A pair of researchers have developed a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. The study has been published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Michael Wong and Stuart Bartlett suggest that the reason that no aliens from other planets have visited us is because of superlinear scaling leads to a singularity.
Physicist Enrico Fermi asked a colleague why aliens from outer space have not visited Earth. The two noted that it seemed unlikely that Earth alone would harbor intelligent life. So, Fermi famously asked “where are they?”. Now, researchers have attempted to solve that riddle.
They began by studying how human civilizations rose and fell throughout history. Then they studied the history of large cities. There they noticed that most grew to a certain point and then collapsed. They developed a hypothesis that suggested such rising and falling by alien space civilizations would lead to one of two scenarios. One is the civilization would come to realize they were growing too large and would cease traveling to or colonizing other worlds. Second is they would not recognize their folly and would therefore collapse. Both scenarios would have the same outcome which is the aliens would not visit us or even demonstrate evidence of their existence. The distance from them to us would be too far.
Scientists described their hypothesis as superlinear scaling. There a civilization grows exponentially and colonize other worlds until they became unable to sustain the energy demands of their constant encroachment. If they did not take action, they would reach a singularity. They note that were it not for the vast distances involved, we would likely easily spot evidence of an alien civilization on the point of collapse because it would be emitting enormous amounts of energy.
