If you haven’t heard of the Fermi Paradox by now you must live under a rock! Dig yourself out because we are about to open your mind to something intense.
The galaxy in which we live is home to anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars and each is potentially orbited by planets.
When you really start to break things down, if there were aliens of any kind out there we would have found them by now, right? With at least 2 trillion galaxies like ours in what we consider to be the observable universe and each one populated by trillions of planets orbiting the stars mentioned above there should be intelligent life out there somewhere. Enrico Fermi was the man to decide that he needed to ask a question. He took these numbers and asked ‘where are they?’
His question is referred to as the Fermi paradox and seems to cover the most possible answers even now. One being the ‘Great Filter’ hypothesis that before intelligent life was able to escape the bounds of its original planet that it hit a wall of sorts, this being the Great Filter. This hypothesis being proposed first in an online essay titled ‘The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past it?’ by Robin Hanson. In our case, we could very well be on the verge of going against our Great Filter as well.
Climate change is our Great Filter and as you likely know if we allow things to continue on as they are, life on this planet will become devastatingly bleak. Could this be why we haven’t found intelligent life in space? While other thinkers have different answers when it comes to the Fermi paradox it seems no matter how deep we dig, things only get more depressing for the human race. For more information and a better in-depth explanation of the Fermi paradox check out the videos below.