MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE

The search for extraterrestrial life has yet to make a breakthrough, but does that mean we really are alone?

Reported by David Crookes

© Pixabay

The physicist Enrico Fermi died 70 years ago, but he certainly left a strong legacy. As well as being the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Italian Nobel laureate also pointed out an apparent contradiction: the fact that life is predicted to exist elsewhere in the universe and yet there has been no scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life found so far. Dubbed the Fermi paradox, the discrepancy questions why aliens haven’t made contact with us. “Where is everybody?” Fermi asked, making a rather valid point. As we now know, there are billions of planets orbiting around stars in just our own galaxy, and there’s a high probability that a good number of them would be like Earth. The assumption is that an intelligent civilisation would have at least reached the levels of humans and maybe even surpassed us. But this doesn’t appear to be the case, at least based on hard evidence.

We say ‘appear’ because there have been no shortage of claims that Earth has indeed been visited by aliens. There is the well-known alleged alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, as well as numerous UFO and ‘alien’ sightings in a quaint Welsh village in the 1970s that were recently the subject of a Netflix documentary called Encounters. Then there are the general reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which actually date back to Egypt in 1450 BCE, but became more prolific in the 20th century. But such sightings and claims – which include the apparent alien corpses found in algae mines in Cusco, Peru, in 2017 – are generally dismissed by scientists. “Something like a third of the American populace believes at least some of these sightings are alien,” says astronomer and author Seth Shostak. “But a third of the American public also believe in ghosts, so would that mean ghosts are real?”

As it happens, Shostak has a keen interest in finding aliens, and he doesn’t appear to lend much weight to the Fermi paradox. Although some scientists have sought to solve it, going as far to say that aliens have not had sufficient time to contact us or are simply not that bothered about getting in touch, Shostak hasn’t spent much time dwelling. “I think the Fermi paradox makes for interesting dinnertime conversation, but I don’t think it’s terribly profound to say this is all there is, because we haven’t found anything else,” he tells All About Space. “In the year 1400, you could have sat around the dinner table saying, ‘well, you know, Europe and Asia are the only continents in the world because we haven’t found any others’. I think the problem is in the observation.”