The media and mainstream scientific consensus seem to have dismissed the extraterrestrial object Oumuamua that passed the Earth last year as a natural object. (But according to this article, we should think of it more as our solar system passing the object. It turns out we are not the center of the universe!) Not so fast, says Avi Loeb, “one of the world’s foremost astronomers“. He says “the most rational, conservative explanation is that ‘Oumuamua was produced by an alien civilisation.”

Warning: This is a potential brain-exploding article if you choose to take it seriously and think about it too hard. He says the reason this is the first time we have seen an object of this type might be that we didn’t have the technology to look. Now we have the technology, we are actively looking, and the technology is continuing to improve quickly. He says we “we should assume that we will see another object once every three or four years” with existing technology, and possibly once a month with near-future (a few months or years from now) technology. This would imply “that there are plenty of them, a quadrillion of them, inside the Oort cloud. Inside the solar system.”

He has been talking about the likelihood of alien life for awhile:

In a 2014 paper, he described the likelihood that rocky planets with liquid water provided the chemistry to support life when the universe was as little as ten million years old. In the 13.8 billion years since that time, billions of galaxies – each home to billions of Earth-like planets – have formed. To say that life, intelligence and civilisation have emerged only once in such an expanse of time and space is, he argues, a radical view.

New Statesman

He has a new book on this subject called Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

And I can’t help saying it: The Truth is Out There, my friends. (Remember when a TV show about a simple vaccine distribution conspiracy linked to aliens was considered quaint entertainment? That ancient civilization and culture was called 1990s USA and will no doubt be the subject of many anthropological studies when the alien scientists land.)