At the opening of a public “Sing for Science” event organized by WBUR in Boston, Massachusetts yesterday, the brilliant singer Josh Ritter sang his beautiful song titled: “Truth is a Dimension Both Invisible and Blinding,” with the words:
“… And I turned it toward an unassuming patch of dusty sky
That was really fifty million stars a billion lightyears wide
And then all at once it felt as if time had been suspended
And a vision poured into me like a bottle’d been upended
I was filled with revelation both infinite and finite
That filtered down my telescope encoded in the starlight
It said, “Truth is not immutable, itself is a dimension
Truth can be both weighted down and warped in strange directions
Truth has a shape that alters, each according to observer
Sometimes you must be close to it, sometimes you must be further
Truth can bend and truth can break, depends on how you ask it
It frays or it may blaze out at some pall bound for Damascus
And it sometimes gets mistook for God, sometimes for his servant
It both exists and doesn’t, like a star that’s not observed yet…”
When asked by the inspiring host and musician, Matt Whyte, to respond, I clarified that the one truth we all know about is that we will die one day. Out of about 100 billion people who lived on Earth, only 8 billion are alive today. Where is everybody? Most of them are dead. The same is likely to be true for extraterrestrial civilizations. Most of them are dead by now.
Instead of approaching our dismal cosmic status with the humility it asks for, most people seek pride and satisfaction from illusions of power or superiority relative to others. For that reason, I do not have any footprint on social media and do not care how many “likes” I get.
Humans (Homo Sapiens) arrived late to the cosmic stage, only in the last 0.02% of the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the Big Bang. In addition, humans are not at the center of the cosmic stage — as Galileo Galilei discovered by pointing his telescope at the moons of Jupiter. Nevertheless, we find it difficult to admit that the cosmic play is not about us, or to seek intelligent extraterrestrial actors with genuine curiosity. Mainstream astronomers argue that the existence of technological civilizations around other stars is an extraordinary claim and that we should invest ten billion dollars in the Habitable World Observatory, searching for microbes rather than extraterrestrial technological signatures. Even those who believe in the existence of residents like us in other houses on our cosmic street, would argue that these residents care about us. But the likely truth is that we are not at the top of the interstellar food chain, nor that extraterrestrials care about us.
Enrico Fermi’s question: “But where is everybody?” is a question that every lonely person asks. And what friends often tell that person is: “Do not be so self-consumed. You are not as attractive as you imagine, for others to show up and satisfy your wishes. You need to be proactive by visiting dating sites or at the very least by looking for neighbors. Enrico Fermi did not build an observatory to seek extraterrestrials in the sky. He just asked the question. Many people followed him by guessing the answer without seeking the evidence. Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. In addition to investing billions of dollars in the search for microbes, we should invest billions of dollars in the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures. This is what the general public, which funds science through taxes, is asking scientists to do. Why is the academic mainstream ignoring this request?”
This summer, the Galileo Project research team under my leadership, will complete the construction and operations of three observatories in search for technological artifacts near Earth. We also plan expeditions to retrieve materials from crash sites of interstellar meteors. Within a day from the advertisement of newly-funded summer fellowships last week, I received applications from five exceptional students who are excited to help the research goals of the Galileo Project.
And since Josh mentions God in his song, I also clarified that we will likely be filled with religious awe once we encounter technologies that are far superior to those we possess. Indeed, the nearest superhuman entity might be an extraterrestrial scientist with a much better understanding of physical reality, capable of manipulating reality in ways that appear miraculous to us. Given that, the discovery of aliens might bring science and religion together.
But most importantly, encountering a superhuman intelligence will bring back the much-needed sense of humility that should follow from our cosmic status and inspire a child-like curiosity as our authentic response to it. To realize these traits, we must invest billions of dollars in the search for entities more intelligent than us among the stars. This research plan might sound extraordinary, but it offers our best change to be better than the role models offered by our politicians.
Either through advances in artificial intelligence or the search for alien intelligence, we are likely to encounter superhuman intelligence soon. This truth, just like our imminent death, will ask for humility. Whether we accept it or insist on investing billions of dollars only in the search for microbes, is up to us. Whether we have neighbors smarter than us is up to nature. And nature does not care how wrong we are. Our neighbors will still be out there, even if we do not search for them. The Earth moved around the Sun for 4.54 billion years before 1992, when the Vatican admitted that Galileo was right.
Here’s hoping that we can learn from the Vatican’s experience and search for extraterrestrial technological gadgets that are even more advanced than the burning bush witnessed by Moses. This is our best guide to the Promised Land, bestowed upon Abraham and his descendants.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abraham (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.
