In 1950 Enrico Fermi sought -after: “Where is everyone?” His sense of cosmic loneliness is not necessarily a testimony to the small number of intelligent partners in our cosmic neighborhood, but instead can be a reflection on how large the cosmic scales are of time and space.
To appreciate the range of scales in the universe, we can use a logarithmic measure of ten forces. The size of a small human cell is 5 orders of size greater than the diameter of a hydrogen atom and 5 orders smaller than the scale of our body. That is why a cell is about halfway through logarithmic between the scales of an atom and our body.
The scale of the human body is 10 orders of size greater than the diameter of an atom and 9 orders smaller than the diameter of the sun. That is why our body is about halfway through logarithmic between the scales of an atom and the sun.
The ray of the sun is 19 orders of size greater than the radius of an atom and 18 orders of size smaller than the distance that light has traveled since the big bang, 46 billion light years. Although the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years, the cosmic expansion has spoken the largest scale that we can investigate, namely our cosmic horizon. In total, the size of the sun lies about halfway through logarithmically between the size of an atom and the scale of the observable universe.
Another important point is that most space is empty. The radius of an atom is 5 orders of size greater than the radius of its core, with 99.95% of the atomic mass concentrated. This means that matter in our body is concentrated in cores that are separated from each other as tennis balls separated by the size of a city, 6.5 kilometers.
We can now answer Fermi’s question. The distance from the sun to the nearest star is 10 orders of size larger than the ray of the sun. This is the same as tennis balls that are separated from each other by the radius of the earth. In view of these enormous interstellar divorces, advanced civilizations must throw away the interstellar space with ten quadriljoen unguided relics per star to allow one of these objects to clash with the earth once a decade. In the past 5 decades, humanity has only launched 5 of our own probes to interstellar space.
At this pace we can launch only one hundred million relics in the coming billion years before the clarification of the sun will be Boil all oceans On earth. This will be halfway through Logarithmic of the requirement of ten quadrillion interstellar launchings, so that meteor lovers on a nearby exoplanet can notice one of our relics as an interstellar meteor during their career.
And even if aliens of Elon Musk from nearby stars surpass our interstellar output with more than a factor of one hundred million, the resulting interstellar space waste has a very small chance to land in the Los Alamos National Laboratory during lunch in the summer of 1950 when Fermi asked his question.
Of course, the detection channel could increase dramatically as functional probes on earth because the planet has developed his last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of life so early 4.2 billion years ago. Our imagination of what these probes can be is limited by a century of modern science and technology. It is also limited by the materials we have access to our current technologies. These materials come from the earth and not from the cosmos in general. When my parents got married on a farm, they were poor.
And so my father built their first furniture from the wooden boxes he used to pack oranges in their backyard. Are our missiles limited in the same way by terrestrial agents and do they seem primitive from an interstellar perspective? In mine Last paperI suggested that the bottling of “dark energy” that is abundantly present throughout the universe can be used to launch payloads to space without rocket fuel.
If functional interstellar probes artificial intelligence (AI) and Stealth ‘dark’ technologies that are our imagination outside our imagination, then we would classify them as one of them ‘dark comets“Or if”Empty trash can objects“Or if” non -created anomal phenomena (UAPS) “, possibilities that I will discuss in a Conference briefing on May 1, 2025.
Fermi’s question can be explained by the rarity of the waste of technological space as a source of interstellar meteors and by the potential abnormal nature of advanced interstellar probes. Electromagnetic loud civilizations may have been invaded a long time ago and are silent by interstellar predators. In that case it is only a matter of time before we will witness a reaction to the electromagnetic signals that we have leaked in the last century.
They now reached only a hundred light years, a spherical volume that only includes ten thousand stars – only a part in ten million of the total number of stars in the Melkweg. The answer can take millions of years, long according to our standards, but briefly from a cosmic perspective where time is measured in billions of years.
The fundamental question is whether our technologies are at the logarithmic centerpiece in the cosmic class of technological civilizations that have ever existed in the last 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. There is no better way to find the answer to this question than to look for the best students in our class of technological civilizations.
