"But Where is Everybody?"

Internationally renowned physicist Enrico Fermi was walking to lunch one day in the 1950s with physicist friends Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski, discussing recent UFO reports and the possibilities of interstellar travel.   

They all agreed that it was possible, but Fermi asked, "But where is everybody?"  It was a good question:  still is.  And there have been a lot of answers to it over the years:

Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent because it's hard to get life going. 

 It takes more than a warm bath of saltwater and a little electricity...  

Periodic extinction by natural events prevent it. 

 Think meteorites, gamma-ray bursts, massive volcanoes, etc. There have been many major extinction events on Earth that wiped out almost all life. And it could happen again.

Intelligent alien species who do exist haven't developed advanced technologies. 

 They're still in the Stone Age, or the Renaissance. Great art, no radio or rockets.

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. 

 How can that be? Well, here on this planet, we're trying to navigate between nuclear annihilation, human-caused climate change, faulty (to put it mildly) AI, population explosion combined with resource depletion, global pandemics, oh, the merry list goes on and on and on...

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others. 

 Huh? Well, you could say that all of human history is a history of wars and conquest. 

PLUS:   "In 1981, cosmologist Edward Harrison argued that such behavior would be an act of prudence: an intelligent species that has overcome its own self-destructive tendencies might view any other species bent on galactic expansion as a threat."

Civilizations only broadcast detectable signals for a brief period of time. 

 So far, we've missed them.  

The Dark Forest Hypothesis: 

 There are aliens, but they are both silent and hostile. (see Liu Cixin's novel The Dark Forest).

Alien Life May be Too Incomprehensible

 This seems to me to be the most probable (and is the whole theme of Stanislav Lem's Solaris. See also "The Devil in the Dark" from the first season of the original Star Trek, where no one can recognize that the Hortha are living beings, a silicon based species). After all, alien life forms might not be carbon based, or look like us, and might even have transcended the physical and/or actually live in other dimensions...  Who knows?  For that matter, maybe they're the viruses that currently inhabit most of us.

Earth is being deliberately avoided or isolated:  

We're too dangerous, we're a slum, we're a simulated universe, we're a zoo, we're contagious.  Who knows?  

We're invisible.  

Meanwhile, I have a few questions back:

Why do so many people want to see aliens / UFOs?  What are we looking for?  Saviors?  Killers?  Something new to fall in love with?  Something new to conquer?  Something new to have sex with?  Something new to kill?  

Once you have your alien, what are you going to do with it?  

Once you have your alien, what is it going to do with you?  

I have a feeling that you'd be better off with Siri...

SIDE NOTE:

Headline of the day:  

1 monkey recovered safely, 42 others remain on the run from South Carolina lab. (SOURCE)