• Question: Do you have an answer to theFermi paradox?

    Asked by xx_AstroBoy_xx to Simon, Julia, Delma, Andrew, Alex on 10 Dec 2015.
    • Photo: Andrew Winnard

      Andrew Winnard answered on 10 Dec 2015:

      I think that just because we haven’t seen any evidence of extraterrestrials visiting us, it doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t. If they’ve travelled from their own solar system to ours, they must have technology far in advance of our own and so may well have the means of concealing it from us as well. Maybe they have something like a cloaking device you’d see in Star Trek, or some other technology to allow them to observe us without being detected?

      I definitely think there is life out there somewhere – given all the planets orbiting all the stars just in this galaxy, let alone all the others in the universe, I’m certain that someone is out there somewhere!

    • Photo: Simon Challis

      Simon Challis answered on 10 Dec 2015:

      I would go with Andrew’s answer…. its true that we do not yet have any significant direct evidence but I am not going to lose any sleep worrying if there is no other intelligent life in the universe!

      On a potentially more optimistic light were you aware of this strange phenomena that has been detected by astronomers:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852

      This maybe the first evidence of a technological civilization on a massive scale… a Dyson sphere under construction…. interesting!

    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 11 Dec 2015:

      One other thing worth noting is that we’ve finding out now that it’s actually harder than we thought to detect civilisation on distant stars. The main method we have for detection – listening for radio emissions – was good when we thought that civilisations would blast lots of radio waves into space. Humans did this in the middle of the 20th century. But now, due to energy efficiency, we don’t any more. If we were looking at a copy of Earth today around a nearby star, we probably wouldn’t see us! We are trying to work out now what the best way to communicate with neighbouring civilisations might be.

    • Photo: Delma Childers

      Delma Childers answered on 12 Dec 2015:

      A number of people have thought of interesting, complicated, or just downright bizarre solutions to Fermi’s paradox (one solution is that we’re just living in a simulation, kind of like The Matrix).

      One proposed solution that isn’t too far-fetched is that conditions in the universe have only very recently (within the last few billion years) reached a point that can support life, so we just need some patience and to continue developing life-detecting technologies.

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