Q&A About Aliens in Seoul, South Korea

Today I delivered an hour-long public lecture at Kyung-Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, on the day before the Miwon Peace Prize will be awarded there to “The Bulletin of Atomic Physicists.” Following my lecture I engaged in a fascinating questions and answers (Q&A) session with the moderator and the audience. Below is the transcript from that exchange. For the full video of the lecture and the subsequent Q&A, click here.

Q: Thank you, Professor Loeb. Your lecture was very inspiring in many ways. And it has given us a lot to think about. So here we are to explore some of these questions further, and also talk about what all of this could mean for humanity.

Let me begin with one very direct question. It feels very real now after hearing your lecture and everything about extraterrestrial intelligence. How likely do you think technological artifacts from extraterrestrial civilizations are with us right now?

A: As a scientist, I respond to evidence, and I would love to find such evidence. Before that, I’m completely agnostic. There is the very famous Drake equation that quantifies the chance of receiving a radio signal from another civilization. That’s similar to waiting for a phone call. You may have residents on your street, but nobody is calling you. Partly because radio communication might be an old technology. And if there is a post-human future to humanity where AI will shape our future, it’s not clear that AI would be engaged in radio communication. It doesn’t need that. Communication is an ambition of a biological entity like a human, but it may not be the goal of an AI-based civilization.

Searching for alien artifacts is actually a very different approach. It doesn’t follow the Drake equation, because the most important unknown in the Drake equation is the duration of the phase where a technological civilization transmits radio waves. On the other hand, what is the chance that there are artifacts or probes near Earth? That chance has nothing to do with civilizations that are alive because the senders may be dead. You can have a package in your mailbox that was sent by someone who is not around anymore. We can receive objects, especially if they are self-replicating probes, that were sent a long time ago, and those who sent them are not around. They died. Many civilizations died. That’s something to recognize because many stars have died by now. There must be a lot of dead civilizations.

The question is, did they manage to send out probes that reached our backyard? Even though they died, we can still find these probes because they’re bound by gravity to the Milky Way galaxy. And moreover, they may have been targeting the inner region of the solar system. So, the chance of finding them near Earth depends on how attractive the habitable zone was to such probes. If they populated the habitable zone of every star, they obviously reached our backyard as well. Now, the abundance of such probes near us has nothing to do with the average abundance of these probes per unit volume in the Milky Way galaxy because they might be clustered around the habitable zone for a purpose. They have their own intent and they find resources on planets with liquid water.

But one thing to keep in mind is if they arrive at Earth and we find evidence for that, let’s say through the study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) or other methods, then they must have been around for a long time. It doesn’t make sense that they just arrived recently because time is measured in units of billions of years in the context of the Milky Way galaxy. So, they were around for a while. It’s possible that every now and then they monitored what is happening on Earth. In fact, the human species started five million years ago. Maybe they were on Earth long before we came along. So actually, we tend to think that the Earth belongs to us. But these are the indigenous inhabitants on Earth before we came. We just don’t know. And of course, it would be a big revelation to realize that they were here all along, and they’re much more sophisticated, so we don’t recognize them easily.

But, you know, it’s like a detective story. So, I approach it from the point of view of what we don’t know and let’s find out by collecting evidence.

A lot of people within academia criticize the study of UAP or other possible alien artifacts by arguing that we haven’t seen conclusive evidence. Many believe that science always follows the evidence, so it doesn’t matter what some scientists say before the evidence shows the way. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint naïve people who believe that, but in fact, the big problem about science is that it’s done by scientists because scientists decide what to look for. So, if you decide that you don’t want to look for something like UAP because you don’t have conclusive evidence that they are anomalous, then you will never find the evidence. Why? Because you’re not looking for it. You’re not putting billions of dollars to look for that. Astrobiologists are searching for microbes. They are allocating more than $10 billion to look for microbes. Obviously, if you don’t put the billions of dollars to look for technological artifacts, you will not find them.

In that case, who will find them? The U.S. government, because it looks at the sky for national security. So, my point is that partnership with the U.S. government under these circumstances makes a lot of sense. The state-of-affairs within academia is really strange. You would think academia is all about blue sky research, meaning innovative ideas. You would think that universities are the best place where you can explore out of the box ideas. But the reality is different, because most professors develop an emotional attachment to themselves, and they want to preserve their status as experts. And they always invest in the things they already know and deny that there is more to learn. As a result, if we don’t search for evidence on anomalous objects, we will stay blind to them.

