Astronomers seek evidence of technology built by aliens
A view of Danxia landforms at a geological park in Zhangye City, Northwest China’s Gansu Province. Reminiscent of a home to aliens, the unique geomorphology is formed from red sandstone and characterized by steep cliffs. Zhangye, an important outpost on the ancient Silk Road, is home to many scenic areas with Danxia landforms that provide a unique tourism resource for the city.
An international team of scientists led by a prominent Harvard astronomer announced a new initiative Monday to look for evidence of technology built by extraterrestrial civilizations.
Called the Galileo Project, it envisages the creation of a global network of medium-sized telescopes, cameras and computers to investigate unidentified flying objects, and has so far been funded with $1.75 million from private donors.
Given recent research showing the prevalence of Earth-like planets throughout the galaxy, “We can no longer ignore the possibility that technological civilizations predated us,” Professor Avi Loeb told reporters at a news conference.
“The impact of any discovery of extraterrestrial technology on science, and on our entire world view, would be enormous,” he said in a statement.
The project includes researchers from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Caltech and the University of Stockholm.
It was announced a month after the Pentagon released a report about unidentified aerial phenomena, which stated that their nature was unclear.
“What we see in our sky is not something that politicians or military personnel should interpret, because they were not trained as scientists, it’s for the science community to figure out,” said Loeb, adding that he hoped to increase the project’s funding tenfold.
Loeb refers to such research as a new branch of astronomy he calls “space archaeology,” intended to complement the existing field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which mainly probes for alien radio signals.
The 59-year-old Israeli-American has published hundreds of pioneering papers and collaborated with the late Stephen Hawking.
However, controversy was created when he suggested an interstellar object that briefly visited our system in 2017 could have been an alien probe sailing on solar winds.
The new project is accordingly named after Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was punished for his key evidence for the Earth not being the center of the universe.
The project’s co-founder Frank Laukien, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department, declared himself as the “resident skeptic.”
But Laukien said that, rather than dismissing the ideas outright, it was more necessary to “agnostically record and interpret the data according to the scientific method.”
