The Longevity Game: An Addendum
Following my latest essay, titled “The Longevity Game,” I received an email from Arjan Singh, who wrote:
“Dear Professor Loeb,
I hope this message finds you well.
I just wanted to say how much I deeply appreciated your recent piece reflecting on survival, impermanence, and the cosmic future. It was both humbling and expansive — a rare blend of poetic insight and scientific clarity. The way you wove Ecclesiastes with astrophysical realities gave a profound sense of scale and meaning, even in the face of meaninglessness itself.
Your writing sparked a few questions that I hope might resonate with your curiosity […]”
Arjan’s insightful questions are attached below, along with my answers:
If nothing in our universe can ultimately survive the heat death, is there a way for advanced civilizations to escape into other universes — perhaps via artificially created baby universes or cosmological tunneling? Could such a feat be the final act of cosmic engineering?
Yes, that may be possible. To accomplish this task, we will need to master quantum gravity, both theoretically and experimentally. Even though we found this challenge difficult over the past century, we might accomplish it over a period of trillions of years.
Do you think consciousness could one day evolve to exist independently of physical matter? Might intelligent life transcend biology and even physics itself, existing as pure information or quantum patterns beyond entropy?
No, I believe consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon associated with the complexity of the human brain. My view can be tested as soon as we develop AI systems with a similar number of parameters.
Is the drive to survive simply an evolutionary instinct, or does it hint at something deeper embedded in the fabric of life and intelligence? Could it be a kind of cosmic imperative?
Survival is simply a reward given to those who remain with the privilege to write history.
If a civilization reached the end of time with full awareness, do you believe they would choose to persist as long as possible — or accept the end gracefully, even ceremoniously?
My hope is that they will seek immortality. This will give a bigger purpose to the Universe.
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.
