14 DAY TRIAL // A team of astronomers has just proposed a new explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which is the contradiction between the hypothesized number of alien worlds that may exist in the Universe and the lack of evidence we detect to support this estimate. Experts now believe they know why this happens.
Basic calculations show that thousands upon thousands of worlds should be primed to support the development of life. Of those, some may feature civilizations similar to our own, while others might even surpass us in technological development.
But, as Enrico Fermi rightfully pointed out decades ago, if that is the case, then where are the evidence to support this claim? This question led to the formulation of the Fermi Paradox, the discrepancy between theory and practice as far as advanced alien civilizations go.
Scientists with the University of Cambridge and Perimeter Institute, led by expert Adrian Kent, now propose that extraterrestrial civilizations capable of space travel or contacting our race are keeping mum in order to avoid attracting any attention to them.
What is interesting about the new proposal is that it approaches the problem from an evolutionary perspective. If we look at the way life evolved on Earth from this point of view, we see that species which attract too much attention tend to be destroyed, with us being the notable exception.
This are the basic premises of the cosmic Undetectability Conjecture, which was first proposed by Instituto de Fisica Fundamental theoretical physicist Beatriz Gato-Rivera, Daily Galaxy reports.
“Intelligent species might reasonably worry about the possible dangers of self-advertisement and hence incline towards discretion,” the expert said at the time. “Evolutionary selection, acting on a cosmic scale, tends to extinguish species which conspicuously advertise themselves and their habitats,” Kent adds.
“It often seems to be implicitly assumed, and sometimes is explicitly argued, that colonizing or otherwise exploiting the resources of other planets and other solar systems will solve our problems when the Earth’s resources can no longer sustain our consumption,” he goes on to say.
“It might perhaps be worth contemplating more seriously the possibility that there may be limits to the territory we can safely colonize and to the resources we can safely exploit, and to consider whether and how it might be possible to evolve towards a way of living that can be sustained (almost) indefinitely on the resources of (say) our solar system alone,” the investigator adds.