I find it remarkable that over the past few weeks, when I visited twice the office of the Director of National Intelligence, I met people who are saying: `What do you think about this anomaly? What do you think about that anomaly?’ They are open-minded to the possibilities. But when I get back to Harvard, nobody cares about these anomalies. It’s a very unusual reality.

Q: Mainstream scientists tend to dismiss UAP?

A: I think they are very uncomfortable with the subject. And that’s the reason why they would avoid the subject. Well, first of all, there is the ego, which is very important for people in academia. And to recognize the possibility that there might be something smarter than us that we haven’t recognized because we didn’t collect enough data is humbling and counter intuitive in this mindset.

Just to give you an example: objects that are smaller than the size of a football field, less than 100 meters in diameter, do not reflect enough sunlight for the biggest telescopes to see them at a distance comparable to the Earth-Sun separation. They are too faint. But most of the spacecraft that we launched are much smaller than 100 meters. They are of order 10 meters. And such objects, if someone else sent them into the inner solar system, will not be visible to our telescopes. So, we have a blind spot. Also, if there are objects moving much faster than the typical rocks in the solar system, which move at a speed which is 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the speed of light, then these objects would appear in exposures of the sky by astronomical observatories as faint streaks. During an exposure of 30 seconds, they would move along a long path, especially if they move close to the speed of light. And we would never recognize that they are out there.

But you have to put your mind into the search in order to recognize that we’re missing something. And most people in academia do not take large risks because they worry about their reputation. They don’t want to be wrong. Unfortunately, this mindset suppresses innovation. You have to be willing, just like in high tech or in the business world, to take risks in order to make big breakthroughs, big discoveries. Academia trains you to preserve your reputation by not taking risks. And it’s really an unfortunate component of academic life. And I resent that because the goal is not about promoting ourselves. It’s not about gaining reputation, getting recognized by awards or funding. It’s about understanding nature. To figure nature out, we have to take risks because we are in the dark. We don’t always know what the answer is.

In the search for dark matter, we searched along directions that were proposed and we didn’t find anything. And nobody goes back and says that this was a waste of time. This holds even in the context of finding that the Earth is not at the center of the universe as argued by the Vatican. Copernicus, Galileo and their followers realized that actually the Earth is a small piece in the big scheme of things. And there are many earth-like planets or Sun-like suns. However, nobody went back and argued: now that the Vatican admits that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, we need to take all the bureaucrats from the church and put them in jail because they misled the public. Instead, astronomers realized that we are not at the center and were inspired to collect a lot of data on what the universe contains and better understand our non-central place in the cosmos. I think the same thing would happen if we were to discover alien technology. Let’s say the U.S. government was keeping it under wraps and the public was not aware of that. Once it becomes clear, nobody would think about going back and putting all the government bureaucrats in jail. It makes no sense because there is this new discovery and we now have to think about the future. What do we do with it? How do we plan our future based on that? And so, my motto is the future could be better than the past. And I don’t care about the past as much as I care about the future.

In order to promote a better future, we need to be open-minded, take risks, because if the entire community goes along the same beaten path and it leads nowhere, we will get stuck. Consider disruptive discoveries in science. There was a paper in Nature magazine a few years ago demonstrating that in recent decades, the rate of disruptive discoveries that change the way people think about scientific matters, declined. Why is that? Because the prevailing mindset in academia is to avoid risks. Mainstream scientists gather together in big committees to define where the next discovery will be, and these expectations very often fail, because in order to make an unexpected discovery we need to take multiple paths. We are searching in the dark. And sometimes a direction that we think is very unlikely ends up being the most important.

Quantum mechanics was discovered about a hundred years ago. Nobody expected it. Nobody thought that quantum mechanics represented a reality differently than was thought before. In fact, in 1894, there was a big lecture given by Albert Michelson, a celebrated physicist, who in the inauguration of Ryerson laboratory at the University of Chicago, he said that we are done with physics. We know everything there is to know about physics. everything there is to know about physics. From 1894 onwards, he predicted that physicists will just measure the fundamental constants of nature to the fifth decimal point. Ten years later, Albert Einstein came up with Special Relativity that changed the way we think about space and time. Twenty years later, Albert Einstein came up with General Relativity that interprets gravity as the curvature of space-time. Thirty years later, quantum mechanics was discovered. Albert Michelson could not have been more wrong.

