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| Enrico Fermi |
In their famous book of hard scientific popularization, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,
published in 1986, the cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler offer a proof that we are alone in the galaxy by
means of a variant of the Fermi paradox (if
there are any extraterrestrial intelligences in the Galaxy, why aren’t they
here?) which can be summarized as follows:
1.
In 100 years we will have succeeded in creating life
in the laboratory. Not just life, we will also be able to build a complete
human being from its chemical components and information about the human genome,
which can be stored in a digital memory.
2.
In 100 years we will have managed to build
artificial intelligences as intelligent as human beings, able to replace us in
any place and circumstance.
3.
Our current space technology allows us to reach a
speed of 0.0003 c (where c is the speed of light). At that speed, a spaceship
would take about 50,000 years to reach the nearest stars.
