By now, I have a pretty reliable method for gauging whether the scientific study of the new interstellar object 3I/ATLAS went viral. When the carpenter that fixes the porch at my home or the mechanic that changes the oil in my wife’s car, both ask my wife with great interest for the latest news about my related scientific papers without me knowing them, I know that 3I/ATLAS went viral!
It is not a trivial matter to get the public interested in the latest scientific research. In recent decades, academia distanced itself from the public. Scientific advances are routinely communicated in press conferences where scientists speak to reporters like teachers in a classroom, encouraging questions but resisting debates. Funding is allocated to research directions within echo chambers that are detached from public questioning.
The problem with this self-defeating approach is that science is fundamentally a work in progress, a learning experience where a sense of humility and raw-curiosity require collecting more data in the face of anomalies. Yes, mainstream scientists could be wrong irrespective of how confident they are about hypotheses. They can invest billions of dollars in searching for weakly-interacting massive particles as dark matter and not find what they are looking for, despite the confidence expressed in press conferences about the latest experiments and the compliments expressed in prize ceremonies that rewarded those who proposed these ideas without experimental evidence.
At the same time, when the possibility that interstellar objects might be technological in origin is proposed based on observed anomalies — knowing that humanity launched interstellar probes over the past half century, comet “experts” are quick to ridicule it. Regarding 3I/ATLAS, the Oxford astronomer Chris Lintott was quoted last week as saying: “Any suggestion that it’s artificial is nonsense on stilts, and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.” Lintott is the editor of the scientific journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, and in that capacity — he asked me to remove any reference to the possibility that 3I/ATLAS might be artificial before accepting my paper for publication (accessible here).
Is it really an insult to consider a hypothesis in the context of figuring out anomalies regarding the nature of 3I/ATLAS? If the nature of dark matter happens to be a primordial black hole but for four decades mainstream astronomers argued that it is likely a weakly-interacting-massive-particle, should this suggestion be considered as “nonsense on stilts, and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object”?
In retrospect, I am grateful for Lintott’s feedback, which convinced me to co-author a full paper with the title: “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” (accessible here). The paper stated explicitly: “We strongly emphasize that this paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting discoveries and strange serendipities, worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and the authors await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.” This paper is currently under peer review, and I can only imagine the pressure that will be applied by mainstream reviewers on the editors to decline its publication.
One of the main reasons I co-authored this second paper is to encourage observers to collect as much data as possible in order to prove this hypothesis wrong. If instead of putting Galileo Galilei in house arrest, the Vatican would have been eager to look through telescopes and prove him wrong, then the clergy would have corrected course long before the Vatican’s official 1992 statement that Galileo was right.
Why is there so much toxicity within academia towards ideas that a carpenter and an auto mechanic find so exciting? After all, the work of science is to consider all possibilities until the evidence rules out all but one interpretation. Why is it far more reasonable to consider the search for anomalous radio signals as a techno-signature while treating the search for an alien artifact among the population of interstellar objects as “nonsense on stilts”? This choice is a matter of taste, not substantive reasoning.
My main concern is about the young generation of fledgling scientists who witness this behavior and are deterred from innovating out of fear that such a choice would risk their job prospects. There is a huge invisible damage to innovation in science that results from the public ridicule towards “out-of-the-box” thinking. Of course, keeping the herd in a tight configuration might be the actual reason for the aggressive behavior of the herders towards individuals who deviate from the beaten path. This practice is common in religious cults, but science is supposed to be guided by evidence and not authority.
Committees of mainstream scientists who decide how to allocate federal funds often resist investments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by arguing that it is too risky and might result in wasting taxpayers’ money. But if these reviewers were humble enough to ask the taxpayers what they wish to spend their tax money on, they would find the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to be at the top of the priority list. Gatekeeping and ridicule are not the landscape I wished for when I started my scientific career 45 years ago, around the time when Chris Lintott was born.
The ridicule of scientific hypotheses before gathering conclusive evidence is anti-scientific. The public lost confidence in mainstream scientists who ridiculed the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology during serial passage or gain-of-function research on SARS-related viruses. This ridicule was unwarranted, as admitted in a recent paper accessible here. This paper concludes with the following statement:
“Science begins with questions and derives its answers through evidence.”
Amen. I rest my case.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.