Fermi's Argument Analysis

The Fermi paradox is frequently misrepresented, even in name alone. Using Fermi’s name falsifies Enrico Fermi’s own opinions on the subject. Fermi was skeptical about the possibility of interstellar travel, but not necessarily the possibility of intelligent life. The paradox however is frequently interpreted to mean that the absence of contact or artifact is evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence does not exist. The “they are not here; therefore they do not exist” argument was not introduced by Fermi, but by astrophysicist Michael Hart. Hart, in a 1975 paper published by the Royal Astronomical Society, argued that if there were intelligent beings in the galaxy, they would have eventually achieved space travel, and would have explored and colonized the galaxy as we have explored and colonized the Earth. The absence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, he concluded, is proof that it does not exist. Hart rejected all alternative explanations, whether physical, sociological, or temporal. The paradox does not originate in Fermi’s question, but rather in Hart’s assertion.
In 1980, Frank Tipler extended the argument. Tipler suggested that self-replicating probes (i.e. von Neumann probes) could use even current spacecraft speeds to colonize the galaxy in less than 300 million years. He concluded that extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist, …show more content…
Though the program has not produced an abundance of data, data has been produced nonetheless. Project Phoenix observed around 800 nearby stars over billions of frequency channels at high sensitivity. No extraterrestrial signal was detected from any of the stars, but the lack of detection does not mean the experiment was a failure. SETI is not exclusively attempting to prove that extraterrestrial life exists; instead the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence attempts to determine if there is intelligent extraterrestrial