“Where is everybody!?”
It was around 1950. UFO mania had recently ramped up across the world, with dozens of reported sightings of strange flying machines fueling rampant speculation regarding their origins.
The eminent physicist Enrico Fermi was visiting his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that summer, and the mealtime conversation turned to the subject of UFOs. Very quickly, the assembled physicists realized that if UFOs were alien machines, that meant it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light. Otherwise, those alien craft would have never made it here.
At first, Fermi boisterously participated in the conversation, offering his usual keen insights. But soon, he fell silent, withdrawing into his own ruminations. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but Fermi stayed quiet.
Sometime later, long after the group had largely forgotten about the issue of UFOs, Fermi sat up and blurted out: “But where is everybody!?”
Every scientist at that table immediately knew what he meant.
That central question—where is everybody?—is now known as the Fermi Paradox in his honor. And while he wasn't the first person to wonder about the nature of other intelligent civilizations, he was the first to give the idea a modern spin.
The paradox arises from a seemingly innocent line of rational thinking that leads to an incorrect conclusion. It goes like this. We’re not special. We live on just another rocky planet around a ho-hum star in an unspectacular arm of an average spiral galaxy. There’s nothing incredibly unique or exotic about our physical circumstances.
And here we are. Alive. Intelligent. (Almost) spacefaring.
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