Terrestrial Destruction Begs Extraterrestrial Aspirations

[Avi Loeb Medium]

Stones from the Western Wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, knocked onto the street below by Roman battering rams on the 9th of Av, 70 C.E. This first century street is located at the base of the Temple Mount at the corner where the Western and Southern walls of the Temple met. (Image credit: Avi Loeb, January 2, 2025)

Last week, I visited with my family the Old City of Jerusalem, which was constructed at ancient times by our civilization. This was a timely history lesson for me, given that my attention over the past six months was dedicated to the possibility that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS might have been constructed by another civilization.

What struck me in particular is one image of the Robinson Arch relic, which supported a flight of steps from a first century street of Jerusalem to the Temple Mount near the southern end of its western retaining wall. The arch was discovered in 1838 and named after its discoverer, the American researcher Edward Robinson. Under the Arch, I saw broken stones from the Western Wall that were thrown onto the street by the battering rams of Roman soldiers on the 9th of the month of Av (July-August), 70 C.E. Some of stones are blackened by the fire that consumed the Second Temple.

A reconstructed miniature of the Old City of Jerusalem at the Israel Museum features the Second Temple in its full glory after its refurbishment was completed by the Roman Jewish King Herod the Great in 18 C.E., around the time when Jesus started preaching as a young Jew.

A scale model reconstruction of the Temple Mount in the Holyland Model of Jerusalem, featuring the Second Temple in the Holyland Model of the Old City of Jerusalem. The model was designed by archaeologist Michael Avi-Yonah, based on archaeological evidence and ancient sources, and is housed at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. (Image credit: Wikimedia)

The refurbished Temple lasted only 52 years. Without getting into the political and strategic mistakes that led to the destruction, an external observer cannot escape feeling sad for the lost cultural treasures, in the form of books, art and scholarship. Their destruction transformed the history of Judaism and Christianity forever.

But as we often see on social media, the destruction of cultural treasures of some is a reason for celebration by others. Roman forces led by Titus besieged the Jewish capital of Jerusalem. A year after the destruction they inflicted, the Roman Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus celebrated their victory with a Roman triumph event in Rome, parading temple spoils — including the Temple menorah — alongside hundreds of captives. Monuments such as the Arch of Titus were erected to commemorate the military victory.

If any archaeological relics of the Temple lie underground, I am most curious to know whether the so-called Holy of Holies — where God’s presence was reported to appear in the Temple, included any technological transmitter to communicate with an extraterrestrial superhuman entity. However, any such relic — if it existed — must have likely been burned down and destroyed.

Human history is full of alternating cycles of construction and destruction, with wounds that sometimes never heal. It is much easier to destroy than to build. Hence, destruction of cultural treasures signals a lack of intelligence. If humans were to cooperate instead of destroy, they would have reached greater heights. This is a particularly acute shortcoming given that all constructions on planet Earth will eventually be engulfed and destroyed

by the envelope of the Sun in 7.6 billion years, like sand castles washed by the ocean. If we wish to be remembered in the long run, we better venture out of Earth rather than fight on its surface prior to our inevitable doomsday.

The scars of tragic human history are marked by blackened stones from fires that consumed books in which the wisdom of past generations was recorded. Often, the historic disputes involved political control over real estate. But the reality that humans failed to recognize over and over again is that most real estate lies on 10^{20} Earth-analogs within the observable volume of the Universe. Surely, many inhabitants of these exoplanets engaged in cycles of destruction like us earthlings. But these are not the ones that will be remembered in the cosmic history books, summarizing the past 13.8 billion years.

The written cosmic record will favor civilizations that engaged in cooperation aimed to explore what lies beyond their planet. Instead of burning down the cultural construction, they burned-up fuel to propel spacecraft. By recognizing that the cosmos is an infinite-sum game, they abondoned zero-sum games on the surface of their home planet.

Will we ever reach that realization? It is difficult to be optimistic after reading the daily news.

Extending Darwinian selection to interstellar space gives a new meaning to “survival of the fittest”. To find the fittest students in our class of intelligent civilizations, it is our scientific duty to invest billions of dollars in searching for them. The benefits will be huge if we succeed.

Currently, the mainstream of the astronomy community focuses on the search for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in exoplanet atmospheres. But those who go on blind dates know very well that one is more likely to find a partner with qualities that exceed yours if one aims higher rather than lower.

Imagining a better future for humanity could guide our search for a more advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Conversely, finding the products of such a civilizations would serve as inspiration for us to do better. Once we realize what it takes to become interstellar, we might do it. In that case, our new actions could serve as an inspiration for those extraterrestrial civilizations which have a lower rank than ours on the cosmic food chain. If they manage to communicate with our devices, they might construct a Temple on their exo-planet in their version of Jerusalem, to express a sense of awe towards more advanced technological accomplishments.

The search for interstellar objects, like 3I/ATLAS, could carve the path for our transition from a past history marked by self-inflicted wounds to a future marked by cooperation and prosperity. Any communication chamber with extraterrestrials would constitute our future “Holly of Hollies” — where the presence of a superhuman alien technology will be celebrated.

As 2026 starts, my New Year resolution is to focus my scientific attention to new interstellar objects that will be discovered by the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory. Here’s hoping that one of them will carry an inspiring message in a bottle to all of us on Earth.

Happy New Year!

The Loeb family during a visit to Israel on the last week of 2025. (Image credit: Avi Loeb)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(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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