The Terrible Theory That Reveals Why Extraterrestrial Life Has Gone Undetected

The Universe is inconceivably large. So much so that it is not even allowed to speculate. But it’s not empty. Between what you see and what you don’t see, it hosts billions of galaxies, which are made up of an even greater number of stars, which in turn have a infinite number of potentially habitable planets orbiting them. It is at least strange to believe then that we are the only living beings. But, where the hell is everyone?

There are many places to look. To get an idea, according to a relatively recent study by the University of California Berkeley and published in PNAS, there are at least 100 Earth-like planets (i.e. with temperatures and conditions that allow life) for every grain of sand in our world. The question becomes more exhausting: why weren’t we able to find them?

And here comes something called The Fermi paradox, raised in the 50s of the last century. The Ferni paradox is the apparent contradiction between estimates that there is a high probability that other intelligent civilizations exist in the observable universe, and the total absence of evidence of said. civilization.

There are as many proposed solutions to this famous paradox as there are scientists, but one that really is unsettling. Its author is a theoretical physicist from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET) in Russia, named Alexander Berezin.

His hypothesis was called: First in, last out.

Berezin’s statement, posted a few years ago on arxiv.org, is a sign that it will be the first civilization that manages to travel to other galaxies the one that will necessarily eliminate all competition “to ensure its expansion”.

The author himself said that his theory is so terrifying that i hope you are wrong: “I’m not suggesting that a highly developed civilization could knowingly exterminate other life forms. More likely, they would do it inadvertently, just as a group of workers destroy an anthill to construct a building, simply because they have no drive to do so.” protect him. Of course I hope I’m wrong. The only way to prove that is to continue studying the universe and look for extraterrestrial life,” she explained.

Parameter A

For Berezin, what is truly relevant is not what possible extraterrestrial civilizations look like, but whether they can be detectable from each other at some distance from Earth.

If an extraterrestrial civilization does not have the ability to develop technologically to be detectable by others, it can still exist, but for us it’s as if it never existed. It’s like the case of the tree falling in the middle of the woods, if there is no one to listen whether it makes a noise or not when it falls, then we will never know, it will be as if it doesn’t exist.

This principle applied to civilizations is to which Berezin attributes the name of Parameter A. For this reason, if a alien civilization If it doesn’t get far enough to get to Parameter A, we’ll never be able to see it, even if it exists.

The specific nature of civilizations that arise interstellarly shouldn’t matter,” he says. “They could be biological organisms like us, rogue AIs that they rebelled against their creators or planetary-scale distributed minds like those described by Stanislaw Lem in Solaris,” he adds.

“The only variable we can objectively measure is the probability that life is detectable from outer space within a certain distance from Earth,” Berezin explains.

First in, last out

“What would happen if the first life achieved interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to drive its own expansion?” he says.

If Berezin’s principles are followed, we will unwittingly participate in a destructive race. Only the most advanced civilization could not only conquer the whole galaxy, but also annihilate the rest of civilizationssimply because you would have the tools to do it.

At this point, the most disturbing thing about the studio is that it contemplates the great possibility that the human being will never find an extraterrestrial race more advanced than him and that therefore the advances of the human species itself could be responsible for the destruction of other life forms without their knowledge.

Berezin too he admits he hopes he’s wrong on that, and it’s worth noting that many other scientists have much more optimistic views about when we can expect to hear about advanced extraterrestrial life.

But the physicist’s views are only the latest scientific statement as to why we might be fated to only gaze at the stars in time and space, just as we wish it were otherwise.

Source: arXiv.org, ScienceAlert, El País, Global Chronicle.