Paywall Scientific American article:
"The year is 1950. Physicist Enrico Fermi is eating lunch with a few colleagues outside Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His shirt ripples in a hot desert wind.
He looks up at the sky and reportedly says, “Where is everybody?”
He is talking about space aliens. Known as the Fermi paradox, the question still hasn’t been answered. Despite numerous anecdotal reports, there is no convincing evidence of alien life or technology within our solar system (or, for that matter, in the cosmos at large).
The absence of evidence for aliens could be because they don’t exist or because our sampling depth is inadequate to detect them—a bit like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater. Sampling depth refers to how thoroughly and keenly we can conduct a search. Fermi’s question is valuable because it narrows the possibilities down to two: either aliens are not present near Earth, or our current search methods are insufficient.
[...]
If interstellar expansion is plausible, we owe it to science to reconsider the dichotomy underpinning Fermi’s famous question. As strange as it sounds, we must revisit our sampling depth. What are the chances we could detect an interstellar spacecraft if it were present nearby? Have we overlooked anything?
[...]
From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy.
With this in mind, we can imagine going back to 1950 and rephrasing Fermi’s famed lunchtime question.
His shirt ripples in a hot desert wind. He looks up at the sky.
“Where are all the loud, obvious indicators of aliens?” he asks.
When phrased like this, the simplest explanation stands out like a sore thumb. Perhaps aliens don’t leave loud, obvious indicators. Perhaps their vehicles are nearby, and perhaps no one has bothered to check properly—yet."
^^^ "The truth" is closer than we think?
"The year is 1950. Physicist Enrico Fermi is eating lunch with a few colleagues outside Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His shirt ripples in a hot desert wind.
He looks up at the sky and reportedly says, “Where is everybody?”
He is talking about space aliens. Known as the Fermi paradox, the question still hasn’t been answered. Despite numerous anecdotal reports, there is no convincing evidence of alien life or technology within our solar system (or, for that matter, in the cosmos at large).
The absence of evidence for aliens could be because they don’t exist or because our sampling depth is inadequate to detect them—a bit like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater. Sampling depth refers to how thoroughly and keenly we can conduct a search. Fermi’s question is valuable because it narrows the possibilities down to two: either aliens are not present near Earth, or our current search methods are insufficient.
[...]
If interstellar expansion is plausible, we owe it to science to reconsider the dichotomy underpinning Fermi’s famous question. As strange as it sounds, we must revisit our sampling depth. What are the chances we could detect an interstellar spacecraft if it were present nearby? Have we overlooked anything?
[...]
From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy.
With this in mind, we can imagine going back to 1950 and rephrasing Fermi’s famed lunchtime question.
His shirt ripples in a hot desert wind. He looks up at the sky.
“Where are all the loud, obvious indicators of aliens?” he asks.
When phrased like this, the simplest explanation stands out like a sore thumb. Perhaps aliens don’t leave loud, obvious indicators. Perhaps their vehicles are nearby, and perhaps no one has bothered to check properly—yet."
^^^ "The truth" is closer than we think?