The Illusion of Our Uniqueness: Reevaluating Our Place in the Universe
Our belief in human and Earth's uniqueness is flattering but potentially misleading. This blog explores the fallacies of self-importance, the implications of advanced AI, and the need to invest in exploring extraterrestrial intelligence.
It's flattering to imagine that we are rare and unique. This sense of uniqueness boosts our self-esteem, making us feel special. However, declaring ourselves extraordinary and avoiding the search for evidence to the contrary maintains our ignorance and feeds our ego. The only people who are entirely in love with themselves are those who ignore everyone else.
The most obvious manifestation of self-pride is encapsulated in the illusion of free will. If we have free will, no 3D printer can replicate us. However, all evidence supports the idea that the human brain is simply a network of 86 billion neurons with about 7,000 synaptic connections per neuron. The wiring of the fruit fly brain, with its 3,000 neurons, was entirely mapped recently and can now be simulated on a computer. If artificial intelligence (AI) systems reach the number of connections in the human brain within a decade or two, their thought processes will be as complex and unpredictable as the human mind. The combination of chaos, quantum uncertainty, and response to an undocumented environment with many degrees of freedom can fully account for the unpredictability we associate with free will. Despite the uncertainty inherent in many-body systems, the statistical behavior of a large number of atoms is forecasted by the laws of thermodynamics and statistical physics. Similarly, the statistical behavior of a large number of people will become predictable with the advent of AI.
Beyond the level of an individual, we also tend to believe in humanity’s central place in the cosmos. This started with the geocentric model that the Earth is at the center of the universe and continues today with the assertion that our intelligence is so rare that taxpayers’ money should not be spent on searching for duplicates of it on exoplanets. The mainstream of the astronomy community is instead focusing resources on the search for molecular signatures of microbial life in the atmospheres of exoplanets. True, microbial life emerged early on Earth, in the form of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) about 4.2 billion years ago, whereas human intelligence surfaced in the last ~0.1% of the time that elapsed since then. However, there is a major limitation to this version of astrobiology.
The new discovery of oxygen production at the dark abyssal seafloor where photosynthesis is impossible has important implications for astrobiology. Given the high electric potentials available on the polymetallic nodule-covered seafloor in the Pacific Ocean, oxygen may be produced by breaking water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen through lifeless seawater electrolysis. This suggests that the Habitable World Observatory, prioritized by the National Academies report Astro2020 at a cost of 11 billion dollars to search for oxygen or methane in the atmospheres of exoplanets, might not yield unambiguous evidence for extraterrestrial life if electrolysis can occur naturally.
Exploring Extraterrestrial Intelligence
In contrast, if HERCULES, a video-equipped robot to be employed by the Galileo Project in its next expedition to the Pacific Ocean’s site of the interstellar meteor IM1, recovers a piece of a technological artifact manufactured by an alien civilization, the finding will not only confirm unambiguously the existence of extraterrestrial life but also the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This expedition will cost less than 0.06% of the Habitable World Observatory’s budget, yet it has zero chance of being funded by a federal agency. Instead, the expedition has a high likelihood of being funded by curious taxpayers who are not intimidated by gatekeepers who aim to shield academia from the public’s genuine interest in extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Rare Earth Hypothesis
The most extreme manifestation of the rarity argument argues that many of the unusual conditions near Earth are required for intelligent life to emerge. By compiling a large enough set of special requirements based on one example, it is possible to get a tiny final probability for reproducing them elsewhere, ignoring the possibility that intelligent life might be far more diverse than we imagine. This argument was formulated in terms of the “Rare Earth” hypothesis in a book by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, who argued that many conditions had to be “just right” for large multicellular animal life to develop on Earth. This includes having a Sun-like star, being at the habitable distance from the star, having an Earth-size rocky planet along with the architecture of the Solar planetary system, having the Earth’s geochemical composition — including a molten core and plate tectonics, having a large Moon, and also being at the appropriate distance from the Milky Way center where extreme phenomena like frequent stellar explosions or black hole flares could sterilize life on an Earth-like planet. This narrative also underlines a more recent proposal that the rarity of continents, oceans, and plate tectonics on exoplanets could explain Fermi’s paradox.
Investing in Interstellar Exploration
Elon Musk echoed a related sentiment, arguing that humanity should become a multi-planet species to avoid extinction from a single-point catastrophe on Earth. Before we invest 11 billion dollars in the Habitable World Observatory or much more money in transporting people to the Martian desert, we should invest tens of millions of dollars in the search for technological objects that originated outside the Solar system, a task that became feasible only over the past decade. Even our best telescopes at present can only detect the sunlight reflected from objects larger than Musk’s Starship within the Earth-Sun separation. There could be many interstellar CubeSats that we missed so far. If most of them are not functional, they only become detected through the fireball they generate as meteors if they happen to collide with Earth. Just over the past decade, the U.S. government employed a network of satellites that routinely document fireballs in the CNEOS catalog and allows us to identify interstellar meteors like IM1. We must check whether among all interstellar rocks there might be some trash from other civilizations.
Challenging Our Self-Centered Narrative
This makes common sense but is regarded as controversial. This cognitive dissonance reflects the self-centered narrative that we are unique and special. It could also be a sign that we are naïve and immature out of ignorance. When my two daughters were infants, they thought the world centered on them. The message from the Universe is different: we are not unique or special. By now, we know that the conditions in the Earth-Sun system are possibly replicated in billions of other examples within the Milky Way galaxy, something that was not known to Ward and Brownlee when they argued that Earth is extremely rare.
If we envision only replicas that share identical freckles and scars to those we see in the mirror, we would never find them. Instead of anticipating the answer, we must invest time and money in seeking it agnostically.
When searching for interstellar visitors, we should not imagine that they are interested in us. Their trips may have started billions of years ago, long before humans existed on Earth.
