Avi Loeb (John Murray)
ON 8 January 2014, a meteor exploded above the Pacific just north of Papua New Guinea鈥檚 Manus Island. Five years later, Amir Siraj, research assistant for Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, spotted it in an online catalogue at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, part of NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Part-way through Interstellar: The search for extraterrestrial life and our future beyond Earth, Loeb explains why he thinks the meteor came from outside the solar system. This would make it one of only three objects so identified. The first, Oumuamua, was detected in 2017. It was an elongated object the size of an American football field and the subject of Loeb鈥檚 2021 book , to which Interstellar is an extension.
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Since Interstellar went to press, Loeb鈥檚 team has gathered fragments from the crash site and sent them for analysis at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, and to a lab owned by scientific instruments firm Bruker. Metallic spherules from beyond our solar system would be a find indeed.
Meanwhile, in his book, Loeb is airing an idea New Scientist readers will already be familiar with, thanks to an article earlier this year. He thinks the meteor might turn out to be the work of extraterrestrials.
There has already been some bad-tempered , but Loeb doesn鈥檛 care. He is inoculated against other people鈥檚 opinions, he says in Interstellar, not least because his first mentor had a professional rival, and when the mentor died, the rival was asked to write his obituary in a key journal.
Loeb, who has spent his career on black holes, dark matter and the deep time of the universe, doesn鈥檛 waste time wondering if space-faring extraterrestrials exist. Instead, he argues that we should be looking for them or their gear.
Among the scenarios for first contact, a human and alien handshake on the White House lawn is least likely, he says. It is far more likely that we will run into some garbage or a probe, and only then, says Loeb, because we have taken the trouble to seek it out.
Until recently, no astronomical instrument was built for such a purpose. But this is changing, says Loeb, who cites NASA鈥檚 Unidentified Aerial Phenomena study, launched in June 2022. And there is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time 鈥� a 10-year-long, high-resolution record of the entire southern sky, which will use the brand new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
There is also Loeb鈥檚 brainchild, the , which aims to bring the search for technological signatures 鈥渇rom accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research鈥�. The roof of the Harvard College Observatory boasts the project鈥檚 first sky-scanning kit.
There is more than a whiff of Don Quixote about this project, but Loeb is well within his rights to say that unless we look for extraterrestrials, we are never going to find them.
Readers of grand speculations by the likes of theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson and writer and futurologist Stanis艂aw Lem will find nothing in Interstellar to make them blink, aside maybe from a rather cantankerous prose style. But extraordinary claims will need extraordinary proof. Can we be reassured by Loeb鈥檚 promise that he and his team work only with scientific data available for peer review, that they share their findings freely and only through traditional scientific channels, and that they will release no results except through scientifically accepted channels of publication?
I am inclined to say, yes, we should. Arguments from incredulity are always a bad idea and sneering is never a good look.
Simon Ings is a writer based in London
