In Oscar Wilde’s play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” Lord Darlington observes: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” I am proud to be one of the characters looking at the stars. In fact, I get paid to do so.
Two years ago, I saw many stars in the background of a completely dark sky during a visit to the brilliant entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson at his home in Necker Island, where I gave a talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This morning, a news report in Futurism, titled “Human Intelligence Sharply Declining,” listed various indicators of a recent downturn in human intelligence and associated this trend with the increase in digital screen time triggered by social media and artificial intelligence (AI). With this perspective, seeking inspiration from a higher intelligence in interstellar space was never more urgent. Gladly, I will be visiting Richard again next week to report on the latest updates from the scientific data collected over the past two years by the Galileo Project which is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial technological objects near Earth.
On my way to Necker Island two years ago, the airline lost my luggage. As a result, I wore the clothes of the Island’s maintenance team. At dinner, one of the attendees confused me for a kitchen worker and asked me to take the empty dishes off the table. In my lecture the following day, I expressed gratitude to be confused for a member of Richard’s team. A promotion from the cloudy sky of the Harvard College Observatory to the dark sky over the British Virgin Islands would have benefitted me with a better view of the stars.
But is a better understanding of the sky relevant for helping us with pressing “down to Earth” problems?
The answer is a resounding yes. Isaac Newton’s laws of mechanics were inspired by data from the sky on the dynamics of planets around the Sun. Currently, these laws play a critical role in guiding the construction of bridges, cars and airplanes. Understanding nuclear physics in the interior of stars enables nuclear reactors which will be critical in powering future AI systems. Even the minor updates introduced to Newtonian gravity on Earth by Albert Einstein a century ago, are currently critical for GPS navigation. But the future might be far better than the past if we ever discover extraterrestrial technologies. These might promote our own future technologies, as long as we will be curious enough to learn from extraterrestrial civilizations that were born billions of years before us.
When thinking “down to Earth,” we focus on oil and gas reservoirs as our energy sources. However, the most abundant matter and energy resources in the universe are still unknown, labeled as “dark matter” and “dark energy”. These constituents are abundant all around us, but we do not know how to harvest them. We operate like accountants who are obsessed with an item that makes 5% of the cosmic mass budget and ignore the remaining 95%. Even within this 5% budget item, we tend to focus on our terrestrial rock, which is only 3 millionths of the mass of the Sun, which itself is a trillionth of the mass of our Milky-Way galaxy, which itself is ten trillionths of the total mass within the observable Universe, which itself is less than ten trillionths of the mass beyond our cosmic horizon. The last two facts were inferred based on the brightness fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang. Our body is mostly water molecules made of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen was made in the Big Bang and the oxygen was made in the interiors of stars. Although we understand the process by which stars formed, we have no clue how the Big Bang emerged.
Yes, we can live in ignorance just like microbes did for billions of years before us, but the curiosity to understand where we came from is what makes us human. Since we arrived late in cosmic history and we are not at the center of the Universe, it is evident that the cosmic play is not about us. By focusing on “down to Earth” matters, we might be missing other characters of the cosmic play who could tell us what the play is about.
The “Tech Support” of entrepreneurs in the White House correctly highlights the critical role that AI will play in the future of technology, entrepreneurship, national security, health and our quality of life. However, the atomic-scale chips that enable the state-of-the-art AI systems are manufactured based on our understanding of quantum mechanics which was discovered by curiosity-driven research a century ago. In the absence of advocacy for fundamental science, we will lose our ability to develop the industries of the future a century from now.
My message to Richard is simple: we must look at the stars in order to solve problems down to Earth. In addition to the practical benefits from doing so, we might also learn about our cosmic roots. A census of dead technological civilizations on exoplanets could also give us tips on how to avoid existential threats beyond asteroids or climate change.
As evident from the vantage point of the British Virgin Islands, it is easier to notice stars on a dark background. This serves as a metaphor to Earth, which may be viewed as a virgin island that could sparkle when seeded by alien intelligence during the looming dark ages of human intelligence.
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.
