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Have you ever heard of the Fermi Paradox? Scratch that, have you ever heard of Enrico Fermi? Fermi was a brilliant physicist who built an atomic reactor in a squash court. Seriously, the dude was freaking smart. So smart, in fact, that a simple conversation he had over lunch in 1950 has dominated the mind of every scientist at the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for decades since.
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While pondering the question of how many sophisticated extraterrestrial societies populated the galaxy over what we assume was a perfectly done meal, Fermi suddenly had a simple, but profound question – “where is everybody?”
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After all, there an estimated 500 quintillion (500 billion billion) sun-like stars in the universe, which in turn necessitates that there are 100 billion billion earth-like planets out there. The very helpful people at Wait, But Why have explained the necessary math.
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In any event, with all these earth-like planets, there must be “10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe. In our humble Milky Way galaxy, in fact, “there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations.”
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That sounds like a lot except, if you think about it, the stars in our night sky consist of what amounts to a pinprick in the galaxy. Which begs the question – where is everybody?
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Fermi and his colleagues had a couple of explanations for this fact:
- There’s nobody else out there (we’re alone!!!)
- There’s somebody out there, but for many reasons, we haven’t yet seen them.
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