A Theory Says We Can't Find Advanced Aliens Because They're Not Trying to Be Found
A possible reason, called the 'Sustainability Solution,' argues that the search for technosignatures necessitates a particular human bias, suggesting that rapid growth is the only means of society expansion.
A new paper reexamining this solution suggests that many societies may face collapse due to the unsustainable aspect of an ever-expanding species, and so many of its technologies could be indistinguishable from nature itself.
For more than 40 years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization has turned its gaze toward the cosmos in search for an answer to one of humanity's greatest questions: Are we alone? Often taking the form of the 'Fermi paradox'—a 75-year-old thought experiment that explores why there are so many worlds, yet seemingly no alien civilizations—this grand question has inspired a lot of possible solutions. Maybe life is much rarer than we imagine? Maybe it's incredibly difficult to evolve into a modern civilization like ours? Or maybe aliens are speaking in a language we simply don't understand.
However, there's one possible solution that eerily speaks to our current moment. Known as the 'Sustainability Solution,' this idea posits that endless economic growth may simply be impossible to sustain, so alien societies either adapt by creating sustainable civilization in harmony with their host planet, or they simply die out. First proposed by Pennsylvania State University scientists Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum in 2009, the 'Sustainability Solution' suggests that if aliens do exist, they likely wouldn't create the technosignatures we often attribute to advanced civilizations, such as Dyson Spheres or interstellar spacecraft. Instead, these structures (part of the 'technosphere') would blend with the natural world, making them difficult to distinguish.
In a new study uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, New York University researcher and philosopher Lukáš Likavčan revitalizes this solution to the Fermi paradox as a lens through which to view humanity's own development. The paper re-conceptualizes technology, history, and sustainability on a planetary scale.
'The ecological limits constrain the topology of viable planetary histories to those evolutionary trajectories where the technosphere successfully folds back into the biosphere,' Likavčan wrote. 'The major result of this reconceptualization is the problematization of the analytical import of technosphere as a category denoting some new geological layer—it seems to be more of a transitory armature of the biosphere's evolution and less of an emerging permanent layer.'
Humans play a strange, transitory role in this conceptualization. Of course, being primates, we are of the biosphere. But our creations—at least, as argued by this theory—become part of the theoretically detectable technosphere (whether this region is a permanent fixture or a temporary arm of the biosphere is up for debate). Drawing on a sample size of one (i.e. human civilization), it's easy to think that progress will continue unabated until we become masters of our own Solar System and beyond. However, as Haqq-Mistra and Baum originally stated in 2009, this 'Sustainability Solution' questions the assumption of the unimpeded exponential growth of such civilizations.
'It is still possible that slower-growth ETI civilizations exist but have not expanded rapidly enough to be easily detectable by the searches humans have yet made,' the original authors wrote. 'It is also possible that faster-growth ETI civilizations previously expanded throughout the galaxy but could not sustain this state, collapsing in a way that whatever artifacts they might have left have also remained undetected.'
Additionally, Likavčan's idea of 'folding back into the biosphere,' means that advanced civilizations might instead create technologies that are essentially biological in nature in order to remain in balance with their finite resources. To support this point, Likavčan quotes Canadian sci-fi author Karl Schroeder, who wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature,' itself a reformulation of sci-fi Arthur C. Clarke's famous words that compared technology to magic. This could also explain why we haven't found civilizations while looking for technosignatures alone.
Magic or no, the nature of the Fermi paradox makes it a 'we won't know until we know' kind of question. But the exploration of possible solutions can also provide a valuable lens through which to value our own society, its future perils, and how we might—against all odds—survive long enough to one day solve this perplexing question.
