Editing Fermi paradox (section)

=== Original conversations ===
[[File:Los Alamos aerial view.jpeg|thumb|[[Los Alamos National Laboratory]], Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States]]
In the summer of 1950 at [[Los Alamos National Laboratory]] in [[New Mexico]], Enrico Fermi and co-workers Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York had one or several lunchtime conversations.<ref name="Eric-Jones">[http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf "Where is everybody?": An account of Fermi's question"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070629174738/http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf |date=June 29, 2007 }}, Dr. Eric M. Jones, Los Alamos technical report, March 1985. Jones wrote to Edward Teller on July 13, 1984, Herbert York on Sept. 4, and Emil Konopinski on Sept. 24, 1984.</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Shostak|first=Seth|date=October 25, 2001|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060415185347/http://space.com/searchforlife/shostak_paradox_011024.html |url=http://www.space.com/searchforlife/shostak_paradox_011024.html|archive-date=April 15, 2006|title=Our Galaxy Should Be Teeming With Civilizations, But Where Are They?|work=Space.com|access-date=October 14, 2014 |url-status=dead}}</ref> In one, Fermi suddenly blurted out, "Where is everybody?" (Teller's letter), or "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York's letter), or "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski's letter).<ref name="Eric-Jones" /> Teller wrote, "The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that, in spite of Fermi's question coming out of the blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life."<ref name="Eric-Jones" />

In 1984, York wrote that Fermi "followed up with a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over."<ref name="Eric-Jones" /> Teller remembers that not much came of this conversation "except perhaps a statement that the distances to the next location of living beings may be very great and that, indeed, as far as our galaxy is concerned, we are living somewhere in the sticks, far removed from the metropolitan area of the galactic center."<ref name="Eric-Jones" />

Fermi died of cancer in 1954. However, in letters to the three surviving men decades later in 1984, Dr. Eric Jones of Los Alamos was able to partially put the original conversation back together. He informed each of the men that he wished to include a reasonably accurate version or composite in the written proceedings he was putting together for a previously held conference entitled "Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience".<ref name="Eric-Jones" /><ref name="Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, edited by Finney and Jones, 1985">[https://books.google.com/books?id=iKnaLbRtQasC&pg=PA249 ''Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience''], edited by Ben R. Finney, Eric M. Jones, University of California Press, 1985.</ref> Jones first sent a letter to Edward Teller which included a secondhand account from [[Hans Mark]]. Teller responded, and then Jones sent Teller's letter to Herbert York. York responded, and finally, Jones sent both Teller's and York's letters to Emil Konopinski who also responded. Furthermore, Konopinski was able to later identify a cartoon which Jones found as the one involved in the conversation and thereby help to settle the time period as being the summer of 1950.<ref name="Eric-Jones" />