Videos

I recommend you check out the latest Cool Worlds Labs video for an intriguing new theory about mankind’s contact with an alien civilization. British astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University David Kipping narrates this new idea, called the Eschatian Hypothesis, in his latest video titled “Our First Contact with Aliens Will Be Their Last Words.”

He discusses how the early detection of hot Jupiters dominated the early discussion about exoplanets, even though we later learned that they are found around less than 1 percent of stars with exoplanets. He attributes this to detection bias, or Malmquist bias, because they were so easy to detect. The same applies to stars in their giant phase, which represents only 1 percent of all stars but about 1/3 of the stars we can see with the naked eye.

In this sense, the first contact with an alien civilization will probably follow this pattern as well. Hence, an alien civilization in disequilibrium will become louder and thereby more detectable by us. At the same time, the more advanced civilizations in balance with nature will be harder to detect.

As a result, the Eschatian Hypothesis contends that the more detectable alien civilizations will be the less stable ones. This is certainly a unique twist on the Fermi principle.

View the video for the full story.

With all the ongoing stories about interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, you may enjoy an earlier video from Cool World Labs titled “Could 3I/ATLAS Be Technological?” Columbia University Associate Professor David Kipping looks at the claims by Harvard Professor Avi Loeb that the comet is not only from another solar system, but it may in fact be a spacecraft.

Professor Kipping focuses his discussion on an earlier paper by Professor Loeb titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Alien Technology? The points discussed in the video are broken down into three categories: (1) trajectory, (2) speed, and (3) excessive size. In each case, he provides plenty of technical points, but the main point seems to be that the evidence is often arbitrary or contradictory. Professor Kipping also notes those occasions where the paper goes “off the rails” to make the idea of a spacecraft possible.

All of these points continue to bounce around as we learn more about the comet, but it is interesting to see the scientific community represented here by Professor Kipping doing a great job of parsing the evidence while keeping all of it professional. He made it clear throughout the video that he has great respect for Professor Loeb’s work over the years, even if this particular theory about a spacecraft does not seem plausible.

Check it out for yourself.