Home > Author > Avi Loeb
1 " La generación anterior de físicos tenía la humildad suficiente para reconocer un error cuando los datos experimentales refutaban sus teorías. Pero la nueva cultura, que se regodea en su propia salsa teórica e influye en comités de premios y agencias de financiación, está formada por predicadores de paradigmas populares, pero no corroborados. "
― Avi Loeb , Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
2 " La humanidad ha pensando muy pocas veces en el bienestar colectivo, tanto durante los últimos siglos como en la actualidad. Entre los malos hábitos en que incurrimos, optamos repetidamente por los beneficios a corto plazo antes que por los beneficios a largo plazo. "
3 " Es habitual creer que la vida es una suma de los lugares que visitamos. Pero esto es una ilusión. La vida es una suma de sucesos, y estos sucesos son fruto de decisiones, pero solo algunas de ellas dependen de nosotros. "
4 " A more ambitious bet would be to learn from what we imagine a more mature civilization might have attempted. To take the small scientific leap and allow the possibility ‘Oumuamua was extraterrestrial technology is to give humanity the small nudge toward thinking like a civilization that could have left a lightsail buoy for our solar system to run into. It is to nudge us not just to imagine alien spacecraft but to contemplate the construction of our own such craft. "
5 " instructive to view things from ‘Oumuamua’s vantage point. From that object’s perspective, it was at rest and our solar system slammed into it. Or, in a way that works both metaphorically and, maybe, literally, perhaps ‘Oumuamua was like a buoy resting in the expanse of the universe, and our solar system was like a ship that ran into it at high speed. "
6 " Nuestros antepasados usaban términos como -viajar- y -explorar-; hoy, nos vamos de vacaciones. "
7 " Durante buena parte de nuestra historia, la gente ha recurrido a explicaciones místicas o religiosas para dar sentido a los hechos que carecían de causas evidentes. "
8 " La ciencia es ante todo una experiencia de aprendizaje, una vivencia que funciona mejor si somos humildes ante nuestros errores. "
9 " La física no es una actividad recreativa dedicada a hacernos sentir bien con nosotros mismos. La física es un diálogo con la naturaleza, no un monólogo. "
10 " ...aunque todos estamos compuestos de la misma materia ordinaria, eso no nos impide ser personas extraordinarias. "
11 " Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path. Life turns on your seeing clearly what’s in front of you. "
12 " One of the most difficult lessons to impart to young scientists is that the search for the truth can run counter to the search for consensus. Indeed, truth and consensus must never be conflated. Sadly, it is a lesson more easily understood by a student starting out in the field. From then on, year after year, the combined pressures of peers and job-market prospects encourage the tendency to play it safe. "
13 " Are you saying you’re Galileo? No. Not at all. What I wished to convey was that history has taught us to keep returning to the evidence about ‘Oumuamua, testing our hypotheses against it, and, when others try to silence us, whispering to ourselves, “And yet it deviated. "
14 " Sentient life’s common circumstance, to live and die without ever learning why, was, Camus believed, absurd. I believe that other sentient beings—who are bound by intellectual limitations, just as we are—will inevitably arrive at the same conclusion: life is absurd. "
15 " As it happens, the Sun-Earth system is anomalous in two clear respects. First, the Sun’s mass—330,000 times that of Earth—makes it more massive than 95 percent of all known stars. And while this does not rule out our interest in searching for life on planets orbiting more statistically average stars, given that we have limited resources of time and money, it encourages us to look for stars that are especially massive, like the one that sustains us. "
16 " Personally, I do not enjoy science fiction when it violates the laws of physics; I like science and I like fiction but only when they are honest, without pretensions. Professionally, I worry that sensationalized depictions of aliens have led to a popular and scientific culture in which it is acceptable to laugh off many serious discussions of alien life even when the evidence clearly indicates that this is a topic worthy of discussion; indeed, one that we ought to be discussing now more than ever. "
17 " For scientists, what remains of a theory after its contact with data is what is deemed beautiful. "
18 " It will be in our open-minded pursuit of data that confirms or disproves hypotheses that humanity’s claim to any universal intelligence will stand or fall. "
19 " I submit that the simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth. "
20 " Youth is a matter not of biological age but of attitude. It is what makes one person willing to open up new frontiers of scientific discovery while others try to stay within the traditional borders. "
