Professor Loeb says we should look harder for life in the cosmos

...Since Nicolaus Copernicus posited nearly 500 years ago that Earth is not at the center of the universe, much of what humanity has learned about the cosmos has confirmed our insignificant ordinariness. We live aboard Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In all the vastness of space and time, then, doesn’t it seem likely, maybe even obvious, that there exist other ordinary beings on other insignificant motes?

You might respond with the physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If life is so common, why haven’t we seen it?

Now, in a dazzling new book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” the astrophysicist Avi Loeb offers a forceful rejoinder to Fermi. Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. What if the reason we haven’t come across life beyond Earth is the same reason I can never find my keys when I’m in a hurry — not because they don’t exist but because I did a slapdash job looking for them? (continues)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/aliens-extraterrestrial-life.html?smid=em-share