Science Mysteries Explained Book entry (excerpt)
If there really were aliens on other planets, wouldn’t we have met them by now?
We’re discovering more and more Earth-sized planets, but we still haven’t found any evidence of other intelligent life. Where are the aliens? Are we really alone in the galaxy?
The opening of the entry. Excerpt.
The case of the missing aliens has a name: the Fermi Paradox. An Italian physicist named Enrico Fermi came up with it in 1950. He said, since the galaxy is so big and so old, there must be other Earth-like planets that could have evolved life millions of years before us. Even if faster-than-light travel is impossible, over millions of years a civilization could easily colonize the whole galaxy. So where’s the evidence of that? One of the problems with answering this question is that humans are pretty bad judges of scale. We think a century is more than a lifetime. We take one quick glance at the sky and say: “Nope, can’t see any aliens, must be no aliens.”
The Fermi Paradox assumes that since we can’t find evidence of aliens really easily, there must be no aliens. It doesn’t take into account the fact we really haven’t been looking for very long, or very far.
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