The half day I was privileged to spend at the world’s largest philosophy and music festival “How the Light Gets In” in London UK, was limited by my commitments to attend an off-world symposium in Schloss Elmau Germany on the previous day and to teach a class on `Radiative Process in Astrophysics’ at Harvard University on the following day. As a result, my festival schedule was packed with back-to-back engagements in a public lecture, a book signing event, a panel discussion and a filmed interview. The audience was brilliant and curious. Throughout all of my presentations, I emphasized that new scientific knowledge beyond our prejudice must be acquired through the hard work of collecting evidence. Science is a learning experience and anomalies are nature’s way of tutoring us about something that our past knowledge is missing.
Despite my many leadership roles over the past decade, I primarily enjoy being in the trenches and pursuing the tedious work of scientific research. This work culminates in multiple scientific papers every month. Last week, I proofread the extensive paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal “Chemical Geology”, which details findings from our Pacific Ocean expedition to retrieve material from the fireball site of the interstellar meteor, IM1. A few days later, I was working on the draft of an extensive paper that the Galileo Project research team is completing based on data from monitoring half a million objects in the sky with our observatory at Harvard University.
Nearly all the people who approached me during the festival expressed enthusiasm and support for my scientific endeavor. There were two exceptions, involving a young critic and a scientist, who injected doubts into the conversation. One noted: “Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute expressed doubts about your line of research.” However, the truth is that Seth wrote a Scientific American article supporting my research. The scientist asked: “Why don’t you share the expedition materials with other scientists?” However, the truth is that the analysis so far was performed in three different laboratories including: Ryan Weed’s laboratory in UC Berkeley, Roald Tagle’s laboratory at the Bruker Corporation in Berlin Germany, and Stein Jacobsen’s laboratory at Harvard University. Each of these three research teams include multiple scientists with a high-level of professional integrity, and I had not personally intervened in their laboratory work. When the critical scientist praised the Starshot Project as an example that I should emulate, I explained that I chaired the Scientific Advisory Board for this project.
Grenades of misinformation are often thrown by commentators who are not involved in the hard scientific work but instead express opinions. In the same spirit, New York Times journalists reported criticism about the expedition materials from scientists who did not have access to these materials. Controversy is good for clickbait, especially when it ignores facts. These same journalists chose not to report now about the peer-reviewed expedition paper that was just published, even though this paper provides a wealth of scientific information about the expedition materials. We are out of luck when misinformation is more attractive than information to some science journalists or bloggers.
I get solace from the vast majority of the festival attendees who displayed genuine curiosity. The following morning, I received an email from a Computational Neuroscientist in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London:
Hi Professor Loeb,
I attended your two sessions at “How The Light Gets In” this weekend together with my husband, toddler and baby. In fact, the main reason we attended the festival to begin with was to hear your thoughts on the current state of and next steps in looking for extraterrestrial life. I am so happy we did. Thank you for the engaging presentation, and enthusiasm coupled with seriousness in approaching such important (yet for some reason controversial) questions and for persisting on the academic path.
The main topic of my work is intelligence — and how this is modulated by things such as substances (e.g. psychedelics/other drugs), neurodegeneration and sleep. I study this in humans, but I am hoping that within my lifetime I will transition to studying aliens, and whatever ‘intelligence’ would mean in their case — as crazy as this might sound to the majority of individuals (at least to those working in my field). This has been my dream since forever. Your work is so important because it could open up the path for this dream to come true, for a whole new field of research to be born, and for humanity to benefit tremendously from new knowledge, even more of a sense of wonder and an exciting future. Please let me know if there are any avenues to get involved with this pursuit at the moment besides theoretical approaches.
Best wishes,
Maria
My response was short:
Dear Maria,
Wonderful to hear from you. I am so glad that you benefited from my presentations yesterday. Obviously, we need to collect more information about aliens before we can analyze their intelligence. I am currently engaged in the scientific search for that information. As of now, we can only imagine what aliens might be like, based on our experiences on Earth.
But just as physicists used laboratory experiments to learn about the laws of physics that rule the universe at large, we can use AI to learn about `Alien Intelligence’, a term which shares the same initials. Currently, AI research aims to align machines with humans but another line of research could be to study the entire range of possibilities spanned by superhuman intelligence that deviates from our intelligence in the way it operates. This would be crucial if we will ever engage in a dialogue with aliens.
Of course, other terrestrial animals may have intelligence different from ours but I am most curious about ‘superhuman intelligence’ which is more efficient in reaching its goals than we are.
Let me know if you have insights on this matter.
With warm regards,
Avi
Another message included an attachment of a colorful painting by Marc Chagall with hope for love, wisdom and peace. The sender noted: “My heart says … you are a real mensch.”
All in all, science can be exciting when curiosity-driven research resonates with the public’s interests. I rest my case.
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.
