Harvard astrophysicist Professor Avi Loeb has become somewhat of a pre-eminent name in UFO circles in recent years, due to a combination of his status in academic circles and his much-publicised theorising about the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua being a possible alien craft, his recent expedition to the ocean north of Australia searching for fragments of an anomalous intergalactic meteor that, once again, he believes might be alien technology, and his Galileo Project which is scanning the skies for anomalous craft.
Such is his status that Loeb was even invited to speak about his theories at the most recent TED conference, once famed for its anti-alternative theory stance (see for example their controversial deletion of talks by Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake a decade ago). And what’s more, his TED talk (embedded below for convenience), even gained a standing ovation from the audience. How times have changed!
Loeb’s main point is an agreeable one: riffing on Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox (‘If the universe is teeming with extraterrestrial life, where are they all?’), he says that maybe the problem is that we haven’t really even looked for them properly yet, and so we should get off our asses and do so – as he has:
If we don’t look for evidence, we will not find anything. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a way to maintain our ignorance.. People often say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they are not seeking the evidence.
Loeb then follows those statements up by paraphrasing Carl Sagan’s aphorism: “Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding”, which – given the wealth and status of the attending audience – may have been more a pitch than humorous aside.
In this talk he does jump around between subjects quite a bit, and people new to the topic might be confused by a lack of context for some of the topics discussed (for example, when he discusses how his critics suggested the interstellar meteor might have been a truck, without giving the detail about it being in reference to the seismic pattern detected).
But overall, great to see formerly ‘out there’ topics like this being discussed by respected academics in mainstream circles.