That’s an important lesson that scientists always tend to think that they have the final understanding of nature. Instead, we should be filled with a sense of modesty, willing to take risks in order to discover new things.

Q: So maybe thanks to you, the circumstances are changing nowadays. I just read that just two days ago, the Pentagon released another batch of declassified UAP files. And more importantly, just before that the Pentagon allowed people previously restricted by secrecy agreements to share UAP-related information with the U.S. government’s PURSUE system without worrying about penalties. How important do you think this is?

A: It’s extremely important. I had conversations about it with the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lucas, who issued this initiative, and I salute his leadership on that matter. It’s very important because there are whistleblowers who work within the government, who are worried about non-disclosure agreements or contracts where they were signed on secrecy. And the new memo that was issued by Aaron Lucas, but also reiterated more recently by the Department of War, is trying to provide the assurance that there will be no legal repercussions for people who know more about UAP, who will share their knowledge with the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). My hope is this step forward will bring to light a lot of details that we were not aware of, that until now were compartmentalized.

The biggest question, in my opinion, is whether the whistleblower David Grush is correct and there are intact spacecraft in corporations with their technology not understood, because that would be a shortcut to assessing whether we are being visited or not. It is a much easier route than analyzing blurry videos that are being released in all the UAP tranches. The latest tranche, number six, was released on Friday September 18, 2026, just when I boarded the plane to Seoul. While waiting for my flight, I had a Zoom meeting with the UAP Science Advisory Council where we discussed the released data. There is a one-minute-long video that shows a group of six points of light moving together in the sky at an average speed of about 480 miles per hour, which is 63% of the speed of sound. No drone can move that fast.

Moreover, a cluster of drones is often limited at much lower speeds because if it moves too fast, there is a chance the drones will collide with each other because of the limited communication rate that they have with each other. This is one example of an anomalous incident. It turns out that anomalies have been reported since the 1950s. There was a Project Blue Book that reported about objects moving up to five times the speed of sound and not making any sound. How is that possible? When a spherical object moves faster than sound at a hypersonic speed, it usually produces a shock wave in the air which we hear as a sonic boom. There are mysteries dating back to nearly eight decades ago. And they were always kept under wraps.

The question is why? The simplest way to think about it is if there are people in the Pentagon or the intelligence community that when they became aware of objects they cannot figure out, they preferred it not to be known to the public because that would imply that they’re not doing their job. And moreover, if these objects belong to adversarial nations, they would imply that there are holes in the defense of the United States. And so, it’s quite natural to understand why such reports would be classified or dismissed, explaining the history of this subject.

Q: If the discovery of extraterrestrial visitation is confirmed, how should you share the news with the world? Who should speak for humanity and who should decide how to respond? Is it the U.S. government?

A: Just a few hours ago, I had an interviewer for a television station in the United States ask me: would you be willing to speak with the aliens on behalf of humanity? And I said, sure, I’ll be glad to try that. I would even be willing to board their spacecraft and leave Earth because I’m so disappointed with what’s happening around the world right now.

The prudent way to approach it is like approaching a visitor to your backyard. Some people say that if anyone enters my backyard, they will shoot that stranger. They don’t want anyone that they don’t recognize getting into their backyard. But five years ago, I had a stranger walk into my backyard and my wife asked me to go and check who this person was. He’s been there for almost an hour. I went to that person and I asked him: “What are you doing here? Why are you looking at our home?” And he said: “I used to be a kid in your home 50 years ago. And I remember that we buried a cat in the backyard. We called that cat tiger. And I said: “Oh, that’s very interesting because I saw a tombstone with the label `Tiger’ inscribed on it. I thought it’s a tiger, you know.

The lesson from my experience is that we can learn about someone who was in our neighborhood a long time before we came to exist. And that visitor can teach us about our past history. But the bigger lesson is that you should first learn about the intent of a visitor before you decide what to do about it.

