Transcript of a Q&A About 3I/ATLAS
Below is the transcript of a live Q&A that I had this evening about the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. The video is available here.
Question:
Welcome to FOX 32 Chicago. I’m Aleksandra Bush, here with Avi Loeb, one of our favorite guests on the show. We love having you on. We’ve gotten so many viewer questions since you started joining us and talking about 3I/ATLAS. We wanted to do a live stream specifically answering questions from our viewers, so if you are watching right now, feel free to put your question in the comments and we might be able to get Avi to answer it live.
We’re going to start off with a question based on our last conversation with you, which was right after NASA released the new images of 3I/ATLAS. A lot of people commented, saying that they were disappointed, they were disappointed with the quality. We wanted to get your reaction if you, you know, were also surprised by the quality of the images.
Answer:
This was a press conference with the purpose of public outreach, and I think they missed two important points. First of all, when you tell the public that there is an interesting object, sufficiently interesting for NASA officials to discuss it, you want to focus on the mysteries. Why does this object merit attention? Why is it puzzling? How much can we learn from it? Instead, they focused on what we think we already know about it: that it’s a comet of a familiar type, nothing really unusual, it just came from a different environment, and so they tried to bring down expectations about anything unusual being uncovered in the scientific process of learning about it. And the truth is that there are lots of anomalies, problems, puzzles, mysteries that we don’t understand and that’s actually what the public cares about. So, when communicating to the public you shouldn’t downgrade the mystery, but instead you should emphasize it and say: “We need as much data as possible. Here is the data we have, and here are the big questions that we can address with future data of better quality.” They didn’t do that, so that’s mistake number one.
Mistake number two was to actually have the press conference, because if you look at the data, it didn’t provide any significant new information. We got some blurry images. In fact, the best image was from the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was taken on October 2nd, and they were holding it during the government shutdown for 45 days, and so they built up expectations by having a press conference about it, and there wasn’t much in it. You know, the only tidbit that I got out of this blurry image, which was degraded by jitter in the camera and the motion of the object, was the fuzz around the object appears to be elongated in the direction of motion, not in the direction of the Sun as we expect from pockets of ice evaporated when they are facing the sun and then the gas and dust coming from them might be pushed away from the Sun. That would have given preference to the axis connecting 3I/ATLAS with the Sun. Instead, what we see is that there is a glow around the object extended perpendicular to that direction, along the direction of motion. This was the first image we have where the direction of motion is not aligned with the direction to the Sun, because in the past 3I/ATLAS was approaching us and the sun, but near Mars it was moving sideways. And so that’s the only tidbit that there seemed to be something preceding the object and that’s difficult to understand. Why would there be a plume of gas and dust or some fragments preceding the object, ahead of it? And, they didn’t touch on that question. Again, they tried to downgrade any mysteries about the object, and other than the HiRISE image, the rest of the images were even worse. I looked into the data of the HiRISE image actually today with my colleague quantitatively. We didn’t get anything out of it. There is no information. So why build up expectations? If you have an image that is degraded plus all these fuzzy images and the best you can say is that there is some hydrogen around 3I/ATLAS, you don’t hold a press conference for that. You just let the data be in a repository where scientists can look into it and do whatever they want with it.
The extended glow is ahead of the object, not trailing it as expected for a cometary tail. In the case of a technological object, it could be a beam of particles or light illuminating the path forward. in order to avoid the hazards of micrometeorites that can damage the object at its speed of 67 kilometers per second relative to the Sun. It is possible to charge obstacles with a light beam and then deflect them with a magnetic field, for example. There might be more advanced technologies to accomplish this task.
They are educating the public by telling the public nothing new, and that is not the way to build trust. Moreover, they placed only officials in that press conference. What you want to have is researchers that are conducting analysis of data about 3I/ATLAS and of course there are such scientists, like those that analyzed the Hubble telescope image or those that analyzed the Webb telescope image. If they were there, it would have been interesting to listen to them because they would have talked about substance with some scientific details. Instead, you see officials talking in general terms and not really educating us much.
Question:
NASA noted that there were no technological signatures identified for 3I/ATLAS. What is your take?
