(NewsNation) — Astronomers and other scientists have concluded that, with so many stars in the universe, there must be planets around some of those stars that support carbon-based life. And some of those civilizations must be more advanced than ours.

But, after centuries of looking and decades of listening, why can’t we find any evidence of those civilizations? What’s the reason for the Fermi Paradox, also known as “The Great Silence?”

Maybe it’s because their technology is no better than ours.

“I propose that technological development has a universal upper limit that cannot be crossed,” wrote Antonio Gelis-Filho, a researcher in public policy at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation at the School of Business Administration in Brazil.

It took fewer than 70 years for humans to go from inventing airplanes to walking on the moon, and about a century to go from the first computers to a thing in your pocket that can access almost all human knowledge in seconds. Assuming the trajectory will continue, won’t our capacities someday be limitless?

Gelis-Filho says “no.” He proposes that we’ve just about reached the limit of what is technologically possible. And if we’re close, he believes it’s a good bet that other civilizations have already hit that ceiling.

“I argue that there exists a universal limit to technological development (ULTD),” Gelis-Filho wrote.

He believes that the limit is a product of decreasing technological returns, increasing maintenance costs of existing technology, the impossible cost of testing new scientific theories and the impossible amount of energy it might take to test those ideas.

The cost factor has already led some governments to abandon ambitious but multi-billion-dollar projects. And leaders may soon have to decide whether to devote dwindling resources to long-term, costly projects with huge payoffs decades away or to build what’s needed for civilization’s immediate survival.

If Gelis-Filho’s idea has merit, it probably means we can forget about our descendants boarding a real Starship Enterprise and trekking through space.

“If the ULTD hypothesis is correct, there has never been, there is not, and there will never be something like an interstellar civilization,” Gelis-Filho told the website Space.com.

On the other hand, what about all of the UFO/UAP sightings, recordings and alleged non-human material that are all allegedly being hidden in facilities around the world? Gelis-Filho doesn’t address that question.

His paper, published in the journal Science Direct, simply offers a solution to “The Great Silence” “without resorting either to the argument that ours is the only civilization in the Galaxy or to the argument that contact is just a few technological steps away.”