By Tim Binnall
A Harvard astronomer has put forward the intriguing suggestion that the surface of the moon may serve as a proverbial 'fishing net' for evidence of alien life. Abraham Loeb, who chairs the Astronomy Department at the prestigious Ivy League university, detailed this new tantalizing theory in an op-ed for Scientific American that was published on Wednesday. In the piece, he notes that the moon possesses two attributes which make it an ideal location to find possible extraterrestrial clues.
Specifically, he says that "the lack of a lunar atmosphere guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up." Loeb also argued that, since the moon has no geological activity, anything that may have hit the celestial body in the past "will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior." Taken together and combined with the fact that the moon is 4.5 billion years old, the astronomer observed that the lunar surface serves as "a natural mailbox" containing all manner of materials, including some which could have come from aliens.
To that end, as for what sort of things could be sitting on the lunar surface waiting to be discovered, Loeb posited that there may be evidence of aliens by way of biomarkers which "would inform us about the nature of extraterrestrial life." Additionally, he postulated that there could even be "microfossils of extraterrestrial forms of life on the moon." But, by far, the most fantastic potential find suggested by Loeb is the scenario that we uncover "traces of technological equipment that crashed on the lunar surface a billion years ago, amounting to a letter from an alien civilization saying, 'we exist.'"
With that in mind, Loeb mused that the possibility that the moon could actually be covered with alien evidence "provides a new scientific incentive for a sustainable base on the lunar surface." Remarkably, this is not the first time that the Harvard astronomer has backed an extraterrestrial hypothesis as he made waves last year when he suggested that the interstellar object 'Oumuamua could have actually been an alien probe observing our solar system.