Answer:
The point of the matter is you cannot find technological signatures unless you are seeking them? If your mindset is that it’s a rock, you are not really searching for any signatures, and then you will not find anything. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just to give you a counter-example, I found that the Wow! signal in 1977 came from within nine degrees of the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS. The following day, I contacted radio observers and said: “You should look at this object in the radio.” And as a result of that, a few days ago there was a report from MeerKAT, a radio observatory in South Africa, that concluded by looking at a band of frequencies between 0.9 to 1.6 gigahertz where cell phones operate, that on the 5th of November, they didn’t see any transmission coming from the object. They found some 23,000 signals, but they say that all of them are probably human-made, and so they put an upper limit on any transmission in this band of frequencies on November 5th at the power level of a cell phone. That’s an interesting limit on a technosignature. That’s not what the NASA official was talking about. Their point of view is unless something just strikes us in the face without us seeking it, unless that happens, we would say: “There is no technological signature.” But that’s not the right approach. For example, with the Webb telescope, in the coming weeks we can search for heat coming out of 3I/ATLAS that cannot be accounted for by the illumination from the Sun, and maybe is related to an engine. That would be really interesting to look for, so you need to search for technological signatures in order to find them.
Question:
Multiple people, have been asking for an update on the Loeb scale, and the last time, um, you said 3I/ATLAS was set at four out of ten. Where are we at right now?
Answer:
I prefer not to announce any update to my ranking, which is a few months old, because in the coming weeks we’ll have a flood of data so it would be foolish of me to update it now. I would wait until we get to the middle of December, closer to the holidays, and then when we have access to much more data, I will be able to either rank it lower or higher on the Loeb scale. It should be exciting. It’s only a few weeks away, and it’s like the work of a detective. Let’s collect more evidence and then decide if it’s closer to being anomalous as a technological object or maybe it would look just like an iceberg.
Question:
You mentioned that 3I/ATLAS will be close to Earth in mid-December, around the holidays, also around the earth solstice. Do you believe the timing of the solstice and the proximity of 3i Atlas holds any significance?
Answer:
I haven’t thought about that. The one thing I thought about is that 3I/ATLAS doesn’t change its course significantly. There was some non-gravitational acceleration measured. There were actually two new papers about it in recent days, but this excess acceleration is not significant. It doesn’t look like 3I/ATLAS is maneuvering towards any particular planet, and mainly gravity shapes its trajectory, and that’s understandable. Even if it’s a spacecraft, it’s a very massive object. It would make more sense for it to release mini-probes that would go towards the planets, and the fundamental question is, are there objects leaving this big object? Are there smaller objects coming out of it? There were some hints of jets pointing in different directions. Some are perpendicular to the object-Sun axis, and so if we find smaller objects coming off it, either right now or in future months, if we find new objects near the Earth or near Mars, that would be exciting. I actually asked NASA to look at their data from rovers and orbiters around Mars, to see if there are any new objects, any new satellites appearing. That would obviously be a technological signature because a natural iceberg would only break into fragments of ice, and they will not arrive close to Earth or Mars. So, let’s continue to monitor the sky around Earth, around Mars, maybe Jupiter, and then if there is something, that would be definitely intriguing.
Question:
Did you watch the new documentary “The Age of Disclosure” and what do you think about it?
Answer:
I know everything that is discussed in that documentary because I spoke with the people featured there quite a bit in recent years, and in part that inspired the Galileo project that I am leading. There are definitely a lot of interesting claims from military personnel, from intelligence agencies. These are serious people, people that are responsible for national security, and they are not easily swayed to claim things that are incorrect or not real, and they say that there are objects we don’t understand. Now, the fundamental question is: does the U.S. government have at its possession or the possession of corporations that it was in contact with, materials from crash sites along with potential biological pilots that may have been there? There are some people who claim that, and I spoke with them. I haven’t seen any evidence to substantiate that and as a scientist I only respond to evidence. I don’t respond to stories that people tell me, but these stories are very intriguing and if the government does have access to such information, I think they should share it with scientists like myself because my day job is what lies outside the solar system. The day job of people in the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies is national security; it’s limited to planet Earth. So, anything about what lies beyond the solar system, should be shared with scientists like myself. And I will be delighted to help them with it if they have it. I have no access to it, but the people that are interviewed in the documentary claim that they had access to such information and it exists.
Question:
So, do you plan on watching it?
