The Exoplanets

Where is ET and how does he look like? The fast rate of discovery of exoplanets is telling us that millions of planets in the universe are most probably teeming with life.

But the extremely small probability that life, once born, evolves into homo sapiens tells us that ET is most probably just a bacterium.

A possible answer to the Fermi paradox (‘where is everybody?’) is therefore: they are all out there, on millions of planets, but bacteria do not build spaceships.

Homo sapiens is alone in a universe teeming with life.

Umberto de Angelis is full professor of physics (retired) at the University Federico II, Napoli, Italy, where between 1971 and 2014, he has taught courses in General Physics, Astrophysics, Plasma Physics and Physics for Astrophysics.

His research activity has been in the fields of Astrophysics and Plasma Physics, mostly in the framework of research grants from the European Community, in the UK (Oxford University, Imperial College London), Germany (Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics, Munich) and Sweden (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm).

He has published more than 120 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals, several books of physics for students and four books in popular science (in Italian):

A due passi da noi, Esplorazioni spaziali diTerra e dintorni, Bibliopolis, 1992

Il mondo dell’improbabile homo sapiens, Europa edizioni, 2019

Il problema energetico. Perchè l’italia non può fare a meno del nucleare, GEDI, 2022

Gli esopianeti. La ricerca di vita extraterrestre, Albatros, 2023

From 2010 to 2015, he has been on the Scientific Board of the European Space Agency for the microgravity experiments on the International Space Station.