The Poet was breathing heavily and the suit kept on adjusting the oxygen levels to compensate for his strained efforts as he was climbing a hill overlooking the outpost. He knew the path well as he made this climb many times before searching for solitude. He found the ridge he knew and sat down to rest kicking up gray dust. Overlooking the large shallow crater where the outpost was built, he saw a cumulous of smoke surrounding a ship on a landing platform readied for take off. The ship takeoffs and landings were infrequent so each was an event that was on everyone’s lips for a few days prior and after – that is until the next ship’s arrival. Those infrequent events didn’t just interrupt outpost’s monotony but also brought supplies enhancing the limited diet of the foods grown locally. Those ships also were a trigger for the inhabitants to dream again. Unlike on the planets and moons with cities and towns, this  lonely outpost on the edge of the Solar system was the only inhabited place on this gray moon. On other celestial bodies one could visit other cities and towns – this wasn’t the case here. To travel anywhere else, one had to boards the ship, this ship that was pre-igniting its engines. Looking from the vantage of this ridge at this lonely, tiny outpost on the outer edges of civilization, he knew that with one gaze he embraces the whole of humanity on this moon. There was something exhilarating in that concept that reflected deeper view of who we were in the vast abyss of cosmos: a tiny spec of life in an insignificant part of an average galaxy. He could look to his right and see a large reddish-white face of the planet Pluto raising slowly over the horizon. He could look above him and among many stars see a larger dot of Saturn and Jupiter, and even – if he strained his eye sight – a much tinier dot of Earth. He could look to his left and see that limitless abyss stretching forever uninterrupted by any planet or moon that belonged to our Solar system. If one ever considered humanity’s or their own insignificance in this universe, this tiny outpost seen from this vantage point would be a perfect metaphor. This is why he liked this ridge so much – not only it gave him the solitude he so often desired, it also put things in perspective. This strange melancholic isolation was what attracted the Poet to this place.

The landing platform was in vicinity of the outpost’s main building. An array of antennas and communication dishes raised above the top floor. Little to the left there were laboratories, large warehouses and a bit further, main living quarters. Those structures were connected with smaller buildings by a network of well-lit tunnels. Far to the left on top of a hill overlooking the base was a navigation beacon. A distant volcano covered with smaller meteor impact-craters closed the valley to the distant right. Here, in this irrelevant corner of the world the Poet could compose verses that defined human insignificance in the universe. He knew his work means very little to the world and that’s how he liked it – he never wanted to pretend that a Man can be anything else other than a flash of brightness on the timeline of infinity.

He used to wonder about the ships – imagining their exotic destinations but with time the event of landing and takeoff has become normalized – this feeling of awe was gone. He remembers distinctly the day this curiosity died within him. It was an ordinary day and there would be nothing memorable about it if not for the fact that this banal day brought with it apathy towards living. The ships kept on landing bringing in supplies for the warehouses storing goods for long distance exploration ships heading further beyond the Solar system, yet those landings and takeoffs have lost their mystery. He found himself thinking about this peculiar aspect of human condition where seemingly nothing changes and yet everything has. The difference between yesterday and today was in the perception and that annoyed him to no limits. All his life he seeked to supersede his own mortality by capturing a feeling of timelessness through his verses but now that desire diminished. It seems the more he understood the world the less excited he was about it. Drown in despair at its banality this knowledge has forced him to realise his own ordinariness. This ordinarity is rooted in dissipating faith that timelessness is possible. He used to strive for glory because of belief that one can leave a mark on universe that, as Tolstoy said, gives meaning to life even after one’s death. Now he was convinced it’s not possible. He thought of great stone artifacts of civilization and imagined how even those will one day succumb to nature – stone, just like us, turns to dust too. Thousands of years after today there will be nothing left of them – their memory just a puff of smoke.

As he imagined the loss of virgin curiosity, there was less activity at the landing platform – the ship was ready for take off and the ground crew was finishing up before moving their machines into garage for blast protection. The engines fired up and the ship, engulfed by the clouds of dust, smoke and fire raised towards the stars. It rose up silhouetted against the large disk of the planet now firmly planted over the horizon. He followed the ship that slowly turned towards its destination – one of the larger dots above. In over one hundred years of space exploration, despite dangers, humanity went to many places. We climbed the mountains, crossed the deserts, seas and oceans – when there was no other new place to go on Earth we took off in fragile rockets towards space. We kept wandering further and further away from the fire of the Sun into darkness. We landed on the Moon, then Mars. Io and Europa followed soon. We’ve build floating complexes on Venus, and the ocean cities on the moons of Saturn. With the supply depot around Pluto, we thought that we’ve reached the boundary of our Solar system. (This extremity was what attracted him to come here). At first in awe, one soon realises something peculiar: beyond the philosophical grandeur, when the layers of mysticism are striped away, the Universe can be actually pretty boring. At some point the only thing that’s changing is the relative color of the planet’s surface: moons are often gray, Mars is red, Venus is piss yellow, Mercury is brown, Io is blue and so on. The further we went, the more the technology advanced. Super high resolution 3D cameras, among others, allowed individuals to stand on the surface of distant planets in the sensory chambers without need to step a foot inside a spaceship. Inside the chamber, one could experience the sandstorms of Mars, heat waves of Mercury, ice storms of Io… For millennia we have looked towards stars dreaming – when the space exploration kicked into gear for real sometime in mid XXI century – we’ve forgotten that fulfilling one’s fantasy often is the easiest way to kill the dream.

