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Space

Why haven't we heard from aliens? Because we've barely started looking

By Douglas Heaven

28 September 2018

A picture of a radio telescope

Is there anything out there?

CSIRO

Where is everybody? With billions of stars in our galaxy, many of which are thought to harbour habitable planets, surely there should be signs of life. Yet after decades of searching, we’ve found nothing.

The mystery of this great silence is known as Fermi’s paradox, after physicist Enrico Fermi. Some have used it to argue that the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) is doomed.

But a new mathematical analysis of SETI activity by Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues shows this is far from the case. The team claim…

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