(ORDO NEWS) — According to the SETI Institute for the Study of Life in the Universe, there may be approximately 300 million habitable planets within the Milky Way galaxy.
For all the time of their existence, alien civilizations could already have developed their technologies to such an extent as to carry out interstellar flights and find the Earth. However, despite such a high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life, contact with aliens has not yet occurred – this phenomenon is commonly called the Fermi paradox.
Scientists have been trying to explain an opinion that is contrary to common sense since the 1950s. And at the moment they have at least seven explanations, each of which is worthy of attention. Let’s find out about them – maybe you will form your own point of view and share it?
How did the Fermi paradox come about?
The Fermi paradox was formulated in the middle of the 20th century, and astronomers still fail to explain it. The history of the appearance of the paradox has many inconsistencies and in general looks like a legend about how Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation after an apple fell on his head.
The most popular version says that the Fermi paradox appeared in the summer of 1950, when scientists involved in the development of atomic weapons shi for lunch. During the discussion of unidentified flying objects, they were surprised at people who actually believe in aliens.
At the end of the conversation, Nobel Prize winner in physics Enrico Fermi suddenly asked where aliens might be hiding.
After all, if you face the truth, they can still exist – in billions of years, in one of the nearby stars, life could well appear and develop to a human level or even better. Enrico Fermi’s remark was the subject of controversy for many years, and they do not subside even today.
Why haven’t aliens been found yet?
There are many explanations for why people still have not made contact with aliens. All of them look at this phenomenon from different angles and may be correct, but it is currently impossible to verify this. Here are the most popular explanations for the Fermi paradox.
Aliens avoid Earth
On many of the 300 million potentially habitable planets, life could have arisen very long ago. During this time, aliens have had a lot of opportunities to develop better than you and me – smartphones, neural networks and other modern wonders may seem to them tools of the Stone Age.
If this is indeed the case, the aliens may well be deliberately hiding from us and watching us until we are ready to contact them.
In 1933, the Soviet scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said that aliens can wait for the development of mankind to a certain level, and only then make themselves felt. This idea is best known as the “zoo hypothesis”, meaning that we seem to be primitive animals to extraterrestrial life at the moment.
Aliens might be too advanced
It is also possible that aliens have been sending us signals for a long time, but current technology does not allow us to catch them. Think for yourself – a few centuries ago, people did not even know what radio signals were, and could perceive it as magic.
So there must be some very advanced ways of transmitting information that we don’t even know exist. In this case, other civilizations are sending us signals right now, but we just don’t notice them. And we can catch them only in the distant future.
Aliens could be extinct
It is possible that life on other planets could die out, and found the Earth. The fact is that in the course of the development of technology, even human civilization each time becomes closer to death. For example, many centuries ago, mankind could have died out only in the event of a natural disaster or an asteroid fall.
And today we are at such a stage of development that we ourselves can provoke death – we massively pollute nature, invented nuclear weapons, and so on. It is possible that intelligent life existed on other planets, but the careless use of technology led them to self-destruction.
Aliens underdeveloped
However, why should aliens be smarter than us? It is impossible to exclude the possibility that life exists outside the Earth, but it is represented not by intelligent beings, but rather primitive animals. Surely, there are also a lot of species of living beings on other planets, but they may simply not develop to such an extent as to fly into space.
There are also many living creatures on Earth, but only people have received strong development. Astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver once noted that dolphins had 20 million years to develop, but they were never able to build an advanced society, much less found a science.
We can be alone in the universe
It may be that our Earth is unique and there is no other similar planet. In fact, people are very lucky – we appeared thanks to the perfect combination of circumstances and environmental conditions. On other planets, the course of events may not go so well, so life on them never arose.
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