One of the biggest challenges we face today is who to trust. The news media is colored by opinions and tribal biases, academic narratives are tuned to a political agenda, and virtual realities take over social media. The main policy goal is how to facilitate the “evidence-based reality” as a unifying theme in our collective knowledge and societal fabric, with fact-checking being the foundation for politics and science alike.
Soon enough, artificial intelligence systems will fake human text or voice interactions and require new verification protocols for our phone conversations. How can we protect our civilization from riding off the cliff into the abyss of misinformation?
Being a scientist who witnessed recent reports about an interstellar meteor being a truck on major news outlets, this concern touches an existential nerve for me. As I wrote to the editors of the New York Times: “If a science journalist can be so careless about official evidence reported by the U.S. Space Command, how can we trust anything we read about politics?”
Romance is a cure for anxiety. My personal hope is that receiving a love letter from an extraterrestrial civilization will save humanity and bring it back to its senses. “Are we alone?” is the most romantic question in science.
Enrico Fermi echoed this question by asking: “Where is everybody?” This is what every lonely person asks. The alternative “can-do attitude” we offer to lonely people, suggests that they invest time in searching for a partner. It is presumptuous to assume that you are so attractive, that without any effort the mere fact of having no partners means that there is nobody for you out there. There could be many who are not aware of your loneliness. To eliminate the feeling of loneliness, it is your duty to find these potential partners.
Fermi did not follow this advice by building a telescope in search of cosmic partners. After his question was raised, Frank Drake led the SETI community to engage in waiting for a phone call. However, there is another, potentially better, way to conduct the search. Our state-of-the-art telescopes and satellites discovered large interstellar objects from outside the solar system over the past decade. Surprisingly, the interstellar meteor, IM1, and the pancake-shaped object `Oumuamua, appeared anomalous in their physical properties. Consequently, I am leading the Galileo Project in search for interstellar objects of an extraterrestrial technological origin. Before expressing an opinion on whether we are alone, it is our duty to invest billions of dollars in a massive search for cosmic partners.
This high price tag is set by analogous searches in experimental physics. In recent decades, the physics community invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter. Surely, finding a cosmic partner would be far more consequential to humanity’s future than the search for the nature of dark matter. Since most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, finding a package from a more advanced scientific civilization might teach us about insights and technologies that represent our future. The new knowledge could inspire us to change our priorities from territorial disputes on the small rock we live on and explore the vast real estate offered in interstellar space. In other words, they would reshape our science and politics.
But most importantly, the encounter with a real extraterrestrial partner and not virtual partners in dating apps on digital screens, could focus our attention on the physical reality that we all share. Finding aliens for real would be the biggest science story in human history.
As the mathematician Blaise Pascal argued in his wager from 1660: “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering … Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.” His argument was constructed about God. But we must keep in mind that an alien civilization with quantum gravity engineers that know how to create a baby universe in the laboratory, could apply for the job description of God.
Often, it is easier to fall in love with someone who is better than us. This is who we choose to trust out of love. Whether our partner truly exists in interstellar space is the most romantic question in science.
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.
