It was a simple question asked over lunch in 1950. Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who helped usher in the atomic age, was dining with colleagues at Los Alamos, New Mexico, when the conversation turned to extraterrestrial life. Given the vastness of the universe and the statistical likelihood of other intelligent civilizations, Fermi wondered, "Where is everybody?"
Seventy-five years later, David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, says we're closer to an answer.
When Fermi posed his famous paradox, Charbonneau said, we hadn't identified a single planet beyond our solar system. The 1995 discovery of the first exoplanet allowed scientists to break the paradox into smaller, more solvable questions: How many stars are there? How many of those stars have planets? What fraction of those planets are Earth-like? What fraction of Earth-like planets support life? And finally, what fraction of that life is intelligent?
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