Everything we do here on Earth will be deleted from the cosmic record in a billion years, when the Sun will brighten and boil off all liquid water from the surface of our planet through a runaway greenhouse effect. The sturdiest structures we construct on the surface of Earth will constitute the tombstones of our civilization. This state of affairs should remind us of our personal life, where the notion of death affects what we choose to do in the limited time allotted to us. However, a cosmic time horizon of a billion years sounds so far away that we tend to ignore it. We keep building castles in the sand that will be washed away by future waves.
The simplest way to salvage humanity’s future is to venture into space. As of now, our ambitions are limited to other rocks that happened to lie in our immediate vicinity, namely the Moon or Mars. These rocks still depend on the Sun for energy supply and relocating to their surface will not resolve our fate when the Sun will eventually die in 7.6 billion years. The resulting white dwarf, a relic of the Sun, could still serve as a faint furnace that warms us but only if we relocate to its immediate vicinity, a hundred times closer than the Earth is separated from the Sun.
The real long-term solution would be to construct our own portable space platform with artificial gravity and a self-sustained nuclear reactor.
I was reminded of the sobering truth that everything in life will disappear in the cosmic scheme of things after giving a lecture in an undocumented gathering last week that included a hundred of the world’s most accomplished CEOs and celebrities. The gathering was purposely organized so that there will be no record of it except in the memories of those who attended it. This was a three-day event, full of lectures and social hang-outs saturated with people I previously saw on the big screen, the red carpet of the Oscars, or the most lucrative podcasts and television broadcasts. The nature of the gathering reminded me of the nature of life. Our interactions are castles in the sand that will eventually be washed out by the passage of time and it is pointless to record them. We tend to pursue a public documentation of our actions because it gives us the illusion that this record will survive the passage of time. Our ego seeks the saccharine of public recognition and approval as an engine that propels our social status. But as Ecclesiastes 1–2 states: ““Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?”
How should we approach our dismal existential status in the cosmos? With a sense of cosmic humility. Being arrogant can only reflect a limited field of view and a focus on what happens close in time and space. Our imminent death, individually and as a civilization, is a reminder that there are bigger forces and constituents on the cosmic stage. Understanding the larger picture would help us realize why we are not in control of our destiny. Our life is worth living because our curiosity can propel us to figure out the bigger picture, and appreciate those who lasted longer than we might last. Once we recognize who else is on the cosmic stage, we can start to appreciate what the cosmic play is all about.
The primary reason to wish that AI-assisted medicine will enable us to live forever is because there is so much for us to learn about the Universe. Here is a sample of a few interesting questions: What happened before the Big Bang? What is inside a black hole? What is dark matter and dark energy? Can spacetime be manipulated by quantum-mechanical effects for travel at the speed of light or even faster? Can we live forever? How many civilizations in the Milky-Way exceed our technological capabilities and what did they accomplish? Which extraterrestrial civilization will be first to detect the radio signals we transmitted over the past century?
Encountering a higher intelligence than we possess or develop artificially as AI on Earth would be of great value for our future plans to preserve our species. We can learn from the lessons of those who survived similar cosmic circumstances. The Sun formed in the last third of cosmic history and other civilizations might have come and gone on exoplanets with their technological castles washed out the evolution of their host star.
But here we are with our eyes still wide open but our academic minds shut. For an outside observer, we might not appear to be very intelligent. The mainstream of the community of astronomers who are supposed to lead our species in exploring what lies outside the solar system is willing to invest ten-billion taxpayer’s dollars in the search for microbes on exoplanets using the future Habitable World Observatory, but is allocating zero taxpayer’s dollars to the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures in the solar system or beyond. We regard ourselves as extraordinary and set our default ambitions to discover living organisms which are below our status on the cosmic food chain. What mainstream astronomers miss is that cosmic neighbors who exceeded humans in their intelligence may have produced technological artifacts that are far easier to detect than the molecular fingerprints of microbes in exoplanet atmospheres.
Our lack of academic imagination could bring peril to humanity. The products of those civilizations who are focused on themselves and ignore the wisdom of earlier surviving civilizations are doomed to be wiped out from the cosmic stage, just like the sand towers built by ants after a rainstorm. In the minds of the ants, these sand towers are a source of pride but “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
As Ecclesiastes 1–2 states: “No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.” I expressed this sentiment in a recent interview at NBC Studios in Los Angeles (accessible here with an expanded discussion here), and can only wish that the mainstream of academia was listening.
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.
