The question is both totally obvious yet technically deep: “Where are all the aliens?” There are hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way alone. Surely some of them must be hospitable. And yet, we never see any aliens! When a group of the world’s greatest scientists sat down to lunch, they challenged one another with this paradox.
It would come to be named after Enrico Fermi, who expressed it in a famously pithy form. Fermi led the world in both experimental and theoretical physics, winning the Nobel Prize at age 37 and inventing the first nuclear reactor. His dining interlocutors were Edward Teller, inventor of the thermonuclear bomb and another certifiable genius; Herbert York, Manhattan Project member and first director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Emil Konopinski, another Manhattan Project member and notable physicist.
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