Tomorrow, I am scheduled for a public interview with the distinguished science journalist, Joshua Foer, on the topic: “Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Jews”.
It is reasonable to imagine the absence of antisemitism in interstellar space. If aliens or their artifacts arrive at Earth from the other side of the Milky-Way, tens of thousands of light years away, they must have started their journey long before the Jewish people emerged — even if they were to travel near the speed of light. Therefore, any interstellar visitors did not have the Jews in mind when they started their journey.
The arrival of superhuman intelligence at Earth could fulfill the longing for a Messianic age in Jewish eschatology, ushering peace, justice and prosperity on Earth. The agency of superhuman intelligence could either be in the form of Alien Intelligence or Artificial Intelligence, both abbreviated as AI.
Throughout history, the Jews have been called the “People of the Book” because of the central role of the Torah in Jewish tradition. But long after the Torah was delivered, cosmologists have learned new details about cosmic history. The latest scientific data confirms that the Universe started at a point in time, as suggested in the Book of Genesis. But the subsequent cosmic evolution was different from the biblical report. Humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees about 5–10 million years ago on a rocky planet that was made 4.5 billion years ago in a debris disk around the Sun, which is one out of hundreds of billions of stars within the Milky-Way galaxy, which was assembled from mergers of smaller galaxies, dating back to the first galaxies which formed when the Universe was a hundred million years old. Well before that, the cosmic soup of elementary particles was nearly uniform to a part in a hundred thousand. The seeds for all the objects we see today likely originated from quantum-mechanical fluctuations much less than a second after the beginning.
The objects we find in the present-day Universe were made over 13.8 billion years, not six days. There is no evidence that the creator rested on the seventh day as the Bible suggests. We would have observed a clear signature of such an anomalous event in the brightness fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background.
Encountering superhuman intelligence from interstellar space would challenge the biblical story in two ways. First, it would imply that humans are not the pinnacle of creation. If humans were indeed created in the image of God, then the existence of superhuman intelligence would imply that the creator endowed humans with an inferior intelligence. The limited capabilities of the human brain would trigger jealousy of the type encountered when witnessing the owner of a new computer which is far superior to the one you own.
Second, if smarter aliens exist and they are far more accomplished than we are in science and technology, then they must have acquired more credit points throughout cosmic history since they reflect better on God’s image. The experience would resemble witnessing smarter siblings of whom our parents must be prouder.
Most stars formed billions of years before the Sun. If superhumans traveled away from their home exoplanet to interstellar space billions of years ago, while we are currently obsessed with terrestrial conflicts and invest 2.4 trillion dollars worldwide on military budgets, then meeting them could indeed deliver a Messianic message to all of us. Successful aliens would serve as better role models than our politicians!
Jews were persecuted throughout history. As a result, they instinctively respond to each historic event by asking the question: “Is this good for the Jews?” Regarding the futuristic encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, my answer to this question is: “Definitely, yes!” Without guidance from aliens, we might never get to the promised land.
Let me make it clear. From an astrophysical perspective, the promised land is definitely not on Earth. The reason is simple. Earth will likely be engulfed by the envelope of the Sun when the Sun becomes a Red Giant. As a result, terrestrial Jewish eschatology will end in 7.6 billion years.
Despite traditional thinking, Jerusalem is not located at the center of the Universe. Cosmological data indicates that the Universe has no center. Both Jews and gentiles are therefore free to populate any habitable planet or space platform they fancy. Over the last thousandth of a percent of Earth’s history, humans made a dramatic transition in their habitat by transitioning from African jungles to high-rises in major cities. The transition from high-rises to space would be less challenging. Our current rocket technology can bring humans to the nearest stars within 60,000 years, the same period of time that elapsed since the first wave of migration of the current human population out of Africa. In the distant future, the promised land could be on a habitable exoplanet around a dwarf star, like the nearest Proxima Centauri b. The most common dwarf stars would live up to ten trillion years, a thousand times longer than the Sun.
With long-term thinking, Jewish eschatology could be extended to trillions of years if a Jewish community with its synagogues and extraterrestrial Temple is established on a habitable exoplanet around a dwarf star. This could be the real deal in terms of the promised land. There are hundreds of billions of candidate stars to choose from and the real estate available near them is unlikely to be surrounded by any sentiments of antisemitism.
All of this is meant to say that the future could be better than the past for the Jewish people. Jewish astronauts can prove to be the “chosen people” if they lead humanity to a brighter future among the stars.
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.
