A few weeks ago we puzzled over one of life's ultimate conundrums: with so many stars and potentially habitable planets out there, where are all the aliens? This is known as the Fermi Paradox and in the video above, design collective Kurz Gesagt have come up with possible solutions for how and where we might find extraterrestrial life.
So what will it take? First of all we'll have to develop the technology to not only reach other stars, but survive the journey there. And if we did make it to a distant Solar System, we also face the very real possibility that we'd find nothing but the ruins of a now-extinct great civilisation. After all, the Universe is incredibly old, and in the grand scheme of things, humans may be pretty late to the party.
But ignoring all those obstacles for a second and assuming we DID eventually find another ancient civilisation, what would happen next? We always imagine that aliens will either want to communicate with us or wipe us out. But what if we're so different that they don't even recognise us as a civilisation?
Watch the video above to see some of the potential futures that humans might face in relation to extraterrestrial life. Of course, there's really only way to answer these questions… and that's to get out there in the Universe and explore. We can't wait. You can see Kurz Gesagt's awesome initial explanation of the Fermi Paradox below: