During a recent forum of the Council on Foreign Relations, I described the need to further our relations with other residents in our cosmic neighborhood.
The latest statistical data on exoplanets implies that there should be billions of Earth-Sun analogs within the Milky-Way. Although we observe many houses similar to ours on our cosmic street, the academic mainstream regards the possibility that they have intelligent residents like us as an “extraordinary claim” that does not merit major federal funding. This argument is rooted in the belief that we are cosmically unique, despite the evidence that humans emerged from a soup of chemicals under natural circumstances that are abundantly replicated near numerous stars. In reality, we are probably late to the party of our intelligent neighbors, since most stars formed billions of years before the Sun.
The latest Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Academies prioritized the launch of the next major space telescope, the Habitable World Observatory, in the 2040s at a cost that will likely exceed ten billion dollars. The goal is to search for biochemical signatures of microbial life in the atmospheres of exoplanets. No major federal funding was recommended for the search of technological signatures. This is not the wisest strategy to hedge our bets in finding evidence for life, because technological signatures might be easier to recognize than the chemical fingerprints of primitive forms of life.
Based on the detection rate of interstellar meteors like IM1, there should be of order a million meter-size interstellar objects within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. As I noted in a recent paper, it would make sense to launch a space telescope that will monitor these objects and investigate whether there is any technological space debris, including pieces from broken spacecraft, among the interstellar rocks. Part of the debris may have been washed away from the home planet by a strong wind or powerful radiation flares that emanated from the host star, especially if it evolved to a red giant.
The anomalies of the interstellar objects `Oumuamua and IM1, which were discovered over the past decade, should make us curious in searching for technological signatures in a new way. The traditional SETI approach of searching for radio signals might not be the best strategy. It is equivalent to waiting at home for a phone call from one of the residents on our street. If we are not recognized as important in the cosmic scheme of things, nobody may call us while we are waiting. Civilizations that were too loud might have been extinguished by predators millions of years ago. We must be proactive in allocating billions of dollars to the search for physical relics that arrive near Earth from a neighbor’s yard.
The largest projects in science are supported by taxpayers. It therefore makes sense for scientific priorities to reflect the priorities of taxpayers. In contrast tothe Astro 2020 Decadal Survey, taxpayers would have probably prioritized the search for technological signatures with a comparable level of funding to the search for microbial life. Why is there a disconnect between the public and academia? Perhaps common sense is not common among mainstream scientists.
If astronomers were to invest billions of dollars in the search for extraterrestrial technological relics near Earth and then find them, the implications to society would be immense. First, policy makers would need to establish a Council on Alien Relations as a separate organization from the Council on Foreign Relations — which focuses on the relations between nations on Earth. At a distance of ten times the Earth-Sun separation, the boundaries between nations cannot be separated by our best working telescopes. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 27 thousand times farther away, and most Milky-Way stars are tens of thousands of times farther than this star. As a result, interstellar matters have no dependance on the way humans choose to split Earth among nations.
After we discover interstellar technologies, space will no longer be viewed in the context of national security or national pride. Instead, policy makers will have to confront new questions concerning how to interact with other residents on our cosmic street: Should our terrestrial laws of ethics apply to aliens that are equally smart or even smarter than us? Are we free to contaminate virgin territories with terrestrial forms or life? Should we respect indigenous species for the ownership of alien lands? What are the scientific, military and commercial implications of interactions with our neighbors? Do alien encounters pose existential or health risks? What can we learn about our cosmic history from interstellar archaeology? What form of government should we establish on alien land?
Even though alien land may offer opportunities for societies to start from scratch, it is likely that humanity will export its flaws to any territory it occupies. The politics on Mars is not likely to be much better than that in Washington D.C. at present.
It is impossible to decide about a general policy before knowing our neighbors. As a first step, we should search for them. Being in denial that they exist is not a good idea, because one day they may knock on our front door.
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.
