Imagine living on a paradise island, where food and water are abundant. The island is so large that it takes ten thousand years to cross it with the best vehicle available. And from the tallest vantage points on the island, telescopes show other islands. However, you calculate that it would take fifty thousand years to reach the nearest one by boat and billions of years to reach distant islands.
You are surrounded by scientists who use mathematical models to argue that there is probably nobody on those distant islands and therefore no reason to waste time and search for them. A small community of dedicated scientists develop sensors that search for radio signals from distant islands, while the mainstream is engaged in developing very costly telescopes that could trace a tree line from a distance and potentially inform us about the habitability of distant islands.
The search for radio signals has not borne fruits for 64 years. The islanders therefore regard the search for people on other islands as controversial and argue that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Some islanders report dreams of being carried by waves to other places where intelligent beings live. These reports are ridiculed and silenced by the adults in the room. Film directors make money out of related fantasies.
Unexpectedly, a couple of weirdly shaped objects arrive at the island’s shores. One had been seen by telescopes as having a flat shape and tumbling every eight hours. The object appeared to have its own propulsion. You are intrigued by the weirdness of the object and publish a scientific paper, suggesting that the object has a thin geometry — like a sail attached to a boat, and is pushed by the wind. The first scientists to review your suggestion are intrigued, and the paper gets published in a prestigious journal within a record time of a few days. But as soon as most islanders get excited about this possibility, your colleagues push back and argue forcefully that this object must be a piece of wood of a type that was never seen before. In fact, four different research teams publish separate papers that suggest different types of natural wood, never seen before, shaped by nature to exhibit the observed properties of this weird object. Unfortunately, the object is not available for further data collection because it sailed away. And so, the dogmatic interpretation is sealed in review papers with the object being classified as a natural piece of weirdly shaped wood, and experts comment to major media outlets: “The mystery is solved. There was nothing unusual about this object. It is just a piece of wood. Perhaps regular wood.” Life goes on.
Being intrigued by the anomalies of this object, you task your student to check a catalog of objects that may have landed on the island’s shores in the past. As it turns out, such objects were monitored for national security purposes over the past decade. Almost all of them turn out to be tree branches or pieces of wood from the island itself. But lo and behold, there appears to be one object that smashed on the island rocks at an amazingly high speed, indicating an external origin from far away. Based on available government data, this object had an unusual material strength, tougher than wood.
When you and your student publish a report about the discovery of this unusual intruder, the mainstream is already committed to a frontal attack pattern and the paper is rejected for publication. The reviewers argue forcefully: “We do not believe the government data.” After three years, the government issues a formal letter, validating the data once again, and so the paper gets published. Following the government’s validation, you decide to lead an expedition to the crash site and retrieve related materials. The expedition is ridiculed by experts who energize their friends to argue that the government must be wrong and that even if you were right, you are unlikely to find any relics from the object. You are not deterred and instead you organize a team of exceptional researchers to go to the crash site for two weeks, collect materials and analyze them carefully for another year. The published findings indicate a chemical composition different from the materials commonly found on the island. At that point, the opposition goes to media outlets and argues that the government is often wrong, that the materials must be coal ash from a nearby forest fire and that the research team probably surveyed the wrong place.
As a curious scientist willing to follow evidence wherever it leads, you establish a project which is developing three observatories dedicated to the search for physical objects from other islands. The argument is that over long periods of time, artificial objects manufactured by civilizations on distant islands may have been carried by ocean currents towards the vicinity of your home island. You explain that finding them would suggest that we are not alone in this vast ocean. In fact, one of these objects might be a bottle with a message that could bring salvation to the islanders and inspire them to travel away. After all, staying on the island can lead to annihilation as a result of a local catastrophe.
Still, the academic mainstream does not allocate major resources to the search for physical objects that may have arrived to the island’s shores. Remarkably, the government keeps reporting about unusual objects but they are all dismissed by the academic mainstream. Your project continues to run on an annual budget from donations of just a millionth of the annual defense budget.
Sounds like a fantasy? Not at all. This is an executive summary of my life over the past seven years. The island is the solar system. The first object is `Oumuamua and the second object is the interstellar meteor, IM1. The Galileo Project reported results on half a million objects from its first operating observatory at Harvard University, and is seeking donations to continue its discoveries, as summarized in a few recent papers.
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.
