On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, gswork wrote:

ON the off chance you don't know, Fermi's paradox is basically - if
even conservative estimates suggest that adanced life in the galaxy is
abundant then even more conservative estimates show that the entire
galaxy should be explored already, so why aren't the aliens here?

various reasons are given as to why they're not : advaned life is
rarer than we thought, space travel is more difficult than we think,
they are here(!), they've put us in quarantine until we grow up,
civilisation destroy themselves at some crucial point etc etc.

Or we may simply be the first. Somebody had to be first, why not us? The
"paradox" holds about as much water as that theory that we must be near
the end of the world because exponential population growth means there's a
95% chance that any given person will be born within a lifetime of the
end, or however it goes.