Fermi's Paradox

[alexanderson1993]

I would like for extraterrestrials to be part of the missions at some point. Not immediately - I think it'd be fun to write missions based around just humanity for a bit. But at some point extraterrestrials should appear. The question is, where have they been all this time?

I asked ChatGPT to give me a summary of Fermi's paradox. It did a pretty good job:

It is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. The paradox is named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who posed the question "Where is everybody?" in 1950 to express his surprise that no extraterrestrial civilizations had been detected. Despite various proposed solutions, the paradox remains unresolved.

Some of the proposed solutions to Fermi's paradox are:

• The Great Filter: The idea that there is a "Great Filter" that makes the evolution of intelligent life difficult, and thus the lack of extraterrestrial civilizations.
• Rare Earth Hypothesis: The idea that the conditions necessary for the evolution of intelligent life are rare and only occur on a small number of planets.
• The Zoo Hypothesis: The idea that extraterrestrial civilizations are observing us, but have chosen not to make contact.
• Technological Incompatibility: The idea that extraterrestrial civilizations may have developed technology that is not recognizable to us.
• The Doomsday Argument: The idea that the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that the end of humanity is near.

Lots of other great possibilities in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Given that we have faster-than-light engines, the crux of the paradox shifts in many ways and leaves more questions to be answered:

• What is the most likely reason extraterrestrials never contacted Earth?
• What level of technology do extraterrestrials have?
• How do the extraterrestrials see humanity?
• Have there been any undocumented encounters with extraterrestrials already? Is it plausible extraterrestrials have lived among humans for some time?

Lots of directions we could take this.