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Fermi's Paradox: Are We Alone?



Does Fermi's paradox make a case for the proposition that we are in fact alone, that there are no other intelligences in the universe?

I attended Enrico Fermi High School in a suburban town where the high school got that name because there were a lot of Italian-Americans in town, and this seemed to some politician a nice sop to them.

The story is that Fermi originally raised the issue now called his "paradox" in a conversation with other physicists in 1950, at a time when there were lots of reports of flying saucer sightings in the newspapers. The smart people around the lunch table, Manhattan Project veterans all of them, believed intelligent life elsewhere was probable, though they disbelieved in the idea that the smudgy photographs supposedly showing "saucers" in the air had anything to do with it.

The conversation had moved on to other subjects, but Fermi brought it back to that one, blurting out after a period of meditative silence: "but then where is everybody?"

If you believe that we are not unique, then you are right to wonder why we haven't been contacted.

The paradox has gotten sharper over the decades. Heck, we've had television broadcasts since around the time of that conversation. Somebody in outer space 70 light years away may be enjoying "I Love Lucy" right now.  If somebody 35 light years away received those signals in 1985 and replied immediately we'd be receiving that response now.

Where, indeed, IS everybody?

See my comment on the movie AD ASTRA last week.
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