Despite the alien hubbub and hoopla of the past few years, we still don’t know for certain if we are alone in the universe.
We haven’t even found the tiniest scrap of evidence to suggest that there are alien civilizations out there. So far, the old Fermi Paradox, which posits that by sheer statistical probability, there has to be another civilization out there, has not been proven true just yet.
An astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center named Robin Corbet has a theory about all that: maybe aliens do exist, but perhaps they’re much more boring than we imagined them to be.
In a new paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed, Corbet proposes the idea of “Radical Mundanity” regarding alien life. They argue that aliens are out there, but they’re probably not much more technologically advanced than we are.
Maybe they’ve got laser guns and teleporters, but there’s a chance they haven’t quite figured out the intricacies of interstellar travel.
Scientists’ Newest Theory About Aliens Actually Makes Sense
Other theories out there say aliens definitely exist. Still, they’re hiding behind cloaking devices or some such absurd high-concept nonsense that reads more like someone trying to sell a novel manuscript.
Corbet’s theory is still sci-fi but grounded in a practical version of absurdity that still manages to be somewhat of a buzzkill. That’s because Corbet theorizes that civilizations might plateau before they develop warp drives that bounce them around the cosmos.
Hypothetically speaking, if Corbet is right, that means the Fermi Paradox is right too; it’s just that a civilization of eight-foot-tall, three-eyed grey dudes is roughly just as stuck as we are.
Yet, even after all that raining on your parade, Corbet isn’t ruling out the idea of first contact with an alien race. He thinks we might eventually stumble across alien leakage radiation, meaning errant signals tossed into space that we detect as a kind of intergalactic butt dial.
But that’s it. Probably no more than that.
It’s not the flashiest, most Hollywood-ready theory about alien life that has ever been proposed, but it does seem like one of the most realistic, even if it is a bummer.
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