Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was the man who first asked the question ‘why haven’t we come into contact with aliens?’ He was born in Rome, and received his doctorate at the University of Pisa at age 21. He worked with nuclear physics and was awarded a Nobel Prize in the year 1938. When he went to Sweden to retrieve the prize, he took his wife with him and never returned to Italy; his wife, Laura, was Jewish, and they both hated Mussolini’s fascist regime.
Fermi proceeded to travel to New York, where he worked with famous scientists such as Niels Bohr and Robert J Oppenheimer, and when he worked with the Manhattan project, it was he who managed to spark the first nuclear chain reaction. In addition to having the Fermi Paradox named after him, element 100 on the periodic table, fermium, bears his name.
He died of cancer in 1954.
Michael H Hart (1932-Present) was the first person to attempt to answer Fermi’s Paradox. Some scholars refer to the paradox as the Fermi-Hart paradox, as his work is a major touchstone for understanding the paradox. He is the originator of the ‘Rare Earth Theory’
It’s also worth mentioning that he’s a member of the alt-right, a white separatist who wants to divide the USA into four sections according to race, and that he has organized conferences on preserving America’s ‘Judeo-Christian and European history’. He is an important contributor to our understanding of the Fermi Paradox, but is also a white supremacist and this should be made explicitly clear, as should the fact that this website finds his views outdated and gross.
Citations
Enrico Fermi Dead at 53; Architect of Atomic Bomb. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0929.html. Accessed 19 Apr. 2019.
Editors, History com. “Enrico Fermi, Architect of the Nuclear Age, Dies.” HISTORY, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/enrico-fermi-architect-of-the-nuclear-age-dies. Accessed 19 Apr. 2019.
Interview with Michael H. Hart by Russell K. Neili, April 14, 2000. Carol M. Swain; Russ Nieli (24 March 2003). Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America. Cambridge University Press. p. 201. ISBN978-0-521-81673-1. “I (like other white separatists) resent being called a white supremacist.”
Hart, Michael H. (1975). “Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth”. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. 16: 128–135. Bibcode:1975QJRAS..16..128H.
Fermi's Paradoxical Prompts 