Best Quotes from Extraterrestrial by Avi Loeb with Page Numbers

The name clearly implies that the object was the first of others to come.

A scientist must go where the evidence leads; there is humility in following the evidence.

We should allow ourselves to stumble. Let go of prejudices.

The idea that our solar system sometimes plays host to rare interstellar objects is wondrous.

The ubiquity of these natural laws suggests that if there is intelligent life anywhere else, it will almost certainly include beings who recognize these ubiquitous laws.

Humanity has slowly been entering adulthood over the course of recorded time.

Much of life stems from a confluence of multiple causes.

Humble acts can have extraordinary consequences.

Some of the most consequential decisions are made out of hopeful expectation of what might result.

Our civilization has sent five man-made objects into interstellar space; a testament to our unlimited potential to venture far out.

In deliberation, there is the humility of uncertainty.

Life is a collection of events, and these are the results of choices, only some of which are ours to make.

It was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions in life, enjoying the beauty of nature.

Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path.

The benefits of astronomers speaking with sociologists and anthropologists and political scientists and, of course, philosophers can be tremendous.

In my experience, children follow their inner compasses more honestly and with fewer pretensions than many adults do.

Taking the evidence presented to you and pursuing it with wonder, humility, and determination can change everything.

The most mundane acts of our existence suggest something miraculous that can be traced back to the Big Bang.

My mother...was dedicated and meticulous in cultivating her children's curiosity.

An honest survey of faculty across academia brings to mind men and women whose contributions are defined by opportunities extended and opportunities taken away.

Science is like a detective story.

In such situations, it is common practice to propose a variety of alternative explanations and then rule them out one by one based on new evidence.

The possibility that they might extend us that courtesy, I suspect, will not be determined by what we know but by how we know it.

It will be in our open-minded pursuit of data that confirms or disproves hypotheses that humanity’s claim to any universal intelligence will stand or fall.

Whatever else we conclude about ‘Oumuamua, most astrophysicists would agree that it was, and remains, an anomaly unto itself.

The more we learned about ‘Oumuamua, the clearer it became that this object was every bit as mysterious as the media reported.

History has taught us to keep returning to the evidence about ‘Oumuamua, testing our hypotheses against it.

And yet it deviated.

Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.

If ‘Oumuamua began to break up, the odds of it doing so while retaining smooth acceleration is, again, infinitesimal.

The existence of intelligent life on Earth is more than sufficient justification to approach seriously the scientific, as opposed to fictional, search for life elsewhere in the universe.

By limiting interpretations or placing blinders on our telescopes, we risk missing discoveries.

The scientific community’s prejudice or closed-mindedness—however you want to describe it—is particularly pervasive and powerful when it comes to the search for alien life.

The search for alien life—even the intelligent variety—is not such a speculative endeavor.

We believed it would help direct attention and effort toward another question: Are we alone?

Given so many worlds—fifty billion in our own galaxy!—with similar life-friendly conditions, it’s very likely that intelligent organisms have evolved elsewhere.

There is no observational evidence for either of these ideas and perhaps never will be.

The path of least resistance...works; scientists who preserve their images in this way receive more honors, more awards, and more funding.

My unusual surveillance project would prove to be transformative.

Ultimately, the project was to seek answers to two of the most fundamental questions confronting humanity: Are we alone? And can we, by thinking and acting together, make the great leap to the stars?

It would be arrogant to think we are alone.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

If radiation pressure is the accelerating force, then ‘Oumuamua represents a new class of thin interstellar material, either produced naturally . . . or is of an artificial origin.

If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin and approach that hypothesis with scientific curiosity, whole new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery open before us.

I was under no illusion that any appreciable part of the scholarly field would approach the theory that ‘Oumuamua had originated in an extraterrestrial civilization as just one exotic hypothesis among many.

Our preference is to stick with analogues we know.

What happens when we start from the mystery end of the trench rather than the familiar-analogues end?

To explain all the known facts, they were forced to imagine ‘Oumuamua was a fluffy object composed of material a hundred times more rarefied than air.

The extraordinary nature of our conclusion rested almost entirely on the presumption that it wasn’t a naturally occurring object.