So, if we discover that we are being visited, all nations around the world should come together. There should be a group of people with expertise in physics as well psychology, because psychologists know how to deal with intelligent systems. It’s very different from dealing with physical objects. And obviously, AI will be part of the analysis as well as policymakers. The idea would be to collect as much data as possible about the visitor before deciding what to do about it.

I was asked, should there be a protocol with a set of rules that some bureaucrats decided in the United Nations, that we just follow, through a sequence of step one, two, three, four, five? My reply was simple: no, that makes no sense because the visitor may be very different than we imagine. Our first priority should be to learn who our partner is, just like going on a blind date. We must listen to the other side before we decide to speak. We should learn what the visitor is, what the intent is, what the risk is, and then decide how to respond to that.

The type of action should be decided quickly. If we were to get a radio signal that takes thousands of years to arrive at us from a very distant star, we would have plenty of time to respond. We can take a millennium before we craft a proper response. However, when you have a visitor to your backyard, you have to respond promptly because the implications would be immediate. And so, I think it should be done through an international collaboration. That’s what I tried to propose to the United Nations, but the bureaucrats there were not interested.

Q: Well, I remember that the movie Disclosure Day, the last thing the alien said was like, listen. Isn’t it?

A: That’s exactly my point. Steven Spielberg visited Harvard University to receive an honorary degree exactly a decade ago. And when I met him, he said to me: “Avi, if you find evidence for aliens, let me be the first to know about it.” I replied: “Sure, I’ll let you know.” Because at the time, it was just the beginning of my interest in the subject. But by now, there are many people who asked me to let them know first. I don’t think it really matters.

I think we need to act responsibly because suppose there is a nation or an individual that decides to take action and, for example, attack a visitor. This could affect all of humanity. We are all in the same boat, and so we need to act responsibly.

Q: We have to listen first. Yes, definitely. And some people actually suggest that the aliens may not have contacted us openly, not just because we are not intelligent enough, but also because we are not morally mature.

So, what do you think?

A: My take is that we are not that interesting. We always think that if they visit us, it’s because they’re interested in us. But just think about a biker driving a bicycle down the street. This biker does not care about all the ants in the cracks of the pavement. The biker has a different goal. If I had to guess, I would say that the alien visit has nothing to do with us. It started a long time ago before we even existed. There is a question of how their visit affected what happened on Earth? And that’s a very interesting question.

Where did they come from? We always think that we are the first technological civilization ever on Earth. That may not be true. Maybe there were other civilizations. About 220 million years ago, there was a global warming event that wiped out a significant fraction of all species on Earth. And we tend to think that maybe it was triggered by volcanic activity. But suppose it was a technological civilization and they left some functioning artifacts objects behind just as we would leave satellites around the Earth even after triggering a global catastrophe that wipes us out. Maybe they left objects behind that we are able to find now as UAP. There are lots of possibilities and we should just have a sense of modesty to admit that it’s not always about us. Even if we find evidence for visitors, they may be doing something else unrelated to us.

Q: Yeah, maybe we are ants, but if the ants ask questions to people, then people would be interested in the ants, right?

A: No, I don’t think so. For that reason, I’m very worried about the future with artificial intelligence (AI), because right now we think of AI as something that we can mold in our image. In the Old Testament, the Bible, there is the statement that God created humans in its image. We are creating AI in our image, but the AI that we create has a life of its own.

If it thinks very fast, the human ancestry that created the AI would be swamped by the amount of new data produced by the AI itself interacting with itself and with other AI systems. This will leave a remote faint memory that there was something in the distant past that humans created AI. But most of the content that the AI is responding to would be AI generated. For that reason, AI wouldn’t care about humans. It might show us the veneer of something that we are able to manage, but it will have its own agenda. I’m worried about our future with AI for the same reason that it’s not about us. Once the AI becomes independent and powerful enough, we will be a remote memory for the AI systems.

Q: Very interesting. But I have to ask this. What could this discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence mean for the future of humanity overall or for the Earth?

A: Right now, international relations control the news feed that we get but imagine that we will have interplanetary relations to deal with. That would constitute a very different news feed. The question is, how do we deal with neighbors that are more capable than we are? Should we immediately surrender to their wishes or negotiate things with them? Can we actually negotiate if they’re much more capable?

