[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]

Introduction

During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly, Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?”

Behind Fermi’s question was this line of reasoning: Since there are likely many other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, and since in a few tens of thousand of years at most they

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