It all started when I, as usual, was skimming through the Google digest on a mobile phone before I went to sleep. There was this article about Avi Loeb a theoretical physicist and Professor of Science at Harvard University who hypothesized that an interstellar object that zipped through the Solar System in December 2017 could have been an artifact or a spaceship from an alien civilization.

This is how I ended up reading unexpectedly Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth book written by Avi Loeb about possible origins of ʻOumuamua. The book itself is not that long and it has a mix of factual information about interstellar object ʻOumuamua and Avi’s thoughts on Scientific Method, philosophy and his childhood in Israel. The book felt too repetitive at times and could have been much shorter. It also could have had more than Drake equation. In a number of places it could have benefited from using math notations instead of describing numbers in words.

What I liked

Avi’s thoughts on science where he suggested that science should be preoccupied with practical theories that try to explain existing evidence sounds similar to the thoughts expressed in Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math book. But this view is not shared by David Deutsch which he expressed in The Beginning of Infinity book and with which I tend to agree more. David Deutsch supports

Karl Popper’s epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and requiring a realist (non-instrumental) interpretation of scientific theories. (a quote from Wikipedia)

The hypothesis that ʻOumuamua could be an alien interstellar visitor, based on its anomalies is an interesting one. Since Avi was participating in the Breakthrough Starshot project, which proposed to use a solar sail to travel to nearest star, he suggested that ʻOumuamua could have been similar object. Then he described how an advanced civilization could surround a star, about to explode, with such solar sails that would be blasted away in all directions, serving as a probes, into space. The only issue with this approach is that somehow it assumes that an advanced civilization, that is capable of surrounding a star with millions of solar sails, would use such technology, can’t we assume that such a civilization could have discovered laws of physics that we cannot imagine yet and could use other means to traverse space.

An advanced ancient civilization here on Earth

There are ample evidence, here on Earth, that shows that in ancient Egypt, and in South America (namely Machu Picchu and other locations) we find hundreds of granite blocks that have marks of being cut by machining tools, like large diameter disk saws and wire saws, that required a power supply and an infrastructure similar to what we have in the factories that use CNC machines to produce granite blocks. The 7 great pyramids and Osirion in Egypt are the best examples of the machining tools applied to granite and limestone blocks.
More details can be found in a good documentary produced by the Laboratory of Alternative History (LAH)

The Film “Mysteries Of Ancient Egypt (2005)

The filmmakers decided not to rely on a particular theory, but on real facts, logic and common sense. This approach leads inexorably to the conclusion that in the land of Egypt for thousands of years before the first pharaohs a highly developed civilization existed that was superior in their knowledge and technology not only primitive society of the ancient Egyptians, but modern humanity.

Additionally, in Israel (Western Wall Tunnel) and in Lebanon (Temples of Baalbek) there are building blocks of some 100 tons that cannot be extracted and moved easily taking into consideration what we know about the level of human technology in ancient times.

Here on Earth and there in space

So not only we should start looking more carefully at what is in the space, we have the evidence of an advanced ancient civilization (interstellar or not) here on Earth.