Special Guest Blogger: Enrico Fermi

My childhood in Rome was a mix of gelato and geometry, my father taught me two things that stayed with me for a lifetime which was never trust a neutron that looks too calm and never skip that second Espresso.
While other kids were busy playing marbles, I was busy counting them and that was when I realised that numbers could be both a hobby and a weapon, my mother would say, 'Enrico, you’re a genio, you’ll solve problems faster than a pizza delivery guy on a Vespa and i did end up creating the famous Fermi calculation or the quick‑and‑dirty estimate.
My University life in Pisa was a blur of chalk dust, late‑night debates in the caffè and an early fascination with the big questions such as what are atom's made of and why does my non‑na always forget where she put her glasses?
In 1921, I was invited to a conference in Rome. The room smelled of tobacco, fresh coffee and the faint perfume of caffè latte which is the holy trinity of any Italian academic gathering. There, I met a young, disheveled man named Niels Bohr and we spent the evening discussing quantum mechanics, my favorite pizza toppings (pepperoni, of course), and the best way to convince a committee that a theory was worth funding.
Fast forward to 1938, when I finally received the Nobel Prize in Physics for my work on induced radioactivity and a job on the secretive, top secret we‑don’t‑talk‑about‑it‑at‑family‑dinners Manhattan Project because then the world was in a heated race to harness nuclear energy both for power and, unfortunately, for weapons.
In a desert outpost bustling with the brightest minds of the era, all hunched over blackboards covered in equations that looked like they were written in a different language, my job was to provide quick, back‑of‑the‑envelope calculations that could tell the project leaders, 'Yes, that implosion will work, or no, we’ll blow our stupid selves up.'
Skip on again to 1950 and the moment which made me famous, explaining why, after all these years, we still haven’t gotten a postcard from the Martians which still confounds scientists, sci‑fi writers and late‑night Bloggers.
I was sitting at a lunch table in in the cafeteria of the Los Alamos laboratory, enduring a less than perfect espresso while watching a group of young physicists argue about the feasibility of interstellar travel and one of them asked me if the universe is so old and so vast, why the heck haven’t we heard from any aliens yet?
I sipped my espresso, stared at my sandwich, then at the ceiling, and thought: 'If even a tiny fraction of those stars host technologically advanced civilizations, why haven’t we heard from them and said, 'Well, let’s do a quick back‑of‑the‑envelope calculation. Suppose a civilization could colonize the galaxy in a million years which is a blink of an eye compared to the universe’s 13.8‑billion‑year age. If even one out of a thousand planets develops intelligent life, then we should be swimming in alien radio signals by now, right?
They looked puzzled so i continued, 'If we assume each civilization lasts for a hundred thousand years then the galaxy should be teeming with active civilizations. Yet all we hear is the cosmic background radiation and the occasional glitch from a faulty satellite. Hence, the paradox is the universe looks quiet despite all the reasons it should be noisy so where are they?'
And that is the Fermi Paradox, named after yours truly because I was the first to raise the question at the Astrobiology conference at Green Bank, West Virginia. I didn’t invent the paradox, I just voiced it and the rest is Astrophysical history.
To answer my own Paradox, it could be that  the space between Worlds is just too great or that maybe we’re looking in the wrong wavelength, like sending an email to a group that are still communicating by smoke signals, or they have seen us and seen just how warlike we are and sensibly swerved us or even they are here observing us but we just cannot see or recognise them or, just maybe, we really are alone in an infinite Universe.
There could be someone looking up at the night sky in another part of the Universe wondering whether someone is out there and pondering the same paradox but after spending so long working alongside nuclear material, my body was wracked with Cancer and I died aged 53 and never did get the post card from the Martians so whether you’re a physicist, a poet, or a curious kid who thinks Fermi is a type of Italian cheese, remember that the next time you see a flicker in the night sky, it might just be an alien trying to figure out why we keep asking, “Where are they?” while we’re busy arguing over whether the pizza topping should include pineapple (It shouldn't by the way).