Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Why haven't aliens contacted us?

Some people believe that the lack of outside contact is evidence that complex life does not exist in the universe.  As the idea goes, we know that simple life is easy to create (from our own experience).  Yet, complex life defined as a civilization at or beyond our level apparently does not exist.  If they did, presumably there would be a lot of them, and we would find evidence of them in the frequencies of the cosmos.  So some people believe life is easy to start but hard / impossible to develop beyond a stage where we are, the conclusion being something snuffs out the civilization when it is about our age.  Maybe nuclear weapons are to blame.

There is a tribe deep in the Amazon jungle in Brazil that has never had contact with humans from the outside.  The Brazilian government is actively protecting them from outsiders who are trying to contact them, in fact. If anyone is curious why we haven't been contacted - this is my theory why:  we are the equivalent to the uncontacted Brazilian tribe.  There probably are millions of intelligent civilizations, and maybe even the supreme among them are protecting our planet from outside signals from others who would interfere.  In their mind, we should make our own way.  If we succeed then we can join the league of universal civilizations.  If we destroy ourselves in the interim, then we weren't a worthy species.

I think Bill Watterson's theory is good too:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I bet Brazil's policy is breached from time to time by anthropologists or curious tourists. If this policy is really in place why haven't rogue aliens visited us?

Even if they collectively think we're unworthy all it would take are a few who disagree with this outlook and there would be. Think of all the various things humans study that most humans would consider "boring" or "not worth my time".

The problem with hypotheses that we haven't been visiting because of some extraterrestrial law is that laws get broken, and the problem with saying they don't think we're a worthy species is that individual aliens may have different ideas.

Unless the only aliens out there are all completely the same with their opinions and values in which case I'm glad they haven't contacted us.