This Harvard Scientist Thinks Alien Probes Are Already Here. He’s Checking Out These Mysterious ‘Spherules’ First

Avi Loeb recently recovered metallic “spherules” from the ocean floor that he believes could be interstellar in nature. But don’t draw any conclusions, yet.

Avi Loeb of Harvard University—known as the “bad boy of astronomy”—is at it again. The theoretical physicist made headlines last month for his controversial expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where his team combed the ocean floor for remnants of two meteors Loeb believes could actually contain alien technology. They did recover metallic “spherules” from the site, but it’s still unclear what they are exactly. Are they remnants of an impact? Are they something naturally occurring, or not?

From where Loeb stands, there’s at least a chance these spherules are alien probes, dropped from a mothership; he believes the cigar-shaped Oumuamua, which in 2017 became the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, could be such a parent craft, for instance. But how would aliens pull this kind of operation off, and why would they want to in the first place?

A recent paper from Loeb and Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s newly created All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, could shed light on those motivations—or lead the public to draw the wrong conclusions. People may find it threatening (or even humorous) that researchers like Loeb put forward ideas that rely on longer odds or explanations from the edges, but many of his suggestions about alien technology are grounded in serious scientific methodology.

For Loeb, this subject is his life’s work; he’s written books and dozens of papers on astrophysics and cosmology, with many tackling his interest in the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. But for Kirkpatrick, his collaboration on this paper could undermine his credibility as the leader of a brand-new office, according to Politico.

✅ A spherule is a deposit from a meteorite impact, according to the Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Spherical droplets are formed when an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere vaporizes, expanding in a large plume or fireball before cooling and condensing into molten droplets, eventually solidifying. These metallic orbs may be less than 100 micrometers or up to a few millimeters in diameter. You can find them embedded in layers of rock, but they also appear in strewn fields (the area where meteorites are dispersed from a single impact). In addition to craters, spherules give scientists information about early impacts on Earth; researchers have even used them to learn more about the asteroids that bombarded Earth from between 4.2 to 3.5 billion years ago, according to a paper published in 2012 in the journal Nature. Loeb believes it’s possible alien intelligence could be lurking inside the spherules he recovered.

Why does the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence create so much turbulence in the political and scientific spheres? The answer could come down to an age-old problem of theoretical discussions in the public eye, and to examine that, we first need to talk about money.

Money Talks
The U.S. has the largest military budget in the world, and the Pentagon is the crown jewel of our military industrial complex. “Our mission is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security,” the Department of Defense website explains. The budget President Joe Biden signed in December 2022 is $816.7 billion for one year.

That’s an enormous number, but the United States also spends upward of $600 billion on research and development each year, another category in which we’re a global leader. The federal government, alone, is responsible for $167.4 billion in research spending in the 2020 fiscal year. By comparison, Ohio State University, one of the nation’s largest research universities, boasted of $1.2 billion in research spending for fiscal year 2021—and $581 million of that was federal government money. The largest corporate research spender, Amazon, spent “just” $42.7 billion in 2020.

These figures mean U.S. money funds a notable portion of the world’s academic research, and more than one-fourth of that money comes directly from the federal government. If you had $1 billion to spend on either cancer research or tracking down alien probes, it’s not hard to guess which the public would generally prefer. So what happens when the experts are working in what has traditionally been the territory of conspiracy theorists?

Public Perception

Academic research is often firmly in the realm of the very distantly possible or totally hypothetical. Researchers like Loeb explore ideas and spin out explanations as a way to help push forward the intellectual rigor in their fields, even if, like Loeb, some researchers are considered more fringe. But because UFOs—or “unexplained aerial phenomena” (UAPs) in the more modern parlance—are the special interest of a large number of conspiracy theorists, other researchers can be very cagey about how work in this area affects the public’s perception.

