At any given moment there's a lot of investigation going on around the world into whether we're alone in the universe, but it's possible that we're thinking in too orthodox a way.
After all, as one Harvard professor has just pointed out in a documentary, it's entirely possible that alien civilizations are out there with such advanced technology that we're not even really able to imagine how they would travel or arrive in our vicinity.
Professor Avi Loeb has speculated that aliens might, in fact, be in command of technology that lets them hop into and through entirely different dimensions, including those that we're not even sure completely exist.
We've been able to detect other dimensions, apparently "curled" almost around our own ones, but Loeb speculated that aliens might be able to use these thanks to their drastically more sophisticated tech.
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He was speaking in a documentary called "The Paranormal UFO Connection", according to the Daily Mail, and said that meeting these aliens, or seeing their home world, would be "just like a cave dweller coming to a city like London, or Europe, and seeing all the technological gadgets there".
This would be thanks to the sheer gap in technology, and he argued: "There will be a sense of religious awe, and we wouldn't understand it, especially if we are dealing with the effects of quantum gravity that we have any clue about".
If you're wondering what quantum gravity is, that's fair enough, and it would basically be a quick way of describing the force that would be impacting us thanks to that proposed interdimensional travel.
Because our understanding of the world is largely based on three dimensions (height, width and length) it's almost impossible to get our heads around what further dimensions would actually mean. The further you go down that path the more quickly you get into the sort of theoretical physics that PhDs are funded around.
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Still, the core idea that Loeb puts forth is that alien civilizations might be wildly more advanced than our own, and that's an evocative one.
It also plays into another popular theory about aliens, called the dark forest theory. This posits the idea that the reason we've heard nothing from alien civilizations despite our best efforts to reach out into space is because those civilizations know better than to be loud like us.
This might be because there's another huge threat in the galaxy that has taught them to stay quiet, or it might be because they themselves are a huge threat, and want to be able to strike at us pre-emptively.
Either way, it suggests that by seeking out alien life among the stars humanity is actually being very naïve.
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