If there is life on other planets, why haven’t they contacted us?

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You paraphrase Fermi’s Paradox, first posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 over lunch with some colleagues. During the same lunch, he also disproved the hahahahahaha existence of UFOs, Sasquatch, fairies. After that, he generally ate alone. But Fermi’s apparent logic overlooked two important probabilities: (1) the aliens are very far away and don’t believe we exist, and (2) Enrico Fermi was himself probably a space alien. I mean: Look at him.

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because they think we are stupid hairless monkeys

contributed by Guest User on Jan 25 1:17pm


A more interesting question may be why humans insist on it.
A short 5 min video show the Pope, Giordano Bruno and Freud debating just this (in Heaven).
Take a look it's pretty cool.

contributed by jm@addresshidden on Jan 26 10:31am


If one looked at the outlandish unlikelihood of life on this planet, one would see that there really isn't going to be life anywhere else. If it's all chance, the chance of even one life is so miniscule that one cannot reasonably look for another. If God, then one should go with God's statement that this is it, here.

contributed by Daniel Davis on Feb 5 2:19pm


The human race has come a long way in the last few millennia. Perhaps, however, if there life on another planet, we would rank somewhere between pond scum and plankton on their evolutionary scale. Maybe we are blissfully unaware of extra terrestrial life that constantly surrounds us. Or it might just be that the big green aliens saw us sitting in front of the tv watching big brother and the E! channel and just decided to cruise on past us.

contributed by Jesse on Feb 6 7:05am


Presuming life exists elsewhere, what demands that it is intelligent? Or intelligent enough to want to contact us? For all we know, there could be all sorts of spooge on other planets - algae, plankton, goo, whatever.

contributed by Warren on Feb 8 7:46am


Stephen Wolfram suggests that other civilizations may in fact be trying to contact us, but because we assume that such a communication would look a certain way, we mistake it for other cosmological phenomena.

contributed by America Jones on Feb 9 6:33am


Really, what is life? How do you define it? I think the defintion is too human-centric. It is like us asking - does irony exist elsewhere in the galaxy?

contributed by alex hausman on Feb 13 2:26pm


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Click this button to save this page to your computer for offline use. Created by pstatz on Jan 23 9:34am. Updated by alex hausman on Feb 13 2:26pm. (25 revisions, 2,366 views)