The silent planet

I have gazed my whole life at the stars that hang above us. And for as long as I have gazed, I hve wandered, if somewhere out there, somebody was gazing back.
There are anywhere from two hundred billion to four hundred billion stars in our milky way galaxy. Each capable of supporting life. There are billions of other galaxy’s with even more stars. Is it so unreasonable then, to suggest that life exists beyond our own planet?
When I say life, I don’t mean the little grey spacemen that abduct farmers, im talking about life in general. Even a single trace of bacteria.
It is with this in mind, I set up an organisation dedicated to the search for alien life. We scan the sky with our radio telescopes, listening to the stars, hoping that somewhere, someone else is talking.
People don’t understand. They say its nonsense, they say its not worth the time. But the entire planet would, in one moment, stop complaining, and start listening as well.
The day the entire planet stood still and listened to the stars. The day we received a signal. We moved out receivers away from the point of the signal, and moved it back. It was still there, indicating it was not merely a satellite. I was so exited. We had discovered life, and we were working on a way to de-code the signal.
We were working on it for three months when suddenly, the signal died. We checked all our equipment, we checked all our coordinates. Everything was in order.

The space telescope was now in position. It has been 12 years since we received the signal, and lost it. Now we hope to get a glimpse at the planet itself, from the telescope we have outside our solar system. In particular, we are going to look at the spectral pattern of light reflecting through the atmosphere, to determine its chemical makeup.
The first glimpse of the planet took my breath away. It was a beautiful globe of blue, much like out own. What had silenced this world?
The light from its sun danced on the atmosphere, elegant and alluring, yet when fed back to our computers, revealed a devastating secret.
The entire planet was covered in radioactive activity. Heavier in some areas than others. No living organism existed.
An entire civilisation, wiped out in the blink of an eye. By themselves.

It was unmistakeably the cause of atomic warfare. An entire planet cried out to the stars, and died. Billions of voices silenced in a day.
And now I gaze out at the stars, the brilliant specks that light up the night, but I hope nobody is watching us. I hope they are watching themselves. I hope they saw what happened and learned a valuable lesson about the fragility of life. It was a lesson learned to late for the silenced planet, which now we know from the decoded signal, was once called Earth.