Enrico Fermi and extraterrestrial intelligence
Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - 08:30
in Earth & Climate
It's become a kind of legend, like Newton and the apple or George Washington and the cherry tree. One day in 1950, the great physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with colleagues at the Fuller Lodge at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and came up with a powerful argument about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the so-called "Fermi paradox". But like many legends, it's only partly true. Robert Gray explained the real history in a recent paper in the journal Astrobiology.