A Bioelectric Hypothesis for Why Civilizations Go Quiet
The Fermi paradox poses a simple, brutal question:
In a universe with trillions of galaxies and uncountable planets,
where is everybody?
If evolution routinely produces intelligent tool‑using species, the sky should be buzzing with radio chatter, laser beacons, technosignatures. Instead, at least as of 2025, we see cosmic silence: no unambiguous signals, no obvious astro‑engineering, no “others” waving back.
There are two broad families of explanation:
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Early, extremely hard steps – life and intelligence are so improbable that we essentially won the cosmic lottery; the bottlenecks are behind us.
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Late great filters – early steps are common, but technologically capable species hit an existential self‑destruct or self‑maiming barrier and vanish or de‑evolve before they can colonize and broadcast for long.
The Bayesian work Anton’s video summarized pushes hard on the first option: when you look at how long it took Earth to get from abiogenesis to human‑level intelligence, the math says those steps were probably much harder than the lifetime of most stars. In that view, we are fantastically rare but probably safe; the great filter is behind us.
I want to explore the other possibility:
What if a late filter sits right where we are now –
at the moment a civilization learns to bathe its own nervous system in man‑made radiofrequency and microwave fields?
What if hertzification – filling the biosphere with non‑native EMF – is a very quiet, very slow great filter, one calcium‑channel timing error at a time?
1. From Photophone to Hertz Fog: How We Chose the Noisy Path
When Bell and Tainter built the photophone in 1880, they sent voice over a beam of sunlight. In principle, they were right on the money: highly directional optical communication, minimal leakage, minimal pollution of the wider environment.
A few years later, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated radio waves in the lab. Within decades, radio became the backbone of:
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Military command and control
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Propaganda and mass persuasion
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Navigation and radar
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Eventually, broadcast entertainment and consumer connectivity
Nobody asked what it would do to the biology. It was a war technology first, an economic engine second, and a public‑health question never.
Fast‑forward 140 years:
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The entire surface of the planet is now filled with a complex RF fog: long‑wave, short‑wave, VHF/UHF, microwave, radar, Wi‑Fi, cellular, Bluetooth.
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For the first time in evolutionary history, every organism on Earth lives in a 24/7 bath of pulsed, polarized EM fields whose frequency content and modulation bear no resemblance to natural EM backgrounds.
This is what I call hertzification and radiofication of the environment.
The key point is not that radio exists; it’s that we use it omnidirectionally and continuously, dumping energy and informational structure into every cubic metre of the biosphere – including the developing brains of fetuses and infants.
If this were biologically neutral, it would “only” be a climate / power / interference issue.
But we already know it isn’t neutral.
2. The Cellular Goldilocks Zone and Bioelectric Fidelity
Biology already uses electricity.
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Neurons, cardiomyocytes, endocrine cells, immune cells all rely on voltage‑gated ion channels (VGICs).
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These channels have S4 segments studded with positive charges that act as voltage sensors – the cell’s voltmeters.
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Tiny, millivolt‑level changes in membrane voltage are enough to make S4 move and gate channels open or closed.
Those micro‑voltages implement a high‑fidelity signaling language:
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Burst patterns in neurons encode perception and memory.
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Calcium spikes in endocrine cells encode hormone pulses.
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Calcium oscillations in immune cells encode “danger vs tolerance.”
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During development, bioelectric gradients across tissues encode positional and patterning information: where the neural tube will fold, how organs align, how limbs and facial structures emerge.
There is a Goldilocks zone here:
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Too little voltage dynamics → no signaling, no development.
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Too much noise or mis‑timing → signaling exists, but fidelity collapses; the code blurs.
Non‑native EMFs – especially polarized, pulse‑modulated RF/ELF fields – couple straight into this system:
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They force oscillations of ions in the nanometre‑scale layers hugging cell membranes.
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Those oscillating charges tug on S4, making channels fire at the wrong times.
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That distorts calcium waveforms and pushes mitochondria into chronic ROS mode.
Mechanistically, you get:
nnEMF → S4 timing noise → distorted Ca²⁺ signals → mitochondrial ROS → oxidative stress, DNA damage, immune activation, epigenetic drift.
