After reading the depressing geopolitical news this morning, I wondered if we could benefit from the advice of a superhuman intelligence in our cosmic neighborhood. Suppose we decide to be proactive and look for the best advisor imaginable, advertise God's job and hope for candidates, what would this job description mean? We would certainly require any viable candidate to know how to create the Universe.
Our scientists don't know what happened before the Big Bang because Albert Einstein's theory of gravity breaks down at that particular moment. However, if we had a theory that unified quantum mechanics and gravity, we could discover the conditions that gave rise to our universe. Having this recipe would allow us to gain the knowledge to potentially create such conditions in the laboratory.
There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, and most of them were formed billions of years before the Sun. This gives enough time for quantum gravity engineers from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization to create tiny universes in their laboratories and acquire the qualifications needed to comply with our description of God's position. Finding them would benefit us greatly, even if imitating their technological insights would be tantamount to cheating on an intelligence test.
Could we find our interstellar partners with our up-to-date telescopes? Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funds. If we invested ten billion dollars in the search, just like the budget allocated to the Large Hadron Collider or the Webb Telescope, we might already have found our space partners, and space might not be as lonely and obscure as it seems to us now. Over the last seventy years, we have been searching for radio signals from other smart civilizations. But it's like waiting for a phone call. No one can call us while we wait. A better solution is to search for packages that may have reached our mailbox. The senders may be dead, but whatever junk they left behind in the ocean of interstellar space could be our treasure.
Finding interstellar artifacts
The interstellar space is the space outside the solar system. Traditionally, we have used telescopes to remotely observe what is nearby other stars. However, remote observations are restricted to extremely radiant objects. If we ever discover an interstellar car similar to the dummy cargo launched by SpaceX in 2018, we will know that Elon Musk is not the greatest space entrepreneur since the Big Bang.
Over the past decade, astronomers have discovered some of the first interstellar objects. As described in my book “Extraterrestrial,” the football-sized object 'Oumuamua was discovered by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii on October 19, 2017. The brightness of sunlight reflected from 'Oumuamua varied tenfold as it descended for eight hours. These extreme differences in brightness suggested that `Oumuamua was pancake-shaped. This mysterious object was moving away from the Sun with no signs of comet evaporation and was moving away from Earth faster than any man-made rocket. A similar burst of sunlight reflection was detected for another object, 2020 SO, which was confirmed to be a rocket booster launched by NASA in 1966.
Interstellar meteor: technological artifact or rock?
As described in my latest book “Interstellar“, the first interstellar object detected was a half-meter-sized interstellar meteor called IM1, which collided with Earth on January 8, 2014. Outside the solar system, IM1 was moving at a speed of 60 kilometers per second, which is faster than 95% of all stars nearby Sun. Despite its high speed, it disintegrated in the lower atmosphere, where the air is dense. This meant it was more resilient than all meteors documented by NASA over the past decade in the CNEOS meteorite fireball catalog.
It took my research team a full year to plan an expedition to the IM1 fireball site in the Pacific Ocean. The location was determined by U.S. Department of Defense satellites that detected the airy of IM1's brilliant fireball. Collecting molten meteorite droplets (spheres) from the ocean floor was particularly arduous because at this point the ocean is a mile deep and the search area is 7 miles in size. Our team anchored a sled full of magnets to a ship called the Silver Star and dragged it along the ocean floor through the study area. We visited the IM1 impact site from June 14–28, 2023, and collected 850 miniature droplets less than a millimeter in diameter each.
It took us a year to analyze the recovered drops. So far, we have published our findings in detailed, peer-reviewed article.
Our analysis used state-of-the-art laboratory instruments (including a micro-X-ray fluorescence analyzer, an electron probe microanalyzer, and an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer). We found that about one-tenth of the total droplet population had a chemical composition that had never been previously described in the scientific literature. It is characterized by an increased content of some chemical elements, such as beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), even a thousand times greater than the materials from which the Solar System is built. We have designated this special set: “BeLaU” type spherules. The composition of BeLaU is unknown and differs from that of the crust of Earth, Mars, the Moon, asteroids and comets, and potentially indicates an origin from outside the solar system. Its origin is unknown.
But curiosity-driven learning never ends. Our analysis raises novel questions: What are the ages and properties of the IM1 material? Is IM1 of natural or artificial origin? Where did he come from and how long did his journey take?
Science is better than politics
We are currently planning another expedition for the summer of 2025, the aim of which is to find answers to these questions. In addition to identifying the nature of IM1, finding huge pieces of its wreck would allow us to determine the age of IM1 based on its radioactive isotopes, find the composition of volatile elements lost from the balls we recovered, and assess IM1's material strength and thermal properties, potentially explaining why it has retained its integrity despite exposure to atmospheric stress beyond the tolerance of the hardest iron meteorites known in the solar system.
To find larger pieces of IM1, we are going to employ a robot called Hercules, accompanied by video that will allow us to see what we are collecting. Our imagination is restricted by our past experiences, but nature can surprise us. Finding clues about a partner from another star can be more inspiring than following our politics.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
