Why haven't aliens contacted us yet? NASA scientist thinks they might've gotten bored

“Where is everybody?” This question has been on the mind of nearly every SETI researcher ever since it was raised by the physicist Enrico Fermi during a lunchtime discussion in 1950. Popularly known as the ‘Fermi Paradox,’ the question underscores the gap between the high likelihood of our galaxy hosting intelligent alien civilizations and the lack of evidence for the same.

Over the years, many attempts have been made to answer the question: maybe Earth is a cosmic zoo, or perhaps we are simply alone. 

Such theories, even the one that says we are alone, are too extreme for Dr. Robin Corbet, who’s a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and is based out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. 

Basing his theory on the principle of “radical mundanity,” Corbet suggests that the Milky Way may be home to only “a modest number of alien civilizations,” none of which “have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so.”

“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,” he told The Guardian. “This feels more possible, more natural, because it’s not proposing anything very extreme.”

If aliens aren’t harnessing laws of physics unknown to us or zipping from one planet to another at the speed of light, then it is quite unlikely that they have the power to run powerful laser beacons for millions of years. Corbet suggests that they still might have searched the galaxy with robotic probes and might have gotten bored with the information received (or lack thereof) and given up on space exploration altogether. 

“This consideration also leads to the expectation that no ETC will colonize a large fraction of the Galaxy, even using robotic probes, and that there are no long-duration high-power beacons,” he writes in his paper published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who famously wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, is thought to have entertained two broad possibilities for the universe: Either we are its only denizens, or we are not. Both possibilities, according to him, were equally terrifying.

Corbet, meanwhile, suggests that the truth may lie somewhere in between.

"There is a reasonable chance that we may make contact on a short, by historical standards, timescale," he writes. "This event would be momentous, but could still leave us slightly disappointed. Such a Universe would be less terrifying than either of the two possibilities in the quote generally attributed to Arthur C. Clarke on whether we are alone or not."

Professor Michael Garrett, the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, found Corbet’s theory to be fresh but thinks it sees the rest of the cosmos with 

“a human-like apathy.” “I find it hard to believe that all intelligent life would be so uniformly dull,” he told the Guardian. In his paper published in the journal Astra Astronautica, Garret instead finds himself gravitating towards another theory, where “other post-biological civilisations advance so rapidly that they slip beyond our capacity to perceive them.”

Meanwhile, Professor Michael Bohlander, who’s an expert on SETI policy and the law at the University of Durham, told the Guardian that the evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations is already here in the form of unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAP’s. He thinks the question posed by Fermi could be “empirically answered" if even a small percentage of those objects turned out to be artificially made and if they displayed capabilities beyond publicly known technology.

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