Where Is Everybody

Summer 1950. Los Alamos, New Mexico. A group of physicists walked to lunch, discussing recent reports of UFO sightings and a New Yorker cartoon about aliens stealing garbage cans.

The conversation drifted to other topics. Then, in the middle of lunch, Enrico Fermi suddenly asked: Where is everybody?

His colleagues understood immediately. They had been talking about extraterrestrial life. And Fermi, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, had just articulated a puzzle that would carry his name.

The logic was simple. The galaxy is old. Billions of years old. It contains hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those stars have planets. If even a small fraction of those planets developed intelligent life, and if even a small fraction of those civilizations developed technology, the galaxy should be teeming with detectable signals. Or visitors.

But we see nothing. Hear nothing. Detect nothing.

Where is everybody?

The question was not new in 1950. Humans had wondered about other worlds for millennia. The ancient Greeks debated whether other Earths existed. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, in part for insisting that stars were distant suns with their own planets and inhabitants.

As telescopes improved, speculation intensified. In the nineteenth century, astronomers believed they saw canals on Mars. Artificial structures. Evidence of Martian civilization. Percival Lowell mapped these canals in detail and wrote popular books about the dying Martian race.

The canals turned out to be optical illusions. Mars was barren. But the expectation of life elsewhere persisted.

By 1950, astronomers understood the vastness of the galaxy. They knew the universe was billions of years old. They understood that the chemistry of life was not unique to Earth. Everything suggested that life should be common.

Yet the sky remained silent.

Fermi did some quick calculations at that lunch table. Given the age of the galaxy and the speed of even primitive interstellar travel, any civilization with a few million year head start should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. The fact that they had not arrived here, the fact that we saw no evidence of their existence anywhere, required explanation.

Something was wrong with the logic. Or something was wrong with our expectations.

The conversation at Los Alamos that day was informal. Fermi never published on the topic. He died just four years later. But his simple question, asked over lunch, became one of the most famous problems in science.

Where is everybody?

The silence of the universe demands an answer.