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The Curious Case of Avi Loeb

He’s curious, as he should be; what’s curious is scientists’ resistance to his work

Douglas Giles, PhD
6 min readFeb 20, 2025
The truth IS out there, but only if you are willing to look (Source: Piqsels)

Professor Avi Loeb has probably shown that there is at least one sentient extraterrestrial civilization. I say “probably,” as Prof. Loeb would, because science is not as absolutist regarding what is or is not fact as some want to believe. One could make a reasonable argument that we should say “possibly” Prof. Loeb has identified an object of extraterrestrial technology. What is unreasonable is to say that there is no chance that Prof. Loeb has identified an object of extraterrestrial technology. Sadly, some scientists are being that unreasonable about Prof. Loeb’s finding.

The Object

The object in question is ʻOumuamua, an interstellar object that passed through our stellar system in 2017. I finally made time to read Prof. Loeb’s excellent book about ʻOumuamua, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. It’s an informative book, easy to read with a refreshing perspective. Prof. Loeb also publishes regularly on Medium, and his articles are well worth reading.

In Extraterrestrial, Prof. Loeb sets out the solid evidence that ʻOumuamua is not a naturally occurring object, and that means it’s a piece of technology, and since we definitely didn’t create…

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Douglas Giles, PhD
Douglas Giles, PhD

Written by Douglas Giles, PhD

Philosopher by trade & temperament, professor for 21 years, bringing philosophy out of its ivory tower and into everyday life. https://dgilesauthor.com/

Responses (15)

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personally I find Avi kind of shallow and self-promoting (attracted to power positions in science, by his own words), IMO there are 'deeper digging' physics authors on Medium like Ethan Siegel, Selena Routley, maybe others)

“These ideas must be true even without experimental tests to support them, because thousands of physicists believe in them, and it is difficult to imagine that such a large community of...

Wow! Did someone calling himself a scientist actually say that? May as well say there is a god because so many people believe there is. Then we wouldn't need science or scientists.

When new evidence comes in to disprove an existing paradigm, the mature and intelligent response is to change one’s paradigm.

Sure, but that's not what Loeb is doing, particularly. He's over-interpreting the evidence, under-investigating other alternative hypotheses save to shoot them down (without adequately exploring the possibilities), and generally raising an important…