Cambridge, Massachusetts A Harvard University professor claims that we are probably not alone in the universe. Astronomer Avi Loeb’s new book ‘Extraterrestrial’ examines the 2017 flight of a space object that he says was not really out of this world.
“Initially, people thought, ‘Well, it must be a rock, just like the asteroids or comets we’ve seen in the solar system before,'” Paula Ebben, CBSN’s Boston correspondent, said. “But because they got more information about it, it seems very strange.”
The cigar-shaped object seen through telescopes was called “Oumuamua” – meaning “a messenger reaching out from the distant past” in Hawaii.
It was ten times as long as it is wide and traveled at a speed of 196,000 mph, researchers said at the time.
“It did not look like a comet, yet it behaved like something that had extra pressure,” Loeb said.
NASA confirmed that it was ‘the first object ever seen in our solar system and known to have originated elsewhere’, but said its origin was unknown.
Loeb argues in his book that the object was probably rubbish from advanced foreign technology – space rubbish from many light years away. It can be a kind of “light sail” powered by sunlight, a technology that humans are currently developing to explore space.
“It is possible that there is a lot of space junk, or that it is a sin,” he said. “We do not know, because we have not collected enough data, enough evidence, and I warn everyone to look for such objects so that we will examine them more closely next time.”
Loeb said it was time for researchers to look for potential ‘messages in a bottle’ like Oumuamua, instead of just looking for radio signals as evidence of other civilizations.
He said his ideas are not popular in the scientific community at the moment – talking about potential extraterrestrial intelligence is “out of the mainstream, and it should not be.”
ESO / M. Kornmesser
“We need to be open-minded and look for evidence rather than assume that everything we see in the sky must be rocks,” he said.
For those who doubt the existence of aliens, Loeb says to consider the chance.
“We know that half of the solar stars have a planet the size of the earth, about the same distance from the star, so that they can have liquid water on the surface – that’s the chemistry of life,” he said. said.
“It means that if we throw billions of times into the Milky Way, we are probably not alone, and on top of that we are probably not the sharpest cookie in the pot, the smartest kid in the block.”