Fermi Paradox: Where Are the Aliens?

By Elizabeth Howell April 27, 2018

The Fermi Paradox seeks to answer the question of where the aliens are. Given that our star and Earth are part of a young planetary system compared to the rest of the universe - and that interstellar travel might be fairly easy to achieve - the theory says that Earth should have been visited by aliens already.

As the story goes, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, most famous for creating the first nuclear reactor, came up with the theory with a casual lunchtime remark in 1950. The implications, however, have had extraterrestrial researchers scratching their heads in the decades since.

"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," the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, said on its website. "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."

Fermi reportedly made the initial remark, but he died in 1954. Publication fell to other people, such as Michael Hart, who wrote an article titled "An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth" in the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Quarterly Journal in 1975. (Some say this is the first such paper to explore the Fermi paradox, although this claim is a bit hard to prove.)

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Answer the questions

1. Do you believe there might be life in other parts of the universe?
2. Do you have any idea of how many galaxies and planets there are?
3. If there was life somewhere else, would we be able to find it?
4. What does the expansion of the universe have to do with it?
5. What is the Kardashev scale?
6. Can you explain the Fermi paradox?

Describe the video. Do you agree/disagree with it? Why/whay not?

Video credits: Kurzgesagt-in a Nutshell