Silence, silence was the epithet for everyone present.
David had interpreted the purpose of the alien signal from a wholly new perspective, and although most of it was speculative, it already fit together quite perfectly.
After all, no one would naively think that aliens were merely concerned about humanity, nurturing its development like a mother—if that were true, there should have been several miracles throughout history.
David's energy threat theory was remarkably concise and fitted very well with the realities of interstellar communication and the malevolent "human" nature assumption.
But this conjecture was too terrifying for anyone to dare believe it.
From a human perspective, mastering nuclear bombs signifies a breakthrough in micro-science, which in the universe should at least represent a certain "threshold."
And what aliens might do to humans who had already crossed this threshold... was simply unimaginable.
