Did an Alien Life-Form Do a Drive-By of Our Solar System in 2017?
An artist’s rendering of Oumuamua. Central to Avi Loeb’s argument is what he calls the “Oumuamua wager,” a takeoff on Pascal’s famous wager, that the upside of believing in God far outweighs the downside. Likewise, believing that Oumuamua could have been an alien spacecraft can only make us more alert and receptive to thinking outside the box.Credit.M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory
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EXTRATERRESTRIAL
By Avi Loeb
On Nov. 12, 2018, Avi Loeb, then the chairman of the astronomy department at Harvard, and a young research associate, Shmuel Bialy, published a paper in the highly prestigious Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that humans may have discovered the first evidence of alien technology in the form of a mysterious object called Oumuamua that had streaked through the solar system the previous fall.
On February 13, 1633, the Roman Inquisition found the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei “vehemently suspect of heresy” for his observation that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He and forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The inquisition concluded that heliocentrism was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.”
Fast forward to October 2018, not unsimilar to Galileo’s intrepid observation, Avi Loeb, then the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper that examined the “peculiar acceleration” of a strange disk-like object that entered our Solar System, and proposed that it “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, reports The New Yorker, recently making further headlines by suggestin
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On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-
STARRS1 when he noticed something strange. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour.
A super-Earth planet 280 light-years away seems to be about 10 billion years old, adding to growing evidence that rocky planets have existed almost as long
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has reignited a debate about whether alien life can explain an object that visited the solar system in 2017 in a scathing new book.