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(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

Life on Earth started with the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), dated to 4.2 billion years ago (as deduced here). Humanity’s first artificial satellite was Sputnik, launched away from Earth’s surface on October 4, 1957. It is commonly assumed that this was the first technological satellite around Earth.

However, suppose intelligent life emerged when Earth was 94% of its current age (which is 4.54 billion years), namely 272 million years ago. In that case, a technological civilization could have started launching satellites a few million years after their intelligence emerged — similarly to humanity’s case. About 252 million years ago, this 20-million-years-old civilization could have polluted the Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases, enough to trigger the largest extinction in Earth’s history, ending the Permian period by killing 96% of marine species in a global warming event that left ocean animals unable to breathe. This well-known “great dying” event in Earth’s history is often interpreted as the natural consequence of the release of greenhouse gases by volcanic eruptions (as reported here). But what if this global catastrophe was technologically-driven instead? Would we have notice any “smoking gun” left in the crime scene?

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(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

Over the past 252 million years, surface layers of Earth have continuously mixed with the interior, primarily through plate tectonics. Subduction zones drag surface crust, water, and sediments into the mantle, while mantle plumes and volcanic activity bring interior materials to the surface. This mixing could have destroyed or buried any technological relics on Earth’s surface from that time. However, sufficiently advanced technological orbiters could have survived. Such `pre-historic’ satellites would be flagged as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The imminent release of UFO files by the White House might provide archaeological evidence for a pre-human intelligence on Earth.

A more speculative idea is that humanity will develop a time machine in the future. In that case, UFOs might simply represent visits from our future. The feasibility of a time machine can only be assessed once we develop a predictive theory of quantum gravity. So far, we can only say that no Jewish scientist was able to use a time machine in our future to travel back in time and prevent the holocaust by killing Adolf Hitler. I would have certainly entered such a machine, because 65 members of my father’s family were killed in Nazi concentration camps. They were naïve enough to believe that German patriotism would save them from the Nazi gas chambers. My grandfather, Albert Loeb — after whom I am named, was wise enough to leave Germany in 1936. He did not count on a time machine to correct the political miscalculation of his family members.

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(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

The most likely interpretation of UFO videos, to be released by the White House shortly, is that they reflect natural or human-made objects that were misidentified by the Pentagon or intelligence agencies out of confusion, by associating independent objects as a single fast-moving object, or being misguided by optical illusions or incorrect assessments of distances to objects or motion of the camera. Nevertheless, if the data is good enough it could potentially flag outliers outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies — in which case these might be products of extraterrestrial technological civilizations. Such objects would be a matter of planetary defense rather than national security, because all nations are passengers in the same boat.

As soon as the UFO videos, never-seen-before by the public, will be released on the website aliens.gov, I plan to analyze them with the research team of the Galileo Project and share our preliminary assessments with the public.

The question of whether non-human-made technological objects are lurking in the sky is not a matter of opinion or belief. It should be answered by scientific data analysis. And if the existing data is not good enough, we should collect more data with better sensors. This is the goal of the Galileo Project under my leadership. We do not need to rely on the government telling us what lies in the sky. Instead, we look up and figure it out ourselves.

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(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

***

Below is the transcript of a related interview that I had this morning with the anchors Marc Lotter (ML) and Sharla McBride (SM) on “Wake Up America.” The video version of this interview is accessible here.

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(Image credit: Newsmax)

ML: Welcome back to Wake Up America. So, if you haven’t had enough space talk after NASA’s Artemis II moon mission, President Trump is now promising to break open the vaults when it comes to UFOs; take a listen:

“This process is well underway and we found many very interesting documents, I must say. And the first releases will begin very, very soon. So, you can go out and see if the phenomena are correct. You’ll figure it out. Let me know.”

So as lawmakers demand the release of America’s UFO files, the president’s announcement leaves many Americans, including me, once again questioning the government’s knowledge of potential alien life. And joining us now to break it all down, astrophysicist, Harvard University professor, Dr. Avi Loeb.

