An international team of scientists led by a prominent Harvard astronomer announced a replacement initiative Monday to seem for evidence of technology built by extraterrestrial civilizations.
Called the Galileo Project, it envisages the creation of a worldwide network of medium-sized telescopes, cameras and computers to research unidentified flying objects, and has thus far been funded with $1.75 million from private donors.
Given recent research showing the prevalence of Earth-like planets throughout the galaxy, “We can not ignore the likelihood that technological civilizations predated us,” Professor Avi Loeb told reporters at a press conference .
“The impact of any discovery of extraterrestrial technology on science, our technology, and on our entire Weltanschauung , would be enormous,” he added during a statement.
The project includes researchers from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Caltech and therefore the University of Stockholm.
It was announced a month after the Pentagon released a report about unidentified aerial phenomena, which stated that their nature was unclear.
“What we see in our sky isn’t something that politicians or military personnel should interpret, because they weren’t trained as scientists, it’s for the science community to work out,” said Loeb, adding that he hoped to extend the project’s funding tenfold.
Apart from studying UFOs, the Galileo Project wants to research objects that visit our system from region , and checking out alien satellites which may be probing Earth.
Loeb refers to such research as a replacement branch of astronomy he calls “space archaeology,” intended to enrich the prevailing field of the look for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which mainly probes for alien radio signals.
These endeavors would require collaborations with existing and future astronomical surveys, including from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile that’s thanks to go browsing in 2023 and is eagerly awaited by the scientific community.
The 59-year-old Israeli-American has published many pioneering papers and collaborated with the late Hawking , but created controversy when he suggested an interstellar object that briefly visited our system in 2017 could are an alien probe sailing on solar winds.
He laid out his arguments in scientific papers and therefore the book “Extraterrestrial: the primary Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which placed him at odds with many within the astronomy community.
The new project is accordingly named after Italian astronomer Galileo , who was punished when he provided key evidence for the world not being at the middle of the universe.
The project’s co-founder Frank Laukien, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s chemistry and chemical department of biology , declared himself the “resident skeptic.”
But he said that, instead of dismissing the ideas outright, it had been necessary to “agnostically record and interpret the info consistent with the methodology .”