Most stars have planets. There are now more than 6,000 exoplanets discovered to date, and the most basic statistics point to the existence of countless potentially habitable planets in the Universe.
But we have yet to find any evidence of alien civilizations. The question is why?
There are many theories put forward such as the Earth is held in a cosmic "zoo"; civilizations destroy themselves as soon as they have enough power to do so; some civilization must be the first, and that civilization is humanity.
Right now, none of these theories are really proven, and none of them really give a satisfactory answer. So why not add another idea? What if the reason we haven't discovered aliens is because of AI ?
This idea comes from a recent paper that revisits some of Carl Sagan's musings. Back in the 1970s, Sagan considered some of the challenges of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, and one of them was what he called the " communication horizon ."
The idea is that as an alien civilization develops, their technology becomes so sophisticated that we cannot detect it. We can detect strong radio signals from a civilization 100 light years away, but if they use neutrino communication, they will be essentially invisible to humans.
And if there is some new physical technology that allows them to communicate faster than light? The human search will fail.
Sagan calculated that it would take about a thousand years for a civilization to progress beyond our observable limits, based on how human civilizations have developed in the past.
But a lot has changed since Sagan, especially in the field of computer technology. Today, artificial intelligence is mainstream. Like it or not, AI is now a part of everyday life. So it is entirely possible that AI progress will reach a technological threshold, but it is also possible that we will achieve a kind of artificial superintelligence (ASI).
If an ASI emerges in the next decade or so, it will become the dominant intelligence on Earth, and will continue to develop at a rate faster than humans can imagine.
This latest research argues that if we take into account the exponential pace of technological development and consider the possibility that non-biological intelligence is common, the observational horizon narrows considerably.
It could take just a decade or two. If that's the case, the chances of discovering an extraterrestrial species are essentially zero.
Perhaps the answer to the Fermi paradox of the Great Silence is that the Internet Theory is dead on a cosmic scale.