The implications of this were obvious: Nature had shown no ability to produce anything like the size and composition of what our assumptions suggested.

The more there is of something, the more likely it is you will encounter it.

Viewing both possibilities through a lens made of beach glass, we can see why identifying the right one is so important.

The challenge that the 'natural origin' explanation for 'Oumuamua confronts is the need for a sufficient amount of interstellar material.

You need a great many seashells in the sea to make discovering an intact one on a beach probable.

When I met my wife and realized how special she was, I married her.

A vast network of such buoys could act as a communication grid.

Foreclose that possibility, and you moot all such explanations.

If any of these ideas seem feverish or over the top or detached from reality, just remind yourself of the evidence before you.

Using very conservative probabilities, based on its shape, rotation, and luminosity alone, a cometary 'Oumuamua would be a one-in-a-million naturally occurring object.

The lightsail hypothesis opens up a world of possibilities—unlike the comet hypothesis, which closes them off.

The moment we have a conclusive answer, negative or positive, is the moment we face profound realizations.

The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.

Science is first and foremost a learning experience, one that works best by keeping us humble when we make mistakes.

Thought experiments consistent with the laws of physics are the very stuff of discovery.

Science must give priority to evidence over imagination and follow that evidence wherever it may lead.

To nurture new discoveries, it helps to construct new matchboxes.

Being more open as to what we know and what we do not will increase scientists’ credibility over the long haul.

The search for extraterrestrial life is the ultimate venture-capital investment of scientific research.

Just knowing that we are not alone would transform humanity itself.

It is very presumptuous for us to assume that we are the only intelligence in this vast cosmos.

When you gaze up on a clear night, the numerous sun-like stars of the Milky Way look like the lights in the main cabin of a giant spaceship streaming through the universe.

By peering deep into space, we can view our own past.

The universe resembles an archaeological dig centered on us. The deeper we look, the more ancient are the layers we uncover.

Even though life as we know it and life as we do not know it may exist on numerous other planets, it is most likely that we will encounter relics of extraterrestrial technologies before establishing contact with any living civilization.

To have seen the first lights in the universe come on thirteen billion years ago, we would have had to live almost one hundred and eighty million lifetimes.

Science also provides us with a means of making sense of what we discover, however fleeting, however partially.

It is essential to contemplate the incomprehensibly vast timescales of the universe.

If we can build it, the odds are great that another intelligence, if it is out there, has done the same.

What can we learn about ourselves based on our brief encounter with ‘Oumuamua?

We should also avoid the trap of imagining interstellar spacecraft as rare and precious... This scenario seems a little less unreasonable if we think of this possibility against the potential projected rate of ejecting StarChips using the Starshot Initiative.

What humans do helps us predict what other civilizations are likely to do.

We are insignificant, not just because the cosmos is so vast, but also because we ourselves are so tiny.

Let us stay honest, authentic, and ambitious. Let our limitations, very much including the limited time we are each given, encourage humility.

Only in this way can we save ourselves.

The tenuous threads connecting humanity’s Earth-bound civilization as it exists today, and the promise of humanity’s possible interstellar civilization as it might exist tomorrow, will not be upheld by exercising conservative caution.

We cannot allow the smaller filters of war and environmental degradation to grow into a great filter.

What will we do as residents of the one universe immediately arrayed before us?

Are we a civilization that will bind the damaged limb, allowing it to mend and grow? Or are we a civilization that either ignores it or shears it off, forever ending that branch of possibility?

If we cannot, as Sherlock Holmes might, entertain the simplest remaining explanation to the collected data—we may walk into the abyss.

As scientists and as a species, we could tailor our detective work and search for the relics of dead civilizations.

We are greatly in need of a new branch of astronomy, what I have termed space archaeology.

Even an oblique discovery of such evidence could teach us an important lesson—namely, that we need to get our act together if we’re to avoid a similar fate.

Optimism is a precondition for scientific work, I’ve found.

Ultimately, we concluded that the likelihood of detecting intelligent life was approximately two orders of magnitude smaller than the likelihood of detecting primitive life.

The qualities of the Sun encourage us to direct our search for extraterrestrial life—at least initially—to stars that are similar to our own.

