A starry picture book for the cutest · by Amberito
📖 Download the printable bilingual PDF picture book
Many years ago, there was a very clever scientist. Let’s call him Grandpa Fermi.
One day at lunch, Grandpa Fermi and his friends were talking about aliens. Suddenly, he put down his fork and asked:
“Where is everybody?”
His friends looked at each other. Nobody knew the answer.
The sky has more stars than anyone can count. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 250 billion stars — way, way more than you could ever count!
Grandpa Fermi thought: with so many stars, surely someone else lives out there, too? And some stars are much, much older than our Sun. Aliens living there might have learned to build rockets long, long before us.
It’s like a big party that started a long, long time ago. We are the very last little guests to arrive — it’s almost midnight! But when we open the door —
Huh? Nobody’s here!
Scientists thought and thought, and came up with three possible answers.
Idea number one: maybe it really is just us.
Growing from tiny cells into people who build rockets might be very, very hard — like climbing over one tall mountain after another. Maybe we are the only ones who made it over.
If that’s true, then Earth — and every single one of us — is very, very special.
Idea number two: maybe they’re out there, and we just haven’t found them yet.
Maybe they live so far away that a single “hello” takes many, many years to arrive.
Maybe they’re shy — like how we quietly watch the birds in a tree, careful not to scare them away.
Or maybe they’re just very busy. When we walk down the street, we don’t stop to say hi to every little ant.
Idea number three: maybe they’ve already visited Earth!
Some people say they’ve seen strange lights in the sky. Even pilots who fly airplanes have said so.
But the pictures always come out blurry.
The scientist says: “I’d love to believe you! Can you show me a clearer picture?”
That’s a scientist’s superpower: being super curious, and also asking, “How do you know?”
Which answer is right? Right now, nobody knows.
Maybe one day, you’ll be the one who finds out. Grandpa Fermi would be so happy!
So tonight, before bed, remember to look up at the stars.
Look — is someone far, far away waving at you?
Goodnight, little one on planet Earth.
A note for grown-ups
This little book is about the Fermi Paradox. Grandpa Fermi is Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who asked this question over lunch in 1950: the universe is so big and so old that it should be full of civilizations, so why haven’t we seen any?
The three “ideas” match the three families of answers that physicist Stephen Webb describes in If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: there’s no one else; they exist but we haven’t connected yet; or they’ve already been here and we don’t know it.
Sources: Fermi paradox · Wikipedia (Chinese) · Fermi paradox · Baidu Baike