A new book from astrophysicist Milan M. Ćirković, The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox:
The Great Silence explores the multifaceted problem named after the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and his legendary 1950 lunchtime question “Where is everybody?” In many respects, Fermi’s paradox is the richest and the most challenging problem for the entire field of astrobiology and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) studies.
This book shows how Fermi’s paradox is intricately connected with many fields of learning, technology, arts, and even everyday life. It aims to establish the strongest possible version of the problem, to dispel many related confusions, obfuscations, and prejudices, as well as to offer a novel point of entry to the many solutions proposed in existing literature. Ćirković argues that any evolutionary worldview cannot avoid resolving the Great Silence problem in one guise or another. More.
The key reason that the Great Silence problem cannot be resolved is that the possibility that They are Not Out There is not emotionally tenable. The searchers do not know how to grapple with that possibility and would not know eight hundred years from now. Some problems are not really intellectual, though they are treated as such.
See also: Fixing the unfixable Drake equation (Ethan Siegel)
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How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?