The author, John Marek, is a writer and CEO of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
At some point during my junior high years, I checked a book on UFOs out of the school library. I don’t remember the exact title, but it was along the lines of “UFOs: Fact or Fiction.” The book recounted several purported examples of encounters with unidentifiable objects in the skies over the United States in the ’50s and ’60s. It wasn’t hard research by any stretch and was written with teens in mind, but it still made an impression on me. So much so that I began carefully watching the night skies in search of something unusual. I particularly remember one late night when my father and I drove five miles into town to pick my mother up from my aunt’s house. The sky that night was filled with blinking lights; not all that mysterious since we were on a common flight path for planes taking off or landing at the Cleveland airport.
Even as an impressionable tween, I doubted the legitimacy of most UFO sightings. Like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and the Abominable Snowman, I didn’t completely rule out the possibility of little green (or gray) men from space, but a lot of logic seems to be against the idea.
In the vastness of the cosmos, there are likely hundreds of millions of planets that could support carbon-based life. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of them harbored what we would consider intelligent life, even intelligence far more advanced than ours. But the idea that they would (or could) travel hundreds of thousands of light years to some insignificant planet in a random galaxy for no good reason, then choose to keep their presence a secret, really makes no sense. The example of a human observing an ant hill is often used to explain extraterrestrials’ arms-length interest in us, but do humans travel thousands of miles to look at a random ant hill, and if they did, would they go to any trouble to hide the fact they were there from the ants? The idea that some advanced spacefaring civilization would care one way or the other about us is hubris on a grand scale.
Similarly, the idea that a spaceship could cross trillions of miles of space yet literally fail to stick the landing is pretty outlandish. Before we knew much about our neighboring planets, the belief that we were being visited by an advanced civilization from Mars or Venus made vague sense. The distances aren’t that daunting, and a species only slightly more advanced than ours might be able to do it. Now that we know beyond the shadow of a doubt Venus is a nightmarish world with clouds raining sulphuric acid on a 500-degree surface and Mars is a barren desert, visits from nearby neighbors are out of the picture.
To traverse the distances a spacecraft would need to in order to come from a different star system, an extraterrestrial civilization would need to have faster-than-light technology. That is no small accomplishment. It’s difficult to explain how a species with that level of engineering development would routinely crash its spacecraft on Earth.
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations existing in the vast universe and the lack of evidence or contact with such civilizations. It was named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked, “Where is everybody?” The paradox raises questions about why we have not detected any signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life despite the vast number of stars and potential habitable planets.
While it may appear to be a paradox at first glance, closer examination reveals that it is not a true paradox but a set of challenges and limitations that we face in our search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The vastness of the universe, the constraints of our technology and the vast timescales involved all contribute to the complexity of the question. While there may very well be extraterrestrial intelligence scattered around the universe, the odds that we will locate it are not necessarily good, and the odds that someone has found us and decided to keep it a secret while lighting up their craft like Christmas trees and continually crashing them into our planet seems infinitesimally small.