‘Bored Aliens’: Has Smart Life Stopped Bothering Trying to Contact Earth?
The enduring question of why we haven’t detected extraterrestrial life, known as the Fermi paradox, continues to prompt diverse theories. While some envision advanced civilizations deliberately avoiding contact or remaining undetectable due to superior technology, a new outlook suggests a more prosaic explanation: intelligent life may simply have lost interest in searching for, or contacting, others.
This idea, termed the “radical mundanity principle” by researcher Dr. Corbet, proposes that extraterrestrial civilizations reach a technological plateau not significantly beyond our current capabilities. “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,” Corbet stated.
Current Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts focus on identifying ”technosignatures” – detectable evidence of advanced technology. These include powerful laser beacons, robotic probes, massive space-based structures designed to harness stellar energy, and even interstellar travel or scattered artifacts. However, according to the radical mundanity principle, sustaining such ambitious projects over millions of years would prove challenging for civilizations limited to technologies comparable to our own. Exploration via robotic probes, such as, might eventually be abandoned due to the monotony of the data received.
The theory suggests a universe less awe-inspiring, and possibly less frightening, than some alternatives. As Corbet puts it, the truth may lie “somewhere in between…in a rather more mundane, and so less terrifying universe,” with contact potentially proving ”somewhat disappointing.”
This perspective isn’t universally accepted. Professor Michael Garrett, director of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics, while appreciating the “fresh perspective,” expressed reservations. ”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, adding that any technological plateau could be far beyond our current understanding.
Garrett, in a paper slated for publication in the journal Acta Astronautica, favors the idea that civilizations may advance beyond our ability to perceive them, evolving into “post-biological” forms that rapidly transcend our detection methods. ”I hope I’m right, but I could very well be wrong.Nature always has some kind of surprise for us around the corner,” he noted.
Meanwhile, Professor Michael Bohlander, an expert on SETI policy and the law at the University of Durham, suggests that evidence of extraterrestrial presence may already be available in the form of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). “If only a small percentage of those objects were found not to be man-made – and the capabilities displayed by them in numerous sightings at the very least suggest a state of advance far beyond current publicly known human technology – then the question posed by fermi, ‘Where is everyone?’, could be answered empirically,” he stated.
corbet’s paper is currently awaiting peer review.
