In 1950, Nobel laureate in physics Enrico Fermi asked a question that still plagues astronomers: “Where is everyone?”. His question was immortalized in the Fermi paradox – a conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence.
The universe is at least three times older than our solar system and contains more than a billion trillion stars. And if humanity has already traveled to the moon (at least astronauts) during this period of time, then why have we not been visited by aliens?
The answer to this question was suggested by a couple of astrobiologists. According to them, extraterrestrial civilizations are becoming so developed and large that they can not make interstellar travel. They are either destroyed by burnout, or reoriented to the priorities of homeostasis, a state in which cosmic expansion is no longer the goal, making it difficult to detect them remotely.
Civilizations of aliens close to burnout are the easiest to detect. They will change the environment and dissipate free energy in an extremely unstable way, causing deviations in the physical quantities of the planetary scale.
“This presents the possibility that a good many of humanity’s initial detections of extraterrestrial life may be of the intelligent, though not yet wise, kind. “
Astrobiologists Wong and Bartlett acknowledge that their hypothesis has a significant flaw: there is no real evidence for this idea. Their theory is simply based on the laws of life on Earth, which may be inapplicable to other planets. And, perhaps, the first victim of asymptotic burnout will be humanity. What an “optimistic” asumption.
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