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SPACE: Where Is Everybody?

Out There - Mike Wall

In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi — who led the team that created the first-ever nuclear reactor, the inadequately named Chicago Pile-1 — and a few of his colleagues were discussing UFOs during their lunch break. The conversation prompted Fermi to ask his companions, “Where is everybody?” [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens] Fermi meant that the lack of visits by ET is distinctly odd. The Milky Way harbors hundreds of billions of stars and is about 13 billion years old, so there has been plenty of time and opportunity for alien civilizations to rise and spread throughout the … Read more

For Writers: The Fermi Paradox

Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Jim Comer: Has anyone seen Geoffrey Landis’ intriguing answer to the Fermi Paradox? If even a very small fraction of the hundred billion stars in the galaxy are home to technological civilizations which colonize over interstellar distances, the entire galaxy should be completely colonized in a few million years. The absence of such extraterrestrial civilizations visiting Earth is the Fermi Paradox. You can find Landis’s arguments here. In a nutshell, though, why haven’t we found noisy galactic neighbors? Join the chat