Peter
If there were no internet,
no telegraph, no telephone—
yet you still wished to reach across the planet,
to connect with everyone upon it…
what would you rely on?
Today, allow me to speak of a treasure.
A phenomenon that exists on this Earth,
still in use across many fields.
It is called shortwave.
One of the electromagnetic waves.
Vibrating between three and thirty million times each second.
Radio waves are used to carry information.
From sender to receiver, a one-way ticket.
Shortwave, too, has served this role:
international broadcasting,
ship and aircraft communication,
and, of course, military use.
Yet shortwave carries a quality
no other band quite possesses.
It bounces.
Between the Earth’s surface and the sky—
more precisely, the ionosphere,
a plasma layer encircling our planet.
By such leaps it can travel
three, sometimes four thousand kilometers.
In favorable conditions, more than eight.
Far enough to reach the other side of the world.
Not without flaws.
It is noisy.
Unstable.
Prone to the whims of its environment.
And yet—
shortwave still moves,
unseen, unheard, around this Earth.
Anonymous.
Persistent.
In that persistence,
in that history,
we found a strange sympathy.
From it we drew a new possibility.
Until the day when signal and humanity both fall silent,
this story will go on.