The sky is our window to the Universe. Looking up allows us to get informed about our cosmic roots. A lot has happened over the past 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang.
At the beginning, there was a nearly uniform soup of elementary particles. But it is sometimes the unimpressive kid in the back of the class that dominates the future. For the cosmos, this unimpressive ingredient was the slight density nonuniformities in the primordial soup. These ended up seeding the gravitational collapse of galaxies, inside of which gas fragmented into stars like the Sun with planets like the Earth forming out of debris disks around these stars. The chemistry of life-as-we-know-it was enabled as soon as the first massive stars exploded in supernovae and enriched their environments with oxygen. Soon afterwards, water molecules emerged when oxygen combined with primordial hydrogen, as demonstrated in a paper I co-authored a decade ago.
This sequence of events eventually led to life on Earth, culminating with our modern technological civilization. Given the sextillion Earth-Sun systems in the observable volume of the Universe, it is most reasonable to assume that we are not alone. This premise requires a sense of humility which most humans lack. And so, this humble notion remains controversial with less than a percent of our science funding dedicated to the search for other technological civilizations. This fact alone offers testimony to how unintelligent we sometimes are.
Over the past 66 years since the first Luna 1 spacecraft left the Earth’s orbit in 1959, the space around Earth was filled with human-made satellites. Some are U.S. Space Force-operated Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites which serve as early warning systems. These geosynchronous satellites identify missile launches, space launches, nuclear detonations and meteor fireballs by using infrared sensors to detect heat from hot transient plumes against the Earth’s background. Other clusters of satellites improve the ability of the U.S. to conduct other missions of national security relevance, including communication, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, climate monitoring and emergency response. There are currently many more active satellites than there were ever before, even a few years ago. The near-Earth space is becoming increasingly contested, with competitors and adversaries developing counter systems to those employed by the U.S. Department of Defense. In November 2021, Russia launched a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon that destroyed one of its satellites, creating about 1,500 pieces of debris, many of which are still in orbit. During the Ukraine war, small satellites provided high-speed internet access and backup communications as well as high-quality imagery and geospatial intelligence collection. China employs hundreds of satellites with surveillance and warfare capabilities — aimed to disrupt satellite communications, PNT, GPS, surveillance and reconnaissance. Near-Earth space is currently congested with military assets.
In other words, the sky — our only window to the cosmos — is currently cluttered by our warfare gadgets. They not only obscure our view but also introduce tension between our innocent interest in knowing more about the Universe and our down-to-Earth conflicts. This tension is another testimony to how unintelligent we are.
Given this tension, it is therefore not surprising that astronomical telescopes which survey the full sky, like Pan STARRS and the upcoming Rubin Observatory, are at risk of revealing the inventory of satellites used for national security purposes by the U.S. Government. For that reason, the U.S. government wishes to remove sensitive information about its space assets from the public database of these survey telescopes, so that the related information will not be available to adversarial nations.
In a recent article at The Atlantic, Ross Andersen reported about the experience of the LSST Project Scientist, Željko Ivezić, of the upcoming Rubin Observatory:
‘After some back-and-forth, Ivezić said, he and his counterparts came up with a less invasive way to remove secret American assets from the observatory’s instant alerts. A government agency — no one told him which one — would chip in $5 million for the construction of a dedicated network for moving sensitive data. Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California’.
Should we worry that the `baby will be thrown away with the bathwater?’, namely that precious scientific data about our cosmic neighborhood will be lost as the government excises some of the data available to scientists? I was asked these follow-up questions in an email from Arjan Singh.
In particular, one may worry that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), potentially linked to extraterrestrial technological gadgets that arrive near Earth, might be removed from the LSST data. I replied to Arjan that as long as UAP have flight characteristics that dramatically exceed human made technologies, they might not be excised from the data. In searching for extraterrestrial artifacts, members of my research team in the Galileo Project will search the publicly available LSST data for UAP and interstellar objects.
Arjan replied: “This situation underscores how much hope and trust many of us place in your work with the Galileo Project, which remains free from such constraints. The independence of the project offers a vital avenue for unbiased exploration, and I look forward to seeing the results of its groundbreaking research.”
I rest my case.
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.
