What is Paradoxical About 'Fermi's Paradox'? The Great Silence

摘要

In this review of Milan Cirkovic's The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi's Paradox, we attempt to reconstruct the logic of Fermi's paradox as understood by the author, and we critically examine the reasoning that leads to the paradox. We show that there is no plausible solution to Fermi's paradox that can satisfy all of Cirkovic's proposed desiderata, which in turn suggests that the author's standards for hypothesis adjudication need to be revised.