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Interesting questions arise when physicists start chatting. Back in 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, physicists Enrico Fermi, Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York were walking to lunch when the conversation turned to a recent spate of reports of UFO sightings.
They quickly honed in on the challenge of faster-than-light travel, with Teller opining that there was a one in a million chance that science might achieve this on the scale of small material objects within the next ten years (i.e., by 1960). Fermi begged to differ; he placed the odds at closer to one in ten, making him the optimist of the merry band physicists. The lunchtime conversation moved on, but Fermi continued to puzzle over the conundrum in his head, finally exclaiming, "Where is everybody?" If his rough calculations were correct, then the Earth should have received alien visitors many times over.
Thus was born the Fermi Paradox, defined as "the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations."
It's been an ongoing puzzle for scientists, and a source of inspiration for science fiction authors, ever since.
There's still no truly convincing explanation, but that doesn't keep physicists from trying to resolve the paradox. The latest effort is a new paper that appeared on the arXiv last week by Igor Bezsudonov and Andrey Snarskii at the National Technical University of Ukraine.
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