Alien
Solar Storms
It's lonely out there.
For nearly two hundred and fifty years, mankind has searched for sentience elsewhere. Massive arrays of sensors cover nearly a thousand cubic light-years of space, stretching from Alpha Centauri, to Barnard's Star, to Wolf 359... Others are on their way to more distant stars, such as Tau Ceti, Sirius, and Procyon.
Life exists elsewhere, this much is certain - organic compounds and microbes hide in their little niches on countless rocks. Both Alpha Centauri A and Tau Ceti were once host to near-Earthlike worlds, now scorched and blasted, respectively.
But the radios are silent. Only the occasional pulse of a neutron star or similar cosmic event generates any notice. If sentience exists elsewhere in the Universe, it is very, very far away.
Except, some will tell you, it's been right here all along.
Few doubt the existence of the mobius patterns. Strange waveforms released into our Universe due to various experiments into faster-than-light travel, somehow able to exist within, or upon, our Universe, they are living music.
They are Power.
Controlled and bred, they can reverse entropy. Focused, they can create something out of 'nothing', their songs working magic in the mythical sense.
Rumor has it, every living being has their own song.
Rumor has it, a few have found them.
Alien Civilizations
Solar Storms does not rule out aliens per se, however, there will not be a cacophony all residing in the Milky Way. The overwhelmingly vast majority of civilizations encountered will be either dead or primitive, but if another does exist, it is likely significantly more advanced than Earth, and already underway.