Where is everybody?

In the year 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, physicist Enrico Fermi pondered extraterrestrial life.

Here are the facts: there is a high probability of the existence of other Earth-like planets.

Here are the facts: there is a high probability of the existence of similarly intelligent life.

Enrico Fermi considered these facts, and then he asked the most important question yet to touch me, only fifty-one years shy of my birth.

Where is everybody?

Zoom out. Adjust the focus. Enrico Fermi is a speck, now, and so are you and me.

That innocent query has become known as the Fermi paradox, the principle conundrum of which is this: considering the high probability of other intelligent life, why have we never crossed paths with anyone else?

I find it harder to breathe, now, and the question comes again: Where is everybody?

Zoom in. Adjust the focus. What is the question?

Can we face the possibility that we are alone?

I search frantically to assuage my fears, and many voices chime in.

“Maybe,” says Iosif Shklovsky, “it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.”

“Or perhaps,” counters Edward Harrison, “it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others.”

“What if we are not listening properly?”

“Maybe they are too alien!”

“They tend to isolate themselves.”

“Everyone is listening but no one is transmitting.”

“Earth is deliberately not contacted.”

“Earth is purposefully isolated.”

And suddenly, where there was a terrifyingly empty nothingness, there is something: a shared desperation, the unifying fear of being alone.

My breath comes a little easier.

I stand outside underneath the hush of the night and look up. Crystalline stars gleam almost close enough to touch. The suns of other Earths, or just stars?

I wonder how many others before me have stood beneath the same sky and asked themselves the same thing. How many others will after me.

Maybe we are alone, but we are not alone.