We Answered Back
A letter to strangers not yet born
After months of argument, the world agreed at last to send a single reply.
The message left the great dish on a clear morning in early spring.
Even though the travelled at the speed of light, the distance was .
Twelve hundred years would pass before the signal so much as reached Kepler.
Mara did the arithmetic and felt the number coldly in her chest.
By the time any answer returned, she would have been dead for centuries.
Every person now alive on Earth would have long turned to dust and memory.
Even though she would never hear a reply, she signed the message with pride.
She thought of the sailors who planted trees they would never sit beneath.
Science, she realized, was often a letter written to strangers not yet born.
Her , still a child, might live to see the first answer.
By then, Mara herself would have become a name in a dusty history book.
Even though the wait felt , she refused to let silence win.
The reply carried the primes, the hydrogen atom, and a simple map of Earth.
It also carried one careful sentence: We heard you, and we are listening still.
She wondered what the world would look like when the answer finally arrived.
Perhaps humanity would have healed its wounds, or perhaps it would have vanished.
Either way, this message would every of her brief century.
Even though no one could promise success, the act itself felt like .
Mara pressed the switch and watched the signal into the waiting dark.
For a heartbeat, the whole planet seemed to hold its breath as one.
She imagined the reply crossing empty light-years, patient as a falling stone.
By the year it arrived, our great-grandchildren would have forgotten her name.
Yet the numbers she chose would still speak clearly on her behalf.
That, she decided, was a kind of worth more than fame.
She walked home beneath the same stars, now no longer entirely silent.