Free Republic

The argument claiming that extraterrestrials don’t exist was actually proposed by the astronomer Michael Hart, in a paper he published in 1975. Hart supposed that if an extraterrestrial civilization arose in the galaxy it would develop interstellar travel and launch colonizing expeditions to nearby stars. These colonies would, in turn, launch their own starships spreading a wave of colonization across the galaxy. How long would the wave take to cross the galaxy? Assuming that the starships traveled at one tenth the speed of light and that no time was lost in building new ships upon arriving at the destination, the...

Over the past few hundred years we, the human race, have experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge. Although our advances due to swarm intelligence have been growing since the beginning of life on the planet, during the recent past knowledge of the natural world has increased exponentially. The start of this rapid increase in the growth of knowledge can traced to the Scientific Revolution. It was the spark which ignited a complete redefinition of the natural world and how we interacted with it; the ignition of a never-ending search for reality and truth. It was a paradigm shift in the...

Enrico Fermi’s paradox has occupied us more than occasionally in these pages, and for good reason. ‘Where are they,’ asked Fermi, acknowledging an obvious fact: Even if it takes one or two million years for a civilization to develop and use interstellar travel, that is but a blip in terms of the 13.7 billion year age of the universe. Von Neumann probes designed to study other stellar systems and reproduce, moving outward in an ever expanding wave of exploration, could easily have spread across the galaxy long before our ancestors thought of building the pyramids. Where are they indeed. Kelvin...