Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

by Avi Loeb

Is human civilization ready to confront what follows our accepting the plausible conclusion, arrived at through evidence-backed hypotheses, that terrestrial life isn’t unique and perhaps not even particularly impressive? I fear the answer is no, and that prevailing prejudice is a cause for concern.

The world will end, of course, and most decidedly with a bang; our Sun, now about 4.6 billion years old, will in about 7 billion years turn into an expanding red giant and end all life on Earth.

I submit that the simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.

On September 9, 2017, the visitor reached its perihelion, the point at which its trajectory took it closest to the Sun. Thereafter, it began to exit the solar system; its speed far away—relative to our star, it was moving at about 58,900 miles per hour—more than ensured its escape from the Sun’s gravity. It passed through Venus’s orbital distance from the Sun around September 29 and through Earth’s around October 7, moving swiftly toward the constellation Pegasus and the blackness beyond.

‘Oumuamua—a Hawaiian name reflecting the geographical location of the telescope used to discover the object.

On October 19, astronomer Robert Weryk at the Haleakala Observatory discovered ‘Oumuamua in the data collected by the Pan-STARRS telescope,

imagination. The Hawaiian word ‘oumuamua (pronounced “oh moo ah moo ah”) is loosely translated as “scout.” In its announcement of the object’s official designation, the International Astronomical Union defined ‘oumuamua slightly differently, as “a messenger from afar arriving first.” Either way, the name clearly implies that the object was the first of others to come.

at the time of ‘Oumuamua’s discovery, we had never seen an object that originated outside of our solar system pass through it.

Our civilization has sent five man-made objects into interstellar space: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, and New Horizons.

have since tried to teach my own students—wasn’t about whether you should or shouldn’t follow the crowd but rather that you should take time to figure things out before acting. In deliberation, there is the humility of uncertainty.

‘Oumuamua, a small interstellar object first discovered by humans on October 19, 2017, that was highly luminous, oddly tumbling, and most likely disk-shaped, deviated from a path explicable by the Sun’s gravity alone without any visible outgassing. All of its properties, very much including its origin in space-time being local standard of rest, rendered it a statistical outlier to a highly significant degree. As a member of a population of objects on random orbits, it required much more solid material to be expelled than available in planetary systems around other stars. But if ‘Oumuamua was extremely thin or its orbit was not random, the problem could be alleviated.

‘Oumuamua was a naturally occurring object, a peculiar, even exotic comet, but still, for all its peculiarities, just an interstellar rock. And yet it deviated.

Accepting my hypothesis about ‘Oumuamua requires, above all else, humility, because it requires us to accept that while we may be extraordinary, in all likelihood we are not unique.

Michelangelo said when he was asked how he produced such beautiful sculptures from a block of marble: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”