San Francisco Mensa Friends

Sat, Nov 8 · 3:20 PM PST

•

Online

Hunting for Aliens

Online

Hunting for Aliens
The Search for Artifacts Near Earth

Professor Avi Loeb Director of the Institute for Theory & Computation, Harvard U.

Saturday November 8, 2025
2:30 PM PACIFIC TIME

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https://space-talk.link/NOV
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Over the past decade, the first four interstellar objects were discovered. They include the interstellar meteor,

• IM1, detected on January 8, 2014.
• Oumuamua detected on October 19, 2017
• Borisov detected on August 29, 2019
• 3I/ATLAS discovered on July 1, 2025

Among these, the first two appeared anomalous relative to known solar-system rocks whereas the third appeared to be a familiar comet. IM1 exhibited the highest material strength among all meteorites in the CNEOS catalog of NASA, `

Oumuamua exhibited a flat shape and non-gravitational acceleration with no detectable cometary evaporation. In June 2023 we recovered 850 spherules from the Pacific Ocean site IM1. A tenth of these submillimeter meteoritic spherules displayed a unique chemical composition, different from familiar solar system materials.

Currently, new Galileo Project Observatories are monitoring millions of objects near Earth in the infrared, optical, radio and audio and analyzing their nature with machine-learning software. Are any of them Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?
Forthcoming data from the Rubin Observatory in Chile will offer additional clues on interstellar objects. Is space trash from extraterrestrial technological civilizations lurking among the natural interstellar rocks.

Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University and a bestselling author (in lists of the New York Times,Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, L'Express and more).

He received a PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24 (1980-1986), led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983-1988), and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988-1993).

Dr. Loeb has written 9 books, including most recently, Extraterrestrial and Interstellar, as well as over a thousand scientific papers (with h-index of 132 and i10-index of 622) on a wide range of topics, including black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life and the future of the Universe.

He is the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (2007-present) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and also serves as the Head of the Galileo Project (2021-present). He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011-2020) and the Founding Director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative (2016-2021).

He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Loeb is a former member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the White House, a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies (2018-2021) and a current member of the Advisory Board for "Einstein: Visualize the Impossible" of the Hebrew University. He chaired the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative (2015-2024) and served as the Science Theory Director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2012,

TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space and in 2020 Loeb was selected among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade. In 2024, Loeb was ranked number 3 in publication record and impact of research among all astronomers worldwide over the past 5 years by ScholarGPS. Loeb’s latest TED talk was among the top five most popular TED talks in 2024. Click here for Loeb's essays on innovation