Scientists now know that there are billions of planets in the universe where aliens could live. So why haven't any of these life forms made contact with us?
Maybe they're too far away, or maybe the aliens just don't want to talk to us. Or there may be an even stranger reason.
Here are the theories that solve the celebrated Fermi paradox: If aliens exist, where are they?
We're looking for aliens in an evil universe
Perhaps we haven't found aliens because our universe isn't particularly hospitable to life. Perhaps Earth is an anomaly among dead worlds. One theory suggests that our universe is one of many possible ones and is not the best place for bright life to emerge.
Humans are just lucky they evolved at all. So if aliens exist, they should be looked for in another, parallel universe, where conditions are better.
Dark energy separates us from aliens
As we already know, the Universe is constantly expanding. Galaxies are slowly but steadily moving away from each other. And all this happens thanks to murky energy.
Scientists believe that within a few trillion years, murky energy will stretch the Universe so much that Earthlings will only be able to see the lithe of the closest galaxies.
Aliens don't live on planets
A recent theory has emerged that suggests that alien species don't necessarily need a planet to exist. Scientists believe that alien colonies could survive by floating freely in space.
Scientists believe that such life forms can exist in slender, see-through, solid shells where temperature and pressure are kept at acceptable levels.
And we did not find such aliens, because this species simply has no means of communication with the outside world.
Aliens “trapped” on super-Earths
Planets that are 2-10 times larger than Earth are called super-Earths and there are many of them in space. At the same time, some rocky worlds may have suitable conditions for the development of bright life.
If aliens live on such planets, then, as some scientists believe, we will never see them. Simply put, the gravity of such a planet is so sturdy that space travel becomes impossible. The rocket simply cannot launch into space.
Aliens caused climate change and died
Another theory suggests that any highly advanced civilization could eventually consume so much energy that it consumes all the planet's resources, causing catastrophic climate change.
Such a scenario would inevitably lead to mass extinction. So if aliens exist, they are long gone, probably destroyed long before we started looking for them.
The aliens couldn't evolve quick enough and disappeared
There may be a huge number of habitable planets in the Universe, but there is no guarantee that all of them will remain so for long enough for life to arise and, most importantly, evolve on them.
This means that potential aliens only have a few hundred million years to develop before their planet changes.
Scientists believe that every rocky planet periodically experiences periods of severe cooling and severe heat, so the aliens may have simply not had time to reach the level of development necessary for space travel and disappeared as a result of another planetary climate catastrophe.
So perhaps the expansion of the Universe prevents us from detecting aliens who are constantly moving away from us and do not have the ability to travel too long distances.
We are aliens
Another strange explanation for the fact that we haven't found aliens is that we are aliens. The panspermia hypothesis states that most of the life we have on Earth today did not originate on our planet, but arrived on asteroids that carried bacteria from other worlds.
Some proponents of this theory suggest that humans evolved from creatures that came from other parts of our galaxy.
But there is no evidence for this yet. Opponents of this theory claim that if bacteria carrying human DNA evolved on another nearby planet, why haven't we found traces of humans anywhere but Earth? But even if this is true, where are all the other aliens, if they exist?
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