Our universe is estimated to be almost 14 billion years old. It is so vast that the total number of stars it contains is virtually uncountable. Billions of star systems are grouped into individual galaxies, galaxies into clusters, clusters into superclusters, and on it goes. Back in 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi suggested that with such an old universe and its large concentration of stars, there should be a multitude of advanced alien civilizations out there, even in our own Milky Way galaxy. Yet he couldn't explain why we have never observed any alien spacecraft, probes or other activity in space. This led to the coining of the Fermi paradox, which brought to light the obvious contradiction between the high probability of the existence of alien civilizations and our lack of evidence or observation of any. Almost 60 years later, after numerous hypotheses and even mathematical equations attempting to solve the paradox, we are still no closer to any real answer.
So why is it that every effort made to discover extraterrestrial life, no matter how technologically sophisticated or far-reaching, has till now failed miserably? Well, imagine if the aliens really are there in huge numbers, even in our own galaxy, but they have concealed their existence from us because they consider us to be too primitive and self-destructive. That is the basic idea behind my novel, and for a plausible strategy the aliens may have used to place such a shroud of oblivion around us, I had to turn to another mystery, one of the biggest in the world of cosmology.
Dark Matter
The evidence for the existence of dark matter is mounting by the day, but its actual composition has remained elusive to scientists for almost a century. In essence, all the kinds of matter that we can actually observe, including stars, planets, moons, asteroids and gas clouds, make up no more than a fifth of the total amount of matter in the universe. So where is the rest? Well, it's there, we just can't see it. It emits no radiation of any kind that we can measure. In fact, this dark matter is especially concentrated in and around galaxies. Current research indicates that the Milky Way may be almost 20 times bigger in mass than what we observe it to be. Without this additional mass, there wouldn't be enough gravity to hold the galaxy together - the stars would literally fly apart from each other into the expanses of space.
What might dark matter be made of? There's talk of non-baryonic particles (ie. particles which are not atomic like neutrons, protons or electrons) such as neutrinos, or even hypothetical particles such as neutralinos or axions. But, to this day, the discussion in scientific circles remains largely hypothetical. Nobody knows for sure what dark matter actually is or why it's there in such abundance.
The question then arises - what if dark matter is not composed of a mysterious, unknown substance, but is simply more regular matter that we can't see because somebody doesn't want us to see it? What if there are many, many more star systems in our galaxy, all of them hidden from us because they contain planets filled with highly advanced alien life? These aliens could just as easily make all other visible galaxies look proportionally smaller to us as well, to make the universe appear consistent. In one stroke, this solves both the Fermi paradox and the mystery about dark matter.
So, if the aliens are so numerous and advanced that they can hide entire sections of space from our view, one could easily ask why they would invest so much time and energy on such primitive beings as us in the first place, and how they could possibly do it anyway. These questions are addressed in my book.
