The Search for Alien Life
Arguments surrounding the Fermi Paradox and why aliens haven’t visited us yet
The existence of Aliens has been a question that has troubled scientists and common people alike for many decades now. A lot of people have expressed their thoughts and opinions about this. A good number of people believe that there are aliens somewhere out there, but there are also a few who think the opposite is most likely the case. In this article we are diving deep into one of the most popular debates on this topic that was started by the famous Enrico Fermi.
Enrico Fermi was a scientist who was known for his role in the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic bomb and is also credited for the establishment of the world’s first nuclear reactor in Chicago.
One day in 1950, Enrico was having lunch with the likes of Teller and Konopinski. This is when he casually said, “Where is everybody?”. He stated that if some sort of alien life did exist outside the Earth, then we would have had the extraterrestrials already coming to meet us.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. But, the universe is even older (13.8 billion years). Hence, if we homo sapiens have evolved and become as technologically developed as we are today in just 300,000 years then, and if some species would have existed even twice as long as us, they would be in theory much more advanced than we are.
Later research was carried out by Michael Hart who stated that we haven’t had any aliens visiting us because they most probably don’t exist. But, he also said the following could have happened :
- Aliens couldn’t visit Earth because of difficulties in travelling the massive distance between any two planets. This is due to limited advancements in astronomy, physics and other fields.
- Aliens could have found other extraterrestrial beings around them, established connections with them and would not have looked further believing that there are no beings outside. It is also possible that even after possessing the needed technology, the aliens simply never chose to visit us.
- Advanced Civilisations beyond Earth are still too new to have reached us. If you look at the 19th century, we as humans were getting more and more developed with new inventions and new discoveries. We were pretty advanced according to the people of that time but today the scenario is completely different. We see things such as televisions, washing machines, computers, and our phones as devices that we use in our everyday life. But for people from the 19th century, this would have felt like a massive step up. We have progressed more in the last three decades in probably the last three centuries. And this is why it is possible that though the aliens would have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, they are still not technologically advanced enough to cover massive distances in space.
- The last possibility is that Aliens have visited Earth in the past, but we have not observed, it hasn’t been documented or we just haven’t paid attention. Erich von Däniken is a Swiss author who wrote a book called ‘Chariots of the Gods’ in 1968. He mentioned that structures like the ancient pyramids were very difficult to build for the humans of that era and how there were depictions of gods coming from the skies on their chariots to give instructions to people on how to build these structures. He argued that the gods in these depictions could have been extraterrestrial beings who were much more advanced than us humans at that time.
These arguments are still fairly weak and lack substantial evidence, hence all of them stand as mere probabilities.
A physics professor, Mr. Frank Tipler disregarded all chances of alien existence and said that we are likely the only intelligence out there.
But, when Enrico Fermi made this statement, we only knew about the planets in our solar system and now around 5600 exoplanets have been discovered, some of them also revolving around red dwarf stars.
Scientists use Drake Equation to estimate intelligent alien civilizations but none of the values are known with certainty making predictions very difficult.
It is also possible that alien life existed once, but is now destroyed due to various factors. It is predicted that the Earth will become uninhabitable for humans in around 1.3 billion years due to the increasing heat from the Sun. So, there is a chance that extraterrestrials might have existed but are now gone……
There is also a chance that some exoplanets are habitable already but life has not started yet as was the case with our planet for several centuries.
Now, We will discuss why space travel is so difficult with current technology.
Last year NASA’s Parker Solar Probe set a speed of 635,266 kph while orbiting the Sun which is the fastest speed ever recorded by a spaceship. Travelling constantly at this speed would let us cover one light year in around 1700 years. The nearest exoplanet, Proxima b is 4.2 light years away thus taking us around 7000 years to reach there with the best possible circumstances.
We will have to create a self sustaining society on the spaceship and other such problems make this type of travel almost impossible. But staying optimistic, we might discover a way to travel at speeds close to the speed of light. There might be a chance that our extraterrestrial friends are already out on a journey to find us. In any case, there is a good chance of both aliens existing and not existing but we won’t know if they are gonna be friends or foes until we meet them.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
- Stephen Hawking
Samarth Singh
