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In October 2017, a telescope operated by the University of Hawaii detected a strange cigar-shaped object (rendered from the artist below), which had grazed the sun at a speed greater than 200,000 km / h. University scientists have dubbed him "Oumuamua, a Hawaiian looking for scout" and first described him as an asteroid and then as a comet, but agreed that it came from another solar system.
Around the world, telescopes were quickly directed to "Oumuamua Road" and scientists plunged into the data. One of them, Avi Loeb, Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, published an article in The letters of the astrophysical journal the following year theorizing that the object could be artificial. "Considering an artificial origin, one of the possibilities is that" Oumuamua is a veil of light floating in interstellar space as a debris of advanced technological equipment, "he wrote with his co-author, Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. , a more exotic scenario is this: "Oumuamua can be a fully operational probe, intentionally sent to the vicinity of the Earth by an extraterrestrial civilization."
It's not something you read every day in a serious science journal. The paper went viral and Loeb began responding to the media call while his fellow scientists began weighing. Regarding the reaction of his colleagues, Loeb said: "Almost all responded favorably and they thought it was an interesting idea. . "
Still, he added, some negative reactions have also occurred. Cutting tweet Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, says, "No, Oumuamua is not an alien space ship, and the authors of the document insult an honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it." In Forbes, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel called the document "Shocking example of sensationalist and badly motivated science."
ESO / M. Kornmesser / Wikimedia Commons
All this hubbub has occurred as a result of reports that the Pentagon has been collecting data on UFO sightings for years. Obviously, the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence is alive and well in our solar system, and it's a hot news. Indeed, Loeb's article has been approved for publication in just a few days.
But if scientists who think about extraterrestrial life can find an enthusiastic audience, they can also elicit cynical, even hostile reactions from their fellow scientists, an answer summarized by the famous physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who once launched at CNN: "Call me when you have an invite dinner from an alien."
This paradox has effects of training. The threat of being dismissed as a kook can weigh heavily for researchers, especially the younger ones. Don Donderi, an associate professor of retired psychology at McGill University in Montreal, is currently teaching an uncredited course titled "UFOs: History and Reality" at the school's continuing education department.
Loeb says that many discoveries have their roots in initially rejected theories. He thinks that open-mindedness allows scientific research to progress, while closing new theories "reduces the effectiveness of science".
NASA physicist Silvano Colombano claims that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been limited by long-standing assumptions and that "the general avoidance of the subject by the scientific community" means that no one is giving them back in question. It's a dilemma: scientists may feel like asking questions about extraterrestrials, but we'll never know unless someone asks for it.
Donderi has received his share of conflicting messages about his research on UFOs. No one at McGill seemed to bother him when he started writing about the paranormal in the 1970s, parallel to experimental psychology. "I was pretty isolated," he said, because he already held and continued to get promotions, including the idea of associating the dean with graduate studies. At one point he had received a federal grant for research on visual perception and memory, as well as a provision providing for additional funding for parallel investigations. UFOs had been sighted in northern Quebec, so he asked for money to find out what people thought he saw – hence his relationship to his main job – but the claim was rejected. He has never tried it again.
Specifically, when he officially retired from McGill in 2009, he offered to give a free seminar on his long-standing parallel research on the evidence behind UFOs and extraterrestrial abductions, and his department said no. Donderi said they knew he was writing on this subject, but when he asked to incorporate this material into their program, they responded that it was the line.
"I'm really surprised that they have a backfire," said physicist Richard Bower of Durham University in England. He has never been criticized for his research in cosmology, which involves making computer simulations of possible parallel universes. He concluded that life elsewhere might be quite common and that others in his field would support him. "We used to say that life is incredibly rare and that we are lucky to live on a habitable planet," he said. "But we have now seen so many planets that are plausible habitats. On the basis of scientific evidence, there seems to be no reason to think that planets like Earth are rare. "
But cosmology also has its limits and Bower says he is "less comfortable" with the excessive speculations he sees in some works. Rather, it suggests that it is better to focus on issues that we will soon have the evidence to answer.
Legitimate academic work on extraterrestrial life must be carefully separated from the reflections of amateur scientists and conspiracy theorists. People who talk at UFO conferences "are not all that good," said Donderi. Meanwhile, people engaged in research through bona fide organizations have achieved minimal results. The Pentagon acknowledges that it has followed observations for years, but claims to have ended its program in 2012.
Meanwhile, astronomers have been trying to communicate with extraterrestrial life using radio waves since 1959. The work was continued by SETI Institute in California and its top scientists – but nothing. Theoretical physics may have determined extraterrestrial life, but it is still a theory.
We may not find anything because we are doing it badly, say the researchers. In a conference paper published in 2018, Colombano suggests that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is based on "beloved hypotheses" that could hinder it: it is unlikely that interstellar travel will be made, extraterrestrial civilizations use the waves. radio, other lives must be carbon-based and UFOs have never visited the earth. He argues in favor of abandoning these dusty beliefs and lets sociologists imagine how foreign companies might evolve, to physicists to do more speculative work on space-time and to 39 energy and technicians to model the ways in which technology could evolve in other civilizations.
Bower explains that donors and academic institutions promote scientific research with some pedagogy. "To look for something in the science you want to know, we are looking for something and if we find it, we will learn it and, if we do not find it, we learn something else," he said. . Just looking for an extraterrestrial life is too binary: if you do not find it, you have nothing.
For Donderi, as a psychologist, it is a cognitive dissonance that prevents the search for another intelligence in limbo. "People are fighting against uncomfortable things," he said. In other words, those who report seeing UFOs will then question themselves, and academics will bristle at findings pointing to extraterrestrials.
Given recent reports that the navy is creating guidelines for reporting unidentified objects, speculation about UFOs and extraterrestrials is not going anywhere. And researchers expect more data on interstellar objects when Chile's large synoptic telescope begins to operate in 2022. Don Donderi concludes that evidence is on the rise and believe that cognitive dissonance is emerging. 39; collapse. "[W]We are at the beginning of change, "he said.
Meanwhile, Loeb said he intends to continue revising his ideas on 'Oumuamua as more data is collected. "I approach this subject in a scientific way, like any other," he said. And that's where patience and hard work come in. "We're learning the answers to these questions," said Bower. "Even if we do not find little green men beckoning us."
Diane Peters is a Toronto-based writer, editor and teacher who focuses on science, health, business, and education. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, University Affairs, JSTOR Daily, and other publications.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
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