Dogmatists Will Never Be Jailed Over Cosmic Mistakes
Imagine an organization that misled the public on an existential question for many years. And when a whistleblower countered the official narrative, the bureaucratic infrastructure of that organization tried the whistleblower and subsequently banned him from public appearances. Organization members canceled the whistleblower on social media and silenced his voice by placing him on house arrest. But he was not alone. The book of a previous whistleblower was banned from being published. And a subsequent whistleblower was killed by organization members in a public square.
When the truth eventually came out, the leader of the organization made a brief public statement — admitting that the whistleblowers were treated improperly, but it was too late since all three whistleblowers were already dead.
Surely, you would agree that this cover-up scandal must raise public uproar and the bureaucrats of that organization should be jailed. You would also expect the organization to lose all public credibility. But the reality of the situation is that even after the official statement appeared in newspapers, the organization maintained its strong hold over millions of supporters around the world.
Keep this real storyline in mind after watching Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Disclosure Day”, in case you happen to imagine in your mind a television appearance of President Trump saying: “We are not alone!”
The actual organization in the above-mentioned story is the Catholic Church and the three whistleblowers are Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno. The Vatican’s bureaucrats were never jailed for misleading the public, even after spacecraft provided clear images of the Earth moving around the Sun rather than being at the center of the Universe.
Instead, the general public adapted to the new reality without chants for revenge after the Vatican’s 1992 announcement. On April 23, 1992, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team announced the landmark discovery of tiny temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, a relic from the Big Bang. These fluctuations provided the first direct evidence for the primordial seeds that eventually grew to make galaxies like the Milky Way, inside of which stars like the Sun formed, surrounded by debris that fragmented to make planets like the Earth. As it turns out, the Earth existed only over the last third of cosmic history. Not only that the Earth is not at the center of the cosmos, it did not even exist for 9.3 billion years after the Big Bang. And after it formed, the Earth circled the Sun 4.5 billion times before the Vatican started arguing otherwise! This is a scandal of cosmic proportions.
Did it matter for the cosmos that the absolute authorities on Earth had the wrong storyline? Not at all. On existential cosmic questions, terrestrial authority is irrelevant. Whether we are at the center of the cosmos or whether we have intelligent neighbors, does not hinge on what the authorities tell us.
What is the lesson to be learned from history? That when revealing a new existential truth, there is no point in hiding it from humanity because eventually the evidence will be beyond any reasonable doubt. Moreover, calls for revenge against bureaucrats that blocked the truth from coming out will not have much traction once everyone knows the foundational truth. In the days after, scientists will be hard at work to get all the details right even if some of them were dogmatic gatekeepers early on. Before an existential truth comes out, truth seekers are outraged about the authorities, but after the truth comes out — their outrage might not have much traction because everyone else will be focused on the implications for the future of humanity.
Here is what the New-York Times reported here about the public announcement by the Vatican on October 31, 1992:
“More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo, Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify one of the Church’s most infamous wrongs — the persecution of the Italian astronomer and physicist for proving the Earth moves around the Sun.
With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Saturday, Vatican officials said the Pope will formally close a 13-year investigation into the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1633. The condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his discoveries, led to Galileo’s house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.
The dispute between the Church and Galileo has long stood as one of history’s great emblems of conflict between reason and dogma, science and faith. The Vatican’s formal acknowledgement of an error, moreover, is a rarity in an institution built over centuries on the belief that the Church is the final arbiter in matters of faith.
At the time of his condemnation, Galileo had won fame and the patronage of leading Italian powers like the Medicis and Barberinis for discoveries he had made with the astronomical telescope he had built. But when his observations led him to proof of the Copernican theory of the solar system, in which the sun and not the earth is the center, and which the Church regarded as heresy, Galileo was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition.
By the end of his trial, Galileo was forced to recant his own scientific findings as “abjured, cursed and detested,” a renunciation that caused him great personal anguish but which saved him from being burned at the stake.
Since then, the Church has taken various steps to reverse its opposition to Galileo’s conclusions. In 1757, Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was removed from the Index, a former list of publications banned by the Church. When the latest investigation, conducted by a panel of scientists, theologians and historians, made a preliminary report in 1984, it said that Galileo had been wrongfully condemned. More recently, Pope John Paul II himself has said that the scientist was “imprudently opposed.”
“We today know that Galileo was right in adopting the Copernican astronomical theory,” Paul Cardinal Poupard, the head of the current investigation, said in an interview published this week.
This theory had been presented in a book published in 1543 by the Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus in opposition to the prevailing theory, advanced by the second-century astronomer Ptolemy, that the Sun and the rest of the cosmos orbited the Earth. But the contest between the two models was purely on theoretic and theological grounds until Galileo made the first observations of the four largest moons of Jupiter, exploding the Ptolemaic notion that all heavenly bodies must orbit the Earth.
In 1616, the Copernican view was declared heretical because it refuted a strict biblical interpretation of the Creation that “God fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.” But Galileo obtained the permission of Pope Urban VIII, a Barberini and a friend, to continue research into both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican views of the world, provided that his findings drew no definitive conclusions and acknowledged divine omnipotence.
But when, in 1632, Galileo published his findings in “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” the work was a compelling endorsement of the Copernican system.
Summoned to Rome for trial by the Inquisition one year later, Galileo defended himself by saying that scientific research and the Christian faith were not mutually exclusive and that study of the natural world would promote understanding and interpretation of the scriptures. But his views were judged “false and erroneous.” Aging, ailing and threatened with torture by the Inquisition, Galileo recanted on April 30, 1633.
Because of his advanced years, he was permitted house arrest in Siena. Legend has it that as Galileo rose from kneeling before his inquisitors, he murmured, “e pur, si muove” — “even so, it does move.””
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The next revolution in our worldview might reveal to religious believers that God is not a parent to only one child. In the days after, scientists may discover indisputable evidence for the existence of siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations.
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On Thursday, June 25, 2026 at 9AM-4PM ET, there will be a UAP Disclosure Forum in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington D.C., a historic Senate chamber built for moments of national consequences. The program and livestream video access are both available here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies, director of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former 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 a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. 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”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
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