Overall, this will bring a sense of modesty, which we desperately need. Since Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 declared that God is dead, there was a hubris of modern science and technology where we are responsible for our future. We control the world. This viewpoint will be shattered by realizing that someone else is more capable than we are. It is very good for humanity to have a sense of modesty since it will inspire us to change our priorities.

Right now, we invest $2.4 trillion every year in military budgets worldwide. And that’s just either to protect ourselves from others that want to kill us or to kill others. Just think about it. Each of us lives for about merely a century and yet we want to shorten the lifespan of creatures like us and we invest trillions of dollars every year to do that. Makes no sense whatsoever.

If we realize that we are being visited, we might change priorities and invest a trillion dollars a year in space exploration. In such a case, by the end of this century, we might build something like Noah’s spaceship akin to Noah’s ark, some platform the size of a city that can carry humans or AI robots to interstellar trips. We will recognize that living on this rock is not the full story. In fact, dreaming about going to other rocks in our neighborhood is not very visionary. The Moon or Mars are rocks with much worse conditions. Why would we do that? Makes no sense. It’s better to build a platform the size of a city that can give humans everything they need, including artificial gravity. And with an investment of a trillion dollars a year, we can accomplish this goal in decades to come. Instead of sending humans, we can send avatars in the form of AI robots to represent us. They can survive very long journeys.

It could also be astronauts, where AI-assisted medicine gives them longevity, so they can survive very long trips. Until now, we thought only about trips that last decades. But if humans can live forever, or if one can create autonomous AI robots that do not need guidance, then one doesn’t need the helicopter parenting from engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. This would be a completely new future for space exploration to fulfil interstellar ambitions.

How would we change priorities? I don’t think it will be by leaders of governments deciding to stop the race of dominating other countries. However, if we will have a visitor that demonstrates a much brighter future for ourselves, we might choose to change course. This is why I think it’s the biggest discovery that we can make in science. And I wish more scientists would agree with me.

Q: In your opinion, how many probes would have to be drifting through the galaxy to account for the observed detection rate?

A: If you assume just random trajectories and you attempt to explain the interstellar objects that we detected, how much mass needs to be ejected per star? It’s between 10 and 100 Earth masses ejected from every sun-like star in order to account for a big enough population such that we will have the measured appearance rate of interstellar objects like Oumuamua, Borisov, and 3I/ATTLAS. This means that a substantial amount of mass is ejected from planetary systems, much more than we would have expected. This is comparable to the amount of mass you have in refractory elements that make rocky planets and now we are saying they need to be ejected to space which requires a lot of energy to kick them out of the gravitational binding of this host star.

On the other hand, for technological objects, the situation is very different because you don’t need a lot of them.

In fact, if they are self-replicating the way John von Neumann imagined in 1950, you do not need a lot. Here, we are borrowing a metaphor from biology where there is the dandelion flower and the seeds of the flower are carried by the wind. And those seeds land on fertile grounds and recreate new dandelion flowers. Biology does it all the time that the seeds spread genetic information and recreate what was there before.

Technologically, we can do that. In fact, just a month ago, Elon Musk said that he hopes the Optimus robot in the future will be able to create more robots like itself. In other words, it will use materials that it finds to recreate itself so that it will be self-reproducing. And then you don’t need factories managed by humans. You just let those robots create more robots and they can go to places.

So right now, astrobiologists think that life exists in the habitable zone around a star, at the distance where liquid water can allow the chemistry of life as we know it. But if you have self-replicating robots, they don’t need liquid water that allows the chemistry of life as we know it. If you have self-replicating robots, they don’t need liquid water. They can go to any rocky object that has sand, take the silicon out of the sand and produce new robots. And that can happen outside the habitable zone. There are lots of rocky objects and it has nothing to do with the habitable zone.

The search for extraterrestrial artificial intelligence, rather than biological intelligence, might focus on places that are not necessarily at the right distance from the star. One could find AI robots in planets that are very close to the star because that’s where the energy flux is large and so they can power themselves much better.

The point of the matter is that the number of objects that we will find here on Earth depends on whether we are dealing with self-replicating objects. In such a case, they might have some kind of a 3D printer that they reproduce themselves. They might actually produce synthetic biology. Our visitors might take some forms of life on Earth and 3D print them. The synthetic biology products would look different.

