Practicing Science is a Low Risk, High Paying Career

Avi Loeb
(Image credit: The Tribune)

While talking about Munich Security Conference in February 2024, I saw explosives on the roof whose purpose was to protect political dignitaries like the Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris, who was present at the same event. During a different public event this week at Boston Museum of ScienceI was joined by best-selling author Patricia Cornwell who was accompanied by two bodyguards.

No one was guarding my body during these two incidents. Therefore, I reasoned that doing scientific work is a less dangerous job than working as a politician or a crime writer. Earlier this week, my podcast discussion about science got more views than a simultaneous podcast about the US Presidential Election with candidate Kamala Harris. This was explained to me by the suggestion that science offers a more exciting perspective than political conflict. So, I came up with an encouraging message for budding scientists: science is a low-risk, high-paying job. If artificial intelligence can relieve us of boring or depressing jobs, we can all be scientists.

Science flourishes because of collaboration and knowledge sharing, rather than zero-sum approaches required by politics. In its purest form, science is a never-ending game in which everyone benefits from new knowledge. However, this integrity is actually compromised by bad actors who politicize science.

My biggest disappointment involves science influencers who don’t use science, but pretend to be the “adults in the room” who defend science from…innovators who actually use science. These inspiring people are haunted by scientists who open new frontiers of research that challenge traditional thinking. Not seeing the joy that drives creative research, they become traditionalists and protect the knowledge of the past by standing against new frontiers of research, such as Galileo ProjectA scientific search for scientific artifacts. I won’t mention the names of these influencers because they don’t deserve the attention they are getting.

Another unfortunate feature of the environment surrounding the scientific method, are scientists who are jealous that others are receiving public attention and do their best to suppress such attention by providing false information to journalists. of the media or with behind-the-scenes personal attacks. Ad absurdum, this manifests itself in the statement that the interstellar meteor was a truck even when they knew that the location of the meteor was set when the satellites of the US government detected a fire that released part of the energy of the bomb Hiroshima atom. This amazing statement was passed on to science journalists who published it without fact checking in search of arguments and arguments. The fact that this statement has no negative impact became clear from a subsequent paper by the Spanish astronomer Hector Socas-Navarro, who argued that the stellar origin of this meteor may be in ts 94.1% mining, does not account for the independently stated 99.999% reliability. in an official letter from the US Space Command to NASA. A detailed paper analyzing materials taken from the meteorite area has revealed meteoritic drops of unknown origin that may be outside the solar system. This careful analysis went unreported by clickbait-seeking journalists who were informed of the paper’s individual press release. As I told a New York Times editor: If journalists don’t pay attention to the facts when they report on science, how can we trust what they report on politics?

Politics is based on beliefs or sentiments that can easily be controlled by desired desires. However, the professional approach to science requires hard work and the humility of a beginner’s mind. The ease with which opinions can be spread was highlighted by the fact that a false statement about the origin of meteor stars was spread quickly and without obtaining information from the meteor site. A careful analysis of these materials in three reputable laboratories (UC Berkeley, Bruker Corporation and Harvard University) took a whole year for my research team to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

Happily, real pay from science practice doesn’t ask for approval from journalists, science influencers or reward committee members. Rather, it is the simple reward we get for understanding something new about the universe by gathering evidence out of open curiosity. If the Galileo Project research team can find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, any recognition given by Earthlings will be dwarfed by the psychological reward of knowing that we are not alone in our universe. I would trade all the money and world class for that knowledge.

Politicians fund science at less than a few percent of military spending. Due to the large investments in monitoring the sky for the sake of national security, it should not be surprising if the American government will be the first to notice unusual objects from other places. Such information should be shared with working scientists, like myself, whose day job is to discover what’s outside the Solar System.

My hope is that the next congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) will bring us closer to the scientific distribution of any interesting data the government has. Meanwhile, the Galileo Project is about to release a new paper with the first results from our first lab at Harvard University. While looking up at the sky, our cameras saw meteors but never the truck. We leave truck discussions to science influencers, jealous scientists or science journalists. Instead, our Galileo Project researchers choose to focus on their low-risk, high-reward work of collecting quality scientific data and analyzing it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(Image credit: Chris Michel, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s – Black Hole Initiative, director of the Center for Theory and Communication at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics, and 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 chairman of the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academy. He is the best-selling author of “extraterrestrial: First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and co-author of the book “Life Cosmos“, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, called “Interstellar”, published in August 2024.

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