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

Astrophysicist proposes a ‘radically mundane’ theory for why humans have yet to encounter extraterrestrials

For centuries, great thinkers have pondered why, given the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy, we have seen no compelling signs of intelligent life beyond 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.”