On Disclosure Day: Keep Your Inspiration from the Stars and Your Common Sense Down to Earth
Albert Einstein wisely said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Steven Spielberg’s movie “Disclosure Day” will premiere next week. When asked about the significance of Spielberg’s work, I noted that its main virtue is in expanding the public’s imagination of the unknown.
The U.S. is investing 700 billion dollars this year in data centers, which represent all the knowledge in our world. However, we must invest even more money in expanding our imagination beyond the boundaries of what we conceive as our `world’.
Right now, our `world’ is everything learned on this Earth. Given that there are over a billion Earth-Sun analogs in our Milky-Way galaxy alone and of order a trillion galaxies in the observable volume of the Universe, with at least 64 billion times similar volumes beyond our cosmic horizon (as the cosmic microwave background anisotropies show no evidence for a drastic change in cosmic conditions out to at least 4,000 times our horizon distance), most real estate is beyond Earth. Hence, most knowledge is about what happens beyond Earth. If we wanted to build data centers that would encompass all the knowledge that exists out there, we would have needed to invest 700 billion times a billion times a trillion times 64 billion dollars. This totals 4.5x10^{43} dollars.
In the language of basketball players, the difference between astronomy and politics can be regarded as: “keeping our eyes on the court, rather than the audience.” The information content of the Universe at large is far richer than anything else on Earth.
The argument that humanity should become interstellar is amplified by adding the dimension of time, because the Sun will burn up all human constructions on Earth within 7.6 billion years. This caps the lifespan of all human constructions on Earth, including the largest monuments that our trillionaires build to carve their name in stone — which are nothing but sandcastles to be washed by waves of the solar envelope. All material on Earth and the Moon will spiral by drag on the expanded solar envelope and get incorporated into a dense metallic remnant, a white dwarf packing 60% of the mass of the Sun within roughly the current size of Earth.
Humanity will be remembered in cosmological history books, where time is measured in billions of years, only if it will venture towards the stars. We must keep our inspiration from the stars. This is what Steven is communicating through his art and what I communicate through my scientific writings.
What distinguishes me from Steven is that I rein in my imagination by the laws of physics. The reason is simple. I am aware of numerous experiments which follow these laws without a hint for a deviation, even after the investment of decades of research time and billions of dollars in related experiments. Physicists are eager to discover deviations from the standard model of physics, such as faster than light travel or extra dimensions. But no hint for such deviations were found in numerous laboratories around the world so far. As a result, when observing a fuzzy video of a source of light moving in strange ways in the sky, we should not argue that it implies extra dimensions or travel through wormholes. Such macroscopic entities would have produced strong signals in laboratory experiments long ago, including the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave observatories. We must collect better data in order to suggest that it may unravel new physics.
In simple words, we must keep our common sense grounded down to Earth. Any object moving highly supersonically through Earth’s atmosphere would produce a fireball surrounded by a blast wave. Indeed, a sonic boom was heard all over the Boston area on May 30, 2026 when a 1.6-meter sized bolide moved a hundred times faster than sound in the sky. Any highly-supersonic object with a solid surface that reflects light and is documented by cameras must also interact electromagnetically with the atmosphere and generate a fireball.
Magical thinking is not allowed in describing conditions that were well studied in past experiments. The laws of physics are different from societal laws: all the atoms in the Universe obey the laws of electromagnetism without exception. Our legal system punishes people who violated our societal laws, but no legal system is required to enforce the laws of physics throughout the cosmos.
President Trump’s directive to release data on UFOs, namely objects that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot identify, is a blessing for both national security and science. My down-to-Earth null hypothesis is that all UFOs represent human-made technologies and therefore must be studied as matters of national security. When finding an ant in the kitchen, I get alarmed because the finding implies many more ants hidden from view in the kitchen sink. Similarly, for every Chinese spy balloon that is shot down or a swarm of orbs that is being noticed in the UFO file release, there may be many balloons and drones that are missed while spying on the U.S.
We must identify the nature of all UFOs to secure the safety of citizens and our strategic assets against adversarial nations. But if one out of a million technological objects happened to be extraterrestrial in origin — this would represent the biggest discovery ever made in the history of science. Multiplying the small likelihood of finding an extraterrestrial technological artifact by its huge potential impact on the stock market or societal unrest, implies that we must take its possible existence seriously. This rationale echoes Pascal’s Wager about God.
In summary, as Spielberg suggests through his artistic work — we should keep our inspiration from the stars by using our imagination, but my cautionary remark is that we should also maintain our common sense down to Earth based on the laws of physics. A horse can run very fast even while wearing reins. UFOs can be extraterrestrial even within the known laws of physics. When Disclosure Day actually takes place in reality, we might realize that the universe is more imaginative than script writers in Hollywood because it is capable of surprising us even within the reins of the laws of physics.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head 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
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