OLLI Stem Lecture – The Fermi Plague: Why Haven’t We Detected Extraterrestrial Civilizations? Should We Care?

The STEM Lecture Series at OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNC Asheville, is free and open to OLLI members and non-members alike. The talks take place at 4:30 p.m. in Reuter Center Room 206.

Stanley Schmidt, of OLLI’s College for Seniors faculty, will be the presenter and offers this abstract:

Science suggests that life should be fairly common in the universe, and that technological civilizations should be detectable even across interstellar distances. Why haven’t we seen any?

Physicist Enrico Fermi asked this question, now known as the Fermi Paradox, in 1950. This lecture will review the “paradox”—why we think other civilizations should exist and we should have seen them—and the many possible explanations that have been proposed, before
concentrating on one that is relatively new.

Most of the proposed explanations of the paradox are only partial answers. One may explain why we haven’t seen one civilization, another may work for another, and so on. Is there a single destructive phenomenon highly likely to occur in any advanced technological civilization? The question may seem academic, but if the effect is real, the problem becomes very practical: How can we keep it from happening to us?