Overview
- David Kipping’s proposal, now on arXiv and slated for MNRAS, posits that our first confirmed extraterrestrial civilization is likeliest to be an atypical outlier with a conspicuously strong signal.
- The argument draws on historical detection bias, citing early exoplanets found around pulsars and the prominence of evolved giant stars in naked‑eye catalogs despite their rarity overall.
- Kipping suggests such conspicuous technosignatures could result from instability or terminal phases of civilizations, with human‑driven climate and pollution offered as an example of how decline might appear to distant observers.
- The paper recommends pivoting SETI toward wide‑field, high‑cadence, agnostic anomaly searches for transients whose flux, spectrum, or motion defy known astrophysical explanations.
- Time‑domain facilities like the Vera Rubin Observatory and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are highlighted as well suited to test this strategy, and the study emphasizes that no technosignature has been confirmed.