Let us introduce you to Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who, among his many other achievements, was the first one to ask himself seriously where the aliens were. He proposed that if other sentient life forms existed, they should’ve already made their way to Earth. In 1950, he and his colleagues Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski were discussing UFO sightings when they got onto the subject of whether life outside Earth existed. The “Fermi Paradox” was born from those exchanges, which asks the question: why haven’t we met any other lifeforms yet? If you want to know more about it, read on!
Get a move on!
Experts estimate that our galaxy has around 100 billion planets, so there must be life in at least one of those, right? Assuming that is true, it is also 100,000 light-years across, which means that it would take a long time to travel here. Fermi had another question.
He calculated that it would take about 10 million years to travel from the furthest confines of the Milky Way to Earth, moving at 1% the speed of life. Since the galaxy is billions of years old, any advanced civilization older than humanity’s would’ve already made its way here.
