Speaking of important things, here is one I think we both agree on: in science, we must keep each other honest. And most importantly, I don’t need to think about what’s wrong with all the things that other people say! And, yes, because of the pandemic, the past 10 months have been the most productive in my career. It’s really beautiful when nobody's outside-just me and the birds, ducks and rabbits.
My routine is to wake up each morning at 5 A.M. Based on your productivity, I’ve never gotten the sense that you get a lot of sleep anyway. I mean, there were 10 filmmakers and producers from Hollywood who contacted me over the past few weeks! I joked with my literary agent that if a film comes out of this, I want to be played by Brad Pitt. I’ve never seen anything like this there has been so much interest in the book. And I already recorded long conversations with Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan for their shows. I’ve got about 100 podcast interviews to do in the next few weeks. and Coast to Coast AM at 3 A.M.-plus appearances on U.S. I’m good, but I have been losing sleep, because in order to cope with all the media requests, I’ve been doing interviews with, for example, Good Morning Britain at 1:50 A.M. Scientific American spoke with Loeb about the book, his controversial hypothesis and why he believes science is in crisis. Loeb has now taken his case to the public with the book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life beyond Earth, which is just as much about the author’s life story as it is about ‘Oumuamua’s fundamental mysteries. To claim otherwise, Loeb’s critics say, is cavalier at best and destructive at worst for the long struggle to remove the stigma of credulous UFO and alien-abduction reports from what should unquestionably be a legitimate field of scientific inquiry.
The paper has been a smash hit with journalists but has fallen flat with most of Loeb’s astrobiology-focused peers, who insist that, while strange, ‘Oumuamua’s properties still place it well within the realm of natural phenomena. In late 2018 Loeb and his co-author Shmuel Bialy, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that ‘Oumuamua had been nothing less than humanity’s first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence. Primed by years spent pondering how we might someday find evidence of cosmic civilizations in the sky’s depths, he became increasingly convinced that, with ‘Oumuamua, the evidence had instead found us. To Loeb, the most plausible explanation was as obvious as it was sensational: taken together with its possibly pancakelike shape and high reflectivity, ‘Oumuamua’s anomalous acceleration made perfect sense if the object was in fact a light sail-perhaps a derelict from some long-expired galactic culture. But no signs of such jets were seen around ‘Oumuamua. Run-of-the-mill comets can exhibit similar accelerations because of the rocketlike effect of evaporating gases jetting from their sunlight-warmed icy surfaces. Most strangely, as it zoomed off after swooping by the sun, the object sped up faster than could be explained by our star’s waning gravitational grip alone. Neither did its brightness, which revealed ‘Oumuamua was at least 10 times more reflective than one of our solar system’s typical space rocks-shiny enough to suggest the gleam of burnished metal. ‘Oumuamua’s apparent shape-which was like a 100-meter-long cigar or pancake-did not closely resemble any known asteroid or comet. The object’s discoverers dubbed it ‘Oumuamua-a Hawaiian term that roughly translates to “scout.” The unavoidably cursory examinations of this celestial passerby showed it had several properties that defied easy natural explanation. All that began to change in late 2017, however, when astronomers around the world scrambled to study an enigmatic interstellar visitor-the first ever seen-that briefly came within range of their telescopes. Until relatively recently, Loeb’s most high-profile work in that regard was his involvement with Breakthrough Starshot, a project funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner to send laser-boosted, gossamer-thin mirrorlike spacecraft called “light sails” on high-speed voyages to nearby stars.
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But for more than a decade he has also courted a more contentious subject-namely, space aliens, including how to find them. The prolific Harvard University astrophysicist has produced pioneering and provocative research on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the early universe and other standard topics of his field.
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