The "Fermi Paradox" has puzzled scientists for more than 70 years: If there are highly developed alien civilizations, why haven't they visited Earth yet? According to a paper published in the latest issue of the Royal Society open science, a Ph.D. couple in the United States proposed a new hypothesis, believing that extraterrestrial civilizations were too developed and resources were exhausted, so they gave up visiting Earth.
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly first proposed in 1950 why there are no signs of extraterrestrial life since there are an estimated 200 billion to 400 billion stars in our Galaxy, and at least 100 billion planets. This is known as the "Fermi Paradox" (Fermi Paradox).
Dr Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Dr Stuart Bartlett of the California Institute of Technology recently proposed new hypotheses that attempt to answer the "Fermi paradox."
They argue that extraterrestrial civilizations may have developed so much and so technologically advanced that they hit a point of crisis and missed the opportunity to visit the New World.
The new hypothesis holds that extraterrestrial civilizations are too advanced and depleted of resources, so they abandon the expansion of the universe and miss the opportunity to visit Earth.
The couple analyzed previous studies that showed that, due to their social nature, cities grew at a "superlinearly" rate, leading to a crisis known as "singularities," in which population and energy needs outweigh innovation, leading to the collapse of the system.
For example, similar scenarios may arise in our Earth civilizations, such as ozone depletion, the upgrading of weapons of mass destruction, and whaling, which can all lead to the "burnout" of systems.
They say that once a planetary civilization develops into what it calls a "virtually connected global city," it will face a "progressive depletion," a crisis that will make the "singularity" interval smaller than the time to innovate.
The answer to the "Fermi paradox," the two argue, is that civilization may prioritize equilibrium in order to avoid collapsing due to depletion of resources, making cosmic expansion no longer a goal. As a result, aliens are difficult to detect from a distance.
However, the two PhDs stressed that their study was only a hypothesis and that further research was needed to prove their theory.
Text/Nandu reporter Chen Lin