Is the lack of convincing signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, despite billions of planets in the galaxy, the result of boredom? A new theory explains the following possibility: if aliens do exist, their technology may be only slightly advanced than ours, and after exploring their cosmic environment, simply got bored and stopped trying to make contact, making detections difficult.
This scenario, described in a new paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, is called “radical mundanity”. He dismisses the idea of aliens using physics beyond our understanding, proposing instead a milky way containing a modest number of civilizations with technology far less impressive than our own.
“They are more advanced, but not much more,” explained Dr Robin Corbetta senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. According to him, this theory is “more possible and natural, because it doesn’t suggest anything extreme.”
Corbett claims that these civilizations have reached a technological level that is not far from our capabilities: they do not have faster-than-light travel, machines based on dark energy or black holes, and they do not take advantage of new laws of physics.
Therefore, they will have trouble operating powerful laser beacons for millions of years, won’t move quickly between planets, and after exploring the galaxy with robotic probes, they may get bored with the information and abandon space exploration. This approach explains the “great silence” or Fermi’s paradox – the gap between the lack of convincing evidence for alien civilizations and the high probability of their existence in a vast universe.
Prof. Michael Garrett the director of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics, praised the “fresh perspective” but expressed reservations. “It projects a very human indifference to the rest of the cosmos,” said Garrett, who believes that any higher technological level could be much higher than ours. He favors a more adventurous explanation: other post-biological civilizations are advancing so rapidly that they elude our ability to perceive them.