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By Avi Loeb Medium
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)Albert Einstein noted:
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion.”
Before my morning jog at sunrise today, I had received the following email message:
“I came across your astrophysics work at Harvard in the context of how the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth seems to affect people emotionally even before there is any final answer. It changes the feeling of how alone humanity really is.
A question, in case you have a minute: In your experience, why do you think the idea of life elsewhere in the universe affects people so personally, even when it remains uncertain?”
My response was short:
“The thoughts about aliens allows people to escape from the frustrations they have in reading the news every day. We hope for uplifting news from space that would inspire us to do better and fill us with wonder. The Massiah may arrive from another star.”
A decade ago, I told my wife that if a spaceship lands in our backyard and I am offered a one-way trip away from Earth, I will accept the invitation. She responded: “Go ahead. Just make sure you leave the car keys with me.” Recently, she changed her answer to say: “I will join you.” One way to interpret this change is that our marriage got better over time, like good wine. But the more likely explanation is that she got too frustrated with the latest geopolitical trends on planet Earth.
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)The mysteries in art have multiple meanings and we have no method of narrowing down the ambiguity of possible interpretations. The physicist Richard Feyman noted:
“A poet once said “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood.”
On the other hand, science aims to clear the fog of mystery by collecting new data. For example, the latest UFO files released here by the Department of War have multiple possible interpretations because the information accompanying each document is rather limited. The problem with past UFO reports is that we cannot go back to the time and place where they were recorded and improve our understanding of these rare anomalous events. The practical scientific approach — adopted by the Galileo Project observatories under my leadership, is to collect new higher-quality data on millions of objects in the sky and check if any of them resembles past reports on unidentified anomalous objects. In simple terms: we can identify the unidentified by looking up.
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)The religious scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides discussed extraterrestrial life in his philosophical masterpiece: the Guide for the Perplexed, where he argued against the anthropocentric view that Earth and humanity are the sole focus of creation. Indeed, the discovery of cosmic neighbors will affect religious beliefs by implying that God is not a parent of a single child. But the same discovery will also be humbling to secular people, because it would suggest that our cosmic siblings are more accomplished than we are. After all, their technological products reached our home planet before we reached their point of origin. Perhaps alien brains do not possess better cognitive skills but they simply had the benefit of more than a century of science and technology since discovering quantum mechanics. Once we meet their amazing vehicles, we would be shocked to learn about their advanced science and technology.
This afternoon I was interviewed by a BBC reporter about my expectations from an encounter with extraterrestrials. The interview was recorded in anticipation of Steven Spielberg’s movie: “Disclosure Day.” When I met Steven Spielberg at Harvard, he asked me to notify him first if I find evidence for alien technology. Even Spielberg realizes that our neighbors would appear differently than we imagine them. I told the BBC reporter that I expect to encounter a technological device guided by AI rather than a biological visitor as portrayed in Spielberg’s 1982 film “E.T.”. But it would be foolish of me to forecast what this blind date of interstellar proportions might look like. One thing is clear: we must observe our dating partner to learn more about its qualities and intent and make sure that it is not a serial killer.
Realizing that we are visited by the products of a sibling in the cosmic family of technological civilizations would also have a profound impact on geopolitics. It would pose a potential threat to all earthlings because we are all in the same boat. All nations will have to be restrained because an irresponsible militaristic response from one of them towards the visitor could have a devastating effect on all of us. The stock market may crash because the uncertain future of financial securities.
A few months after the anomalous interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was discovered, I reached out to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the International Astronomical Union with the recommendation to establish a committee that will define a protocol for an international response to a visit by alien technologies. This protocol would be very different from the traditional SETI protocol of response to electromagnetic signals (posted here) from a source which is many light years away, because the response to a visitor in our backyard has to be prompt. Unfortunately, the representatives of these organizations replied that it will take years for their administration to approve and establish such committees. As often is the case with administrators, my initiative was damped by bureaucratic viscosity.
The antidote to bureaucracy is the inspiration that creative art and science bring when exploring the unknown in our cosmic neighborhood. Lets hope that interstellar visitors will bring harmony, and as Confucios realized:
“Through harmony all things are transformed.”