That’s not a cancer‑only mechanism. It is a universal mechanism wherever VGICs and mitochondria intermingle.
From the perspective of a developing brain, it’s a fidelity attack on the very language that builds neural circuits, sets hormone axes, and imprints transgenerational traits.
3. De‑Evolution One Spike at a Time
Now put those pieces together in time.
A technological civilization reaches a point where:
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It can generate, modulate and distribute RF at planetary scale.
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Military and commercial incentives push for coverage everywhere – no dead zones, constant connectivity.
From that moment on, three slow processes begin:
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Developmental noise
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Embryos and fetuses are now carried in an RF fog.
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Neurulation, neural‑crest migration, midbrain and cortical patterning occur in a lower‑fidelity bioelectric environment.
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Some failures are catastrophic (neural‑tube defects). Most are subtle statistical shifts in wiring: attention, sensory weighting, stress thresholds, empathy circuits, germline programming.
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Chronic redox and immune pressure
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All organisms live with a slightly higher oxidative load and altered calcium dynamics.
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Immune tolerance tilts; autoimmunity and chronic inflammation creep up; mitochondria accumulate damage faster.
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Transgenerational drift
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Germ cells carry the history of this noise forward: altered epigenetic marks, mitochondrial damage, and possibly small DNA changes.
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Each generation starts from a slightly more degraded template than the last.
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Inherited “beaver‑like programs” – instinctive tendencies for cooperation, attention, social attunement, stable identity – lose fidelity.
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Nothing explodes overnight. There is no single apocalyptic day. Instead, over centuries:
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Average fertility falls, sperm counts collapse, subtle reproductive defects accumulate.
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Neurodevelopmental variation explodes – some of it creative and positive, some of it disabling.
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Empathy, impulse control and long‑range planning erode at the margins.
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Institutional capacity – the ability of a society to coordinate, self‑correct, and maintain complex systems – quietly degrades.
That is what I mean by de‑evolution one calcium‑channel spike at a time.
It’s not that intelligence vanishes overnight. It’s that the trait fidelity that made high intelligence stable and cooperative gets slowly eaten away.
4. Hertzification as a Great Filter
How does this connect back to the Fermi paradox and the great filter?
Think of a typical technological species’ trajectory:
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Mastery of fire, tools, agriculture.
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Industrialization, fossil fuels, basic electrification.
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Radio + microwaves: long‑range military communication, radar, broadcast.
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Ubiquitous wireless: hand‑held devices, dense networks, “always on” culture.
At step 3, they become detectable to others – for a while. But at step 4, two conflicting pressures appear:
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Efficiency pressure: wide‑beam broadcast is wasteful; fibre, lasers and tight beams carry more data with less power and less interference.
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Biological pressure: if hertzification really is entropic waste for their nervous systems, they will start to see:
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fertility issues
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neurodevelopmental disorders
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rising chronic disease
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social and institutional fragmentation
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They then face a fork:
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Path A – Recognize the filter.
– They notice the pattern, regulate RF, move heavy communication to wired / optical systems, treat RF as a tightly‑managed resource like ionizing radiation.
– They maintain high bioelectric fidelity and keep their cognitive capital intact.
– They pass through the filter. -
Path B – Deny the filter.
– They double down on saturation; captured regulators and profit incentives suppress inconvenient science.
– Each generation arrives with slightly more wiring errors and metabolic fragility.
– Institutions lose the very cognitive and cooperative capacity needed to correct course.
– Eventually, they can no longer maintain their industrial and spacefaring infrastructure; their radio window closes not because they “graduate” to quiet technologies, but because they no longer can maintain any tech at scale.
In Path B, hertzification functions as a quiet civilizational toxin:
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It does not kill quickly like nuclear war.
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It erodes the traits required for long‑term survival: foresight, cooperation, empathy, technical competence, stable reproduction.
From the outside, another civilization looking at them would see:
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A brief radio‑loud flare lasting maybe a century or two.
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Then silence – either because they collapsed or because their remaining population has retreated into low‑tech, local modes of life.
