Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

New Mexico’s Very Large Array (VLA) – on the SETI trail.
Image credit: Bettymaya Foott, NRAO/AUI/NSF

Back in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake put chalk to chalkboard and devised a formula to estimate the number of communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Just how many alien societies exist and are detectable?

Then there’s the paradoxical and cosmological query asked a decade earlier by physicist Enrico Fermi. If indeed there is a believed likelihood of ET out there, where is everybody?

Home alone, naturally?

Over the decades, researchers have been trying to come to terms with and sort out answers. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a mix of technology, super-smart software, patience, gently whipped into a concoction of optimism…but also pessimism.

Since there’s not been a clear, distinct, confirmed, vetted, and voiced confirmation of any alien signal from afar, it all gets shoved into the “Great Silence” and we’re home alone bin of belief.

Decades of listening for SETI signals suggest to a “Great Silence.” But maybe nobody wants to communicate with Earth?
Image credit: UCLA SETI

New thinking on this quagmire of thinking is offered by Erik Geslin, an associate professor of interactive media at Noroff University College in Norway.

Go to my new Space.com story – “Where are all the aliens? Maybe they just don’t want to talk to us” – at:

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/where-are-all-the-aliens-maybe-they-just-dont-want-to-talk-to-us