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Fermi Paradox: The Rare Earth Hypothesis

In 1950, Enrico Fermi and some of his colleagues were having lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Imagine them eating and chatting, maybe they were also drinking some wine, who knows?
The only thing that we know, and that everyone knows, is that they had some conversations about UFOs.
In particular, Fermi issued a statement that would become quite famous. He asked: “Where is everybody?”
Fermi was referring to extraterrestrial life.
This question became the basis of the Fermi Paradox.
The Fermi paradox refers to the high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. How is it possible, that, given that the universe is infinite, given the huge number of stars and planets in the universe, we still haven’t found a signature of life other than us?
More than seventy years have passed since that lunch, and we still don’t have a proper answer to Fermi’s question. As always happens, when we don’t have answers we try to come up with some theories.
During all these years, many theories were developed to explain why the “Great-Silence” endures. They are theories that could explain why we seem to be alone in the universe.
Some of them are optimistic, some others are quite creepy and pessimistic.

For example, it could be that aliens are too far away for any contact, or maybe we are the firs tones and we will be extinct before there are any others, who knows?

A creepy one could be the theory of hibernation. According to this completely speculative theory, aliens would be hibernating and WAITING. But waiting for what?
Well, if a super-intelligent civilization had succeeded in replacing its biology with machines, it might be waiting for the expansion of the universe to cool it down in order to increase the efficiency of its computations. In fact, computers work better in colder environments!

However, among all these theories, in this video, we address the possibility that life-bearing planets like Earth are just very rare.
This hypothesis is known as the “Rare Earth Hypothesis”.

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