Do Aliens Go Invisible By ‘Going Green’?

Do Aliens Go Invisible By ‘Going Green’?

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The Fermi Paradox asks the simple question “where are they?” Our Milky Way galaxy is so big and so old — and we are estimated to be accompanied by at least 100 billion planets — that aliens should have visited us by now. Instead, when we peruse the heavens, we are faced with the Great Silence, which is one of the biggest challenges to modern astronomy.

Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder has come upon a novel solution to the failure of astronomical observations to solve the Fermi Paradox. He proposes: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” In other words, smart aliens have “gone green” and generate no waste products that we could detect. They therefore blend into the galaxy, so “artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable,” writes Schroeder.