post the hundred-seventy-fourth, 2013

(Enrico Fermi; b. 1901, d. 1954)

enrico fermi was a physicist who lived in the first half of the 1900s and worked on projects ranging from particle physics to quantum theory, from radioactivity to statistical mechanics. he was a great thinker and didn't have televised football to distract him.

among the untold numbers of things that he thought about, fermi thought about extraterrestrial life, and this thinking resulted in the FERMI PARADOX.

basically, the FP says that statistically speaking, earthlings should have long since either colonized, or have been colonized, by others.

see... out in the great wild universe, there are other suns and those suns have planets and those suns with their planets form systems, and it just defies logic that every single other solar system is lifeless. by orders of magnitude, it's more logical to think there is life in other locations in the universe -- and not merely "life" but "intelligent life". i mean, assuming an infinite universe, it's simply implausible that the entirety save our minuscule corner is devoid of life.

so?

well.

if we assume ourselves to be intelligent and assume other intelligent lifeforms exist, then the next logical step is curiosity about those other lifeforms, and curiosity leads (excepting, with cats) to ACTION. curiosity is what makes us want to go and do, explore and build, creep to the edge and peek into the abyss just to see what the fuq is down there.

our instinctual drive to know what and who are OUT THERE fuels our feeble attempts to find out, and putting aside the highly unlikely notion that we are the valedictorians of the universe, there's someone out there making a better stab at interstellar travel than what we're able to put together.

anyway.

what fermi was saying was that based on all this logic about the universe, we should have either colonized others or been colonised ourselves by now. according to the wikipedia article on this topic, there are 80 million (MILLION!) observable galaxies, and in all those, there's not a single who calling a single horton.

fermi asked... "Where are they?" and this is the fermi paradox in a nutshell. where are they? where are all these other lifeforms and civilisations? we're not seeing any evidence in our neighborhood of 80 million (MILLION!) galaxies.

how many solar systems are in a galaxy, anyway? well, there are between 200-400 billion stars in the milky way. (there are 70 sextillion [that's 70x10^22] in the visible universe.) so, say that there are (for example) 312 billion stars in the milky way, and for the sake of argument, say half have planets, and those that have planets have an average of 3. that's 468 billion potential life-bearing planets IN THE MILKY WAY ALONE. i can't do the math for the visible universe (much less that outside our sight), but i think you get the drift.

anyway.

the reason it's a paradox is because while it's completely logical to believe there is life somewhere out there, we have the complete sum total of zero (scientifically verifiable and roundly accepted) evidence.

where are they?

- maybe too far away from us for either of us to make contact with the other.
- perhaps no brighter than us, ergo no further down the exploration path.
- could be they don't exist at all.
- could be we don't understand the universe at all.

from here, theories get deeper, murkier, less penetrable - so, i'll stop here say my theory is that we simply don't understand the universe at all.

i mean, c'mon. most of us don't even understand ourselves.