On War And The Fermi Paradox

Some polemology to inform the 'toy model'

British astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University David Kipping, host of the Cool Worlds YouTube channel, published a speculative paper this month to propose what he calls the Eschatian Hypothesis: “that the first confirmed detection of an extraterrestrial technological civilization is most likely to be an atypical example, one that is unusually ‘loud’ (i.e., producing an anomalously strong technosignature), and plausibly in a transitory, unstable, or even terminal phase.” In plain English, we are most likely to hear a civilization when it is dying, because it will be loud.

Kipping’s paper is an attempt to form a conceptual framework for future SETI missions. He would ideally have “agnostic anomaly searches in wide-field, multi-channel, continuous surveys as a practical strategy” to detect a sudden, strong signal that might not last. This is a question of “observational bias”, the necessary limiting of scientific inquiry to get useful results, as when ice cores are drilled straight down instead of sideways. Quite simply, astronomers tend to see “loud” signals from space, so the question is what kind of loud ones to look for.

For a civilization comparable to our own, the brightest luminosity we could achieve would be a global nuclear war — which too is obviously unsustainable. The “Eschatian Hypothesis”, outlined here, thus argues that humanity’s first confirmed detection of another intelligence could be that of an inherently unstable, transitory, atypical but very loud example.

The trick, of course, is to winnow out signals “whose luminosities and timescales are difficult to reconcile with known astrophysical phenomena.” The rest of the paper is a brief mathematical discussion, or “toy model”, in which Kipping lays out his thinking. I will let Anton Petrov explain the problems with this idea, since I am not an astronomer. My thoughts about the military history variable in the Fermi paradox are below the video.

First, the assumption that a civilization would use up more energy in wartime is flawed. We have two global wars, called World Wars, from our 20th century of our common era that produced sufficient records to show that energy consumption rose faster before and after each war than during it. Coal production declined in Europe during the First World War and increased after it, while the petroleum conversion was completed by the Second World War, which was followed by an enormous global boom in energy consumption. So if we see an alien civilization ‘signature’ rising suddenly, it more likely means that peace has just broken out.

Furthermore, it matters just what type of energy we are talking about. Terrestrial radio signals did not escape the atmosphere from 1914 to 1918, but the amount of radio energy that lit up the ionosphere over Europe absolutely peaked during the war as radio technology advanced. At the beginning of the war, Morse code and carrier waves were the state of the art, and no one had ever mounted a wireless set into an airplane. Heterodynes and the earliest vacuum tubes were available by the end of the war, so that pilots were being monitored and directed through voice transmissions. A similar signal boom applied to the Second World War.

So if there is a sudden surge of alien civilization radio communications, that could indeed mean they are having a war. The problem, again, is that in this scenario, the war would probably have to take place in space, likely in orbit around whatever alien planet we overhear, because atmospheres tend to block signals in the lower bands which are the most useful for tactical communications on earth. A planet might lack an ionosphere, of course, or the conditions of a planet might alter the utility of radio on the surface. Out in space, however, everyone can hear you scream into a hot mic.