Despite the years of exploration, discovery, and calculations, the science community has yet to come to a collective decision on whether there’s intelligent life elsewhere.


People have long been entertaining the idea that there’s intelligent life somewhere out there other than on Earth.

Despite the years of exploration, discovery, and calculations, the science community has yet to come to a collective decision on the matter.

Carl Sagan was famously in the ‘life is out there’ camp, noting that given the billions of celestial bodies in the universe, surely some of them have smart occupants.

Frank Drake came up with the Drake Equation as a means of calculating what the odds of life outside Earth really were.

Results vary, but have been positive enough for some to keep their hope alive.

Among the popular scientists who maintained certainty that Homo sapiens are all there is was Enrico Fermi.

It was his position that if they were smart and out there somewhere they would have made themselves known or at the very least, there’d be some sort of evidence.

Biologist Ernst Mayr argued against the possibility that the complex yet delicate evolutionary process that created humans would ever have occurred elsewhere.

For the time being, the only guaranteed places we’ll find brainy aliens are in the pages and films of science fiction narratives.