We needn’t stop with brown dwarfs; we should also consider examining green dwarfs, dwarf stars that show the telltale 'red edge' in reflected light that is evidence of photosynthesizing plants.

If we can accept that we are very likely less advanced than civilizations that have come before us, this might well lead to our finding ways to speed up our own plodding evolution.

The search for extraterrestrial life could jar us from our more limited frame, our habit of looking forward a generation or two and not with the future of our civilization uppermost in mind.

As individuals and as a civilization, we also must learn modesty regarding both our potential place in the universe and our potential future in the universe.

Finding evidence of life on another planet... would change us in both fundamental and subtle ways—and I have to imagine that most of them would be for the better.

Given the ubiquity of habitable planets, it is the height of arrogance to conclude that we are unique.

In order for our civilization to mature, we need to venture into space and seek others.

Not only are you and I personally going to be intellectually eclipsed by future generations, but humans are the sole creators of a civilization no more.

Such a framework of understanding will endow us with a sense of modesty, and modesty will improve our perspective on our place in the universe.

With every day that goes by, we are gambling with our civilization’s fate—and at the moment, the odds that it will last seem long indeed.

My hope is not that the first extraterrestrial intelligence we encounter be either religious or secular but rather that it be animated by humility rather than arrogance.

The more we see evidence of humankind cultivating humility when confronted with the awesome, the more we have reason to anticipate the same from extraterrestrial civilizations.

Perhaps, rather than behaving like outsize actors in puny roles, we should adopt the perspective of spectators and simply enjoy the dazzling show all around us.

Live as if we know there is, or has been, intelligent life in the universe other than our own, and we redefine some of the missions of humanity.

What would be the most ambitious wager humanity could place on ‘Oumuamua? It would be something sufficient to ensure terrestrial life’s survival.

The moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization ever to have existed in the cosmos, we will realize that we’ve spent more funds developing the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would have cost to try to preserve it.

By spreading multiple copies of our genetic material through the universe, we could guard against that risk.

As soon as we learn how to produce synthetic life in our laboratories, 'Gutenberg DNA printers' could be distributed to make copies of the human genome out of raw materials on the surface of other planets.

Consider that cookbooks are full of recipes that have the same ingredients but result in different cakes, depending on the timing and fashion in which these ingredients are mixed and heated. Some cakes taste better than others.

If humanity is able to think, plan, and build in pursuit of a vision measurable in millions of years, we just might manage to ensure that life in the universe is able to ride out the vast challenges of time and space.

When I think of this familiar technology in that way, a lightsail tumbling in sunlight resembles nothing so much as the wings of a dandelion seed sent off by the wind to fertilize virgin soil.

Take the more ambitious approach to ‘Oumuamua’s wager, and creating synthetic life in the laboratory becomes, potentially, a means for terrestrial life to outrun the great filter.

No civilizations, very much including our own, will make the leap to migrating out among the stars if they are not smart enough to preserve their home planets while they plan and prepare.

It is a civilization’s greatest of hedged bets to preserve the building blocks of life, ensuring that existence persists even when individual civilizations cannot.

‘Oumuamua is extraterrestrial technological equipment. That is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.

Accepting my hypothesis about ‘Oumuamua requires, above all else, humility, because it requires us to accept that while we may be extraordinary, in all likelihood we are not unique.

The simplest, most direct line from an object with all of ‘Oumuamua’s observed qualities to an explanation for them is that it was manufactured.

It requires imagination as well as humility to acknowledge the utter ordinariness of humanity.

We should not take our mistakes as insults but rather as opportunities to learn something new.

We have the briefest of windows available to us, precious little time to study the universe and attempt to tease out the answers to its mysteries and paradoxes.

The scientific method is, in fact, closer to the commonsense approach to problem solving that a plumber adopts when trying to fix a leaking pipe.

Scientific advances are cross-generational efforts, and the benefits of human progress accumulate over centuries.

When humanity works together, we can achieve the unimaginable—feats of research, discovery, and technological innovation that under other circumstances would have been impossible.

The outcome of the scientific process is not up to the practitioners, since reality is determined by nature.