Life in universe, the immortal paradox
Oppenheimer. In my last column, I touched on the connection between the Galton-Watson process and Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project colleague Leo Szilard’s work. Time, this week, for a look at another Oppenheimer colleague, the physicist Enrico Fermi.
Specifically, this is about a conversation Fermi and a few other scientists had at Los Alamos in 1950. The Manhattan Project and the bomb were in the past, so perhaps not so much on their minds by then. But there had been several reports of UFO sightings.
I don’t think these thinkers believed these were actually extraterrestrial visitors, but it got them discussing space travel, and the possibility of it happening at speeds close to or even faster than the speed of light. For at least from how we humans look at it, visiting other stars would have to happen at those kinds of speeds. After all, even at the speed of light it will take over four years to travel between Earth and our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri.
The men sat down for lunch, and Enrico Fermi suddenly asked, “But where is everybody?" His colleagues laughed, because given the context, they knew exactly what he was referring to. Not that the lunch-room was empty, but that there was no evidence anywhere of extraterrestrial life. Thus was born what we now know as the Fermi Paradox.
Just by looking around our place in the universe and making some reasonable calculations, it seems very likely that extraterrestrial life must exist somewhere. Yet in 1950, there was no sign of it anywhere. Not in 2023 either.
(There are those who might contest that; of that, more later.) Spend a few moments taking in the numbers and the reasoning. To start with, we live our lives on a planet that orbits a star, our Sun. That
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