Figuring Out What Lies Outside the Solar System is the Day Job of Astronomers, not Government Officials
Why should Government officials be the ones who are tasked with telling us what lies outside the Solar system? After all, this is the job definition of astronomers.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) currently chairs a Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which among various unresolved mysteries plans to also investigate Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Dr. Jon Kosloski who serves as director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), stated in an interview last month: “We do have some events in our holdings that are really peculiar, and I don’t know yet what’s behind those […] I’m impatient and, being a data scientist, I am also a data hog. I want more data, and I want it quicker so that we can get to the heart of these problems. It boils down to asking ourselves, “What type of data is it going to take to prove to the scientific community, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this anomalous phenomenon was not a sensor artifact and is, indeed, something truly peculiar?” And I feel that’s going to require multiple sensors gathering the same event from different perspectives at the same time […] I think it’s plausible that there’s life out there. I haven’t yet seen the substantial evidence I need to convince me that extraterrestrial life has found its way to Earth as yet, but I am open to anything.”
Jon’s views resonate with the scientific goals of the Galileo Project under my leadership. This comes as no surprise, since I had a lengthy conversation with Jon on this topic. The Galileo Project is currently in the process of constructing two new observatories, one in Pennsylvania and the other in Nevada, in addition to the one operating in Massachusetts, with the goal of documenting a few million objects per year in the infrared, optical and radio bands with triangulated distances. If science is supposed to be guided by curiosity to explain anomalies through new evidence, why is the Galileo Project an outlier in the astronomy community?
The greatest privilege of being a scientist is the opportunity to learn from evidence. Limits on available funds and time imply that scientists must choose the evidence they wish to seek. But if the Galileo Project research team commits its own resources to collect new evidence, it would only be natural for astronomers, including the SETI community, to applaud this effort. Given this expectation, I was personally shocked to witness scientists pushing back against the objectives of the Galileo Project’s ocean expedition to retrieve materials from the crash site of an interstellar meteor.
From a scientific point of view, an effort to collect new data can only be good. One could argue about the interpretation of the data but pushing back against the effort to collect it is anti-scientific. In a recent podcast interview, I was asked how I approach the unknown. I explained that the Galileo Project is searching for unfamiliar technological objects that have flight characteristics or material composition different from human-made objects. For example, we are currently analyzing UAP tracks with machine-learning software and checking for anomalous isotope abundances in the materials retrieved from our ocean expedition. We employ instruments to record data that is not biased by prejudice or wishful thinking of a skeptic or a believer, a scientist or a layman.
Pushback against the effort to collect data is the trademark of anti-science sentiments. It is surprising to find such sentiments among scientists.
The shortcoming of the scientific method is in conservative choices of which evidence to seek. Risk-averse committees reduce the chance for breakthroughs. Most often, progress is made in small steps that do not deviate much from the boundaries of past knowledge. Large steps forward are left to serendipity. They are made despite all odds in a toxic academic culture that is trapped in groupthink.
Most tenured scientists find it risky to go against the grain even though tenure was supposed to relieve them from concerns about job security. The possibility that meteors or UAPs might truly be anomalous triggers a cognitive dissonance for them.
The scientific way of resolving “extraordinary claims” regarding anomalies, is by enabling a flood of data. Quantum mechanics made extraordinary claims, and even after a flood of experimental support — physicists still have difficulties interpreting it.
In another podcast recording, I mentioned that exactly a century ago Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin examined a wealth of spectroscopic data with a fresh perspective on quantum-mechanics. Her calculations suggested that the surface of the Sun is made mostly of hydrogen when the dogma was that the Sun has the same composition as the Earth. The senior astronomer Henry Norris-Russell dissuaded Cecilia from including this conclusion in her PhD thesis. Eventually, he confirmed her result through his own work four years later.
As Cecilia noted: “There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas”. She accurately captured the main source of pleasure for a practicing scientist. It is far better to be correct than to be popular. Her Nobel-prize worthy discovery is now understood as the earliest evidence for the Big Bang, but it never received the Nobel Prize.
The way to maintain our ignorance is to assume the answer in advance and not seek evidence. When scientists assume that interstellar objects can only be asteroids or comets but they notice anomalies in objects like `Oumuamua or IM1, they insist that `Oumuamua is a dark comet or that IM1 is a Solar system meteor that was incorrectly classified as interstellar. The truth is that until more data is collected, it is inappropriate to dismiss the possibility that these anomalous objects represent technological space trash from another civilization.
The level of federal funding recommended by the Astronomy community to the search for microbes through the Habitable World Observatory is larger by a factor of order 100,000 than is allocated by federal agencies to the search for technological signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. Something is wrong with these priorities. There is a better way to hedge our bets about the search for extraterrestrial life.
Will artificial intelligence make scientists more open minded? Time will tell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, 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 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.
