Really Out There

The Incredible Seriousness of Extra-Terrestrial Fictions

Oumuamua is an unusual interstellar object that has been floating through our solar system. What is more unusual is that a pair of astronomers suggested in a recent study that it might be a "light sail of extra-terrestrial origin," that is, a small spacecraft, powered by light.¹ One of them, Abraham Loeb, is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, alongside other prestigious appointments.

Yet no uproar ensued. It was not, after all, as though Loeb had suggested the unthinkable, that the universe shows evidence of being fine-tuned by a cosmic intelligence. The facts that the signature of fine-tuning seems quite clear and that there is no sign whatever of extraterrestrials...