Abstract
In a 1989 comic strip Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) makes the following consideration: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us”. In a sense this is another way to solve the so-called Fermi Paradox. In the summer of 1950 during lunch Fermi was having a conversation about aliens (remember that the fifties were the period of the UFO fever in the US) and at some point he asked why, if they existed, there were no visitors from outer space. This very loosely question was since then considered as the Fermi paradox. In principle there are plenty of reasons to ask such a question. The dimensions of our galaxy are around 105 light years and if we assume an average velocity of c/1000 (with c velocity of light) it would take 108 years to transverse the Galaxy, which is a short time with respect to the age of our Galaxy (1010 years). Such a very simple calculation, typical of the Fermi approach, indicates that our solar system should have been visited (or contacted) several times during its existence by extraterrestrial intelligence. Another important point is that our solar system has an age of roughly 4.5 billion years so that is relatively young with respect to the age of the universe.
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Book Reading List
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Visconti, G. (2021). The Fermi Paradox. In: Visconti, G. (eds) Climate, Planetary and Evolutionary Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74713-8_10
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