A simple Fermi paradox solution proposed

A scientist proposed a simple solution to the Fermi paradox, which asks why humans have never encountered aliens. The physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 pointed out that given the age of the galaxy, even slow-moving spacecraft could easily have spread across the stars, so the cosmos’ apparent emptiness was surprising.

A researcher writing in Scientific American suggested one possibility: That aliens are here, but our atmosphere is sufficiently large — and their spacecraft, perhaps, sufficiently small — for us not to have noticed them. The apparent absence could be because “our sampling is inadequate to detect them… like declaring the entire ocean free of fish when none appear in a scooped-up bucket of seawater.”