UFO obsessives will be disappointed by new theory that says aliens probably don’t have highly advanced technology – Jalopnik

The discovery of a mysterious interstellar object called “3I/ATLAS” and its passage through our solar system has sparked all kinds of speculation about whether the rather large visitor could be some kind of alien probe. But now a NASA scientist has suggested that aliens might not be able to visit our little corner of the Milky Way because their technology might be just as bad as ours.

In a research article titled “A less terrifying universe? Ordinariness as an explanation for the Fermi paradox”, astrophysicist from NASA and the University of Maryland Robin Korbet states that the reason we haven’t encountered aliens up close is because they don’t actually have warp drives or access to wormholes. Corbet says they probably don’t have technology that is significantly more advanced than what humans have:

Applying the principle of ‘radical ordinariness’, this article explores explanations for the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy… With this principle, the prospect that the Galaxy contains a modest number of civilizations is preferable, none of which have achieved a level of technology sufficient to achieve large-scale astroengineering or the desire does not have to do so.

The reference to ‘Less Terrifying’ in the article refers to a commentary by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarkewho is said to have once postulated that we are either alone in the universe or we are not, and that both possibilities are equally frightening.

Physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have proposed the paradox named after him in the 1950s, sometimes expressed as the question “Where is everyone?” Essentially, Fermi wondered why, if life were abundant in a vast universe, we haven’t encountered other civilizations yet. Over the years, various explanations have emerged, ranging from the fact that humanity is the only evolved, intelligent life smart enough to ask the question, to the likelihood that aliens are so far above us in intelligence that we are effectively irrelevant to them. (My personal favorite is that the most intelligent life in the universe actually lives in the water—life on Earth began in the oceans, after all—and that’s why we live in a galaxy of whales that have no interest in leaving their happy watery homes.)

Corbet acknowledges that we’ve been talking about UFOs for decades and have developed a huge subculture around them, but the NASA researcher notes that no one has found any definitive proof that sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena can be traced to objects not from this planet. That said, controversial Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has been responsible for all kinds of interesting theories about why 3I/ATLAS could be a fragment of incredibly advanced alien engineering. (Loeb, of course, has also done some real science, undermining some of the more outrageous speculation about what is probably just a large comet.)

The idea of ​​radical ordinariness is a bit exciting Occam’s razor: If we haven’t seen aliens yet, it’s because they look a lot like us, maybe a little better, or possibly worse. The simplest explanation is the best. “The idea is that they are more advanced, but not much more advanced,” Corbet told the Guardian. “It’s like having an iPhone 42 instead of an iPhone 17,”

He also suggests that even relatively advanced civilizations could send out a slew of probes, find nothing at all – or nothing of note – and abandon their explorations. After all, civilizations may all be too far apart in space, and too limited technologically, to ever be able to influence each other’s fate.

In his article, Corbet also presents a variety of refutations of the worldliness theory. Obviously, if the aliens appear, the theory will be disproven, as they would need very advanced technology to reach Earth. But even if we were to discover a distant alien civilization, it might turn out to be just a little more impressive than our own. Scientifically speaking, we wouldn’t get much out of the encounter and might have to conclude that ordinariness is the rule in the Milky Way. Sorry, UFO obsessives. It really can be that boring.