It’s been a long time since I last wrote, so I’m going to go to a weird place today, if only for a reason to write.
In my last year at UCLA, I fulfilled a life science course requirement by taking a class on extraterrestrial life – what it might look like, how to look for it, what life is, even. Amid lectures on planetary accretion disks and the inertness of silicon atoms, we learned about a decades-old question called the Fermi Paradox, which goes something like this:
The universe is several billions of years old. Life on earth is only a few billion, and intelligent life (i.e., humans) has been around ostensibly only for many thousands of years. So it seems not to take very long (relatively) for smart animals to evolve. Even if life, and by extension intelligent life, has an astronomically rare chance of occurring on any given planet in any given solar system, there are so many – so very, very many – planets and solar systems that we should be overwhelmed by the sheer number and diversity of intelligent, extraterrestrial beings communicating with us. Even if these beings are millions, or billions, of light years away, they have had plenty of time to travel to us, to give us a ring, or to send a measly text message.
But we’re all alone. So the Fermi Paradox asks, where the hell is everyone?
One school of thought proposes that we really are the only ones in the universe. Another suggests that advanced civilizations adhere to some ethical code of conduct, that they refrain from contacting or even showing themselves to people as primitive as we are. There are many other explanations, but none of them really satisfy.
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