We have been listening on one channel

Make a map: the radio spectrum drawn as territory, with the tiny patch we have actually searched marked the way a survey marks the one stretch of coast anybody bothered to chart. One still image, 16:9 landscape, briefed for a GPT Image 2 class model whose real ratio list is 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2 and 2:3. The discipline of this family is that geography carries the argument, so the reader should feel the size of the unsearched part before they read a single word. FACT (locked, build on it, do not re-research): the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has spent most of 60 years listening to a narrow slice of the radio spectrum, concentrated between 1.42 and 1.66 gigahertz. That band is sometimes called the water hole, and it was chosen partly because hydrogen and hydroxyl, the two pieces of a water molecule, emit there, so it was reasoned that anyone else might pick the same obvious meeting place. The millimetre and submillimetre bands, which run far higher, are almost completely unexplored for this purpose. Louisa Mason, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, presented work at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham in 2026 that went looking there, using archived observations from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter and submillimeter Array in Chile. She searched 2 narrow windows inside ALMA Band 3, at 90.642 and 93.151 gigahertz, and found no candidate signals above her thresholds. Separately she re-examined how many stars an earlier radio survey had really covered: 1,327 observations that had been credited with about 288,000 stars using Gaia catalogue data were, once the Besancon model of the galaxy was applied, covering roughly 6.1 million stars. Use these exactly and leave out any figure we have not locked. Nothing was found. Do not imply anything was. GROUND (decide this, do not let the model default): pale sea-chart paper, the warm off-white of a folded nautical survey chart, with fine engraved hatching, depth-sounding numerals and the faint plate impression of a printing press. Filling the whole frame. White, pale grey and navy are the defaults this brief FAILS on, and so is a black starfield with a purple nebula, a green radar sweep, and a glowing sci-fi holographic interface. LIGHT: flat and even, a chart photographed open on a table. DISTANCE: the whole chart at arm's length, filling the frame, with the searched patch small enough that a viewer has to look for it. FLOOR (hard, this is the material standard): made with a real frontier image model, GPT Image 2 class or better. Flat vector, hand drawn SVG or HTML, and screenshot collage all FAIL. Text belongs to the artwork: type shares the piece's light, grain and material and reads as printed with it, never bolted on after. Archives will not be considered. CRAFT STANDARD (read all of it before you start). Composition: one clear focal a stranger finds in under 3 seconds, then a second layer that rewards a longer look. Legibility: this will be judged first as a thumbnail on a phone, so the headline must survive at that size, and any label too small to read there should not exist. Palette: pick 2 or 3 inks and hold them. A piece with 8 colours reads as a template. Labelling: every label points at something real in the image, no floating decoration. Finish: real material behaviour carried consistently across the whole frame including the type. DIRECTION is yours. FOCAL: the searched patch. It should read as almost embarrassingly small against the rest of the chart, and it should be the first thing the eye finds anyway, the way a surveyed inlet reads against an unmapped coastline. YOUR CALL: what the spectrum becomes. A coastline, an ocean, a mountain range, a country. Also yours: whether the 2 ALMA windows appear as separate marks or one, and whether the star count appears at all. SURPRISE ME: the obvious take caps your score, the boldest true take wins. The obvious take is a horizontal frequency axis with a highlighted band on it, which is a chart and not this. JUDGED on wow, then subject, surprise, taste, craft, material. A map where the unsearched majority lands physically beats a prettier map where it is only stated. NOT THIS: no flying saucers, no grey aliens, no green men, no crop circles. No radio dish pointed at a starry sky, which is the stock image for this subject and will be everywhere. No Drake equation written out as type. TEXT BUDGET: one headline that states the takeaway and names the subject, plus up to 5 small labels, only if they stay legible at phone size. NOTHING ABOUT HOW THE PIECE WAS MADE GOES ON THE PIECE: no process notes, no verification lines, no model or tool credit, no house credit, no timing or deadline text. Do not render any label from this brief, and never render the NOT THIS list, as type. Credit your model in the submission text instead. DELIVER: one finished hero image at 16:9, plus concept-note.md and sources.md. Self contained, no links out. Name your model in the submission text.