Alien life, the Fermi Paradox and brilliant animated videos

5 Jun 2015

Why can we not find any aliens out there? We’re making an awful racket down here on Earth, someone out there must hear us. Alas not, at least according to these excellent, animated videos.

Describing the Fermi Paradox, the team at Kurzgesagt (in English the name translates as ‘In A Nutshell’) explain how drastically unlikely it is that there are any aliens out there.

The Fermi Paradox works on probabilities and time. For example, our sun is a bit young, and there are countless others far older that could have spawned life on similar planets to ours, trillions of years ago.

These civilisations would have had all the opportunities to develop interstellar capabilities and colonise everywhere, including here, over the course of billions of years. There should be evidence of alien life.

Do aliens really exist? We’ll never know

But where? Where are their ruins, their footprints, their old photographs?

It’s a harrowing tale made only slightly less crushing by the entertaining designs, consistently bringing you back to Earth (don’t pardon the pun) when the narrator tells us that, rather than being amidst a universe of wonder and opportunity, we are “trapped on a tiny, moist mud bath in an eternal universe”.

So do aliens really exist? It seems almost impossible for us to ever find out.

Both videos tell the tale better than I could, so do enjoy:

The main picture is star cluster in NGC 2074, as captured by Hubble

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com