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Aliens might actually be trapped on their home planets by gravity

Might aliens be ‘stuck’ on their home planets? (Picture NASA)
Might aliens be ‘stuck’ on their home planets? (Picture NASA)

Here’s another possible reason for the fact we’ve never met any aliens here on Earth – the extraterrestrials might be ‘stuck’ on their planets by extreme gravity.

It sounds surreal – but it might be true.

‘Super-Earth’ planets are like giant versions of our Earth, and some experts believe that alien life could evolve there.

But getting off those planets would be unimaginably difficult due to the huge gravity: an Apollo-style mission would have to weigh 400,000 tons, the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza, due to all the fuel required to escape the atmosphere.

So civilisations on such planets would be far less likely to develop their own space programs, say the searchers from the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany.

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Lead author Michael Hippke told Fox News, ‘On more-massive planets, spaceflight would be exponentially more expensive.

‘Such civilizations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission or a Hubble Space Telescope.’

Some previous research has suggested that life might actually be more likely to evolve on super-Earths – as the gravity tends to hold a thicker atmosphere to shield the planets from cosmic rays.