The year is 1950. Physicist Enrico Fermi is eating lunch with a few colleagues outside Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His shirt ripples in a hot desert wind.
He looks up at the sky and reportedly says, “Where is everybody?”
He is talking about space aliens. Known as the Fermi paradox, the question still hasn’t been answered. Despite numerous anecdotal reports, there is no convincing evidence of alien life or technology within our solar system (or, for that matter, in the cosmos at large).
The absence of evidence for aliens could be because they don’t exist or because our sampling depth is inadequate to detect them—a bit like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater. Sampling depth refers to how thoroughly and keenly we can conduct a search. Fermi’s question is valuable because it narrows the possibilities down to two: either aliens are not present near Earth, or our current search methods are insufficient.
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