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Summary (Aug 09, 2003): Physicist Enrico Fermi proposed informally a question that became to be known as Fermi's Paradox: If there is intelligent life out there, why haven't we found it yet? SETI astronomer, Seth Shostak, considers the relevant hugeness of the universe and the time it might take to colonize it--even by an very advanced civilization.
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Fermi's Paradox By Seth Shostak, Astronomer, Project Phoenix
Is there obvious proof that we could be alone in the Galaxy?
 | Seth Shostak.
Credit: SETI Institute |
Enrico Fermi thought so - and he was a pretty smart guy. Might he have been right?
It's been a hundred years since Fermi, an icon of physics, was born (and nearly a half-century since he died). He's best remembered for building a working atomic reactor in a squash court. But in 1950, Fermi made a seemingly innocuous lunchtime remark that has caught and held the attention of every SETI researcher since. (How many luncheon quips have you made with similar consequence?)
The remark came while Fermi was discussing with his mealtime mates the possibility that many sophisticated societies populate the Galaxy. They thought it reasonable to assume that we have a lot of cosmic company. But somewhere between one sentence and the next, Fermi's supple brain realized that if this was true, it implied something profound. If there are really a lot of alien societies, then some of them might have spread out.
Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire.
Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.
So what Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn't see any clear indication that they're out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"
 | | The Earth is our only example of planetary life. This makes it difficult to unravel what is universal and what is accidental about the nature and history of life. |
This sounds a bit silly at first. The fact that aliens don't seem to be walking our planet apparently implies that there are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy. Many researchers consider this to be a radical conclusion to draw from such a simple observation.
Surely there is a straightforward explanation for what has become known as the Fermi Paradox. There must be some way to account for our apparent loneliness in a galaxy that we assume is filled with other clever beings.
A lot of folks have given this thought. The first thing they note is that the Fermi Paradox is a remarkably strong argument. You can quibble about the speed of alien spacecraft, and whether they can move at 1 percent of the speed of light or 10 percent of the speed of light. It doesn't matter. You can argue about how long it would take for a new star colony to spawn colonies of its own. It still doesn't matter,
Any halfway reasonable assumption about how fast colonization could take place still ends up with time scales that are profoundly shorter than the age of the Galaxy. It's like having a heated discussion about whether Spanish ships of the 16th century could heave along at two knots or twenty. Either way they could speedily colonize the Americas.
Consequently, scientists in and out of the SETI community have conjured up other arguments to deal with the conflict between the idea that aliens should be everywhere and our failure (so far) to find them. In the 1980s, dozens of papers were published to address the Fermi Paradox. They considered technical and sociological arguments for why the aliens weren't hanging out nearby. Some even insisted that there was no paradox at all: the reason we don't see evidence of extraterrestrials is because there aren't any.
Related Web Pages The Envelope of Life, Please
SETI Institute
What is the Fermi paradox? If there is intelligent life out there, why haven't we found it yet?
Note: Phoenix
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Re: Fermi's Paradox
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by Astrian on Mar 13, 2005 - 03:00 AM
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Darwin teaches that our organisms are largely contingent – they are such as they are, but could be greatly different if a free play of an immense number of factors fell differently.
How greatly? One could assume that if a certain lump of cosmic debris did not hit Earth some fifty-odd million years ago, this text would be written by an intelligent saurian. His species would have different Gods and different philosophers. Would it have different mathematics and a different picture of the Universe? Are intelligent species sufficiently diverse to explain Fermi’s paradox? Are we living in a densely populated Universe but separate inhabitants perceive so differently that they cannot perceive each other?
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