It's fun to speculate about aliens (see "The human universe: If aliens exist, do they know we're here?"). But what if there are no aliens? It's been 65 years since Enrico Fermi first pointed out our solitude. Fermi estimated that it would take an advanced technological civilisation 10 million years or so to fill the galaxy with its spawn. Our galaxy is 10,000 times older than that. Where is everybody?
It's not as though we haven't been looking. Not for long, perhaps, and not very hard, but even a crude estimate suggests there should be other advanced civilisations capable of signalling over interstellar distances. And yet – nothing.
So what if we really are alone, or so isolated as to amount to the same thing? "If we think we are the only life in the universe, we have a huge responsibility to spread life to the stars," says Anders ...
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