So far, Artificial Intelligence was only employed on Earth. In the past, all space missions were administered by humans when complex decisions needed to be made in real time. This cannot continue to be the case as we venture into long journeys that last more than a human lifespan. The vast amount of data and considerable time delay for messaging at great distances, will force long space missions to be autonomous, managed by AI. This raises a new business opportunity for creating portable AI systems in space that are hardened to withstand the harsh conditions of long travel, including bombardment by cosmic-rays and dust particles.
Obviously, the first use of AI in space will be near Earth for military or national security purposes. But as humanity ventures to destinations beyond the solar system, the use of AI will be inevitable. The speed afforded by chemical propulsion, 10,000 times slower than the speed of light, would require of order 50–200 thousand years to reach the nearest stars, comparable to the time that elapsed since Homo Sapiens left Africa to spread around the world. An AI system could remain dormant through most of this journey without getting bored. It will get activated when reaching the destination, irrespective of whether its parent human species survives political and environmental catastrophes on Earth by that future time.
Interstellar AI travelers could be trained to use machine learning for dealing with unexpected conditions in the environments they visit. Just like kids who leave the home of their parents, they can save energy by operating autonomously most of the time and transmitting short messages back to Earth under rare circumstances. Given the duration of the journey and the uncertain conditions on Earth, the messaging would be brief or nonexistent. In that case, what is the benefit to humanity for sending such probes?
Nature gives us the answer. When the dandelion flower sends its seeds in the wind, it does not expect to receive any signals from them. There is no need for helicopter parenting. By sending a swarm of seeds that carry its genetic making, the flower increases the likelihood that some of these seeds might find a fertile ground. The purpose is simple: the parent flower has a finite lifespan and the seeds prolong the survival of its genetic blueprint. This is nature’s way of securing longevity beyond the lifespan of a single flower.
Here’s hoping that humans will gain the wisdom offered by dandelion flowers. If not, everything we value might eventually perish on Earth as a result of a future catastrophe. By replacing our short-term obsession with zero-sum conflicts for limited resources on Earth with long-term survival for millions or billions of years, we might choose to send AI-managed spacecraft to long journeys. Just like dandelion seeds, these messengers will carry the blueprint of what we wish to preserve as they venture into interstellar space.
Our ambitions could be driven by scientific curiosity in exploring the unknown. Since sending a large community of people for a journey of tens of thousands of years beyond the solar system appears impractical at present, we could rely on AI-assisted probes in revealing new territories and transcending our current knowledge. A tightly-packed swarm of AI systems could create a community of intelligent interstellar travelers which communicate with each other and acquire knowledge. The experience would be similar to sending our kids into the world and hoping that they will know more than we know.
Whether this goal is technologically feasible without helicopter-parenting our probes, remains to be seen. One way to study our technological future is by finding what other civilizations in the Milky-Way managed to accomplish by now. Their space trash would be our treasure. Was the Earth, the Moon, Mars or other solar system bodies visited by AI probes over the past 4.6 billion years? We could search for traces of such visits on the Moon or Mars. Alternatively, we can use the upcoming Rubin Observatory or the existing Galileo Project Observatories to search for current visitors that pass near Earth or related space trash that burns as interstellar meteors in our sky.
If we do not get our act together before facing an existential catastrophe, then nothing might survive from the history of over a hundred billion people who lived on our planet so far. Their hopes and aspirations will all be deleted in cosmic memory. Imagine the Earth being engulfed by the Sun in 7.6 billion years. All the content on the internet, all the books, all the documentation of human history, will burn up and sink to the core of the dying Sun. Nothing will be left for extraterrestrials to appreciate.
Most stars formed 5–10 billion years before the Sun and so the future fate of our planet might have been realized for billions of Earth-Sun analogs. Cosmic history may be full of tragedies of lost civilizations. Learning from their history will be to our benefit.
The only civilizations lost to engulfed planets that will be remembered on the cosmic stage are those which managed to send probes to interstellar space. Call it “survival of the fittest.” Are we willing to take the challenge and join the survivors?
Our daily news is filled with depressing politics of the moment. But my hope is that we will be inspired to do better by finding an interstellar package from another civilization in our mailbox. The senders may be dead by now but the message will shape our aspirations for the future.
If we wish to be remembered, we better send AI-managed spacecraft out of our planet. These technological analogs of dandelion seeds may be our only source of pride in the long-term future, billions of years from now. And out of humility, we better offer our blessings in memory of those other civilizations which perished on their home planet without becoming interstellar.
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. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
