Astronomical dumpster diving may reveal more than we think — perhaps even the existence of intelligent alien life.
On July 26, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb launched the Galileo Project, a new scientific research group that will use telescopes and cameras to find interstellar objects and evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
The project was spurred by the 2017 observation of ‘Oumuamua, a flat interstellar object that did not resemble a comet, as well as this year’s release of an intelligence report on UFOs. Some believe that ‘Oumuamua was garbage, which would be a “theoretical smoking gun” in Loeb’s new approach of “astro-archaeology.”
On Earth, garbage has been used by archaeologists to uncover watershed discoveries. Historian Jose Remesal Rodriguez explained that an ancient Roman dumpsite was used to learn more about food policy in the Roman Empire. More recently, in 2019, archaeologist Guy Bar-Oz and his team utilized the end of ancient trash collection to unearth the true cause of an ancient Byzantine city’s demise.
So, why does trash yield such insightful findings? Simply put, “trash is a proxy for human behavior,” as archaeologist Richard Meadow told CNN in 2011. Astro-archaeologists must hope that extraterrestrial explorers are just as wasteful as we are.
Of course, all of this is assuming that ‘Oumuamua was indeed a piece of trash. Some scientists have disputed this, saying that the object may have just been made entirely of nitrogen. For Loeb, however, one can only speculate until there is more information. “But if we see more [objects] like [‘Oumuamua], then we know these can actually form naturally outside the solar system,” Loeb told the Jerusalem Post.
Who knows? Perhaps ‘Oumuamua was a natural object. Or maybe weird space garbage will reveal the existence of an even more extravagant civilization than ours.
