During a recent interview at the Milken Institute’s global conference in Los Angeles, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made some thought-provoking comments about humanity’s potential to one day discover traces of long-extinct alien societies. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla was asked about his cosmic vision and his ambitions to help make humanity a multi-planetary species.
Musk made a convincing comparison between the vast time scales of the universe’s existence and the relatively brief period of modern human civilization’s existence. “If physics is correct, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, while the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old,” he said. “On that time scale, a civilization that lasted only a million years is an insignificant number.”
He used the emergence of human writing as a reference, noting that it dates back only about 5,500 years to the ancient Sumerian culture. Musk then extrapolated this time period: “If our civilization lasted a million years, that would be incredible. We would probably have colonized most of the galaxy.”
This set the stage for his provocative suggestion about the possibility of humanity one day finding traces of other civilizations that arose and disappeared long before our species. “If we send space probes, we could find ruins of alien civilizations that existed long ago,” Musk said.
The idea that advanced intelligent life could predate humanity by billions of years and leave ruins to be discovered by future species is certainly intriguing. It aligns with Fermi’s Paradox and other theories that attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction between the vast universe and the lack of evidence of other civilizations.
Musk admitted that he himself “has seen no evidence of extraterrestrial visitation” based on SpaceX’s satellite operations. However, he acknowledged the limitations of this perspective, noting that “Starlink satellites are not intended to detect or monitor the presence of UFOs in orbit”. An advanced alien civilization could easily navigate around our satellites.
The billionaire seemed to endorse the “rare Earth hypothesis”, which argues that the emergence of complex life, such as humans, required an unlikely convergence of circumstances unique to our planet. “If any civilization in our galaxy had lasted a million years… it could have explored and colonized the entire galaxy. So why didn’t they?” asked Musk. “I think the answer may be – or probably is – that civilization is precarious and rare.”
He left the audience with a poetic plea to see humanity’s existence as “a tiny candle in a vast darkness” that must be fiercely protected by expanding to other hospitable worlds. “We must do everything we can to ensure that this candle does not go out,” Musk implored.
Whether one agrees with Musk’s views or not, his comments have undoubtedly provoked fascinating debate and contemplation about our place in the cosmos. The notion that humanity may one day gain evidence that we are not the only civilization to emerge is certainly an extraordinary prospect to consider.
Perhaps future probes or human explorers will indeed stumble upon the long-eroded ruins of an intelligence that preceded us by eons on some long-abandoned world. Or perhaps we will be the first – charged with safeguarding the miracle of conscious, technological life by spreading out from our precious pale blue dot. Only time will tell which vision is closer to reality.
