Will We Ever Find Alien Life?

The silence of the galaxy and the resulting Fermi Paradox has perplexed us for nearly 50 years. But our most recent surveys of the Milky Way finally allow us to draw scientific conclusions about the depressingly persistent absence of aliens. Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: What are the Strings in String Theory? Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Luke Maroldi Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) When Enrico Fermi uttered the words, “Where is everybody?” he was succinctly summarizing what has become known as the Fermi paradox. In short: in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having billions of years to spawn life and civilization, isn’t it odd that none have made themselves apparent to us. Enrico Fermi was, supposedly, using this as an argument against the plausibility of interstellar travel. If aliens can travel between the stars, why haven’t they visited? But the paradox is much broader than this. There are several ways that an advanced civilization could give away their presence. Radio transmissions, robotic probes, or star-blotting solar arrays. A series of very recent surveys of our galaxy reveal none of the above, while at the same time proving the abundance of potentially habitable worlds. The Fermi paradox has become only more paradoxical, and these surveys are finally powerful enough to draw some serious conclusions about the rarity of advanced civilizations AND about the chance of us ever becoming one. Big Bang Justin Lloyd Anton Lifshits CoolAsCats David Nicklas Fabrice Eap Juan Benet Quasar Dean Fuqua James Flowers Mark Rosenthal Roman Pinchuk Tambe Barsbay Vinnie Falco Hypernova Chuck Zegar Dan Harris Donal Botkin Edmund Fokschaner John Hofmann Jordan Young Joseph Salomone Martha Hunt Matthew O’Connor Ratfeast Alexander Rodriguez Alexey Eromenko Brandon Cook Brandon Labonte Daniel Lyons David Crane Fabian Olesen Fauzan Ardhana Greg Allen Greg Weiss Jack Frosch James Hughes JJ Bagnell Jon Folks Joseph Emison Josh Thomas Kevin Warne Malte Ubl Mark Vasile Nathan Leniz Nicholas Rose Nick Virtue Scott Gossett Shannan Catalano Shawn Azman Tommy Mogensen سلطان الخليفي