The hypothesis examined in this paper was first articulated by the author in the science-fiction novel La Reliquia (Mandala & LápizCero, written 2005, published 2006, ISBN 978-84-935401-0-4) and revisited in Kira y la Tormenta de Hielo (Lulu, written 2007–2008, copyright 2009, second
edition published December 2010, ISBN 978-1-4467-3396-7). The hypothesis addresses the Fermi paradox by proposing that interstellar civilisations may indeed be transmitting, but that their signals reach Earth so degraded by the cumulative effects of inhomogeneous spacetime traversal — gravitational potentials of intervening galaxies, differential cosmological expansion, plasma scattering — that they appear indistinguishable from cosmic noise. Without a "Rosetta-stone" record of the propagation path, no straightforward inverse can recover the original message. The author proposes that modern machine-learning techniques, of the kind successfully applied to anomaly detection in medical imaging, may be capable of recognising the residual statistical signature of an originally-coherent message in what currently appears to be background noise
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