Humans will contact ‘loud’ alien civilization on the brink of ‘violent’ collapse: Columbia astronomer

When ET phones home, it could be his last call.

Contrary to sci-fi movie depictions, our first contact might not be with a super advanced alien civilization at the height of power.

Rather, Ivy League astronomer Dr. David Kipping argues that we’re more likely to meet “unusually loud” extraterrestrials whose empire is in decline.

“Hollywood has preconditioned us to expect one of two types of alien contact, either a hostile invasion force or a benevolent species bestowing wisdom to humanity,” the space expert, who hails from the UK but runs Columbia University’s Cool Worlds Lab, postulated in a Youtube video.

He declared that more likely, our flagship close encounter “is with a civilization in its death throes, one that is violently flailing before the end” — like an intergalactic version of the late-stage Roman Empire.

Kipping outlined this bold theory, dubbed the Eschatian Hypothesis, in a new study slated to appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the paper, Kipping argued that our first contact would follow the same rules as other interstellar “detection firsts,” which constitute “rare, extreme cases with disproportionately large observational signatures.”

To illustrate his hypothesis, the Brit referenced supernovas, luminous explosions marking the death of a star.

These “astoundingly rare” cosmic phenomena only occur twice per century in Milky Way-sized galaxies, but astronomers routinely detect thousands of supernovas each year due to their enormous “luminosities,” per the study.

In fact, most stars we see are in the twilight of their life.

“One merely needs to look up at the night sky to note that approximately a third of the naked-eye stars are evolved giants, despite the fact less than one percent of stars are in such a state,” Kipping declared.

By this logic, he deduced that the “first signatures of extraterrestrial intelligence will too be highly atypical, ‘loud’ examples of their broader class.”

But instead of a supernova, he argued, this extraterrestrial empire would be denoted by an event on par with “global nuclear war” — a similarly fleeting and cataclysmic phenomenon that represents the “brightest luminosity” we can achieve as humans.

Kipping concluded: “The ‘Eschatian Hypothesis’ 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 astronomer noted that this doesn’t mean that any “loud” civilization we encounter will necessarily be one the decline. However, he explained that most observable “technosignatures” — climate change, pollution etc — do represent some departure from the status quo.

The theory comes amid a swirl of hypotheses surrounding 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor that made its much-anticipated closest approach to Earth on Friday.

While NASA has maintained that ATLAS is a comet, Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has speculated that it could be artificial due to the abundance of anomalies, ranging from its unusual trajectory through the solar system to its strange jets that he speculated could be technological thrusters.