Life as We Know It
The Next Sunrise Will Look Different
Circumstances make our lives different. The same must be true for extraterrestrial life and spacecraft.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I developed the routine of a morning jog around 5 AM in the company of birds, ducks, bunnies, wolves and wild-turkeys. I soon realized that every sunrise looks different for a variety of reasons: a change in season, cloud cover, abundance of dust, and other ingredients. We all know that the soup of life tastes differently every day as a result of new circumstances. Identical twins develop different qualities throughout their life, even though they possess the same genetic making initially.
Data obtained by the Kepler satellite telescope implied that a significant fraction of all Sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly at the same separation. But even if all these planets host liquid water with the same nutrients, they could have ended up making very different forms of life out of their soup of chemicals. Recipe books offer different cakes out of the same ingredients, depending on the order in which they get mixed and the heat applied to the mix at different times.
This implies that we should not expect to find “life as we know it” on other planets or “spacecraft as we know it” closer to Earth. In our search for clues on life in the cosmos, it would be prudent to stay open minded to the unfamiliar.
In this vein, we should search without prejudice for unfamiliar objects in space that may represent technological equipment sent out by civilizations that predated us in the Milky Way. This is the rationale behind the inauguration of the Galileo Project.
Enter The Galileo Project
The primary objective of the Galileo Project is to bring scientific rigor to the study of objects near Earth whose nature is unidentified. This includes unusual interstellar objects (ISOs), like their first example `Oumuamua, which do not resemble comets or asteroids seen before, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) of the type mentioned in the National Intelligence report to the US Congress on June 25, 2021.
In recent interviews, I was challenged whether the public will indeed be convinced by better scientific data on unusual ISOs or UAP. After all, discussions on topics ranging from COVID-19 to climate change to the UAP report, often focus on convictions rather than evidence.
My response was that the Galileo Project is not a publicity campaign aimed to convince everyone about the validity of new scientific evidence. There is no doubt that some people will ignore new evidence in favor of prejudice, irrespective of how convincing the data would be. But the scientific process resembles a judicial procedure whose verdict is based on evidence. The scientific “courtroom” is represented by peer reviewed journals.
The Galileo Project embodies a scientific research program. As such, it aims to collect with fully-controlled instruments, new high-quality data that will be peer reviewed. The data will be open to the public and its analysis will be transparent. The Project’s goal is to assemble reliable evidence that will convince the scientific mainstream community beyond any reasonable doubt. This fishing expedition may end up with conventional “sardines”, namely near Earth objects whose nature has mundane local explanations. If that is the case, so be it. But we should keep in mind that finding just one unusual “fish” could have a profound impact on the future of humanity.
When the theory of General Relativity was pioneered by Albert Einstein in November 1915 — more than a century ago, only a handful of scientists understood it. Despite this limited public understanding, the fact that it reflected reality eventually led to its practical use for precision navigation. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is now embraced by any cell phone user with a related application, irrespective of how scientific savvy that person is. Similarly, those of us who exposed their arm to the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 over the past year, were not asked to explain the way it works.
This follows a standard practice throughout life. We use things that we do not fully understand, including the internal organs in our body. We are under no obligation to understand how our heart operates in order to benefit from its existence. In much the same way, modern scientific advances benefit the population at large irrespective of whether we all agree about the evidence that enabled them.
Galileo Galilei was unable to convince philosophers and social media during his time that the Earth moves around the Sun, yet this fact is used in designing all space missions today. Similarly, if the Galileo Project will find clues for smarter kids on our cosmic block, this scientific knowledge will ultimately shape our aspirations in space, irrespective of how many likes it gets on Twitter today.
The Galileo Project team plans to share its data products and analysis with the public. But this will be done with quality control so that premature communications will not mislead the community by releasing unreliable intermediate steps. This objective is commonly accomplished in science by publishing papers in peer reviewed journals.
Altogether, the Galileo Project plans to follow the standard scientific practice. It is not a publicity stunt aimed to satisfy the hunger on social media for UAP or ISO research. Rather, it represents a research program to promote the subject to the mainstream of science. Here’s hoping that the effort will bring a new sunrise in our understanding of the cosmos.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos.”
Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer Bryce Zabel and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.
