Eschatodelia

Technology is a way of revealing. . . . It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth. ¹

Our greatness will appeer

Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,

Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse

We can create . . .

. . .

and build up here

A growing Empire ²

Heidegger was hardly so sanguine about techno-empire as evidently were Field Marshal Mammon and der Rebellenführer, inventor of artillery.  Heidegger lays it down that “The basic form of appearance in which the will to will [der Wille zum Willen³] arranges and calculates itself in the unhistorical [Ungeschichtlichen] element of the world of completed [vollendeten] metaphysics can be stringently called ‘technology’ [»die Technik«].”⁴  And die Technik, he says, “rages about in the ‘world’ today like an unshackled beast [entfesselte Bestie].” ⁵   “Before Being can occur in its primal truth, Being as the will must be broken, the world must be forced to collapse and the earth must be driven to desolation, and man to mere labor. . . . The still hidden truth of Being is withheld from metaphysical [technological]  humanity.  The laboring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces [zerreiße] and annihilate itself in empty nothingness [in das nichtige Nichts vernichte].” ⁶

The processes of technological self-annihilation at global scale would generate an outsized ‘technosignature,’ as planetologists call it. And because the technosignature of any exoplanetary civilization would be detectable here at home only by our technology, one senses something of a Technik ruft nach Technik  theme (‘Kilroy was here’) immanent in David Kipping's recent paper “The Eschatian Hypothesis.” There he proposes that “the first confirmed detection of an extraterrestrial technological civilization [ETTC] 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.” ⁷  

Observational bias, Kipping explains, “is a powerful and familiar force in astronomy. . . . 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 that less than one percent of stars are in such a state.”  Another example is the supernova, a rare event per galaxy.  Yet astronomers observe thousands of supernovae every year ⁸  because “they are so damn bright” ⁹  (also there are so damn many galaxies; 10 to the eleventh power of them Guth said recently, ¹⁰  on the order of 10 to the twelfth per Wikipedia ).

All technosignatures, writes Kipping, “represent some kind of departure from natural equilibrium.”  He presents a simple model to bolster the intuition from observation-bias that “the (presumably) rare examples of loud civilizations will truly be more likely to be detected against the backdrop of what is (presumably) a more abundant quiescent population [of ETTC].”  He seeks thereby to motivate search strategies prioritizing “broad, anomalous transients — in flux, spectrum, or apparent motion — whose luminosities and timescales are difficult to reconcile with known astrophysical phenomena.” ¹¹  

In the event we ever do acquire cogent, unambiguous evidence of a death-shrieking ETTC then at the least it will show that such a departure from natural equilibrium is itself not unnatural; that an ETTC's blowing up is a kind of mininova, something that happens from time to time ob rerum naturam. At (unlikely) best it will goose us into realizing that ‘It can happen here ’ and undertaking a reorientation, the ‘homeostatic awakening’ of Wong and Bartlett's discussion; viz.:

“we hypothesize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ‘asymptotic burnout’, an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation [needed to forestall burnout/collapse].  If a civilization develops the capability to understand its own trajectory [i.e., THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS], it will  have a window of time to affect a fundamental change to prioritize long-term homeostasis and well-being over unyielding growth—a consciously induced trajectory change or ‘homeostatic awakening’.” ¹²

‘One virtually connected global city’ can be thought of as a supertechnology in its own right.  Citing Bettencourt et al., Wong and Bartlett note that many properties of cities “are power law functions of population size with a super linear scaling exponent of β > 1, rendering increasing returns with increasing size.”  The bigger a city gets the faster these properties get bigger.  Biological metabolism, on the other hand, “scales as a function of size with a sub linear scaling exponent β < 1.”   The total energy consumption of cities also scales superlinearly as do their growth and wealth-production; they are “highly resilient dynamical entities,” supertechnologies. ¹³

A superlinear global civilization, in Wong and Bartlett's analysis, “will march towards a singularity where energy resources can no longer sustain the trajectory of unbounded growth. . . . the collapse or regression of planetary civilizations can be momentarily avoided by innovation-related resets that only delay the inevitable. . . . these adaptations must occur at an ever-increasing pace.” ¹⁴

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch, maybe.  And the rescuing power in this context, as said before, begins as some sort of global awakening to the trajectory of unsustainable growth.

In Wong and Bartlett's formalism ∆twindow =  tburnout − tawakening .  So  ∆twindow < 0 implies the global civilization's burning out before awakening.  If  the ratio ∆ twindow /∆taccomplishment  is greater than 0 but ≤ 1, the civilization awakens to its plight but does not have sufficient time to accomplish the fundamental changeover, “a rewriting of the fabric of global civilization,” and burns out while trying (or simply gives up ¹⁵ ).  If the ratio ∆twindow /∆taccomplishment  is greater than one, the civilization awakens in time to accomplish the changeover and continues into a future of homeostatic existence.

Consider ∆twindow = 0, wherein burnout and awakening coincide (tburnout = tawakening).  This is the tragic case.  Ἀναγνώρισις, Aristotle says, “is an exchange,” μεταβολή, “out of unknowing into knowing,” ἐξ ἀγνοίας εἰς γνῶσιν.  The most beautiful (καλλίστη) realization, he opines, “is when the ἀναγνώρισις and the reversal (περιπέτεια) coincide (as in Oedipus).” ¹⁶   I.e., clear vision of ‘the truth of the matter’ comes just at the inflection point of reversal, new heading dead south. We can project from Aristotle's exposition that the content of the ἀναγνώρισις at the co-occurrence of burnout and awakening is the γνῶσις that the wakeneds' glorious arete, their greatness conspicuous even unto exo-Daseins across the universe, is their fatal hamartia; that their Darwin's curse has wrought its thing. ¹⁷  

The art of tragedy contrives the ἀναγνώρισις to happen in a moment of illumination, an Augenblick.  By contrast it's altogether implausible that homeostatic awakening of an entire global civilization would occur everywhere all at once.  It would more plausibly be a case of, in Wittgenstein's trope, ‘light dawning gradually over the whole.’ In the case ∆ twindow  = 0, the civilization is already in the throes of terminal burnout and precisely then sensing, to use Heidegger's term, its Vorbei, ‘over-with.’  Sensing that the primal truth of being is »es endet«.

DCW 03/02/2026

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Ereignis