The greatest pleasure that academia offers is the steady opportunity to collaborate with the young minds of students.
Students are not wedded to past knowledge and welcome open-minded thinking along paths not taken. They are not old enough to get attached to their ego or to build echo chambers that amplify their voice. They do not pretend to be experts on anything and possess a beginner’s mind. I enjoy collaborating with them because they rarely pretend to be the adults in the room, those who routinely dismiss new knowledge because of a cognitive dissonance. Every new day, students get better at what they do. Personally, I wish to stay forever in the company of students who learn without limit by being curious and honest. Getting better every day is what makes life worth living.
The Talmud (Ta’anit 7a) quotes Rabbi Chanina who confessed: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues and most from students.” In addition to this selfish benefit, there is a higher calling for collaborating with students to maintain the continuity of the scientific endeavor. Given our limited lifespan, each of us can only carry the burning flame in the torch of new scientific knowledge across a short path, but together with many generations of students we can carry the torch much farther.
The only way to advance humanity in the class of intelligent civilizations within the Milky-Way galaxy is to promote new scientific knowledge. Once we realize what lies beyond the Solar system, including intelligence like ours on exoplanets, we will recognize that our cosmic existence is not pointless and answer the most romantic question in science: “are we alone?” If we listen well enough, we might hear back the message: “welcome to our interstellar class of students of the cosmos.”
My colleague from the history department at Harvard University, Professor Erez Manela, wrote in response to one of my recent essays: “If we assume that the competitive instinct we see in humans that leads to wars but also to innovation is inherent to the logic of evolution (`survival of the fittest’), then the only way to remove it would be for some outside (alien?) force to manipulate the genome of humanity. That might create humans who were peaceful but also perhaps passive and unmotivated to do very much at all. I don’t know how the aliens could resolve this conundrum, unless of course they were a lifeform created by some unknown process other than evolutionary competition and therefore — somehow — developed motivations to strive toward truth and beauty that are not propelled by the logic of `survival of the fittest’. Here’s hoping!”. In response I wrote: “My take is different. No need to change the human genome. As soon as we encounter an extraterrestrial competition or threat, my hope is that all humans would feel connected as members of our terrestrial tribe. Instead of competing and engaging in conflicts on Earth, we might unite in our competition with the extraterrestrials.” Erez agreed and added: “I just hope that the competition that ensues is a peaceful and creative one.” To which I replied: “Indeed. Note that there is no need to wait for competition with aliens. The same social dynamics on Earth could be achieved if we establish another human society on Mars.”
Of course, interstellar competition is in a league of its own relative to solar system competitions, because there is much more real estate among the hundreds of billions of planetary systems in the Milky-Way. This is the message I conveyed in a recent four-hour interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, to be aired soon.
Getting back to Earth and terrestrial competitions, this weekend we held the annual Soccer Cup game of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC), for which I serve as director. This competition is traditionally held between two teams, one representing the students and the other featuring postdocs and faculty.
This time I convinced my daughter, Lotem, who is an undergraduate student at Harvard College, to join the student team. Lotem and the Astronomy graduate student Olga Borodina, both excellent defenders, helped the student team block many of the faculty attempts to score goals. As a result of their amazing defense, I personally was able to score only two goals, a third of my last year’s yield. When another brilliant student, Claire Lamman, scored a beautiful goal for the student team, I complimented her for the play. Claire responded: “In fact, I happen to be your academic granddaughter,” as she is a PhD student of my former graduate student, Daniel Eisenstein, who currently chairs the Harvard Astronomy department and played in the faculty team. I told Claire how proud I am of her accomplishments both on the soccer field and in science.
By the end of the game, the faculty team won the ITC Cup this year. After the collective group photo was taken by the ITC administrator, T.J. Martin, I advised the students: “Do not forget to apply to our faculty jobs, so that you could join the faculty team in future years.”
This was not an empty gesture. My sincere hope is that the future will be better than the past, for the sake of academia and humanity alike.
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.
