AbstractThe apparent absence of extraterrestrial signals is commonly interpreted as evidencefor the rarity or absence of advanced intelligence. This note proposes an alternativehypothesis grounded in a stability-centered theory of adaptive systems. It argues thatdetectability is not a primitive property of signals, but a relational property emergingfrom the interaction between the emitting system and the observer’s representationaland viability constraints.Within this framework, intelligent systems are modeled as bounded adaptive structuresoperating under condensation and viability filtering. Signals that do not map into theobserver’s viability-relevant representation space may systematically fail to berecognized as signals, even when present. Furthermore, emissions that increaseinstability exposure may be suppressed, avoided, or encoded in forms indistinguishablefrom background physical processes.The resulting hypothesis implies that observational silence does not entail signalabsence, but may instead reflect a structural non-recognition condition. Detectability istherefore recast as an intersection problem between adaptive systems rather than aproperty of emitted energy or information alone.
Roman Lukin (Sat,) studied this question.