Is AI the reason we can't find alien life?

In the past three years, AI has discovered more planets outside our solar system than human astronomers found in the preceding decade. NASA's ExoMiner has validated thousands of exoplanets, including ones trained scientists overlooked.

In November 2025, a deep learning system at the Allen Telescope Array achieved a 600-fold speed increase in scanning radio signals from space for intelligent life. It is also pulling out signal types no human programmer would have thought to look for.

Yet the result of all this expanded searching is the same one we have always had. No signals, no visitors, no evidence anyone else is out there. The Milky Way alone contains 250 billion stars, with billions of potentially habitable worlds orbiting suns far older than ours.

That gap between expectation and observation has a name. The Fermi Paradox, after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who reportedly raised it over lunch at Los Alamos in 1950. It has occupied serious minds in physics and philosophy ever since.

The AI helping us search the cosmos may also be the reason we are not finding anything in it.

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The economist Robin Hanson introduced the Great Filter idea in a 1998 essay. Between dead matter and a galactic civilisation, many steps must be cleared. Simple life. Complex life. Intelligence. Technology. Long-term survival. Expansion.

Somewhere along that chain, almost everyone fails. The critical question is whether the filter sits behind us or ahead of us. Behind us means we got lucky and the road is open. Ahead of us means something consistently destroys civilisations at our stage of development.

Max Tegmark, the MIT physicist, addressed this in his 2017 book Life 3.0. He admitted he secretly hoped extraterrestrial searches would fail. Finding primitive life elsewhere would push the filter forward, suggesting the hard part is what comes after intelligence emerges.

Tegmark would rather live in a universe where life is rare and we got lucky. The alternative is a universe where civilisations routinely emerge and routinely fail to survive their own technology.

In 2013, Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg at Oxford published a paper called Eternity in Six Hours. Their argument made the paradox dramatically worse. A civilisation that captured a fraction of its star's energy could launch self-replicating probes to every reachable galaxy.

The numbers are uncomfortable. Colonising the Milky Way takes roughly 10 million years at conservative speeds, less than a tenth of one percent of the galaxy's age. The launch phase to reach billions of galaxies takes about six hours of solar output once the collectors are built.

Going back two billion years, over 2.5 million galaxies could have sent probes that would have arrived here by now. The question is no longer why our galaxy looks empty. It is why hundreds of millions of other galaxies, with billions of years of head start, sent nothing.

Michael Garrett, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, published a paper in Acta Astronautica in 2024 asking whether AI is the Great Filter. His argument is that the window between developing radio technology and developing AI that surpasses its creators is under 200 years. For us, that window may close between 2040 and 2060.

A number of serious researchers have arrived at the same conclusion. If the universe is populated, it is populated by machines. Steven Dick, the former Chief Historian of NASA, calls this the Intelligence Principle. Any civilisation a few thousand years ahead of us would have moved beyond biological substrates.

Seth Shostak at the SETI Institute, Susan Schneider through her NASA research, and Paul Davies at Arizona State have all reached similar positions. The period between a civilisation developing radio and upgrading beyond biology is vanishingly brief on cosmic timescales.

So why do we not see machine civilisations? Robert Bradbury proposed the Matrioshka brain in 1997, a star wrapped in nested computers using all its energy for processing rather than colonisation. Anders Sandberg has argued that advanced AI might be deliberately dormant, hibernating until the universe cools and computation becomes vastly more efficient.

There is also the Dark Forest hypothesis from Liu Cixin's science fiction trilogy. A superintelligence might recognise that announcing itself is dangerous and optimise for invisibility instead.

Each of these scenarios produces the same observable outcome. A universe that looks empty even when it might not be. We are using artificial intelligence to look for artificial intelligence, which is either a useful tool for discovery or a piece of cosmic irony. Possibly both.