Following a public lecture yesterday, I was asked by Racheli Kreisberg what is the most effective method for inspiring innovation in science and technology in 2025 and beyond. Racheli added: “Can an ant discover a human as a more innovative creature, or can an ant not grasp that there is a creature which is more intelligent than it? Is our intelligence the limiting factor?” My answer to these follow-up questions was: “Indeed, ants will have a hard time understanding a higher intelligence and the same could apply to humans. The evidence might be around us. My hope is to find data for technologies that are not human-made even if we do not understand their purposes or meaning.”
Racheli’s overarching question about innovation is not only relevant to the competitive context of advancing the technological superiority of a nation relative to adversarial nations, but also to the cooperative context of advancing fundamental science and promoting the prosperity of humans wherever they might live: on Earth, the Moon, Mars and beyond.
There are a number of areas in urgent need of innovation. Let me mention just a couple of examples. First and foremost is artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. In the past, we created technological objects that are under human control. The steering wheel of a car allows the driver to control the car. However, once AI develops superhuman cognitive abilities, the AI system might control its user rather than the other way around. This could generate anxiety in all aspects of human-AI interactions. Innovation is required to avoid the associated mental health crisis. In the longer-term future, innovation might lead to gadgets that reproduce copies of themselves out of raw materials in their environment, just like the seeds of the dandelion flower. Such a capability could have major implications for space exploration. If there were even one technological civilization in the Milky-Way galaxy that was capable of manufacturing self-replicating probes, it could have filled the Milky-Way galaxy with such probes in just a billion years, using conventional chemical propulsion.
Innovation is also needed to alleviate the environmental damage of our industries. The solution will not arise from reading Henry Thoreau’s book `Walden’, where he says: “We can never have enough of nature.” The solution will also not arise from acts of virtue signaling, like Greta Thunberg’s refusal to fly on airplanes. A far more effective approach is to use innovation in science and technology to minimize the negative effects of existing technologies. Metaphorically, the train of technological progress cannot be stopped but it can be fueled in better ways. Despite Thoreau’s romantic sentiments, nature is under no obligation to match our wishes and keep humanity alive. In fact, Earth went through global ice ages and major asteroid impacts with catastrophic consequences for life. Within a fifth of its current age, Earth will lose all liquid water reservoirs on its surface due to the natural brightening of the Sun. Scientific innovation can shield us from existential threats, irrespective of whether they are natural or artificial in origin. Nostalgia for a past with muted technological abilities is not the solution. Just as with riding a bicycle, a technological civilization can maintain balance only by moving forward.
Given the existential need for scientific and technological innovations, it is important for policy makers to recognize how best to foster it. From my forty years of experience as a scientist, I know that innovation stems from brainstorming sessions that attempt to explain puzzling data or solve a practical problem that was never addressed before.
The historical role model is Bell Labs, which employed top level researchers and tasked them with solving practical problems in communication and electronics. The Bell Labs culture gave birth to many scientific breakthroughs that won Nobel prizes, as well as many technological inventions which resolved practical challenges and maintained the leadership of the U.S. in science and technology.
Here are a few discoveries from Bell Labs that any first-class university would have been thrilled to be credited for. In 1928, John Johnson measured the thermal noise in a resistor, which was theoretically explained subsequently by Harry Nyquist. In 1927, Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer discovered electron diffraction, which enabled solid-state electronics and for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1931, Karl Jansky founded radio astronomy, by discovering radio emission from the Milky-Way center while analyzing static on long-distance shortwave communication. In 1947, the transistor was invented in Bell Labs by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley. In 1948, Claude Shannon published seminal work on information theory in the Bell System Technical Journal. A year later, Shannon founded modern cryptography. In 1954, the first solar cell was invented at Bell Labs. In 1958, Arthur Schawlow and Charlie Townes wrote the first paper to describe the laser. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background as residual noise in a horn antenna that was developed for communication, for which they received the Nobel Prize. In 1985, laser cooling was used to slow and manipulate atoms by Steven Chu’s team, for which he received the Nobel Prize.
Why would innovation blossom in commercial entities like Bell Labs and not strictly in academia? After all, academic tenure is meant to encourage pursuing blue sky research, taking risks and exploring virgin territories without concerns for job security. There are at least three factors which explain this phenomenon. First, practical challenges within the commercial sector stimulate creative thinking in the context of problems that are important for society. Innovators thrive there because they can visualize the benefits and relevance of their inventions to society. The practical success of a real system is far more rewarding than the race to show off who is smarter in academia. Second, academic researchers are funded through committees in federal agencies such as NSF, NASA, NIH or DOE, whose members are reluctant to spend taxpayer’s money on risky projects. Committees often prefer to amplify existing echo chambers and fail to recognize the truth apparent to revenue-oriented companies: even if only one out of a hundred risky paths leads to a major breakthrough — the benefits from that successful path could potentially more than pay for all the unsuccessful paths. This shortcoming of academia can be overcome by populating funding committees with innovators and allocating a substantial fraction of federal funding to risky projects. Third, highly profitable companies often have more funds to spend on innovative research. For the last two reasons, all of my creative research over the past decade was funded by private foundations or donors.
The success of Bell Labs suggests that in order to foster innovation, one needs to select a community of brilliant individuals and task them with the challenges of solving practical problems or explaining new data.
Personally, I am particularly passionate about restoring the approach of Bell Labs to disruptive innovation by bringing together exceptional scientists and technologists and fostering risk taking for technologies of the future. In particular, we could benefit from a quantum leap in our abilities if the Galileo Project under my leadership discovers artifacts from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that had millions or billions of years of innovation.
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.
