The Eschatian End to an Extraterrestrial Civilization

If you’re familiar with Dr David Kipping of Columbia University you may have seen his appearances on various YouTube channels or his Cool Worlds channel talking about extraterrestrial life. Kipping recently published a very short paper hypothesizing how we might first detect an extraterrestrial civilization based on observational bias. But, before we get into that let’s first pronounce the new word derived by Kipping - eschatian (es-ska-ti-un) derived from the word eschatology (es-ska-ta-le-gee)^[1] meaning the final events in the world or history. Typically eschatological discussions are reserved for Christian theology but the word does serve some purpose to what some may coin “end times”.

So how does that definition tie to extraterrestrials? Kipping hypothesizes that our first detection of signals may be very similar to other types of large and loud events in then universe (think supernovae explosions, gamma-ray bursts, etc) or objects that emits large amounts of energy that can be detected. Add to that astronomers are burdened with something called the Malmquist bias meaning we detect the brightest, most energetic objects first and lower energy objects are hidden until more sensitive technology is developed.

Given those conditions our first detections of any extraterrestrial civilization may very well be its end - the “loud” burst of energy from a nuclear war or some other catastrophic event. As Kipping notes 

"rare examples of loud civilizations will truly be more likely to be detected, against the backdrop of what is (presumably) a more abundant quiescent population."

He goes on to create a simple toy mathematical model based on the fraction of loud and quiet civilizations and their possible time windows of extreme energy output from an event. In his discussion, the suggestion is some wide field observations may be able to detect such transient events.

This is an interesting hypothesis that touches Level 2 of the exoastronomy categorization. Granted, this is highly speculative without actual values to use for the model. However, these are the types of scientific speculations we need to see more of. His paper can be found here. (I may do a deeper dive on the model in a later post)

1. Note that I'm not using standard dictionary pronunciation guides here↩