Extraterrestrial Life Forms Were Not Created Equal
Given the billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy, humanity is probably not at the top of the Galactic food chain.
We desperately need a dose of cosmic modesty. The answer to Enrico Fermi’s question: “where is everybody?” is: “to find them, you need to be proactive and search for interstellar objects of technological origin”. The reply to Elon Musk’s assertion “we are probably alone,” is: “do not be so presumptuous, as space entrepreneurs that are better than you probably lived in the Milky-Way for billions of years before you were born.” It is our scientific obligation to find the relics of these space entrepreneurs rather than brag about our cosmic importance without investing resources in the search for alien technological products. Whether they exist does not depend on what we tell each other, for the same reason that the Earth revolved around the Sun 4.54 billion times before the Vatican dismissed Nicolaus Copernicus for suggesting a heliocentric Solar system. The next Copernican revolution would involve the realization that humanity has siblings in the family of technological civilizations. These siblings might have existed for billions of years before humans emerged on Earth. Most of them did not only live but also died billions of years ago.
We are not at the center of the cosmic stage and we arrived late to the cosmic scene. Common sense suggests that we are not central actors in the cosmic play. If humanity were to die by self-inflicted wounds, geological activity would wipe out all of humanity’s industrial scars on Earth’s surface within millions of years. By the time the Earth will lose its water reservoirs to become a desert like Mars in a billion years — as a result of the brightening of the Sun (as calculated here), no visitor to the solar system would even notice that humans lived on Earth. A billion years amounts to just 7% of cosmic history. In the cosmic scheme of things, nobody would be aware of the loss of humanity … unless we send technological relics carrying our AI-descendants to interstellar space.
These technological relics will be the only clues that humanity could leave behind for future space archaeologists. By reciprocity, the search for similar relics is the best way for us to realize that other civilizations preceded ours by billions of years. How would we be perceived by others if they happened to monitor us?
To aliens, humanity might look like a toddler on the cosmic stage. Foolish and focused on itself, unaware of the experienced adults with bigger brains in the adjacent room.
In preparation for a 4-hour interview yesterday, I was asked to watch the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” crafted by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, in which humanity is viewed as a toddler with alien monoliths serving as monitors in its baby room. The creator of these monoliths appears in the image of God, resembling an adult in the adjacent room. This remarkable film envisioned the creation of AI systems which might have kinship to alien technologies more than to humans because they are made of silicon chips and not flesh and blood.
We must imagine possible realities in order to search for them. If we follow comet experts with the default assumption that all interstellar objects are comets, we might fall into the trap of insisting that spacecraft are “dark comets” because they do not show visible gas or dust around them. This is not a hypothetical concern. Currently, comet experts firmly argue that the first interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua was a dark comet (as discussed here) and alternative interpretations of its unresolved anomalies (as discussed here) are ridiculed through personal attacks on those who dare to imagine something else.
In order not to miss clues offered by anomalies of technological objects relative to space rocks, we must imagine extraterrestrial technologies as a possibility. Our physical reality within the Milky-Way might be more imaginative than we are, because our training data set is limited to Earth and there is much more real estate in outer space.
Most astrobiologists are obsessed with the search for microbes and life-as-we-know-it. If instead, we were to hedge our bets and invest similar funds and research effort in the search for intelligent life, the reward could be greater. Finding new unimaginable technologies would inspire humanity to change priorities. Instead of investing 2.4 trillion dollars per year in military budgets worldwide, we might choose to invest a similar amount in space exploration.
It is our call. If we wish to be remembered within billions of years, we must venture into interstellar space. Any space relic that we leave behind will serve as testimony that the human spirit cannot be wiped out as easily as life can from the surface of planets like Earth or Mars.
Extraterrestrial life forms were not created equal. Those who were intelligent enough to leave relics in interstellar space elevated themselves to the status of major actors in the cosmic play. They might be remembered by space archaeologists. Our siblings might look differently, including forms of life as we-do-NOT-know-it.
It might be easier to identify interstellar objects of technological origin than to identify the subtle chemical fingerprints of familiar microbes in exoplanet atmospheres. These technological relics might show up as anomalous interstellar objects in the inner solar system — like the latest visitor 3I/ATLAS with its 7 anomalies (as discussed here).
It is the obligation of scientists to be intrigued by interstellar objects that appear unusually big and follow trajectories that are fine-tuned to encounter Solar system planets, as 3I/ATLAS appears to be. Will 3I/ATLAS take advantage of a gravitational assist from the Sun at perihelion on October 29, 2025 to make an Oberth maneuver (as discussed here)? If not, 3I/ATLAS will arrive within 54 million kilometers from Jupiter on March 16, 2026.
Yesterday, I also met at an MIT conference Scott Bolton who serves as the principal investigator of the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter — which will have an opportunity to probe 3I/ATLAS from up close in 5 months. Scott informed me that Juno will use its Waves dipole antenna and magnetic coil to search for radio emission from 3I/ATLAS in the frequency range of 50 hertz to 40 megahertz. Given the coincidence between the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS into the Solar system and the direction of the enigmatic “Wow! Signal” detected in 1977 (as discussed here), it would be worthwhile to search for any anomalous radio emission from 3I/ATLAS.
As a toddler technological civilization, we must study in all possible ways the nature of objects that are entering into our baby room from the outside world.
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.
