Why aliens aren't visiting us

People who believe in alien visitors to Earth don't like Enrico Fermi, the brilliant physicist who, one day at Los Alamos in the middle of the Manhattan Project, found time at lunch to ask 'so, where is everybody?' and then proceeded to answer the question himself.

Fermi speculated... that the age of the universe, as well as its size, meant that there should be a number of advanced societies keeping Earth company, in a galactic sense. Growth of these civilizations would be exponential, Fermi implied, and therefore if they existed, we would have encountered them already. Ergo, advanced alien societies must not exist, since their expansion hasn't brought them into the range of our detection. Source

That was Fermi's conclusion: that there are no aliens, at least none within range.

Nowadays, we find it hard to believe that we are alone in the universe. We know that lots of stars - perhaps the majority - have planets. We believe that, given the odds, intelligent life-forms must have evolved on many of these planets.

Yet still the skies (for everyone but UFO buffs) remain discouragingly empty.

Obviously, massive astronomical distances don't help. Plugging very generous numbers into the Drake equation gives an average separation of about 200 light-years between intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy. But we should still have picked something up - an alien radio transmission, perhaps.

Now (see the above link) comes news that the problem may be one of limited resources. It appears that civilizations probably can't expand exponentially in space. Fermi's assumption was wrong.

So no alien visitors.

And - worse still - no galactic empires for mankind, either. We can no more expand our presence in space exponentially than aliens can.

Looks like it's going to be a long wait for ET, one way or another.

Maybe they just don't want to visit us. Maybe they are here and we just don't know it. This is basing on human growth and technology, not their's.

The problem with theories from people like this is he is basing the sightings of UFO's on modern day or at the very outset 20th Century.

Were the Egyptians in the time of the building of the pyramids 'UFO Buffs'?

UFO and Alien sightings have been going on for thousands of years. And I doubt the people who saw UFO's thousands of years ago had clubs and webpages on UFO's.

Sorry but I think that guy is speaking from his a**e!!

What makes you think that humans have reached the pinnacle of scientific discovery already? This hypothesis is based off modern science and therefore refuses to acknowledge that our current technology and scientific understanding might be very limited compared to a civilization that could potentially be millions of years more advanced than us.

That is to say that if they are "here", why would they reveal themselves to us and what's to say that they aren't already in plain sight but fobbed off as the fantasies of an over-active imagination? Again, if they are "here", why do we try to understand the motivation behind ET life by basing it off our own?

"Enrico Fermi, the brilliant physicist" - why is it that he can't see the error in his own thinking? Perhaps it's sycophants like the author of this article that have let his "brilliance" go to his head. It's people like this that hold back scientific discovery.

[edit on 24-6-2009 by dodgygeeza]

Originally posted by Astyanax
So no alien visitors.

No, they aren't 'visitors'. Visitors is a word you usually use when you denote a friendly encounter. These little imps aren't 'visiting' us. They are farming us and studying us and being dishonest. Those aren't 'visitors'. Those critters are not to be trusted and they aren't friendly.

Watch this video; it is about different dimensions; it shows how a flat lander would see us; Maybe the aliens are around us in higher dimensions and we are just unable to see them or understand them.

Has this man never thought of the social implications if advanced Aliens visited us and how that is as good a reason as any to keep it quiet and leak it out over time.

IF advanced aliens are visiting us, humanity as a whole is not ready to be immersed in that information.. there would be big trouble in the less advanced countries.. and probably our own...

Not to mention all the wackjobs that are already out there, someone would probably kill a few of them, then trouble would start.

I have a great deal of respect for Fermi and his work, particularly that in theoretical physics. I can understand the semi-logical conclusion he came to, however I believe he was using variables that were consistent with his human experience.

Put more simply: We can't know what we don't know.

It seems very possible to me that "others" -- those that are nonhuman and sentient, might (a) be from within our own solar system (b) so very old in development that they set out to travel with ships containing active biospheres or even (c) have perfected the warping of spacetime such that immense distances can be traversed.

My concern and belief is that some of "them" are not here for purposes that are beneficial to humanity, much as FlyersFan indicated. That resonates as very probable to me, however I cannot support that notion with any verifiable evidence.

reply to post by Astyanax


Hi Astyanax,
S&F for a nice thread.
I personally feel that a belief in ET's, at the moment resembles religion, just updated with a new face that science and technology deem possible, which in the case of more abstract religious figures is much more difficult to do.
That aside, I never hear anyone ever entertain the thought that we may infact be the first life as we know it, actually existing in the universe. This would also put us first in space etc.
More life may exist, we all can accept that. But it could be that it is just us at the moment, the first of more to come perhaps?

