Research from the Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has come up with another explanation for why we have never detected aliens.
The research has been published in the Astronomical Journal.
"We've only been looking for 60 years," biophysicist Claudio Grimaldi told Science Alert. "Earth could simply be in a bubble that just happens to be devoid of radio waves emitted by extraterrestrial life."
The scientist explained that there is too much space to scan and it is a possibility that not enough alien transmissions cross our path.
However, the scientist said that we need to stay patient. The biophysicist said that scanning for traces of communications out in the Universe requires time, effort, and money, and there is some debate as to whether or not the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is worth our while.
The research model revealed that there has been an assumption that there's at least one electromagnetic signal of technological origin in the Milky Way and that Earth has been in a quiet bubble (or sponge pore) for at least six decades.
The scientist says if that's the case, then statistically there are fewer than to 5 electromagnetic emissions per century anywhere in our galaxy. To put it another way, they're about as common as supernovas in the Milky Way, Science Alert reported.
The scientist says it could be at least 60 years before we get a hit on an alien transmission.
"We may have been unlucky in that we discovered how to use radio telescopes just as we were crossing a portion of space in which electromagnetic signals from other civilizations were absent," says Claudio Grimaldi. "To me, this hypothesis seems less extreme than assuming that we are constantly bombarded by signals from all sides but are, for some reason, unable to detect them."
The scientist explained that we've still got a lot of space to cover in the search. Grimaldi suggests that the best way forward is commensal investigations: looking for signals in data collected by telescopes that are focused on other missions, rather than using telescopes specifically to look for alien communications.
"The best strategy might be to adopt the SETI community's past approach of using data from other astrophysical studies - detecting radio emissions from other stars or galaxies - to see if they contain any technosignals and make that the standard practice," says Grimaldi.
