A question that has haunted humanity is whether there’s intelligent life in some other part of the universe. According to science fiction, the answer is always yes. Aliens have been depicted as everything, from big-headed green creatures to blue humanoid giants. However, reality might be very different from what we imagine. Researchers have searched for signs of other civilizations for decades, but they still haven’t found any concrete evidence. Is it because we are truly alone in the world? Are we looking for the wrong kind of traces? Here, we’ll answer all these questions and more.
Beyond the Fermi paradox
Physicist Enrico Fermi wasn’t the first to ask himself where all the aliens were, but he was the first to calculate the odds of them existing, which were pretty high. Why haven’t we been contacted, then? This is how the Fermi paradox was born.
As the Hart-Tipler conjecture argues, one possible answer is that there’s no intelligent life outside Earth. The idea is that the absence of technology, such as Von Neuman probes or self-replicating machines, means that aliens probably don’t exist. However, there might still be hope.
