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| The arrogant mentality that saw Galileo derided still exists today, claims a Harvard professor who wants to prove aliens exist |
Galileo Galilei was locked up after
the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. That was 1633, but Professor
Avi Loeb of Harvard University is going through his own tribulations. Some view The eminent scholar as controversial, which sparked an outpouring
against his new initiative to finally answer the question, ‘Are we alone?’ It
is called the Galileo Project and aims to provide data and evidence
about what is flying above us. No more fighter jet cockpit cameras, vague
eyewitness testimony, or reports from a hacker who infiltrated the CIA’s
network.
The idea is simple: obtain good-quality images and study them, but many of Loeb’s peers have already shot him down in flames. He admitted: “The reason I am doing what I’m doing is not that I enjoy the pain of the wounds inflicted on me on Twitter, that’s not a very pleasant experience.
“The only reason I’m willing to go
through it is that I think it’s an extremely important question for the
future of humanity. That’s probably the most important scientific question you
can ask. It’s not about me, we should be open, rather than assume we know the
answer in advance, that’s what Galileo taught us.”
Even though the Galileo Project was only
launched last week, it has already attracted the attention of amateur
astronomers, as thousands have landed emails in Loeb’s inbox. The venture was
partly in response to the US government’s June 2020 Unidentified Aerial
Phenomena (UAP) report, which offered more questions than answers.
“You
expect the scientific community to be blue sky, open-minded, but the government
seems to be more open-minded in declaring that and the scientific community
ridicules it out of a habit. There is this tendency of staying conservative and
not dealing with it, which I think is inappropriate,” Loeb
said.
Oddly,
Loeb didn’t plan to start the Galileo Project, the interest stemmed from his
book, ‘Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond
Earth’, about the unexplained object glimpsed from a Hawaiian observatory
in 2017. Arriving at his office recently, he was informed a new research fund
had been created in his name. Loeb said: “Soon after I had a
multi-billionaire on the porch of my home with questions about my book.”
The next
morning, the fund had $1.75 million from two mystery donors. Loeb added, “That
never happens in academia, you have to understand that. A lot of people seek
funding and work very hard to get funding and most often don’t get funded, but
here I didn’t engage in any fundraising.” The cash allowed him to
follow his instinct and recruit a team of 50 scientists.
It
will also enable him to buy telescopes, cameras, and computer systems.
The
Galileo Project is going after two types of targets, and the first is
UAPs. Loeb explained: “Astronomers usually look at distant objects so
if a bird flies above the telescope, it’s ignored. We will pay attention to
that bird and make sure it’s a bird and not something else. We’ll be looking
at the sky but not focusing on the usual suspects that astronomers are looking
at far away, we’re looking at nearby objects. It’s a fishing expedition, you
throw the hook and you don’t know what kind of fish you will find, and then you
get as much data as possible.”
The other is interstellar objects from
outside our solar system. Loeb continued: “I’m not after recruiting
thousands of people with their cell phones looking at the sky, we want a large
telescope more than 10cm in size or up to a meter, that’s 1,000 times the
aperture of a cell phone. We want to read off the label if it’s Made in Country
X versus Made on Planet Y.”
The US government report confirmed to Loeb
the gaping lacuna in the status quo. The wrong people are investigating
matters, he believes. “That report was an admission of failure of these
intelligence agencies as that is their job, they are paid to figure out what
flies in the sky,” he said. “I realized that this subject should
not be limited to the talking points of politicians or military personnel, it
should be in the realm of science because you would never ask a plumber to bake
you a cake.”
Loeb said: “The data the government has
was gathered by classified sensors, they are sensors monitoring the sky and the
US government prefers its adversaries not to know what sensors it is using. It
cannot release the data for that reason, not because all of the data is
classified.
“Frankly, I’m not interested in that data,
I want to collect my own data. I behave like that kid that is told by adults
this is the truth, often they don’t pay attention, and the kids want to find it by
themselves or by checking it out. Science is an extension of our childhood
curiosity and about reproducible evidence.”
The Galileo Project should swing into
action in 12 months. What members of the public may be surprised to discover is
that Loeb is not actually expecting to see aliens, he is looking for their
equipment. That for him will be enough to prove there is a more advanced
species than us in the universe.
Loeb said: “We live in the 21st
century, not in the Dark Ages, and we know that if we have the instruments that
can collect the evidence we need, we should just go ahead and do it, rather
than argue forever philosophically whether it makes sense or not, or ridicule
it. The right approach is this is an intriguing question because it could
indicate there is a smarter kid on the block, we should consider that
possibility.”
“If you imagine chemical rockets that
we use to cross the galaxy, it would take them 100 million years. No biological
creature can survive that long even if you have multiple generations because of
the impact of cosmic rays, but there is no need to send them, you can send
artificial intelligent systems.”
And expanding on his theory, it truly does
become hard to visualize. Loeb said: “If there was a civilization, more
advanced than we are, that sent self-replicating AI systems, that are connected
to 3D printers that can make more of the same as they get to other places, you
could easily full up the Milky Way galaxy with such probes within a billion
years, and most of the stars in the universe formed billions of years before
the Sun. If you just imagine another star that predated us, that’s enough to
fill up the galaxy with probes.”
Once the
cameras and computers are calibrated, Loeb will place them in different parts
of the world. Mountaintops are a likely spot but if he can reach $10 million in
funding, then he will have over 100 sets of equipment to deploy in a variety of
locations. He said: “Then we will have a high likelihood of resolving this
question of what UAPs are all about. If it turns out to be some atmospheric
phenomena that we’ve never anticipated, so be it. We will just report back and
clear up the fog.”
Underlining
how tough it may be is the fact that NASA has already snubbed Loeb. But with
his status as a professor at the world’s most prestigious university, he hopes to inspire others to push the boundaries. He said: “Around the same
time (of the US government report) the head of NASA Bill Nelson said scientists should look into
that, I was very happy to hear that so I approached people under him and said
‘Here I am, to serve and make your boss happy. Nobody got back to me.
“This subject
appeals to the public, it’s an opportunity if it were to be brought to the
mainstream of science to attract more funding to science, and to attract talent
into science, young people that will become scientists because it’s exciting.”
The example of Galileo is inescapable.
Loeb is staking a lot on his theory and generations to come could look back at
him as we now do at the famed Italian astronomer. Who else is leading an
educated surge to countenance that we may not be the shot callers that we think
we are?
Loeb said: “I don’t think we’re special
or unique and the reason I say that is whenever we’ve pretended we’re really
special, it ended up being wrong. We thought we were the center of the
universe, that’s wrong and that’s what Galileo showed by looking through his
telescope.
“The philosophers at the time said, ‘We
know the Sun moves around the Earth and you’re claiming the Earth moves around
the Sun, therefore, we will not look through our telescope because we know the
truth’.
“They put him on house arrest, today he
would have been canceled on social media. Reality doesn’t care what we say, we
can pretend there are no neighbors and there is no smarter kid on the block by
not looking through our windows and closing the curtains, but that won’t get rid of
that smarter kid.
“The point is not to repeat again the
mistakes made during the days of Galileo.”
Written by
Chris Sweeney
Chris Sweeney is an author and columnist
who has written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun, and
the Daily Record, along with several international-selling magazines.
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