CSIRO
Where is everybody? With billions of stars in our galaxy, many of which are thought to harbour habitable planets, surely there should be signs of life. Yet after decades of searching, we’ve found nothing.
The mystery of this great silence is known as Fermi’s paradox, after physicist Enrico Fermi. Some have used it to argue that the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) is doomed.
But a new mathematical analysis of SETI activity by Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues shows this is far from the case. …