Earthlings have not yet discovered aliens for the same reason that people who closely follow an event do not notice what is happening right in front of their noses, neurophysiologists say in an article published in the journal Acta Astronautica.
“When we think of 'brothers in mind', we imagine them as they can be drawn by our imagination and reason. We do not understand how much the perception of the world, unique to a person, limits our capabilities, and it is difficult for us to admit it. We tried to go beyond this framework and imagine intelligent beings living beyond the possible,”said Gabriel de la Torre from the University of Cadiz (Spain).
Invisible screen of space
More than half a century ago, American astronomer Frank Drake developed a formula for calculating the number of civilizations in the Galaxy with which contact is possible, trying to estimate the chances of discovering extraterrestrial intelligence and life.
Physicist Enrico Fermi, in response to a rather high assessment of the chances of interplanetary contact using Drake's formula, formulated the thesis, which is now known as the Fermi paradox: if there are so many alien civilizations, then why does humanity not observe any traces of them?
Scientists have tried to solve this paradox in many ways, the most popular of which is the “unique Earth” hypothesis. She says that for the emergence of intelligent beings, unique conditions are necessary, in fact, a complete copy of our planet.
Other astronomers believe that we cannot contact aliens because galactic civilizations either disappear too quickly for us to notice them, or because they are actively hiding the fact of their existence from humanity.
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De la Torre and his colleague Manuel Garcia, neurophysiologists by training, offered their original explanation for the Fermi paradox, which links the apparent absence of extraterrestrial intelligence not with processes in space, but with psychology and the peculiarities of the human brain.
They came to this conclusion after an experiment in which they asked 137 volunteers to find various man-made structures, such as bridges, houses or roads, in satellite photographs of the area. In some of these photographs, in addition to real objects, there was an almost imperceptible, but very "bright" anomaly - a microscopic photograph of a gorilla.
Blinders of perception
In a normal situation, a person almost always notices such objects. As shown by the experiments of de la Torre and Garcia, focusing on some other details of the image makes these "gorillas" invisible to the eyes of 66% of the volunteers.
This phenomenon, called the "gorilla effect", was discovered about 20 years ago by American psychologists. They noticed that students counting passes between players of the same team in a basketball game did not notice how a boy in a gorilla suit appeared among them. As it turned out, something similar happens to people who are trying to find traces of "intelligent life" in photographs, relying only on their own ideas about the possibilities and appearance of its carriers.
It is noteworthy that this was more susceptible to people with a rational mindset, inclined to systematize knowledge, which include almost all scientists. This, according to Garcia and de la Torre, suggests that we are looking for traces of extraterrestrial intelligence not where they may actually be, but where we think they may be present.
For example, today astronomers and other scientists engaged in the search for aliens ignore the fact that extraterrestrial intelligence may have a fundamentally different nature. Aliens can live in several dimensions, consist of dark matter or some other exotic forms of matter, use fundamentally different methods of transmitting information, including gravitational waves, to communicate with other civilizations.
For this reason, humanity, first of all, needs to focus not on the search for extraterrestrial life similar to our civilization, but to understand how we can establish contact with creatures that are beyond our ordinary perception and understanding of what an intelligent creature might look like. In other words, the "blind" search for extraterrestrial intelligence may yield more results than other attempts to find it, scientists conclude.