This is an old argument, covering well-trod ground. Somewhere in the ocean there's an island with only one colony of ants. In that colony, there's a little an

This is an old argument, covering well-trod ground. Somewhere in the ocean there's an island with only one colony of ants. In that colony, there's a little ant-Enrico Fermi, doing little ant-things, writing in little ant-journals, wondering little ant-thoughts, including "Where are they?" You have to bring a great amount of hubris to bear on this problem to reach any kind of conclusions. After all, we only have an example of one Earth, with one species of humans on it. I'm not sure we'd know what an alien was if one were standing next to us (metaphorically, perhaps actually). We have no common frame of reference to reason about such things. The best we can do is string together a lot of terms representing concepts through multiplication. This gives us the unsurprising result that lots of things multiplied by each other tend to get either really large or really small really quickly. The question Fermi asked was a truly profound one. It was profound because it points the finger back at us, asking just what do we really know about the entirety of universe we live in? It's a great question. We will be fortunate to see little tiny pieces of the answer in our lifetimes.