“The idea of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life is no more speculative than extra dimensions or dark matter. It fact, he says, it is less so,” says Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb.
In November of 2018, The Daily Galaxy reported: “You would have thought it was 1938 again following Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds the way the way Twitter lit up last week when the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, Israel-born theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, suggested that an alien spaceship was possibly on its way to Earth to study humankind, and probably had Stephen Hawking spinning in his grave.”
“Life could be transported across the Milky Way”
In October, 2018, Loeb published a study explaining how aliens can travel throughout the galaxy on the backs of everything from meteoroids to space dust. “Our paper considers the possibility that life could be transported across the entire Milky Way galaxy and beyond,” Loeb said. “The solar system acts as a gravitational ‘fishing net’ that contains thousands of bound interstellar objects of this size at any given time. These bound interstellar objects could potentially plant life from another planetary system and in the solar system.”
All hell broke out when Loeb followed up with a new paper suggesting that the interstellar object we now know as Oumuamua might be a spaceship, “a lightsail, from an alien civilization.”
“Think big and to expect the unexpected”
Fast forward to the new year, 2021, Avi Loeb’s highly anticipated new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, is being published Jan. 26, detailing his controversial theory that an artificial object may had been sent to Earth in 2017 from an extraterrestrial civilization. New York Times best selling author Alan Lightman, called “Extraterrestrial” provocative “and thrilling” and praising Loeb for asking readers to “think big and to expect the unexpected,” reports The Boston Globe.
Backstory
In late 2017, scientists using some of the biggest telescopes on earth detected an odd oblong-shaped mystery object floating through space. They said the interstellar asteroid is like nothing that’s been seen in the solar system before, with an “extreme oblong shape” that’s as much as 10 times as long as it is wide. ‘Oumuamua was discovered Oct. 19 using the Pan-STARRS telescope, which is operated near the summit of Maui’s Haleakala volcano by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.
The dim object was reported spotted as it traveled through the inner solar system, at a distance of about 19 million miles from Earth, but an analysis of its trajectory suggests that it came in from a place far beyond the solar system, somewhere in the constellation Lyra, heading towards the constellation Pegasus.
In late 2017, Loeb said, “scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star.” Loeb, the statement continued, “showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.”
On November 10, 2018, The Daily Galaxy emailed Loeb asking him for a quote (of any length) on his thoughts about human implications of the Oumuamua “spacecraft” debate. “In short,” we wrote in the email that “it seems that we are rooting beyond the science for validation of the spacecraft hypothesis. In the rancorous, tribal environment we’re living through, it appears the human species is yearning for validation of intelligent life beyond our fragile Blue Dot.”
Avi Loeb responded as follow…
“I was very surprised about the reaction of the media to our paper. We did not have a press release. The paper was submitted for publication ten days ago and posted on the online arXiv at the same time. It was reviewed and accepted for publication within a record time of only a few days. I received positive reactions from distinguished astronomers, such as the Astronomer Royal in the UK, Lord Martin Rees. I am glad to see the excitement about the paper, but it was not written for that purpose. We just followed the standard practice of scientific research.
“I prefer not to assign probabilities to the nature of `Oumuamua. e just need to be practical and collect more data on it or other members of its population. The interpretation of existing and future data is my plan for the future.”
“It is exciting to live at a time when we have the scientific technology to search for evidence of alien civilizations. The evidence about `Oumuamua is not conclusive but interesting. I will be truly excited once we have conclusive evidence.”
Avi Shporer, formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).currently with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Boston Globe and “Harvard Researchers Suggest Interstellar Object Might have been from Alien Civilization”
Image credit: Oumuamua , courtesy ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser. Top of page, Shutterstock License.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”