While speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February 2024, I noticed snipers on the roof whose goal was to protect political dignitaries like U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who attended the same event. During a different public event this week at the Boston Museum of Science, I was joined by bestselling author Patricia Cornwell who was escorted by two bodyguards.
Nobody guarded my body during these two events. I therefore reasoned that practicing science is a much less risky job than serving as a politician or a blockbuster crime writer. Earlier this week, my podcast interview about science garnered more views than a simultaneous podcast about the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election with candidate Kamala Harris. This was explained to me by the suggestion that science offers a more uplifting vision than political conflicts. Hence, I came up with an encouraging message to fledgling scientists: science is a low risk, high-reward job. If artificial intelligence will be able to relieve us from boring or depressing jobs, we can all become scientists.
Science blossoms from collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, unlike the zero-sum maneuvers required in politics. In its pure form, science is an infinite-sum game in which everyone benefits from new knowledge. However, in reality this purity is compromised by bad actors who inject politics into science.
My biggest disappointment involves science influencers who do not practice science, but pretend to be the “adults in the room” who protect science from … innovators who actually practice science. These influencers are bothered by scientists who open new frontiers of research which challenge traditional thinking. Being blind to the joy that propels creative research, they become zealots of tradition and defend past knowledge by taking a stand against new research frontiers, such as the Galileo Project’s scientific search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts. I will not mention the names of these influencers because they do not deserve the attention they seek.
Another disappointing facet in the landscape around the practice of science, is scientists who are jealous of others getting public attention and do their best to suppress such attention by misinforming journalists or through behind-the-scenes personal attacks. Ad absurdum, this manifests itself in a statement that an interstellar meteor was a truck even when they know that the meteor location was set when U.S. government satellites detected a fireball that released a percent of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. This weird statement was communicated to science journalists who published it without fact-checks as they were seeking clickbait and controversy. That this statement is ill-motivated became clear from a follow-up paper by the Spanish astronomer Hector Socas-Navarro, who argued that the interstellar origin of this meteor is likely at the 94.1% confidence, not accounting for the 99.999% confidence mentioned independently in the official letter from the U.S. Space Command to NASA. A detailed follow-up paper analyzing materials retrieved at the meteor site revealed meteoritic droplets of an unknown source that could lie outside the solar system. This careful analysis was not reported by the same clickbait-seeking journalists who were notified about the published paper individually through a press-release. As I told the editor of the New York Times: if journalists do not attend to facts when reporting about science, how can we trust what they report about politics?
Politics is based on beliefs or opinions that can be easily manipulated by wishful thinking. However, the professional practice of science requires hard work and the humility of a beginner’s mind. The ease by which opinion can be disseminated was evident from the fact that the faulty statement about the interstellar origin of the meteor was publicized quickly and without access to the material from the meteor site. The careful analysis of this material in three reputable laboratories (UC Berkeley, Bruker Corporation and Harvard University) took a full year for my research team to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.
Gladly, the real reward from practicing science does not ask for recognition by journalists, science influencers or prize committee members. Instead, it is the simple reward we get from understanding something new about the cosmos by collecting evidence out of open-minded curiosity. If the Galileo Project research team will discover evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence, any recognition given by earthlings will be dwarfed by the intellectual reward of knowing that we are not alone in our cosmic neighborhood. I would trade all the money and status in the world for that knowledge.
Politicians fund science with less than a few percent of their expenditure on military budgets. Given the massive investment in monitoring the sky for national security purposes, it should not come as a surprise if the U.S. government will be the first to notice anomalous objects with an extraterrestrial origin. Any such data should be shared with practicing scientists, like myself, whose day job is to find what lies outside the Solar system.
My hope is that the next congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) will bring us closer to the scientific sharing of any intriguing data that the government has in its possession. In the meantime, the Galileo Project is about to release a new paper with first results from our first observatory at Harvard University. While monitoring the sky above, our cameras noticed meteors but never a truck. We leave the discussion on trucks to science influencers, jealous scientists or science journalists. Instead, our Galileo Project researchers prefer to focus on their low-risk, high reward job of collecting scientific-quality data and analyzing it.
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.
