A New 21st Century Meaning to Human Existence
At the opening lines of his book “The Myth of Sisyphus”, accessible here, Albert Camus wrote:
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.”
Over the past half-century, the mainstream of theoretical physics focused on “whether or not the world has three dimensions,” within the attempt of string theory to unify quantum mechanics and gravity by adding 6 to 22 spatial dimensions. As Albert Camus realized before string theory was conceived, this mathematical exercise did not help us understand whether our life is worth living. Similarly, the use of artificial intelligence to explore the categories of the human mind will also not bring us to Camus’ promised land.
So, lets follow Camus’ lead and ask: What would give meaning to human existence in the 21st century?
Numerous philosophers and lifestyle influencers addressed this question. They pointed out that having human friends, maintaining a healthy diet, and sleeping 6–8 hours (as advised in a new Nature study here) promote human happiness and longevity. But I know personally many billionaires who have lots of friends, eat healthy food and sleep well, yet they are desperate to find a higher purpose and meaning to their life.
No, occupying Mars will not give a deep meaning to Elon Musk’s life, nor to the life of his followers. Mars is just another rock like Earth which unfortunately lost its atmosphere about 4 billion years ago. It used to have liquid water reservoirs in the form of oceans, lakes and rivers, on its surface more than 3 billion years ago. Back then, terrestrial travel agencies could have advertised its ecosystem as a desirable tourist destination. But right now, it is a desert with temperature swings between day and night in the range of +60 and -150 degrees Celsius, a cosmic-ray intensity that is 50 times higher than on Earth, and a surface gravity that is 38% of that on Earth. Space cowboys who are intrigued by wild-west ambitions of conquering virgin territories, should keep in mind the health risks imposed by these harsh conditions which are far more life-threatening than early Americans faced. With current transportation technologies, travelers to Mars will lose about 20% of their bone density on their trip from Earth to Mars because of the low gravity encountered during their trip. Making humanity a multi-planet civilization by going to Mars is equivalent to safeguarding your housing opportunities by buying a second home in the South Pole. Without proper precautions, traveling to Mars is akin to committing suicide. Elon Musk said: “I’d like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Camus’ question remains unanswered by this statement.
If traveling to Mars will not answer Camus’ question, what else can do it?
I had been practicing astrophysics research for forty years and studied all the data we collected within our cosmic horizon, extending out to 46.5 billion light years if we account for cosmic expansion over the past 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang.
Based on all that I have learned, let me state unequivocally that Ecclesiastes 1:9 got it wrong when he stated:
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
In fact, the Sun did not exist for the first two thirds of cosmic history and it will die in 7.6 billion years. There is certainly `something new under the Sun’. The graveyard of dead stars in the Milky-Way galaxy implies that `what has been will not be again, and what has been done will not be done again’. Death breaks the symmetry between the past and the future. In fact, stars with more than tens of times the mass of the Sun live for only a few million years and collapse to black holes. They turn into prisons of spacetime from where even light cannot escape. The Event Horizon Telescope (within Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, for which I served as the founding director) imaged the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky-Way — into which astronauts can enter but never share their experiences on social media. Both Ecclesiastes and Elon Musk are not helpful in finding meanings to human life.
After forty years of studying the physical Universe, I now realize that my two cosmology textbooks (here and here) — currently vetted by the Webb telescope, described the cosmos merely as a collection of matter and radiation. Indeed, cosmologists view the observable cosmic volume as a lonely place which does not add meaning to human existence. Astronomers are merely spectators, observing the vast expanse of the cosmos through telescopes. They often assume that nobody looks back at them.
But suppose, for a moment, that there are numerous observers out there looking back at us. After all, the latest census of exoplanets implies that there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy. Assuming that we are unique is arrogant. Instead, the most plausible hypothesis is that similar initial conditions lead to similar outcomes. Since most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, we are late to the cosmic stage. The primary obligation of astronomers must therefore be to find technological signatures of intelligent actors that predated us.
Given this perspective, it is completely unreasonable for the mainstream of astronomy to focus its funds on the search for microbes — as done in the 2020 Decadal Survey of Astronomy & Astrophysics. Why is common sense not common in academia?
Finding intelligent cosmic partners will be the most consequential discovery for the future of humanity, because it will give a new answer to Camus’ question. If we find an alien civilization which is more accomplished than we are, we might learn from it new science and technologies. This could allow us to travel more efficiently and satisfy Musk’s ambition of making humanity a multi planet civilization without compromising on the hazardous housing conditions on Mars. But most importantly, discovering intelligent extraterrestrials could give us an emotional connection to the otherwise lonely cosmos, and inject new insights into the meaning of our life in the cosmos.
Following the logic of Blaise Pascal’s Wager about God (as described here), we must take the possible existence of a higher alien intelligence seriously because its existence could have a huge impact on our future.
Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg is known for his bleak view of the universe. In his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes,” he famously wrote:
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Steven referred to the `physical universe’ on which his book focused. He missed the possibility of superhuman intelligence beyond Earth. If we discover the products of advanced extraterrestrials, we would realize that `the more the Universe seems comprehensible, the more meaningful our life would be.’ This would reflect the power of super-human intelligence. We are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking. Learning from those who are wiser than we might give a meaning to our existence.
It appears that Albert Camus, Elon Musk, Ecclesiastes, Steven Weinberg and many other distinguished thinkers, all missed the possibility that we might derive a meaning to our life from superhuman intelligence in outer space. There is nothing more worthy of the billions of dollars that we allocate to space exploration, than the search for superhuman intelligence out there.
The new insights from advanced extraterrestrials were likely gained over billions of years of cosmic history. Benefitting from the wisdom of our cosmic elders, we should value those who had a thousand times longer history than the human species.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
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