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Atlantic
5 days ago
- Atlantic
The Rise of the ‘Club Sandwich Generation'
Through her teens, Hannah Domoslay-Paul had a great-grandmother on each side of her family. One of them was always crocheting, and as a girl, Domoslay-Paul would sit and watch her nimble hands construct the most delicate lace doilies. The other was a retired schoolteacher; at family events, she would tell stories or just list off all the counties in Michigan—the kind of thing students learned back when she was leading the classroom. Even their most mundane activities, to Domoslay-Paul, were enchanting. Now Domoslay-Paul is a graphic designer in Pensacola, Florida, and she herself has six children: four with her late first husband, and two with her current husband. On the morning that I spoke with Domoslay-Paul, those kids were in Michigan with their great-grandmother, a 92-year-old in excellent health, picking strawberries to take home and make jam. They visit her every summer; they play cards, water the flowers, and even haul hay like Domoslay-Paul did when she was around their age. Domoslay-Paul is grateful that her kids are growing up in a four-generation family as she did—but that experience is actually less rare now than when she was a child. For centuries, living long enough to become a great-grandparent was uncommon. The role was niche enough that kin researchers rarely studied it. But now many more people are reaching old age; even with people having children later on average than those in previous generations did, great-grandparenthood is becoming remarkably unremarkable. Ashton Verdery, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist who's part of a four-generation family himself, estimates that from 1996 to 2012, the number of great-grandparents in the United States increased by 33 percent, up to 20 million from 15 million. And according to Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, American 15-year-olds today have an average of 2.85 great-grandparents—a figure that has been inching up since at least 1950 while the mean numbers of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins have fallen. He expects that the overall number of great-grandparents will continue rising, not just in the U.S. but in countries across the globe. In some ways, this is a beautiful development: Imagine your own children's children's children someday learning about history not from textbooks but from you, the person who lived it. But aging inevitably entails frailty, and caregiving often falls to one's children; when it comes to great-grandparents, their children are seniors themselves. Sociologists have long worried about the 'sandwich generation,' meaning the people who are simultaneously caring for their young kids and their own aging parents—a situation that can significantly strain one's mental health (and savings). Now they're seeing a growing number of people in a sort of triple squeeze, helping care for their grown children, their grandchildren, and their own parents. This cohort is called the 'club sandwich generation'—and they're stretched exceedingly thin. Zuzana Talašová, a doctoral student at Masaryk University, in the Czech Republic, likes to do a little experiment. When she asks people what it means to be a parent, everyone seems to have an answer. When she asks what it means to be a grandparent, she finds the same. But she doesn't get any cohesive response when she asks what great-grandparents do. A lot of people tell her plainly: 'I don't know.' In the absence of a strict cultural script, great-grandparents are in a strange position. Many of them didn't grow up with any such living elders and thus have no models to look to. They might never have expected to get to this point at all. But many of them end up serving an important function—one that is not practical, Talašová told me, so much as 'emotional, symbolic, or narrative.' Great-grandparents are, as Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist, told me, 'the peak of the family pyramid': a kind of mascot for the whole lineage, and commonly a source of great pride. (Women live longer on average than men, so often that figure is a great-grand mother —a matriarch.) Many of them show up to special occasions and tell stories of national and family history. Verdery's kids have blond hair and blue eyes—but when they spend time with their great-grandmother, they get to hear about her childhood in Japan and her immigration to the United States. They love feeling connected with not only their great-grandma, Verdery told me, but also the whole line of ancestors she brings to life for them. Domoslay-Paul's grandfather died last winter, but when he was alive, he would drive her kids around his hometown, telling tales as they went. ''That's the house that my grandfather lived in. And that's the house where I was born,'' she told me he'd recount. ''When we were kids, we got drunk over there and then had to get sat by that outhouse because we were in big trouble,' and 'That's where my brother's buried. He died when he was a year old.'' Stories like these can give some perspective. Great-grandparents are a reminder that things change—that our lifetimes are enormously brief, but also that we are one link in a long line of generations, a part of something bigger than ourselves. In some sense, great-grandparents are acting in a capacity quite like grandparents might have in the past. In the U.S., grandparents tended to be seen as familial authority figures and storytellers. Now, as I've reported, their role has evolved. Many of them are deeply engaged in the everyday bustle of raising their grandkids—because child-care costs keep climbing and the demands of parenthood keep growing, but perhaps also because more of them are staying active long enough to be able to help. As Silverstein told me, 'Maybe an 85-year-old great-grandparent is as healthy as what used to be a 70-year-old grandparent.' That is: maybe not quite fit enough for anyone to ask them to pick up the great-grandkids from soccer practice, but hopefully strong enough to enjoy the birthdays, the holidays, the visits with no purpose other than to be together. Domoslay-Paul has observed that such a position can mellow out people who might've been harsh as parents. Instead of worrying about 'who needs to go to the doctor, who needs new pants,' she told me, 'you're able to just give the love.' Grandparents, then, may actually be in the most difficult position within the four-generation family. In one 2020 qualitative study, researchers interviewed working grandmothers in four-generation families; the participants described being so busy caregiving that they had no time for medical appointments or tests, even though they could feel themselves aging and their body changing. Sometimes, their different roles—mother, grandmother, child, not to mention employee—would come into direct conflict; they were needed everywhere at once. 