With 100 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and most, if not all, of them, possessing planets, the galaxy should be home to dozens of intelligent alien civilisations.
So how come we haven’t seen them? For more than 70 years, scientists have been perplexed by this subject, known as The Fermi Paradox.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a leading astrophysicist, has proposed three major solutions to the conundrum.
First, he suggests that long-distance space flight is more difficult than we realise.
Light travels at 671 million miles per hour, but for scientific reasons, a spaceship could never reach that speed. An explorer could cross the entire Milky Way galaxy in a million years if they just travelled at 10% of that speed.
According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, an advanced alien civilisation could have evolved over a million years ago, somewhere in the cosmos.
“A million [years] is small, compared to the time life has been on Earth,” he told Popular Mechanics.
So, perhaps, the Star Trek ambition of traversing the cosmos at a significant fraction of the speed of light is simply unattainable, he claims.
The highest speed ever achieved by an Earth-based spacecraft is 364,660 mph, which was accomplished by the Parker Solar Probe just over a year ago. At such a rate, it would take nearly 8,000 years to reach the Sun’s nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri.
But, if aliens can travel at great speeds, there could be a very easy reason why they haven’t visited us. We’re simply not smart enough.
Tyson believes that by the standards of a super-advanced civilization, we may be too primitive to connect.
However, there is a third, more dramatic option. Star Wars, not Star Trek.
According to Tyson, several advanced civilisations may have arisen, all of which could have attempted to colonise overlapping portions of the galaxy, resulting in a series of galactic wars.
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