A recent Sci Am article considers the so-far-fruitless hunt for intelligent life beyond Earth and attempts to deal with Fermi’s query “if life is out there, where the heck is everyone?” Their take? Well, first of all, if self-replicating machines are the obvious way to cross interstellar distances, we should’ve been knee-deep in beeping explora-droids by now. We don’t seem to be knee-deep in these devices. So, is that just because our mostly empty cosmic neighborhood is, like, so far out in the galactic boonies that we can’t even get Grubhub delivery? Or, is it because there’s some other element inherent in organic-built machine-ish exploring that prevents them from doing it in a way that allows them to reach us. Or, possibly, to reach anywhere. I know. Counter-intuitive, eh? The article authors figure maybe it takes undaunted, obsessively curious biological units to achieve the necessary level of galactic-scale void-crossing/life-finding. Which leaves us, for the time being, utterly FTL (freakin’ totally luckless) – at least until we invent drives capable of FTL. (Heh. See what I did there?) Better start building those miles-long generation starships then, eh?