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Is E.T. Avoiding Us?

An aloof alien
If advanced life exists on other planets, it might be giving Earth an intergalactic snub, a mathematician suggests. (Image credit: <a href="">Shiva</a>, <a href="">Shutterstock</a>)

Mathematically speaking, ET would have found us by now -- if he exists -- so we’re being consciously avoided for some reason, a new study concludes.


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Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second.

"They've either passed us by, or they stay around their home star systems and contemplate their navels," Hair said. Figure another 500 years to build new ships, set out again, and so on and so on, and the calculations show that civilizations starting out from the oldest stars in our galaxy would have had epochs of time to reach us by now. So where are they?

There could be several reasons why we’re not listed in intergalactic Yelp. Perhaps most important is that we don't have anything aliens need.

“Any ancient civilization is probably not biological. They don’t need a place like Earth. They don’t need to come here and steal our water. There’s plenty of it out in the outer solar system where the gravity is not so great and they can just take all they want,” Hair said.


Whatever the reason we're being ignored, there is no chance ET, if he exists, does not know we are here, Hair said, pointing to telescopes, such as NASA's Kepler observatory, which can detect planets around other stars.

If humans living on a planet that is roughly 5 billion years old have technology like Kepler, an alien civilization with another 10 million years of experience under its belt would have advanced much further, Hair maintains.

“I’m sure they’d be able to detect if this planet had life on it. Just the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in our atmosphere would give us away,” he said.

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"I think there are three options," Halley told Discovery News. "Life is rare, which I think has a reasonable probability of being correct. Life is weird -- every time you run into it, it's extremely different from the last time you saw it. Life is dull, meaning you will find something that looks a lot like life on Earth and our problems (in detecting life) are technical.

"I've come to the view that they’re all possible, but the preponderance of evidence most likely fits the first -- we are rare,” Halley said.

This article was provided by DiscoveryNews.