So good morning, Professor. President Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin reviewing these files related to aliens and UAPs back in February. What are you thinking? Are we actually going to see anything that we don’t already know?

AL: On Friday, I had the fortune of a visit by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna to my office. We spoke for about 90 minutes, and it definitely looks like there are objects that either the intelligence agencies or the Pentagon cannot figure out, and that’s what makes life interesting.

The Trump administration rejuvenated space exploration with the Artemis II success recently. They’re also pursuing the new age of artificial intelligence. But I’m most interested in whether we have neighbors, whether there is alien intelligence, because that could transform the future of humanity.

Obviously, the government has a lot of data, which in part will be declassified and released, while other data will stay hidden from view because it relates to classified sensors or touches on national security. So, we will not see everything. The question is whether we will see some interesting data coming out in the first release on aliens.gov — the website that is currently expected to be the one where all the data will be deposited.

SM: I like that you are referring to them as neighbors. That’s nice. That’s a nice way to look at things. So, when UFO sightings have been reported in this country in the past, the military has been quick to kind of swoop in and ensure that there are no national security threats. And since the government has mostly kept what they found from secret sightings secret, how much do you think will still be redacted when these files are released?

AL: I expect only parts that relate to national security to be redacted or not released at all. But the disclosed data is really something that all of us should have a look at, especially scientists like myself. I am leading the Galileo Project, where we are looking up. We don’t just wait for the government to tell us what is out there in the sky, because we can build telescopes and observe it. And we are analyzing our data with machine learning or artificial intelligence. I just told my research team yesterday that once the data is released on the new government website, we must immediately examine it and assess what it implies. It may well be related to mundane phenomena or to human-made technologies. So, we have to look at it.

It’s all about the data. It’s not a matter of belief or conviction or opinion. It’s all about looking at the data and seeing what it means. And very often you don’t know the distance of objects or two objects may appear as the same object, so you can’t tell how fast they are moving. In the Galileo project, we use triangulation to figure out distances, accelerations, velocities, and we are still searching for something that is not human-made. Anything human-made is boring as far as I’m concerned.

ML: So, Professor, here’s my problem, and trust me, I believe that we are not alone, or space would be an awful waste of space, but I can prove one thing: the government in Washington leaks like the Titanic, and if they have had information, I have to believe someone would have leaked it to the media in the last 70-plus years.

A: I agree with you. The most reasonable scenario that I can imagine is there are things that the government cannot figure out. The intelligence agencies and the Pentagon prefer to keep these things under wraps in order not to be embarrassed that they’re not doing their job. Also, some of this data relates to classified censors, so they would not release it in order for adversarial nations not to be aware of our capabilities.

The way I see it, is that there is something that they do not understand. And I am here to help them figure it out. At the very least, it will help national security. We will feel safer. Remember the Chinese spy balloon incident where it took a while before it was spotted and eventually shot down. At the very least, this would help the Pentagon and the Intelligence agencies to do their job. But if we find that we are not alone, that would be the biggest revelation ever made. And I think it will bring us to a better place.

ML: Well, let me tell you, having worked for decades in the government, there’s a lot they don’t understand. Dr. Avi Loeb, thank you very much. Appreciate the conversation.

***

In this essay, I featured four amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. These watercolors incorporate inspiring statements by Ludwig Van Beethoven, John Milton and Walt Whitman. This is the 12th in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here, and the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here, the sixth titled: “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here, the seventh titled: “Will the Human Survive for Billions of Years”, appeared here, the eight titled: “The Butterfly Effect of Intelligence in the Cosmos”, appeared here, the ninth titled: “Benefits of Extraterrestrial Intelligence over AI”, appeared here, the tenth titled: “Übermenschen on Exoplanets” appeared here, and the eleventh titled: “If You Had an Infinite Research Budget, How Would You Allocate It?” appeared here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

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.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

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