When this story popped up on Yahoo News, I couldn’t resist taking a look. As you may have heard, NASA has taken a greater interest in UFO studies lately and they have always had scientists who have searched for signs of life elsewhere in the galaxy. Now some of their scientists have published a new paper that offers an explanation as to why we haven’t encountered any intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe. The Yahoo article variously describes this news as “heartbreaking” and “crushing.” Of course, all of this depends on whether or not you believe the underlying premise that we really haven’t run into any extraterrestrials yet. (More on that in a moment.) But if you take that as a given, here is part of what NASA offers as an explanation for the Fermi paradox.

NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

All intelligent life, they argue, has likely destroyed itself before reaching a sophisticated enough point in evolution to support such an encounter. And the same fate likely awaits humans unless we take action, they believe…

But there’s still a bit of hope for humans — provided we can learn and take steps to avoid our own extinction, noted the paper by a team of researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.

What the NASA paper is describing isn’t some revolutionary breakthrough in our studies of the cosmos. The idea is known as “the great filter” and it’s been around for a long time. The great filter theory proposes that there have very likely been any number of other technologically advanced civilizations around the cosmos, but once they reached a certain level of technology, they destroyed themselves long before they would have had a chance to come and visit us. And proponents of this theory argue that this is probably how humanity’s reign on this planet will end as well.

Being something of a Luddite by nature, I’ve always been open to this idea. Humans (in various forms) spent millions of years wandering around and interacting with the rest of the life on Earth in a fairly basic, primitive state. Like other animals, our population was probably limited by the amount of vital resources we were able to acquire and how much predation we suffered from more capable predators. But once we started mastering technology, we amplified our footprint to an unimaginable degree. And we became so dependent on that technology that we’ve now reached a point where we couldn’t support 5% of the population of the planet if it all suddenly broke down. We’ve risen to spectacular heights, all the while setting ourselves up for an equally spectacular fall if we screw something up majorly.

Would other intelligent species on other worlds all fall into the same trap? We can’t possibly say for sure. It’s possible, I suppose, but then again, perhaps humans are just really stupid by comparison and some of the aliens intuitively avoided falling into such a trap. Of course, all of this assumes that there is other life “out there,” a premise that we have thus far utterly failed to prove. (Though some scientists have recently posited that there might be a very good chance of finding life under the surface of Neptune’s moon Triton.)

At the other end of the scale of possibilities, you will find an extensive number of people who argue that the entire question is balderdash because we’ve been being visited here on Earth by aliens for a very long time, perhaps for all of our species’ history. They are collectively known as “experiencers” in the UFO community. They’re the ones who have claimed to have had indisputable contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms, sometimes repeatedly and with damaging results. Others argue that there are aliens that are either so similar to us or able to mimic us so perfectly that they are mingling among us right now. I’ve never seen any aliens (at least that I know of) so I’m rather undecided on the subject, though I’d love to know who or what is piloting all of those weird craft the Pentagon has been chasing. (Assuming anyone is.)

I’ll close with a brief video from a very smart person I follow on social media who goes by the name Rather B. Squidding. In response to the article I referenced in this piece, he asks and attempts to answer the question of “Why the aliens are not calling.” You might find it interesting.