Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour 3.

Hello America, delighted to have you with me.

It's Eric Erickson here this fine Friday, an hour from hitting golf balls and having a beer.

Well, we may do an open container Friday here in a little while.

We'll see.

The phone number, if you want to be on the show today, 877973-725.

Glad to have you with me.

I want to go off the beaten path.

Got to go off the beaten path because I'm, you know, I occasionally get

fascinated by other things, get bored of talking politics and then the major headlines.

And here I wish to talk about us. Well, us in a broader sense. Are we alone? So ours Technica, a tech and science website,

Rush and I used to complain together about some of the content on the site, but we both would

read it. But there's this story today. Silence. Complete unnerving silence.

Despite decades of searching for any form of life, intelligent or otherwise out there in

the cosmos, the universe has but one message for us. No one is answering. But that solitude is not a curse. The great expanse

of the empty heavens above us does not carry with it an impossible burden of loneliness.

It begets a freedom, a freedom to explore, to be curious, to wander, to expand. The universe

is ours for the taking.

According to physics legend in the 1950s, the great scientist Enrico Fermi put it bluntly during a casual conversation with a friend.

Where is everybody?

The logic behind the question is simple. Modern cosmology is built on the Copernican

principle, or what I call the principle of we're not special. The Milky Way is an average

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