Williams reported in late 2020 that in 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: "Where is everybody?"
This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. Since Fermi's time, there have been several proposed resolutions to his question, which includes the very real possibility that interstellar colonization follows the basic rule of Percolation Theory.
One of the key assumptions behind the Fermi Paradox is that given the abundance of planets and the age of the Universe, an advanced exo-civilization should have colonized a significant portion of our galaxy by now. This is certainly not without merit, considering that within the Milky Way galaxy alone (which is over 13.5 billion years old), there are an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars.
Another key assumption is that intelligent species will be motivated to colonize other star systems as part of some natural drive to explore and extend the reach of their civilization.
Last, but certainly not least, it assumes that interstellar space travel would be feasible and even practical for an advanced exo-civilization. But this, in turn, comes down to the assumption that technological advances will provide solutions to the single-greatest challenge of interstellar travel. In short, the amount of energy it would take for a spacecraft to travel from one star to another is prohibitively large, especially where large, crewed spacecraft would be concerned.
[Read on ... This is an outstanding article on the subject]
For a review of possible aliens, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlPG7CwudAs
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