Historical research guide · 0626 · 2023
Overview of the Galileo Project
Abraham (Avi) Loeb · Frank H. Laukien
In one minute
Avi Loeb and Frank Laukien describe the programme they founded at Harvard in July 2021 and its first year of work. The Galileo Project’s premise is simple and, they argue, overdue: sixty years of searching for radio signals from distant stars has skipped the possibility that physical objects from another technological civilisation are already in our own neighbourhood, where they can be photographed, intercepted, or picked up off the seabed. The project has three branches — new all-sky observatories that watch in optical, infrared and radio plus audio, magnetic field and energetic-particle channels; software to pull anomalous interstellar objects out of survey pipelines and a mission to fly to one; and expeditions to recover fragments of interstellar meteors. Two of the first three known interstellar objects were already outliers. The rules are strict on purpose: open data only, no classified material, known physics only, everything published for peer review. Loeb’s closing point is that the missing evidence is often self-inflicted, because nobody looked.
Connection
Chapter 1 is about how a claim climbs the evidence ladder, and this is that method applied to the hardest subject on the site: instruments specified in advance, categories declared before the data arrives, and every result routed through peer review. Chapters 9 and 8 gain the observing programme that could turn anomalous kinematics from footage into calibrated, multi-sensor measurement.
From the source
The Galileo Project, co-founded in July 2021, is described as the first systematic scientific research program searching for potential astro-archaeological artifacts or remnants of extraterrestrial technological civilizations, or potentially active equipment near Earth. It runs three branches: building new telescope systems to infer the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena; mining high-quality telescope data — from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory or the Webb telescope — for anomalous interstellar objects and designing an intercept or rendezvous mission to one; and coordinating land or ocean expeditions to study interstellar meteors.Abstract; Sec. 1; Sec. 5
Two of the first three known interstellar objects are outliers relative to familiar Solar System asteroids and comets. CNEOS 2014-01-08, detected by US Government sensors near Papua New Guinea on 8 January 2014, was about half a metre in size, exhibited material strength tougher than iron, and was in the fastest five percent of the local stellar velocity distribution. ‘Oumuamua was pushed away from the Sun by an excess force declining as the inverse square of distance with no cometary gases to explain it, and had an extreme, most likely flat shape, high reflectivity, no rotational jitter, and an origin in the Local Standard of Rest.Sec. 2, items 1 and 2
The division of labour between agencies and scientists is stated explicitly. Government agencies must account for the vast majority of reports and therefore must work with data of compromised quality, such as blurry video. Science does not need to explain most reports if their data is inconclusive — but if even one object among the clutter is of extraterrestrial technological origin, it would represent the most consequential discovery in human history. To settle that, scientists need the highest quality data: a high-resolution image of an object showing unconventional propulsion, a manoeuvre at extreme speeds, or kinematics outside the performance envelope of conventional aircraft and projectiles.Sec. 4
Three ground rules bind every contributor. The project uses only openly available scientific data and transparent analysis, so classified government-owned information cannot be used; it works only with new data collected from its own observatories, under the full and exclusive control of the research team. The analysis is based solely on known physics and does not entertain extensions to the standard model. Results are released through traditional peer-reviewed channels, internal discussions and hardware specifications are not publicised before the work is finalised, and the project has no commercial interests.Sec. 5, ground rules 1 to 3
Space archaeology needs a different accounting from the Drake equation, because relics accumulate and their senders need not still be transmitting. If instruments survey a volume, the number of objects found in a snapshot is the number density times the volume; if the survey is a net of a given area, such as Earth’s atmosphere catching meteors, the rate of new objects is the number density times the characteristic velocity times the area. The paper then multiplies both by one minus a further probability — the chance that scientists decline to look at all, for instance by fitting only Sun-bound orbits to survey data. The likelihood of finding technological objects depends on us being willing to search, not only on whether anyone sent them.Sec. 7, Eqs. (1)–(4)
The named next measurements are concrete. The first all-sky Galileo Observatory is built on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory and is expected to collect and analyse data in the coming months and years, with findings reported in peer-reviewed journals and the data opened to the community after an initial verification period. An ocean expedition is planned to scoop the seabed near Papua New Guinea for fragments of CNEOS 2014-01-08 — an approach a thousand times cheaper than a space mission. Software to flag interstellar objects that do not resemble Solar System comets or asteroids will be applied to the Rubin Observatory survey pipeline, and the James Webb Space Telescope, observing from the second Lagrange point, could map a future object’s three-dimensional trajectory precisely enough to detect any force acting on it beyond the Sun’s gravity.Sec. 5; Sec. 6; Sec. 7; Sec. 8
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1142/S2251171723400032How to cite it
Abraham (Avi) Loeb, Frank H. Laukien (2023) Overview of the Galileo Project doi:10.1142/S2251171723400032