Professor Avi Loeb, a controversial science author who claimed the Oumuamua interstellar object was an alien spacecraft, is leading the project
An international team from Harvard University is set to launch a new programme in order to discover evidence of potential alien civilisations through the signs that are left by their advanced forms of technology.
The so-called Galileo Project is being led by Professor Avi Loeb, who is a controversial popular science author who had claimed that the Oumuamua interstellar object, which had never been imaged in more detail than a single pixel, was actually an alien spacecraft.
Announcing the new project on Monday, the team said that it was dedicated to the proposition “that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations”.
This comes after billionaire Jeff Bezos has thanked his Amazon employees, as well as customers for paying for his leisure voyage to space, but his remarks have since prompted criticism from many, including politicians and celebrities.
The Galileo Project will be searching for and investigate evidence of potentially defunct or still-active extraterrestrial technology civilisations (ETCs) by using astronomical survey data, as well as telescope observations.
New artificial intelligence algorithms will be developed in order to spot interstellar objects that could potentially be of artificial origin, as well as satellites, as well as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) that are believed to have been built by ETCs.
Citing a recent United States intelligence report on UAPs, the project said that “the scientific community now needs the determination to systematically, scientifically and transparently look for potential evidence of extraterrestrial technological equipment”.
The report, that was published back in June, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to make any claims that could attribute the phenomena to any alien civilisations.
Professor Loeb also stressed that the unusual nature of Oumuamua interstellar object in his announcement of the Galileo Project, which had described the object as posessing “highly anomalous properties that defy well-understood natural explanations”.
The object was certainly unusual, its trajectory had suggested that it had come from outside of the solar system, with astronomers detecting a non-gravitational acceleration to its trajectory, something that other astronomers sought to explain by using an exotic hydrogen iceberg theory.
This comes after a team from NASA and NOAA have recently found that Earth’s “energy imbalance” had doubled between the years of 2005 and 2019. The energy imbalance of heat within the planet is simple to understand but is complex in its causes and impacts upon the climate.
Other researchers had attempted to cool the alien speculation regarding the interstellar object, with Coryn Bailer-Jones, who is an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, saying: “In science, we must ask ourselves ‘Where is the evidence?’ Not ‘Where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?'”
Dr Bailer-Jones noted that the tumbling motion of the Oumuamua in particular “would make it impossible to keep any instruments pointed at the Earth” if the object were an alien spacecraft.
Mr Loeb called his findings “purely scientific and evidence-based” and added: “I follow the maxim of Sherlock Holmes: when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
