For 70 years, humanity has tried listening for radio emissions coming from other star systems. This is like sitting at home and waiting for a phone call that may never come or trying to hear noises from around our own singular farm house.
Avi Loeb thinks a next step is to look around our yard. If we find a tennis ball that we did not make then it could mean that our neighbors exist and that they play tennis.
Avi Loeb is searching for objects that we know came from outside our solar system. This is known because they were traveling at a speed and direction which meant that they came from outside.
Enrico Fermi asked the question where is Everyone? Where are the aliens? However, people did not make a huge effort to look.
Single, lonely people often ask where is everyone? They have to go to dating sites or at least look out their window or leave their home to try to find people.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.
Avi Loeb funded an expedition to the Pacific to find, collect and analyze the pieces of an interstellar meteor.
The new telescope will start operating next year. It will scan the southern sky every four days.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I really hate the extraordinary evidence BS quote. Claims require evidencence. period. Who TF gets to decide what ‘Extraordinary ‘ even means?
IMO, I find it highly unlikely we will ever detect alien life by detecting their radio signals (of course, I’d love to be wrong…). I say this because radio frequencies, unless uber intense and focused, fade out, evaporate after tens of light years. At most. Detecting the radio “noise” of an artificial extrasolar source, just doesn’t seem likely, as I understand the physics of radio. No, I don’t and never will understand everything, of course. I’d REALY love to be wrong. But I’m not holding my breath.
I believe advanced civilizations use telepathy for communications. It is instantaneous and confidential . For humanity to progress to a cosmological citizen, spiritual advancement will be more important than technological advancement.
David Brin posits in “Existence” that all alien civilization converge towards sending their minds and/or AI into compact computer media, with the bare minimum required to make the trip and brake into its destination, and then they just wait until a civilization develops and finds them on the far away star system, usually in space or buried in the planetary crust after aeons. Then they contact and entice us to do things for them in exchange of their knowledge. Ergo the artifacts Avi Loeb is looking for.
He posited they all use some kind of long term stable photonic crystal computers with very little power consumption, fed from the light of the stars. And Brin also assumes our Solar System would be packed with these probes, considering all the time they had to send something and wait for us to find them.
Funnily we could literally build an interstellar probe containing an LLM agent in a long term photonic data storage, with instructions to run then o a golden LP or whatever.