Recently, I was invited to a Reno Foundation Symposium with the #1 NYT bestselling author, Patricia Cornwell, in celebration of her new book: “Identity Unknown.” The event will take place on October 8, 2024 @ 7:30 PM Eastern Time at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts. This timing coincides with the publication day of Patricia’s book.
In preparation for the event, I attended an online meeting with the organizers in which the details of the event were discussed. During this preparatory meeting, one of the organizers had mentioned that Patricia’s main character in the new book was inspired by me in real life. The character is an astrophysicist described as an “alien whisperer” from the upper echelon of academia and with an Italian origin. Following my utmost surprise, I pointed out that six years ago, I gave a lecture at 23andMe and was rewarded by a free gift of a DNA test. The test revealed that 7% of my DNA originated from Italy. My mother denied any Italian traces in my documented family history, but I figured out that the 7% fraction could have been the result of an undocumented affair of one of my ancestors with an Italian four generations ago.
More importantly, I cautioned the organizers that people who use online dating sites often report that their date in real life is very different from the advertised version. It would therefore be interesting to compare the fictional character that Patricia describes in her new book to the real me. This would constitute a good discussion topic on stage.
As it turns out, “Identity Unknown” is about the violent killing of that astrophysicist, Sal Giordano, a fictional Nobel laureate who served as an “advisor to the White House and other top officials in the U.S. and internationally.” The crime is investigated by a fictional detective named Dr. Kay Scarpetta. The cover of the book reads: “Autopsies can reveal the secrets of the dead. And this victim is sending Scarpetta a message … Summoned to an abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr. Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once had an intense love affair with. The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano’s skin is strangely red. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead’s secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue. As the investigators are torn between suspicions of otherworldly forces, and of Giordano himself, Scarpetta detects an explanation closer to home that, in her mind, is far more evil…”
Obviously, the Italian aspect of the search for extraterrestrials brings to mind the historical context of Giordano Bruno who proposed that stars are distant Sun-like objects surrounded by their own planets. Giordano raised the possibility that these planets might foster life and was burned alive at the stake in 1600. Shortly afterwards, another Italian — Galileo Galilei -realized that Earth is not at the physical center of the Universe, and was put on house arrest after the publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632.
Without reading Patricia’s book, it is unclear to me whether I would resonate more with the victim of the crime or the detective who resolves it. The work of a scientist resembles that of a detective. It relies on collecting enough evidence so as to rule-out reasonable possibilities and single out the most likely explanation for the evidence.
Following this online meeting, I attended a faculty meeting of the Black Hole Initiative — for which I served as the founding director. Since the plot of Patricia’s book was still fresh in my mind, I notified my colleagues that they might want to have a contingency plan in case anything bad happens to me. They assured me that literature is different from reality for the same reason that science fiction is different from science. Indeed, my research focuses on separating science from fiction in the search for extraterrestrials.
In the real world, I am leading the Galileo Project in search of extraterrestrial technological artifacts. The millimeter-size spherules retrieved from the fireball site of the interstellar meteor, IM1, were analyzed over the past year and the findings were published last week in the form of a new detailed paper. We plan another expedition in 2025 to retrieve larger pieces from IM1’s wreckage and decide whether it was a rock or a technological gadget. In addition, the preliminary results from monitoring half a million objects in the sky by the first Galileo Observatory at Harvard University are being summarized in a new paper that will be shared publicly soon. In 2025, we plan to construct and operate two additional Galileo observatories and search for new interstellar objects and unidentified flying objects in the data pipeline of the Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Why is science more thrilling than fiction? Because the unknown could exceed our imagination, including any fiction written by a brilliant author such as Patricia Cornwell.
During the forthcoming discussion at the Museum of Science, I will do my best to explain what astrophysicists actually know and what scientific projects like the Galileo Project could unravel about the unknown. Here’s hoping that science will turn out to be far more uplifting than fiction.
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.
