Where Is Everyone?

In 1950, during a lunchtime conversation discussing extraterrestrials, the renowned physicist Enrico Fermi turned to his colleagues Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York, and asked a thought-provoking question: “Where is everybody?” His colleagues were accustomed to Fermi’s penchant for mentally calculating solutions to highly complex situations from what seemed like insufficient data. In this case, he had mentally estimated the number N of contemporary civilizations that should populate our galaxy, arriving at a certainly high value, despite the lack of evidence of their existence—a phenomenon known as the “great silence.”