Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

This would make ‘Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme by at least a few times in aspect ratio—or its width to its height—than the most extreme asteroids or comets that we have ever seen.

What stands in our way of the fair consideration of ‘Oumuamua being of extraterrestrial design isn’t the evidence or the method of its collection or the reasoning behind the hypothesis. What most immediately stands in our way is a reluctance to look past the evidence and reasoning at what should follow. Sometimes the problem lies with the message,

Pascal’s reasoning ran as follows: If it turns out that God doesn’t exist, you have only given up a few pleasures during your lifetime. If God does exist, however, you gain heaven and with it an infinity of rewards. You also avoid the worst of all possible outcomes: an eternity in hell. In much the same way, I would argue, humanity bets its future

Long before I confronted the evidence presented by ‘Oumuamua, I had learned that across all facets of life, taking the evidence presented to you and pursuing it with wonder, humility, and determination can change everything—if, that is, you are open to the possibilities contained in the data.

Today, a young theoretical astrophysicist is more likely to get a tenure-track job by pondering multiverses than by seeking evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is a shame, especially because budding scientists are often at their most imaginative during the early phases of their careers. During this fertile period, they encounter a profe

Very often, what sets an astrophysicist’s detective story in motion is the discovery of an anomaly in experimental or observational data, a piece of evidence that does not follow our expectations and that cannot be explained by what we know. In such situations, it is common practice to propose a variety of alternative explanations and then rule the

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

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

As I have mentioned, when ‘Oumuamua sped part of the way around the Sun, its trajectory deviated from what was expected based on the Sun’s gravitational force alone. There was no obvious explanation for why.

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.