The Training Set for Our Future Scientific Discoveries
We are all born ignorant, without a `life manual’ handed to us by the obstetrician in the delivery room.
Subsequently, we learn that the Earth under our feet is just a rock — formed 4.54 billion years ago out of debris from the formation of the Sun. In the sky above our head, there are as many as 10^{22} observable Sun-like stars, and likely many more outside our cosmic horizon. The only way to believe that we are the pinnacle of creation is by ignoring these facts.
In the marketplace of ideas, there are many people who offer us shortcuts to knowledge. Consuming what they say rather than following the evidence resembles the health risk from consuming junk food. The `sugar rush’ from junk ideas may feel good at first, but it is destined to damage our wellbeing in the long run.
Evidence-based science offers the best opportunity for us to learn. But the pride and prejudice of dogmatic scientists can block that opportunity. As gatekeepers to new knowledge, scientists have the power to suppress innovation. With great powers comes great responsibility.
The efficiency of the scientific engine is measured by the number of breakthrough discoveries made relative to the resources allocated to research. Historical evidence suggests that disruptive science has been declining in recent decades, despite the increases in resources and size of the scientific community. Large communities are dominated by regression to the mean and foster a dogmatic culture that bets on one possibility as the most likely to succeed. The reduced efficiency of scientific discovery in recent decades begs an alternative approach which spans a variety of ways to explore the unknown.
Reality is under no obligation to make us proud of ourselves. There are countless ways by which reality could have flattered our ego. We could have been at the center of the universe, we could have lived forever, we could have known what happened before the Big Bang or what the nature of 95% of the cosmic mass budget is. But we don’t.
It is difficult to forecast the nature of the unknown. The mainstream of the astronomy and physics communities invested billions of dollars over the past four decades in the search for dark matter but did not find it. The mainstream has no clue what dark energy is either, nor how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity into a theory that explains what happened before the Big Bang or what replaces black hole singularities. In a more `down to Earth’ context, the mainstream insists that the existence of intelligent beings around other stars is an extraordinary claim, and that we should spend more than 10 billion dollars over the next two decades on the search for microbes while sidelining funding to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
However, in order to increase the efficiency of scientific discoveries, we must adopt multiple strategies to explore the unknown. We should not only rely on the mathematical virtuosity of string theorists in figuring out quantum gravity. Instead, we should also foster new experiments to detect quantum gravity effects that will guide us to a falsifiable theory of dark energy, black holes and the Big Bang. As I noted in a recent paper with Mark Hertzberg, it is possible that dark energy is explained by the known constants of nature. Similarly, we should also fund the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures which are easier to detect than the chemical fingerprints of microbes. Discovering our siblings among the stars would imply to religious people that human civilization is not a member of a single-child family under God. The more extraterrestrial siblings we have — the better, because we could learn from their accomplishments.
Science holds the potential for amplifying rather than suppressing spirituality. Studying the inner workings of the human brain is not dissimilar from figuring out the inner workings of an artificial neural network (AI) as a token of appreciation for the process that created it. Similarly, understanding the cosmos should only enhance the sense of awe that religious scientists feel towards God. Real love involves the desire to learn as much as possible about the subject of this love. If you are not interested in the details of a loved one, you might be in love with a figment of your imagination or perhaps with yourself.
But there are also practical benefits to learning. The more we learn, the better we get at coping with the challenges of life. The technologies which make our quality of life better than that of past generations are based on the scientific knowledge we gathered over the past century. The longest-lived human so far, Jeanne Calment, had the privilege to exist for only 122.45 years, less than one part in a hundred million of the age of the Universe, 13.8 billion years. But AI-assisted medicine may allow us to increase the human lifespan to a more meaningful fraction of the age of the Universe. If that happens, future generations might benefit from watching a 4D movie of the Universe in a high-resolution of 3.2 gigapixels from telescopes like the Rubin Observatory, for many millennia rather than just a decade as we currently plan. In order to acquire new knowledge from this movie, we must be open minded to anomalies, namely facts that do not line up with our expectations. Revolutionary discoveries are by definition unexpected.
With this perspective, we must accept with humility the existential truth that our life is a learning experience. We can do better by recognizing three foundational principles: (1) What we know is work in progress; (2) Learning is propelled by new data on anomalies, gathered out of raw curiosity; and (3) The roadblocks to learning are the pride and prejudice of gatekeepers who are connected to their ego or their academic community more than to nature.
In an email exchange with the Galileo Project manager, Zhenya Shmeleva, I noted yesterday: “The best is yet to come. I want to be remembered for my future work. The past is just a training set for our future scientific discoveries.”
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.
