Whether You Believe in God or Not, You Should Welcome Aliens!
In an interview with Brad Smith on iHeart Radio this morning, I was asked about the impact of discovering aliens on religion.
My response had two parts: one for secular people and the other for religious people.
From a secular perspective, God represents an entity with superhuman capabilities. Such an entity could exist within our Universe in the form of an extraterrestrial civilization that exceeds our abilities by orders of magnitude. Humanity just had one century of science and technology since the discovery of quantum mechanics. Another civilization might be billions of years ahead of us because most stars formed billions of years before the Sun. But even if another civilization is similar in age to ours, the cognitive abilities of its biological brains or artificial intelligence products might be superior to ours. Visitation of our home planet would select the most accomplished civilizations, those who managed to venture beyond their birth planetary system to interstellar space. We have not accomplished this feat yet, as the Voyager spacecraft will exit the outer edge of the Oort Cloud only in 30,000 years. An encounter with the products of a highly-advanced civilization near Earth would bring a sense of humility to secular people, akin to the humble state-of-mind of religious believers.
On the other hand, religions define God as the superhuman entity which created the Universe and everything within it. In that case, imagining God as a parent that can attend to only one child is a very limited view. The birth of my second daughter did not take away any of the love that I have to my first daughter. Surely God can do better and attend to numerous siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations within the Universe at large. Finding our siblings will fill believers with an enhanced sense of awe at all of God’s intelligent creations, akin to finding a multitude of paintings from the same artist.
Alien visitors are likely to possess a more advanced understanding of science and technology than we do because they arrived at our cosmic backyard before we reached their backyard. Meeting their products would be a learning experience for us. It will inspire us to shift priorities from conflicts over territories on our tiny rock towards space exploration. What could be a more uplifting experience for humanity?
In his 1670 book Pensées (Thoughts) — which I read as a teenager — the French philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal posed a wager:
“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”
While Pascal referred to God, his wager can be paraphrased in reference to an advanced alien civilization:
“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that highly-advanced aliens exist. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain a lot; if you lose, you lose very little.”
Among all scientific inquiries, the discovery of aliens would have the biggest impact on the future of humanity. Therefore, the related search must be pursued by the mainstream of science. Without investing major resources in the related research, we might not find conclusive evidence.
The discovery of a cosmic neighbor is likely to bring together all humans, because we all share the same house. The encounter might usher in a Messianic era of world peace — as imagined by traditional religions, except that the Messianic message here arrives from another star. As evident already, the UAP disclosure effort is unique in bringing together politicians on both sides of the political aisle in the U.S. Congress.
From a scientific perspective, we have learned over the past decade that about a tenth of the Sun-like stars have an Earth-mass planet at roughly the same separation (as summarized in Figure 2 here). Assuming that a substantial portion of these planets have an atmosphere and liquid water on their surface, billions of Earth analogs could have developed intelligent beings like us. Common sense suggests that similar circumstances lead to similar outcomes.
In addition, we know that most stars formed billions of years before the Sun. As a result, most extraterrestrial civilizations could have launched interstellar probes billions of years ago. It takes Voyager-like probes less than a billion years to cross the Milky-Way disk of stars. Therefore, it is completely reasonable for us to find near Earth interstellar objects of technological origin that targeted the habitable zone of the Sun.
In contrast to fleeting communication signals that travel at the speed of light, physical interstellar objects are trapped by the Milky-Way gravity and accumulate over time. Technological devices might cluster around the habitable zone of stars for the same reason that bees seek resources around flowers. Interstellar probes could outlast the age of their senders.
The only way to find out whether we are being visited is to use cameras, telescopes and space missions to examine anomalous near-Earth objects that could be of extraterrestrial technological origin. Any such finding would have a huge impact on the future of humanity. Multiplying the small probability of finding alien technology among the natural interstellar rocks and icebergs near Earth by the huge impact that such a finding will have on the future of humanity, suggests that we must engage in the search. This is the reason that I am leading the Galileo Project at Harvard University in search of extraterrestrial artifacts.
The public understands this sentiment because it makes sense. Academia is slower to adapt to it. Most astronomers are willing to search for microbial life, but at the same time they are sidelining the allocation of major resources to the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
It makes no sense for the U.S. government to hold in secrecy any information on non-human-made technologies, for the same reason that parents should not hide information about the existence of neighbors from their family members. If we have a neighbor, all humans should be aware of it because that neighbor could affect our life. It is possible that the visitors will have hostile intentions. But in that case, they could have killed us a while ago and there is not much we can do if they are far more advanced. I prefer an optimistic outlook.
Here’s hoping that a knock on our front door by a superhuman entity would quiet down all loud conflicts within our family of humans.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former 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.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
