If I had been conducting the interview, I would have asked Jill Carter about her thoughts on the Fermi Paradox. While the interview touched on our search for Earth-like planets and the Drake equation, which attempts to answer this question, the Fermi Paradox asks directly, "Where are they?" Given that we estimate thousands of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, the skies and our telescopes should be teeming with evidence. But it is radio silent. I would like to hear a thinker like Jill Carter give us her best take.
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Hi Tim,
You raised a great question in your post. I believe that while we may predict the probability that there exist other intelligent civilizations, this still doesn't mean that such civilizations exist, even if there is a 100% chance probability. An similar yet opposite example would be if I asked you to choose a real number between 0 and 1. Regardless of your choice (for example: .35849295), given an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, the probability that you chose your number at random is technically 1/infinity = 0, yet you chose it. In a similar regard, just because we estimate a non-zero probability of intelligent civilizations in space, there still may be none.