EXPLAIN THIS: Theoretical Physicist Says Maybe Aliens Made Us in a Lab

Avi Loeb is one of the smartest individuals walking the face of the Earth these days, having been chairman of the Harvard University astronomy department, founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Loeb is raising eyebrows with an article in the current issue of Scientific American in which he posits the possibility of an intelligent designer of the universe. But don’t get too excited because Loeb doesn’t say that Intelligent Designer is the supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God:

“Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says ‘everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,’ or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole,” Loeb writes.

Aliens Made Us:

“A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling,” he continues.

“This possible origin story unifies the religious notion of a creator with the secular notion of quantum gravity. We do not possess a predictive theory that combines the two pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and gravity. But a more advanced civilization might have accomplished this feat and mastered the technology of creating baby universes,” Loeb wrote.

“If that happened, then not only could it account for the origin of our universe, but it would also suggest that a universe like our own — which in this picture hosts an advanced technological civilization that gives birth to a new flat universe — is like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations,” he observed.

Intelligent Designer!

So, at least according to Loeb, it turns out, there really is an Intelligent Designer behind the universe. We don’t know it’s name, but Loeb clearly thinks it was part of an “advanced technological civilization” researching at a level far above anything being done on this planet today. We are occupants of a “baby universe,” one of countless many such universes.

Now, being a mere journalist, I don’t claim to be even remotely as smart as Loeb, but I do see a couple of difficulties with his suggested explanation of the origin of the universe. First, as he clearly acknowledges, he is suggesting a possible explanation, not a supposed final answer.

It is one of many possible explanations that, as Loeb describes them, assume a pre-existing material or natural process that produced the matter that is in and of the universe. It is to his credit that Loeb does not pronounce his Alien Creation Lab theory to be the definitive explanation for the existence of the universe, and it should not be presented as if he does.

Infinite Regress:

Second, the Alien Creation Lab theory has an infinite regress problem. How is the origin of the Alien explained? Was it also the product of a prior research lab. And where did the matter with which it worked in its research lab come from? Either it had a beginning, and therefore a cause, or it has always been.

Third, whence came Loeb’s Intelligent Designer’s will to conduct the research that resulted in the creation of our universe? It seems logical to conclude there was a time when it was not researching, so there must have been a point at which the idea of the research was conceived and then executed.

But will requires choice and reflection, which require self-consciousness. If there is self-consciousness, it is distinct from matter. What is the origin of this non-material characteristic? We’re back to the issue of origins and infinite regress.

The ‘Other’ Loeb:

Earlier this year, Loeb sat down for an interview with Closer to Truth on PBS and offered these additional observations on the origins question:

“My personal view is that we are byproducts, accidental byproducts, we’re not too significant in the cosmic scheme of things. We would not exist beyond [unintelligible] centuries from now because even the lowest mass star will burn out by then and the universe will become dark.

“So here we are, creatures on the surface of a habitable planet … we live for a short time, matter takes it’s shape in the form of our bodies, matter that was expelled from the heart of a massive star in a supernova explosion, so we owe our existence to many things that happened in the universe since the Bib Bang.

“But we are just transient structures passing by, with no great significance, and obviously if the conditions were different, we wouldn’t be the way we are. And so from that perspective, I don’t think there was any particular fine-tuning.”

Bottom line: Loeb has a theory based on a set of assumptions about the origin of matter and energy that do not include God. The Alien Research Lab theory is a great conversation starter but it’s inadequate to the task of answering the question, does God exist?

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