150. The Most Romantic Question in Science: 'Are We Alone?' – Avi Loeb

“Science isn't about showing off. It’s about attending to unusual data, unusual evidence”, says astrophysicist Avi Loeb.“We can only learn new things from anomalies, from what doesn't line up.”Paying attention to anomalies is precisely what he does as head of the Galileo Project at Harvard, whose purpose is to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology.Loeb is frustrated. Almost all the research money that is allocated to the search for extraterrestrial life goes to projects for picking up radio signals and scanning for molecular fingerprints of microbes on exoplanets.“It’s like lonely people waiting for a phone call. Nobody might call you”, says Loeb.“And personally, I think microbes are boring. I am more interested in intelligent life. Yes, there are more microbes, but it is arguably easier to detect evidence of technology.”Loeb became famous in 2017 when he suggested that the first detected interstellar object traversing our solar system, named 1I/Oumuamua, might be artificial because of its strange behavior.His suggestion was not well received in the scientific community. He was academically attacked by many colleagues.Now, the third interstellar object ever detected, 3I/Atlas, is hurling past the planets in our home system at breakneck speed. This visitor also features very odd properties. It doesn’t look like a comet. It seems to be extremely large, it doesn’t have the classic cometary tail, its glow is preceding it, the composition of its coma is unique, and its trajectory is in line with the plane of the planets.“If you were to construct a spacecraft that were to visit this solar system, you would make it go in the plane of the planets”, Loeb says.Yet mainstream astronomers call it a comet, or more specifically a “black“ comet.“It’s like having only seen zebras and then suddenly see an elephant and go: ‘Look, a zebra without stripes, and with a trunk’.”Loeb has developed a scale for assessing whether a space object is natural or artificial, where 0 means decidedly natural and 10 means decidedly artificial. Loeb has given 3I/Atlas a 4, the same score he gave 1I/Oumuamua.It might drop on the scale – or climb – as more data is collected. By the end of October 2025 we probably know more, because that is when the object will be at its closest to the sun.Avi Loeb has always been an outlier in the scientific community, he says. He would “trade everything” he has of modern life to go back 95 years, to the time of quantum pioneers like Bohr and Heisenberg.“Because they were open-minded and willing to replace an old worldview with something completely new.”Science is more rigid today, he feels. Paradoxically, this may have to do with the fact that there are so many more scientists today. With a large enough population, ideas tend to regress to the mean.Avi Loeb isn’t afraid of airing ideas that would appear outrageous in conventional quarters. Have there been advanced civilizations on earth millions of years ago? Could our species have been genetically manipulated by interstellar visitors a long, long time ago? Loeb is open to both propositions.“We tend to think we are first. But it’s fully plausible that there was a technologically advanced civilization millions of years ago that was destroyed in a major catastrophe.”

The Galileo ProjectPersonal page at HarvardEssays on MediumThe Book Interstellar (2024)The Book Extraterrestrial (2022)