'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.