Book · 29 August 2023
Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars
Also known as Interstellar (Loeb)
Avi Loeb · Mariner Books (HarperCollins) · ISBN 978-0-06-325087-1
Glimpses
The fastest way to ascend the ladder of civilizations is to reach in hopeful expectation of another civilization (even if only by way of a long-discarded artifact) extending us a hand up.
To those concerned that AI’s arrival augurs humanity’s annihilation … I urge optimism.
Interstellar (Mariner Books, 2023) continues Avi Loeb's case for looking for alien technology. Its centrepiece is the 2014 meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08, which Loeb argues came from outside the solar system, and the 2023 expedition he led to the Pacific floor off Papua New Guinea, where he says the team recovered tiny metal spherules of interstellar origin, possibly remnants of an extraterrestrial craft. Around this he ranges over the Galileo Project, humanity's future among the stars and the philosophy of science.
The claims are disputed. NASA called the evidence for the meteor's interstellar origin inconclusive; the meteor physicist Peter Brown argued the material could be explained as non-interstellar; and a 2024 seismic study concluded the signal that guided the search was a passing truck. Reviewing it for Undark, Sarah Scoles called it "a fairly disorganized, rambling affair" while crediting some of its points about how science works.
Sources: Wikipedia · Wikipedia — Avi Loeb · Undark (2023)
Facts and claims
- claimed Loeb describes his 2023 Pacific expedition to recover fragments of the 2014 meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08, which he argues came from another star and could be remnants of extraterrestrial technology. — Avi Loeb Source: en.wikipedia.org (archived)
- claimed A 2024 study led by planetary seismologist Benjamin Fernando concluded that the seismic signal used to locate the search area came from a truck near the sensor, not the meteor. Source: en.wikipedia.org (archived)
Connected files
Books
People
- Avi Loeb (authored by)
Organizations
- Galileo Project (Harvard) (about)
Mentioned in this file
- NASA (Organization)
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