Is anyone out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; So far we have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets, and the most basic statistics suggest the existence of countless potentially habitable worlds in the universe. But when we’ve looked for any evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, we haven’t found anything yet. The question is why?
There are the usual ideas: life doesn’t really find a way; Earth is kept in a cosmic zoo; Civilizations destroy themselves as soon as they have the power to do so; Some civilization has to be first, and that is us. None of these are really provable at this point, and none of them are particularly satisfactory answers. So why not add another idea? What if the reason we haven’t discovered aliens is AI?
*A graphic showing how the acceleration of technological progress shortens the window of opportunity to discover a civilization. Photo credit: Michael A. Garrett*
This idea comes from a new article that re-examines some of Carl Sagan’s thoughts. Back in the 1970s, Sagan was thinking about some of the challenges in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and one of them was what he called the “communication horizon.” The idea was that as an alien civilization advances, its technology becomes too sophisticated for us to detect. We could detect powerful radio signals from a civilization 100 light-years away, but if they used neutrino communication they would be essentially invisible to us. And what if there is a novel physics that allows them to communicate faster than light? Our search is doomed to failure.
Sagan estimated that it would take about a thousand years for a civilization to advance beyond our observational limits, based on the way human civilization had developed in the past. But a lot has changed since Sagan’s time, especially in the area of computer technology.
Artificial intelligence is on everyone’s lips these days. Whether you like it or hate it, AI is now part of our daily lives. It is entirely possible that the progress of AI will reach a certain technological plateau, but it is also possible that we will reach some kind of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Should an ASI emerge in the next decade or so, it would become the dominant intelligence on Earth, evolving faster than we poor lumps of flesh can imagine.
This latest work argues that the observation horizon shrinks significantly when we take into account the exponential speed of technology and consider the possibility that non-biological intelligence is widespread. It could only take a decade or two. If this is the case, our chance of detecting an alien species is virtually nil. Perhaps the answer to Fermi’s Great Silence Paradox is the Dead Internet Theory on a cosmic scale.
Reference: Garrett, Michael A. “Blink and You’ll Miss It – How Technological Acceleration is Shrinking SETI’s Narrow Detection Window.” *Acta Astronautica* (2025).
Reference: Sagan, Carl. “On the detective nature of advanced galactic civilizations.” Icarus 19.3 (1973): 350-352.
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