Answer:
Yes, I’ll watch it, but I don’t expect to learn anything new from it because the classified information will not be featured there, and that’s where the myth lies. And of course, it would be nice to have disclosure, one way or another, if the current administration, for example, will come forward with an initiative to share data. For example, things that were collected 50 years ago have no relevance to national security today. If there are any retrieved gadgets developed by adversarial nations, they’re obsolete by now if they are 50 years old. So, any unusual data from 50 years ago can certainly be released without any concerns about national security.
Question:
How will artificial intelligence (AI) be able to help with space research in the future? Do scientists use AI already, do you feel like they’ll be using it more, and how?
Answer:
The most important role that AI can play is on spacecraft, namely missions that we send to space. So far, AI was never loaded on a spacecraft. The reason it’s so valuable is that if we are able to do that, then we can allow the spacecraft to have its own brain. We don’t need to send a human. And that’s particularly important in missions that take a long time. So, if you send, for example, a spacecraft to interstellar space, then the journey takes a long time. It takes tens of thousands of years to exit from the solar system and its Oort cloud, and humans are not suited for such long journeys. Moreover, when the spacecraft reaches a destination of interest, let’s say in a million years from now, the AI will not get bored along the way. But once it gets there, it will need to make decisions quickly and it cannot get guidance from the sender. It just takes light signals too long to traverse these distances. And so, what you want is an intelligent probe that is capable of making its own decisions and accomplishing its goals, and for that you need AI. So far, we haven’t launched AI to space, but once we do, we will get autonomous spacecraft. For now, whenever we send something to Mars or the moon or any other planet, there are engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) that are controlling these devices. I call that helicopter parenting, and in fact there was a helicopter sent to Mars and it was parented by those JPL engineers. And so, we can give up on the concept of helicopter parenting when our engineers on Earth will not need to be responsible for the actions of the spacecraft we send, and these probes would be much more efficient. For example, we can send a swarm of small gadgets that think about what to do under different circumstances and they navigate to many different locations at once instead of sending one big mission that we monitor from Earth. And we will accomplish much more in space this way.
Question:
If humanity were to make first contact with extraterrestrial species and you were allowed to ask one question, what would it be?
Answer:
What happened before the Big Bang?
Let me explain why. First of all, it’s our cosmic roots. Where did we come from? You know, I can trace my roots back to my mother and so forth, throughout the history of Earth, but if you ask where did the Earth come from, it’s from a cloud of gas that made the Sun. Where did that come from? From the reservoir of gas in the Milky Way galaxy. Where did the Milky Way galaxy come from? It’s from the cosmic gas that filled up the universe and existed in the vicinity of the Milky Way; it condensed to make the Milky Way. Why did the Milky Way form? Because there was some over-density, there was a concentration of mass in the region of the Milky Way early on in the universe, and then you end up in the Big Bang as the initial conditions of the current universe, and you ask, “Where did that come from?”
That is the fundamental question about our cosmic roots, and maybe there was something before the Big Bang, and the reason we can’t figure it out is because the density of matter and radiation diverged at that time. They become infinite as we approach the Big Bang, and Einstein’s theory of gravity breaks down. And we know what’s the remedy. The remedy is to unify it with quantum mechanics, but we don’t have a predictive theory that marries quantum mechanics and Einstein’s gravity. We don’t have a reliable theory that makes predictions. I mean, there were people working for 50 years on string theory, but if you ask them: “Can you explain what really happened before the Big Bang?” they would say, “No, we have no clue.” And so unfortunately, we can’t really tell the answer to this question, and hopefully, an alien scientist would have a better understanding of nature that combines quantum mechanics and gravity and knows the answers to what happened before the Big Bang.
So, the first benefit from knowing the answer is that we will know our cosmic roots. Second, we will have a better grasp of quantum gravity that we don’t have right now. And third, as soon as we know what started our universe, we will have a recipe for creating a baby universe. Because it’s just like seeing kids. Suppose you see kids appearing and you don’t know where they come from. But once you understand how they are made, then you can have kids of your own. Of course, you need to have the ingredients for that and appropriate conditions and so forth. Or we can make an analogy with a cake. If you know how to make a cake and you know the ingredients that you need plus the need for an oven, then once you have the recipe — you can actually bake a cake as long as you have the oven. So, this knowledge of where the universe came from will elevate us to the status of being able to apply for the job of God. Because if there was a job advertisement to fill a vacancy of God then what would be the job requirement? The first requirement would be that you should be able to know how to create a universe because according to some religions God created this universe. So, if we had an understanding of what were the circumstances under which one can create a baby universe in the laboratory, even if we didn’t have a particle collider that creates these circumstances, we would have a recipe for creating a universe. And that is something that we previously assigned to the notion of God. So, it would be an amazing knowledge. There is no bigger knowledge than that. If you can create a universe, you can create everything inside the universe as well. And so that would be amazing if that alien scientist would be able to tell us that.
