Is it too soon for another aliens post?  Nah.  Let’s have another aliens post!

Why haven’t we encountered aliens yet?  Turns out there are a variety of reasons.  Excerpt:

In 1950, a learned lunchtime conversation set the stage for decades of astronomical exploration. Physicist Enrico Fermi submitted to his colleagues around the table a couple contentions, summarized as 1) The galaxy is very old and very large, with hundreds of billions of stars and likely even more habitable planets. 2) That means there should be more than enough time for advanced civilizations to develop and flourish across the galaxy.

So where the heck are they?

This simple, yet powerful argument became known as the Fermi Paradox, and it still boggles many sage minds today. Aliens should be common, yet there is no convincing evidence that they exist.

Here are twelve possible reasons why this is so.

Go on and read the twelve, but not mentioned is one that I find most likely; alien life may well be so alien as to make any social interaction impossible.

If you haven’t yet, check out the recent sci-fi thriller Arrival.  Movies aren’t usually the best place for possible scenarios for alien contact; nor are sci-fi novels (and I say that as a part-time sci-fi writer.)  But Arrival does a halfway decent job of portraying the visiting aliens as truly alien; they aren’t just humans with odd makeup jobs.

As for convincing evidence; give some thought as to what convincing evidence would be, short of aliens actually showing up here.  In Carl Sagan’s book Contact he had an alien transmission in a radio signal, presenting a string of prime numbers.  That’s a pretty good indicator.

We could always wait for aliens to notice us.  But any such indication would be limited by the speed of light.  Given how long we’ve been broadcasting, that limits our possible contacts to a sphere of about a hundred light years – or less, depending on what specifically any possible intelligence may be watching for.  That’s a teeny, tiny little bubble of our stellar neighborhood.  And there is no reason to think they’d even recognize us as intelligent – or even as life.

The Milky Way may well be teeming with intelligent life.  They’re just beyond our ken.