Book Reviewed: Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb

Oumuamua, the interstellar visitor to solar system, is that an alien ship? Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is one of the enthusiastic alien searchers who dares to investigate and examine anything that resembles like an alien technology or alien-made spacecraft. In this book, he proposes that Oumuamua is alien spacecraft that came from a distant planet. This was discovered on Oct. 19, 2017, by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations (NEOO) Program, which finds and tracks asteroids and comets in Earth’s neighborhood. Oumuamua was travelling at a speed of 196,000 miles per hour. This is the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system which is rocky, cigar-shaped with a reddish hue. It was one-quarter mile long and 10 times as long as it is wide. That ratio is greater than that of any asteroid or comet observed in the solar system. This cosmic craft is wandering through the Milky Way Galaxy, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before it reached our solar system. It also varied in brightness by a factor of 10 when it spun on its axis every 7.3 hours. No known asteroid or comet from our solar system varies so widely in brightness. These properties suggest that Oumuamua is dense, composed of rock and possibly metals, has no water or ice, and that its surface was reddened due to the cosmic radiation. Its outbound path is about 20 degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun. It left solar system in early 2019. The Pan-STARRS team dubbed it Oumuamua (pronounced Oh MOO-uh MOO-uh), which is Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.” It deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. Based on these facts, author Loeb concludes that it is a spacecraft from an alien world. The argument is interesting but not too convincing. Loeb is known to discuss even with UFO enthusiasts to investigate extra-terrestrial objects to study possible alien-technology or LightSail technology. He is currently involved in a meteor that fell into the South Pacific eight years ago, Avi Loeb believes that it was from another star system. He is currently exploring to recover the metallic debris. He suggests that this is made from an alien technology from another solar system possibly made of some alloy that humans are not aware of.