Victor Tangermann reports that humans have accomplished a lot in our (relatively) short time on Earth. We’ve sent humans to the Moon and to live in space, developed massive and sophisticated telescopes to see the farthest reaches of the cosmos, and even rocketed rovers to Mars and probes to the edge of our solar system. However, a number of organizations have taken humanity’s voyage into the final frontier a step farther. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the research collective behind the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have been working tirelessly to find out if we are alone, once and for all.
Already, a number of projects exist that scan the stars for signs of intelligent life. And despite the fact that many of them have been looking to the skies for decades, we have yet to make contact. And that’s a bit of a problem. To put it mildly, our solar system is very old. In fact, scientists are still figuring out just how old — clues gathered from meteorites suggest it is almost 5 billion years old, and surrounding star systems are likely billions of years older. While interstellar travel still seems to be a distant dream, new technology is born every year that allows us to scan the skies for signals from civilizations in the most distant corners of the cosmos. The number of known alien worlds and star systems discovered through these technologies continues to rise, but our creative methods of listening to space have not yet revealed anything that resembles extraterrestrial communications or civilizations.
Given the size and age of our universe, it seems like we should have made contact. We, of course, have not; Otherwise at least one convincing photograph of Mr/Mrs ET would have come forward by now, although there is plenty of evidence that ET was once here, i.e., most of Ancient Aliens, etc. In the early 20th century, physicist Enrico Fermi asked himself a now-famous question: Given the scope of our universe, why haven’t we found intelligent extraterrestrial life yet (or why haven’t they found us)? This is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox or the Great Silence. Scientists have floated many possible answers in the century since Fermi first asked this question. Here are some of the most plausible reasons why he haven’t made first contact.
Basic probability asserts that alien life must exist. Since we haven’t made contact yet, one theory goes, there must be something barring life from interstellar travel or, at least, barring it from communicating with other alien species. This barrier is known as the “Great Filter,” and it is a force or event that stops a civilization from getting to the aforementioned point of interstellar travel or communication. If the theory holds true, there are two primary reasons that we haven’t made contact: Because societies kill themselves off before they reach a state advanced enough to explore the stars or interstellar travel is simply not possible on a technological scale. Neither option is particularly pleasing.
And according to the experts behind the work, the filter event is of equal or greater probability than the existence of alien life itself. This is the point argued by Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Since we have not been able to detect alien life (or leave the solar system much, for that matter), how far are we from being caught up in some event that would bar us from ever finding aliens? “The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are,” Hanson writes. In other words, the more life there is in the cosmos, the greater the likeliness that we are about to reach a cataclysmic, life-ending event or reach the cosmic limits of technological advancement.
Another hypothesis asserts that alien civilizations certainly exist, but they’re simply inactive. That’s the “aestivation hypothesis” (aestivation refers to an organism’s state of prolonged inactivity, similar to a bear hibernating or a frog that buries itself in sand during hot weather), which was put forth by researchers from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade.
The theory, published in a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 2017, states that aliens may be “hibernating” until the environmental conditions are just right to become active and build their super society. The researchers argue that the laws of thermodynamics directly limit computation, as computing technologies need to be cooled in order to function. This makes it exceedingly difficult to create advanced technologies, as keeping them cool at scale quickly becomes prohibitively difficult. So the aliens are falling into a dormant until, to be blunt, the universe cools.
But distilling the development of a civilization to the kinds of conditions that our current, and somewhat imperfect, models can predict could be reductive. What if intelligent extraterrestrial life has found a way around the thermodynamic conditions that limit its ability to compute? “What if there are other forms of value that can be generated?” the study authors write. If they’re wrong about the relationship between thermodynamics and technology, the aestivation hypothesis would be moot. In this case, perhaps one of the other ideas here holds true.
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