Blurs

Imagine standing in a dark forest at night. You know other people might be somewhere among the trees. You cannot see them. You cannot hear them. You do not know whether they are friendly, frightened or dangerous. Would you shout to announce where you are? Probably not. This simple thought experiment lies at the heart of one of the most unsettling explanations for the Fermi paradox: if intelligent extraterrestrial civilisations should be relatively common, why have we found no convincing evidence that any of them exist? The answer proposed by the Dark Forest theory is chilling. Perhaps everyone is silent because everyone is hiding. The Fermi Paradox The observable universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, while the Milky Way alone contains hundreds of billions of stars. We now know that planets are extremely common. Thousands of exoplanets have been confirmed, including worlds orbiting within regions where temperatures could potentially allow liquid water. Given the enormous n...