'Who do I need to help first; for whom should I be more available?' one woman in the study wondered. 'I respond not to my own agenda but to other people's agenda.' I heard something similar from Jerri McElroy, a fellow with the nonprofit Caring Across Generations who lives in Georgia. McElroy is a full-time caregiver for her father, who has dementia and epilepsy and who lost his ability to speak after a seizure in 2018. She lives with him, her daughter, and her grandson—and has five other children and five other grandchildren as well. She has learned that when she's watching her grandkids and her dad, it can help to include the children in his care, as if it's a game—to get them excited to check up on him together, or let them carry a towel. She has mastered the juggling act, but it's never gotten easy. 'When I think about certain seasons of life,' she told me, 'it's all a blur. I don't even know how I got through.' Great-grandparents are a kind of microcosm of the larger picture of extending lifespans: On the one hand, around the world, 'aging is a big success story,' Silverstein told me. The grandmothers from the 2020 study were exhausted—but still grateful that their parents were alive. They viewed their circumstances not only as a duty, the author wrote, but also as a 'privilege.' On the other hand, many societies—including the U.S.—have left family members to care for one another largely on their own, without guaranteed parental leave, child-care subsidies, or any cohesive, accessible system for tending to the proliferating elderly. Populations are transforming radically, and policies aren't keeping up. If lifespans continue extending in the way we'd expect, four-generation families will become only more common. The future may be old. But it also might be more interconnected. As much as people talk about the U.S. and other countries becoming ever more individualistic, generations of American kin are arguably growing closer on average, researchers told me, and becoming more generous with one another. Silverstein said that because today's grandparents are so involved with family life on the whole, both logistically and emotionally, we might expect that great-grandparents will keep becoming more tied in as well. That shift is bittersweet. With an aged loved one, impending loss is always close to the surface. But great-grandkids stand to benefit from being immersed in the normality of aging and death. They get to observe firsthand how time works: what it takes, but also what it gives. Domoslay-Paul's grandfather, born in 1930, rarely spoke about emotions. But she remembers that after her first husband died, her grandfather talked to her two oldest sons, who were 6 and 7 at the time. He told them that his own parents had died when he was not much older than them—eight decades earlier. 'I know this is hard right now,' he said, 'but I got through it.' They could see for themselves that he had.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Yahoo
A Scientist Says the Universe May Have a Memory of Its Own
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: A new hypothesis known as the Quantum Memory Matrix (QMM) could help explain some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including the Black Hole Information Paradox. The idea is that space-time itself holds a history of quantum information in 'memory cells.' This is just one of many hypotheses that aim to explain the paradoxes that form when general relativity and quantum field theory collide. Paradoxes can be scary things in science, as they almost always represent some fundamental misunderstanding of reality and the universe. However, paradoxes can also present opportunities—chances to re-examine what we know and forge previously unimaginable paths toward new understanding. For example, the Fermi Paradox—which questions why there are so many extraterrestrial worlds, yet absolutely no signs of intelligent life—has pushed scientists to explore various reasons why the universe is so silent. Various temporal paradoxes, such as the Grandfather paradox, have allowed us to probe mind-bending concepts like the multiverse theory. And the same can be said for the Black Hole Information Paradox. First formulated in the 1970s by physicist Stephen Hawking, the paradox boils down to the idea that black holes appear to destroy information (via Hawking radiation) over incredibly long timescales. However, quantum field theory suggests that quantum information cannot be destroyed, and instead must be conserved. This has led to several theories, including that information is somehow encoded onto the event horizon of the black hole itself and released within the Hawking radiation in a way we simply can't detect, or that it even travels to a completely different universe. But for years, Florian Neukart—an assistant professor at Leiden University and the chief product officer at the quantum computing outfit Terra Quantum—has promoted another fascinating idea known as 'Quantum Memory Matrix,' or QMM. In a new article published in New Scientist, Neukart details how space-time itself could retain a 'memory' that recorded the history of the universe. In a sense, according to Neukart, space-time is a blanket of 'memory cells' that could not only solve the Black Hole Information Paradox, but could clarify other major space-time conundrums like dark matter. 