My colleague Ian Crawford and I recently made a bet — a little bet with potentially big consequences.
In a paper recently published in Nature Astronomy, Ian — a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the University of London — discussed possible solutions to the Fermi paradox, also commonly referred to as the “Great Silence.” This refers to the mismatch between the widely held expectation that advanced technological life should be common in the Universe and the apparent lack of evidence to support that belief. The discovery in this century of thousands of planets beyond our Solar System, along with recent interest by NASA and others in investigating Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), make a re-analysis of the Fermi paradox timely.
Our conclusion is that advanced extraterrestrial intelligent life (ETI) is either (1) extremely rare or non-existent in our galaxy or (2) these civilizations are deliberately hiding from us. No other possibility seems very likely. While Ian tends to favor the first explanation, I lean toward the second one. We settled on a wager, a bottle of whiskey, on whether convincing evidence for technological life elsewhere in the Universe will be found within the next 15 years.
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