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Western Slope Skies - The Fermi Paradox

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NASA.gov
If Earth is truly the only place with advanced life in the universe, then Earth must be exceedingly rare, in fact 1 in 10 billion trillion.

What do piano tuners and aliens from a galactic civilization have in common? Enrico Fermi, of course! Fermi was a Nobel Prize winning physicist famous for quickly estimating answers to questions, like how many heart beats are there in a lifetime, or how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? These types of questions are now called Fermi questions. Perhaps the most famous Fermi question is the Drake equation, which asks how many advanced civilizations exist in our galaxy.

One day in 1950 Fermi was talking with colleagues about a cartoon that jokingly blamed a bunch of missing trash cans on UFO’s. Being physicists, they talked about the possibilities of interstellar travel. Later at lunch Fermi suddenly blurts out ‘So, where is everybody?’ In his head, Fermi had estimated that even if an advanced civilization could travel between the stars at just a fraction of the speed of light, they could potentially hop from star system to star system and within a few hundred thousand years populate the galaxy. Given that there are hundreds of billions of stars with potential planets to seed such civilizations, and billions of years of time with which these civilizations could develop and spread, he supposed that the galaxy should be absolutely teeming with civilizations. Yet, there is no convincing evidence of any of these civilizations. Hence, the so-called Fermi Paradox, simply stated as, ‘Where is everybody?’

Many possible solutions have been proposed, in fact there is a book called 75 solutions to the Fermi Paradox by Stephen Webb. Most of them can be put into three broad categories: 1) We are alone. Aliens don’t exist., 2) Advanced civilizations do exist, but they have not colonized the galaxy, and 3) Galactic civilizations exist, but they have not revealed their existence to us.

1: We are alone. Scientists Frank and Sullivan calculated that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable planets in the universe, which are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been done in which advanced life could have developed. This makes it very hard to believe Earth is the only one.

2: Aliens exist, but a galactic civilization does not. This solution is quite concerning. Perhaps aliens advance technologically, but die off before becoming interstellar travelers. Or, perhaps we have been visited by an advanced civilization, but only hundreds of millions of years ago because civilizations don’t last forever.

My personal favorite is 3), in particular the Zoo hypothesis. Perhaps a galactic civilization exists, but is deliberately leaving us alone for now, allowing us to advance on our own, similar to how we humans try to avoid contact with indigenous tribes in the Amazon to preserve their culture.

Some scientists say there is no Fermi Paradox. We simply have not been looking hard enough for evidence of aliens. It’s like collecting a hot tub’s worth of ocean water, seeing no fish, and then concluding that there are no fish in the ocean. If we keep looking and exploring, perhaps one day soon we will at least know whether or not we are truly alone.

Music written and produced by Kenny Mihelich (pronounced ma-HELL-itch).  Western Slope Skies is produced by the Colorado Mesa University Astronomy Club, the Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition, and KVNF Community Radio. This feature was written and voiced by Catherine Whiting.