A new response to the Fermi paradox challenges the idea that aliens, if they exist, are so much more advanced. Maybe they just got tired of looking.
Billions of galaxies, stars and planets tell us that, statistically, there must be other forms of life in the Universe: so how do we explain the deafening silence that surrounds human civilization, uncontacted by other possible neighbors?
A new study offers a fresh, simple and… reassuring to this question, known as the Fermi paradox: if aliens exist, they have never even sent us a signal because they are “stuck” at a technological level not much higher than ours. And, after a few attempts at searching, they got tired.
Aliens look like us
The scenario proposed in an article posted on arXiv by Robin Corbet, scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center at the University of Maryland, hypothesizes that any extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist, have reached a “ceiling” in technological development not far from that of earthlings: «They do not have speeds greater than that of light, they do not have machines based on dark energy or dark matter, nor black holes. They are not exploiting new laws of physics” he told al Guardian.
Therefore, nothing powerful lasers that can be detected from other planets, no loyalty program for interstellar travel, no megastructures in space to exploit the energy of their star. Corbert proposes that in the Milky Way there are a modest number of civilizations with technology only a little more developed than ours, but «not that much. The same difference between owning an iPhone42 rather than an iPhone 17″ he says.
After a while, that’s enough
If the hypothesis holds, it is conceivable that having reached a plateau, a technological flattening, the aliens struggle to make powerful laser beams work for millions of years, that they give up investing in space exploration and that, after sending robotic probes to the worlds closest to them, at a certain point they get tired of searching. Putting aside galactic travels to follow smaller horizons.
Does it remind you of anyone? Exactly: man, in certain phases of his history. In fact, Corbet’s principle is called “radical monotony” (radical mundanity), precisely because it tends to discard the most extreme hypotheses. It brings aliens closer to us, making them less elusive.
Our own flaws
The study, which has yet to be reviewed in peer-reviewedsuggests that a possible contact could leave us a little disappointed, but at the same time proposes solutions that are a little less terrifying than some of those already explored, such as that of aliens secretly surveilling us, keeping the Earth in quarantine.
This same idea of normality, however, is open to criticism: other scientists believe that projecting an exquisitely “terrestrial” apathy onto other civilizations is not credible, because it is implausible to think that aliens are all, uniformly, so bored and dull. Furthermore, the technological plateau of an alien civilization could still be at a much more developed level of technology than that of Earth.
