I’ve been thinking about a possibility that I find really interesting.
What if intelligent civilisations exist throughout the universe, and some of them already know about us, but deliberately avoid contacting humanity?
My idea is that, over billions of years, civilisations may have encountered each other many times. Some encounters might have led to wars, exploitation, the destruction of weaker civilisations, or attempts to steal resources and technology. Eventually, the more advanced civilisations might have realised that unrestricted contact can be dangerous for everyone involved.
Imagine that they created something like an intergalactic constitution — a set of universal rules regulating contact between civilisations.
One of those rules could be simple: don’t interfere with a civilisation that isn’t ready for contact.
Think about isolated human communities on Earth. We know that some exist, but we avoid contacting them because an encounter could endanger their way of life. Now imagine applying the same principle on a cosmic scale.
Perhaps advanced civilisations look at humanity and see a species that still wages wars, competes for resources, and struggles to cooperate even on its own planet.
Why would they give us technologies we couldn’t possibly understand or control? Why risk destabilising our entire civilisation? And if we cannot even travel to their worlds, what would meaningful contact look like in the first place?
Maybe they have established criteria for contact. Technological advancement could be one of them, but so could our ability to cooperate, manage resources without constant conflict, and coexist peacefully.
Perhaps they won’t contact us until we reach a certain level of maturity. Or perhaps their rule is that a civilisation must discover and reach out to them on its own.
I’m not claiming this is actually happening. It’s just a thought experiment inspired by the Fermi paradox.
But here’s the question I’m really interested in:
What if the reason we haven’t encountered extraterrestrial civilisations isn’t that they don’t exist, but that humanity hasn’t yet become a civilisation they are willing to contact?
And if an intergalactic organisation like this existed, what criteria do you think humanity would need to meet before being accepted into the wider cosmic community?