What is Fermi’s Paradox, and who came up with it?
Public Domain Image The exact date of the conversation may be unclear, but apparently in either the late 1940s or early 1950s, (perhaps the summer of 1950), depending on the source you read, a group of scientists at Los Alamos were having a lunch time conversation, about the probability of extraterrestrials throughout the Universe, when the physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question, “Where is everybody?” His basic argument was that given the extreme age of the Universe, and the vast number of stars, life throughout the cosmos ought to be common place. If true, and that many planets have also been the homes of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then even at sub-light speeds a multitude of these ETs should have visited Earth by now, and therefore we should have discovered considerable evidence of such alien visitations, or have had direct contact, or even been conquered by technologically advanced beings with conquest on their minds. Many “conventional” minded scientists take Profe
