Vojin Rakić, a Serbian philosopher, has put forward a hypothesis that suggests that extraterrestrial life forms could be imperceptible to our senses, perhaps living in parts of the universe that we don’t yet know about.
Rakić believes that our perception of extraterrestrial life is limited by our own experience of the world.
The philosopher rejects the idea that the absence of evidence of extraterrestrial life is proof that it doesn’t exist.
Scientific solutions to the lack of contact with extraterrestrial life can be classified into three categories: exceptionality, annihilation, and communication barrier.
Exceptionality suggests that life is extremely rare in the universe and other life forms may be too far away from our planet to detect, perhaps only in other galaxies.
Annihilation implies that civilizations disappear before they can contact us.
The communication barrier proposes that extraterrestrial civilizations are very different and incomprehensible to us.
Rakić goes beyond these hypotheses by considering that living entities could be made of dark matter or dark energy, or that they share the same space with us, but in dimensions beyond the four that we can perceive: height, width, depth and time.
This hypothesis questions our ability to detect extraterrestrial life with current scientific tools.
His conclusion is that the problem is much broader: “What is happening around us that we cannot perceive?”
A question that opens the way for new perspectives on our place in the Universe.