At the end of a podcast interview with a young host, Ayush Prakash, yesterday, he asked: “What is your advice to young members of Gen Z?” My advice was straightforward.
It is natural to complain about the past because history is full of wrong ideas and mistaken assumptions. We live for such a short time, so we better make the most out of it. Instead of wasting time on negativity towards the people who made these mistakes, let’s focus on building a better future for all of us based on science and technology.
The engine of science is powered by the ability to imagine possible realities, followed by the curiosity to search for evidence that will decide which possibility is real. Without imagination, we would be stuck in prejudice. Without evidence, we would be stuck in wishful thinking and virtue signaling, with no anchor to a factual arbitrator. By gaining a new understanding of reality through the scientific method, we are able to develop technologies that advance our goals within the constraints of reality. In the 19th century, the French author Jules Verne imagined spaceflight and solar sails, long before science enabled these technologies. The dance between imagination and the constraints imposed by data is the way we move forward.
Our historical miseries stemmed from limited resources. With the aid of science and technology, humans were able to relocate from natural habitats — like jungles, to artificially-designed environments — like cities, where the quality of life is under control. However, a global catastrophe like a giant impactor or an unprecedented solar flare could wipe-out our technological infrastructure. A better future is possible by leaving our planet and traveling to space. If humanity were to divert the 2.4 trillion dollars a year currently spent on military budgets to space exploration, we could find our future in the stars.
Elon Musk’s goal of relocating humans from Earth to Mars is a good first step. But it is not ambitious enough. Occupying Mars is like climbing a different tree in the jungle. Both Earth and Mars are natural rocks left over from the formation of the Sun. Instead of limiting our habitats to what nature produced by chance in discrete locations, we can design our habitat in the form of an artificial space platform that supports a better quality of life. With that perspective, the transition we made from jungles to modern cities would be followed by a transition from Earth to an artificial space habitat, constructed by humans for humans.
The intelligence of a civilization is measured by its ability to shape its physical environment so as to match its needs, instead of surrendering to what nature gave it. Our obsession with the Sun as a natural energy source should be substituted with building an artificial nuclear furnace that would keep us warm wherever we wish to go. Rather than stay home because it is naturally warm, we can turn the heat on in our interstellar vehicles.
To exceed our limited imagination, we could train our telescopes to find out what extraterrestrial civilizations were doing. These extraterrestrials might have been privileged to live near a Sun-like star that formed a few billion years before the Sun and so they already lived through our future. Searching for them could save us time, because their technological accomplishments might exceed our imagination and inspire us to do better.
In a second podcast, titled `Event Horizon,’ a few hours later, I was fortunate to have a conversation with the brilliant Robin Hanson, who argued that we must consider the high-performance tail in the distribution of extraterrestrial civilizations in assessing who might be visiting us. I agreed that it would natural to imagine humans as a typical member in the distribution of intelligent civilizations within the Milky-Way galaxy. If so, how far could the tail of this distribution of intelligence go?
If each Sun-like star in the Milky-Way had an opportunity to host a civilization, there would have been a hundred billion rolls of the dice drawn from that distribution. The Central Limit Theorem in statistics states that for a large sample of independent units, the probability distribution converges to a Gaussian (normal) form with an exponential tail. If humanity is within one standard deviation from the average cognitive ability of Milky-Way civilizations, then the brightest civilization in the tail of that distribution would be about 6.5 times more intelligent than we are. This is the best one can hope to get from a hundred billion samples of the tail of a Gaussian.
The technological accomplishments of the smartest members of our Milky-Way family would depend on how much time they allocated to developing their science and technology, compared to the single century we benefited from since the discovery of quantum mechanics and General Relativity. If they had a million years of science and technology, they could have gone beyond building their artificial habitat to sending technological ambassadors in the form of self-replicating probes with artificial intelligence to remote destinations. This would resemble a dandelion flower spreading its seeds in the wind to replicate its genetic making on distant fertile grounds. Was human intelligence triggered by an alien seed that arrived at Earth from interstellar space?
I told Robin that as the scientist leading the Galileo Project, my commitment is to search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth. He acknowledged that academia is hostile to this search for unjustified psychological reasons and therefore the topic does not attract prestige and funding in universities. “You have to choose your battles,” he sighed. I replied that I would give all the prestige and money in the world just for the sake of knowing about a smarter member of our family of civilizations. I am personally willing to die in that battle. After all, what is the benefit of academic tenure if not for the pursuit of a question that would shape the future of humanity? The universe is far more imaginative than any university.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, 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.