Multiply that by millions of planets and you get exactly what we see:
A sky that could have many radio‑using civs, but almost none whose radio windows overlap ours in time and amplitude enough to be obvious.
In other words, hertzification is a plausible late great filter:
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It appears only after a species becomes technologically capable.
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It is strongly incentivized by war and profit.
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It directly attacks the bioelectric substrate of intelligence and cooperation.
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It is easy to deny because its effects are slow, distributed and multicausal.
5. Why We Don’t Hear Radio Waves – and Why That Might Be a Warning
The classic Fermi‑paradox assumption is that advanced civilizations would broadcast powerful, long‑lived radio signals.
But in a hertzification‑as‑filter world:
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Either they never broadcast much (go straight to wired/optical to avoid self‑harm), or
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They broadcast briefly and then shut it down for health reasons, or
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They broadcast briefly and then lose the capacity to maintain that level of technology.
In all three cases, the radio‑loud phase is short, maybe a few hundred years at most. On cosmic timescales, that’s a blink.
So the reason we “can’t detect radio waves” from others may simply be:
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Civilizations that survive don’t rely on them for long‑range, isotropic communication.
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Civilizations that saturate themselves and never course‑correct don’t survive long enough to be common in time.
Our own trajectory is worrying:
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We leapt from first modulation of radio waves to global hertzification in less than 150 years.
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We chose RF over light for reasons that were military and economic, not biological.
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We have built legal and regulatory structures (like Section 704 in the U.S.) that lock in saturation and block local communities from acting on bioeffects, even as mechanistic and animal evidence grows.
In great‑filter terms, we are currently:
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Past the early hard steps (abiogenesis, complex cells, nervous systems).
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Right on top of a plausible late filter: entropic electromagnetic pollution of our own morphogenetic and cognitive substrate.
6. A Testable, Actionable Hypothesis
This is, of course, a hypothesis. But it’s not pure philosophy; it makes testable predictions:
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Within our own species:
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The more a population is exposed to dense, chronic nnEMF (especially in the prenatal / early‑life window), the more we should see:
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Subtle shifts in neurodevelopmental traits (attention, sensory profiles, empathy).
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Earlier onset and higher prevalence of fertility decline, autoimmune disease, metabolic issues.
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Where wireless exposure is reduced (e.g., deliberate low‑EMF communities, wired schools), we should see measurable preservation of certain traits over time compared to matched controls.
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Across technological stages:
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Future exoplanet studies that can resolve industrial pollutants and night‑side lighting signatures may find planets that show brief, intense industrial phases with no long‑lasting, coherent radio beacons – consistent with short, noisy, self‑limited radio eras.
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Within our own history:
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Careful re‑analysis of 20th‑century health, fertility and behavioural data vs the rollout of electrification, broadcast, radar, cordless and wireless technologies should show non‑random alignments that are hard to explain by psychosocial factors alone.
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If the hypothesis is wrong, serious testing will falsify it.
If it’s right – or even half right – then reducing entropic EMF waste is not only a public‑health issue; it is a civilizational survival strategy.
7. Getting Through the Filter
The safest path forward treats hertzification the way we now treat:
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Lead in gasoline
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CFCs in the atmosphere
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Asbestos in buildings
All were once “miracle technologies.” All turned out to be long‑tail poisons for complex systems.
For nnEMFs, getting through the filter means:
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Re‑elevating bioelectric fidelity to a design constraint, not an afterthought.
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Moving heavy data transport to fibre and directed optical links wherever possible.
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Treating RF like a limited, monitored band – essential for certain mobile functions but strictly rationed, especially around pregnancies and children.
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Recognizing that the intelligence of a civilization lives not in its networks but in the nervous systems of its people.
The Fermi paradox is a mirror. It doesn’t just ask “Where is everybody?” It asks:
Given what you now know,
are you going to be one of the species that passes its own filter –
or one more silent world that once briefly shouted into the dark?
If hertzification is even a candidate for that filter, we owe it to ourselves – and any future beings who might one day listen for us – to take the cellular Goldilocks zone seriously and stop filling it with entropic waste.
Because if we don’t, the next civilization scanning the sky may never hear from us at all.