Question:
Hearing that the next 3I/ATLAS NASCAR race will be in Daytona next month, is it true that Avi Loeb will be one of the test drivers?
Answer:
Well, a few weeks ago, I was invited by Alex Malicke, a car racer in the NASCAR car race in Bakersfield, California because he decided to feature my image along with 3I/ATLAS on the hood of his car. And there I was the day after my Joe Rogan podcast, and Alex put me in his car and taught me how to drive it. So, I haven’t driven the car yet, and I asked my wife and she said that she is not allowing me to take the risk. Obviously, there is a risk if you race a car. The other thing that was interesting during that visit is that I thought why isn’t it that some corporation decided to have a self-driving car compete in a NASCAR race because you can definitely design a self-driving car that is aided by AI that would beat all the drivers in the race. And the answer is because we enjoy seeing humans competing. I mean, obviously we can build a robot that will perform better than athletes and we already have a computer that is winning chess games against all humans. That doesn’t take away the joy of witnessing humans play chess because we enjoy challenging humans. And the same thing applies with respect to art. There is AI that is capable of producing art with qualities even better than many humans can. And so, you might wonder how come the value of art produced by humans is not degraded by that, and that’s because art is a means of communication between humans, and we appreciate a human making art much more than an AI system making art. We see art as a way for humans to communicate with humans. So I don’t think there is a risk of seeing self-driving cars competing in NASCAR because we are not interested in that. I don’t see a risk for artists in terms of AI taking away their creative powers and selling products at a much higher price than human artists. And I don’t imagine chess players stopping to play chess just because a computer is doing it better.
Question:
Have we attempted to send a signal to 3I/ATLAS or is it going too fast and is it too far away from us?
Answer:
No. The signal can propagate at the speed of light and 3I/ATLAS is moving at roughly one part in 5,000 of the speed of light. This means that the signal can easily reach 3I/ATLAS very quickly and without any problem. If 3I/ATLAS ends up being a rock what’s the point? If it’s not a rock but instead technological, will we irritate whoever is on it by trying to do something to it or sending a powerful beam of light towards it? The one thing I did calculate is that if the Earth was at this position six months earlier, then we would’ve been very close to 3I/ATLAS, just like Mars was. I realized that we have radar systems that we could’ve used to map and get an image of 3I/ATLAS in three dimensions because as it is rotating every 16 hours, we would’ve taken snapshots of it with a radar at a distance of about 50 million kilometers. That’s feasible given the large size of 3I/ATLAS. The signal would’ve been significant. However, it so happens that we were on the opposite side of the Sun when it came closest to the Sun, and as a result we never get close enough to it to use radar systems.
In terms of transmitting and waiting for an answer, you know, that’s an interesting question. Nobody, as far as I know, is planning to do that. Obviously, one can shoot a laser beam or some radar signal and wait for an answer, but I think it would be more informative for us to figure out remotely what it is by taking a lot of data of it with hundreds of ground-based telescopes and the Hubble and Webb telescopes as well.
Question:
Could the Wow! Signal have been a message sent to 3I/ATLAS from its home planet?
