Scientists now know that there are billions of planets in the universe where aliens could live. So why haven’t any of these life forms contacted us?
Maybe they’re too far away, or maybe aliens just don’t want to talk to us. Or there could be an even stranger reason.
Here are theories that solve the famous Fermi paradox: if aliens exist, where are they?
We’re looking for aliens in the wrong universe
Maybe we haven’t found aliens because our universe isn’t particularly hospitable to life. Perhaps Earth is an anomaly among the dead worlds. One theory suggests that our universe is one of many possible ones and is not the best place for intelligent life to emerge.
Humans are lucky to have evolved at all. So if aliens exist, they must be sought in another, parallel universe where conditions are better.
Dark energy separates us from aliens
As we now know, the universe is constantly expanding. Slowly but surely, galaxies are moving away from each other. And all this happens thanks to dark energy.
Scientists believe that dark energy will stretch the universe so much over several trillion years that Earthlings will only be able to see the light from the nearest galaxies.
Aliens don’t live on planets
A theory has recently emerged suggesting that alien species don’t necessarily need a planet to exist. Scientists believe that colonies of aliens can survive by floating freely in space.
Such life forms, scientists believe, could exist in thin, transparent, sturdy shells where temperature and pressure are kept at acceptable levels.
And we have not found such aliens because this species simply has no means of communication with the outside world.
Aliens ‘trapped’ on super-Earths
Planets 2 to 10 times larger than Earth are called super-Earths, and there are many of them in space. At the same time, some rocky worlds may have suitable conditions for the development of intelligent life.
If aliens live on such planets, as some scientists believe, we will never see them. It’s just that the gravity of such a planet is so strong that space travel becomes impossible. A rocket simply cannot fly into space.
Aliens caused climate change and died
Another theory suggests that any highly advanced civilization could eventually consume so much energy that it uses up all the planet’s resources, causing catastrophic climate change.
This scenario would inevitably lead to mass extinction. So if aliens exist, they are long gone and probably destroyed themselves long before we started looking for them.
The aliens couldn’t evolve fast enough and disappeared
There may be a large number of habitable planets in the universe, but there is no guarantee that they will all remain that way for a long time so that life can emerge and, most importantly, develop on them.
That is, potential aliens only have a few hundred million years to evolve before their planet changes.
On any rocky planet, periods of strong cooling and strong heat periodically occur, scientists believe, so aliens may simply have not had time to reach the necessary level of development for space travel and disappeared as a result of a new planetary climate catastrophe.
So perhaps the expansion of the universe prevents us from detecting aliens who are constantly moving away from us and have no way to travel too great distances.
We are aliens
Another strange explanation for why we haven’t found aliens is that we are them. The panspermia hypothesis states that most of the life we have on Earth today did not originate on our planet, but arrived on asteroids carrying bacteria from other worlds.
Some proponents of this theory suggest that humans evolved from creatures that came from other parts of our galaxy.
But there is no evidence for this yet. Opponents of this theory say that if bacteria with human DNA evolved on another nearby planet, why haven’t we found traces of humanity anywhere but Earth? But even if this is true, where are all the other aliens, if they exist?
