Nana 🚀

We’re probably living in the galactic boondocks — and even if aliens have already built a “galactic internet,” we almost certainly can’t join it. Japanese astrophysicist Koji Tsumura from Tohoku University decided to test one of the boldest ideas out there: what if other civilizations in the Milky Way don’t just exist, but have already been searching for each other and built a shared communication network? How realistic is it for our civilization to connect to that network? The answer is pretty grim: almost impossible. Why almost no one can hear us There are billions of Sun-like stars in the Galaxy, and millions of them should have planets in the habitable zone. The classic Drake equation suggests there ought to be a lot of intelligent civilizations. But then we run into the famous Fermi paradox: “So where is everybody?” Tsumura started from the most optimistic scenario — civilizations exist, they’re active, and they’ve already built a galaxy-wide network. Even then, everything depends on location. The galactic habitable zone isn’t the entire Galaxy; it’s a relatively narrow band where three things line up: - enough heavy elements to form planets, - stars that live long enough, - and not too many nearby supernovae sterilizing everything around them. Modeling showed that the most densely populated part of the Galaxy is probably about 3,000 light-years closer to the center than the Solar System. We’re sitting roughly 26,000 light-years from the center — on the rather distant periphery. Out in these “suburbs,” the chances of plugging into a shared network are essentially zero. Either there are simply too few civilizations for a network to exist at all. Can we at least detect anyone? Detecting even one extraterrestrial civilization is theoretically possible, but only if it: - exists at the same time as we do, - is deliberately beaming a signal toward the Sun, - and is doing so in a way we can actually notice. According to Tsumura’s calculations, the fact that we still haven’t heard anyone means there’s a 35–38% chance that there really is nobody within about 6,000 light-years of us. But there’s a 61–65% chance that civilizations do exist — we just can’t detect them for some reason. In other words: our cosmic loneliness is not yet proof that the Milky Way is empty. We might simply be sitting in a quiet neighborhood where signals either don’t reach us or arrive too weakly to notice. The study is available on arXiv (arxiv org/abs/2610.20475).