He caught himself structuring his thought too much. He always felt that between the indescribable passion of art and concrete reality of logic he spent too much energy on elegant structures of thoughts rather than letting the feeling overpower those structures. He pulled out his writing pad. He wanted to write something that could give meaning to this climb but nothing of significance came to his mind. He resigned to the feeling that this moment will not matter after all, that between his thoughts and those of calculated concrete actions executed by the crew of the taking-off ship, his being there was that much less significant. Just as this melancholic torpor was overtaking his body, in the glassy surface of his writing pad he spotted a curious flare as if something bright was behind him. He turned towards the reflection and saw a space of the night sky cut open with geometrical clouds pouring out of that sky-wound. A dark starry sky was split open and through that split a “structure” emerged that couldn’t make up its color nor its shape. It was partially a cloud and in parts the geometric skeleton that gives the cloud its shape. This cloud-grid had its sharp “tentickles” quickly extend forward as if those spiky cones were reaching out towards something past the Poet, past the planet, far into the distance past the solar system. He was in awe but not the sort he kept on trying to rekindle while imagining ship’s destinations. This awe was beyond the senses and his mind. Only after a moment he’s realised that he was both experiencing the event but also observing his body standing motionless and staring in continuous infatuation. He felt that something profound was taking place but he couldn’t find any means to understand it nor words to describe it. He looked with an astonishment uncertain if he should let himself be immersed in this complex experience or if he should seek words that could describe this occurrence. The climb gained its mean even though his notebook stayed empty.

The signal was detected – almost simultaneously – by the supply outpost around Pluto, listening station on Jupiter’s smallest moon Europa, and the radio telescopes on Earth. The signal, as we came to call it the Event, came to us in form of an atmospheric discharge. A large area of the sky has discolored. Pink and violet hues merging with flashes ripped an ugly scar. Clouds have formed and through the clouds we could see a quasi-organic shape made out of inorganic polygons that could be perceived as the substructure of the Universe. The shape looked like a huge geometric structure intertwined with organic elements: one was becoming the other. The “object” was huge – a few stories high. Many who have witnessed the Event have had a mystical experience. In the 3D video library you can look behind at the faces of people staring at the scar in the sky and instantaneously see reference in their eyes. Afterwards they look one at another with a visible feeling of tremendous peace and joy as if they were given a chance to see behind curtains of the Universe. The Event lasted 19 minutes leaving a lasting impression on our civilization. Was it a signal from the Others, and if so what were they trying to communicate?

Our spaceships take off for the stars but we know it’s only a metaphor. In truth we only travel to nearby planets only sometimes sending probes to distant places beyond the Solar system. Ultimately we are very provincial, stuck in this tiny corner of the Universe. We look at the state of our technology and realise that none of it is powerful enough to hope that one day we’ll be able to reach out to the Others. We automatically assume our inferiority in relation to other sentinel civilizations. We presumed that they would be polluting the airwaves with powerful radio signals reflecting their advanced activities. Unable to produce equally powerful signals we resorted to listening rather than transmitting. If we were to make contact of any kind – it had to be Them that extended the hand. Since mids of twentieth century we’ve listened to the sky. We’ve built huge arrays of radio telescopes on Earth. Much later, one of the shallow perfectly shaped craters of Europa has become the dish of another large listening “ear.” In light of our growing familiarity with the cosmos and the passive listening that lasted centuries, the search for the Others was losing its priority until the day that changed everything. It was those radio telescopes build to listen for the Alien signals from the outer space that helped us triangulate the source of the Event. Right away everyone’s eyes turned to the dark sky, 182 light years away was a star in the Orion constellation named Betelgeuse and around that star orbits a planet called Gaspra. There was nothing out of ordinary about the star and the relatively close proximity to us made everyone uneasy. All those years we’ve been listening because we’ve assumed the contact  – if ever – would come from a supremely distant place – the kind of place that bordered on impossibility. And now, if the astro-triangulation was correct, the contact came from a planet that could be reached in a little more than 180 years using current space travel technology.

We’ve pointed our radio telescopes towards the star system and kept on listening hoping to hear more. The star stayed silent. Months have turned into years… and nothing. Despite the silence, a huge boost in public’s interest was apparent: everyone wanted to know who the Others were, what do they want from us, was the signal even meant for us? A possibility of a journey was speculated on. Money was marked to advance necessary technology and complex theoretical research that moved possibility of that journey to the star beyond the realms of science-fiction. We looked towards the star as the point setting our next frontier.