Enrico Fermi's lunchtime question at wartime Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?" has been both a gift and a problem to scientists ever since. Known as "Fermi's Paradox," it simply asks, why, since life on Earth is ubiquitous and developed very early in Earth's history, and the galaxy is very old and not overly large, aren't there intelligent, advanced extraterrestrials everywhere? In particular, why can't we detect any, and why haven't any (obvious) aliens visited us?
There have been a few dozen proposed explanations of Fermi's Paradox, in which, as is the human way, mankind is placed at the center of the picture. It's about what we see, how we evolved to this technological state, what we have or haven't heard from space.
Vojin Rakić, a Serbian philosopher, calls these anthropocentric solutions, because they put humans at the center of the picture. In a paper that studies the existing proposals for solving the paradox, he puts forth a new, possible explanation: Alien life might be unobservable to the senses humans have developed, or even live in part of the wider universe we don't know of or can' t yet detect and observe.
His epistemological approach discards the role of man in the nature of the universe and the search for life. A scholar from the Center for the Study of Bioethics at the University of Belgrade, Rakić's work has been published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
The anthropogenic point of view was summarized early by the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras, who, in the 5th century B.C., wrote, "Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not."
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