MISSING, OR SLEEPING? During a lunchtime conversation in 1950 , Enrico Fermi, the “architect of the nuclear age” who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, posed a question that has resulted in decades of research and hundreds of published papers: “Where is everybody?” This is the crystallization of the paradox he perceived (now known as the Fermi Paradox) which questions, “If the universe is large enough to have more than sufficient opportunity to create more life than what we see on earth, why haven’t we met that alien life yet?” Scientists, like Anders Sandberg , an Oxford neuroscientist, and Milan Ćirković , part of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, have used this as a jumping-off point in their attempts to debunk — or defend — the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. Sandberg and Ćirković teamed up with Stuart Armstrong , an AI expert at the Future of Humanity institute, to author a new paper arguin...
