For more than 70 years, scientists have been looking for evidence of intelligent aliens by hunting for radio signals – messages from the stars spread billions of kilometers across space. But for Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, searching extraterrestrial intelligence it starts much closer to home: In the oceans of the world.
In the summer of 2023, Loeb led an expedition near Papua New Guinea to attack. hundreds of small cubits of iron he suggested that it was the remains of an interstellar meteor that had broken up in the Pacific Ocean ten years earlier. For Loeb, this mission was not only to find rare evidence of something from beyond our planetary system – but also an opportunity to investigate the elements of extraterrestrial technology. the rest.
The ultimate goal of the journey gathered criticism from the scientific community – but to Loeb, even the slightest chance to learn something new about our universe is reason enough to do research.
“I don’t pretend to know more than I do,” Loeb told Live Science in an interview. “I’m willing to think about the possibilities that others can completely reduce.”
Loeb, who is a professor of astronomy and director of the Center for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says he came to his academic success by accident, after a lifelong interest in philosophy which led him to astronomy. Live Science was held with the professor before HowTheLightGetsIn Festival London, where Loeb will be speaking later this month, to discuss his research, his hopes for future travel, and the search for foreign intelligence.
Brandon Specktor: You said, from a young age, you wanted to be a philosopher. Do you have a philosophy that guides your scientific research?
Avi Loeb: Humans, in general, have existed for several million years on earth, which is only one in 10,000 of the earth’s. age of the universe. So we have just reached the end of the cosmic game. And we know, thanks to Copernicus and Galileo, that we are not in the middle of the stage. And so the game is not about us. And it is good that we remain humble and curious. That is my basic philosophy.
BS: You’ve shared a lot of ideas about where people should look for extraterrestrial life. If you were given a blank check to pursue any of your ideas about immigrants, how would you use it?
AL: I think we should do a better job on Mars, because Mars had liquid water on the surface. We know that for sure. There was the first evidence that the soil of Mars may have mysterious signatures of life that was first mentioned by the Viking mission. [in 1976]. There are many things we can do that are less difficult than what was done in the 1970s. Too bad NASA doesn’t.
[Editor’s note: NASA has collected as many as 30 geological samples on Mars, and is working with the private sector to develop a plan to return them to Earth for analysis. The budget for such missions remains an issue.]
One thing I can do is, there are millions of objects, about a meter in size, that come from outside the solar system. At any given moment in time, there are a few million of them in Earth’s orbit around the sun. They do not emit enough sunlight for us to detect them with our existing telescopes. So I set up a test program to try to detect them.
I would like to see if, among the rocks that reach the planetary system from other stars, there is technological waste. It may be local waste or it may be functional, but it should be easy to distinguish between stones and something else. So if I had all the money in the world, I would set up an experimental program to monitor objects in the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
We have already realized ‘Oumuamua, an interstellar object about 100 meters [330 feet] in size – size of [SpaceX’s] Starship, the largest spacecraft ever developed by humans. There must be many other very small things.
BS: Are future satellites – like NASA’s NEO Exploreran infrared telescope focused on tracking near-Earth objects – to help detect possible interstellar objects?
AL: Indeed. But only if they can get close to Earth. There will be a large telescope called the [Vera C.] Rubin Observatory in Chile will start operations in 2025, and will find many other objects of stars close to the Earth, or in the orbit of the Earth around the sun. I’m working with my postdocs and students on the acquisition program once the data comes in from the Rubin Observatory.
I am very happy. You see, if you are driven by curiosity, more data is a blessing. If you’re driven by something else, like showing off or establishing your status, then you would respond to something like Oumuamua the way one of my colleagues did – he said “I wish it never happened.”
I would like to see if, among the rocks that reach the planetary system from other stars, there is technological waste. It can be space junk or it can work. “
Avi Loeb, Harvard astronomer
You see that often in science, where you have scientists who are confused and very confused by anomalies. They claim that anomalies do not exist. Nothing new. We already know everything. People who point out anomalies should be criticized. Papers should be ignored… We should forget about it and move on. You see that, and unfortunately, that suppresses scientific progress.
BS: You’ve gotten the latest ideas from a recent study of rocks you’ve recovered from the sea off Papua New Guinea, which you claim are fragments of an interstellar meteor. Do you put any stock in the papers that criticize your findings? Do you read them with an open mind and see if they really have solid evidence?
AL: Yes. For example, it was said that what we found was coal ash. So we looked at 55 points from the interim table after this claim was made and showed that it is not coal ash. We made a diagram in which we showed that most of the chemical compounds are not coal ash.
I submitted this research paper to the journal that published the original argument that it was coal ash. The editor said, “No, I’m not sure there’s any reason to publish this”… So I wrote to the editor-in-chief above him, and it was finally published.
All of this means that sometimes there is an agenda behind what is happening. It’s not a fair game.
BS: So you plan to go back to Papua New Guinea to look for more evidence of this meteor?
AL: We plan to do it again in a year. I launched it a few months ago, and I have a few people interested in funding it. It will be $ 6.5 million.
BS: How will this tour be different from the last one?
AL: In the past, we were only at sea for two weeks. The material we made was a collection of round metals less than a millimeter in size, less than the size of a grain of sand. In fact, that was very important, allowing us to find that a fraction of them, 10% of them, have unusual chemicals. But even now it doesn’t tell us the nature of that thing. Because these were molten droplets that lost some parts as they melted.
What we want to find are larger pieces, the size of centimeters, at least a few millimeters, which we can use, first of all, to find the full amount of all chemical elements. But we can also check the property. We know that this object had a material energy much harder than even the iron meteorites from the solar system because it only exploded in a low pressure region. larger than that seen by other meteorites. We want to check the property. Also, if we find a large piece, we can do an isotope analysis and date the material to show that it is different from the planetary age.
Finally, the most important thing, is that we can know if it is a natural object like a stone or something else, part of a gadget. On the next trip, we will use a remote control vehicle that we will put on the ground, and we will have video, and it will collect. [spherule samples]. The hope is to collect larger pieces and test them in a laboratory afterward.
There can be a lot of waste in the area resulting from past development. We have been searching for radio messages for 70 years. We need to change this trend. “
Avi Loeb, Harvard astronomer
BS: How confident are you that we will find evidence of an unusual life in your life?
AL: I am very optimistic because [we are taking] a path that has not been taken before, in this case, looking for the type of things that arrived in the solar system from outside. Traditional [search for intelligent life] it was for radio messages, which is just like waiting for a phone call. Here, we are looking for packages that may be in our mailbox. It’s a very different approach. I am hopeful that we will see something unusual, especially since two out of three known interstellar objects seem strange, we will learn something new. I think that in the coming years, there is a good chance that there will be exciting results, either from the Rubin Observatory or the trips we have planned. After the one I told you, we will go for the second star meteor between Portugal and the Azores. It’s a very different place.
BS: And to be clear, do you think studying the interior of stars is the most promising way to find evidence of extraterrestrial life?
AL: I think so. First of all, it is easy to tell the difference between a natural substance and a synthetic substance. There can be a lot of waste in the area resulting from past development. We have been searching for radio messages for 70 years. We need to change the way we do things. In fact, radio communication was the first technology that humans developed. However, to me, space exploration sounds like a normal activity that advanced humans would engage in. We should look for those things. I think there is a chance that we will find something amazing. It is clear that without seeking, we will find nothing.
It’s like Blaise Pascal argued that you can’t just deny the possibility that God exists, because if God does exist, the consequences are enormous. That was Pascal’s argument. I developed it based on extraterrestrials. I say, this has to be part of a big scientific investigation, because the implications are huge.
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