I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation “theories” to explain the fact we’re not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they’re not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they’re doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they’re all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there’s at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that’s just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it’s not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as “intelligent”. But, like, we’re realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I’m proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the “Fool in a Field” hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It’s pitch black, he can’t move, and he’s been standing there for ages. He’s just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. “Oh no!” He says. “Robots have killed them all!”
I love that and want to add my own.
The 20 Minutes Late with Starbucks hypothesis: They noticed us and want to meet us! But since they are several million light-years away and don’t have FTL travel, they’re just gonna take a while.
Personally I lean towards the First One At The Party Theory. Yeah, the universe is 13 billion years old, but our own life-supporting solar system is 4.6 billion and the majority of known exoplanets are younger than us.
It took about a billion years for life to arise, once our planet existed. If our galactic neighbors are operating on a similar timescale, there might just not be anyone out there yet who’s technologically advanced enough to make contact. Right now, the best we can hope for might be people at similar levels of development to us, looking out at the starts and wondering if anyone else is out there.
don’t know if there’s an official name for this theory but I will call it the “We Can’t Talk To Fish” theory
because while I am absolutely positive that there is life out there (it seems highkey unlikely that in an infinite universe across billions of years only one planet got life), *even if* we were close enough to make contact and *even if* both sides were advanced enough to try to communicate… we might still not ever hear it because it’s in a form we don’t interpret as communication. we have trouble communicating with *other humans,* let alone other species. it’s like sending a probe underwater and hoping the fish talk back to you.
I like the xkcd comic about the ants’ search for us, and I think this version of the theory should be called the Formi paradox