Why do animals join herds? Because a coordinated effort can be more than the sum of its parts. Synchronized action leads to a stronger punch. It also compensates for the weakness of an individual by support from stronger group members.
This rationale explains herds in the wilderness as well as on social media.
An unappreciated fact is that herds greatly benefit from an individual who wanders away from the beaten path to explore new opportunities. A scout with a beginner’s mind could alert the herd of a looming existential risk or could recognize new resources on “The Road Not Taken,” in the words of the poet Robert Frost. Deviant opinions often trigger fury in herd members who are used to conventional thinking. The anger stems from a cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort herd members feel when being informed about a realization that does not align with their herd mentality, egos or traditional beliefs.
In the history books of the Universe, humanity will be remembered as a herd of humans that was mainly obsessed with capturing resources on planet Earth. Most of the herd members argued repeatedly that effort should be dedicated to problems on Earth. But the reality is that there is much more real estate beyond Earth. Think of a herd of antelopes grazing the yellow grass in a small region of the savannah, when far away there are vast spaces with better food.
The small group of human scouts that look out at interstellar opportunities are called astrophysicists. Gladly, I am one of them. This scout job carried a high societal status in the Mayan culture, but this was because the sky positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars were thought to determine the outcome of wars. Today’s politics is not much better, as leading nations regard space as the arena for gaining strategic advantages in future wars. Political attention to space is still guided by terrestrial wars.
Alerting humanity to the opportunities of searching for other intelligent civilizations in space gets scouts like myself into trouble because of the cognitive dissonance that this proposal creates. Mainstream astrophysicists insist on searching for extraterrestrial microbial life because of the argument that it is likely more abundant. But the accessibility of data depends not just on how abundant the targets are, but also on how easy it is to detect them. Surely, it is easier to identify cars than ants on a distant road, even if there are many more ants than cars passing through it.
Extraordinary evidence is best discovered by curious scouts who look out without denying or compartmentalizing unwelcome thoughts.
In my recent TED talk, I argued that we should seek the pack of all intelligent civilizations in the cosmos. By joining forces with them, we can become more powerful than we are on our own. Many people ask: “where is everybody?” but they do not invest time in scientific scouting for technological signatures of extraterrestrials. Talking or philosophizing about extraterrestrials is no better than coming up with science fiction scenarios. A real scout must separate science from fiction by searching for evidence.
Evidence about what lies beyond the Solar System is not difficult to retrieve. There are millions of ton-mass objects within the Earth’s orbit around the Sun that originated from outside the Solar System. They were not studied so far because they do not reflect enough sunlight to be visible with our best telescopes. One of them collided with Earth on January 8, 2014 and its easily visible fireball indicated an extremely high speed and material strength of this interstellar meteor. I am currently leading a new Galileo Project expedition to retrieve large pieces from its crash site in the Pacific Ocean.
Finding the herd of intelligent civilizations in the Milky-Way would educate us about their history. This can be done by searching for material relics, space trash or functional devices near Earth, and mega-structures, artificial lights or industrial pollution on exoplanets.
Knowledge of other civilizations like ours would magnify our power. However, we must keep in mind that scientific knowledge is not acquired by beliefs or opinions, but rather by the collection of evidence. Having a hallucinating scout is worse than having no scout at all.
The challenge in acquiring a herd identity across the cosmos is set by its enormous scale of time — longer by a factor of a hundred million than the human lifespan, and the enormous scale of the observable Universe — a tenth of an octillion (1 followed by 26 zeros) times the size of the human body. The mismatch of scales between our daily experiences and the cosmos at large, implies that the most relevant data for answering the question “where is everybody?” lies far away or in our distant past. We are like a colony of ants wondering about other colonies in the vastness of the African savannah.
Accessing relevant data about our pack of intelligent civilizations requires exceptional patience, perhaps immortality. Gladly, there is ongoing research on extending longevity; in a recently published paper, scientists have identified a molecule that diminishes age-related inflammation and enhances brain and muscle function. Here’s hoping that scouts like myself will live long enough to prove that humanity is not alone.
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.
