Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has drawn criticism for suggesting 鈥極umuamua, a weird object passing through the solar system could be an alien spacecraft. But he insists we must keep an open mind when nature throws us a curveball like this, and that the search for extraterrestrial life is just good science.
It is certainly weird. Observations suggested 鈥極umuamua is likely to be either flat or cigar-shaped, tumbling end over end every 7 hours or so and accelerating at a pace seemingly greater than could be accounted for by gravitational forces alone. Loeb鈥檚 colleagues have since come up with various natural explanations for what we glimpsed of 鈥極umuamua鈥檚 features, including the idea that it is some sort of giant fractal snowflake. But he is adamant we should at least be open to the possibility that it could be evidence of the existence of聽extraterrestrial civilisations.
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