If highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations could exist anywhere, they are most likely located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Astrophysicists believe that intelligent life might reside in orbits around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
Scientists believe that time flows significantly slower near supermassive black holes. Such an environment would give civilizations a decisive advantage—the ability to explore the entire Milky Way galaxy in just a few years on a local timescale.
The black hole Sagittarius A* has a mass of approximately 4.3 million solar masses and is 26,000 light-years from Earth. Calculations show that time flows about 100 times slower in its vicinity than on Earth. That is, a century on Earth would only take a year there. This time dilation effect significantly improves the efficiency of space exploration.
The authors suggest that intelligent civilizations might not live on planets, but rather in small space stations—from which they could launch spacecraft to various parts of the Milky Way. Traveling at near the speed of light, a journey to the solar system would only take them 260 years.
This hypothesis also explains the famous Fermi paradox: why we haven't yet discovered extraterrestrial life. If their time flows hundreds of times slower than ours, then the probability of us capturing a moment of their activity is almost zero.
