Bored aliens': has intelligent life stopped bothering trying to contact Earth?

"Now, scientists are mulling an intriguing possibility: if aliens exist, their technology may be only marginally better than ours. And having explored their cosmic neighbourhood for a while, they simply got bored and stopped bothering, making it difficult to detect them. The scenario, described in a new paper, embraces the principle of radical mundanity, which shuns the notion of extraterrestrials zipping around the universe after harnessing physics beyond our comprehension."

"Instead, it proposes a Milky Way that is home to a modest number of civilisations with technology not wildly more impressive than our own. The idea is that they're more advanced, but not much more advanced. It's like having an iPhone 42 rather than an iPhone 17, said Dr Robin Corbet, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who is based at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center. This feels more possible, more natural, because it's not proposing anything very extreme."

"Corbet came up with the hypothesis after considering researchers' explanations for the great silence or Fermi paradox, the discrepancy between the lack of compelling evidence for alien civilisations and the likelihood of their existence in a vast and aged universe. Most theories struck Corbet as exotic. Perhaps extraterrestrials were too advanced to be detected? Perhaps Earth was a cosmic zoo that aliens had agreed to leave alone? Perhaps Earth was the sole home for life in the galaxy?"

Civilizations in the Milky Way may be only marginally more technologically advanced than humanity, producing few dramatic technosignatures. Radical mundanity rejects the existence of physics-defying megastructures or galaxy-spanning empires and instead envisions a modest number of civilizations with incremental improvements. Such civilizations might explore local space briefly, become complacent or bored, and cease active broadcasting or expansion, leaving little detectable evidence. Traditional Seti searches focusing on powerful beacons, robotic probes, or large-scale engineering projects could therefore miss such subtle signatures. Marginal technological gaps between civilizations offer a natural explanation for the Fermi paradox and the persistent observational silence.

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