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The Starshot program, funded by Russian internet billionaire and philanthropist Yuri Milner, was announced just a year and a half before Oumuamua’s discovery. It was natural for Loeb to think that the great minds in the universe could have thought the same way. It sounds crazy, but it has to make a bigger point, which is worth emphasizing and reading.
At the center of his argument is what he calls the “Oumuamua bet,” a take-off on Pascal’s famous bet, that the advantages of believing in God far outweigh the disadvantages. Likewise, believing that Oumuamua could have been an extraterrestrial spacecraft can only make us more alert and receptive to the idea of thinking outside the box. As Louis Pasteur said, “chance favors the prepared mind”.
“If we dare to bet that Oumuamua was advanced alien technology, we just have to win,” Loeb writes. “Whether it prompts us to methodically search the universe for signs of life or to undertake more ambitious projects, placing an optimistic bet could have a transformative effect on our civilization. Imagine, for example, glowing sails equipped with copies of human DNA placed around a star that would one day explode, sending them on a flash of light across the galaxy. It would take millions of years to set up, but what is a million years in the Milky Way’s 10 billion year life?
He continues: “When I think of this familiar technology in this way, a veil of light falling in the sun looks like nothing more than the wings of a dandelion seed blown by the wind to fertilize virgin soil.
Modern academic science, he complains, has overestimated topics such as multiple dimensions and multiple universes, for which there is no evidence, and undervalued the search for life there, not just under in the form of extraterrestrial radio signals, but in the form of chemicals. biosignatures ”, or even technological artifacts – like, according to Loeb, Oumuamua. We could try harder, he wrote. The discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the greatest discovery in the history of science.
As he writes towards the end of this half-memoir, half-sweeping monologue: “But as soon as we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization to have ever existed in the world. cosmos, we will realize that we have spent more funds to develop the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would have cost to preserve it.
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