💡 "The universe contains an estimated 2 trillion galaxies. If even a tiny fraction harbour life, the galaxy should be teeming with civilisations. So where is everybody?"
Do you believe there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? Why?
If aliens exist, why do you think we haven’t made contact yet?
Would the discovery of alien life change anything about how you see humanity?
Do you think humans will ever colonise another planet? Would you go?
Is the search for extraterrestrial life a good use of scientific resources?
The Milky Way galaxy stretched across a silent night sky over a rocky desert
A radio telescope dish at the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico, pointed up at a clear blue sky — instruments built to listen for messages we have never received
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc
Kurzgesagt — "The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens?" (2015, ~6 minutes).
✍️ Open Cloze — Fill in the gaps with ONE word only (from the video transcript)
The Milky Way is our home galaxy. It consists (1) _ _ _ _ _ up to four hundred billion stars. That's a lot of stars, roughly ten thousand for every grain of sand (2) _ _ _ _ _ Earth. There are about twenty billion sun-like stars in the Milky Way, and estimates suggest that a fifth of them have an Earth-sized planet (3) _ _ _ _ _ its habitable zone, the area with conditions that enable life to exist. If only 0.1% of those planets harboured life, there would (4) _ _ _ _ _ one million planets with life in the Milky Way.
This is the Fermi Paradox, and nobody has an answer (5) _ _ _ _ _ it. But we do have some ideas. Let's talk about filters. A filter in this context represents a barrier that is really hard for life to overcome. They (6) _ _ _ _ _ in various degrees of scary. One: there are Great Filters and we've passed them. Maybe it is way (7) _ _ _ _ _ for complex life to develop than we think. Two: there are Great Filters, and they are (8) _ _ _ _ _ of us. This one would be really, really bad. Maybe life on our level exists everywhere in the universe, (9) _ _ _ _ _ it gets destroyed when it reaches a certain point — a point that lies ahead of us. If this is true, then we're closer to the (10) _ _ _ _ _ than the beginning of human existence.
