by Avi Loeb
Two examples of artificial structures from alien intelligence around stars and planets: a Dyson sphere (a hypothetical megastructure constructed around a star to harvest its light) and a swarm of communication satellites around an Earth-like planet.
Pursued to its fullest extent, astro-archaeology would inevitably be humbling—but this is the aspect of it that could yield the richest rewards.
If we can accept that we are very likely less advanced than civilizations that have come before us, this might well lead to our finding ways to speed up our own plodding evolution—a psychological transformation that might allow humanity to leap forward by thousands, millions, or even billions of years.
Evidence is omnipresent for the real probability that humanity has not set the intelligence bar particularly high and that other civilizations have likely cleared it. It is as close as your newspaper, your nearest screen, and your endlessly refreshing newsfeed. The true marker of intelligence is the promotion of one’s own well-being, but too often our behavior does the opposite. I have found that paying close attention to the world’s most pressing news stories provides ample evidence that we cannot be the smartest species out there.
Humanity has rarely focused on its collective well-being, not over the preceding centuries and not today. Among our current bad habits, we repeatedly opt for short-term benefits over long-term benefits in matters as complex as carbon-neutral energy, as fraught as vaccines, and as obvious as shopping with reusable bags. And for over a century we have been broadcasting our existence to the entire Milky Way in radio waves without pausing to worry if any other civilizations out there might be both smarter than us and more predatory.
Of course, the coordination of effort required to present the universe with a more nuanced, uniform message from human civilization presupposes a civilization capable of unity. Human history gives scant reason to hope for that in the future, at least in the near term.
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For the budding field of space archaeology, another foundational challenge—besides getting the requisite tools and resources—will be adopting approaches that increase our ability to imagine the products of other, more advanced civilizations. To put it another way, we must not let the limitations of our own experience and our resulting presumptions leave us intellectually unprepared to interpret any defunct, discarded, or deliberately sent extraterrestrial technology.
To make the point to my students that we cannot allow the familiar to define what we might discover, I have often used the analogy of cave dwellers discovering a modern cell phone. It aptly applies to the possibility that soon humanity may discover a piece of advanced technological equipment developed by an extraterrestrial intelligence. If we do not prepare ourselves, if we have not allowed for the science of space archaeology, we could act much as these cave dwellers would, imagining the phone to be nothing more than an exotic, shiny rock. And with that shortsightedness, those dwellers would miss the chance to take that million-year leap forward.
One fact is clear. If we assign a zero probability for finding evidence of artificial objects, as some scientists did in the case of ‘Oumuamua, if human civilization organizes its efforts and its funding and its scholars by declaring, “It’s never aliens,” then we guarantee that we will never find evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. To move forward, we must think outside of the box and avoid prejudice about what we expect to find based on past experience.
As individuals and as a civilization, we also must learn modesty regarding both our potential place in the universe and our potential future in the universe. It is far more statistically likely that we are at the center of the bell curve in universal intelligence than that we define the outer edge of the most intelligent.
Students in my class are often surprised to hear the trivial but sobering remark “Only half of you are better than the median of this class.” The same applies to civilizations. That we have discovered many planets similar to Earth and have to date found no conclusive evidence of other civilizations should not lead us to presume our civilization and terrestrial life is uniquely assured of a bright future.
While historians can quibble over whether or not our past suggests a teleological direction toward progress, the universe offers a clear answer: The history of the universe indicates a trend toward extinction—of stars, of planets, of solar systems, and, perhaps, of the universe as we know it. The search for, let alone the discovery of, extraterrestrial technology could jar us from our more limited frame, our habit of looking forward a generation or two and not with the future of our civilization uppermost in mind.
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Let me illustrate the need for a new mindset with a personal anecdote. I made six visits to the same university town in Europe, and my hosts kept putting me in a small hotel room where I would bump my head against the tilted ceiling while taking a shower and had to crawl into my narrow bed without space to stretch my legs. I decided I had had enough. “Next time,” I promised myself, “I will reserve a double room.” And so I did.
But when I arrived at the hotel on my next trip, the receptionist said: “I see that your wife could not make it . . . I will be glad to downgrade your room reservation to a single room.” I said, “No way, please put me in the double room that I reserved.” When I mentioned the story to my hosts and asked why space was so limited in this town, they answered, “Because the town has a rule that no building can be taller than the church.” This raised my inevitable question: “Why don’t you make the church taller?” To which they replied, “Because it has been like that for centuries.”
Inertia is a powerful thing. Young people often imagine new worlds, literally and metaphorically, but their revolutionary ideas are frequently met with skepticism and dismissal by the “adults in the room,” who lost their enthusiasm for challenging reality in many bruising fights long ago. The “adults” simply got used to things the way they were; they came to accept what was known and to ignore the unknown.
