Why haven't we found intelligent alien civilizations? There may be a 'universal limit to technological development’ | Space

If the technological capacities of intelligent entities throughout the cosmos are unbounded, why haven't we seen signs of other intelligent life?

Source: Why haven't we found intelligent alien civilizations? There may be a 'universal limit to technological development’ | Space

Opinion

The article at space.com discusses the Fermi Paradox - why haven't we found signs of intelligent alien life yet, despite the vastness of the universe. It explores a new hypothesis, the Universal Limit to Technological Development (ULTD), which suggests that all civilizations eventually run into a barrier that prevents them from achieving interstellar travel and communication.

While the article admits that we might still get a "message in a bottle" sometime in the future, it overlooks an important aspect of ET investigation. It might be that mankind, for the most part, is just not equipped to make contact. By that I mean mentally, not so much technologically.

If ETs wanted to contact human beings, would they not begin with the most intelligent and perceptive among us? Now, before you start thinking of Nobel Laureates and Oxford Dons, think again. These people are rewarded because they advance knowledge within our existing structures. They are smart, no doubt. But their intelligence more or less conforms with the worldview we've created.

Independent sensitives and intutives are largely overlooked and if they happen to make unusual or far-fetched claims, they may be ridiculed. In some instances, that might be justified. But I don't believe all inward 'seers' are flakes or charlatans. And some do claim to be in contact with ETs.

True, we cannot verify this. But to rule it out is equally problematic.

By way of analogy, consider an ant crawling along your kitchen floor. Does the ant understand why you want to get rid of it from your kitchen? The ant is just doing its thing, trying to survive by searching for your sugar bowl. The scale of being and consciousness is so vastly different between the ant and the human that even if we wanted to reason with the ant and tell it why it should go away, it likely would not be able to understand.

I would imagine the same kind of gap exists between human beings and ETs. Even if the ET wanted to reach us, most of us are just too regimented and materialistic to receive their informational vibe, a vibe that, for all we know, can travel across light-years or at least from Earth orbit from an invisible, cloaked craft.

Scoff if you like. But this probably is the kind of thinking we need to consider if we want to make first contact.