The story is that it all started one day in 1950, when a group of prominent physicists— all veterans of the Manhattan Project—were walking to lunch at the Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos. They were discussing the spate of recent UFO sightings that had been claimed in the area, and the conversation turned to the topic of extraterrestrial civilizations. Out of the blue, Enrico Fermi (1901–54), a man well known for his ability to see to the heart of a problem, asked a simple question: Where is everybody? In the years since then, scientists have come to realize that Fermi’s offhand question is, in fact, the deepest question we can ask about life in our galaxy. The fact that there is no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrials in spite of the calculations suggesting that they should exist is known as the Fermi paradox.
So why has his offhand question played such an important role in the debate about extraterrestrials? To understand this, we can go back to our old device of compressing the lifetime of the universe into a single year. In this scheme, the Sun and our solar system formed in the late summer (Labor Day is a convenient approximation), modern humans showed up a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, and all of recorded history took place while the ball is descending in Times Square, with modern science appearing in the last second of that descent.
The point is this: if there really are other technological civilizations out there, it is extremely unlikely that they developed science after we did—after all, they had the whole year to discover the laws of nature. To understand what follows from this statement, let’s look at a possible future for the human race.
That statement is patently ridiculous.
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