Will We Ever Become An Interstellar Civilisation? - Avi Loeb

What do you think is the chance that our universe was created by aliens in a lab?

It's a possibility. We don't understand how the Big Bang, uh, came to exist, uh, and, uh, it's really troubling that there was a beginning in time, uh, and it's, um, uh, in, uh, in a way it shows the shortcoming of Einstein's Theory of, um, General Relativity which, um, has singularities, and the Big Bang is one of them. It's this, it's a time singularity. If we go back in time, there was a point in time (laughs) when, um, the space and time, um, uh, you know, had the very extreme, uh, conditions, and, and, and we can't go beyond that point. Uh, and, um, clearly the reason for that is that there is no, um, quantum mechanical theory of gravity that is predictive. And th- you know, for the past few decades, there were attempts to, uh, put these two theories together, of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and (laughs) I must say that, uh, despite the, the, uh, claims made by string theorists, they don't make any predictions about the Big Bang. They don't even make predictions about what happens inside a black hole. So as far as I'm concerned, you know, if you're a plumber, and I ask you, "Can you fix my toilet?" And you say, "No, that's too difficult." Then I ask you, "Okay, so can you fix, uh, um, my, my faucet?" And you say, "No, that's also too difficult," uh, and then you tell me, "But actually, in the Metaverse, you know, I'm a real plumber," that doesn't buy much from me. I, I would say, "You're not a bl- a real plumber." Um, so claiming that the, you're working on the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity and, and you have succ- some partial success doesn't count if you can't solve the main problems that face us, and one of them is how the Big Bang started. And I can imagine an advanced technological civilization that has these two theories unified, because they had more than a century of physics to work on, and, uh, if so, they might engineer their knowledge into creating a baby universe in the lab. And of course, our ba- our universe could've been the result of a lab, uh, experiment, and in that case it's just like humans, you know, that babies grow up to become adults and they have their own babies and so forth. So you can have a universe inside of which the, you know, it gives rise to technological civilizations that give birth to new baby universes, and, and it goes forever this way. So that's one possibility, and I consider it as possible.

I suppose this would nicely fold in the fine-tuning argument as well. Why is the cosmological constant just so, so delicately balanced along with gravity, along with the strong and weak, et cetera, et cetera?

Well, I think it stems from the fact that, uh, a very advanced technological civilization is a good approximation to God. And of course, some people believe that God created the universe, and I'm just saying it could've been a technological civilization that unified quantum mechanics and gravity. And then, uh, the fine-tuning is also argued, "Oh, well, there was a design here, that some numbers worked out so that we exist, and these numbers were designed by some divine entity." Well, you know, here I say again, uh, whatever we see around us, including life, could've been created by an advanced technological civilization, and the only way to find out... I mean, the difference from religion is that I'm talking about something that can be tested experimentally. I- if we find evidence for such a civilization, we will know their capabilities, I mean, at some point. Once we visit their home, uh, we can see what they are up to. Or, we might see gadgets that are so advanced that, you know, we won't be able to understand them. But, and, and they would be considered as miracles, just the way Moses, you know, in the Old Testament, the Bible, Moses saw the burning bush, and that was a miracle that convinced Moses that God exists. Well, if I was around Moses at the time, I would use infrared cameras that we are using right now in, in the Galileo Project that I'm leading, and I could advise Mor- Moses about the, the surface temperature of the burning bush, the amount of energy emitted per time, and I could assess very clearly whether, uh, the burning bush is a natural phenomena or some creation of a superhuman entity, uh, so that, uh, he would, you know, have more or less awe from this, uh, phenomenon, and perhaps, uh, decide whether he believes, uh, in, in God or not. But what I am saying is, if a cave dweller came to New York City right now, the cave dweller would be at awe, and would think that everything around must be a miracle. Th- and that's what Moses felt.