If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

by Stephen Webb

The columnist was Marilyn vos Savant, who is clearly a very bright woman: from 1986 to 1989 she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as possessor of the “Highest IQ (women)”; she ceased to appear not because some other woman was deemed to possess a higher IQ, but because the editors at Guinness saw sense and realized that attaching a number to intelligence in this way is essentially meaningless. Her proposed solution to the Monty Hall problem nevertheless provoked outrage from several mathematics professors; at least one academic argued that by publishing such nonsense she was doing a disservice to the public understanding of mathematics. And yet her analysis was perfectly correct.

Wow