Ars on your lunch break, week 4: Some possible solutions to Fermi’s Paradox

I'm not saying the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but..." guy looks like Londo Mollari, but...

Today we present the second installment of my interview with British astronomer Stephen Webb on the subject of Fermi’s paradox. Part one ran yesterday—so if you missed it, click right here. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded player or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

This time, we open by talking about the second large category of possible solutions to the paradox: that intelligent aliens are out there, but we just haven’t detected them yet. Webb's book Where Is Everybody includes freestanding chapters on 25 such solutions, but of course we only tackle a subset here.

We then go on to the third major category—which is that we are quite alone in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire universe. This idea tends to be a dismaying possibility to science-fiction authors like me (and is inimical to the entire premise of my first novel!). But it can also be seen as an optimistic—and indeed even relieving—interpretation. Stephen and I discuss why.