One of Avi Loeb’s most vivid childhood memories is sitting at the family dinner table at his family farm in Israel asking “difficult” questions about the mysteries of the universe.
As he recalls, the adults would either pretend to know the answer or dismiss the question when they didn’t.
Now 60, the longest serving chair of
Harvard’s Department of Astronomy tells
The Independent that a deep intellectual rot has set in in
academia that has left many of his contemporaries behaving like the unquestioning know-it-alls who tried to silence him as a kid.
“I thought that by becoming a scientist, I would be surrounded by like-minded people that want to find the answers to questions based on collecting evidence and trying to figure it out, you know, like a detective. And, unfortunately, that’s not the reality right now.”
Prof Loeb is a prolific writer, and has long espoused strong beliefs on speculative ideas in theoretical physics - on subjects like black holes and the possibility that life can shift from one planet to another.
But it was only when he turned his focus to investigating the existence of alien life that he became truly controversial. For him it always seemed obvious that aliens not only existed, but had already visited Earth. To think otherwise would be the height of human arrogance.
He explains: “We know the Earth is not unique, it’s very common, and about half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly the same distance. And most stars from billions of years before the sun. So all I’m saying is just use common sense. Okay? The conditions here on Earth, were replicated, you know, tens of billions of times in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and the trillion galaxies like it in the universe, how can you claim that your privilege if your neighborhood is reproduced in so many other places?”
It was the publication of his bestselling 2021 book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth that set him at odds with the scientific establishment.
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