In 1950, four scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory discussed UFOs over lunch, prompting one, a physicist named Enrico Fermi, to ask, "Where is everybody?" Over the decades, this question has become known as Fermi's Paradox, often misunderstood in the modern day. While Fermi was originally asking about interstellar travel, the question evolved over time and today, it refers to a bizarre, possibly terrifying conundrum.
Where are all the aliens? Here's where it gets crazy. Alien life almost certainly exists. The observable universe is around 90 billion light years in diameter and contains at least 100 billion galaxies. Within these galaxies, there are trillions of possibly habitable planets, yet this same scale that ensures the existence of alien life also virtually guarantees this life will never meet our species.
Numerous scientists, scholars, and researchers have attempted to answer this dilemma and some of their theories are frightening. What if, for instance, every civilization self-destructs after attaining a certain level of technology? Or what if these civilizations fall prey to cosmic disasters, like gamma ray bursts, before they become sophisticated enough to reach the stars. And, perhaps the most disturbing two extremes.
What if there is something out there in the deep? A conscious entity or civilization actively ending all other forms of life? Or, and for some, this may be the most chilling, what if we're alone? What if there really is no other life in the universe? These are not the final questions, of course. The more astronomers and astrophysicists learn about the universe, the closer our species comes to discovering some answers and along the way, we keep finding new questions to ask. Some of the concepts sound remarkably like conspiracy theories. What if alien civilizations are aware of Earth but have chosen not to respond to our attempts at contact?
Could we be some sort of nature preserve, as John A. Ball supposes in his zoo hypothesis? Could these civilizations have decided not to contact us due to some sort of prime directive of non-interference, similar to Star Trek? If either of these answers to the paradox were true, and there's no proof of either yet, then the extraterrestrial conspiracy would be radically different from the usual story.
It could be that our planet hasn't been contacted because aliens do not exist. Or, instead of government cover ups or corporate shenanigans, it could be that the aliens themselves are covering up evidence of their existence