Extraterrestrials: what if they were everywhere but we couldn't see them?

Could extraterrestrial life forms exist around us without our awareness? This question might redefine our view of the cosmos.

Enrico Fermi wondered why, in such a vast Universe, no extraterrestrial intelligence has yet been detected. This question, known as the "Fermi paradox," has intrigued scientists for decades.


Dozens of explanations have been proposed to resolve this paradox. However, Serbian philosopher Vojin Rakić offers a radically different hypothesis. He suggests that extraterrestrial life forms might be imperceptible to our senses, perhaps living in parts of the Universe we do not yet know.

Rakić criticizes "anthropocentric" solutions that place humans at the center of the Universe. For him, our perception of extraterrestrial life is limited by our own experience of the world. He rejects the idea that the absence of evidence of extraterrestrial life necessarily means it does not exist.

According to him, solutions to the Fermi paradox can be categorized into three groups: exceptionalism, annihilation, and the communication barrier. Exceptionalism suggests that life is extremely rare in the Universe, while annihilation implies that civilizations go extinct before they can contact us. The communication barrier, on the other hand, proposes that extraterrestrial civilizations are either too distant or incomprehensible to us.

Rakić goes further by envisioning living entities made of dark matter or dark energy, or existing in dimensions we cannot perceive. This hypothesis challenges our ability to detect extraterrestrial life with our current tools.

Ultimately, he concludes that the Fermi paradox is a too narrow formulation of a much broader problem: what is happening around us that we cannot perceive? A question that opens the way to new perspectives on our place in the Universe.