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Why Don’t We See Them? All our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique— that they must be there. And yet we do not see them. —David Viewing, British Interplanetary Society, 1975! There is... another species of life—corporeal indeed, and various in its order; but... not to be seen, not to be heard, not to be felt by man. —British historical and religious writer Isaac Taylor, 1836? Early in the twentieth century, pioneering spaceflight theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovskii envisioned human expansion through the solar system. If extraterrestrial colonization was in Humankind’s future, Tsiolkovskii assumed that it was an inevitable step for other intelligent beings. Those older and more advanced than we must already have expanded beyond their natal star systems. Tsiolkovskii’s reasoning led him to confront what later became known as the Fermi Paradox. If alien expansion included our solar system, why don’t we see any evidence of them? He suggested that because older and wiser civilizations know that contact could ruin us, they leave us alone; we have been set aside as a reserve of intelligence. Tsiolkovskii thought that they would visit us when we are more advanced.* Charles Fort identified what he called the greatest of mysteries in 1919: “Why don’t they come here, or send here, openly?” He offered his own, possibly ironic, explanation: We are property. Once upon a time, the Earth was a no-man’s land. Other worlds explored and colonized here, fighting among themselves. There has been an adjustment among contesting claim- ants. Now something owns Earth, warning off all others.‘ This question arose again in 1950, when a conversation among Enrico Fermi and other scientists touched on the question of flying saucers and extraterrestrials. Fermi asked “where are they?” He followed up with a 164 Before Fermi