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Interstellar review: The case for seeking out alien technology

As labs study possible fragments of a meteor that might have been more than it seemed, we must keep looking for any signs of extraterrestrial life, argues astrophysicist Avi Loeb in his new book

By Simon Ings

30 August 2023

Beautiful night sky, the Milky Way, meteor and the trees. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.; Shutterstock ID 1205926213; purchase_order: -; job: -; client: -; other: -

A meteor traverses the night sky. Could other meteors originate outside our solar system?

Triff/Shutterstock

Interstellar
Avi Loeb (John Murray)

ON 8 January 2014, a meteor exploded above the Pacific just north of Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Five years later, Amir Siraj, research assistant for Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, spotted it in an online catalogue at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Part-way through Interstellar: The search for extraterrestrial life and our future beyond Earth, Loeb explains why he thinks the…

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