Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars

When a plumber arrived today to solve a gutter problem in my backyard, he looked at me and said: “I saw you in the news. Your job is to look at the stars!” This reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s insight: “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25-we-are-all-in-the-gutter-but-some-of-us" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars</a>.” Fifteen years ago, I visited Tasmania where the sky is dark with no city lights. The stars looked to me like lights from the cabins of a giant ship, the Milky Way galaxy, sailing through the ocean of space. I wondered whether there are other passengers next to these lights. This is a common thought. Even though I get paid to think about the sky, I do not regard myself different from the general public. I was born on a farm in an unprivileged background. The most frustrating experience for me as a child was asking difficult questions at the dinner table. The adults in the room avoided or pretended to know — but did not actually know — the answers to these questions. By becoming a scientist, I hoped to find the answers myself, guided by evidence and not opinions. But ironically, I now find myself surrounded by colleagues who wish to be the adults in the rooms of academia. They have strong opinions and are not seeking evidence. Not much had changed from my childhood. I remained a curious boy, frustrated by the “adults in the room”. Currently, space exploration is motivated by commercial interests or national security benefits. A more inspiring motivation would be childlike curiosity of exploring the unknown. For example, Gil Levine wrote <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/im-convinced-we-found-evidence-of-life-on-mars-in-the-1970s/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">an essay in 2019</a> in which he expressed the view that he is convinced that the Labeled Release experiment on the Viking mission, for which he served as a principal investigator, found evidence for life on Mars. Despite the controversy around this finding from half a century ago, NASA never repeated the experiment to clarify the situation. Instead of following childlike curiosity on one of the most important questions in science, the scientific community adopted a risk-averse strategy to avoid this question altogether. <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/some-of-us-are-looking-at-the-stars-674383385039">Website</a>