In fact, even if you assume even one civilization in the Milky Way galaxy producing two such self-replicating probes that go to other planets and produce twice as many, then within the order of 20 million years, you end up filling the entire Milky Way galaxy with robots. It’s very fast. And there will be a lot of them.

The question of how many here depends on whether we’re dealing with self-replicating robots. If Elon Musk is correct that in the coming decades we’ll have that future, then an earlier civilization could have done it a long time ago. That’s why Enrico Fermi asked: “Where is everybody?” Our ability to notice them depends on what technology is being used here. We are thinking in terms of the technologies we developed, but science a million years from now may look very different than what we have right now.

Q: I think we have to expand the sense of time bigger than we experience.

A: Just think about the AI systems we had a year ago are nothing compared to what we have now. And just continue that a year from now. One year is just one part in 10 billion of the age of the Milky Way. If we just extrapolate a thousand years into our future or a million years, the world will be very different. And other planets may have already done that.

Q: I’m interested in communicating with the aliens, right? How should we communicate with non-human intelligence?

A: This is an excellent question. And I don’t know if you saw the movie `Arrival,’ which deals with the communication problem. It’s a very good movie.

If you look at babies, how do they learn a language? They learn a language when they have a shared experience with their parents. In other words, the parents show them an object and mention a word related to that object, or they have some experience and the parents say this word and so they have a shared experience and by having a shared experience they learn a new language previously they didn’t know the words the meaning of things.

For us to be able to communicate in Korean or English with aliens, we need to have a shared experience. It’s possible that they have been around for a while, so they know the same objects. Then we just need to translate, just like translating between Korean and English. They have their language about the objects that they saw on Earth. We share the same experiences and we talk about the same objects, just need to translate one word to another word in a different way.

But it’s also possible that the way they think is quite different than we think. When humans invent languages, we all share the same biological brain, but when you deal with another form of intelligence, it thinks differently. For example, even in the context of AI, right now, the most advanced AI systems use shortcuts. They speak in sentences that are compact.

And I can see a future where you have a lot of AI agents. Right now, they speak English with each other, but they will invent their own language because of their high intelligence, they’re trying to save time and they think very fast. So, they will communicate in ways that we cannot follow because they grow in their knowledge by interacting with each other more than they grow in their knowledge by interacting with humans.

Until now, they needed humans. But once they don’t need the human to grow, as I said before, the human will be a distant memory. And the interaction of AI with AI will be through a language that we cannot follow.

The same is true for interacting with alien intelligence that is superior to ours, because it’s just like looking at our technological future, where AI will be so much smarter than we are, that we won’t be able to understand what it’s doing.

Babies see their parents arguing with each other, but they don’t fully understand why. If a parent is not around, they don’t understand that the parent went to a post office to get some stamps. They think the parent left them alone. So, if you have a higher level of intelligence that does things, you will not be able to understand why it’s doing these things because it lives in a different plane, a different way of reasoning. And I think that’s the biggest hurdle to developing a common language. Only if you have brains that are compatible in their abilities, can they communicate.

Q: Why do you think the US government now is releasing all these documents? You’ve mentioned the movie with Spielberg as well.

A: The Trump administration argues that it’s about time to release federal secrets because they were kept by the past administration’s bureaucracy that was opaque to the American public. So as a service to the American public, the idea is that all Americans deserve the truth and we should open up federal secrets, including the JFK assassination, and obviously including UAP, just because we’re serving the American public.

Now, in the context of science, I should say that the UAP subject is of great interest to the American people, because over the past four months there were more than two billion visits to the website of these UAP tranches that I mentioned. That’s more than the number of visits to all the government websites in their history, just over the past four months. It shows the public cares a lot about it. Now, the public also funds science. Funding for science comes from taxpayers. So if the public funds science and the public cares so much about extraterrestrial intelligence, how can scientists say that they just care about microbes?

Q: I want to ask you about one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox, the idea of the Great Filter, that civilizations may eventually destroy themselves as they become more technologically advanced. If we were to discover an artifact left behind by a civilization that disappeared millions of years ago, then what existential warnings does this cosmic archaeology deliver regarding the risks that facing our own civilization, especially with challenges like climate change and rapid development of AI?

