The Starshot scheme, registered by Russian internet billionaire and philanthropist Yuri Milner, was announced just a year and a half before Oumuamua was discovered. It was natural for Loeb to think that great minds across the universe might think the same. It sounds crazy, but he needs to make a bigger point, one that is worth reading and reading.
Central to his argument is what he calls the ‘Oumuamua bet’, a rise from Pascal’s famous bet, that the disadvantage of faith in God outweighs the disadvantage. If we believe that Oumuamua could be a strange spacecraft, it can only make us more alert and receptive to think outside the box. As Louis Pasteur put it: “Chance benefits the prepared mind.”
“If we dare to bet that Oumuamua was a piece of advanced extraterrestrial technology, we are profitable,” Loeb writes. “Whether it asks us to methodically search the universe for signs of life or to embark on more ambitious projects, an optimistic bet can have a transformative effect on our civilization.” Imagine, for example, light seals equipped with copies of human DNA placed around a star that would one day explode and cause them to travel on a flash of light across the galaxy. It will take millions of years to set up, but what is a million years in the 10 billion year long life of the Milky Way?
He goes on to say: “When I think of this well-known technology, a tarpaulin tumbling in sunlight no longer looks like the wings of a dandelion seed sent down by the wind to fertilize virgin soil.”
Modern academic science, he complains, has overestimated topics such as multiple dimensions and multiple universes for which there is no evidence, and underestimates the search for life out there, not only in the form of extraneous radio signals, but also in the form of chemical “Biosignatures,” or even technological artifacts – such as, Loeb believes, Oumuamua. We can try harder, he writes. The discovery of alien life would be the greatest discovery in the history of science.
As he writes at the end of this half-memoir, half-ascending monologue: “But the moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization ever in the cosmos, we will realize that we We have spent more funds to develop the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would cost to preserve it. ”