Now is the Time to Search for Extraterrestrial Visitors: Announcing the New Galileo Project Foundation
The graveyard of dead sun-like stars in the Milky-Way contains billions of white dwarfs. These are faint Earth-size metallic spheres containing about two thirds of a solar mass. The ages of white dwarfs can be gauged by how cold they are, since they have no internal engine to warm them up and they keep losing heat. Their inferred age distribution suggests that their parent sun-like stars formed mostly between 8–10 billion years ago. The latest data from the TESS satellite implies that 40–85% of all stars host Earth-size planets.
Given this information, the politically-correct narrative that we should all adopt is summed up by the Copernican Principle, namely that we are not privileged in the cosmos. This should not pose a threat to religious beliefs. I have two daughters and my love for one does not take away from my love to the other. God can surely love multiple civilizations at once. Violating this sentiment of cosmic modesty is an unwise move, as it led to the humble admission from the Vatican in 1992 that Galileo Galilei was right after all, and the Earth is not at the center of the Universe.
The Sun formed late, 3.4–5.4 billion years after the peak in the Milky-Way’s star formation history. It took a while for human-made technologies to emerge. The spacecraft Voyager was launched from Earth to interstellar space 4.6 billion years after the Earth formed. Based on a recent paper I wrote with my undergraduate student, Shokhruz Kakharov, it takes about a billion years for a Voyager-like spacecraft to travel from the opposite side of the Milky-Way disk to the solar system. The combination of these numbers allows for Earth to have been visited by Voyager-like extraterrestrial probes billions of years ago. If aliens developed propulsion technologies that are far more advanced than our rockets, the sky’s the limit.
Old extraterrestrial visits encountered a very different Earth than we have now. The first terrestrial life in the form of the Last Universal Common Ancestor, LUCA, was recently dated to approximately 4.2 billion years ago. Life on Earth remained mostly microscopic until complex multicellular life culminated in the Cambrian Explosion 538.8 million years ago. More than 99 percent of the five billion species that ever lived on Earth are extinct by now and cannot tell us the history of extraterrestrial visits. Recorded human history only dates back to 8,600 years ago, merely two millionths of the Earth’s history. We should therefore be humble and not assume that we are the smartest kid that ever lived on the block. Evidence is our best guide to the truth.
The occurrence of extraterrestrial visits is a worthwhile hypothesis based on the Copernican Principle, since billions of Earth-analogs could have been pregnant with the potential of giving birth to technological civilizations like ours. Most of these civilizations may have perished by now because of the death of their host star. But if gadgets launched long ago arrived at Earth, they could have been around for billions of years. Any self-replicating probes that survived until now would have acclimated to the evolving Earth and masqueraded as an integral part of our natural habitat. Long-term guests look like family members.
This sets the rationale for the scientific study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena and interstellar objects by the Galileo Project. It would have been easier to identify extraterrestrial objects a century ago when human-made drones and satellites did not exist. As of now, the challenge of the Galileo Project is to separate the wheat of truly anomalous objects from the abundant chaff of human-made balloons, drones, airplanes and satellites.
By summer 2025, there will be three Galileo Project observatories operating in three different states within the U.S., collecting data on a few million objects per year. With new quantitative data on images, distances, velocities and accelerations, it would be possible to find outliers outside the performance envelope of human-made gadgets, if those exist.
In June 2023, my research team and I led a groundbreaking expedition to the site of IM1, the first interstellar object detected in our Solar System. There, we successfully retrieved and analyzed molten spherules from the fireball site — an unprecedented scientific milestone. This discovery is just the beginning. For current highlights of the Galileo Project publications, click here.
If technological gadgets entered the solar system, it is likely that they first did so billions of years ago, long before the human species appeared. This might mean that they have been around Earth for a while. The time is ripe for us to find them.
The time to act is now.
Today, I am thrilled to announce the launch of the Galileo Project Foundation, founded on the bold belief that humanity can no longer ignore the potential existence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations. For too long, societal stigma has hindered the pursuit of this profound question, “Are we alone?” Science must rise above these barriers with curiosity, courage, and an open mind. For more details and donation opportunities, click here.
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.
