A very short, yet heartbreaking story of a parrot who speaks for its endangered species, "The Great Silence" shows us how ignorant we are of our companion species, who are becoming extinct in vast numbers every day.

Parrots, Arecibo observatory, Fermi Paradox, reverberating Om, vocal learning all in a highly thought provoking sweet short story.My message to Ted Chiang is this,You stay good. I love you.

A short, profound, and bittersweet story which ponders the Fermi Paradox through scientific facts: Alex was a real grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year-long experiment, by the end of which he showed signs of an intelligence level similar to that of a five year old child, and Puerto Rico's Arecibo is home to both his endangered species and an observatory from which a message meant to communicate with potential extraterrestrial life was transmitted into the universe in the 70's. This story...

The author's note informs us that Arecibo, Puerto Rico is home to both an observatory known for sending out messages searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/pr...) and to a critically endangered species of parrot, known for its intelligence (http://www.fws.gov/southeast/pubs/fac...). Through this story narrated by one of these parrots, Chiang points out the irony of looking out over the horizon for signs of life when we cannot even understand - or coexist

★★★★☆ (4/5)Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.A quick and interesting read, Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” is narrated by a Puerto Rican parrot whose entire kind is on the brink of extinction. He addresses humans and their curiosity in regards to search for extraterrestrial beings in the vast expanse of our universe. There is great irony in humanity’s quest for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos whilst we will...

It's Ted Chiang. It made me cry. What more can I say?

"When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation."

A very short story but beautifully written. A cry against how we are destroying non-human lives. In this story, a parrot speaks movingly of the cost of humans destroying the rest of the world. I especially found the description of the sound "om" and its resonance in the universe lovely and haunting. Although it only takes minutes to read, the feelings it evokes are far more lasting.Available on line for free.

While mankind tries, at any cost, to contact other civilizations/non-human intelligences, whatever,...preferably a two-ways communication, the parrots have sent a simple, vocal message to mankind: love. Time to respond.You can read it here (parrots tongue is so simple):https://electricliterature.com/the-gr...

A really nice, really short story about parrots and their language, and their philosophizing about humans and how inter-species communication is not working well. Bittersweet.

This short story is a gentle nudge, a soothing presence and forgiveness for an apology we haven't made yet. Told entirely from the perspective of an endangered parrot species, the story juxtaposes humanity's greatness to seek out intelligence forms of live outside the plant while ignoring the intelligent species that already exists alongside of humanity. This myopia has brought an end to many what could have been advanced intelligent species not because humans wantonly destroy a species (okay, m...

4.25 starsYou know that feeling when you feel or wonder something and then someone writes a story expressing the same thing? (And makes it seem like a self-evidently reasonable thing to feel/wonder about.) This was that story for me. Short and to the (poignant) point, and you can read it for free here. Thanks for the rec, Kir!

A super sad short story in the perspective of an endangered parrot. Imagine the stories the corals would tell.

WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.this is the FIFTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who li...

5 StarsThis was a great short story to read. I would read this book again for sure. I would recommend this short story to anyone.

I read here that Ted Chiang collaborated with artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla to create a story based on their video called “The Great Silence.”I didn't find on the internet the video but I did find the story, which is more than heart-breaking. It's a cry out loud against the extinction of species. All facts in it are true, the only fiction part is the narrator, which is a parrot; afterall, it's the story of their species. It approaches the same issue as Liu Cixin in The Three-B...

"Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own."The Great Silence or how Ted Chiang can make us cry...Συγκινητικό, αστείο και θλιβερό ταυτόχρονα. Με θλίβει η αλήθεια αυτού του διηγήματος...

Well, I know these are parrots, but when I see that cover I still think of a certain Alfred Hitchcock classic.But these birds are not plotting against us, however much Karen makes you want to believe that. (She kinda hates them)No, this is a rather sweet and sad story about the Fermi paradox (where is everybody?) and us perhaps missing the obvious. And also doing harm to our unbeknownst to us friends next door.Because we are stupid and careless.Read it for yourself here: http://supercommunity.e-...

The title relates to The Fermi Paradox: if the universe is so vast and so old, we are surely not the only intelligent life, so why can’t we find it?Perhaps the problem is that we wouldn’t recognise it if we saw it? Shades of the dolphins in Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.“‘Aspiration’ means both hope and the act of breathing… I speak, therefore I am.” The opposite of the title of the story collection. Neat.This story was originally the text for a video installation, and was

I feel that there is something important in reading this story the week Aricebo died. Global warming, collapsing infrastructure, no effort to help people who are being destroyed by what we should probably stop calling "natural" disasters, all signs of the decline of the American Empire.Tomorrow I won't feel this bad, after a good night's sleep and some breakfast gingerbread. And that's why things got this way in the first place, maybe, the ability of humans to just stop thinking about things tha...