Harvard professor Avi Loeb predicted that the scientific discovery of an alien civilization — one that may potentially be billions of years old — will prompt humanity to unify. He talked to Fox News Digital for a wide-ranging interview that covered billions of years of history, and even interstellar fragments from the bottom of the ocean.
Loeb, a trained physicist who received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of 24, said it was "arrogant of us to think that we are alone, that we don't have a neighbor out there."
"There are tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone and hundreds of billions of galaxies like the Milky Way in the observable volume of the universe," he said.
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"Perhaps noticing a neighbor will be a wake-up call that will bring us together," Loeb said, speaking of humanity as a whole. "There might be many more neighbors that are far more accomplished than we are, and we can learn from them. So my hope is that it will bring humanity to a better place in the long term future."
Loeb also theorized that countless "dead" civilizations may exist in the galaxy. The question for the scientific community, he said, is to search for evidence of their existence.
That process will likely be similar to "archeological digs" on Earth, Loeb said.
"I call this space archeology, archeology in space, trying to figure out who preceded us. And when I say preceded," Loeb clarified, "it's by billions of years, not thousands of years, like on Earth."
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Evidence of an alien civilization is exactly what Loeb said he may have found evidence for at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In a separate interview with Fox & Friends, the professor, also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, said that he found startling material recovered from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
That trip, Loeb told Fox & Friends, produced evidence of material that was moving "faster than 95% of stars near the sun" and had "material strength" that was "tougher than most rocks."
In other words, material that is possibly artificially designed by another species in the galaxy, and not naturally produced by a meteor or other form of space matter.
Some scientists have publicly disputed Loeb's claims, telling The New York Times in an article from July that the Harvard professor's theories, despite attracting attention, were not based in solid scientific evidence.
"People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims," astrophysicist Steve Desch, said. "It’s polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room."
But Loeb was adamant that other scientists who are skeptical of his theories are not wiling to actually search after the evidence, dismissing some attacks as "academic jealousy."
Loeb heads the Galileo Project and has an ambitious goal, according to the organization's website: "to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research."
He said that the search for alien life begins in "our backyard."
That involves checking for a "tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor," Loeb said, one of his oft-used analogies for wreckage, debris or other evidence from an extraterrestrial civilization of high-tech spacecraft within the reach of modern science.
But whatever theory of alien civilizations is eventually accepted or rejected by scientists, Loeb said, people across the world should be "open-minded."
That doesn’t mean that the realization, on a humanity-wide level, of "neighbors" in the universe would not be a shocking event, Loeb said. In fact, it might be a profoundly spiritual experience.
"A very advanced scientific civilization is a good approximation to God," Loeb said. "Imagine a cave dweller visiting New York City and seeing all the gadgets in technology in terms of the lights appearing as a miracle to the cave dweller."
In the same way, Loeb explained, a "higher level of intelligence may not be easily understandable to us."
One Biblical story came to mind for Loeb — the famous Old Testament passage of Moses and the burning bush. But Moses, he said, could have been aided by the knowledge of modern science.
"If I were there with the Galileo Project, the infrared sensors, I could have advised Moses about the surface temperature of the bush," Loeb said, "the amount of energy [in a] period of time emitted from it and whether it's indeed an unusual phenomenon."
Going further, Loeb said that it is conceivable that an ultra-advanced civilization may appear to humans to have godlike powers.
"You can imagine that the super human civilization that understands how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity might actually be able to create a baby universe in the laboratory, a quality that we assign to God in religious texts," he said.
Loeb then defined the "fundamental difference between religion and science in that the science is guided by evidence collected by instruments. It's not this subjective personal matter of belief."
He also called on humanity as a whole to share scientific knowledge with "all humans."
"We're all in the same boat, the Earth, sailing through interstellar space, and anything about the universe, any knowledge that we gain about our neighbors, about the universe more broadly, should be scientific knowledge, meaning that it should be shared openly," Loeb said.
He harkened back to the story of the scientist Galileo Galilei, an astronomer and physicist who was put under house arrest for his support of a heliocentric model of the universe.
"Once we realized that the Earth moves around the Sun, Galileo should not be put in house arrest," Loeb said, referring to the scientist, who is also the namesake of his organization, the Galileo Project. "This should not be politicized, because whether the Earth moves around the Sun or not does not depend on whether the voice of Galileo is heard publicly. And that's a perfect illustration of the difference between science and politics. Science is better than politics."
He left off with a final message.
"Science should be guided by evidence, not by prejudice," Loeb said. "It should not be diminished by negative undertones on social media or by academic jealousy. And what I'm doing is seeking a higher intelligence out there, because it's not always evident here on earth."
Loeb has written a book about the search for evidence of alien life in the universe that is headlined, "Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars."
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