When Fermi asked “where is everybody?”, the “everybody” referred to intelligent extraterrestrial creatures. While the discovery of any life elsewhere would be profoundly important, it’s intelligent life we search for with passion. It is (presumably) only intelligent life that can travel between stars and with whom we can communicate, interact and learn from. But perhaps intelligence—the sort that can investigate and understand the laws of physics—is rare in the universe? As many as 50 billion species have lived on Earth, but only one has evolved the sort of intelligence that can determine the
...more
