Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

by Avi Loeb

Throughout the expanse of space and over the lifetime of the universe, are there now or have there ever been other sentient civilizations that, like ours, explored the stars and left evidence of their efforts?

Over the years, I have come to believe that the laws of physics cease to apply in only two places: singularities and Hollywood.

In “The Hollow Men,” his meditation on post–World War I Europe, the poet T. S. Eliot reflects: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

adulthood, a good definition of which might be “the point at which you have gathered enough experience that your models have a high success rate in forecasting reality.”

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

It is commonly thought that life is a collection of the places you visit. But this is an illusion. Life is a collection of events, and these are the results of choices, only some of which are ours to make.

staring out into the vastness of space, contemplating the start and end of everything, provides a framework for answering, “What is a life worth living?”

Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path. Life turns on your seeing clearly what’s in front of you.

‘Oumuamua, the interstellar object spotted tumbling across the sky in October 2017, was not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

The idea of a solar sail—a manufactured object that would be propelled by the pressure sunlight exerted on it—was centuries old. As early as 1610, Johannes Kepler wrote to Galileo of “ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes.”

If the lightsail hypothesis is true, there are two possible explanations. One is that ‘Oumuamua’s makers intentionally targeted our inner solar system; the other is that Oumuamua is a piece of space junk that happened upon us (or we upon it).

“I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here,” Churchill wrote, “that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”

To take the small scientific leap and allow the possibility ‘Oumuamua was extraterrestrial technology is to give humanity the small nudge toward thinking like a civilization that could have left a lightsail buoy for our solar system to run into.

‘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.