To paraphrase the Declaration of Independence in the context of science:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the search for extraterrestrial knowledge, the liberty to deviate from the arrogance of dogmatists, and the pursuit of scientific truth.”

The human spirit is superior to artificial intelligence (AI) in its willingness to take risks and explore new territories of knowledge that are not restricted to past training data sets.

In a recent interview with a high-school girl, I was asked the question: “what is your advice to young adults?” to which I replied: “maintain your childhood curiosity, take risks to improve the world, but most importantly: give priority to human companionship over AI companions and follow primary sources of information rather than processed intellectual junk-food that is fed to you from your environment. The reason is simple: only critical thinking will make you smarter. The brain is like a muscle: you must use it in order to get better.” After the interview, I was informed that the student is the daughter of an AI technology mogul with a net worth exceeding 10 billion dollars. When asked if she can share the interview’s video with her father, I replied: “by all means.”

In a 3.5-hour podcast interview the following day, I was asked why is academia alienating the public? I explained that the communication port enabled in academia is often one-way, taking the form of scientists telling the public what they think it needs to know. This is no different than Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution, stating: “There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”

I do not see myself as different from any member of the public. I was born on a farm and fell in love with nature. When you are in love, you wish to learn everything you can about the subject of your love. Your ego, your recognition by peers, or your sense of self-importance, are secondary to the subject of your love. I entered academia under the illusion that tenure secures this path. But instead, I found myself surrounded by self-declared kings and queens who rule over communities of students and postdocs in echo-chambers that they built out of taxpayer’s funds. They are in love with themselves rather than with nature.

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The scientific declaration of independence asks instead that we attend to the public’s curiosity because the public funds science. The 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics identified the search for the molecular fingerprints of microbial life as the highest research priority, worthy of the investment of at least 10 billion years in the next two decades. The search for technological signatures of extraterrestrial intelligence was sidelined with no recommended funding. This stands in contrast to the public’s passion to search for aliens and not just microbes. The mainstream report recommended searching for microbes in distant houses, Earth-Sun analogs, on our cosmic street. But if any of these houses happens to host intelligent residents, these might send a package to our backyard in the form of interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS or have a construction project in their backyard that is easier to detect than microbes. The scientific declaration of independence argues for hedging the bets and investing in both types of searches. But the gatekeepers of academia avoid the public’s passion for aliens.

Academia communicates science from a pedestal. After 3I/ATLAS was discovered, I chose the alternative way of communicating the scientific process as the opportunity to explore an exciting possibility that 3I/ATLAS might be a technological object based on its 13 anomalies, listed here. Even if this explanation turns out to be wrong, we must take it seriously because of its huge implications to society. Admitting that there are mysterious facts about 3I/ATLAS endows us with the curiosity to learn something new. Excluding the anomalies from the vocabulary of NASA officials alienates the public, because it violates the scientific declaration of independence. The proper way to address alternative interpretations of 3I/ATLAS is by explaining anomalies away, not by ignoring them.

The public’s passion must be respected, not sidelined. Once science is perceived as a learning experience of the people, not an occupation of the intellectual elite, it would receive increased federal funding and would address exciting problems that the public really cares about. Just as with AI systems, there is “an alignment problem” in ensuring that scientists act in accordance with taxpayers’ intentions, values, and goals. Just as with AI systems: the problem stems from faulty training data sets. Comet experts should add spacecraft to the icy rocks that they have in their training data set, because humanity produced such objects and most of the 100 billion stars in the Milky-Way galaxies formed billions of years before the Sun. In a billion years, the Voyager spacecraft will visit the opposite side of the Milky-Way relative to the Sun.

And then there are science popularizers, who are simply worried about being liked without practicing scientific research on the topics they speak about. I would not worry about them, because they will drift in the right direction once the mainstream of science practitioners will attend to the scientific priorities of the public.

Even if the interstellar gift of 3I/ATLAS ends up being a natural iceberg, its revolutionary significance was in exposing major problems with the way science is pursued and communicated to the public. Here’s hoping that the passage of interstellar objects through the inner solar system will lead to a better future in which science is regarded as work of the people, rather than the work of the intellectual elite.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

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.

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