Silence. Complete, unnerving silence. Despite decades of searches for any form of life, intelligent or otherwise, out there in the cosmos, the Universe has but one message for us: No one is answering.

But that solitude is not a curse. The great expanse of the empty heavens above us does not carry with it an impossible burden of loneliness. It begets a freedom—a freedom to explore, to be curious, to wonder, to expand.

The Universe is ours for the taking.