This morning, I received a message from the brilliant poet, Alan Wagstaff, with a collection of poems inspired by my scientific writings on alien intelligence. The collection is titled “Different Suns,” and is characterized by Alan as `a collision between science and poetry’. It is accessible in full here.
Alan resides in Snells Beach, Auckland, New Zealand, 14,500 kilometers away from my Harvard University office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This distance spans 72% of the maximum separation that a resident of Earth can have away from me. I crossed this separation a couple of years ago on my way to retrieve materials from the fireball site of the interstellar meteor, IM1, near Papua New Guinea. My trip was much shorter than that of the meteoroid, which likely originated thousands of light years away. From the vantage point of the meteor source, Alan and I are co-located. We are sailing in the same boat, the Earth, through interstellar space. In 2017, a second interstellar object was discovered by a survey telescope in Hawaii and named `Oumuamua. Both IM1 and `Oumuamua were anomalous in their physical properties relative to Solar system comets or asteroids. This triggered in my mind the question: “are these interstellar bottles, carrying a message from an alien intelligence?”
I explored this question scientifically through several dozen peer-reviewed publications over the past 7 years. These studies triggered scrutiny, pushback and animosity by some of my colleagues in academia. But at the same time, the research stimulated generosity and encouragement from creators in other disciplines. Just this month, I encountered interest in my research from Anna Luna, Tim Burchett, Jerry Bruckheimer, Adrien Brody, George Lucas, Demi Moore, Trevor Noah, Margot Robbie, Michael Dell and Ted Decker. Why do creative minds in business, politics and art resonate with thinking outside the box whereas academia is threatened by it? After all, tenure in academia was supposed to secure freedom of thought by providing job security. Instead of fostering risk-taking, the ambition to receive honors and grants tightened the academic herd mentality over the decades and established a culture of “virtue signaling” in research and campus politics.
The punishing quality of the academic response to the possibility that alien intelligence exists is puzzling given the statistics that there should be billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way alone. Given that, it is not unreasonable to imagine that something better than us existed elsewhere. And the fact that most stars formed billions of years before the Sun implies that we are late to the party and that there was enough time for alien space trash to reach us at the typical speed of chemical rockets. Why would the consensus 2020 Decadal Survey of U.S. astronomers recommend as its highest priority to invest over ten billion dollars in the search for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in exoplanet atmospheres, and avoid hedging our bets by investing at least a few percent of that amount in the search for technological interstellar objects?
Gladly, the sterilizing acidity outside the beaten path of academia was neutralized for me by hugs from artists. A musical piece inspired by my research on `Oumuamua was created by the composer and cellist, Jeremy Lamb, and performed with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra in May 2024. Another musical piece was created by the composer and artist in residence of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, David Ibbett, and performed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in April 2025. In addition, my scientific work on `Oumuamua and IM1 inspired a 2023 play titled “A Piece of Sky” by the playwright Josh Ravetch and a song by Alan Bergman. The Galileo Project under my leadership inspired two bronze sculptures that were donated to my Harvard office in 2025 by the sculptor Greg Wyatt.
Creations of art and innovative science are acts of generosity. They did not have to exist. Just like the Universe as a whole. Once we witness their beauty, we are filled with gratitude. They give meaning to our short life, cosmologically speaking.
Poetry can explore landscapes of our imagination and drift towards the unexplored, those uncharted territories which we hope to visit. But nature is sometimes richer than our imagination, especially when dealing with the unknown. This is why we need to rely on scientific evidence to guide us through the darkness of our ignorance. Our imagination was shaped by our past experiences which may not explain the full extent of the unknown.
Through the method of gathering scientific evidence, we can maintain a sense of cosmic humility. Science is a learning experience, during which we learn equally from being right or wrong. The fact that Albert Einstein argued between 1935–1940 that black holes do not exist, that gravitational waves do not exist, and that quantum- mechanics does not have spooky action at a distance, led three experimental teams to prove him wrong and win three separate Nobel Prizes in physics over the past decade. His wrong assertions were in fact win-win propositions.
Alan Wagstaff’s poetry invites us to engage with science as a human endeavor, filled with missteps, wonder and discovery. He encourages readers to examine what we learned so far with a critical mind and boldly go where nobody went before.
In Different Suns, Alan Wagstaff challenges the existence of a boundary between science and poetry and demonstrates their common foundation in creativity and beauty. His anthology is an original and uplifting read, full of wisdom. It is one of these rare finds that make life worth living, just like interstellar artifacts.
Alan wrote to me: “I have an inkling why the ‘creative community’ responds so warmly to your efforts: they have the scope of imagination to intuit the earth-shattering impacts that confirming that non-human intelligences exist would make. The scientific community is constrained by the rigors of the scientific method. While the scientific method is vital, it has the tendency, I guess, to make scientists create defenses against imagining. My poem ‘Walking With Frost’ suggests a solution to this riddle:
‘It’s not that I am fixed to either road.
I walk them both — and have no hesitance.
Their combination moderates the load
and clarifies the cypher in their code.
The right path is to know the difference.’
So, walk both paths but know the difference is my offering. This is clearly what a person of your abilities and sensitivities is doing. Thank you for your brave work and your kindly disposition. If I had 7 million, I gladly donate it to the Galileo Foundation.”
In response, I noted that scientists do imagine things with no evidence to support them, like extra dimensions or specific types of dark matter. But there is something else, perhaps the human ego, that triggers pushback against the notion of superior alien intelligence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
