The reason we haven't found aliens isn't because they are rare, but because they are constantly collapsing and starting over.
April 16, 2026
Original Paper
Projections of Earth's Technosphere: Civilization Collapse-Recovery Dynamics and Detectability
arXiv · 2604.13774
The Takeaway
The Fermi Paradox asks: if the universe is so big, where is everybody? This model suggests that the answer isn't that civilizations never evolve, but that they have low 'duty cycles.' Technological societies might naturally hit ceilings that cause them to collapse and then slowly recover, over and over again. This 'collapse-recovery' cycle means that at any given moment, most civilizations are in a 'dark age' and can't be detected. It reframes our own environmental and social crises not as unique threats, but as a standard physical hurdle that all civilizations face. For us, it means the 'silence' of the stars is a warning that staying high-tech is harder than getting high-tech in the first place.
From the abstract
How long a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question for both projecting humanity's future and assessing the prevalence of detectable intelligence in the galaxy. We model collapse-recovery dynamics across ten plausible futures for Earth-originating civilization using a hybrid deterministic-stochastic simulation over a 1000-year window. The duty cycle, defined as the fraction of its total lifespan that a civilization is