I don't think #astroarcheology will be a busy tag.
It will be. In a few million years, when someone in a distant civilisation is gently teasing apart the stratigraphy of the faint EM pulses the found emanating from near an insignificant yellow sun and find a brief sequence of repetitious digital pulses seem to encode language from a tiny faction of a once great species. As Gla'ar Hthrod sits back from his instruments that it uses to sift the electromagnetic equivalent of the Burgess shale, pushes back its spectacles with one tentacle and wipes its brow with the other two, it marvels at the wit, intelligence and reasonable discursive tone of this minuscule enclave embedded in a vast, insane civilisation that ended itself by the destruction of its own habitat; and it wonders. How could such contrasts co-exist? How could such introspection live alongside such short-sightedness? And what is this repeated glyph that is found in this particularly advanced nation that flourished just before the end? What does it mean: ⱨµℬℨ₭Ḭ ?
imagination and in plausibility according to our current understanding of science. However, the scenarios considered here are limited to those that: are self inflicted (and therefore imply the development of intelligence and sufficient technology); technologically plausible (even if the technology does not currently exist); and that totally eliminate the (in the test case) human civilisation. Baah. So they took a look at the last three cofactors of Drake's Wild Guess, smoked a bowl and decided to strategize around a limited set of circumstances of those last three and write a paper about it. We are not impressed. If you're going to go full-on imaginary science, at least humor Hawking's notion of malevolent space beasties.The variety of potential apocalyptic scenarios are essentially only limited in scope by