Where is everyone?

Pabasara Kandabada

Published in

In Sanity

4 min readMay 19, 2020

The universe is billions of years old.

The observable universe is about 90 billion light years in diameter.

There are about 100 billion galaxies within this expanse.

Each of these galaxies contain 100 to 1000 billion stars, including planets, which are also very common.

This means, that there are possibly trillions of planets within the observable universe itself capable of harboring life.

But if that’s the case, where are all the aliens?

This was the same question asked by the Physicist Enrico Fermi, the one who created the first Nuclear Reactor. Thus, this question became the Fermi Paradox, the question of “Where is everybody?”

Let’s take the Milky Way, our own galaxy, as an example.

The Milky Way is about 13.5 billion years old and consists of around 400 billion stars (that’s 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth, think about that the next time you’re on the beach).

Around 20 billion of these are sun-like, and estimates say that fifth of these have earth-like planets on their habitable zones.

Even if 0.1% of these planets harbored life, that would still amount to 1 million planets, just within the Milky Way, with life.

But the infinite space is silent, and it feels like we’re all alone.

How do we explain it?

There are a whole lot of explanations. Here are some of them.

Alien civilizations are simply too far away for contact.

Extent of Human Radio Broadcasts by Planetary.org

This image portrays the extent of human radio broadcasts currently. It is actually an astronomically large amount (spanning about 200 light years) but, in a galactic context, it’s minuscule, as is apparent.

There might be huge galactic civilizations within the Milky Way but we haven’t even come close to broadcasting our message over such a distance, let alone explore it.

We’re simply not intelligent enough to comprehend their existence.

Take a colony of ants for example.

Ants have survived and thrived for millions of years on Earth. They build complex dwellings, they are capable of teaching and communication, they cooperate and exhibit teamwork, and they have even been observed to be farming and cultivating several types of fungi within their colonies for consumption.

However, for all their ability and intelligence, they simply aren’t able to comprehend that we, humans are a thing. That we are up here sending cars to space, dabbling in artificial intelligence, and thinking of colonizing Mars.

Now imagine, if we were the ants in this analogy, and the humans are the aliens. They might be operating at a level we are simply not able to comprehend.

A bit unsettling, but still a possibility.

We did not/ do not have the technology to perceive them

Although humans have been around for a while (around 200,000 years in fact), we spent 90% of our entire existence as hunter-gatherers.

Just 500 years ago, our knowledge of the universe was low that we thought we were the centre of the universe. Even if alien civilizations existed then, there is no way we could have known.

We weren’t advanced enough to perceive them for a majority of our existence. Even now, advanced as we are, we have no idea how alien technology might work (provided it exists in the first place of course). So maybe, we still aren’t advanced enough.

Maybe. just maybe, we are alone in this universe. Maybe intelligent life is so massively unlikely to pop up that we are the only one out there in the vast expanse of the universe.

Maybe this speck of time is all we have to make humanity potentially the first galaxy-wide civilization of the entire universe.

Whether we succeed or not is entirely up to us.