Wang Miao asks Ye Wenjie why the Red Coast Project received such extreme secrecy when SETI was once considered marginal research. Ye says the project’s leaders had correctly foreseen a danger that later scholars also identified: contact with extraterrestrial intelligence would not unite humanity, but deepen divisions within human society. Wang reflects on the theory of “contact as symbol,” which argues that even the mere confirmation of alien intelligence could be politically explosive, especially if one nation or faction controlled that information.

The conversation then turns to whether Red Coast could ever have succeeded. Wang suggests it is still too early to know, but Ye argues that Red Coast’s transmissions were far too weak to matter on a cosmic scale. Using Kardashev’s civilization scale, she explains that Earth is not even a full Type I civilization, while a detectable broadcast would require energy on the scale of a star. Because Red Coast listened for twenty years without hearing anything, Ye says the people who worked there gradually came to feel that Earth might be the only world with intelligent life, even if that can never be proven.

Ye next describes Red Coast’s gradual decline rather than a sudden end. In the early 1980s, the base received upgrades that improved its automated transmission and monitoring systems, but at the same time leaders lost interest in SETI and reduced the base’s security level. Administrative control of its scientific work shifted toward the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Red Coast increasingly took on non-SETI research, including radio astronomy and solar electromagnetic studies. These projects gave the base some practical value after its original mission lost support.

Ye credits Commissar Lei with helping Red Coast survive during this transition. Although Lei had political motives and wanted to return to scientific work, his efforts brought in outside research that delayed the base’s collapse. Wang suspects Lei benefited from Ye’s work, but Ye answers that without him Red Coast would have closed even sooner. After the military largely abandoned the site and the Academy could no longer fund it, the base was finally shut down.

The narration notes what Wang already learned elsewhere about Ye’s life at Red Coast: she married Yang Weining, later lost both Yang and Lei in an accident, gave birth to Yang Dong after her husband’s death, and eventually left Radar Peak after the base was decommissioned to teach at Tsinghua. Returning to the present conversation, Ye reflects on the emotional effect of years spent listening to the universe’s constant, lifeless noise. That silence made her feel both that life was infinitely precious and that humanity was utterly insignificant. Moved by her sorrow, Wang offers to visit the ruins of Red Coast with her someday, but Ye declines gently, speaking as an aging woman who now lives one day at a time and is still burdened by thoughts of her daughter.