Today I co-authored an intriguing new paper with the brilliant collaborators Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in London, UK. The paper is accessible here.
One of the solutions to Enrico Fermi’s question about extraterrestrials: “where is everybody?” is offered by the dark forest hypothesis, popularized by Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel “The Dark Forest.” This hypothesis proposes that our cosmic neighborhood is dangerous, filled with intelligent civilizations that are hostile and silent to avoid detection by potential predators. In this context, the silence in searches for radio signals by the SETI community is not caused by the lack of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations, but is instead a consequence of them fearing mutual destruction.
Our paper explores the possibility that the recently discovered interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, may provide evidence in support of the dark forest hypothesis. This new interstellar interloper has displayed a number of anomalous characteristics, some of which were summarized in an essay that I wrote shortly after its discovery.