First Extraterrestrial Contact Could Come From A Collapsing Civilization

Modern science fiction has lulled us with images from Epinal since the genre was popularized at the beginning of the 20th century.^th century: aggressive fleets of immense ships at the Independance Daymenacing little green men aboard their UFOs who have come to kidnap us, or, on the contrary, hyper-evolved civilizations who have come to guide humanity and save us from ourselves. According to David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University and a well-known figure among exoplanet enthusiasts via his YouTube channel Cool Worlds, our first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence will likely be nothing like this.

In an article to appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societytitled ” The Eschatian Hypothesis » (« The eschatological hypothesis “), Kipping puts forward a very dark idea. If we ever detect a signal, there is a good chance that it comes from a civilization… dying.

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Cosmic survivor bias: we only see what shines

To understand this pessimistic hypothesis, we must first understand how we look at the sky. David Kipping recalls a golden rule in astronomy: the first objects that we discover in a new category are never the most common, but those that are detectable primarily because they are easier to see. This is the basis of what he calls the Eschatological Hypothesis (from the Greek “ Eschatos », which deals with the end of times and death): a theoretical framework which invites us not to confuse signal strength et technological maturity.

The history of the conquest of space is full of these biases. Take the first exoplanets detected in the 1990s: they orbited pulsars. However, we know that today, out of more than 6,000 worlds discovered to date, those orbiting these dead stars can be counted on the fingers of one hand. We found them first only because pulsars are very visible, strongly disturbing their surrounding space and, consequently, our instruments.

The same goes for the stars that we see with the naked eye, since around a third of them are red giants, stars at the end of their life, while they represent only a tiny fraction of the total stellar population. If they jump out at us, it’s because their signal is abnormally strong, and it catches our attention just before going out. Kipping thus applies this same prism to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: the first civilization we detect will probably be a statistical exception, a people in terminal illness.

A tragic first contact?

But why would a dying civilization be more noisy and visible than a stable and flourishing society? To explain this theory, Kipping draws an analogy with supernovas: they only become the brightest objects in the universe when they are destroyed. For extraterrestrial intelligence, this peak in visibility could therefore be the accidental by-product of its decline.

We can take our own case: global warming, the carbon and toxic emissions that we release into the atmosphere, the destruction of ecosystems, constitute, in themselves, noisy and unusual technosignatures. If a theoretical extraterrestrial people observed us from afar, they would not say that we Earthlings shine with our wisdom, since our planet bears the scars of our excesses.

A civilization in full collapse could thus saturate its light spectrum in a totally abnormal wayattracting the eye of our telescopes like a light bulb that burns out after a last overpowering flash.

Another possibility is possible, even more desperate: the cry of voluntary distress. Kipping suggests that a species aware of its impending end might choose to burn its last resources to send a unique and incredibly powerful message across the cosmos; a final “ We were there » before the final extinction.

In the video accompanying his research (at the top of the article, at 13 min. and 40 s.), Kipping wonders if the famous signal “ Wow ! » captured in 1977 could not be the perfect example of this ultimate swan song. This signal could have been the transient emission of a civilization reaching its own ” eschaton “. A brief burst of energy, detectable only because it was out of the norm, before the source died out or radically changed its nature.

If this “ Eschatological Hypothesis » says the truth, track regular signals over the long term as we do today would be so a methodological error. Perhaps we should point our instruments at more sudden phenomena that would occur in a wider portion of the cosmos. Good news: new generation tools like the Vera-C Observatory. Rubin or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are precisely designed to detect the slightest change in brightness or spectrum in the celestial vault. For Kipping, we must position ourselves as researchers agnostics des anomalies : no longer seek what we hope find, but identify everything that nature can’t explain alone.