Youth is a matter not of biological age but of attitude. It is what makes one person willing to open up new frontiers of scientific discovery while others try to stay within the traditional borders. Becoming a scientist offers the great privilege of maintaining our childhood curiosity and questioning unjustified notions. But this opportunity does nothing for anyone unless people seize it.
It is commonly believed in the conservative scientific community that intelligent life is probably unique to Earth and that it would be a waste of time and funds to search for artificial signals in the sky or for the debris of dead civilizations in outer space. But this is an ossified way of thinking. Today’s new generation of researchers has access to telescopes that could turn this notion on its head. Just as Copernicus revolutionized the prevailing dogma about our place in the universe, our generation can foster a new revolution by “making the church taller” still.
11
‘Oumuamua’s Wager
Imagine life on our planet the day after there is irrefutable confirmation of life elsewhere in the universe. Briefly entertain the hypothetical idea that ‘Oumuamua had been discovered before October 2017 and that we had the opportunity to launch a spacecraft with a camera that snapped a close-up photo of ‘Oumuamua at nearest approach and demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that this object was technological debris from an extraterrestrial civilization.
Now ask yourself: What would have followed?
Finding evidence of life on another planet, I believe, would have a profound impact not just on the science of astronomy but on human psychology, philosophy, religion—even education. Whereas at present only a small minority of the scientific community seriously studies the probability of and search for extraterrestrial life, these subjects will become part of our mandatory high-school curriculum the moment we know for a certainty that we are not alone. It is not too much to presume that such a discovery would also affect the way we behave and how we interact with each other, because we might come to feel as though we are a part of a single,
unified team, humanity, and stop worrying and warring over mundane issues like geographical borders and separate economies.
Such a discovery would change us in both fundamental and subtle ways—and I have to imagine that most of them would be for the better.
Given the ubiquity of habitable planets, it is the height of arrogance to conclude that we are unique. It is, I believe, the hubris of a young age. When my daughters were toddlers, they believed they were special. But after meeting other children, they developed a new perspective of reality, and they matured.
In order for our civilization to mature, we need to venture into space and seek others. Out there, we might discover that not only are we not the only kids on the block, we are also far from the smartest kids on the block. Just as we once gave up on the belief that the Earth was at the center of the universe, so must we start to act from the clear statistical likelihood that we are not intelligent sentient creatures without peer. Not only are you and I personally going to be intellectually eclipsed by future generations, but humans are the sole creators of a civilization no more and we are very likely a great deal less accomplished than what the universe has already witnessed.
Such a framework of understanding will endow us with a sense of modesty, and modesty will improve our perspective on our place in the universe, which is frailer than we tend to believe. And that could increase the chance we endure. Because with every day that goes by, we are gambling with our civilization’s fate—and at the moment, the odds that it will last seem long indeed.
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Think of it as ‘Oumuamua’s wager—a bet along the lines of the one proposed by the seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, and theologian Blaise Pascal. He framed his famous wager this way: Humans bet with their lives on whether God exists or not. It is better, Pascal argued, to live a life as though God does.
Pascal’s reasoning ran as follows: If it turns out that God doesn’t exist, you have only given up a few pleasures during your lifetime. If God does exist, however, you gain heaven and with it an infinity of rewards. You also avoid the worst of all possible outcomes: an eternity in hell.
In much the same way, I would argue, humanity bets its future on whether ‘Oumuamua is extraterrestrial technology or not. And while our wager is thoroughly secular, its implications are no less profound. In a very tangible sense, the promise of betting right, of exploring out among the stars for the life we expect to find there, are the heavens themselves. And, especially when we consider the specter of the great filter and the fact that civilizations with the technological prowess to explore the universe are also highly vulnerable to annihilation by self-inflicted wounds, betting wrong and planning too little and too late could hasten our extinction.
These two wagers are, of course, vastly different in some important ways. For instance, Pascal’s wager requires a giant leap of faith. ‘Oumuamua’s wager requires only a modest leap of hope—specifically, hope for more scientific evidence. That could be something as simple as a single close-up, high-resolution image of an object we have already managed to photograph from afar.
Pascal’s eternal cost-benefit analysis required him to posit a divine, omniscient being. To posit that ‘Oumuamua is extraterrestrial technology requires only the belief in an intelligence other than our own.
What’s more, whereas Pascal had faith and faith alone, we have evidence and reasoning—assets that shorten the odds in favor of ‘Oumuamua having been extraterrestrial technology.
There is another reason I find the comparison of these wagers instructive. I have learned that conversations about ‘Oumuamua often veer into the religious. I believe this is because we understand that any sufficiently advanced intelligence will appear to us as a good approximation to God.
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“Have your religious beliefs, or beliefs about God, changed in any way in the time you have been studying astronomy?” When a New Yorker journalist interviewing me about ‘Oumuamua asked me this, I was initially perplexed. Why make the assumption that I am religious? I was, and remain, secular.
