In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi asked a crucial question that astronomers still seek to answer today: “Where is everybody?”
This question is immortalized by the Fermi paradox. This theory and paradox examines the conflict between the possibility that aliens never appeared and the possibility of their existence in the universe.
Supporters of this paradox state that the universe is about three times older than our solar system and contains more than a billion trillion stars. If “stupid” humans can travel to the Moon, why haven’t intelligent extraterrestrials visited us until now?
Last week, a pair of astrobiologists offered an answer: Alien civilizations are developing and expanding so much that they can’t afford interstellar travel.
Carnegie Institute for Science, Dr. Michael Wong and California Institute of Technology’s Dr. Stuart Bartlett describes this crisis as “asymptotic burnout”.
What is asymptotic burnout?
Societies get to this point when their energy demands become unsustainable. They are then faced with a stark choice. At the Royal Society Open Science, scientists hypothesized that “Civilizations are either collapsing from extinction or are shifting themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a condition where cosmic expansion is no longer a target, making them difficult to detect from afar.”
Planetary civilizations can divert these catastrophes through technological resets, but this will only delay the inevitable. Alien civilizations that are close to extinction may be the easiest to spot.
To avoid a crisis, growth needs to slow down in continuous “resets”… Wong and Bartlett The authors of the study say, “They change their environment and dissipate free energy in an excessively unsustainable way, on a planetary scale. They [produce] the largest signal-to-noise fluctuations,” he says. “This raises the possibility that many of humanity’s early detections of extraterrestrial life may have been of the intelligent, if not yet wise, kind.”
Wong and Bartlett, admits that their hypothesis has a major shortcoming: There is no evidence yet to actually support the idea, and their theory may not hold true for other planets because it uses the laws of life on Earth
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