Where is Everyone?

This extract from
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1057.htm

"Where Is Everybody?": An Account of Fermi's Question Eric M. Jones, Los
Alamos National Laboratories original source | fair use notice
Summary: Fermi's Famous question, now central to debates about the
prevalence of extraterrestrial civilizations, arose during a luncheon
conversation with Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York in the
summer of 1950. Fermi's companions on that day have provided accounts of the
incident.

Part of the current debate about the existence and prevalence of
extraterrestrials concerns interstellar travel and settlement [1-3]. In
1975, Michael Hart argued that interstellar travel would be feasible for a
technologically advanced civilization and that a migration would fill the
Galaxy in a few million years [4]. Since that interval is short compared
with the age of the Galaxy, he then concluded that the absence of settlers
or evidence of their engineering projects in the Solar System meant that
there are no extraterrestrials.

Newman, Sagan, and Shklovski [2,5] recall that a legend of science says that
Enrico Fermi asked the question, "Where are they?" during a visit to Los
Alamos during the Second World War or shortly thereafter. Fermi's question
has been mentioned in several other recent publications, but historical
basis for the attribution has not been established. Thanks to the excellent
memory of Hans Mark, who had heard a retelling at Los Alamos in the early
1950s, we now know that Fermi did make the remark during a lunchtime
conversation about 1950. His companions were Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller,
and Herbert York. All three have provided accounts of the incident. ...


..... It was after we were at the luncheon table," Konopinski recalls, "that
Fermi surprised us with the question 'but where is everybody?' It was his
way of putting it that drew laughs from us ."

York, who does not recall the preliminary conversation on the walk to Fuller
Lodge, does remember that "virtually apropos of nothing Fermi said, 'Don't
you ever wonder where everybody is?' Somehow . . . we all knew he meant
extra-terrestrials."

Teller remembers the question in much the same way. "The discussion had
nothing to do with astronomy or with extraterrestrial beings. I think it was
some down-to-earth topic. Then, in the middle of this conversation, Fermi
came out with the quite unexpected question 'Where is everybody?' . . . The
result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that
in spite of Fermi's question coming from the clear blue, everybody around
the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about
extraterrestrial life.

"I do not believe that much came of this conversation, except perhaps a
statement that the distances to the next location of living beings may be
very great and that, indeed, as far as our galaxy is concerned, we are
living somewhere in the sticks, far removed from the metropolitan area of
the galactic center."

York believes that Fermi was somewhat more expansive and "followed up with a
series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the
probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life,
the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on
the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago
and many times over. As I recall, he went on to conclude that the reason we
hadn't been visited might be that interstellar flight is impossible, or, if
it is possible, always judged to be not worth the effort, or technological
civilization doesn't last long enough for it to happen." York confessed to
being hazy about these last remarks.


Tom Hendricks


There is great chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent. - Mao-Tse
Tung


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