Anyone Hoping for Aliens to Contact Earth Will Have to Wait Another 400 Years At Least

Nobody knows for certain what the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi did or didn’t say at the lunch with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that took place in 1950. But as the perhaps apocryphal story has it, Fermi was holding forth on the sheer number of stars in the sky and the sheer number of intelligent civilizations the planets orbiting them might harbor, and puzzling out why we’ve never seen or heard any sign of them. “Where is everybody?” Fermi is said to have asked. That question, now known as the Fermi Paradox, has long bedeviled astronomers and other scientists studying exobiology—which explores the possibility of other life in the universe. Now, there may be an answer, according to a new paper published on the preprint site arXiv: The aliens are out there, alright. We just have to give them time to notice us and reach out to us. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The paper, written by Amri Wandel, a senior scientist in astrophysics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, does not rely on new findings, but is rather a thoughtful analysis of the size and scale of the universe as we understand it today, the probability that life exists on other worlds, and that those life forms would know we’re here and would show a lick of interest in us. The analysis begins with some basic numbers: There are an estimated 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and an estimated two trillion galaxies in the u...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news