‘Bored aliens’: has intelligent life stopped bothering trying to contact Earth?

Steven Spielberg’s ET famously wanted to phone home, but real aliens might have hit a technological plateau and given up on getting through to us. Photograph: Cinetext/Universal/Allstar

For centuries, great thinkers have pondered why, given the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy, we have seen no compelling signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Now, scientists are mulling an intriguing possibility: if aliens exist, their technology may be only marginally better than ours. And having explored their cosmic neighbourhood for a while, they simply got bored and stopped bothering, making it difficult to detect them.