Around 1.3 billion years ago, a vast distance from where you are sitting, two massive black holes completed their eons-long spiral tango and merged into a blacker (is that possible?) hole. A massive event; a collision of pure darkness. But one that no one could have heard in the vacuum of space, were anyone actually there to witness the cataclysm. Outward streamed light-speed, invisible waves, on an interminable journey through the cosmos. Ripples in spacetime, perhaps felt by very occasional motes suspended parsecs apart in the emptiness. An occasional silent molecular quivering.
Around 1.3 million years ago, perhaps directly next to where you are sitting right now, in a small, warm pond of salty water that to them was an entire universe, some single-celled living beings – eukaryotes like you and I – were quietly living their short lives, as had multitudes of ancestors, and ancestors of ancestors, before them.
At some point far earlier, a billion or more years prior, cyanobacteria had begun to use light energy as plants do today, filling the atmosphere with oxygen in the process. That changed everything. The little eukaryotes swimming in their universe-pond were the result of that toxic-yet-life-giving shift. But they’d never know it. Other than the sounds of waves and wind, our earth was as silent as space.
Life. Death. Life. Death. Life. Death. Life.
A minuscule bit more life than death.
An occasional genetic ripple in the silence, quivering through subsequent eons.
An occasional asteroidal punctuation mark.
Time moved forward, as it always has.
One-point-three-billion rotations of our earth around the sun.
Silence in space.
Mostly silence on earth.
Mostly unwitnessed…
…until yesterday, when the great-great-great-great(…) grandchildren of those ancient silent silt-dwelling cells heard the silent sound of the distant cosmic collision, and learned something new about their limitless universe.