Professor Brian Cox believes this is the reason we haven't yet heard from aliens

Professor Brian Cox has come up with a hilarious reason as to why aliens haven't yet made contact with Earth.

It all started when Cox turned to X/Twitter with his bemusement at how the 1977 interstellar probe Voyager could be fixed remotely from Earth.

His tweet was met with some comedic responses, comparing it to modern-day problems.

"Meanwhile, the printer that's 3 feet from my laptop won't connect," one person humoured, while another chimed in: "It is amazing, and with a tiny amount of power. If we could get that comms team working on train wifi."

However, the physicist and musician also received some responses that left him dumbfounded, leading him to believe aliens have avoided Earth because "civilisations are inevitably crushed by the weight of nobheads shortly after inventing the internet."

"Honestly - a few of the replies to this little tribute to engineering excellence exhibit a level of stupidity that suggests to me that it won’t be long before our spacecraft are the only thing that remains of our increasingly dim-witted civilisation," he wrote.

"Until recently my guess has been that the answer to the Fermi Paradox might be found in biology - complex biological systems are rare," Cox continued, adding: "I’m increasingly of the view that the reason for The Great Silence is that civilisations are inevitably crushed by the weight of nobheads shortly after inventing the internet."

Ouch.

Elsewhere, a team of scientists at Harvard and Montana Technological University released a paper which suggested an advanced alien civilisation may be "walking among us."

The document speculated that sightings of "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" (UAP) may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the Moon), and/or even 'walking among us' (e.g., passing as humans)."

And whilst its authors acknowledge that the idea of hidden-in-plain-sight "cryptoterrestrials" is "likely to be regarded sceptically by most scientists," they argue that the theory "deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness."

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.