In late spring or early summer, several years after World War II finally came to an end with the aid of lethal mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, four researchers went to lunch in Los Alamos, New Mexico -- and launched a legend.
This made sense, as far as it goes, since the men themselves were legendary scientists: Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. Although the precise date of the lunch is unknown -- circumstantial evidence suggests it took place in June of 1950 -- the site is known. It happened at Fuller Lodge, which had served as a mess hall during the Manhattan Project.
As they walked from their labs to the lodge, Teller and Fermi began discussing extraterrestrials and interstellar travel, a possibility that implied traveling faster than the speed of light.
Konopinski later recalled that Fermi and Teller "bounced arguments off each other" as to the likelihood of such travel.
At some point after they were seated, Konopinski mentioned, in a lighthearted way, a recent New Yorker cartoon about disappearing trash can lids -- the gag being that they were being stolen by aliens living among us the way teenagers boost cars for joy riding.
Fermi amused his friends by quipping that the cartoon explained two seemingly unrelated phenomena: missing trash can lids and increased reports of flying saucers. A bit later, however, Fermi said something else, seriously and pensively. It was a simple question, really: "Where is everybody?"
His lunch companions immediately understood Fermi's meaning: If the vast size of the universe implied that there almost had to be other intelligent civilizations out there, why had none of them ever made contact with Earth?
Their conversation was repeated inside scientific circles for years until Carl Sagan mentioned it as a footnote in a 1963 paper. Now the cat was out of the bag. Where was everybody? Another astronomer, Michael H. Hart, took Fermi's question and ran with it: If there are other habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy, if intelligent life had formed on them, if they developed civilization and technology, if they looked to the stars, if they explored space … well, why haven't we seen them?
Sagan, who co-authored a 1966 book called "Intelligent Life in the Universe," rejected Hart's paper on the topic for publication in the scientific journal he edited. But Hart found a publisher in 1975, and the question was joined publicly.
The ensuing debate became known under the shorthand of "Fermi's Paradox." But it isn't actually a paradox. It's a timeless question human beings have asked since they first began gazing at the stars and wondering about the immensity of the cosmos and our place in it:
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
