In 2029, a small non-profit founded by technology entrepreneurs plans to launch a ten-centimeter cube into the cosmos on an 80,000-year journey toward Alpha Centauri — not to arrive, but to depart. The mission, called Fermi Explorer, is less a scientific endeavor than a philosophical one: a response to the ancient silence of the universe and the question of whether intelligent life is capable of reaching beyond its home star. No one living will see its completion, and perhaps that is precisely the point — that the meaning of the act resides entirely in the willingness to begin.