The Eschatian Hypothesis
The history of astronomical discovery shows that many of the most detectable phenomena, especially detection firsts, are not typical members of their broader class, but rather rare, extreme cases with disproportionately large observational signatures.
Motivated by this, we propose 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.
Using a toy model, we derive conditions under which such loud civilizations dominate detections, finding for example that if a society is loud for only 10−6 of its lifetime, it must emit ≳1% of its total observable energy budget during that phase to outrun quieter populations.
The hypothesis naturally motivates agnostic anomaly searches in wide-field, multi-channel, continuous surveys as a practical strategy for a first detection of extraterrestrial technology.
David Kipping
Comments: Accepted to RNAAS
Subjects: Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2512.09970 [physics.pop-ph] (or arXiv:2512.09970v1 [physics.pop-ph] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.09970
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Submission history
From: David Kipping
[v1] Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:10:09 UTC (120 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09970
Astrobiology,
