David Ibbett is a brilliant musical composer and the Artist in Residence at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. On April 24, 2025, David organized a unique event titled “Astrobiology and Music” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The music was composed by David and performed with remarkable talent by the singers Barbara Hill and Jessica Smith, violinist Sophia Szokolay and musician Reuben Durham.
The event opened with an original musical piece inspired by the prospects of life in the liquid ocean under the surface ice of Jupiter’s moon, Europa. David was inspired by visiting the Europa Clipper spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena before it was launched to space on October 14, 2024. The musical piece was followed by a short poem, read by the inspiring writer Zac Smith, about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Following Zac’s reading, I described the Galileo Project which is currently assembling three observatories in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Nevada to collect data on UAPs and analyze it with artificial intelligence. I argued that finding evidence for a smarter kid on our cosmic block is far more inspiring than discovering evidence for microbes or moons or planets. The reason is simple: we can learn more from those who are smarter than us.
Subsequently, there was a musical piece about water and another one about the red edge, which is a distinct spectral signature of vegetation on Earth. The red edge represents a rapid change in reflectance of terrestrial vegetation in the near infrared. Chlorophyll absorbs most of the light in the visible part of the solar spectrum and uses it for photosynthesis. However, infrared light is reflected by the leaf cells which act like corner reflectors. As a result, the reflectance of light by terrestrial vegetation changes from 5% to 50% between wavelengths of 0.68 to 0.73 micron. Finding a red edge in the reflection of starlight from an exoplanet can serve as a biomarker. Obviously, life on exoplanets may use a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, depending on the radiation emitted by the host star.
The red edge music was followed by Zac reading a poem about the possibility of finding extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth. In this context, I provided an overview on the discovery of the anomalous interstellar meteor, IM1, in 2014 and the anomalous interstellar object, `Oumuamua, in 2017. This discussion was followed by an original musical piece with sonification of orbital data on `Oumuamua, along with an imaginary NASA trip to `Oumuamua with a camera capable of providing a clear image of this unusual object from outside the Solar system. The camera snapshot from the imaginary flyby showed an image of … a light sail.
Finally, I described the findings from the 2023 Pacific Ocean expedition to retrieve materials from IM1. My presentation concluded with our research plans to retrieve larger pieces from IM1’s wreckage in a follow-up expedition and to discover family members of `Oumuamua in forthcoming data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Altogether, the combination of art and science resulted in an amazing evening. It was a wonderful mix of music, poetry and science. When I praised the event to a BBC reporter the following morning, he asked what makes my interaction with artists so enjoyable. I replied that art and science explore reality in complementary ways. Both create new insights about reality. However, when a scientific finding is well established, all scientists refer to it in the same way. In the final phase, scientific content does not depend on the identity of the scientist who speaks about it. But creations by different artists are different because they represent their unique personal experiences. In fact, a completely different musical piece about `Oumuamua was composed and performed with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra in 2024 by the composer and cellist, Jeremy Lamb. In addition, my work on `Oumuamua inspired a 2023 play titled “A Piece of Sky” by the playwright Josh Ravetch and a song by Alan Bergman, and the Galileo Project inspired two bronze sculptures this year by the sculptor Greg Wyatt.
I find teaching science much more boring than creating science. In principle, the materials in scientific textbooks can be taught by any scientist who understands them well. However, discovering the scientific content that will appear in future textbooks is much more fun. First, there is the challenge of asking the right scientific question. Second there is the challenge of ignoring pushback from traditional thinkers who insist on past knowledge and are not imaginative enough to appreciate the value of new ideas. Finally, there is the challenge of solving the question and communicating the discovery to the world. The last part is particularly challenging if the discovery challenges dogma. In the case of continental drift, the mainstream community of experts ridiculed Alfred Wegener’s proposal from 1912 and only accepted it in the 1950s, two decades after Alfred died. The difference between teaching and creating science resembles the difference between being a coach versus being a player on the soccer field. The coach has the secondary privilege of jumping with joy when the player scores a goal. Many excellent coaches used to be good players, but few excellent players become good coaches.
In a new podcast recording that was posted publicly on the day after the musical event, I explained that science relies on data from instruments and not on eyewitness testimonies for the same reason that FIFA uses cameras and not reports from players to rule on what actually happened on the soccer field. Obviously, personal information about people is relevant for a medical doctor who examines them, because the state of the patients is part of the reality that is being assessed. However, physics is interested in the underlying physical reality and not in the response of people to it. That human response is what makes artistic depiction of life so beautiful.
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.
