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If there are aliens out there somewhere in the vast universe, as many have suggested, why haven’t they contacted us? A new theory proposes that perhaps they did try, but their technology isn’t much better than ours, and after awhile they may have just given up.
That’s the general idea that Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland Dr. Robin Corbet, who is based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, has put forth in a new paper.
“The idea is that they’re more advanced, but not much more advanced. It’s like having an iPhone 42 rather than an iPhone 17,” said Dr. Robin Corbet. “This feels more possible, more natural, because it’s not proposing anything very extreme.”
He feels that is a more likely explanation for why we haven’t been contacted by aliens than the Fermi Paradox – the discrepancy between the lack of compelling evidence of alien civilizations and extraterrestrial life and the high likelihood of their existence in the vast universe.
Instead, he suggests the principle of “radical mundanity” – the theory that the universe contains more modest civilizations, similar to ours, and “none have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so.”
Dr. Corbet also suggested that Earth is “not likely to be a very interesting place to visit” if there are other, more interesting extraterrestrials civilizations out there.
That doesn’t mean that they haven’t tried to contact us, much in the way we currently do. It’s just that they have “nowhere near the super-science levels” that we imagine them to possess.
“They don’t have faster-than-light, they don’t have machines based on dark energy or dark matter, or black holes. They’re not harnessing new laws of physics,” said Dr. Corbet.
Dr. Corbet isn’t the only one with a theory about alien civilizations
Not everyone agrees with Dr. Corbet’s “radical mundanity” theory, however. Professor Michael Garrett, the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, is one of them.
“It projects a very human-like apathy on to the rest of the cosmos. I find it hard to believe that all intelligent life would be so uniformly dull,” he said.
He suggests in another new research paper that there is “a more adventurous explanation of the Fermi paradox: that other, post-biological civilizations advance so rapidly that they slip beyond our capacity to perceive them.”