There is a strange forest in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of empty land north of San Francisco, where 42 steel trees sweep their parabolic canopies across the skies like industrial sunflowers. It’s quiet here, at the Allen Telescope Array, but the silence is deceiving. Just ask the trees, which are condemned to listen to a shrieking cosmos so that they might hear an extraterrestrial whisper—a whisper so faint that the sound of a snowflake falling to the earth is deafening by comparison. The astronomers who walk among these trees are preoccupied by the Big Question: What will the whisperer say? Will it be a greeting? A warning?
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