Fermi's Paradox Galbraith

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During the talk by Dr. David Galbraith, several global questions were raised. The most prominent one that came to my mind during the talk was how we are going to survive on a planet that we cannot leave, yet one that we have depleted our natural resources by 98.5%. Galbraith discusses how we survive on Earth because of the presence of our atmosphere and internal magnetic field; we are unique because we have yet to encounter another planet that has an atmosphere like we do. Because our atmosphere is protecting us from cosmic rays and radiation, and we have yet to find a way to substantially protect ourselves outside of our atmosphere, we are stuck on our current planet. As Galbraith discussed during his talk and mentioned above, we have depleted …show more content…

Galbraith mentioned Fermi’s Paradox, which instantly peaked my interest. He described it as a theory stating there are billions of stars in our universe, and eventually different planets started to develop, so their must be other planets like Earth out there somewhere. The question is why haven’t we found them. Galbraith mentioned that because we have had trouble with sustainability outside of our own atmosphere, maybe other Earth-like planets are in the same boat as we are. This paradox got me thinking about space travel, and if we will be able to visit other planets like Earth one day. I also started to think about the Drake equation, which I learned about in high school. The Drake equation looks at different things like the formation of stars and the probability of other life-sustaining planets, which in turn gives us a number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy that we can detect electromagnetic emissions from (The Drake Equation). While I thought quite a bit about extraterrestrial life, I also thought about the fact we are stuck on Earth. The first thing that immediately comes to mind with that is how we are going to produce enough food. In the paper we discussed during class on Thursday, the data showed that we are using a significant amount of our natural resources in the production of beef cattle, and my thoughts on this are that we should transition to meats that don’t use as many resources. However, as was also discussed in class, beef is considered a