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Health & Science4h 28m ago
Professor David Kipping of Columbia University and the head of its Cool Worlds Lab offers a new take on the Hart-Tipler Conjecture, known as the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture."
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Columbia University
Who
David Kipping, Michael Hart, Frank Tipler
What
Professor David Kipping of Columbia University and the head of its Cool Worlds Lab offers a new take on the Hart-Tipler Conjecture, known as the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture."
When
Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:30:02 GMT · 4h 28m ago
Where
Columbia University ·
Why
This new model, presented in an article posted to the arXiv preprint server, employs a simple equation involving emergence, propagation, and time, and accounts for cosmic expansion, with potentially disturbing implications.
The Frontline Impact
How this affects you
This new model implies that if "artificial infections" (a proxy for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations) spawn more frequently than 1 in 100,000 galaxies, then 99.9% of the universe would be infected, leading to the conclusion that humanity is either alone or intelligent life is extremely rare. This impacts the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by suggesting significantly tighter constraints on the statistical probability of alien behavior.
Story chain
6 events in this thread- Health & Science4h 28m agoProfessor David Kipping of Columbia University offers a new model, the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture" (CH-TC), which suggests that the spontaneous emergence of intelligent life must be staggeringly rare to account for the absence of galactic "infections."Open article
- Health & Science4h 28m agoProfessor David Kipping of Columbia University and the head of its Cool Worlds Lab offers a new take on this hypothesis known as the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture" (CH-TC).Open article
- Health & Science4h 28m agoProfessor David Kipping of Columbia University and its Cool Worlds Lab has proposed a new model, the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture," that suggests very tight constraints on the possible existence of technological civilizations in the universe.Open article
- Health & Science4h 28m agoProfessor David Kipping of Columbia University and head of its Cool Worlds Lab has proposed a new model, the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture," which suggests that the spontaneous rate of intelligent life emerging must be extremely low, on the order of one in a million galaxies over cosmic history, to be consistent with the observation that the universe is not largely "infected" by advanced civilizations.Open article
- Currently Reading4h 28m agoProfessor David Kipping of Columbia University and the head of its Cool Worlds Lab offers a new take on the Hart-Tipler Conjecture, known as the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture."
- Health & Science4h 28m agoProfessor David Kipping of Columbia University's Cool Worlds Lab has proposed a new model, the "Cosmological Hart-Tipler Conjecture" (CH-TC), which suggests that if "artificial infections" (like Von Neumann probes) spawn more frequently than 1 in 100,000 galaxies, then 99.9% of the universe would be infected for a 0.1c infection wave speed, leading to a "staggeringly tight observational constraint on alien behavior."Open article