How to Mitigate Global Concerns of Doomers
Before CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashed particles at the highest energy ever achieved by humans — ten thousand times the proton-rest-mass, some expressed the concern that it might produce tiny black holes that would swallow Earth. The sobering realization missed by these doomers is that numerous cosmic-rays already collided with protons in the Earth’s atmosphere at much higher center-of-mass energies. Earth survived these numerous impacts throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, implying that we should not fear a black hole doomsday for center-of-mass energies up to a million times the proton rest-mass. If any microscopic black holes had been produced by cosmic-ray impacts on Earth, these black holes must have evaporated rapidly without causing any harm to our environment.
The first atomic weapon test, “Trinity,” was conducted on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico by the U.S. Manhattan Project. A plutonium-based implosion device, dubbed “gadget,” generated a blast with an energy output of 18.6-kiloton of TNT, marking the dawn of the nuclear age. Before that test, there was a concern among the Manhattan Project scientists that a nuclear explosion could ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the deuterium in the oceans. In 1942, the Physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility that the extreme heat of a fission bomb could trigger a self-sustaining runaway fusion reaction in the atmosphere. Hans Bethe and Emil Konopinski performed calculations that concluded such a reaction was impossible because of radiative cooling. In retrospect, given what we know today about the impact rate of meteors, fireballs carrying more than 18.6 -kiloton of TNT are generated every few years by solar system asteroids larger than a few meters in diameter. The Earth’s atmosphere and oceans survived energetic explosions of this magnitude a billion times throughout the past 4.5 billion years.
In the same spirit, some people worry that Earth will not survive the technological scar inflicted on it by modern technological products. The truth is that Earth already survived much larger catastrophes. For example, 2 billion years ago an asteroid with a diameter of 20 (+/-5) kilometers impacted Earth and created the Vredefort crater with a width of order 250 kilometers. This structure is larger than the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula that killed non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, by releasing the energy output of 100 million megatons of TNT, equivalent to 5 billion Triniti-like bombs.
Earth was not only hit hard but was also exposed to extreme cold. About 700 million years ago, in the latest 16% of its history, the Earth’s surface was nearly frozen from pole to equator. This snowball Earth phase was triggered by runaway cooling due to the depletion of carbon dioxide (CO2). Eventually, this catastrophic cooling, akin to a nuclear winter from a global nuclear war, likely led to the Cambrian explosion of complex lifeforms. Life on Earth did not only survive this stressful period, but actually blossomed subsequently in accelerated and complex ways that were never manifested before.
These three examples demonstrate that as-of-yet humanity did not rise to the occasion of modifying its natural environment at a level that resembles extreme cosmic events. Our best accelerators are still weaker than natural particle accelerators near astrophysical compact objects like neutron stars or black holes. Our entire nuclear arsenal worldwide is about a thousand times weaker than the energy released by the Chicxulub impactor. All in all, our natural cosmic environment featured hazards that exceeded those of human-made technologies by orders of magnitude.
This inference also applies to our upcoming technologies. There is a 9 orders-of-magnitude gap between the 20-watt power consumption of a natural human brain and the tens of gigawatts required to imitate the human brain in our most advanced artificial-intelligence (AI) centers. Given the excessive power requirements of AI centers, many startup companies popped up like mushrooms after the rain, with the promise to achieve gigawatt-scale power supply via nuclear fusion in hot plasmas that are confined magnetically. But so far, the only functioning fusion reactor locally is the Sun — where a hot hydrogen plasma is gravitationally confined to supply a power output of 4x10^{17} gigawatts, namely 17.6 orders of magnitude larger than the scale offered by these companies.
Throughout all of our communication channels with our cosmic neighborhood, we receive DMs suggesting a sense of cosmic modesty. Nevertheless, many earthlings choose to live life by looking down and arguing that we should spend all our resources on problems “down to Earth.” The missed perspective is that by looking up, we might realize a more inspiring meaning for our existence.
Instead of worrying about the risks from our technologies, we should ask how to use them in order to lift our aspirations to space and build habitats that take advantage of the huge amount of real-estate available to us beyond Earth. As I argued in my book titled Interstellar (available here), we should treat space habitats as “Noah’s Spaceships,” in analogy to the biblical story of Noah aiming to save life from the Great Flood. We do not know when other Chickxulub or Vredefort impactors will appear, but in the remaining time we must develop a Plan B for survival beyond Earth. Even if some of the extraterrestrial real estate had already been claimed by extraterrestrials, we should aspire to follow them and become an interstellar civilization. Traveling on Starship to occupy Mars is only the beginning of a bigger journey.
In a recent WORLD.MINDS forum organized by the brilliant Rolf Dobbeli, I asked Nobel Laureate James Robinson who wrote the book Why Nations Fail?, the fundamental question for space habitats: “How should we best organize an extraterrestrial society?” James answered that the answer depends on the values and traditions of the community involved in the journey, but one thing is non-negotiable: they must have a strong court system that maintains a fundamental rule of law.
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.
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