Humanity’s Final Exam
To pass, we must transcend tribalism. Are we worthy?
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
— Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Terrifying, but inspirational. That seems to have been the astronomer Frank Drake’s attitude when he devised his equation in 1961, which helped to spark the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Drake rose to fame for his attempt to estimate the odds that we’re not alone. He wasn’t the first to muse about that question, though. In fact, he didn’t even devise the back-of-the-envelope method that his equation relies on. Both of those honours go to Enrico Fermi, the father of the nuclear reactor and the eponym of the Fermi Paradox.
One afternoon in 1950 at Los Alamos laboratory, where Fermi and his colleagues were hard at work on theoretical calculations for the first thermonuclear bomb, they put down their chalk and took a lunch break. The conversation ventured into the likelihood of alien life, to which Fermi supposedly quipped, with…