Nice nod to Fermi. Lots of people love Drake, for obvious reasons. Support for beliefs and all. Fermi Paradox

This thread is in the wrong forum

it should be in:

Conspiracy Theory Discussion Forums >> Aliens & UFO's

fermis paradox does raise some questions. Its not even encountering alien beings themselves but the lack of anything at all. First question would be - why hasnt earth been colonized? An ET civ has had 500 million years to do it but it didnt happen.

even if we say interstellar travel is extremely hard we would still expect to see the robot probes an ET civ would send. Theres no doubt when the tech allows we will send our first interstellar probe somewhere.

If ET civs are common we should be inundated with these things. There should be hundreds in our solar system. So far we havnt detected any.

Theres a complete absence of powerfull "beacon" type signals. Whether thats radio waves or optical. An advanced ETI could make soemthing really obvious like a blinking star (naked eye seti) something that a cow in a field could see. But we haven't found any of those.

The Great Silence or fermis paradox prompted a very spirited response. Ive read all sorts of ideas on why we wouldnt detect anything yet. But sometimes the simplest answer is usually correct. ET civs are extremely rare or dont exist at all in our galaxy.

[edit on 24-6-2009 by yeti101]

space aliens dont visit because they are very far away, and dont have the technology to traverse the distances.

is that so hard to grasp?

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams

I honestly don't think that Enrico Fermi's suggestion holds any more weight than those who claim we're not seeing them because of some speculated alien federation policies idea they lifted from Star Trek. While he certainly seems to have put quite a bit more thought into it than your average alien apologetics, the variables which must be accounted for before making a reasonable estimate on why they aren't around are thus far unknown today - and certainly were in his day.

All we can really do is keep up the search for evidence of microbial life either current or in the fossil record outside of Earth and keep our fingers crossed for something a bit more conversational is out there and decides to make contact.

DohBama - Space is even bigger than that. Everything we've thus far been able to observe is thought to be comparable to the area of a Quarter when compared to the Earth according to a cosmology lecture I listened too from Stanford University. If I'm not mistaken, the rate at which the universe is expanding (as well as accelerating it's expansion) has pushed the distance of some objects we observe back 46.5 billion light-years away - even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old. Beyond that point - we're blind to the Universe.

Well I believe and know they are here and visiting us. Just because everyone doesnt see them doent mean they arent here or visiting. I dont think we can say what they can do when we have no idea how they really operate, although I believe there are a select few on Earth who do know, but they are dismissed as crazy and nutty.

reply to post by DohBama


How would you know this for a fact?

An alien race could have evolved at ten times the rate we have and could have technology for sniffing out life across the vast distances along with technology that allows them to travel millions of light years instantaneously..

Or have created a team of probes that sniff out life across the galaxy like ourselves... except 400 years more advanced..

Or be exactly the same as us..

I like to think that we have had some contact with other intelligent life & definitely some form of ET life.. there is a lot of unexplained phenomenon when it comes to the subject of UFO's and the evidence there to support them.

My point is really, we could never know unless we have had direct contact with them.. And our governments would not be able to tell us because the majority of the world would not be able to handle it and the world would collapse economically in a matter of days..

Originally posted by Astyanax

Fermi speculated... that the age of the universe, as well as its size, meant that there should be a number of advanced societies keeping Earth company, in a galactic sense. Growth of these civilizations would be exponential, Fermi implied, and therefore if they existed, we would have encountered them already. Ergo, advanced alien societies must not exist, since their expansion hasn't brought them into the range of our detection. Source

So this is your proof that we are not being visited? REALLY? He is right, the universe would be full of life. But how do you know we have not encountered them before in our past? Evidence shows we have. However, even if we have never encountered them in our past till the present, maybe it is because they do not want to be seen. Perhaps we are not ready, perhaps there is a rule for them not to intervene with an evolving race? How can we know? All we do know is that there certainly are unexplainable things going on in this world, and if you do enough reasearch the evidenve will be clear, something is going on here beyond our traditional understandings.

Also, you cite a single man as proof that we are not being visited, but do not cite the dozens of others that state their reasoning on why they think we are being visited. Is this man above all others now? Is a man who believes we are not being visited given more approval than one who says we are? I hope that we are all not to that level of ignorance.

What is he talking about? We have detected them. Go look at all the radar data and witness sightings of alien creatures and abductions.

Originally posted by LeTan
Maybe they just don't want to visit us. Maybe they are here and we just don't know it. This is basing on human growth and technology, not their's.

Exactly. And there IS evidence they're here, so the point is moot anyway.

This is speculation distracting from the real quest, transparent government. I don't care if aliens are visiting us or not, I care that we are being denied access to information with the potential to save a LOT of lives.

Second, there's a loophole in his logic, he assumes that aliens are not visiting us now, and have not throughout history.

Finally, enough with drake's equation, we don't have the numbers to plug in damnit!

reply to post by DohBama


in 1890 a man Clément Ader make the first fly betwen france and britain ,one year before another man say to him you dont have the technology to traverse the distances, now you can buy a ticket and you can go country to country, imagine the face of the same man if we had talked about cloning