The search for alien life has been a long and winding road to this point.
From ancient times to the modern day, we’ve peered into the sky and asked the age-old
question: are we alone?
Is it just us in the universe, or are there others?
Now, partway through the twenty-first century, the quest for answers is more urgent than
ever before.
This is Unveiled, and today we’re exploring the extraordinary story behind a new and independent
search for alien life.
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In astronomy circles, SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And, for decades, so many of our SETI initiatives have been at least partly passed through government
groups - including major space agencies like NASA.
For the most part this is no bad thing.
Organisations like NASA bring some serious clout to any conversation regarding the potential
existence (and detection) of aliens.
In America, there’s also the US Air Force to thank for many of the most compelling UFO
sightings, as those grainy images of flying objects are so often captured by American
fighter pilots.
But for all the upsides of SETI via government agencies, there are downsides, as well.
Including that so much of the information gleaned is kept firmly classified for years.
It was a hot topic of conversation in early 2021, as the world awaited the declassification
of long-held government secrets as part of a potentially historic UFO Report.
That nine-page report, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
was eventually published on June 25th, and you can check out our dedicated video for
some in-depth analysis.
The main takeaways from it, though, were that it related to 144 reported cases of unidentified
aerial phenomena, from between the years 2004 and 2021… but also that just one of those
cases had been successfully identified after its sighting.
The report conceded, then, that the other 143 UFOs remain unexplained.
But that was really as far as it went… and much of the reaction to this much anticipated
document was somewhat muted.
The declassified information wasn’t as far-reaching as many had hoped it would be.
However, in the wake of the UFO Report, on July 26th 2021, another news story broke…
and astronomical interest picked up once again.
A team based at Harvard University and lead by the high-profile astronomer, Avi Loeb,
announced to the world the Galileo Project.
In an official statement, it was described as a “transparent scientific project”
with its main goal being to “bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures
from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent,
validated and systematic scientific research”.
In short, it wants to turn UFOs into a real, serious, and concentrated point of scientific
study.
Importantly, the Galileo Project is to be privately financed, with around $2 million
dollars secured from multiple donors at the time it was made public.
This means that it isn’t tied in with various government agencies, and therefore that any
discoveries it does make should automatically be free to reveal to the rest of the world.
As part of the announcement, Loeb broadly argues that “science should not reject potential
extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences,” as this
opening insight into the Galileo Project determinedly pushes for a change in the way we even think
about our search for alien life.
But, what’s the plan on the ground?
And how does the Galileo Project hope to achieve results?
Official government organisations, in the US and all around the world, typically have
billions of dollars’ worth of funding behind them… but still even they have produced
no confirmed evidence of an extraterrestrial anything.
The Galileo Project, by comparison, and despite the notable private backing it has received,
simply doesn’t have that kind of money.
But it’s hoping to do more with less.
It will follow what it calls three major avenues of research.
1) It will obtain high-resolution images of UFOs.
The plans are for a network of mid-sized, multi-wavelength telescopes to be established
at specific locations around the world - with all the images and data they collect made
free for anyone to analyse.
2) The Project will focus on finding and researching ‘Oumuamua-like interstellar objects.
Loeb has famously spoken at length about how he feels that ‘Oumuamua (the first interstellar
object ever observed passing through the solar system) could potentially be alien technology.
Galileo will hope to find more objects just like it.
Finally, the third avenue of research is a search for potential satellites from extraterrestrial
civilizations.
Here, and really across the entire project, proposed AI recognition methods will be key…
that’s computer-generated study and statistics… with Galileo looking, in particular, for ET
satellites that could be monitoring Earth.
The bold ambitions laid out by Loeb and his team have led some early commentators to doubt
whether the Galileo Project will prove to be successful.
Clearly, finding alien signatures of any kind is a supremely difficult business… given
that we have zero officially confirmed examples so far, despite decades of typically state-sponsored
searching.
But, nevertheless, in their initial announcement, the Galileo team remain bullish and confident.
Toward the announcement’s end, they recall how the revolutionary astronomer Galileo Galilei
- after whom this project is named - was also doubted and persecuted during his lifetime.
In the early 1600s his challenging assertations that the Earth in fact moved around the sun
were too much for many of his critics and contemporaries to fathom.
In adopting Galileo’s name for this initiative, then, Loeb and his team appear to have placed
themselves into a similar position.
They, too, hope to prove a new truth, even if the rest of the world isn’t ready for
it yet.
They warn us not to repeat the mistakes of those who doubted the original Galileo, and
their pioneering stance is perhaps best summed up within the project’s chief tagline - “daring
to look through new telescopes”.
And there’s no doubt that the Galileo Project does carry quite a high risk.
It does require its supporters - both financial and intellectual - to display quite a lot
of daring.
While we have seen privatised SETI before now, this is perhaps the most high-profile
bid to date.
And with a limited scope to achieve limited goals, at least in comparison to the ever-increasing
ambitions of something like NASA, it will need to achieve results fast.
So, what do results for the Galileo Project actually look like?
Naturally, the holy grail would be to find (and prove beyond doubt) evidence of aliens.
Whether that’s on Earth, around Earth, in the Solar System, or in another star system
entirely.
That’s the best-case scenario, though.
In reality, for so long as Galileo trains more eyes onto the sky, and chisels away at
the secrecy and red tape that has traditionally surrounded alien and UFO sightings, then it
will be deemed as a successful venture by many.
Even if it doesn’t deliver a real-life, living, breathing, and functioning extraterrestrial.
Finally, in introducing Galileo, Loeb also highlighted the “recently discovered abundance
of habitable-zone exoplanets” as another reason why the time is right for this particular
project.
It can feel strange to modern minds, but exoplanets - planets from outside the solar system - are
still a relatively recent topic of scientific study.
The first one was only confirmed in the year 1992.
And there were still fewer than just five thousand of them confirmed, as of July 2021
- when the world first learned of the Galileo Project.
Scientists expect that number to rise quickly, though, and soon.
That’s because most of the world’s biggest space agencies have cutting-edge, next generation
space telescopes in the works… with a flurry of launches scheduled between the years 2022
and 2030.
Along with objectives such as understanding dark energy and tracing back to the Big Bang,
these machines are also being specifically built to seek out exoplanets (and, potentially,
to spot alien signatures coming from them, too).
Again, it’s highly unlikely that the Galileo Project will ever be able to compete with
the likes of NASA when it comes to size or scope of mission… but it will still be guided
by what the national agencies achieve.
And, if it can carve out is own niche in the growing search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
then it could become a window to the stars that everyone can look through.
For optimistic alien hunters, the Galileo Project could be the start of a new and transparent
age of discovery… for those more inclined to a pessimistic view, it might never have
the power to truly get off the ground.
But that’s why scientists are now searching for alien life without the government’s
help.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
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