According to the “Fermi Paradox,” the question posed by Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, “Where is everybody?” Specifically, what are the chances that we are alone in the universe? According to the laws of probability, if we exist, why not others? (Specifically, Fermi was referring to “intelligent” beings… You know, like us… though the question extends, as well, to all life… hence, the first nascent, and, yet, ever-burgeoning attempts to discover evidence for life, in any form, elsewhere in the universe…). Even more specifically, an equation describing this question can be seen here.
However, maybe the true answer to the question is simpler than that. Maybe the question, itself, is even more simple: “Why?”
And that answer is posed by renowned astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan in his “Pale Blue Dot,” describing an image of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Specifically:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…
“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
That is poetry. And it is echoed by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and all other poets, prophets, philosophers, PEOPLE, including you, and me… and any time ANY of us, ALL of us, take a breath… ingest, digest… respire, perspire, and… expire.
To ask the question is to prove the point. “Why?” “Because…”
The question AND the answer lead to greater self-acceptance.
Why would we ever leave?
Observations from the Brink 