{"id":3766,"date":"2023-08-30T14:08:45","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T14:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3766"},"modified":"2023-09-18T14:12:32","modified_gmt":"2023-09-18T14:12:32","slug":"3766","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3766","title":{"rendered":"Taking in the garbage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading Interstellar by Avi Loeb for New Scientist, 30 August 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

On 8 January 2014, a meteor exploded above the Pacific just north of Papua New Guinea\u2019s Manus Island.<\/p>\n

Five years later Amir Siraj, then a research assistant for Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, spotted it in an online catalogue at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, part of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<\/p>\n

Partway through Interstellar, Loeb explains why he thinks the meteor comes from outside the solar system. This would make it one of only three objects so identified. The first was \u2018Oumuamua, detected in 2017: a football-field size pancake-shaped anomaly and the subject of Loeb\u2019s book Interplanetary, to which Interstellar is a repetitive, frenetic, grandiose extension.<\/p>\n

Since Interstellar was sent to press, Loeb\u2019s team have gathered particles from the crash site and packed them off to to labs at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bruker Corporation in Germany for further analysis. Metallic spherules from outside our solar system would be a considerable find in itself.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Loeb is publically airing a hypothesis which, thanks to an opinion piece on 10 February 2023<\/a>, is already familiar to readers of New Scientist. He reckons this meteor might turn out to have been manufactured by extraterrestrials.<\/p>\n

Already there has been some bad-tempered push-back<\/a>, but Loeb does not care. He\u2019s innoculated against other people\u2019s opinions, he says in Interstellar, not least because \u201cmy first mentor in astrophysics… had a professional rival, and when my mentor died it was his rival that was asked to write his obituary in a prestigious journal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loeb, who has spent a career writing about black holes, dark matter and the deep time of the universe, does not waste time arguing for the existence of spacefaring extraterrestrials. Rather, he argues that we should be looking for spacefaring extraterrestrials, or at any rate for their gear. Among the possible scenarios for First Contact, \u201ca human-alien handshake in front of the White House\u201d is the least likely. It\u2019s far more likely we\u2019ll run into some garbage or a probe of some sort, and only then, says Loeb, because we\u2019ve taken the trouble to seek it out.<\/p>\n

Until very recently, no astronomical instrument was built for such a purpose. But this is changing, says Loeb, who cites NASA\u2019s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena study, launched in December 2022, and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time — a 10-year-long high-resolution record of the entire southern sky, to be conducted on the brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Then there\u2019s Loeb\u2019s own brainchild, The Galileo Project, meant to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures \u201cfrom accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.\u201d The roof of the Harvard College Observatory boasts the project\u2019s first sky-scanning apparatus.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more than a whiff of Quixote about this project, but Loeb\u2019s well within his rights to say that unless we go looking for extraterrestrials, we\u2019re never going to find them. Loeb\u2019s dating metaphor felt painfully hokey at first, but it grew on me: are we to be cosmic wallflowers, standing around on the off-chance that some stranger comes along? Or are we going to go looking for things we\u2019ll never spot without a bit of effort?<\/p>\n

Readers of grand speculations by the likes of Freeman Dyson and Stanislaw Lem will find nothing in Interstellar to make them blink, aside maybe from a rather cantankerous prose style. Can we be reassured by Loeb\u2019s promise that he and his team work only with scientific data openly available for peer review, that they share their findings freely and only through traditional scientific channels, and will release no results except through scientifically accepted channels of publication?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m inclined to say yes, we should. Arguments from incredulity are always a bad idea, and sneering is never a good look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Interstellar by Avi Loeb for New Scientist, 30 August 2023 On 8 January 2014, a meteor exploded above the Pacific just north of Papua New Guinea\u2019s Manus Island. Five years later Amir Siraj, then a research assistant for Harvard … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[733,651,730,1105],"class_list":["post-3766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-astrobiology","tag-astronomy","tag-seti","tag-ufos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3768,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3766\/revisions\/3768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}