A conversation with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
In the last decade, astronomers have detected the first interstellar objects passing through our solar system—enigmatic visitors from beyond. Some, like the comet Borisov, resemble familiar celestial bodies. Others, like Oumuamua and the meteor IM1, defy easy classification. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has spent years investigating their strange features: material strength unlike anything known in the solar system, unexplained acceleration, and curious shapes.
Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, leads the Galileo Project, a bold scientific effort using AI-powered observatories to scan Earth’s skies for unidentified anomalous phenomena. In 2023, his team retrieved over 800 metallic spherules from the ocean floor—some with a chemical composition never seen before. Are we glimpsing remnants of alien technology? Or merely misunderstood natural phenomena?
Join us for an eye-opening conversation on the frontier of astrophysics and the tantalizing possibility that signs of intelligent life may already be within reach.
speaker
Avi Loeb is a leading figure in modern astrophysics, known as much for his groundbreaking research as for his willingness to challenge scientific orthodoxy. Born in Israel in 1962, Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and has served as Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics since 2007. He chaired Harvard’s Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020 and is the founding director of the university’s Black Hole Initiative—the first interdisciplinary center worldwide dedicated to the study of black holes.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics, Loeb also serves as the science theory director for the Breakthrough Initiatives, a set of interstellar exploration programs funded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
His research spans cosmology, black holes, the first stars, and—most controversially—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2018, he proposed that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which briefly passed through our solar system, may have been an artificial probe from another civilization. In 2023, he led an expedition that retrieved metallic spherules from the Pacific Ocean, which he believes may be fragments from an interstellar meteor.
Loeb is the author of several books, including Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021) and Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars (2023). Both explore the possibility that we are not alone—and what that might mean for science and society.
