It is being said that the Alien civilizations may have slowly vanished because of climate catastrophes on their home planets.
In a new paper published in the pre-print server ArXiv, a group of NASA scientists analyzed the ‘Great Filter’ theory, which states that ancient alien civilizations may have wiped themselves out before they could have contact with people on Earth.
The ‘Great Filter’ theory tells us that the time we have on Earth is getting shorter. Extreme changes in climate may cause the entire civilization to be wiped out.
The Great Filter theory is also a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, which states that intelligent alien life should be abundant and detectable, given the fact that there are billions of planets located within the habitable zones of their solar systems in our galaxy alone.
The paper states that “evidence of life should exist in abundance in our galaxy alone, and yet in practice, we’ve produced no clear affirmation of anything beyond our own planet. So, where is everybody?”
“We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially towards space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which may explain the cosmic silence.”
“The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying those attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance,” the study’s authors explain.
The Great Filter theory was first brought forward in 1998 by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University. In an essay, he wrote that “the fact that our universe seems basically dead suggests that it is very, very hard for advanced, explosive, lasting life to arise.”
Some scientists are of the opinion that the theory might not be entirely applicable as it doesn’t take into account our current limited capacity to view the cosmos.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Seth Shostak, a California-based astronomer with the SETI Institute, said, “The Great Filter theory depends on the assumed observational result that nobody is out there. But that conclusion is far too premature. We’ve just begun to search.”
Nevertheless, the study pulls ur focus on human collaboration that can majorly help our civilization to have a better shot at surviving climate change and many other natural factors.