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)***
In this essay, I featured four amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. These watercolors incorporate inspiring statements by Albert Einstein, Richard Feyman, Moses Maimonedes and Confucios. This is the 16th 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 eighth 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, the 11th titled: “If You Had an Infinite Research Budget, How Would You Allocate It?” appeared here, the 12th titled: “Are Human-Made Objects Orbiting Earth?” appeared here, the 13th titled: “Lets Send AI Astronauts, Not Humans, to the Moon”, appeared here, the 14th titled: “Our Highest Priority Should be National Innovation Centers to Complement AI Data Centers” appeared here, and the 15th titled “The Cosmic Shells That Seeded Life” appeared here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(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
View the full article
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By USH
We’ve recently reported on the unusual surge of fireballs streaking across skies worldwide, many of them breaking apart mid-air and crashing to the ground. This is not something that used to happen with such frequency, yet now, it seems to be occurring almost constantly.
Just two days ago, on 4/4/26 in the evening, a massive fireball was captured by witnesses over Lampung in Sumatra, roughly 400 kilometers from Jakarta, Indonesia. Footage shows the object racing across the sky, appearing to fragment before ultimately impacting the ground and igniting a large fire.
Officials are quick to label these events as routine meteor activity, noting that this time of year typically brings increased meteor sightings. However, that explanation is being met with growing skepticism. Even more striking is the lack of coverage from mainstream media, both globally and within Indonesia, despite clear indications that something significant may have crashed in Sumatra.
Some suggest these fireballs could be space debris rather than meteorites. But while a single incident might be explained that way, a continuous stream of similar events occurring around the world raises serious questions.
Something unusual appears to be happening in our skies, something that doesn’t neatly fit the explanation of meteorites or space junk. What exactly is happening, or what may be being concealed, remains unclear.
The next two videos show the anomaly in Sumatra, Indonesie. View the full article
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By Avi Loeb Medium
Space Companies Did Not Pollute Our Night Sky for Billions of Years and Should Not Do So in the Future
Satellite streaks are evident in this long-exposure image of the sky over the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile. (Image credit: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/W.O’Mullane)If a future catastrophe will wipe out our technological civilization from the surface of Earth, will there be a technological relic that will survive intact for billions of years?
One form of such relics are satellites above the altitude of geostationary orbits at 35,786 kilometers. These relics will continue to orbit the Earth long after they stop operating, since they do not have significant drag on the Earth’s atmosphere. Given that we had not discovered any prehistoric satellites at these high altitudes, we can safely conclude that there was no SpaceX-like company on Earth for billions of years before Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002.
If the dinosaurs had launched a geostationary satellite, it could have still been up there today. If the Roman Empire had been able to launch a satellite with an orbital altitude as low as 1,200 kilometers, then this Roman satellite might have been falling back to Earth and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere just now. Space archeology informs us that no space launch capabilities were available to the dinosaurs or the ancient Romans.
(Image credit: UN/ESA)But with advanced technology comes responsibility! This does not only apply to artificial intelligence systems, a hot topic for today’s policy makers in Washington DC, but also to satellites around Earth. Let me explain.
The lack of a large population of high-altitude pre-historic satellites allowed humans to study the Universe with ground-based telescopes and understand how we came to exist from the initial conditions set by the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. This intellectual accomplishment started with Galileo Galilei who spotted the moons of Jupiter through his telescope and realized that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe. Following his pioneering work, humanity’s best telescopes were placed on top of remote mountains — where they can effectively avoid the contamination of the night sky by light pollution from human made activities. Largely because of SpaceX and other companies, this is not possible any more. Our space economy is now gearing up to fill the dark night sky with lights.
Communication satellites are already leaving unavoidable marks on the images obtained by ground-based telescopes, as they reflect sunlight outside the Earth’s shadow. Their motions around the Earth imprint prominent streaks in the (15+15) second exposures taken by the state-of-the-art NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile (as discussed recently here).
But the worst is yet to come. A new space-mirror company is requesting authorization to pollute the night sky intentionally!
Reflect Orbital is a start-up company proposing a constellation of up to 50,000 satellites by 2035, to provide a sunlight-on-demand service to consumers. This would involve reflecting beams of sunlight with a diameter of about 5 kilometers onto Earth’s surface to provide lighting or solar energy to the customers.
(Image credit: Gaspar Bakos, Princeton University)This potentially new source of light pollution could affect astronomical observations irrespective of their elevation or distance from city lights on the surface of Earth. Rayleigh scattering in the Earth’s atmosphere, both from the incoming beam and from reflected light, is ignored by the company and could result in an enormous skyglow from a brightly illuminated area, the size of 650 football stadiums. This technology will introduce sustained artificial dusk and dawn conditions across landscapes, in addition to hours-long bursts of daytime brightness.
