Enrico Fermi’s decades-old question—“Where is everybody?”—remains one of science’s most haunting mysteries. If the universe is teeming with stars and planets, and life has evolved on Earth, why hasn’t it happened elsewhere in a way we can detect? For many researchers, the so-called Fermi Paradox is a puzzle that demands fresh approaches rather than grand assumptions.
Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and science communicator, digs into this question in a Popular Mechanics feature, drawing heavily from a recent paper by NASA scientist Robin Corbet. Corbet’s “A Less Terrifying Universe,” published on the arXiv preprint server, challenges our longstanding ideas of advanced alien civilizations and offers a less dramatic—but more grounded—explanation for the quiet cosmos.
The Hollywood Trap: Wrong Assumptions About Alien Tech
One of the core arguments Corbet raises, in his paper, is that our expectations of alien technology are shaped more by science fiction than science. From cinematic flying saucers to galaxy-spanning empires, popular culture has created an image of extraterrestrials far beyond what physics or engineering currently allow.
According to Corbet, even if advanced alien societies do exist, their technology may not differ significantly from ours—at least not in the detectable ways we assume. According to Popular Mechanics, Hollywood imagines aliens as having flying saucers capable of beaming humans into the sky. We don’t have anything close to that, and by that logic, they wouldn’t either. This more restrained view of technological progress suggests that alien civilizations might not be broadcasting strong signals, launching visible megastructures, or traversing the galaxy at impossible speeds.
This perspective reframes the entire search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). If other civilizations are using low-power communications or simply not interested in contact, we might never know they’re there—even if they’re relatively close.
Cosmic Vastness and Signal Decay
Distance remains a primary barrier in any attempt at interstellar communication. While the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, is just over four light-years away, even that modest stretch poses monumental challenges.
Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object, is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Traveling at 38,000 miles per hour, it would still take roughly 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, according to the article. Corbet uses this to highlight a simple truth: If our most advanced spacecraft can’t span the gap, why should we expect alien vessels to do so either?
And radio signals, though faster, degrade over distance. Once they travel far enough, even Earth’s strongest transmissions blend into the general galactic background. As Sutter explains in the same source, “By the time even our most powerful broadcasts… reach Proxima Centauri, they are so weak that they can no longer be distinguished.” Interstellar space is noisy, full of radiation from exploding stars and charged particles. In that context, alien messages—even if they exist—may arrive as nothing more than static.
Galactic Scale, Fleeting Presence
Even if advanced civilizations had emerged and expanded in the past, their traces could easily be lost in the sheer size and age of the Milky Way. The galaxy spans over 100,000 light-years and contains hundreds of billions of stars. In that context, the presence of even a million colonized systems would be barely noticeable—a statistical rounding error.
Paul M. Sutter writes that an alien empire inhabiting a million worlds would still account for “less than 0.001 percent of all the stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy.” Furthermore, civilizations—even highly advanced ones—may exist only for brief periods when measured against the universe’s 14-billion-year history. Humanity’s own urban existence spans a few thousand years, a mere blink on the cosmic calendar.
According to this view, the reason we don’t see alien ruins or hear alien voices may be that the universe is too vast and too old, and intelligent life—no matter how advanced—is simply too temporary to leave lasting footprints on a galactic scale.