Recently, a group of Jewish students at Harvard University complained that they do not have suitable representation within the traditional Harvard Hillel and requested an anti-Zionist Rabbi who will represent their community of anti-Zionist Jews.
Traditionally, Jews had a menu of options for possible national and religious identities. These Jewish Harvard students did not find in this menu an option that allows them to organize animosity towards the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. Anti-Zionism denies the Jewish people’s right for self-determination at their ancestral biblical land in the form of the state of Israel, approved by U.S. President Truman and the United Nations in 1947.
These students live in a virtual reality shaped by their own social media. But the state of Israel already exists for 76 years in the physical reality that we all share. Under these circumstances, the public denouncement of the legitimacy of an existing state to exist can only be regarded as advocacy to undermine global world order. The surprising element here is that this destructive sentiment is originating within the community that it calls against. Perhaps I should not be surprised by this phenomenon. After all, no women organization denounced the rape of Israeli women in the wake of the October 7, 2023 brutal attack. As an alternative mindset, some young people promoted a video of the “Letter to America” delivered by Osama Bin Laden against the U.S. on TikTok. In an anonymous letter self-attributed to “Harvard Students” which was emailed to over 400 other faculty members after the terror attack, the authors admitted that “There are those in the Free Palestine movement who will accept nothing less than total reconquest, total evacuation, or total eradication of the Jews.” This led me to ask Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle Corporation — a computer technology company: “How can we educate the young generation to recognize the difference between forces that aim to destroy Western civilization and the values that will make it blossom?”
Let me address my concern with a metaphor borrowed from the realm of physics.
In my class on `Radiative Processes in Astrophysics,’ I derived the power emitted by a collection of accelerated charges. The power scales as the square of each charge times the square of its acceleration. This implies that if each charge emits independently, the total power equals the number of particles times the power emitted by each of them. However, if the charges are bunched and move coherently, they behave as a single cloud of charge and the total power equals the square of the number of bunched particles times the power of each. This state-of-affairs has important implications in physics and in society.
In the context of physics, Free Electron Lasers are devices composed of bunches of electrons which are deflected up and down by a wiggler, an alternating magnet array along their path. These lasers emit coherent radiation with a total power that scales as the square of the number of electrons in each bunch.
The wiggler is analogous to the tumultuous political challenges that human society encounters throughout history. In this context, collections of people with a constructive mindset promote much more powerful programs than a similar-size community with conflicting opinions that interfere with each other.
At the opening of a public appearance at the Boston Museum of Science yesterday, I noted that I am happy with my personal life but am worried that humanity is going down the drain. My solution is shock therapy, triggered by the discovery of an uplifting messenger from a successful civilization that was born near another star. That civilization could inspire us to do better than the guidance we get from our politicians or the virtual realities promoted on social media. I noted that there are parts of democratic societies which advocate for self-destruction by promoting violence and conflicts. This makes our collective power incoherent. Civilizations which survived for a longer term could advise us how to increase the power of humanity by acting coherently.
The interstellar lesson to humanity might be simple: we better get our act together since we are all in the same boat — the Earth — sailing through interstellar space. We have much more to lose than to gain by undermining the fabric that supports our fragile existence.
Humanity can reach great heights if we will only cooperate and work constructively with each other. Choosing to live coherently rather than incoherently is a lifestyle choice. In the grand scheme of the cosmos, only the fittest intelligent civilizations survive over millions of years. Our fundamental choice will dictate the lifespan of our civilization in the Drake equation.
What will the surface of Earth look like in a million years? Will it be an abandoned desert, like the surface of Mars, with no visible signs of life, except for a few scattered pamphlets of self-hate from the last protestors on that habitable planet?
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.
