In case the forthcoming expedition of the Galileo Project to the Pacific Ocean discovers that the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, was a technological relic from an extraterrestrial civilization, the future of humanity will be different from its past. …

Humanity reached a major milestone recently, when the most complex system that it constructed, GPT-4, has similar complexity to the most complex organ that terrestrial biology produced, the human brain. The number of connections in future versions of GPT will likely exceed the measure of quadrillion synapses in the human…

Suppose NASA astronauts had images of technological objects hovering above Earth that are not identified as human made. Should they share the data with the public or worry that such an act would generate turmoil in society? As a scientist, it is obvious to me that we must be aware…

Longevity is more likely for entities that replicate themselves, because multiple copies are less vulnerable to a single-point catastrophe. However, the number of copies is irrelevant if the environment cannot support any of them. For example, in a billion years the brightening of the Sun will extinguish all life forms…

Our current scientific knowledge implies that advanced technological civilizations on Earth-like exoplanets might have produced artificial life or baby universes in their laboratories if their star formed billions of years before the Sun. As such, the most accomplished technological cultures in the Milky Way galaxy could harness awe-inspiring capabilities, on…

Black holes are the ultimate source of clean energy. They can convert a substantial fraction of the rest mass of any trash thrown into them to pure energy, with an efficiency orders of magnitude larger than that of nuclear reactors. The terrestrial politics surrounding nuclear energy suggests that extraterrestrial technological…

In this week’s meeting of the dozen students and postdocs of my research group at Harvard University, I asked: “What do you call a group of theorists without data?” My office was filled with silence. “Happy”, I answered, “because their theories will never be proven wrong.” Given this perspective, happiness…

Sometimes, life feels like running a marathon. You fight your way through the beaten path with bruises to prove it. But when reflecting upon your journey, you realize that the destination is somewhat arbitrary. After my parents passed away, I decided to focus on a destination that I care about…

Baseball players know that a ball going up will eventually come down. But their experience is limited to speeds of up to 106 miles per hour — the Guinness World Record for the fastest baseball pitch in history, or 122 miles per hour for the hardest hit ball. Translated to…