[ WP ] If life is possible , then where is everyone ? The answer to the Fermi Paradox .

Thirteen point eight two billion years. 
 
 Thirteen point eight two billion years and somehow, out of all the stars in the sky, all the worlds in existence sprinkled here and there, ours was the single solitary speck to develop life? It seemed improbable, impossible even. 
 
 Mike Stahl turned away from the porthole. It was too much. It was just too much goddamn *space*. Back home in North Carolina, the population had hit eighty million, bodies packed in so tight you might as well be leftovers in a vacsac. It was an apt comparison, he thought, there was really no room to breathe down there, nowhere to go to escape the constant adwaves that permeated the outdoors, screaming their sales pitches straight into your skull. But out here it was entirely the opposite problem; untold millions of light years of nothing but vast emptiness. Space as far as the eye can see, and yet nobody's home. 
 
 It was a puzzle that had stumped scientists for generations. The Fermi Paradox, they called it, after one of the scientists had posed a question to his colleagues at lunch: If space is so big, and so old, why do n't we see anyone else there? There had been guesses, sure, anything from outright fiction to serious attempts at some sort of theory to explain just why the universe was so lifeless. But that's all they were, really: guesses. 
 
 He ran a hand through his hair, still thick and dark, though age was finally starting to creep in as specks of grey flecked the stubble on his face. There was no hair dye in space, not where the chemicals could easily contaminate some of the delicate experiments kept aboard. Mike grinned to think what his wife would say. She could n't bear it, he thought. Hell, she never wanted me to go to begin with. 
 
 A chime brought Mike from his reverie and back to the small terminal attached to the desk. It really was n't necessary, not with his neural jack, but Mike felt more comfortable with the screen. What could he say? He was a'30s kid at heart. The jacks had been around for nearly two decades, but growing up with the screen had been too powerful an influence to overcome, at least when he had the choice. He tapped twice and proceeded to navigate slowly down the data stream, the screen advancing in time with his eye movements. Hey, the jack was n't *all* bad. 
 
 The experiments aboard the station ranged from the mundane to the extravagant. Ant farms, greenhouses, a miniature particle accelerator, and the project Mike was assigned to: a dark matter sieve. A scant decade ago they had discovered how to interact with this strange matter that seemed to make up most of the mass in the known universe, and had found that, not unlike oil deposits back on Earth, it made a wonderful fuel source, without the drawback of smog like that which blanketed New Beijing. Unfortunately, though they'd discovered how to tap the energy potential of the dark matter, no one had yet been able to explain just what it was made of. This experiment hoped to change that. 
 
 Mike read the results, slowly at first, and then faster, skipping lines and skimming as quickly as he was able. This was astonishing. No, it was insane. He had done it, alright, but it was not what he had hoped, and now a dark feeling crept up his spine. Somebody *was* home, the universe was not quite so empty as they had thought - or at least, it had n't been. Somebody *had been* home, but now they were dust, broken into strange matter scattered throughout the stars. An interesting coincidence, Mike thought, that mankind should launch an Industrial Revolution fueled by the liquid corpses of the dinosaurs, and a short five hundred years later begin his journey through the cosmos on the sludge that was once a galactic civilization. 
 

