Avi Loeb Quotes

Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path. Life turns on your seeing clearly what’s in front of you.

If radiation pressure is the accelerating force,” we wrote, “then ‘Oumuamua represents a new class of thin interstellar material, either produced naturally . . . or is of an artificial origin.

Youth is a matter not of biological age but of attitude. It is what makes one person willing to open up new frontiers of scientific discovery while others try to stay within the traditional borders.

One of the most difficult lessons to impart to young scientists is that the search for the truth can run counter to the search for consensus. Indeed, truth and consensus must never be conflated. Sadly, it is a lesson more easily understood by a student starting out in the field. From then on, year after year, the combined pressures of peers and job-market prospects encourage the tendency to play it safe.

A more ambitious bet would be to learn from what we imagine a more mature civilization might have attempted. To take the small scientific leap and allow the possibility ‘Oumuamua was extraterrestrial technology is to give humanity the small nudge toward thinking like a civilization that could have left a lightsail buoy for our solar system to run into. It is to nudge us not just to imagine alien spacecraft but to contemplate the construction of our own such craft.

Are you saying you’re Galileo? No. Not at all. What I wished to convey was that history has taught us to keep returning to the evidence about ‘Oumuamua, testing our hypotheses against it, and, when others try to silence us, whispering to ourselves, “And yet it deviated.

If evidence of extraterrestrial life appeared in our solar system, would we notice? If we are expecting the bang of gravity-defying ships on the horizon, do we risk missing the subtle sound of other arrivals? What if, for instance, that evidence was inert or defunct technology- the equivalent, perhaps, of a billion-year-old civilization's trash?

The data we confront tells us that ‘Oumuamua was a luminous, thin disk at the LSR, and when it encountered the gravitational pull of the Sun, it deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. These data points can be summed up as follows: ‘Oumuamua was statistically a wild outlier.

instructive to view things from ‘Oumuamua’s vantage point. From that object’s perspective, it was at rest and our solar system slammed into it. Or, in a way that works both metaphorically and, maybe, literally, perhaps ‘Oumuamua was like a buoy resting in the expanse of the universe, and our solar system was like a ship that ran into it at high speed.

Personally, I do not enjoy science fiction when it violates the laws of physics; I like science and I like fiction but only when they are honest, without pretensions. Professionally, I worry that sensationalized depictions of aliens have led to a popular and scientific culture in which it is acceptable to laugh off many serious discussions of alien life even when the evidence clearly indicates that this is a topic worthy of discussion; indeed, one that we ought to be discussing now more than ever.

truth is not dictated by the number of likes on Twitter but rather by evidence.

It will be in our open-minded pursuit of data that confirms or disproves hypotheses that humanity’s claim to any universal intelligence will stand or fall.

The value of information doesn’t reside in the number of thumbs-ups it gets but in what we do with it. And then I put to them a question that many Harvard undergraduates feel they have the answer to: Are we—that is, human beings—the smartest kids on the block?

Be humble, Earthlings.

La humanidad ha pensando muy pocas veces en el bienestar colectivo, tanto durante los últimos siglos como en la actualidad. Entre los malos hábitos en que incurrimos, optamos repetidamente por los beneficios a corto plazo antes que por los beneficios a largo plazo.

...aunque todos estamos compuestos de la misma materia ordinaria, eso no nos impide ser personas extraordinarias.

La ciencia es ante todo una experiencia de aprendizaje, una vivencia que funciona mejor si somos humildes ante nuestros errores.

La física no es una actividad recreativa dedicada a hacernos sentir bien con nosotros mismos. La física es un diálogo con la naturaleza, no un monólogo.

La generación anterior de físicos tenía la humildad suficiente para reconocer un error cuando los datos experimentales refutaban sus teorías. Pero la nueva cultura, que se regodea en su propia salsa teórica e influye en comités de premios y agencias de financiación, está formada por predicadores de paradigmas populares, pero no corroborados.

For scientists, what remains of a theory after its contact with data is what is deemed beautiful.

studying anything at the university seemed far more exciting than slogging through the muck with a rifle on my back.

Over time, I have come to appreciate science slightly more than philosophy. Whereas philosophers spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, scientists are all about having a dialogue with the world.

I submit that the simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.

As it happens, the Sun-Earth system is anomalous in two clear respects. First, the Sun’s mass—330,000 times that of Earth—makes it more massive than 95 percent of all known stars. And while this does not rule out our interest in searching for life on planets orbiting more statistically average stars, given that we have limited resources of time and money, it encourages us to look for stars that are especially massive, like the one that sustains us.

Durante buena parte de nuestra historia, la gente ha recurrido a explicaciones místicas o religiosas para dar sentido a los hechos que carecían de causas evidentes.

Es habitual creer que la vida es una suma de los lugares que visitamos. Pero esto es una ilusión. La vida es una suma de sucesos, y estos sucesos son fruto de decisiones, pero solo algunas de ellas dependen de nosotros.

Nuestros antepasados usaban términos como -viajar- y -explorar-; hoy, nos vamos de vacaciones.

sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Central and South America. Fueled by a hatred of idolatry, in 1562 the Roman Catholic priest Diego de Landa Calderón burned in a grand auto-da-fé thousands of Mayan manuscripts, or codices, destroying so many that next to none remain for today’s scholars to study. “We found a large number of books in these characters,” the priest declared, “and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all.

And it is a comparatively rare occurrence.

The benefits of astronomers speaking with sociologists and anthropologists and political scientists and, of course, philosophers can be tremendous. Yet I have learned that in academia, interdisciplinary careers often share the fate of rare seashells swept onto the shore: if someone doesn’t pick them up and preserve them, they erode over time until unrelenting ocean waves render them into indistinguishable grains of sand.

Si juzgamos honestamente a los catedráticos de todo el espectro académico, encontramos hombres y mujeres cuyas contribuciones dependen de las oportunidades que se les han concedido o denegado.

El progreso científico se mide por cuánto se acerca una idea propuesta a la verdad

Casi podemos decir lo mismo de la adultez, una buena definición de la cual podría ser «el punto en el que has reunido tanta experiencia que tus modelos pueden predecir la realidad con un alto porcentaje de éxito».

Pentagon Report on UAP

the Galileo Project

Simple and plausible hold, of course, only if you grant human civilization is likely not alone in the Universe. For many, granting that possibility has proven not a stumbling block so much as a brick wall.

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

We cannot ignore the possibility that we arose from another civilization’s “Noah’s Spacecraft.” Nor can we fail to

Underlying the hope that our future will be better than our past is the belief that rational reasoning will prevail over irrational instincts and that the advance of scientific knowledge can become the dominant feature of our civilization.

Viewed this way, we are merely passengers on a space-born cabin called Earth,

I am seeking to learn from a higher intelligence in outer space what we could aspire to be. —Avi Loeb (February 26, 2023)

This is the way the world ends Not with a ban but a whimper.

Sentient life’s common circumstance, to live and die without ever learning why, was, Camus believed, absurd. I believe that other sentient beings—who are bound by intellectual limitations, just as we are—will inevitably arrive at the same conclusion: life is absurd.

There is one more prediction I feel confident in making: when we learn for certain that we are not alone in the universe, all of humanity’s religions—and all of its scientists, even the most conservative—will find ways to accommodate the fact.