Newly Launched ‘Galileo Project’ Will Hunt for Alien Technologies in Our Midst

A brand new challenge seeks to uncover proof of aliens, not by gazing upon distant star techniques however by discovering traces of their applied sciences inside our photo voltaic system—and even on Earth.

The seek for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, started within the Nineteen Sixties, however scientists have but to search out ironclad proof of its existence. The Fox Mulders of the world could argue on the contrary, however UFO sightings, often known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) sightings, aren’t ample proof for scientists to declare the existence of alien civilizations. A Pentagon report delivered to Congress on June 25 stated as a lot:

The restricted quantity of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our capacity to attract agency conclusions concerning the nature or intent of UAP.

Still, the seek for aliens goes on, because it represents probably the most profound—if not the most profound—unanswered questions in science.

To that finish, a newly launched SETI initiative, referred to as the Galileo Project, has introduced its purpose of trying to find indicators of extraterrestrial technological signatures, however as an alternative of trying to find alien radio alerts or messages encoded in laser mild, as different initiatives have accomplished, these researchers can be trying to find bodily objects situated close by. These objects might take the type of a passing probe, a small object in orbit round Earth, or—to the delight of you Fox Mulders on the market—UAPs.

Astronomer Avi Loeb from Harvard University is the co-founder and head of the Galileo Project, named in honor of the unfairly maligned Seventeenth-century Italian astronomer. You could already be aware of Avi Loeb, as he has made many headlines for controversially suggesting that interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which briefly passed through our solar system in 2017, was an alien probe. In addition to being an exotic visitor from afar, ‘Oumuamua exhibited a strange cigar-like shape and appeared to accelerate without the assistance of gravity, leading Loeb to infer the presence of alien technology.

Other scientists have disagreed with this claim, providing plausible explanations for how ‘Oumuamua got its odd shape and why it moved the way it did, but Loeb was, in my opinion, right to make his assertion.

The Milky Way galaxy has likely hosted a plethora of alien civilizations over the course of its long history, and while many of those lifeforms may now be gone, any probes they dispatched could still be wandering aimlessly through the cosmos. Heck, even our puny human civilization has launched five (yes, five!) interstellar or soon-to-be-interstellar probes: Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, and New Horizons. Accordingly, it’s not unreasonable to counsel that our galaxy is affected by interstellar probes, each primitive and superior. ‘Oumuamua might be not an alien spacecraft, however because the Galileo Project crew argues on its homepage, “science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences.”

That alien aircraft tease fighter jets on occasion or that toaster-sized alien satellites are spying on us from Earth orbit are more radical assertions, but again, the team is not wrong to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial provenance.

Activities planned for the Galileo Project include searches for ‘Oumuamua-like interstellar objects, UAPs, and alien satellites in orbit around Earth. The team will look for interstellar objects by studying existing and future astronomical surveys (including observations made by the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory) and hunt down possible UAPs with a network of mid-sized, high-resolution telescopes, detector arrays, and cameras. Artificial intelligence will be used to distinguish natural or human-made phenomena—things like birds, aerial drones, and F-22 Raptor fighter jets—with actual alien gizmos.

When it comes to searching for and studying UAPs, the team will “not seek data from government-owned sensors that were not designed for this purpose, but instead collect our own state-of-the-art scientific data in a reproducible fashion,” as Loeb wrote in an essay he shared with me. “Most of the sky above us is not classified.”

Future telescopes, including the Vera Rubin Observatory, should be able to detect 3-foot-wide objects in Earth orbit. The trick, of course, will be in validating candidate objects as being truly extraterrestrial in nature.

As Space.com reports, the project has already received $1.755 million in donations, and the team is currently holding weekly meetings and considering which instruments to purchase. Frank Laukien, president and CEO of Bruker Corp., a Massachusetts-based science equipment manufacturing company, is the other co-founder of the Galileo Project.

Should no alien tech be detected, the project will still collect valuable scientific data that could be used to study interstellar asteroids and comets and reveal new atmospheric phenomena, among other things.

I really like this project, as it fills an important gap in the search for alien civilizations. As the team admits, this “ground-based project is complementary to traditional SETI.” That said, it’s vital to not get forward of the proof and leap to conclusions. When you wish to discover aliens badly sufficient, it’s straightforward to see human-made and pure phenomena as proof of them. Patient information assortment is probably not as headline-grabbing as a grainy video taken from a fighter jet, nevertheless it’s extra prone to yield the solutions we’re searching for.

More: Read the Pentagon’s huge declassified UFO report proper right here.