Part of the Our Universe Revealed Lecture Series
The Great Silence: An Exploration of the Fermi Paradox
Mr. Jared Coughlin, Graduate Student, ND Physics
Where is everybody? For as long as humans have looked up at the stars in the night sky, we have wondered whether or not we are alone in the Universe. With an estimated number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy in the billions, the odds seem to favor the existence of many other civilizations, and if even a small fraction of these are sending out signals or colonizing among the stars, we should have detected their presence by now. But we haven’t. This unexpected silence is known as the Fermi Paradox, and in this talk I discuss potential solutions to this problem as well as the central question: how common is intelligent life in the Universe?