ASTRONOMY | LIFE
What Is Fermi’s Paradox and Why Does it Matter?
How Enrico Fermi’s decades old question continues to captivate the world
In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory were discussing extraterrestrial life and the size of our universe when Fermi famously asked “Where is everybody?”
He wondered why, given all of the Earth-like planets capable of supporting life and the unthinkable time scales of the universe, there remains no clear evidence of alien civilization. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is already so vast that the question of extraterrestrial life appears more a matter of “where?” than “if.”
Even within our own solar system, we’ve hardly managed to rule out the possibility of life on our nearest three planets. Speculation about basic biology taking place on or beneath the surface of our next-door neighbors remains alive and well. And that’s still without getting into Jupiter’s and Saturn’s staggering nearly one hundred moons a piece.
The sheer distance from galaxy to galaxy is so large that it leaves the possibility of life elsewhere feeling all but inevitable. When we begin processing the size of the universe as a whole, the notion that the conditions were only right on this piddly blue planet…
