Alien Census: Can We Estimate How Much Life Is Out There?

One day in 1950, nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to a few colleagues he was lunching with at Los Alamos National Laboratory that would become known as the Fermi Paradox: If the Milky Way is indeed teeming with alien civilizations, as many theories suggest, where are they? Shouldn't we see evidence of their existence? Nearly 60 years later, the question remains just as vexing. After all, decades of searching for extraterrestrial radio signals or evidence of alien civilizations have come up empty. [More]

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