"Assuming our solar system's newest interstellar object isn't an alien mothership sent here to menace us, humankind still hasn't spotted any signs of extraterrestrial life, let alone intelligence - which, given how incalculably vast the universe is, is strange. With all the potential homes for potential alien civilizations, why aren't we seeing any evidence of them? You've probably heard of the name for this conundrum: the Fermi Paradox. And you've probably heard of more than a few solutions to it, too."
"There's the infamous zoo hypothesis, which supposes that advanced aliens know about our planet but stay away to let us evolve naturally. Or maybe you subscribe to spookier ones like the vulnerable worlds hypothesis, which holds that there may be a certain type of ominous technological innovation that humankind doesn't even know about yet which always destroys any civilization advanced enough to develop it."
"Or perhaps the universe is a kind of dark forest, with plenty of alien civilizations, but all too scared to show themselves out of fear of being annihilated by an even more advanced and bloodthirsty interstellar species. But here comes the party pooper. In a new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, NASA astrophysicist Robin Corbet proposes an outlook of "radical mundanity" that basically banishes these fun ideas back to the realm of speculative scifi."
No confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life or intelligence has been observed despite the vast number of potential habitats in the universe. Several proposed explanations address this absence, including the zoo hypothesis, the vulnerable worlds hypothesis, and the dark forest scenario in which civilizations hide from hostile neighbors. An alternative view called "radical mundanity" proposes that many civilizations are only marginally more advanced than humanity. Those civilizations encounter similar technological and logistical limits when searching for others, become bogged down by those limits, and ultimately give up on large-scale cosmic exploration.
Read at Futurism
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