The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet?
The article revisits the Fermi paradox, questioning why humanity has not detected extraterrestrial civilizations despite the universe’s age and size. It outlines early scientific attempts such as Project Ozma and the ambitious Project Cyclops to search for radio signals from alien societies. Recent public interest in UFOs and UAP hearings has not yielded definitive evidence of nonhuman technology.
- ▪Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?” highlighting the paradox of missing alien contact.
- ▪Project Ozma in 1960 scanned nearby Sun‑like stars at the hydrogen line frequency but detected no artificial signals.
- ▪Project Cyclops proposed a massive array of up to 2,500 antennas to accelerate SETI searches, though its cost was estimated at $10‑25 billion.
- ▪U.S. congressional hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena have increased public attention but have not produced conclusive evidence of extraterrestrials.
The Guardian — Science publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under science. We currently carry 84 of its stories.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/11/the-great-silence-why-havent-we-found-any-aliens-yet |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:00:04 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T04:15:46.264Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T04:15:46.264Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | D1oETjdHZMs3 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An astronomical radio observatory in New Mexico. Photograph: Gabe Palmer/AlamyGiven the size and age of the universe, it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than our own. So where are they? The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order By Adam KirschTue 11 Aug 2026 00.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleDuring a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Science.
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