Reflect Orbital has submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a testing satellite, EARENDIL-1. Their demonstration satellite would produce a beam about as bright as the full Moon, while the full constellation could produce illumination comparable to that of the Sun at high noon. The FCC has opened a public comment period until March 9th, 2026, giving the public an opportunity to voice their thoughts and concerns about federally approved projects.
If you care about the above-mentioned risk to the dark night sky, please sign and share the open letter opposing this initiative, written by DarkSky International, and consider submitting a public comment to the FCC by March 9th, 2026. More details, compiled by Sarah Thiele & Gaspar Bakos from Princeton University, are available here.
Past terrestrial civilizations did not pollute the night sky for billions of years and space companies like Reflect Orbital should not be allowed to do so in the future.
The species of non-avian dinosaurs was extinguished as a result of a giant asteroid impact 66 million years ago. If consulted, these dinosaurs would have agreed with this sentiment. They dominated the Earth without looking up through telescopes. The lesson is simple: if our species will not be able to survey the dark sky in search for near Earth asteroids because of light pollution, it might not survive for long in cosmological terms.
We tend to arrogantly assume that we are more intelligent than any life form that ever existed on Earth, while at the same time we promote technologies that could lead to our demise. This suggests a new solution to Enrico Fermi’s paradox concerning extraterrestrials: “Where is everybody?” Extraterrestrial technological civilizations might have blinded their outward-looking Rubin-like telescopes with light pollution and went extinct in the same way that the dinosaurs did.
Extending the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” to the cosmos, suggests that only civilizations which were intelligent enough to block companies like Reflect Orbital survived. The FCC could decide whether our civilization has a chance of fulfilling the Vulcan salute from Star Trek: “live long and prosper”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(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
View the full article
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By USH
These images captured by the Curiosity rover in 2014 reveals yet another unexplained aerial phenomenon in the Martian atmosphere, a cigar-shaped object with a consistent width and rounded ends.
What makes this anomaly particularly compelling is the sharp clarity of the image. According to Jean Ward the stars in the background appear crisp and unblurred, indicating that the object is not the result of motion blur or a long exposure. Notably, the object appears in five separate frames over an 8-minute span, suggesting it is moving relatively slowly through space, uncharacteristic of a meteorite entering the atmosphere. It also lacks the fiery tail typically associated with atmospheric entry.
Rather than a meteor, the object more closely resembles a solid, elongated craft of unknown origin. When oriented horizontally, it even appears to feature a front-facing structure, possibly a porthole or raised dome, hinting at a cockpit or command module.
Whether this object is orbiting beyond the visible horizon or connected to the surface far in the distance, its sheer size is unmistakable. Its presence raises compelling questions, could this be further evidence of intelligently controlled craft, whether of extraterrestrial or covert human origin, navigating through Martian airspace?View the full article
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By USH
Have you ever looked up and seen the sky split into two distinct colors, one side glowing red while the other remains a dull gray? At first glance, it may seem like a natural optical effect, but it is not!
Watch video of this bizarre sky phenomenon below.
This phenomenon has been observed before, and many believe it is not just a random occurrence. Instead, it could be the result of large-scale geoengineering projects, deliberate interventions in Earth's climate system. These efforts, often carried out under the guise of combating climate change, may actually be disrupting natural atmospheric processes.
Strange, unnatural-looking clouds, such as square formations and other unusual weather anomalies, may also be linked to these operations.
Additionally, the infamous chemtrails are a product of weather manipulation, involving the release of chemicals into the lower stratosphere. Proponents argue that these methods help mitigate global warming, but that is not true, these sprayings really doing more harm than good.
While mainstream narratives push the climate change (hoax) agenda and link climate change to human activity and greenhouse gas emissions, an increasing number of scientists step forward and explain that natural Earth cycles, particularly its position relative to the sun, play a significant role in climate shifts. They point to Milankovitch cycles—long-term variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt, which have historically played a key role in global temperature changes.
Interestingly, it seems that some high-ranking government officials are beginning to question the effects of geoengineering. If action is taken to regulate or halt these practices, we may once again witness unaltered, natural skies. Until then, all we can do is observe, question, and seek the truth. View the full article
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