Why might aliens find Earth unremarkable?

There is always a question of whether we are alone in the universe. The search for life beyond Earth is an interesting and curious endeavor that can lead us to achieve sustainability through space. As we experience high-tech knowledge bases and artificial intelligence data mining, it is evident that ancient thinkers and philosophers have created several hypotheses relevant to this topic.

“Where is everybody?” Physicist Enrico Fermi asked in the 1950s about extraterrestrial life. At the age of 13.8 billion years of our universe, we have no evidence of intelligent life on other planets. It has been a good enough time to civilize a nation and reach through interstellar travel, or the other intelligent life is not interested in primitive earth creatures who possess war, environmental pollution, and technological missteps. Another possible reason can be that communication frequencies are not evident to our technologies, and we are not advanced enough to understand them or probe them. This is called the “Fermi Paradox.”

According to the “zoo hypothesis,” as we are not interested in animals in a zoo, extraterrestrials consider us an irrelevant species in a cosmic zoo, and they observe us from far.  Why are we not contacting bacteria or ants, as they are not well-advanced creatures and are insignificant?

On the other hand, the “Dark Forest hypothesis” explains that all other civilized extraterrestrial life is hidden to protect from potential threats. If any advanced civilization arose on earth before humans, the evidence has been destroyed due to geological processes over millions of years, as explained by the “Siluriyan hypothesis.”

Can we be a part of a sophisticated simulation run by a

more advanced civilization? If the simulation hypothesis is correct, extraterrestrial life can or cannot exist according to the simulation conditions.

As a final thought, the aliens can be entities composed of energy that can move through multidimensions that are incomprehensible to us, such as the “Enigma Aliens” (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Enigma aliens

These hypotheses and theories indicate different possibilities for thinking of extraterrestrial life beyond Earth with its challenges.

Prof. (Mrs.) M.L.C. Attygalle

Department of Physics

University of Sri Jayewardenepura