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A Message to Future Trillionaires

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Avi Loeb Medium

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Henry Thoreau’s cabin site. (Image credit: The Walden Woods Project)

When I met Sergey Brin and Mark Zukerberg in Silicon Valley a decade ago, their net worth was about $30–40 billion. By now, it is 6 times larger. Over the same decade, the net worth of Elon Musk and Jensen Huang grew by a factor of about 60. With AI advancing rapidly, the latter two are projected to become trillionaires over the next few years.

This level of wealth is staggering. What is the best way to use it?

Reflecting back on my life, my career goal was to earn just the amount of money necessary to buy me freedom. By freedom, I mean the pleasure of pursuing my creative work while minimizing the time spent on running errands. At times, I accepted leadership positions at Harvard and nationwide as a way of giving back to the community that nurtured me. But as soon as these tasks were completed, I returned to the bliss of creative work.

There is nothing better than creative work because it delivers new knowledge every day. Within a week, I am invited to play myself for a cameo in a new movie that is currently in production, called: “Sol Hershowitz’s Guide to Extraterrestrial Life,” alongside the professional actors: Brandon Routh, Sarah Cooper and Mickey Rourke. There is no greater privilege than playing myself, either on a movie set or in life.

Science offers the privilege of staying curious about the world, without pretending to be the adult in the room that knows more than is actually known. The problem starts when peer pressure from review committees, or failed academics who became YouTube celebrities by pretending to represent science, push back and ask you to play a role other than yourself. My response to them is simple. Given that all of us will not be around within a century, I ignore haters and focus on what is most important to me: playing myself.

The recognition that everything is transient and that all of us will die guides our life goals. An even deeper sense of humility is delivered by a grander cosmic perspective.

The age of the observable Universe exceeds the maximum lifespan of a human by a factor of 100 million. There are as many stars in the Milky-Way galaxy and as many galaxies within the observable Universe as the number of humans who ever lived on Earth, of order a hundred billion in both cases.

Undoubtedly, this realization delivers the message that we are not the central actors on the cosmic stage. We are not located centerstage and we are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking.

Our technological civilization will reach an inevitable natural doomsday as soon as the Sun will die. Most sun-like stars formed billions of years before our Sun. We observe their corpses in the form of billions of white dwarfs within the Milky-Way graveyard.

Where are the civilizations that might have blossomed around these dead stars?

Any survivors must have escaped their birth planet. Some engaged in interstellar travel. Rather than search for radio communications from young civilizations which are still within the habitable zone of their parent star, we should search for technological signatures of `Noah’s arks’ from old, technologically-advanced civilizations. These are the ones whose lessons we want to learn. Instead, mainstream astronomers are focused on the search for microbes and the SETI community focuses on radio communication signals.

Over the past five years, the Galileo Project under my leadership brought the search for extraterrestrial technological objects near Earth into rigorous, transparent mainstream science. The Galileo observatories use triangulation to reliably detect, track, and characterize aerial objects in three dimensions, and employ AI to distinguish outliers from human-made technologies. We also study recovered materials from interstellar meteor candidates, to decide whether they are from outside the Solar System and potentially technological in origin. This work is essential for a scientifically credible evaluation of the nature of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), reported by the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence agencies. Hopefully, the Galileo Project will strengthen the empirical basis for distinguishing Solar System phenomena from genuinely anomalous events associated with extraterrestrial technological objects near Earth.

As of now, the ability of the Galileo Project to pursue its goals depends on the generosity of millionaires and billionaires who support it. I sometimes wonder whether I made a strategic mistake by not focusing at first on creating the wealth that would later support the goals of my scientific research. Research funding is a prerequisite for a major breakthrough in answering the most romantic question in science: “Are we alone?”

Here’s hoping that the highest net-worth individuals will choose to invest a small portion of their wealth in the quest for the technological products of our cosmic neighbors. We do not need to rely on the declassification of UAP videos by the White House. We can make pioneering discoveries ourselves by simply looking up.

All we need is that someone with an ultra-high net worth will read this essay and resonate with its premise.

As a realist, I do not hold my hopes high. I also contemplate `Plan B’ in case AI will deliver a technological doomsday for our civilization in the coming years. This outcome might answer Enrico Fermi’s question: “Where is everybody?” As for myself — rather than move to an underground bunker, I plan to retire into a cabin in the local woods with no internet connectivity. I know of at least one suitable property, the foundations of Henry Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond, just 10 miles away from my current home.

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, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2005–2026), 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.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

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