Avi Loeb is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology and is a Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). In July 2021, Avi became head of The Galileo Project. The project was inspired by the detection of ʻOumuamua and by the release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
In this episode, Ben and Avi discuss how ʻOumuamua (the first interstellar object detected to pass through the solar system) could be space junk or it could be a message in a bottle from an extraterrestrial civilisation. They discuss the importance of interstellar archaeology and why we should be looking further for evidence that we are not the only sentient beings in the universe!
What you will hear in this episode
Who Avi Loeb is
How Ben heard about Avi over Covid
What ʻOumuamua is (or what it isn't)
Project Galileo
What Avi thinks ʻOumuamua is and where it is going
How it escaped the Sun's gravity
The US government's 2019 announcement and UAPs
A new telescope in Chile, "like a dating app"
Where to look first
NASA's DART mission and planetary defence
Project Lyra: is chasing ʻOumuamua possible?
The scientific discoveries Avi wants to live long enough to witness
Physics as a dialogue with nature
Follow Avi Loeb
Listen to the Astro Ben Podcast
More episodes: Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Stephen Bassett, Paradigm Research Group, or browse all episodes.
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