![]() ![]() ![]() Around 1950, during one of his visits to Los Alamos, Fermi pondered the possibility of alien life in the galaxy with his lunchtime companions and asked the unexpected question, “Where are they?”įermi’s question comes down to this: given what we know or expect to find out about the age of the universe the number of stars within it the number of those stars likely to have planets the number of those planets likely to support life the amount of time it took life to evolve the amount of time it took human life to evolve the relatively short leap from the invention of agriculture to fully technologized, world-transforming civilization and the relatively short distances between stars, the Earth should have already been visited or colonized by alien life (and perhaps many times over across its four-billion-year history). ![]() THE FERMI PARADOX is an avenue of cosmological speculation popularly attributed to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who developed the world’s first nuclear reactor as part of the Manhattan Project and who is thus considered (alongside men like Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Szilard) one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. ![]()
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