World Building 2: Articles by Torn MacAlester

Part 2 of World Build­ing for Sci­ence Fic­tion Part 2—It Starts With A Para­dox   by Torn MacAlester     Pho­to by Rakice­vic Nenad from Pex­els The Fer­mi Para­dox The Fer­mi para­dox tries to answer: Where are they (the aliens)? It looks at how fast trav­el is across the galaxy.  It says by infer­ence the time to explore the 100 bil­lion solar sys­tems with­in the galaxy. The para­dox assumes that the first civ­i­liza­tion to emerge will find itself alone the cos­mos.  Because they find them­selves alone, the civ­i­liza­tion will try to fig­ure out the answer to the ques­tion: Where are they? […]

Fea­tured The Fer­mi Para­dox cre­ates an inter­est­ing dilem­ma from sci­ence.  What is the fil­ter that seems to be pre­vent­ing con­clu­sive evi­dence of alien civ­i­liza­tions? In oth­er words, what is the ‘Great Fil­ter’? We have sev­er­al options: Plan­ets capa­ble of sup­port­ing life:  That might be a decep­tive descrip­tion.  What is a plan­et capa­ble of sup­port­ing life. The first indi­ca­tion is that it must have liq­uid water present.  This is cer­tain­ly nec­es­sary but it isn’t suf­fi­cient. A bet­ter cri­te­ria would be the world hav­ing suf­fi­cient­ly long time to sup­port life for life to evolve far enough to have intel­li­gent life. Such examples […]