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Friday, February 5, 2021
CONTEXT: Harvard’s Avi Loeb — Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
Harvard professor and chairman of the Astronomy department Avi Loeb believes that the most parsimonious explanation for interstellar object 1I/‘Oumuamua is that it is a discarded light-sail built by an advanced technological civilisation. In his recently published book, Extraterrestrial, he argues that natural explanations for the object's bizarre light curve, reflectivity, trajectory, and non-gravitational acceleration as it departed the solar system are more contrived and implausible than the object's being a piece of technology humans could build and launch today if we so wished.
In this conversation with Brian Keating, Prof. Loeb discusses ‘Oumuamua, what the Copernican principle implies for such objects and our likelihood of finding additional exemplars passing through the solar system, and why academic science is so loath to investigate evidence for artefacts of extraterrestrial technology while entertaining theories such as the multiverse, dark matter, supersymmetry, and string theory, for which there is no experimental evidence whatsoever.
Posted at February 5, 2021 17:15