'How can empty space hold information when there is nothing 'inside it' to change? The key is to realize that modern physics describes all particles and forces as excitations in quantum fields—mathematical structures that span space and time,' Neukart wrote in New Scientist. 'Space-time itself is, in principle, no different, and each of my cells of space-time would have a quantum state that can change. Imagine it as like a tiny dial or switch. There is also a more emergent kind of quantum information at play that describes the relationship of each cell to the others—this isn't held in any one cell, but in the sprawling network of relationships between them.' In the Black Hole Information Paradox, for example, as an object moves through space, it interacts with these 'dials' of space-time that imprint information. When a black hole evaporates—a process that takes around 1068 to 10103 years—the surrounding space-time will remain. 'Information doesn't vanish after all,' Neukart said. 'It has been written somewhere we hadn't thought to look.' Working with quantum computers to test this idea, Neukart said that they've extended the framework beyond gravity, insisting that QMM extends to all four fundamental forces of nature. Additionally, Neukart posited that the 'weight of information woven into space-time' could be an alternative explanation for dark matter—a weakly interacting form of matter that is one of the big missing puzzle pieces of the Standard Model. For now, QMM is just another radical-yet-fascinating potential solution to a long-standing paradox. It could be be far from the truth, or closer to reality than we might expect, but it undoubtedly stands as evidence of paradoxes being roiling cauldrons of scientific creativity. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Newsweek
25-06-2025
- Newsweek
Temple of Civilization That Mysteriously Vanished 1,000 Years Ago Revealed
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A newly uncovered ancient temple in the Bolivian Andes is offering archaeologists rare new insights into the Tiwanaku civilization, a once-powerful society that existed over a thousand years ago and was a precursor to the Inca empire before it mysteriously disappeared. The temple—dubbed Palaspata, after the native name for the area—is located on a hilltop in the municipality of Caracollo, near Tiwanaku's historical UNESCO site by Lake Titicaca. The spot was known to local indigenous farmers, but was never explored in depth by researchers because of its unassuming location. However, the position of the site was actually very strategic, anthropology professor José Capriles of the Pennsylvania State University said in a statement. "Their society collapsed sometime around 1000 CE and was a ruin by the time the Incas conquered the Andes in the 15th century", he said. The anthropologist explained that, at its peak, the Tiwanaku civilization boasted a highly organized societal structure and it had left behind remnants of monuments like pyramids and temples. Capriles added: "While we know Tiwanaku's control and influence extended much further, scholars debate how much actual control over distant places it had." The above image shows a digital reconstruction of the newly discovered Tiwanaku temple ruins in the Bolivian Andes. The above image shows a digital reconstruction of the newly discovered Tiwanaku temple ruins in the Bolivian Andes. José Capriles / Penn State During the time of the Tiwanaku civilization, the spot in which the newly discovered ruins were found connected three main trade routes. These included the highlands around Lake Titicaca to the north, the llama-herding plains of the Altiplano to the west and the agriculturally rich valleys of Cochabamba to the east. After noticing an unmapped plot of land in the area, researchers from Penn State University and Bolivian institutions used satellite images and 3D reconstruction techniques to create a detailed rendering of the structure and its topography. They found that Palaspata was approximately the size of a city block, and its layout was aligned to perform rituals following the solar equinox. "Most economic and political transactions had to be mediated through divinity, because that would be a common language that would facilitate various individuals cooperating," Capriles said in the study. According to the mayor of the municipality of Caracollo, Ventura Guarayo, these archaeological findings are significant because they highlight a crucial aspect of the local heritage that had been completely overlooked. "This discovery is vital for our community, and we believe its documentation will be invaluable for promoting tourism and showcasing our region's rich history" he said in a statement, adding that the city is working with state and national authorities to ensure proper protection and preservation of the site. "With more insight into the past of this ancient site, we get a window into how people managed cooperation, and how we can materially see evidence of political and economic control," Capriles added. "There's still so much to discover that we don't know about, and that could be hiding in plain sight. It just requires opening your eyes to see what's out there." While the reason behind the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization still remains a mystery, archaeologist Luis Miguel Callisaya told the BBC that the most widespread hypothesis is an environmental crisis that led to a prolonged drought. To back this theory, scientists even found the bones of 19 women thought to have been sacrificed to the gods in exchange for rain. However, very little is still known about this ancient civilization, in fact, less than 10 percent of their ruins have to this day been excavated. Do you have a science story to share with Newsweek? Do you have a question about the Tiwanaku civilization? Let us know via science@ Reference Capriles, J. M., Maldonado, S. C., Calero, J. P., & Delaere, C. (2025). Gateway to the east: The Palaspata temple and the south-eastern expansion of the Tiwanaku state. Antiquity, 99(405), 831–849.
