Hollywood makes initiating alien contact seem much easier than it has proven to be. In E.T. the Extraterrestrial, E.T. got stranded on earth when his alien compadres abandoned their botany mission. In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace happened upon an alien—Rocky—while he was on his mission to save Earth. In the Alien franchise, an alien race called The Engineers flat out started humanity. But as far as real-life Earthlings finding other intelligent beings in the universe? No dice.
The great physicist Enrico Fermi first posed the challenging question over half a century ago, wondering why we appear to be alone in the universe. As Fermi’s argument goes, there’s nothing special about us. So there must be mulтιтudes of lifeforms and intelligent civilizations across every galaxy throughout the universe. And given that the universe has been around for nearly 14 billion years, there has been more than enough time for life to arise, civilizations to develop, and for those aliens to develop the technology needed to completely colonize an entire galaxy. Even if all those civilizations last for only a relatively fleeting amount of time (say, a million years or so), then at least their technological remnants and ruins should be littered anywhere. And yet, we don’t see anybody. However, some scientists believe that there are some good reasons why we haven’t made contact with aliens yet—and it’s not because they don’t exist.
Aliens Communicate With Mind-Bending Tech
As our technology has evolved, we have shifted from radio to other modes of communication, such as fiber optics, internet, and cables buried deep beneath the ocean. This shift also means that radio signals from our telescopes may take a backseat to these newer types of signals. However, if intelligent aliens are looking for other life in the universe, it’s possible that none of these signals may resonate with an advanced civilization, which could be millions—or possibly billions of years—older than ours; its members could be communicating in ways only science fiction could fathom.
In a 2024 study published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, the authors explore the possibility that alien communications technologies are so advanced, they may be talking to each other using gravitational waves. These are ripples in spacetime, and physicists don’t yet fully understand them. The problem is that—unlike narrowband radio waves—our science cannot distinguish between gravitational waves that are natural and those that may be artificial.
And even if we did understand these gravitational waves (or any other advanced communication technology that aliens might be using, for that matter) scientists aren’t sure that we would even be able to decode the intercepted messages—although, even indecipherable messages could still lend to some kind of learning.