Telescopes, not astronauts
Loeb complains about the attitude of the majority of the scientific community to his thesis that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial technology. And he recounts how a fellow astrophysicist at Harvard confessed “I wish Oumuamua had never existed: he’s so weird!” Then he asks me “what would you have done? I would have said to myself ‘that object is very strange: let’s look for more information about it’”. These days he frequents billionaires who he asks for funds for his Galileo project to send telescopes with artificial intelligence in rockets that allow us to see what today we believe indecipherable infinity and beyond, but criticizes the space walk of Jeff Bezos and Branson: “They give tone spending a fortune to raise his body 1% of the radius of the Earth, when the future of exploration is to send our intelligence –in artificial form– and not our bodies into space ”.
Are you getting more or less support for your thesis that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial technology?
Let’s see: you will remember that on October 19, 2017, the first object that came to us from outside our solar system was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii. They called him Oumuamua.
How did you know it was not another asteroid?
We were only able to observe it for 11 days. And astronomers thought it was a comet that came from another star, but it did not have the gaseous tail of comets and instead an unusual flattened disk shape in them.
Couldn’t it be a very peculiar asteroid?
It neither looked like it nor behaved as such, because, furthermore, it deviated from the path that could be explained by the gravity of the sun. However, most scientists still prefer to think that it was a comet, even if it was so unusual.
And what do you think today?
That the available data allow us to assume that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial technology, even if it was waste.
What if it was Earthling space debris?
No, because on September 17, 2020, when I had already published my book Alien the same telescope discovered another object, 2020SO, which was also artificial, but its trajectory came from Earth.
What was the 2020SO?
A piece of propellant launched from Earth in 1966 on a lunar mission. And it shows that we can differentiate between a rock and an artificial object and that Oumuamua can be a fragment of extraterrestrial artifact.
What have you deduced from Oumuamua during these four years of research?
That the extraterrestrial radio signals that we have searched for 70 years always require an attentive interlocutor; That is why, in addition, we must look for archaeological remains of navigation from other civilizations.
Aren’t we exploring space already?
But we must not send our bodies, our intelligence is enough.
How to send it to space?
We have evolved to adapt to Earth and we would not survive the space travel of years, decades, centuries, millennia, that is required to explore space. But we can send our brains.
Without body?
Oumuamua teaches us that space will be explored by minds and their artifacts, not bodies. We can educate artificial intelligence systems and delegate exploration to them.
Isn’t that what we already do on Mars?
Those artifacts that we send into space now are rather dumb. Perseverance is a robot operated by engineers from Earth. I am talking about autonomous artificial intelligence capable of learning by itself in space.
How?
Teaching him to explore other galaxies as we teach children to ride a bicycle.
What kind of intelligence would we send?
To begin with – it is my Galileo project – launching telescopes that will scrutinize the frontiers of space as far as we do not reach with those of now from Earth. I’m talking about autonomous systems capable of self-healing with 3-D printers, for example.
To see the hitherto invisible?
Galileo proved that the Earth revolved around the Sun because he saw it.
And it almost cost him his life if he did not retract.
But the Earth was moving and today Oumuamua shows that in space exploration philosophies are not worth it, you have to go, see and demonstrate. There are millions of galaxies like ours: Why should we be unique in them?
Yes, but if there are so many, where are they?
That is the Fermi paradox, but it is very presumptuous to sit in your garden waiting for the neighbors to come and greet you. You should go find them and visit them and not stay home saying they don’t exist.
Why is so much scientist reluctant to accept the intelligent origin of Oumuamua?
Because we have always believed ourselves to be the center of the universe. Sodom, for example, was destroyed by a meteorite of which remains have now been found, but then we prefer to believe that it was our sins that destroyed it. And so, for centuries, we have felt the center and the protagonists of everything. Enough, humans! Let’s accept that we are only a tiny part of the cosmos.
All astrology believed that we were.
And he founded religions of astronomer priests who studied the stars believing that they moved to condemn or save us: and so that we could lose or win wars. For this reason, scientists today find it difficult to accept that it is not only they who count.
What do you suggest?
I founded the Galileo project a month and a half ago. And I invite the readers of The vanguard . In addition to the help from Harvard, this July at dinners in my garden I have raised two million dollars. I want to add support so that the exploration of space and our search for other intelligences is also intelligent.
