If extraterrestrial life exists, why has it not reached out to us? Dr Robin Corbet, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, believes he has a provocative answer - and it portrays aliens as strikingly human-like in their limitations. In a groundbreaking paper, Dr Corbet posits that alien civilizations might have simply grown bored of the search and stopped trying to contact us. According to him, these extraterrestrial beings are only modestly more advanced than humanity, reaching the limits of their technology before losing interest in interstellar exploration.

“In the mundane perspective, where other civilizations are not that much more advanced, a limit to exploration would arise,” said Dr Corbet. He points to Proxima Centauri b, a planet located four light-years away, as a potentially promising abode for alien life. Yet, with our current spacecraft technology, a journey there would take an astronomical 100,000 years.

Pop culture has long fueled our fascination with advanced aliens - from interstellar probes to powerful cosmic beacons, sci-fi films like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind envision them as capable of traversing the galaxy in technologically superior starships.

Dr Corbet, however, believes this perception may be wildly exaggerated. Extraterrestrials, in his view, may be equipped with technology only slightly ahead of ours -“an iPhone 42 rather than an iPhone 17.” He adds, their advancements may not involve revolutionary leaps such as harnessing electricity or discovering new physical laws.

Even if some aliens possess beacon transmitters capable of interstellar messaging, there might be little incentive to maintain them for millions or billions of years. And any large-scale galactic exploration would only occur if its benefits clearly outweighed the enormous costs - a challenge even for human civilizations.

Dubbed the“radically mundane” theory, Dr Corbet's explanation offers a plausible solution to the Fermi paradox: the perplexing contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and our lack of evidence for it. Simply put, other lifeforms might be technologically limited, just like us, or situated so far away that contact is effectively impossible.

“The Fermi paradox may be explained if the galaxy contains a modest number of technological civilizations, with technology levels that, while more advanced than contemporary Earth, are nowhere near the 'super-science' levels that could result in readily detectable astro-engineering,” Dr Corbet concludes in his yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper.

Professor Michael Garrett of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics warns that the theory risks projecting a very human-like apathy onto the cosmos:“I find it hard to believe that all intelligent life would be so uniformly dull,” he told the Guardian.

Other theories abound: aliens might perceive humans as too dangerous or violent to approach. Dr Gordon Gallup, a biopsychologist at the University of Albany, noted in a 2022 paper:“If there is intelligent life elsewhere, they may view humans as extremely dangerous. Maybe this is why there is no proof or compelling evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence – we pose too great a risk, and they do not want to be discovered.”

Alternatively, aliens may have transcended our realm of understanding, evolving in ways that render them virtually unrecognizable.

Scientists on Earth have attempted to beam messages toward distant solar systems using radio and light signals, akin to sending an interstellar email. Mark Buchanan, a UK physicist and writer, emphasizes the importance of light signals for speed and clarity:“There are many ways to send signals of a kind that do not get changed by any natural process, so another civilization would see them as coming from an intelligence,” he told the Daily Mail.

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