The Snub

Voyager 1    NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

The Snub

As missives go, this one was nothing short
of monumental. All was revealed, humbly
and yet elegantly, in prose meant to disarm
and to invite. Communication of the most
hopeful kind, the written word so anxious
to convey the need to keep in touch that 
it was seen as paramount to miss nothing
and so the appeal was repeated and repeated
no fewer than fifty times in fifty languages
in the fervent hope that the reader would
be convinced of the moral, philosophical
scientific need to respond. In kind most
preferably. Yet despite the outreach with the
use of the most bliss-inducing music on
Earth, and the voyage undertaken as a
celestial messenger of curiosity and agape
it is as though the appeal to get in touch
please, we do so very much want to hear
from you, failed to touch an equal eagerness
and curiosity in the recipient. Where did 
the message go astray? Obviously the
errand of delivery failed ending up in
the Dead Letter Box of an endless void in
time and space known affectionately as
the Universe. What did we do wrong? How
did we err in our presumptuous message in
the certainty that a higher, more advanced
alien life would be the least bit interested in
exposing itself to the virus of humankind?