Why Haven’t We Found Aliens? Fermi’s Paradox May Explain 2%
By PopMech Editors51%
7/12/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Hasty Generalization, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 29.5% saturation with 774 hits. Analysis detected 4,819 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,620 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 10% and a BS Rank of 2% (21,585 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 98.60% of the article peer group.
Hollywood makes initiating alien contact seem much easier than it has proven to be.
In E.T. the Extraterrestrial , E.T. got stranded on earth when his alien compadres abandoned their botany mission.
In Project Hail Mary , Ryland Grace happened upon an alien —Rocky—while he was on his mission to save Earth.
In the Alien franchise, an alien race called The Engineers flat out started humanity.
But as far as real-life Earthlings finding other intelligent beings in the universe ?
No dice.
The great physicist Enrico Fermi first posed the challenging question over half a century ago, wondering why we appear to be alone in the universe .
As Fermi’s argument goes, there’s nothing special about us.
So there must be multitudes of lifeforms and intelligent civilizations across every galaxy throughout the universe.
And given that the universe has been around for nearly 14 billion years, there has been more than enough time for life to arise, civilizations to develop, and for those aliens to develop the technology needed to completely colonize an entire galaxy.
Even if all those civilizations last for only a relatively fleeting amount of time (say, a million years or so), then at least their technological remnants and ruins should be littered anywhere.
And yet, we don’t see anybody.
However, some scientists believe that there are some good reasons why we haven’t made contact with aliens yet—and it’s not because they don’t exist.
Aliens Communicate With Mind-Bending Tech
As our technology has evolved, we have shifted from radio to other modes of communication, such as fiber optics, internet, and cables buried deep beneath the ocean.
This shift also means that radio signals from our telescopes may take a backseat to these newer types of signals.
However, if intelligent aliens are looking for other life in the universe, it’s possible that none of these signals may resonate with an advanced civilization, which could be millions—or possibly billions of years—older than ours; its members could be communicating in ways only science fiction could fathom.
In a 2024 study published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics , the authors explore the possibility that alien communications technologies are so advanced, they may be talking to each other using gravitational waves.
These are ripples in spacetime, and physicists don’t yet fully understand them.
The problem is that—unlike narrowband radio waves—our science cannot distinguish between gravitational waves that are natural and those that may be artificial.
And even if we did understand these gravitational waves (or any other advanced communication technology that aliens might be using, for that matter) scientists aren’t sure that we would even be able to decode the intercepted messages—although, even indecipherable messages could still lend to some kind of learning.
Alien Civilizations Are Too Young, Too Old—or Extinct
In a 2021 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Galaxies, researchers used a galactic simulation model to estimate the possibility of extra terrestrial intelligence throughout time (including the present) in the Milky Way.
The researchers wanted to add nuance to the search discussion by increasing the depth of their analysis, and they wanted to gauge how relatively “old” any alien civilizations are likely to be.
This is a critical factor in whether or not a civilization can even travel in space or put out intergalactic feelers, because they can only do that from a key “sweet spot.”
Too young, and, like us before very recently, they simply won’t have the means yet.
Too old, and they could be stripped of technology in a post-apocalyptic burnout.
They could even be extinct.
In fact, the research includes parameters for extinction and the idea of “self annihilation,” a probability that could be extraordinarily high.
What’s the point of research like this?
It’s fair to ask, the same way it’s fair to ask questions about projects like SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, in the first place.
But these researchers have a clear goal, which is to place a touchstone for others who want to continue to explore the Fermi paradox.
They explain:
“The exact number of the intelligent life estimated here is not the focus of our work;” the authors write in the paper.
“[R]ather, it is instead the development of a statistical, comprehensive galactic picture tracing the potential growth propensity of intelligent life over a course of ~20 billion years.”
In other words, this is our best guess at what—or who—might be lying around the extraterrestrial corner.
Alien Tech Isn’t Advanced Enough
In the same vein, Robin Corbet, PhD—a senior research scientist at University of Maryland Baltimore County—claims in a 2025 preprint paper that extraterrestrial technology might not be as advanced as we think.
Now, Corbet isn’t insinuating that alien life is merely a cluster of microbes on a primordial planet.
Instead, his “mundane approach” suggests that there are other extraterrestrial civilizations out there, perhaps even more advanced than own.
The only caveat?
Their technology isn’t nearly “super-science” enough to be noticeable from galaxies away.
More simply put, Hollywood imagines aliens as having flying saucers capable of beaming humans (and sometimes cows) into the sky.
Now, we don’t have technology even close to the UFOs terrorizing characters in blockbuster movies, so by Corbet’s logic, extraterrestrial civilizations—should they be somewhere among the cosmos—wouldn’t either.
Regardless of which theory might champion Fermi’s paradox, the simple fact is that there are plenty more places to look among the cosmos.
The universe has vast gulfs in space, gargantuan numbers of stars, and lastly, immense expanses of time.
Our universe has been around for nearly 14 billion years, and the Milky Way galaxy formed at least 9 billion years ago.
Civilizations that rise and spread and thrive for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, live for just a blink of an eye when counted in cosmic time.
Humanity founded its first cities only a few thousand years ago; alien intelligences that last for orders of magnitude more time still aren’t even worth mentioning on the great cosmic calendar of our universe.
With this cosmic isolation comes bad news and good news.
The bad news is that we’ll likely never encounter another intelligent species, except perhaps for a rare and fleeting glimpse at a stray radio transmission someday in the far future.
The good news is that every star we see in the sky is unclaimed, empty, and waiting for us to reach out and explore it.
Editor’s note: Caroline Delbert, Emma Frederickson, Elizabeth Rayne, and Paul M.
Sutter contributed reporting to this story.
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