Humanity Must Become Interstellar, the Sooner the Better!
Lately, I came to realize that the present is worse than our recent past. This realization is corroborated by a number of facts and is not a nostalgic aberration. Humanity is entering a treacherous era with unprecedented existential risks in science and technology. Let me explain.
My immediate academic environment is crumbling. For one, students and postdocs are trading critical thinking for advice from artificial intelligence (AI) and this makes them dumber than the machine.
In the public domain, science is incorrectly perceived as an occupation of the elite rather than as a curiosity-driven discovery machine that is destined to improve our quality of life. This misperception is compounded by the malpractice of physicists who over the past half a century divorced themselves from societal impact by exploring speculative notions involving extra dimensions or the multiverse, with mathematical gymnastics that only served the purpose of impressing their peers. On top of that, the affluent class of tech billionaires, who profited financially from fundamental science, are investing nearly a trillion dollars in AI data centers and quantum technologies, while sidelining investments in fundamental research. They do not realize that watering the technological branches of the tree of knowledge while cutting funding for its scientific roots will deprive us from future fruits. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden as a consequence of their disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the present-day interpretation of this story, Adam and Eve are the tech billionaires and the forbidden fruit is the money made out of the tree of science.
Scientific breakthroughs are also in decline. Recent studies indicate that disruptive ideas in science are rarer than in decades past (as reported here). As a scientist with a steady stream of creative new ideas, I encounter frequently conservative gatekeepers and social media mobs who attempt to silence these ideas. Academic jealousy of unimaginative scientists was always in existence, but today it gets amplified by social media which drives regression to the mean. Priorities are mostly set by consensus documents which sideline innovators who take the path not taken, in the words of Robert Frost.
On top of that, political agenda tends to dominate over merit and excellence in selection of students, postdocs and faculty. I know of brilliant young scientists who in past decades would have easily secured a tenured appointment but today struggle to find a long-term position after multiple postdoctoral fellowship. Much of the political turmoil at my home institution, Harvard University, was triggered by colleagues from the humanities who damaged science funding through their political activities.
Biotechnology brings another existential risk. CRISPR and its successors are making the design of pathogens increasingly accessible. The combination of AI-assisted protein design and gene synthesis would allow the creation of novel pandemic agents.
If humanity gets through the next century without a civilizational catastrophe, we will have the opportunity to become an interstellar species. A single-planet civilization is one pandemic away from extinction. An interstellar civilization is much more difficult to extinguish. Venturing to space provide the insurance policy that transforms humanity from a fragile transient into a potentially enduring entity. Settling on a nearby rock, like the Moon or Mars, is not optimal because of the harsh living conditions there. It is much better to construct a kilometer-scale, habitable space platform artificially.
I am not naïve enough to imagine a political reality in which the 2.4 trillion dollars allocated each year to military budgets worldwide will be repurposed to space exploration out of an epiphany of our leaders. Instead, I am hoping that through my leadership of the Galileo Project or the UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S. Government, we will discover technological artifacts from interstellar civilizations. Such a finding might change our priority and inspire us to imitate our cosmic neighbors. Witnessing a more accomplished sibling in our family of intelligent civilizations will encourage us to do better.
To reach interstellar space at a low cost, we could potentially hitchhike kilometer-size interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS, which was moving at 58 kilometers per second — several times faster than our fastest interstellar probes so far. Such an object would bring us to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in 22,000 years. To cross the Milky Way galaxy will take a billion years. Synthetic biology might allow us to design astronauts that survive long interstellar journeys and adapt to the harsh conditions of space.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Based on the latest data (as summarized last night in my interview on NBC News here), 3I/ATLAS likely formed 10–12 billion years ago, implying that carbon-rich planetesimals formed well before our Solar System. The Milky Way contains about a hundred billion Sun-like stars with planets and most of them formed billions of years before the Sun. This means that there was sufficient time for the packages sent by interstellar species to reach us by now.
As I had mentioned in my opening remarks at the Disclosure Forum in the U.S. Senate two days ago (accessible here and expanded upon in my follow-up interview on The Hill here), the answer to Enrico Fermi’s paradox: “Where is everybody?” might be “Right here”. Now is the time to search for interstellar packages in our mailbox. If we find nothing, it would be disappointing to contemplate that we are the pinnacle of creation in such a vast universe.
Fundamentally, I am an optimist. I genuinely believe that the future can be better than the present or the past. This is because life is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mistake of Enrico Fermi is that he did not build observatories. He only asked his question without actively seeking the answer. In order to bring humanity to a better place, curiosity must be translated to action.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies, director of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former 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
