Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox implicitly or explicitly assume humanity has searched for extraterrestrial radio transmissions and found few or none. This paper challenges that premise, arguing that search completeness is extremely low. The authors develop a quantitative, eight-dimensional model of the "Cosmic Haystack" to calculate the fraction of this search space examined by several large radio SETI programs. They conclude that the fraction searched is very small, comparable to the ratio of a small swimming pool to Earth's oceans. A Python script is provided to calculate haystack volumes for future searches.

JASON T. WRIGHT, SHUBHAM KANODIA, EMILY LUBAR