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Aliens Don’t ExistAt least one alien civilization would travel –total absence proves they don’t existDick’96 (Steven, Chief Historian for NASA, “The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science”, p. 443-444) The origin of the crisis was renewed attention to a question casually raised by the pioneering nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi almost 10 years before the modern era of SETI. During a luncheon with colleagues at Los Alamos in 1950, Fermi had simply asked, "If there are extraterrestrials, where are they?" a question that now became known as The "Fermi Paradox."93 UFO believers would have answered without hesitation`that the extraterrestrials were here — they had known it all along — and perhaps it was in part the reputation of this group that kept scientists from pursuing the Fermi question for 25 years. That in 1975 the issue was raised in forceful form in two independent articles in the United States and Britain, without at least one of the authors knowing about Fermi's casual question, is some indication of the force of its logic. The fact that there are no intelligent beings from outer space on Earth now, argued Michael Hart and David Viewing in their respective articles, is an observational fact that argues strongly that extraterrestrials do not exist.94 The basis for this conclusion was the assertion that interstellar travel was possible after all, coupled with attention to the time scales involved. The pessimistic views of those like Purcell, Hart claimed, were based on relativistic spaceflight; the use of nuclear propulsion at say, 1/10th the speed of light would have much more reasonable energy requirements.95 Given the age of the universe and the time needed for intelligence to develop, Hart and Viewing stated, extraterrestrials should have populated the galaxy. At a velocity of 1/10th the speed of light, Hart argued, this would have occurred in a mere i million years. Having addressed the physical argument against interstellar flight, Hart went on to argue against sociological and temporal considerations and to reject the view that extraterrestrials were here now. All sociological arguments — that advanced civilizations engage in spiritual contemplation rather than space exploration, that they destroy themselves, or that they set aside planets like the Earth as wildlife preserves — Hart felt were answered because in order to be effective they would have to apply to every race in the galaxy at all times, an unreasonable assumption. If only one race survived, it could have colonized the galaxy given the time scales involved. In Viewing's words, "This, then, is the paradox: all our logic, all our antiisocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them."96 Thus, Hart concluded, the existence of thousands of civilizations in the Galaxy is quite implausible: "though it is possible that one or two civilizations have evolved and have destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, it is implausible that every one of 10,000 alien civilizations had done so." And there might be a few advanced civilizations that chose never to travel, but "their number should be small, and could well be zero." The bottom line, if this rationale held, was that "an extensive.search for radio messages from other civilizations is probably a waste of time and money."97 Aliens Don’t ExistRocket technology and Von Neumann probes prove any aliens would have reached our solar system – the absence of such evidence mathematically proves we are aloneDick ’96 (Steven, Chief Historian for NASA, “The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science”, p. 446-447) Even as the "Where Are They?" conference participants were gathering in College Park, Maryland, mathematical physicist Frank Tipler was putting the finishing touches on an article that would encapsulate the opposition views to SETI, taking the extreme position that the arguments were so compelling that it was a waste of taxpayers' money to undertake a search. Together with the Maryland conference, Tipler's articulate arguments and controversial extreme stance marked a turnabout in the for-tunes of SETI, a turnabout given wide circulation in the press. Giving due credit to Fermi, Dyson, Hart, and others who had preceded him, Tipler felt that the force of their arguments had not been appreciated, and he delighted in turning the SETI proponents' own arguments against them. Any civilization that had developed the technology for interstellar communication, he argued, must also have developed the technology for interstellar travel. The rudiments of rocket technology, after all, were developed long before the existence of radio waves was expected. More-over, any species capable of interstellar communication would also be adept at computer technology and would have developed "a self-replicating universal constructor with intelligence comparable to the human level," something some experts on Earth expected within a century. Such a machine would have explored or colonized the Galaxy within 300 million years, he argued, at a cost less than that of operating a microwave beacon for several hundred years, as SETI advocates postulated alien civilizations might do.105 In order to make maximum use of the resources of the other stellar systems being explored, Tipler proposed the universal constructor, "a machine capable of making any device, given the construction materials and a construction program," a so-called von Neumann machine, since the mathematician John von Neumann had first discussed it in theoretical terms in 1966. The most important device it would make – out of the raw materials of asteroids and other debris found in the stellar system – would be copies of itself, which would then be launched to the nearest stars, only to repeat the process until the Galaxy was full of such probes. Even with velocities a few 10/1000ths the speed of light (the speed of the Voyager spacecraft leaving the solar system), each interstellar trip would require less than 100,000 years, and the entire Galaxy would be full of probes in 300 million years. Furthermore, Tipler argued, if one accepts the observational fact that no traces of extraterrestrial intelligence are evident in our planetary system, this places an "astrophysical constraint" on the evolution of intelligent species. If the Galaxy is about 15 billion years old, as is usually stated, then twice as many stars formed before the Sun did. This is approximately equivalent to 100 billion (or 10^11) stars – so that the probability that intelligence will evolve is 1 divided by that number, or 10-11. But since the number of stars born since the Sun was formed is also 10^11, the number of civilizations in the Galaxy is one – ours.'" 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