“Where is everybody?”
Asked Enrico Fermi as he sat down to have some lunch with friends.
But he wasn’t talking about humans…
The year was 1950.
Fermi, along with some friends were sitting down for lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Fermi was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who contributed to the development of the first nuclear reactor and the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb).
Fermi was accompanied by Herbert York, Emil Konopinski, and Edward Teller.
All of these individuals played a crucial role in developing nuclear/atomic technologies and conducting research.
While walking to the lunchroom, they had been talking about reports of the latest UFO sightings.
The focus of the conversation shifted, but after some time, Fermi interrupts everyone…
Teller recalls the experience:
“In the middle of the conversation, Fermi came out with the quite unexpected question ‘Where is everybody?’…The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that in spite of Fermi’s question coming...
...out of the clear blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life”.
It would have been interesting to sit in on their conversations.
In Teller’s recollection of the event, he doesn’t remember Fermi going too deep into the matter but York remembered differently:
“[Fermi] followed up with a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life given...
...an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of these calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over”.
York continues saying that Fermi supposed the reason we hadn’t been visited “might be the interstellar flight is impossible, or if it is possible, always judged not worth the effort, or technological civilization doesn’t last long enough for it to happen”.
It is worth noting that the Fermi Paradox, despite its popular name, does not stem from an actual paradox posed by Fermi himself.
Fermi did not express skepticism regarding the existence of extraterrestrial life, nor did he find their absence from Earth to be paradoxical.
Fermi simply posed the question, "Where is everybody?", leaving room for many answers.
Among these explanations, Fermi seemed to lean towards the idea that either interstellar travel is impractical due to vast distances, or Earth simply hadn't been reached by alien travelers.
FERMI PARADOX SUMMARY:
“The Fermi Paradox seeks to answer the question of where the aliens are.
Given that our solar system is quite young compared to the rest of the universe — roughly 4.5 billion years old, compared to 13.8 billion — and that interstellar travel might be fairly easy to achieve given enough time, Earth should have been visited by aliens already, the idea goes.”
One of the best explanations of the paradox I have read from Space.com
This paradox connects to @elonmusk and @spacex’s mission heavily.
They are working extremely hard to make life multi-planetary in the case that becoming multi-planetary is incredibly rare or hard, in hopes that consciousness can continue to advance and propagate into the future.
Exciting times!
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