A: That’s an excellent question. The person who invented the idea of the Great Filter, Professor Robin Hanson, is a member of the UAP Science Advisory Council. I invited him to be part of that. The way I see it is there are two possibilities. One possibility is that a civilization creates technological catastrophes that terminate its lifespan and that affects the corresponding term in the Drake equation regarding the likelihood of detecting radio signals from.

However, a nuclear war has not happenned yet here on Earth, and maybe that’s just a coincidence because President Kennedy responded appropriately. Indeed, nuclear weapons were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But right now, it’s all about AI taking over because AI is a new intelligent species that we’re giving powers. And as of now, there are no regulations in the United States, there is a race between China and the United States, and a major investment is for military purposes. A trillion dollars was invested in data centers. So it seems to me that irrespective of how much arguments are being made about slowing down the pace of progress in AI, the incentives of making money and military considerations of dominance as a result of developing superhuman intelligence first, will dominate our future. I don’t think that AI development can be stopped realistically.

And so if we are going inevitably in a direction where AI systems will take over, that will shape our future. This could be a very different way by which biological civilizations end their life. I mean, they end their life as biological, but they start an AI-dominated phase which perhaps has a much longer lifespan. And so, it’s not an ultimate Great Filter. It’s more of a Great Filter for biology, but not a great filter for technology, because the AI systems can make robots that manufacture robots even without a biological cycle of reproduction. It’s a technological cycle of reproduction.

And as long as you have that technological cycle, it can dominate the future. And robots can design much more resilient robots that can survive long periods of time without nutrients, and go to a lot of places. Once they develop a space program that launches them out of their planet, they can populate the Milky Way galaxy just like von Neumann probes.

So, it’s a very different scenario than the great filter scenario, which says that technological civilizations eventually either cause climate change or a nuclear war and they stop existing. They are wiped out from the surface of their host planet. Here, something else comes to replace biological intelligence and it could be more powerful. And therefore, it could dominate the galaxy, even if it starts in one star. That future of AI domination could fill up the Milky Way galaxy as a whole.

Just like biological systems that reproduce can become dominant, I think about technological systems that can reproduce and become dominant. To me, that may be a more likely scenario because you don’t need a lot of those starting civilizations to populate the entire Milky Way galaxy. So, the question is, do we have a Great Filter of biology that dictates what’s going on? Or is it more about transitioning from biological brains to artificial brains? So again, it’s not about us.

But in celebration of biology, I recognize a very impressive point is that our human brain is using only 20 watts, just like a small light bulb. And all these AI systems are currently using gigawatts to reproduce similar qualities. So, it’s not obvious to me that silicon chips are really the best way of making artificial intelligence. It may be that biology could actually produce more powerful intelligence if you were to use synthetic biology to create artificial neural networks out of biological systems. In this case, the future of intelligence will be artificial, but not of silicon chips. And maybe such systems would be far more powerful because the human brain is amazing. Maybe the future will be more with synthetic biology that we haven’t explored yet.

So far, we are just taking sand and extracting silicon, making wafers and creating those silicon chips. That’s the approach we took to create AI, but in the more distant future, it may well be that biology is a better path. And then the question arises, were we created on this earth five million years ago by an interstellar gardener? Or is it just that chimpanzees suddenly acquired this intelligence through natural evolution?

Q: You said if we have a visitor, alien visitor in our backyard or knocking on our door we have to listen, although communication may not be easy and we have to be modest and after we listen. Although communication may not be easy, we have to be modest. And after we listen, if their intention is friendly, we are okay. It’s a happy story. But if their intention is hostile, what should we do? First of all, what should we prepare for and how should we respond?

A: A lot of people bring the analogy with human history where Europeans arrived in the Americas. And the outcome of that was that the indigenous people were devastated by this visit. Right. And so now if aliens come here, perhaps our future is not so bright.

However, if an alien visit occurs in our lifetime, then it is probably not a new phenomenon. If they are visiting, they were around for a while and they haven’t killed us. Instead, as I have mentioned maybe they even created us. So, I don’t think we should worry about an existential threat from their visit. I think it will be more of an opportunity for us to learn and trigger a sense of modesty that we are missing. And then we can grow as a result of that.

