There is something good about being middle old (70 to 80 years old). I can look back on things I thought would be known by now. The title says it - have aliens visited the Earth?
And what we got? The Fermi paradox - "the stress and tension between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence."
Carol Sagan made the paradox public in 1963 in a footnote of a paper. It was originated by Enrico Fermi who asked simple but seemingly unanswerable questions. "How many atoms of Caeasar's last breath do you inhale with each lungful of air."
Fermi blurted a question variously recalled as: "Where is everybody?" (Teller), "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York), or "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski). According to Teller, "The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that, in spite of Fermi's question coming out of the blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life."
After the many calculations, Fermi concluded that we should have been visited long ago and many times over. Are we living in the sticks far removed from the metropolitan area of the galactic centre? - that was Fermi's follow-up.
There's much history in this area. Wikipedia covers this extensively HERE. scrolled and scrolled and the very last paragraph. It is on Conspiracy theories: alien life is already here, unacknowledged and/or deliberately concealed. To read more on this we go to this Wikipedia entry HERE. Again, we can scroll and scroll. There is so much investigation by so many different governments, scientists, thinkers and professionals with no conclusive evidence. Or no evidence that has been made public, feeding conspiracy theories gaining momentum over time.
Can we imagine what it would have been like to see a newspaper heading one morning that read: "We are not alone."
Our meeting with Aliens would be a Carl Sagan moment about butterflies, don't you think? "We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."
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