"Fermi Paradox"

Since Fermi’s first conversation with fellow scientists in 1950, the Fermi Paradox has haunted astrobiologists and astronomers with its giant, looming question mark: Where is everybody? Dozens of hypotheses have been proposed to answer that seemingly simple question,…

Even though there is a preponderance of evidence to suggest that alien life exists (and may exist in myriad forms on myriad worlds), thus far, humanity has not been able to produce definitive proof of…

Despite what you’ll often read, the Nobel prizewinning nuclear physicist never suggested that aliens don’t exist. Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation,…

Everyone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic…

The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations, according to a new study. We just don’t know about it because they haven’t paid us a visit in 10 million years. The study, published last month in The…

Extraterrestrials may be biding their time, waiting for a more ideal universe. Missing, Or Sleeping? During a lunchtime conversation in 1950, Enrico Fermi, the “architect of the nuclear age” who built the world’s first nuclear reactor,…

The question “where is everyone?” is the crux of the Fermi Paradox. If life on Earth is not particularly special and unique, where are all the alien civilizations? Many explanations have been proposed to explain why…

Would aliens want to help us or hurt us? In a paper by researchers Seth D. Bauma and Jacob D. Haqq-Misra of Pennsylvania State University and NASA’s Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman, the prospect of extraterrestrial contact is analyzed from…

Are we alone? Probably not. After all, astronomers have already found 4,001 confirmed exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy, and expect there to be over 50 billion exoplanets out there. For scientists gathering in Paris today, the…

Physicist Brian Cox has weighed in one of astronomy’s most curious questions: Given the high probability of extraterrestrial life existing in the endlessly massive universe, why haven’t we seen any clear evidence of it? This…

During the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to his colleagues over lunch, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” Fermi was referring to alien life. In the 4.4 billion years it…

Running into an alien on the bus would be strange — but it’s almost equally strange that humankind has never encountered aliens. The universe is vast. Can we really be alone in it? (Cue “X-Files”…

Only decades into our “age of cosmology” — the moment when we earned the technological rights to peer deep into our cosmic home — we’ve learned that we live in a mega-palace of a universe.…