Where are the ET’s?

Have you heard of the Fermi paradox? Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

“The apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.”

Or to put it in layman’s terms: Where are the ET’s?

If you are interested, check out this article for detailed stats of why scientists believe that intelligent species should be abundant in the universe, even if we assume that life is very, very rare.

I found a couple of articles that point out that while the universe is the domain of physics, the resolution to the Fermi paradox may lie in biology!

But first, is it really necessary that a sufficiently advanced species would always explore the universe and/or want to “colonize new habitats”? As Alan Jacobs asks is it necessary that:

“Superior alien civilizations will be to us as Victorian explorers were to the tribes of Darkest Africa. Higher intelligence is then identified with (if we’re inclined to be critical) the British Empire at its self-confident apogee or (if we’re inclined to be really critical) the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany in their pomp. (It’s all about the galactic Lebensraum, baby!)”

While what Jacobs says could indeed be true, I feel that if life on earth is any indication, then life tends to spread out: just see how the DNA molecule has spread to almost every corner of the planet via one or the other life form. Sure, there might be some species that don’t have such a desire, but the odds must favour the species that does because they would survive catastrophic events in one area. Extending that idea, if the dinosaurs could have gone to Mars, they wouldn’t have gone extinct when the meteor hit earth, would they? Putting your eggs in one (planet) basket is not a good idea: surely, a sufficiently advanced species would know that.

Now to the biology: Nathan Taylor points out that to physicists, anything that violates the Copernician view must be wrong (Copernicus is the guy who pointed out that the earth is not the center of the universe; and by extension, any theory that considers any one part of the universe to be unique or special is considered anti-Copernician and hence wrong). But to a biologist, life is very, very, very rare: consider the fact that we can’t create any form of life, let along intelligent life in our labs whereas we created the Higgs Boson in the lab. To a biologist, Taylor says, “evolution follows quirky and highly contingent historical paths. There’s nothing inevitable about evolving intelligence”. To put it very crudely, the Copernician idea applies to physics, not necessarily to biology (unless we find the evidence)!

So is the answer to the Fermi paradox biological? That the evolution of life is far, far more rare than what physicists assume, and the evolution of intelligent life rarer still?