The discovery of a mysterious interstellar object called “3I/ATLAS” and its transit through our solar system has set off all kinds of speculation about whether the fairly massive visitor could be some kind of alien probe. But now one NASA scientist has suggested that extraterrestrials might not be able to visit our little corner of the galaxy because, well, their technology may be just as crummy as ours.
In a research paper titled “A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox,” NASA and University of Maryland astrophysicist Robin Corbet argues that the reason we haven’t closely encountered any aliens is because they actually lack warp drives or access to wormholes. In fact, Corbet says, they likely don’t possess any tech that’s significantly more advanced that what humans have:
Applying a principle of “radical mundanity,” this paper examines 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 preferred, where none have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so.
The paper’s “Less Terrifying” reference is in relation to a comment from sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who is said to have once postulated that we are either alone in the universe or we aren’t, and that both possibilities are equally scary.
Resolving Fermi’s Paradox
Physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly proposed the paradox named for him in the 1950s, sometimes expressed as the question “Where is everybody?” At root, Fermi wondered why, if life should be bountiful in a vast universe, we haven’t yet encountered any other civilizations. Various explanations have arisen over the years, ranging from humanity being the only evolved, intelligent life that’s smart enough to ask the question, to the likelihood that aliens are so far beyond us in intelligence that we’re effectively irrelevant to them. (My personal favorite is that the most intelligent life in the universe is actually aquatic — life on Earth started in the oceans, after all — and so we live in a galaxy of whales who have no interest in leaving their happy watery homes.)
Corbet acknowledges that we have spent decades talking about UFOs and have developed a massive subculture around them, but the NASA researcher notes that no one has found any definitive evidence 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 manner of interesting theories about why 3I/ATLAS could be a fragment of incredibly sophisticated ET engineering. (Loeb has also been doing real science, of course, undercutting some of the more outrageous speculation about what is probably just a big comet.)
Radical mundanity isn’t that radical
The radical mundanity idea is a bit of a turn on Occam’s razor: If we haven’t seen any aliens yet, it’s because they’re either a lot like us, maybe just a little bit better, or possibly worse. The simplest explanation is best. “The idea is that they’re more advanced, but not much more advanced,” Corbet told the Guardian. “It’s like having an iPhone 42 rather than an iPhone 17,”
He also suggests that even relatively advanced civilizations might send out a bunch of probes, find nothing at all — or nothing remarkable — and give up on exploration. After all, civilizations may all be too far away from each other in space, and too technologically limited, to ever interfere with each others’ destinies.
In his paper, Corbet also entertains a variety of refutations of the mundanity theory. Obviously, if the aliens show up, the theory is disproven, as they would need very advanced tech to get to Earth. But even if we did detect a distant extraterrestrial civilization, it could turn out to be just slightly more impressive than our own. We wouldn’t get that much out of the encounter, scientifically, and might have to conclude that mundanity is the rule in the Milky Way. Sorry, UFO obsessives. It really could be that boring.
