The nostalgic new film `Reagan’ brought tears to my eyes by portraying the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a proposed missile defense system to protect the U.S. from ballistic nuclear missiles. This program, nicknamed `Star Wars’, was announced by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 as a vision to counteract the risk of mutual assured destruction in a global nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
At that time, the initiative was controversial among American physicists who argued that Reagan’s vision is naïve and cannot be realized technologically. Forty years later, the capability to defend against ballistic missiles was demonstrated during the Iranian launch of more than 120 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles and 170 drones towards Israel, on April 13, 2024. Some of these ballistic missiles were shot down in space by the Arrow defense system.
The `Star Wars’ program was headed by Lt. General James A. Abrahamson from the U.S. Air Force, a past director of the Space Shuttle Program at NASA.
Coincidentally, in August 1983 I completed basic officer training and a Bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics within the prestigious `Talpiot’ program of the Israeli military. In collaboration with the experimentalist Dr. Zvi Kaplan, I proposed a novel method for accelerating masses to high-speeds using electric energy.
The energy released by chemical propellants heats the burnt gas to a temperature of a few thousand degrees Kelvin. The resulting sound speed, of order a kilometer per second, does not allow the gas to push a projectile faster than twice this speed, because the pressure wave cannot catch up with a faster projectile. However, the controlled release of electrically-stored energy into hotter gas of charged particles (plasma) with a low atomic weight could bring the sound speed to higher values, allowing to launch masses up to extremely high speeds which are of interest for chasing ballistic missiles. At age 21, I led the theoretical research on this novel acceleration scheme. Remarkably, my simple scaling model described the detailed experimental results as the size of the system was increased by a factor of a hundred. This taught me that physics works.
General Abrahamson visited Israel in 1984, and I presented the project to him along with Zvi. `Gen Abe’ was impressed and selected our proposal as the first international project to be funded under the Strategic Defense Initiative.
The resulting funding of millions of dollars per year brought me to Washington D.C. regularly during the remaining 5 years of my Talpiot service. In one of my visits, the `Pope’ of plasma physics, Marshall Rosenbluth, suggested that I visit the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he was faculty between 1967–1980. I followed Marshall’s wise advice, and scheduled a one-day visit to Princeton at the end of that trip in 1986. There, I met Freeman Dyson who introduced me to the distinguished astrophysicist, John Bahcall. Subsequently, John offered me a five-year fellowship starting in 1988, under the condition that I will switch to astrophysics. This led me to thirty years of active astrophysics research, primarily on the first stars and black holes. The beginning of my career in `Star Wars’ culminated in a fully-fledged exploration of the stars.
Following the discovery of the first interstellar object, `Oumuamua, on October 19, 2017, I became interested in the scientific study of anomalous objects that visit us from outside the Solar System. The brightness of sunlight reflected off `Oumuamua changed by a factor of ten as this football-field-size object tumbled every eight hours. These extreme brightness variations implied that `Oumuamua was shaped like a pancake. This mysterious object accelerated away from the Sun without signs of cometary evaporation, and receded from Earth faster than any human-made rocket. A similar push by reflection of sunlight was detected for another object, 2020 SO, which was verified to be a rocket booster from a 1966 launch by NASA.
When I mentioned this career history in a podcast interview last night, the host played the recording of President Reagan’s speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1987, which included the statement: “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”
I wholeheartedly agree with President Reagan that finding extraterrestrials will remind all humans that we are in the same boat — the Earth, floating through interstellar space. After hearing Reagan’s speech, I commented on the podcast that if I had the privilege of meeting President Reagan today, we would have had a very interesting conversation.
This morning, I was interviewed on the Moncreiff show in Newstalk National Radio in Dublin, Ireland. The broadcaster asked me a series of questions after the opening: “Presidential candidate Donald Trump confirmed in a podcast interview with Lex Fridman that if he is re-elected to the White House, he will push the Pentagon to release footage of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). What is your take on the search for extraterrestrials?”
I explained that in closing a lifelong circle that started with the `Star Wars’ project in my early career, I am currently leading the Galileo Project in a search for objects manufactured by extraterrestrial technological civilizations near Earth. The Galileo research team is operating a new UAP observatory and constructing two other UAP observatories to monitor the entire sky continuously in the infrared, optical, radio and audio. A year ago, I led a Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean, which retrieved anomalous molten droplets from the crash site of an anomalous interstellar meteor, IM1. We are planning a second expedition in 2025 to find larger pieces of IM1. Also in 2025, the Rubin Observatory in Chile will employ a 3.2 gigapixel camera to survey the entire southern sky every four days.
Wars were the trademark of humanity throughout its past history on Earth. But finding our cosmic neighbors would encourage us to display more intelligence by engaging in President Reagan’s vision of a peaceful coexistence under the stars.
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. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
