Planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said that scientists are delaying our contact with the alien civilizations as most of these extraterrestrial organisms would be living deep inside their home planets.
The new theory, proposed by the American Astronomy Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Provo, Utah, and labelled the 'Fermi paradox', seeks to explain the disconnect between the signals emanating from other technically advanced civilizations and our failure to decipher them.
The new theory reiterates the fact that the presence of oceans in other planets of our solar system was not known until recently and even the evidence for the presence of water in several moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and even distant ex-planet Pluto -- all have been recent additions to our knowledge.
These planets contain water in its ice form in crust with hydrothermal vents in their ocean bed pumping up nutrition for organisms, similar to the Earth's oceans, noted Alan Spern, who has long vouched for Pluto to be brought back as full planet. The thick ice cover in these planet crusts could effectively shield the life from exposure from the outside environment and other alien disturbances, hence making them incommunicado for human explorations, he argued.
Stern suggested that such "creatures which don't have any contact with their own planet's surface might not have any knowledge even about the night sky" as well as humans. Their greatest missions would be to move around their own planet's surface. Even though there weren't any new pieces of evidence to support the proposal, it had links to the prevailing icy ocean worlds with lack alien signals.
Douglas Vakoch, a psychologist and president of the San Francisco, California based Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence described it as intriguing, "The idea is intriguing". He believed that there was no need to invoke the Fermi paradox, which talks about lack of evidence to prove a theory. "Biochemical indications of life are simply hard to detect remotely. It could be because they decide long-distance communication isn't worthwhile, especially if they think everybody else is trapped in their own little icy bubbles," he said.
