A universal limitation on technological development may explain the lack of contact with aliens

If the technological capabilities of intelligent beings in space are limitless, why have we still not discovered signs of other intelligent life?

In less than seven decades, humanity has gone from no active flight technology to walking on the Moon. It took a little more than a century to go from the first basic computer to a handheld device that allows access to almost the entire volume of human knowledge in a matter of seconds. Based on this technological trajectory, there is a strong assumption that our technological capabilities are limitless.

This insight, along with the discovery that habitable worlds are common in space, influenced a question that has haunted scientists and others for decades: “Why is the universe so quiet?” This mystery, said to have been proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, is known as the Fermi Paradox. If our solar system is young compared to the rest of the universe, and humans will someday be able to travel interstellarly, shouldn't we already have seen signs that other intelligent beings have spread throughout space? Really, where are all the aliens?

Perhaps we haven't encountered alien civilizations because every intelligent species in the universe has a “universal technological limit” (UTL), and that limit is well below a civilization's ability to colonize an entire galaxy, suggested public policy researcher Antonio Gelis-Filho. from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation at the School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP) in Brazil, in a recent article published in the journal Futures.

If the UPTR hypothesis is correct, then there has never been, is not, and never will be anything like an interstellar civilization or anything like an “interstellar conversation,” Gelis-Filho told Space.com in an email interview.

Given the history of the rise and fall of human civilizations, the ability to create and implement scientific projects that expand our knowledge and technology, and the apparent lack of technological intelligence in other parts of the cosmos, Gélis-Filho believes that we should be careful with assumptions about technological capabilities people and other intelligent beings are limitless.

An unbridgeable gap

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” The simplest interpretation of this statement is that our technology—what we can create—is limited by our knowledge.

Of course, there are natural limits to human technology. For example, we cannot travel in a straight line faster than the speed of light. There may also be natural barriers to human knowledge—facts about the universe that remain forever inaccessible to us because of our biology. Of course, we have created technologies that facilitate our senses and cognition: Microscopes allow us to look into the world of the small, telescopes give us a glimpse into the world of the big, and computers process numbers and data that our individual minds cannot process.

However, the technologies and experiments that allow us to expand our knowledge are increasingly expensive. Projects such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN ($4.75 billion to build and $286 million per year), the International Space Station ($3 billion per year) and international efforts to achieve nuclear fusion at ITER (approximately $18-20 billion dollars for construction) show that human efforts to expand scientific horizons require more and more energy and resources.

“To be frank, the fact is that the last major fundamental advances in the science of the Universe (macro- and micro-reality, cosmology and quantum mechanics) go back almost a hundred years,” says Geles-Filho.

Of course, black holes and other phenomena are much better understood today than they were a century ago, but their theory is not as important for human technology as relativity and quantum mechanics, says Gelis-Filho.

It is enough to “compare the development of science from 1830 (no theory of evolution, no theory of electromagnetism) to 1930 (relativity and quantum mechanics already exist) and from 1930 to 2024 (still no unifying theory) to understand that the pace of progress, mildly speaking, they slow down,” says Gelis-Filho. “The low hanging fruit has already been picked. The remaining ones seem to be hanging from unattainably high branches.”

The increasing cost of exploring the limits of human knowledge may lead us to decide that the cost is too high. Thus, the European Commission recently abandoned a plan to select several billion-euro flagship research projects that included plans to convert solar and wind energy into fuel and bring cell and gene therapies into clinical settings. In this case, the development of new technologies that facilitate new breakthroughs in our understanding of reality will also stop, as will our dreams of becoming an interstellar civilization.

Any intelligent civilization in space would face the same scenario, says Gélis-Filho. At some point, no matter how inventive they become, they will have to make a decision: Do we build a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way to, for example, test our new unifying theory, or build the necessary infrastructure for the survival of our civilization?

The UPTR hypothesis states that even if a civilization decided to build such a machine to test the limits of its knowledge, it would find that the energy levels required to conduct experiments that would facilitate leaps in scientific knowledge did not increase linearly. They would reach a point where their current technology would not allow them to bridge the gap between one level and the next.

Because the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, every civilization will eventually face this “uncrossable chasm,” says Giles-Filho.

The Cost of Increasing Complexity in Society

Gélis-Filho also believes that lessons learned from the rise and fall of human civilizations can be applied to an astrobiological context. Complex societies expand, adding layers of complexity to society to produce more “energy” for further growth. However, after a certain point, complexity stops “paying for itself” and its returns diminish, he says.

“If we think of a hunter-gatherer society, the number of social roles (chief, hunter, gatherer, etc.) will be minimal; in the late Roman Empire it was much higher, and in our industrial society it was much higher,” explains Gelis-Filho.

Of course, with increased specialization, more complex societies can produce more. For example, when humans developed agriculture on Earth, the influx of food provided by new technology led to the emergence of new social roles aimed at further increasing production. But as the level of complexity grew, so did the need for expensive infrastructure to support it.

Gelis-Filho borrows his arguments from Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist who has studied many complex societies throughout human history. Tainter suggested that although the fatal blow to a society may vary (such as war, drought, epidemic, or astronomical event), the root cause is always the same: the diminishing returns to complexity that made society fragile.

“I apply this concept to any technological society anywhere in the universe,” says Gelis-Filho. “Advanced spatial technologies require the development of legacy infrastructure. This infrastructure is only part of the complexity of society. … It is possible that many extraterrestrial societies collapsed due to diminishing returns to the complexity of society, even before encountering the constraints imposed by the energy requirements for testing scientific theories.”

Cosmic “messages in a bottle”

Despite all this, Zhelis-Filho does not exclude the possibility of receiving a message or signal from another intelligent civilization. The universal technological development limit prohibits technological development above a level that prevents the orderly, self-sustaining spread of a civilization beyond its solar system.

However, this does not exclude the existence of “abandoned technologies”, such as wandering dead space probes (just think of Voyager 1 in a hundred thousand years, silently crossing our galaxy), received isolated messages (the “Wow!” signal is one candidate) or even the “dead alien voyagers” we found (as incredible as that event may be),” he says.

Such attempts to communicate with other intelligent civilizations across space are reminiscent of “great cosmic messages in bottles” – like the captain of a sunken ship on a remote island trying to send a signal to the outside world using the primitive instruments at his disposal, Geles-Filho explained.

The Gelis-Filho hypothesis is one possible explanation for why our attempts to observe an interstellar civilization have been unsuccessful. Yes, we're just a few decades away from looking for signs that we're not alone in space. We may not have been looking long enough, in the right place, or even for exactly what we needed. The unambiguous discovery of an intelligent alien civilization would obviously prove the ULTD hypothesis wrong, as would a sudden leap in knowledge that could facilitate the spread of human civilization to the stars. Until then, the ULTD hypothesis serves as a sobering reminder that the fate of our species is not a given.