'Bored aliens': has intelligent life stopped bothering trying to contact Earth?

[hunter]

For centuries, great thinkers have pondered why, given the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy, we have seen no compelling signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Now, scientists are mulling an intriguing possibility: if aliens exist, their technology may be only marginally better than ours. And having explored their cosmic neighbourhood for a while, they simply got bored and stopped bothering, making it difficult to detect them.

The scenario, described in a new paper, embraces the principle of “radical mundanity”, which shuns the notion of extraterrestrials zipping around the universe after harnessing physics beyond our comprehension. Instead, it proposes a Milky Way that is home to a modest number of civilisations with technology not wildly more impressive than our own.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/oct/15/bored-aliens-has-intelligent-life-stopped-bothering-trying-to-contact-earth

original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22878

This puts words and math to my favorite theory.

In this universe faster-than-light travel is simply not possible and complex systems such as humans or intelligent machines do not survive interstellar travel at sub-light speeds.

My more cynical perspective is that we are not actually intelligent and therefore incapable of recognizing intelligence as it most commonly exists in this universe.

[Vogon_Glory]

1. Or they've decided to move in on us after

our civilization collapses. As Napoleon supposedly said: “Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.”


Considering the actions of the leaders of the larger and more powerful nation-states here on Earth during the last half-century, they might not have to wait that long.

[3catwoman3]

2. Or they took a look and decided we were to FUBAR to bother with.

[EYESORE 9001]

3. If an alien civilization had faster-than-light technology

or if they travel through ‘wormholes’, why would they bother with a podunk planet like this one? With the whole universe open to you, wouldn’t you go where there are richer deposits of whatever it is that you’re looking for? One without scrappy bipedal life forms.

[slightlv]

4. Beyond this place being fubar'ed enough to stay far away from,

I really like your last paragraph! I agree with it!!

[yaesu]

5. Maybe after a long look they put a warning beacon here to warn other civilizations not to bother nt

[ms liberty]

6. What do you expect? We're no longer "Mostly Harmless"

[JBTaurus83]

7. I don't think

Technological societies are likely to be very common. When adding billions of years to the mix and blip of time we have been around and space faring, I really am not shocked we haven’t found anyone.

[hvn_nbr_2]

8. "For centuries... thinkers have pondered... hundreds of billions of planets"

It's well less than one century that we've even known for sure that there were any planets outside our solar system.

But that's a picayune detail. The general idea of the post seems plausible and interesting.

[JoseBalow]

9. That's an interesting theory