(ORDO NEWS) — Albert Einstein is probably not the smartest scientist who has ever lived since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Most stars formed billions of years before the sun. Probably a billion years ago there was a greater scientist on another habitable planet.
A civilization aided by this extraterrestrial genius could already populate the entire Milky Way galaxy with advanced probes. Perhaps we will find one of them.
The Galileo Project is searching for extraterrestrial equipment using telescopes on earth and in space. If we find an unusual interstellar craft, I’d love to jump on it and go looking for top scientists all over the Milky Way. We have a lot of pressing questions for them:
What happened before the Big Bang? Is there a way to create a baby universe in a lab? What is inside a black hole? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? Is it possible to travel faster than light? How widespread is intelligent life in space? And much more.
Space exploration is currently popular due to its commercial incentives. These include space tourism, new low-gravity industries on the Moon or Mars, and the mining of rare minerals on asteroids such as Psyche.
But there is no business plan for going beyond the solar system to other stars due to the vast distance and duration of such travel. The motivation for such expeditions must be spiritual, namely the exploration of the unknown. If interstellar travelers arrive at our doorstep, it will be because we are unknown to them.
Encountering an alien culture will be a humiliating experience for us as we will have to accept that our modern science has only been developed during the last century of Earth‘s 4.5 billion years of history.
A little over a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein first developed general relativity, the foundation of our current understanding of the universe, and quantum mechanics, the knowledge base for our electronic gadgets. But we still don’t know the answers to many of the fundamental questions about our space neighbor listed above.
Much of human history has been shaped by the illusion that some people are superior to others, when the reality is that all people are fundamentally so fragile that even a tiny virus like COVID-19 can wipe them out in two weeks.
On the WORLD.MINDS forum, which is moderated by Rolf Dobelli, Avi Loeb asked Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA‘s Science Mission Directorate, “Do you believe we’ll find evidence of intelligent alien life in our lifetime?”
Thomas replied that we would probably find such evidence, but the timing was highly uncertain.
Avi Loeb’s answer was short: “I will be sixty years old at the end of this week, and I believe that we will find such evidence during my lifetime.” He then jokingly added, “The only thing I doubt is whether we will ever find intelligent life in Washington.”
Loeb said “extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding”
It remains to be hoped that we will find a message in an “alien bottle” that will offer us salvation from our weaknesses through the larger perspective of the cosmos.
There is a contradiction between the damage that our new technologies bring to the Earth and the possibility of avoiding a planetary catastrophe by going into space. Perhaps the signal for awakening will come from interstellar space in the form of an unusual technological object that will be discovered as part of the Galileo project.
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