Following the debate four years ago on whether COVID-19 originated in a lab leak or an infected animal, a distinguished scientist said publicly: “I prefer not to know.” This confession from one of the most esteemed astrophysicists in the world shocked me since it is undoubtedly important for the sake of public health and safety to know whether the virus came from a lab leak. Finding the facts about the origin of the pandemic could lead to new policies that would prevent similar circumstances from happening again. As it turns out, just a few months ago classified U.S. State Department documents credibly suggested that COVID-19 originated from a lab related accident in Wuhan, China. If politicians are willing to study the facts, why would a leading scientist prefer not to do so?
After all, the circumstances that led to the Chernobyl environmental catastrophe were used by nuclear energy agencies to plan safer nuclear reactors and avoid similar radioactive contamination in the future. In analogy, prominent scientists should not promote ignorance but rather wish to know the scientific facts on any event that could be detrimental to public health. Why would anyone mix ulterior considerations into a scientific debate about global life-and-death risks?
Right there and then, I realized that there is a strong tendency for humans, not just scientists, to purposely avoid facing clarity based on factual information. This is evident in political affairs where rational guiding principles are often secondary to emotions. But science is better than politics, isn’t it?
Let me bring a few other examples.
Imagine a Machine Learning (ML) system that was trained on all records of human DNA, studied your genetic ancestry and your full medical history and listened 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to your personal life through your cell phone. Then, one morning this ML system informs you that it can forecast the longest time you have left to live your life, leaving out any unexpected accidents. Would you listen to the forecast or prefer not to know the forecast? The benefit of knowing would be in the ability to plan ahead and make the most of the time left in your life. The concern would be that knowing when the end is coming would spoil the joy and spontaneity of life.
Consider an even more mundane example. Suppose that the abilities of the human brain will one day be fully reproducible by artificial means. This is not fantasy, as this scenario might be realized in the coming decades, once neural networks of artificial intelligence will possess a similar number of parameters to the nearly trillion synaptic connections in the human brain. In that case, would humans accept the notion that they may have no free will? My guess is that most humans would prefer to maintain the illusion that they have free will, irrespective of whether artificially-made machines would show similar traits. Giving up the notion of free will might loosen the underpinning of the judicial system which holds individuals responsible for their actions. It could also strip away the magic from our spiritual life. Humans prefer to believe in magic because it offers a metaphysical lift out of common miseries.
Science could explain away magic by providing details on why it happened. Trained “magicians” know that they abide by the laws of physics. But in explaining away magic, science also empowers humans to create a new physical reality that would have appeared magical to those trapped in the past. The biblical Moses would have assigned superhuman God-like qualities to gadgets in today’s electronics stores.
Speaking about superhuman abilities enabled by science and technology, consider the follow-up question: “are we the smartest kid on our cosmic block?” Most scientists avoid seeking evidence in answer to this question. The mainstream priorities diminish the investment of funds or research time by labeling the question as “speculative” or “controversial”. This establishes a circular argument, because without seeking evidence we will never find it. This circularity is obviously recognized in our searches for the nature of dark matter or extra dimensions, which are funded by the mainstream even though they had not produced any positive results as of yet. Some prefer not to know whether we have neighbors because they fear from alien predators or the societal instability that would be triggered by this knowledge. However, not knowing what our cosmic environment entails will not rid us from our neighbors.
Experts often prefer to avoid new information because it creates a cognitive dissonance with their past set of beliefs. They keep away from information that does not flatter their ego or stature, which rest on past knowledge. After a colloquium about `Oumuamua, the first reported interstellar object from outside the Solar System, a colleague of mine said: “`Oumuamua is so weird … I wish it never existed.” In contrast, after hearing the colloquium I was eager to retrieve as much data as possible about `Oumuamua, whatever it is, out of raw curiosity.
The tendency to embrace ignorance was highlighted by George Orwell in his novel 1984, where the ruling party’s slogan was: “Ignorance is strength.”
Personally, I could not disagree more with that slogan. In my books, knowledge is the absolute measure of strength. Knowing that we are not at the center of the Universe allowed us to fly rockets to Mars, given that Mars does not orbit around the Earth. As a curious scientist with a beginner’s mind, I wish to know as much as possible about the world. I would love to know whether alien civilizations and their technological products are lurking in interstellar space, whether I have no free will, how much time I have left to live, or whether COVID-19 arrived at my doorstep from a lab leak.
Knowing all of that would have allowed me to plan better for the future. If I knew all these statements to be true, I would have taken a long vacation on a remote island. Instead, I am working around the clock to address one of these questions, the query about aliens. Time is short and we better focus on what matters the most.
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. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
