When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum.
Astronomers call that the cosmic microwave background. It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago.
But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.
When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.
We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them.
Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out. I doubt the humans will have deciphered our language before we’re gone.
So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.
Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.
And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that’s why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species who can build such a thing must have greatness within them.
My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.
The message is this:
You be good. I love you.
Omphalos
Lord, I place myself in your presence, and ask you to shine your light into my heart as I look back upon this day, so that I may see more clearly your grace in everything that has happened.
Right now I’m content and grateful for such a satisfying day, but it didn’t begin auspiciously. My mood was poor when my aeroplane arrived this morning. As I was looking around the terminal for the cabstand, a man thought I was lost and tried to come to my rescue. He told me Chicagou was no place for a woman traveling alone, and I replied that I had managed well enough in Mongolia and that I doubted Chicagou could be any worse. Forgive me, Lord, for being sharp to a man who sought only to assist me. I ask for your help in being patient with those who believe women helpless.
I admit, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to stopping here. It’s been so long since I wrote the book that my attention has moved on to other things, and in the last month I’ve been entirely focused on preparing for the Arisona dig. After Dr. Janssen’s electric mailgram, all I could think about was those spearpoints and what they might tell us. When my publisher arranged for me to give a public lecture here, I thought he was just taking advantage of my travel plans, getting me to promote the book without paying for the aeroplane ticket, and it felt more like a delay than anything else.
My mood improved after I got to the hotel and was met by an assistant from the theater where I was to speak. At first, when she told me how much she was looking forward to my lecture, I thought she was simply being polite, but then she spoke in some detail about how my book had given her a renewed appreciation for the work that scientists did, and I realized her enthusiasm was unfeigned. Hearing such a response from a reader was gratifying, but more important, it was a reminder that education is just as important a part of an archaeologist’s job as fieldwork. Thank you, Lord, for gently showing me how self-absorbed I was to regard the public lecture as a chore.
I had a light supper in the hotel restaurant and then proceeded to the theater. It was by far the biggest audience I’ve had for one of my lectures; men and women crowded the hall like puffins on a beach. I knew better than to imagine the turnout was a reflection of my popularity; the name “Dorothea Morrell” on a poster has never been a major draw. They came because the Atacama mummies are being sent on a fund-raising tour around the country, and their first stop is here in Chicagou. Archaeology is on everyone’s mind right now, and I was incidentally benefiting from that. But that was fine with me; I was happy to have such a large audience, no matter what the reason.
I began my lecture by discussing the growth rings of a tree trunk, and how the thickness of each ring depends on the rainfall during that year of the tree’s growth, so that a succession of narrow rings indicated a period of drought. I explained that by counting back from the year a tree was felled, we can compile a chronology of weather patterns going back many decades, beyond the memory of any person living. The past has left its traces on the world, and we only have to know how to read them.
Then I described the technique of cross-dating: matching the pattern of growth rings across different trees. I offered an example where we see an identical sequence of thick and thin rings in two pieces of wood: in one case it’s near the center of a recently felled tree, whereas in another it’s near the perimeter of a piece of timber found in an old building. We know those trees’ life spans overlapped; the former was a sapling when the latter was mature, but they experienced the same sequence of abundant and scarce rain. We can use the growth rings in the older tree to extend our record of weather patterns further into the past. Thanks to cross-dating, we’re no longer limited to the life span of any individual tree.
I told the audience that archaeologists have examined the timbers from older and older buildings, matching the patterns of growth rings along the way. Even without the benefit of written records, we knew that the timbers in the top of Trier Cathedral in Germany came from trees cut in the year 1074, while those in the base came from trees cut in 1042, by examining the growth rings they contained. And it didn’t stop there, I told them; there were even older timbers we could use, like the pilings in the Roman bridge at Cologne and the beams that reinforced ancient salt mines at Bad Nauheim. Every timber served as a volume in a history written by nature itself, an almanac of yearly rainfall reaching back to the birth of Christ.
Then I told them that going back further was trickier. It meant finding tree trunks preserved in bogs, beams excavated from archaeological digs, even large pieces of charcoal found in the firepits of cave dwellers. I explained that it was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle; sometimes we found many pieces that fit with one another, but we didn’t know where they belonged until we found the piece that connected them to our main chronology. Over time we filled in the gaps, until our unbroken record of growth rings became five thousand years long, then seven thousand years. I told them how thrilling it was to examine a piece of wood and know that the tree it came from was felled eight thousand years before the present.
But even that thrill can’t compare to that inspired by examining samples of wood a few centuries older. Because in those tree trunks, there’s a point at which the growth rings stop. Counting back from the present, the oldest growth ring was formed eight thousand nine hundred and twelve years ago. There are no growth rings before that, I told them, because that is the year you created the world, Lord. In the center of every tree of that era is a circle of perfectly clear and homogeneous wood, and the diameter of that ringless area indicates the size of the tree at the moment of creation. Those are primordial trees, created directly by your hand rather than grown from seedlings.