The Starshot scheme, funded by Russian Internet billionaire and philanthropist Yuri Milner, was announced just a year and a half before Oumuamua was discovered. It was natural for Loeb to think that great minds across the universe could have thought the same way. It sounds crazy, but there is a broader point that he needs to make, which is worth addressing and reading.
The central point of his argument is what he calls the “Oumuamua bet”, a takeoff from Pascal’s famous bet that the advantage of believing in God far outweighs the disadvantage. Likewise, believing that Oumuamua could have been an alien spaceship can only make us more alert and receptive to thinking outside the box. As Louis Pasteur said, “chance favors the prepared mind”.
“If we dare to bet that Oumuamua was a piece of advanced extraterrestrial technology, we can only win,” writes Loeb. “Whether it leads us to methodically search the universe for signs of life or to undertake more ambitious projects, making an optimistic bet can have a transforming effect on our civilization.” Imagine, for example, candles of light equipped with copies of human DNA placed around a star that would one day explode, sending them in a flash of light across the galaxy. That would take millions of years to establish, but what is a million years in the 10 billion year life of the Milky Way?
He continues: “When I think of this familiar technology in this way, a candle of light falling in the sunlight resembles nothing more than the wings of a dandelion seed blown by the wind to fertilize virgin soil.”
Modern academic science, he complains, overestimated topics such as multiple dimensions and multiple universes, for which there is no evidence, and underestimated the search for life outside, not only in the form of extraterrestrial radio signals, but in the form of chemicals ” bio signatures, ”or even technological artifacts – like, Loeb believes, Oumuamua. We could try harder, he writes. The discovery of alien life would be the greatest discovery in the history of science.
As he writes at the end of this half memoir, half high monologue: “But the moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization that has ever existed in the cosmos, we will realize that we have spent more funds developing means to destroy all life on the planet than it would cost to preserve it. ”