Author: Bill Cox

In the summer of 1950, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in North America, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a simple but profound question to his colleagues – “Where is everyone?”

If life was abundant in the universe and often gave rise to intelligence, then, given the age of the universe, our world should already have been visited by alien life. Why weren’t they here?

In the summer of 2025, seventy-five years later, his question is answered. A small vessel arrives in Earth orbit, observed by the missile detection systems of the major powers. While they are pondering how to respond, the vessel initiates a broadcast that is heard around the Earth in all its many languages.

“People of Earth. Hello. We are the creators of your universe, conscious beings whose true home is the endless eternity that exists outside of space and time.

We built this universe to answer a question, to provide us with knowledge that did not already exist within the totality of us. We inhabit the eternal, timeless vastness outwith your universe, where there is no prospect of change. How could we add to the sum of our knowledge, without there being a ‘before’ that understanding and an ‘after’? Constructing a universe where time flows and entering that universe afforded us that ability.

We built spacetime from strings of fundamental uncertainty, whose vibrations spawned the particles and forces that make up all you see. Such beautiful music we made, an orchestra of creation, your cosmos our symphony.

Yet, although we are beings with power beyond your understanding, we are not infallible. In every system, there is the unforeseen, the ghost in the machine. In our creation, this was the flaw, an off-key note, at first little noticed in the background harmony. However, this discordant element grew in strength and potency. If left unchecked, it threatens to corrupt the consonance of our magnificent construction, poisoning the knowledge that we seek to add to ourselves.

The irony is that this defect is an echo of our own greatest attribute; consciousness! It infects the fabric of spacetime, moving through galaxies and superclusters, sparking self-awareness in countless worlds. Granted, these consciousnesses are poor reflections of our own, yet, over the ten trillion years of our great project, they will threaten the balance of our magnificent construct.

Thus we, the architects of the universe, are here today to remove the flaw from your world. Embedded as it is in life, we must destroy all biology on your planet. You may think us unfeeling, but we take no joy in your extinction. This telepathic message is a gift of understanding from all of us to all of you, that you may grasp your true place in the nature of things and the absolute necessity of us removing the infection of your consciousness from this universe.

Your deaths will help us restore harmony to our grand composition. In oblivion, you will allow splendour. At time’s end, our goals having been achieved, we will sing a lament in your memory, as we ascend once more into infinite eternity.”

As the message ended, the vessel grew in brightness. The wormhole at its centre opened, the other end being tethered inside a pulsar, thousands of light years away. The hard radiation thus released, over the course of a number of days, completely sterilised the Earth of all life. Enrico Fermi’s question, asked seventy-five years previously, was finally answered. Alas, a lifeless planet Earth joined all those other worlds where, the question having been asked, an answer was given with merciless efficiency.