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Marcus Str. Husband, flight sim pilot, IT specialist About | Tweets | Code | CV | Categories | Ortho4XP Tiles | Live Stream |
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Where is everybody? Nature of Existence Fermi essentially asked this question, based on the fact that we live in a galaxy with billions of stars in it, which in turn finds itself in an ocean and unfathomably large structures of galactic clusters - which in turn again have an unimaginable number of stars in them. It is possible to extrapolate an approximate number of planets that orbit these stars. Which was the base for Fermi's question: if there are so many stars and planets out there, then where is everybody? Meaning alien life and civilisations of course. While we do have projects like SETI and we did find some rather interesting locations in space indicating the existence of Dyson Spheres (Link), we have nothing substantial, nothing concrete, no suitable prime suspect in our quest to answer one of the most important questions ever asked by mankind. And before you ask: a Dyson Sphere is a postulated hyperstructure (postulated by Freeman Dyson) that is essentially a shell or a shell-like structure built around a star with the intent to either capture 100 percent or something close to that, of the star's energy output. Building one of these would obviously take an enormous amount of effort, material, planning, and time. All of these would, without a question of a doubt, be absolutely clearly visible in an infrared signature being emitted by the sphere, and that is something we could pick up as our technology is advanced enough to do so. In case you want to learn more: (Link). While we do have some pretty nifty gadgets to make out signs of life elsewhere, the question still is: where is everybody? Surely within the 96 bilion light years of the for us visible universe, there must be someone. There might be a very chilling answer to this question, and it is called the Zoo Hypothesis. It boils down to basically the universe around us booming with life - but all of it is choosing to exclude us from space club, for various reasons. One of them would be, I guess, that pointing nuclear warheads with the power to basically end the civilization as we know it on the planet, is not necessarily helping us to get a ticket to be let in to the ultimate swinger club. If I were watching Earth and mankind on it, I would be very cautious about any attempt of contact... who knows what happens. Not a risk worth taking I suppose. And that could also be the reasoning of a civilization advanced enough to be able to assess our current level of planetary evolution. "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C. Clarke |