Brian Cox | Why It's Impossible for Humans to Ever Meet Aliens

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Brian Cox | Why It's Impossible for Humans to Ever Meet Aliens

There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on every beach on Earth. That's not poetry. That's mathematics.

Roughly 200 billion trillion stars, each one a sun, many of them orbited by planets. The Kepler space telescope alone discovered over 2,600 confirmed exoplanets in just one small patch of sky. Extrapolate across the entire galaxy and you get estimates of 100 to 400 billion planets in the Milky Way alone.

Some of those planets sit in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. Some of them have been there for billions of years, far longer than Earth has hosted life. The numbers seem to guarantee that we're not alone. Surely, somewhere out there, other intelligent beings have evolved, built civilizations, looked up at their own night sky and wondered if anyone else exists.

And yet we've found nothing. No signals. No visitors. No evidence whatsoever that any intelligence exists anywhere in the universe except here on this one planet. This is the great silence. This is the question that has haunted astronomers and physicists for decades. If the universe is so vast, so old, so filled with opportunity for life to arise, where is everybody?

Brian Cox

physicist

Brian Cox | Why It's Impossible for Humans to Ever Meet Aliens

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