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Fermi Paradox


Have you ever looked up into the sky and wondered, are we alone in this universe? Why haven’t we seen any extraterrestrials life out there? The contradiction that despite the high odds of extraterrestrials civilization, we have yet to discover any single one of them, is called the Fermi paradox.

Given the Milky Way galaxy alone is consists up to 4 hundred billion stars and there are about 20 billion sun-like star. There are estimated a fifth of them have an earth size-planet in its habitable zone. If there are only 0.1% of these planets harbored life, there would still be around a million planets with life. Since the formation of the Milky way galaxy, there should probably have trillion of chances for life to develop in the past before earth was even formed.

There are a lot of theories that attempt to explain Fermi paradox. We will look at some of the interesting ones. For example, rarity of intelligence life. In the rare earth hypothesis, the conditions needed for the evolution of life or biological complexity is nearly impossible. That’s why the earth is unique and the evolution of life is so rare that there are none within our sight.

It might be too difficult to discover extraterrestrial life due to some reasons, such as we haven’t been using the right method for listening their messages or they are simply too far away. Another one dark theory states that it is the nature of  intelligent lives to destroy itself at certain point. For example, development of technology become so advanced, it leads almost universally to an existential disaster (The Great Filter, will be discussed in the future ), and we are closer to the end than the beginning of human existence! What do you guys think?

Fun Fact

The Milky Way gets its name from a Greek myth about the goddess Hera who sprayed milk across the sky. … This is what the Milky Way Galaxy looks like from Earth.


Keywords

  • Milky Way Galaxy: The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy’s appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.

  • Great Filter: The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox is whatever prevents non-living matter from undergoing abiogenesis (life arising from lifelessness) in time, to expanding lasting life


Images


References

https://www.amnh.org/explore/ology/astronomy/the-milky-way-galaxy2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc&t=287s