[Verse 1] Fermi asked the question: Where is everyone? A universe this old Should be crawling with someone So SETI raised antennas Turned them toward the sky Sifted through the static For a pattern made by minds [Pre-Chorus] We listened by the second We measured by the year We searched on human timescales For something we could hear [Chorus] At the scale of the universe You are already dead Mountains rise and oceans fall Before a word is said Whole species bloom and disappear Before the message ends At the scale of the universe You are already dead [Verse 2] But maybe they can see us Maybe they already know A living world in starlight Long before our radios A species barely waking Counting lifetimes like they're long Calling, "Is there anybody?" In the middle of their song [Rapid Spoken Verse — continuous beat, quick delivery] Imagine a mind that doesn't die A million years behind its eyes Stars move Worlds change Species come and go Still the mind persists Still the sentence grows Hello takes a thousand years To us, impossibly slow To them, barely begun One year looks like noise A lifetime It's just noise A civilization Extinct within a syllable [Bridge — rhythmic, no slowdown] Maybe that's the filter Maybe that's the gate Not a weapon Not a border You have to outlive the wait But someday we stop dying Someday memory survives Thought no longer measured By the length of human lives [Build — quick, continuous electronic progression] A century becomes a moment A millennium, a beat The static starts resolving When our memory runs deep Maybe every mind that makes it Eventually becomes Something built for deep time Something that outlives its sun [Final Chorus — expansive melodic vocals] At the scale of the universe We are already dead Born between two letters Gone before the next is read But if the mind survives us If the signal carries through One day we may hear the whole sentence In the noise we knew [Rhythmic Spoken Tag — immediate, no slowdown] Where is everybody? Maybe they've been talking. We were just too brief to hear it. But not forever.
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