An expedition by Harvard physicist Avi Loeb with the potential to unearth insights into alien life is coming closer to fruition, the Daily Beast reports.
Loeb’s team is preparing to travel to Papua New Guinea to search for a meteorite that landed off the coast of the Pacific island nation in 2014. He described the expedition as justified but not without risk, the Daily Beast reported Thursday.
He and his team are targeting this particular meteorite because it is likely “from interstellar space,” according to a Jan. 27 post on Medium. The physicist added that “a boat” along with “a dream team” and approval from the Papua New Guinea government were in place for the expedition.
Any fragments found from the meteorite, dubbed CNEOS1 2014-01-08, would be extremely small at the scale of mere millimeters. Loeb told the Daily Beast such fragments have the potential to be “technological,” or artificially made.
EXCLUSIVE: Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.https://t.co/oE6n7YfkwQ
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 23, 2023
If the fragments turn out to be “technological,” they could be indicative of the potential existence of alien life somewhere in the universe, Loeb told the outlet. They could also be a special kind of metal, with Loeb pointing out that either way, “we will learn something new.”
Loeb and his team plan on scouring the seafloor for a period of two weeks with an array of specialized sifters, some with magnetic assistance, designed to comb through the sand and find the meteorite fragments, the outlet reported. (RELATED: Pentagon Officials Suggest Aliens Could Send Probes To Earth)
Even if the fragments are not indicative of alien life, the expedition “could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor, and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites,” NASA astronomer Ravi Kopparapu told the Daily Beast.
The expedition, eight years in the making, is set to sail in the coming summer. Loeb acknowledged a chance that the project will be unsuccessful, but told the outlet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”