Name                    
 Parent Directory

	

The Fermi Paradox

[unfinished] Wikipedia:

The Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens.
In an informal conversation, Fermi noted no convincing evidence of this, leading him to ask, “Where is everybody?”
There have been many attempts to explain the Fermi paradox, primarily either suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial life is extremely rare or proposing reasons that such civilizations have not contacted or visited Earth.


The most common explanations are:

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
Periodic extinction by natural events



Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.
(a variation on Clarke’s third law)

On the cosmic timescale, humans have been emitting radio waves for an incredibly short time.

The assumption that an advanced society will continue to emit radio waves and not find more efficient (and to us, invisible) means of communication is childlike.

It’s like a tribe in a rainforest saying “we’ve looked everywhere for canoes and haven’t seen any so we must be alone in the universe”.

©Andrew Swift · top · more · contact