Benefits of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Over AI
The fundamental difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is in their training data sets. Whereas AI is trained on data limited to Earth, most of the real estate lies beyond Earth.
That we fail to recognize this simple fact and focus on our immediate environment is testimony to the limitations of the human mind. Even just days before the Artemis II launch of humans to an orbit around the Moon, critics express concerns that money would be better spent on solving problems closer to home. Well, guess what … if we keep our focus only close to home, we may lose this home and everything in it to a future catastrophe.
Exploration of residential areas far from home can save our descendants from extinction. Sixty-six million years ago, non-avian dinosaurs were not smart enough to avoid an asteroid impact. Are we smarter than they were or are we doomed to extinction together with our digital mirrors?
Earth went through many major catastrophes in the past 4.6 billion years. Its history started with the Moon-forming collision when a Mars-sized protoplanet named Theia is believed to have collided with proto-Earth. Later, the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.4 billion years ago, occurred as early bacteria began producing oxygen via photosynthesis, which was toxic to the anaerobic life that dominated the Earth at the time, leading to a massive die-off. The Earth also went through multiple snowball events during which it encountered “deep freezes” where glaciers may have reached the equator. One significant period occurred around 700 million years ago, likely triggered by changes in greenhouse gases or volcanic activity, turning the entire planet into a frozen wasteland for millions of years. The end of the Ordovician period, about 444 million years ago, was triggered by intense glaciation and falling sea levels, killing 85% of marine life. The late Devonian period, about 360 million years ago, was associated with a series of pulses over millions of years, likely caused by ocean oxygen depletion as land plants rapidly diversified. Subsequently, the Permian-Triassic Extinction event, about 252 million years ago, eliminated about 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. And the end of the Triassic period, about 201 million years ago, was associated with massive volcanic activity during the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea which led to rapid climate change, allowing dinosaurs to dominate.
Existential risks are inevitable also in our future. Within about a billion years all liquid water will dry up on Earth as a result of the greenhouse effect of the brightening Sun (as discussed here), and in 7.6 billion years the drag on the expanded envelope of the Sun will deliver Earth into its hot and dense center.
In the long run, the City of Jerusalem will not be within humanity’s Promised Land, because it will be consumed by the dense metallic remnant of the Sun, a white dwarf the size of Earth containing about 60% of the current mass of the Sun.
The actual Promised Land for humanity’s long-term future will be on a space platform that guarantees its long-term survival. Instead of relying on a natural fusion reactor, the Sun, we could build an artificial nuclear fusion reactor inside a city-size spaceship that produces artificial gravity through rotation or rocket acceleration.
Our transition from the surface of a habitable natural rock to a space platform where the living conditions are manufactured technologically, is similar to the transition from the jungles of Africa where humans needed to collect their food from scarce natural resources to a city where abundant food can be ordered through speech to an AI agent.
Currently, our most visionary space ambitions involve traveling to other natural rocks which happen to exist in our neighborhood, like the Moon or Mars. But a more uplifting vision would be to construct a space platform that will carry humans to interstellar journeys, a Noah’s spaceship of sorts, making our survival independent of Earth’s future calamities.
So far, we have not employed AI for our space missions, but future interstellar trips will likely be guided by AI, while the bodies of any human passengers will stay frozen through the boring and long parts of the journeys.
We might be inspired to become an interstellar species once we discover that ETI were successful in doing so. Finding their spacecraft would guide us in selecting the technologies that made their trips successful. The fact that they arrived at our backyard before we arrived to theirs would not be surprising, given that we only had one century of modern science and technology after discovering General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, whereas most Sun-like stars formed billions of years before the Sun.
The best is yet to come. Here’s hoping that a new age of peace and prosperity will result from our encounters with ETI. Judging by the terrestrial news cycle every day, it appears likely that we are not at the top of the cosmic food chain.
Recently, Vice-President JD Vance noted that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) might be demons flying around Earth (as reported here). If the Galileo Project discovers UAP under my leadership, I would view them instead through the words of President Abraham Lincoln as the “better angels of our nature.”
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In this essay, I featured four amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. These watercolors incorporate inspiring statements by Giordano Bruno and Marsilio Ficino. This is the ninth in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here, and the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here, the sixth titled: “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here, the seventh titled “Will the Human Survive for Billions of Years”, appeared here, and the eight titled: “The Butterfly Effect of Intelligence in the Cosmos”, appeared here.
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Before my morning jog at sunrise, I received the following uplifting email:
“Good morning, Avi.
We have spoken over email before.
I read your Medium posts and I recently watched you on Why Files — The Basement, with AJ. It was a great show!
I also own a couple of your books.
I believe you are right about Aliens, Alien probes and life on other planets, other than our own.
The reason I believe that is because every time I consider any single problem that seems absolutely impossible to resolve, I just look up at the stars at night and I think, “it’s impossibe that Avi is wrong, hard data or not, I believe in my heart that he is correct.”
Space goes on forever but on the other hand how can it? Where is the end? Is there a wall? What is on the other side of that wall then? If there’s a wall, then what is containing the wall? If there is no wall, how will you ever reach the end? For this reason alone, I believe that the conclusion is so likely and so undeniable, that people are crazy not to understand that.
I do not think you are wasting your time. I think you are doing immense work for the good of humanity and for our continued existence in the universe. I look forward to reading the results of your future work and people such as myself will always, always, believe in you, no matter what the critics say.
It’s just common sense.
Robin Lindberg”
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.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
