“There’s a reason why aliens haven’t visited Earth yet, say scientists”, proclaims the headline of this linked article. We know the obvious answer, but first let’s see what the scientists have to say. “The Fermi paradox questions why aliens have never visited Earth despite the Universe being so old and so vast that races should have evolved interstellar travel and come calling by now,” the article says. Stuart Bartlett of the California Institute of Technology and Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, think it’s because there’s a limit to how advanced any civilization can become, and this top-out point prevents vast interstellar travel. “We propose a new resolution to the Fermi paradox: civilisations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritising homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely. Either outcome — homeostatic awakening or civilisation collapse — would be consistent with the observed absence of (galactic-wide) civilisations.”
There’s another answer to the Fermi Paradox, of course. The question of “why haven’t aliens visited Earth yet?” The answer: They have. And they do. Perhaps frequently. We can’t say for sure that our “strange visitors” come from other planets, no—but they come from somewhere. That we *get* strange visitors seems beyond anyone’s ability to deny at this point.