A few weeks ago, Professor Ben Zuckerman spoke at my school. He is one of the editors of the popular book "Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?" which explores in part the Fermi paradox: Why haven't extra-terrestrials tried to contact us yet? While he gave two lectures, I only attended one, where he went over many of the ideas in his book, explaining the rarity of technological life and the improbability of us ever making "contact".I went to the colloquium talk rather interested. In honesty, I kind of misunderstood the intention of the talk (I thought he was going to be arguing against the existence of extraterrestrial life), but I was not disappointed. There were a lot of interesting ideas brought up about how to make contact or about what sorts of development projects we should pursue. And while I think some of them were really bad, they were thought-provoking. (Dr. Zuckerman of course recognizes the flaws of these, saying they are just stage 1 prototype designs).
The talk was very well done and I won't touch on it too much. What I really wanted to address was an audience question asked by one of the professors at my university. First let me provide some background.
