Where Have All the Spacemen Gone? Speculations on the Fermi Paradox (Part 1)

As I return home from work each day, the darkness of night already enveloping the world, my two-year-old son and I always linger outside for a few minutes and gaze up at the stars. He likes to call them "little bitty peanuts"—something his mother said as a joke and which stuck—and he is totally fascinated by them. So am I; and always have been since I was his age. As we stare up into the blackness, the little twinkles dancing around the sky, we both ask questions. For him, it is What are they? For me it is Where are they?

In my case "they" refers to the aliens that surely must be out there. I don't mean those annoying little flying saucers that like to buzz farmers, but rather the other intelligent life that must surely exist somewhere in the visible universe. With billions of galaxies out there—each filled with billions of stars—it would be absurd to think that only our little blue-green oasis has seen the spark of life.

Nevertheless, when we turn our ears to the heavens we are met with silence. The Great Silence it is called, in fact—another name for the famous Fermi Paradox. The Paradox is based on a question once posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in which he asked why we don't detect any signs of life in the cosmos when the odds are so strongly in favor of its existence. It is a problem that has puzzled

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