The universe is unimaginably enormous. A trillion stars in one galaxy and as many galaxies as there are stars in the Milky Way. Many of those stars have planets. Even if only a small percentage were conductive to life, there HAS to be life elsewhere, just by the percentages. If even a smaller percentage of planets evolved intelligent life, just by sheer numbers there also has to be alien intelligent life somewhere.
So, why doesn't our galaxy look like "Star Wars?" That is the Fermi Paradox.
Because "somewhere" is unimaginably far away. "Far away" in terms of space. There is a reason it is called "space" - it is mostly nothing with an almost insurmountable distance between anything. If you scaled the Sun to the size of a basket ball, even Saturn would be miles away, let alone another star.
But "far away" could also be in terms of time. Earth and the Sun are very young as far as the time scale of the universe. Alien life could have evolved and died out long before our sun existed.
There is much more to the Fermi Paradox, involving questions about whether intelligent species tend to extinguish themselves, etc. Read up, it is interesting.
Have we been contacted? No, I don't believe so. And I agree with Stephen Hawkins that maybe we don't want to be advertising our presence. If a species is advanced enough to travel those huge distances, we probably don't want to meet them. Although "The War of the Worlds" has a terrific premise, that Earth, teeming with bacteria and viruses as it is, would be deadly for aliens that did not co-evolve with them.
So, why doesn't our galaxy look like "Star Wars?" That is the Fermi Paradox.
Because "somewhere" is unimaginably far away. "Far away" in terms of space. There is a reason it is called "space" - it is mostly nothing with an almost insurmountable distance between anything. If you scaled the Sun to the size of a basket ball, even Saturn would be miles away, let alone another star.
But "far away" could also be in terms of time. Earth and the Sun are very young as far as the time scale of the universe. Alien life could have evolved and died out long before our sun existed.
There is much more to the Fermi Paradox, involving questions about whether intelligent species tend to extinguish themselves, etc. Read up, it is interesting.
Have we been contacted? No, I don't believe so. And I agree with Stephen Hawkins that maybe we don't want to be advertising our presence. If a species is advanced enough to travel those huge distances, we probably don't want to meet them. Although "The War of the Worlds" has a terrific premise, that Earth, teeming with bacteria and viruses as it is, would be deadly for aliens that did not co-evolve with them.
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