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So, to sum up: current conservative estimates are for 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the Milky way, most of them circling red dwarves but 2 billion or so circling yellow dwarves.

Think about that: 40 billion potential Earths circling red dwarves, 2 billion circling Sol-type stars. And that’s based on just a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way – it’s probably twice that number, maybe three times. And most of those stars are much older than Sol – up to 4 billion years older – giving life on them hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion more years to develop. (Consider that the earliest Australopithicus appeared just 4 million years ago.)

Which leads to Fermi’s question: Where is everyone?

Enrico Fermi, the genius Italian physicist, was one of the so-called fathers of the atom bomb. The paradox of his question, posed in 1950, remains unanswered. With billions of habitable planets in our galaxy (I’m not going to touch the unthinkable number of planets in all the billions of galaxies throughout the universe), so many of them older than ours, why haven’t we found a trace of sapient life anywhere else? (Notice I’m using “sapient” instead of “intelligent” because intelligence is vulnerable to interpretation and the inevitable wisecracks.)

Human civilization started in Mesopotamia about 8 thousand years ago. Alien civilizations around older stars could easily be millions of years old. Even at non-relativistic speeds, that’s plenty of time to colonize the habitable planets in their stellar neighborhood and far beyond.

We’ve been listening for interstellar soundbites via the various SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) groups since the early 1980s, but not hearing a thing. It’s called the Great Silence, and it leads to an inevitable question: Are we alone in our sapience?

In what might be called the Great Noise, humanity has been beaming electromagnetic waves since the invention of radio. Those waves escape into space and travel at the speed of light in all directions. Estimates say that once they reach the 60-light-year mark (which they have) they won’t be distinguishable from background noise. But we’re talking a sphere 120 light years in diameter. And since the 80s we’ve been deliberately beaming messages out there. Any being passing through that space would hear something.

And yet…nothing. Like one of my fave Beatles songs: No Reply.

A slew of explanations has been offered. The most simplistic: We are the only sapient lifeform in the universe because a Supreme Being (spin the wheel and take your pick) created the universe just for us. This is the obvious favorite of many religions.

So many other theories: We are under quarantine until we mature, we are an experiment and under observation, we simply aren’t that interesting, no one has come close enough to be aware of us, we were discovered millennia ago and are viewed as a sort of preserve to be observed and toyed with. (That's the Fortean outlook: “The Earth is a farm. We are someone else’s property.”

What do I think? Haven’t a clue. I’m perfectly happy with saying I don’t know who or what’s out there and what they’re up to if they are. If pressed, I’ll use Occam’s Razor and say they simply haven’t got around to us yet.

And maybe that’s a good thing – not noticing us. Because as Stephen Hawking has said, contact with extraterrestrials carries a significant probability of a bad outcome. To quote the man, the encounter "might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don't think they were better off for it."

So, have I laid all this before you just to say I don’t know? Truth is, I did it for me. To have my next novel’s central conceit – its maguffin, if you will – make sense to me and, by extension, to the reader, I need to reference the Fermi Paradox. This post is a way of assembling facts and theories and organizing my thoughts –

DaveStrorm Wrote:And when are we all going to get to read this new novel?

mad4tunes Wrote:The other reason may be because of the energy costs, Paul.

At between 70 and 80 light years, even using a full-blown conversion engine that can come close to attaining the speed of light (and good luck finding materials that can handle that kind of stress), it would still be a minimum of a 160 year round trip to go from point A to point B.



The other thing about the energy costs is the return on investment. Even if you COULD visit Ougadougou or Timbuktu, why would you want to if Paris is easier to get to?

Logan Wrote:I'm not trying to nitpick, but it's "the Goldilocks zone" not "the Cinderella zone". It's because that area is not to "hot"and not to "cold", but just "right". Other than that, it's a great post!

fpw Wrote:Next year -- summer, most likely.