Answer:
That’s possible. That may be why the Wow! Signal was nine degrees away from the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS or 3I/ATLAS started in a slightly different direction than we saw it, explaining the offset. In 1977, 3I/ATLAS was at the distance of three light days, about 600 times the Earth-sun separation, and back then it needed the power of a nuclear plant in order to transmit the Wow! Signal, about a gigawatt. So that’s feasible. But it may well be that the Wow! Signal has nothing to do with 3I/ATLAS. We don’t know, we just need to keep our eyes on the ball and obviously there will be more interstellar objects coming our way that the Rubin Observatory will discover in the Southern hemisphere. I really wish we had a copy of the Rubin Observatory in the Northern hemisphere. If I had a billion dollars, that would be my next priority so that we cover the entire sky, both the north and the south in terms of incoming interstellar objects and potentially discovering a technological object, a tennis ball that was thrown by a cosmic neighbor. That would be amazing. It will change the future of humanity. I had a podcast interview this morning with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and he said that by advocating for public attention to 3I/ATLAS, I was able to actually increase awareness to the importance of space exploration in recent months. I do think that it’s really important for us to put science at a higher priority and for the scientists to attend to the interests of the public. That’s the other part. What we saw in the NASA press conference is not the right approach. I think we should work together with the public by focusing our efforts on questions that the public cares about because the public funds science. And by the way, those are the most interesting questions, so it’s not as if we are sacrificing anything. I’m just saying the obvious. And secondly starting from a standpoint of the humility to learn. We don’t know the answers. There are mysteries. Let’s figure them out rather than pretend that scientists are experts that can tell the public the answer, the way that we see in press conferences like that one.
Question:
Avi, thank you so much. This is exactly why we appreciate you so much, being able to give time to our viewers, people online, who just want to ask questions and learn more information and are obviously very excited about this topic. Thank you so much. We’re going to continue to follow up with you.
Answer:
Thank you so much and stay curious.
***
During the interview, I have received the following uplifting letters:
Letter 1
“Dr Loeb,
I’m a graduate research assistant working on Gravitational waves data analysis and currently in the final years of my PhD journey. I want to thank you for your relentless effort in pursuing a topic that has been historically stigmatized with an unbiased, open-minded scientific inquiry. You’re doing incredible work that many of us wish we could if we were in your position.
Regardless of what 3I/Atlas ultimate turns out to be, I just hope it does not amplify the existing biases and stigma within the scientific community. I could only hope your work brings a broader cultural shift in academia and enables more open-minded scientists to pursue this topic without risking their careers.”
Letter 2
“Dear Dr. Loeb,
My name is Sandy Guo, and I am a high school intern with IEG Global Association, a nonprofit that partners with Harvard SEAS, Columbia Business School, and other universities to connect students with inspiring innovators through our i3 (https://ivyedugrp.org/i3/) Interview Series.
Your research on interstellar objects and the search for life beyond Earth has deeply inspired many of us, especially in Taiwan. The way you encourage curiosity and challenge traditional ideas aligns perfectly with i3’s mission to help students think creatively and explore knowledge beyond what is found in textbooks.
For this episode, I would love to ask your perspective on how high school students can explore topics not usually covered in school, such as interstellar science, unexplained phenomena, or new frontiers like the Galileo Project. How should students think, learn, and prepare to become the next generation of curious minds and problem solvers?
Thank you very much for considering this invitation. It would be an incredible honor to learn from your insights on how young people can think scientifically about the universe beyond the classroom.
Best regards,
Sandy Guo”
Letter 3
“Dear Professor Loeb,
I wanted to send a brief note of appreciation as one of the many “earthlings” following your work on ʻOumuamua, IM1, and now 3I/ATLAS.
I am not an academic or a professional astronomer. I’m a 59-year-old from Oklahoma. working in the everyday world of customer service. Most of my life, space was more of a background wallpaper than an active interest. That changed when I started reading your essays and interviews over the past few years.
What struck me first was not just the ideas themselves — interstellar visitors, possible technology, “space archaeology” — but the way you hold two things at once: a willingness to entertain bold hypotheses and a commitment to let data decide. In a time when many public debates are either cynical or dogmatic, that combination is strangely refreshing.
Your recent writing on 3I/ATLAS, the “anomalies,” and the possibility of technological signatures has had an unexpected effect on me. It’s not that I am convinced it must be technology; I fully accept that future data may point to a purely natural explanation. What matters to me is that you are public about the fact that we do not know yet — and that it is legitimate, even healthy, to ask the uncomfortable questions while we wait for better measurements.
From the outside, science can sometimes look like a closed club where curiosity has to pass through too many gates before it’s allowed to speak. Watching you argue that imagination and openness are not enemies of rigor, but its starting point, has quietly changed how I think about my own work and projects here on Earth. It makes me ask: “Where am I treating assumptions as laws of nature, instead of hypotheses to be tested?”