But I began to appreciate where this line of questioning had stemmed from during an interview with CNN. Toward the very end of our allotted time, the interviewer asked me, “In our first encounter with extraterrestrial civilization, would we hope they be religious or secular?” Perhaps realizing it allowed for no one-sentence answer, he added that, given the time constraint, I needn’t provide my answer.
I think I do need to. And, more important, I believe we need to think more than we have about the wellsprings of this sort of question. ‘Oumuamua presents us with an awesome possibility, and we have traditionally struggled with awe.
Over centuries, our civilization has invented means, from myths to the scientific method, to make sense of things that inspire awe in us. And with the passage of time, many such things have moved from the “miraculous” column of human experience over to the mundane. Much of this can be attributed to advances in the sciences. But no discipline of thought is free of the risk of dogmatic blinders, and this is true for scientists as well as theologians.
Consider how a secular person would hear the question posed to me by the CNN interviewer. He might briefly allow that, on the one hand, religious beings are more likely to be ethical—guided by noble values, perhaps, or holding to some injunction that the meek should inherit the universe. After all, most of humanity’s religions teach abstract value systems that followers obey, whether out of fear of punishment by a divine entity or out of social interests. A secular person might even grant that a small number of religions, such as Jainism, explicitly espouse nonviolence.
But, this person will point out, even the briefest survey of our religious history should give one pause. To pick an example at random, recall the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Central and South America. Fueled by a hatred of idolatry, in 1562 the Roman Catholic priest Diego de Landa Calderón burned in a grand auto-da-fé thousands of Mayan manuscripts, or codices, destroying so many that next to none remain for today’s scholars to study. “We found a large number of books in these characters,” the priest declared, “and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all.” If we imagine that our first encounter with extraterrestrials or their technology will replicate the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and the practices that followed Hernán Cortés’s 1519 arrival in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, we would be right to be concerned.
But consider how a religious person is likely to respond when asked, “In our first encounter with extraterrestrial civilization, would we hope they be religious or secular?” Without question, the sciences, including the social sciences such as economics, have steadily increased life expectancy and reduced extreme poverty. But the presumption that we would obviously prefer a civilization that is secular and scientific raises equally well-worn concerns.
Consider a recent century, the twentieth. Both World War I and World War II, among the most lethal conflicts in all of human history, were secular contests over borders, resources, and power. During that same century, eugenics, the supposed science of controlling human propagation for its improvement, lent false credence to racism in the United States and encouraged the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Then, too, the twentieth century’s most boastfully secular experiment, the Soviet Union, frequently demanded that scientific advances conform to Communist ideological tenets. Clearly science, too, is susceptible to orthodoxy, authoritarianism, and even violence.
The difficulty rests, I believe, in the question the interviewer posed. He took the wrong lesson from the evidence supplied by the one civilization available for study, our own. At the scale of an entire civilization, “Religious or secular?” is liable to be a false dichotomy. Judging by human history, both recent and distant, any alien intelligence we encounter is likely to be both religious and secular, and that isn’t necessarily a cause for concern.
Cast your mind forward once more
to the day after we find proof of life elsewhere in the universe. There is one more prediction I feel confident in making: when we learn for certain that we are not alone in the universe, all of humanity’s religions—and all of its scientists, even the most conservative—will find ways to accommodate the fact.
My hope is not that the first extraterrestrial intelligence we encounter be either religious or secular but rather that it be animated by humility rather than arrogance. This would qualify the encounter as a mutual learning experience that enriches both parties rather than a zero-sum conflict propelled by self-interests and followed by a power struggle for domination. This hope extends, of course, to the way we should engage in space exploration as we approach distant outposts and as we consider establishing our own settlements—our own little Beit Hanans among the stars. As we proceed farther into the universe, our moral responsibility and humility should follow higher standards than those demonstrated so far on Earth.
In humanity’s case, both religion and science have, over the course of our history, bolstered both our humility and our arrogance. It is the height of arrogance to rule out what can be rationally considered, but that is the work of all intellectual blinders, whether they’re manufactured by theologians or scientists. Both fields have, on occasion, encouraged their practitioners to don such blinders, restricting their thoughts and forcing them to follow the well-worn traces of existing lines of inquiry.
It must also be admitted, however, that both science and theology have, on occasion, encouraged pockets of their practitioners to do the opposite, to shed their blinders and open themselves up to the new, the controversial, the unexpected. This is where I find cause for hope.
First, it is probable that the members of any extraterrestrial civilization will be as awed to encounter us as we are to encounter them. They, too, will likely have stared out into the abyss of space for countless generations; they, too, will understand that the universe teems with planets capable of supporting life and yet life in the universe seems exceptionally rare.