Without the complete context that an expert like Loeb or Fitzpatrick has in how their work fits into their industry, and with an attitude of anti-intellectualism and conspiracy thinking, the American public is uniquely positioned to “get the wrong end of the stick” about a paper like this. Politico asked a researcher to explain the situation:

“It’s a fine line because there’s ‘being open to speculative ideas’ like this, but that can be translated into an actual supporting of this possibility, and I think that’s where there needs to be more clarity,” said Alejandro Rojas, a board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a think tank exploring unidentified aerial phenomena, and head of content and research for Enigma Labs, a start-up using machine learning to investigate UFO data.

Back to Business

Loeb and Fitzpatrick’s paper, which is a draft and not peer reviewed or scheduled for publication, is a short exploration of what kinds of things could travel toward Earth as alien probes. It’s a thought exercise, not a theory. For anyone who’s read even introductory papers in a field like philosophy or applied mathematics, it’s familiar to see a situation that researchers make up as an example that pulls on all the right threads to get us thinking about how we might unravel some very big idea. The cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett calls these “intuition pumps.”

Both Loeb and Fitzpatrick have decades of experience in space subjects and physics research. And in this paper, they’re just shaving off the conditions we know are impossible because of science. “It is likely that any functional devices embedded in the Earth’s atmosphere are not carrying biological entities because these would not survive the long journey through interstellar space and its harsh conditions, including bombardment by energetic cosmic-rays, X-rays and gamma-rays,” the paper states, for example.

The paper also offers up an idea for how alien probes could find their way to Earth. “… An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions. These ‘dandelion seeds’ could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the Sun or by a maneuvering capability.” Loeb’s recent mission to recover spherules from the ocean is an attempt to find such dandelion seeds in the form of spherules.

An intellectual discussion about what a probe could or could not have isn’t threatening at all. But the combination of Loeb, whose Galileo Project at Harvard seeks to study the possibility of probes from outer space; and Fitzpatrick, who leads a newly created office that many still believe indicates the U.S. government believes in aliens; is as tantalizing to conspiracy theorists as it is worrying to traditional research academics. To be clear, spherules do result from meteorite impacts, but they don’t necessarily contain alien intelligence—that’s where Loeb’s own theories come into play.

Probing the Possibilities
While he hasn’t pinned down extraterrestrial intelligence yet, Loeb has seriously considered what an alien probe might look like, and even how he’d design one.

“My favorite probe to send to interstellar space would include artificial intelligence (AI) like GPT-4 or upcoming versions of it and a 3D printer,” he tells Popular Mechanics. “The probe will be designed to target habitable planets and use a parachute to land smoothly to their rocky or ocean surface. It would aim to refuel by using water, and potentially seed the planet with the building blocks of life based on the raw materials there.” He points to an essay he’s previously written to explain how the refueling ocean could work.

“The probes could be released from motherships that are bigger in size. Releasing many can help in exploring many geographical locations on multiple habitable planets within the same planetary system,” Loeb says. This ties into the “dandelion seed” idea from the new paper.

💡Coincidentally, the space terraforming video game Terra Nil was released (including for free via Netflix) about a month after Loeb and Fitzpatrick’s paper was published this past spring. In the game, you land on four discrete biomes on an alien planet that has been ravaged by an environmental disaster. And by recycling materials from your own ship and the planet’s surface, you make everything you need to revitalize the planet and then leave without a trace.

I also asked what Loeb feels is the likelihood of finding an intelligence in a life cycle or biome so different from ours that we may not even be looking there—think Class Y, or demon planet, from Star Trek. Loeb is as intellectually ambitious as ever: he thinks the possibility exists, and that we must explore the entire Milky Way to see what exists.

“I calculated that if humanity decided to reallocate the worldwide military budget to space exploration ($2 trillion per year), then by the end of the 21st century, we will be able to send a small probe towards every star in the Milky Way galaxy,” he says.

For now, Loeb is stuck on Earth, where he’s trying to determine if those spherules really are interstellar in nature. He sent them to labs at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bruker Corporation in Germany for further analysis, according to The New York Times. Plus, he’s planned to revisit those same waters near Papua New Guinea later this year, and intends to visit the coast of Portugal to hunt for remnants from another meteor he believes is of interstellar origin.

If there are alien probes somewhere on our planet, it seems Loeb is determined to be the one to find them.

Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She’s also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all.