If 3I/ATLAS turns out to be nothing more than a very peculiar chunk of natural debris, that will still be a beautiful result. We will have learned something new about the universe. But the cultural impact of this moment — the permission you give people like me to wonder out loud, to follow the evidence wherever it goes, and to treat the cosmos as a place we can investigate rather than just admire — is already valuable on its own.
Thank you for being willing to take criticism in order to keep that door of curiosity open. Please keep asking the questions that make both your colleagues and the public slightly uncomfortable. It reminds the rest of us that science is not just a catalog of answers, but a living, human process of exploration.
With appreciation,
Cornelius McHugh”
Letter 4
“Dear dr Avi Loeb,
I’ve read your Medium.com articles about 3I-Atlas over and over again. Becoming an astronomer was my first childhood wish after receiving a book about star constellations — a wish that never became reality for a girl who wasn’t even allowed to attend school during the first Taliban period in Afghanistan.
Years later, when I was able to attend university, under the circumstances, becoming an astronomer was no longer practical for me unfortunately.
Yet the passion for physics and space always remained in my heart. Now, seeing and reading your valuable curiosity alongside the reactions of other involved institutions, I’m increasingly convinced how we as humans are trained not to think.
Tonight, I talked with my 10-year-old son about 3I/ATLAS again, and do you know what he said? He said: “Based on the calculations, this comet is at least 1000 times heavier than 2I-Borisov, yet it’s faster. It’s like someone being 1000x heavier than me but running faster! How can they say that’s normal?”
Thank you for keeping us sharp.
With love,
Masoumah Yasin zadeh
Afghanistan- Holland”
Letter 5
“Dear Professor Loeb,
My love for the cosmos began when I was eight years old and watched that Magic School Bus episode about the class going into space. Since then, the mysteries of the universe and the pursuit of discovering them have been my life’s driving force.
I follow every new discovery almost obsessively and the thought of what might be out there consumes my thoughts.
More than anything, I long to see humanity become an interstellar species, or to finally meet an interstellar civilization. Knowing we aren’t alone would fill a deep, shared void our species seems to carry, and it could be the one thing that truly unites all of us here on Earth.
That is why I feel so much frustration when I hear mainstream voices in science dismiss promising research with mere opinion. Science is meant to be the pursuit of what is true not what we prefer to believe. It’s about having the courage to follow the evidence, no matter how unusual, instead of asserting a conclusion and forcing the facts to fit it.
I used to donate to organizations like The Planetary Society every month, but after the NASA press conference- I have decided to pull my support from the voices who show they no longer prioritize the relentless pursuit of truth.
You, Professor Loeb, have been such a bright light in this landscape. Your clear love for the truth, your passion, and your never-ending curiosity and especially your immense courage in the face of so much adversity- only fuel the fire I already have.
Please know that so many stand behind you. Don’t ever stop being a champion for the pursuit of what is real and true, in nature. Anyone with discernment can see in your eyes when you speak a kind soul who values the truth. I have no doubt you will be remembered as one of the greats along with Galileo, Copernicus, Wegener and all of the others who dared to question, to follow the evidence and to stand their ground no matter how much the mob wanted to shame or disgrace them. Does the Galileo project accept donations? If so, I’ll send my donations your way instead.
With immense gratitude and encouragement,
Stephanie François
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina”
Letter 6
“Dear Professor Loeb,
I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to take a moment to express my deep respect and appreciation for your resilience, integrity, and intellectual bravery in the face of mainstream resistance.
Your willingness to challenge entrenched assumptions in science, and to pursue evidence wherever it leads, embodies the very spirit of discovery. It takes immense conviction to stand firm against the gravitational pull of consensus, especially when that consensus often values comfort over curiosity.
It’s clear that you are ahead of the curve. History shows that transformative ideas are rarely welcomed at first, and yet, they are the ones that ultimately redefine how we see the universe and ourselves. Forgive those who doubt; they simply have not yet caught up with your vision. In time, the data will speak for itself, as it always does.
Thank you for your courage, your persistence, and your commitment to the honest pursuit of truth. You remind many of us why we fell in love with science in the first place, not as an exercise in conformity, but as a quest for understanding.
With respect and appreciation,
Abbey”
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.
