First Things
Jul 23, 2010
Edward T. Oakes, S.J.In the early spring months of 1950, the city of New York witnessed an outbreak of juvenile delinquency. Late at night, prowling gangs were stealing those iconic Department of Sanitation iron-mesh trash cans from New York's street corners—and local newspapers at the time were in a dither.
That was also the time when America was going through one of its many flying-saucer crazes, a mania that would in that same decade bequeath to pop culture the delightfully cheesy sci-fi movie
The Day the Earth Stood Still and the equally cheese-laden TV hit
The Twilight Zone.
The coincidence of these two “leading cultural indicators” prompted the always whimsical
New Yorker to publish a captionless cartoon by Alan Dunn in its 20 May 1950 issue, which showed a flotilla of flying saucers bivouacked on the Great Lawn of Manhattan's Central Park: in the foreground could be seen aliens schlepping up DSNY trash cans into the cargo holds of their spaceships.
While all this was going on, the famous Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was working away at the famous government laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. One day, he was chatting to Edward Teller and Herbert York as they walked over to a cafeteria for lunch, where they were joined by Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann (all except Fermi and York were Hungarian émigrés).
Their topic was the recent spate of UFO sightings. (Roswell, site of perhaps the most famous claim of alien-visitation, was after all in the same state.) At that point another colleague, Emil Konopinksi, joined the group and told his fellows of the Dunn cartoon. Fermi drolly remarked that Dunn's was a reasonable theory because it accounted for two distinct phenomena: the disappearance of trash cans and those recent reports of flying saucers. Just what scientists are
supposed to do!
When the men sat down to lunch, discussion turned to other topics. Then, in the middle of the conversation and seemingly out of nowhere, Fermi asked: “Where is everybody?” Thus was born what has become known ever since then as Fermi's Paradox...
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