Where Is Everybody?

"Where Is Everybody?" is the first episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It was first broadcast on October 2, 1959.

Plot summary

A man finds himself alone on a dirt road, walking towards a diner. Inside he finds a jukebox playing loudly, and a pot of hot coffee on the stove. But there are no other people. He inquires for some breakfast, but no chef or waitress is to be found. He is dressed in an Air Force flight suit, but he does not remember who he is or how he got there.

After leaving the diner, he walks to a nearby town. The town seems deserted, but everywhere the man goes, he seems to find proof that someone had been there recently: food is cooking on a stove, water dripping in a sink, and a cigar is burning in an ashtray. He grows more and more unsettled as he wanders through the empty town, looking for someone—anyone—to talk to, all the while having the strange feeling that he is being watched.

In a soda shop after talking to himself he idly spins racks filled with paperback books until he comes to an already spinning rack filled from top to bottom with the same book: "The Last Man on Earth, Feb. 1959".

Fermi paradox

The Fermi paradox or Fermi's paradox, named after Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, such as in the Drake equation, and the lack of evidence for such civilizations. The basic points of the argument, made by physicists Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) and Michael H. Hart (born 1932), are:

According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens. In an informal conversation, Fermi noted no convincing evidence of this, nor any signs of alien intelligence anywhere in the observable universe, leading him to ask, "Where is everybody?" There have been many attempts to explain the Fermi paradox.