We know that aliens have visited us before, but why hasn't humanity been visited? The question has puzzled scientists for decades, but two researchers have come up with an explanation: advanced civilizations could be doomed to either stagnate or die before they get the chance.
The new hypothesis suggests that as space-faring civilizations grow in scale and technological development, they eventually reach a crisis point where innovation no longer keeps up with the demand for energy. Collapse is what comes next. The only alternative path is to reject a model of unyielding growth in favor of maintaining equilibrium, but at the cost of a civilization's ability to expand across the stars.
The argument was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The paradoxes draws attention to the contradiction between the age of the universe and the scope of the universe, as well as the lack of advanced alien life.
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Civilizations collapse from burnout or shift their focus to homeostasis, a state where expansion is no longer a goal, making it difficult to detect remotely.
They came to their hypothesis by studying studies of the growth of cities. The studies suggested that cities grow at an rapid rate, inevitably leading to crisis points, or singularities, that cause rapid crashes in growth.
We theorize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ultimate crisis.
The researchers suggest that these close-to-collapse civilizations would be the easiest to detect, as they would be dissipating large amounts of energy in a unsustainable way.
To avert their doom, civilizations could undergo a "homeostatic awakening", redirecting their production away from growth across the stars to one that focuses on societal wellbeing, sustainable and equitable development and harmony with their environment. Civilizations that do not completely abandon space exploration would not be able to make contact with Earth.
The researchers point to a few of humanity's "mini-awakenings" that addressed global crises on Earth, such as the reduction of global nuclear arms stockpiles from 70,000 to below 14,000.
The scientists stress, however, that their suggestion is simply a hypothesis, taken from the observation of laws that seem to govern life on Earth, and is designed to evoke discussion, introspection and future work.
Their proposal is one of a number of scientific and popular suggestions as to why we have never made contact with the stars. There are a number of practical challenges presented by interstellar travel, including that aliens may actually be visiting in secret, or that aliens arrived to Earth too early in the life of the universe.
It could take as long as 400,000 years for a signal sent by one advanced species to be received by another, according to a new hypothesis published in The Astrophysics Journal.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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