Harvard professor Avi Loeb is convinced that humanity needs to look for dead aliens. They will definitely not conquer us, and you can learn a lot from them. Loeb is convinced that civilizations of our type are inherently short-lived, and we do not yet know how to become a civilization of another type. The help of lost civilizations in this can be overvalued.
Professor Avi Loeb presented his views on the study of extraterrestrial life during the Humans to Mars Summit. He is confident that the discovery of a dead civilization will serve as an excellent warning for humanity. Loeb calls his field "space archeology".
Artifacts of dead civilizations can appear in different forms: a disfigured planet surface, traces of toxic gases in the atmosphere, or powerful machines that have failed.
The professor also notes that the short lifespan of civilization would help solve the Fermi paradox - the absence of visible traces of aliens, despite the billions of billions of stars in the universe.
Another plus of Loeb's technopessimism is that although he talks about dead aliens, he is not particularly afraid of the living either. Humanity will destroy itself without their help, and it is worth continuing the search for the chance to find a good race that will share with us advanced technologies: "Ours are only a century old, and their development may have been a billion years."
As noted by Space.com, now at the disposal of humanity there are already many options to destroy life on Earth as we know it. There are fast ones - for example, nuclear weapons. There are slow and painful ones - like the consequences of global warming.
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When we find traces of any extinct civilization, it will be the discovery of the century. And it will be important to draw the right lessons from this.
“I hope the search for dead civilizations will inspire us to behave better and act together,” says Loeb. - There is one more hope: that, after leaving the solar system, we will receive the message: "Welcome to the interstellar club." And let's find out that there is a lot of traffic in this space that we did not know about."
Earlier Loeb did not rule out that humanity has already encountered the first alien object. In his opinion, the celestial body of Oumuamua, uncharacteristic for a meteorite, may have lost control of the spacecraft. But it turned out to be impossible to establish whether this is so with the means available to scientists.
