ourselves in the old forests that lay there.

It didn’t take us long to hit a roadblock set up by God knows who, however it quickly dawned on us that these people were not the police or the military, they began ripping things out of our car and man handling my wife. The fire inside her had not yet been snuffed out and she began to fight back, I screamed “please, don’t hurt her!”, just as the unmistakable sound of a gunshot pierced the still night air, my wife stumbled, slouched and fell, blood streamed from her neck and flowed away filling the cracks of the pavement as it went.

I ran to her, disregarding the thugs who now scattered at the sight of a dying pregnant woman as the echoes of the shot slowly ebbed into the darkness. I will forever be haunted by the memory, of her strength leaving her body and the light fading from her eyes as.

I don’t know how long I knelt by her side, clutching at her, willing her to come back to me, repeating in a sob “I’m sorry” over and over, until the sound of voices and footsteps pierced my entombment of grief. That was when I finally acted on her final word.

“Run!”

That’s how I ended up here, in some long-forgotten part of the woods, slowly forgetting why I continue to survive, but always haunted. I attempted to study, to work but all I can manage is to write, for everything is meaningless without her.

My whole life I spent as much time as possible looking up towards the sky and what lay beyond, but now? Well now I look down at the world around me, and think on all the things I will miss, all the things that I love and have lost.

For They heard us, They are coming, and as I feel the earth around me begin to shake, I know, They are here.