During a 1950 lunch at Los Alamos Enrico Fermi asked “Where is everybody?” turning belief in extraterrestrial life from philosophy into a scientific problem. Given the universe’s age of about 13.8 billion years and the Copernican expectation that Earth is not unique, the article asks why we have found no trace of other technological civilisations. The first targeted radio search, Frank Drake’s Project Ozma in 1960, looked at the hydrogen line frequency 1420 MHz, following a 1959 paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison arguing that technologically advanced observers would use that band. Since 2017 the Pentagon’s blurred UAP videos and subsequent House hearings renewed public attention, but no clear, unambiguous evidence of nonhuman craft has emerged. For most scientists the puzzling fact is not that aliens might exist but that decades of searches for technosignatures have come up empty, leaving the Fermi paradox and hypotheses such as Rare Earth or the Great Filter unresolved.