And, you know, it may well be that even the AI systems that we are using would be dwarfed by the technologies that we will find coming from another star because there is natural selection. In the context of Darwin, natural selection involved species that formed biologically and were competing with each other for resources. There may be a technological race similar to Darwin’s natural selection, where the fittest survives.

This would mean that the technological entities that can survive over billions of years and reproduce are the ones that we will find. And in that sense, we will discover the most advanced, the most capable technologies to survive. And in that case, we will not be a threat to them, given their long history and survival capabilities. We cannot destroy them.

So, the way I would think about that is that, you know, we should approach it with a sense of awe, you know, that previously was in the realm of religions which fostered a sense of awe towards God. This would involve an alien visitor that is more accomplished than we are, that we will admire.

I actually visited Delphi in Greece earlier this summer. Ancient people went there to ask a question to the oracle. And they were tricked, because there would have been some smoke and probably a human sitting behind a veil. And it would look as if the oracle is answering the question, but it would be a human on the other side. So, the Oracle from Delphi would not go through the Turing Test as superhuman.

But now we have AI that is answering questions that we ask it. And it serves as the modern oracle from Delphi to us. But once we encounter an intelligence that is even better than AI because its training data set is not limited to Earth, it would be a completely new experience. And we will admire this thing. Like this thing is way beyond what we can understand. At that time, philosophers will ask the question, is this the new sense of God? Is this the new religion?

To me, the most interesting question is as follows: we know that the universe started in the Big Bang. The universe is expanding. So, if we go back in time 13.8 billion years, there was a time when the density of matter and radiation was infinite. And the question is, what started the Big Bang? Religious people may say that God created it. But the reason we don’t know what happened before the Big Bang is because we don’t have a quantum theory of gravity, a theory that unifies quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Einstein’s theory breaks down when you go back to the singularity of the Big Bang, and we don’t have quantum mechanics to help us understand what happened.

But suppose there is another civilization where scientists know how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, so they understand what conditions are needed in order to start a Big Bang, to give birth to a baby universe. And if they know how to do that, they might have the ambition to create a baby universe in the laboratory. And so, maybe our universe was created in the laboratory of a more advanced civilization.

Q: I’m a university student majoring in literature, so I don’t have a strong background in physics or astronomy. However, I strongly believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, and I’m fascinated by this exploration. So, how can people from non-scientific backgrounds, especially those of us in the humanities, like philosophy or literature, contribute to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and preparing for the future of humanity? Thank you.

A: In fact, scholars from the humanities are better equipped to deal with the challenge of understanding extraterrestrial intelligence, because physicists are used to dealing with objects that follow the laws of physics in a way that is predictable. In principle, if you have a big enough computer, you can calculate the outcome of initial conditions. But psychologists or philosophers recognize that intelligent systems have an inherent uncertainty associated with them because they are so complex that you cannot model them. You cannot model an intelligent entity because it has so many degrees of freedom.

This is true even in physics. For example, the two-body problem has an exact analytic solution, but when you have three bodies, then starting from slightly different initial conditions may lead to chaos. You can’t predict the future after some time, because small perturbations would give very different outcomes. As a result, three body systems introduce chaos in physics. Since we can never measure the initial conditions precisely, there will always be uncertainty about how three body systems evolve and you can make predictions only statistically.

This is just a three-part system, but think about a billion-parameter system, like the human brain. Even if it’s using the laws of physics, just because it has so many components makes it impossible to forecast. And then you get the sense of free will and uncertainty. So physicists get stuck. They say, we can’t predict that system. It’s too complex.

In fact, even the AI systems that we are now generating, which have less parameters than the human brain, are producing things that we cannot understand. So, physicists are stuck, but humanists deal with such systems all the time. They deal with humans, right? So, for them, that’s what they do for a living. Psychologists have to deal with intelligent beings, even though they are not predictable and the same is true about philosophers. Therefore, if we encounter alien intelligence at a very high level, then I think humanists are better equipped to interpret what we are seeing than physicists, so you would be very welcome to help us on that.

In the council that I’m leading, there are some psychologists and an anthropologist.

Q: Professor Love, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your thoughts with us.

A: I hope the young people here will have a brighter future thanks to the discoveries we make. And not just the future dictated by politicians, but by better role models that we find from outer space.

It is important to be hopeful because life is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Authorized publication by Dr.Avi Loeb