A mystery explored in depth reveals the possibility of an alien flyby. ( )

Very interesting points that really make you think.
I wish the future holds the answers, that the author is proven right and that I live to see it. ( )

https://applemcg.github.io/#Extraterrestrial ( )

It is an ok book. It has one major argument. That weird thing they found in 2017 Oumuamua might be extraterrestrial and this possibility is much more interesting than the supersymmetry idea behind the CERN supercollider so this is where the money must go. ( )

I’m not sure what I expected from a book that posits that advanced alien technology passed through our solar system in 2017. Yes, I expected to read about some kind of weird anomalous, unexplainable object that passed through our solar system, and that’s definitely here. In the 11 days that we astronomers were able to observe it—noticed too late to possibly catch it before the interstellar object was on the way out of the solar system—it didn’t seem to fit all the characteristics of an asteroid or comet. Weird geometry, its luminosity, its lack of a cometary tail, the strange fact that it appeared to have accelerated away from the sun in a straight line, out of its orbit, somehow propelled...

All that I expected. And it’s really interesting. I’m not a scientist, but I find the natural world and Avi Loeb is an excellent writer. His book is replete with examples to demonstrate complex principals of physics. But the Extraterrestrial is not just a scientific argument for an interstellar visitor of alien origins. Also here are Loeb’s philosophical examination for what it means to look for evidence of aliens, why we should care, and why we should question scientific orthodoxy.

Yeah, that. It’s not as if Loeb is finding common cause with Galileo, who died accused of heresy by the Catholic Church because he would not agree with the orthodoxy of the day, though he’s certainly willing to point out the similarities. In his case, it’s the willingness to look for extraterrestrial life, something many of his colleagues in the field of astronomy are unwilling to do. The longest-serving chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, Loeb sees the impact of tenure, and the fight for tenure by young astronomers, as a force that influences young astronomers towards conformity instead of encouraging creativity and out of the box thinking.

Loeb is good writer and his life-long interest in philosophy and an inclination to examine the big questions makes for an interesting narrative and mini-biography intermingled with how he got to a place where he’s mixing with Stephen Hawking, theorizing about black holes, and searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life. It’s really interesting stuff.

Is he right? Heck if I know. But he’s got me convinced that the questions we ask are about as important as the stuff we observe out there. If the universe is as big as we think it is, there’s good reason to think that other civilizations have arisen and, maybe, are even more advanced than we are. When might we find evidence of them? Or they of us? ( )