What the heck is the Fermi Paradox?

A big thanks to DeborahWalker7 for this subject.

The Fermi paradox goes back a ways, to the 1950’s when Enrico Fermi, a brilliant physicist working with Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York at the Los Alamos Laboratory came up with the idea. The paradox involves the reconciliation of the predicted number of intelligent civilizations out there in our big galaxy and the fact that we haven’t made contact yet.

Actually, this idea should be more important now that astronomers have detected lots of Earth-like planets around stars like our sun.

My answer to this is that the estimate of intelligent civilizations is wrong or these civilizations don’t want to spend the assets to travel here. Maybe the reason is that they have a large debt like we do and they need the assets to solve problems on their planet, or that they’re too busy fighting among themselves like us.

Seriously, a better answer is that the Earth is orbiting a very ordinary dwarf star out on the boondocks of the galaxy. Who even knows that we exist? If you’ve seen the picture that a NASA probe took of the Earth out by Saturn you realize how insignificant we are in the universe. Our little Earth is a tiny blue dot in the vastness of space. Those aliens better have good eyesight or very powerful telescopes.

Some would argue that we’ve been sending out radio and TV signals for approximately eighty years. Why haven’t we received a reply? First of all, it’s only been eighty or ninety years and radio signals obey the same speed limit as light. In other words, a star system with an intelligent species would have to be within forty light years to have received a signal and sent it back in the eighty-year timeframe. That’s not all that far away, and even if they just send out spurious signals like we do, their solar system would have to be within the eighty light year limit. Any further away and the signal hasn’t gotten here yet or has fallen on deaf ears (radio telescopes).

SETI or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been listening for alien signals with radio telescopes since 1960 and has only detected one interesting signal that has been deemed the ‘Wow’ signal from the Sagittarius constellation on August 15, 1977. Unfortunately, they never detected it again despite many tries.

The first popular estimate of the number of intelligent civilizations out there was made using the now famous Drake equation. This equation states that the number of civilizations N is equal to the average rate of star formation times the fraction of those stars that have planets times the average number of planets that can support life times the fraction of planets that support life that would develop life times the fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life times the fraction of civilizations that develop technology time the length of time that these civilizations release detectable signals to space.

As you might conclude from this, many of these factors are guesses that scientists call estimates. There have been modifications made to this equation. The original result was 20 civilizations minimum and 50 million maximum. That’s a big range, and it only got worse when the modifications are added. The range went from 2 to 280 million. Let’s face it; these estimates are simply conjecture not hard data.

As far as I’m concerned, the Fermi paradox is bogus because modern technology isn’t developed well enough to determine if other civilizations are out there. Just because they haven’t sent back a signal is no proof that they don’t exist, and if you believe the UFO enthusiasts, we’ve been visited by a hoard of aliens. Come on, ET, we’ll let you phone home, but it’ll be a long distance charge.

Thanks for reading.