ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE?

The search for alien life is ramping up. But what if, instead of searching for signs of biology, we looked for something more familiar: an extraterrestrial civilisation

- MARCUS CHOWN

In Arthur C Clarke’s award-winning 1973 novel, Rendezvous With Rama, a mysterious 50-kilometer-long cylindrical spacecraft enters the Solar System. A space mission is mounted to intercept it and study it before it flies back out and is swallowed up by the darkness of interstellar space.

Now, remarkably, science fiction is morphing into science facts. Astrophysicist Prof Avi Loeb of Harvard University believes ‘Oumuamua, a mysterious interstellar object that flew through the Solar System in 2017, may have been an alien Rama-like artifact. But being a scientist rather than a science fiction writer, he wants data. “With that in mind, I have set up Project Galileo,” he says. “Its aim is to scan the heavens for the next ‘Oumuamua and send a space mission to fly by it and photograph it.”

More than 100 scientists, led by Loeb, are involved in Galileo. They are subtly shifting the emphasis of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) from looking for signs of alien biology or electromagnetic signals to hunting for objects as signs of alien technology. Loeb thinks this change is long overdue.

“For 70 years we’ve been barking up the wrong tree,” he says, alluding to the 70-odd years astronomers have been searching for intelligent radio signals from our Galaxy. “That search is predicated on the assumption that extraterrestrials communicate via radio waves, a technology we have used for just over a century and which advanced extraterrestrials may have long ago left behind,” he adds. “I think a better strategy is to look for artifacts: alien tech.”