The Sunrise Ritual

During the pandemic, I developed a spiritual ritual of jogging every

morning at sunrise for three miles near my home, in the company of
colorful flowers, butterflies, birds, wild turkeys, rabbits and ducks.
The sunrise looks different each time, depending on cloudiness, rain
or snow. As a scientist, I find nature more imaginative and inspiring
than people. During my thirty-minute run, I digest the events of the
past day and contemplate exciting ideas for creative work in the new
day which was just born.

The pandemic illustrated how vulnerable I am to the invisible, but

had also been the most creative period in my career. It removed
distractions from unexpected visits to my office or time wasted on
commute to work and travel to public events, and improved my
efficiency at work by enabling multi-tasking during online meetings
or lectures. As a result, I was fortunate over the past 30 months to
write about 100 scientific papers, 160 commentaries and 3 books.

The fountain of ideas for creative writing is a surprise to me. Even

though I go through life attached to my body, my brain and my heart
are hidden “under the hood” and so I cannot take pride in the way
they operate. This constitutes a truism for all of us; we receive our
body as a package delivered by our parents, like a new car from a
dealer. Given that it was handed to us by external handlers, it is
rather surprising that we get attached to this package and derive
pride from its accomplishments. The most we can aspire for is the
role of a passenger and on occasion — the role of a driver.

But even as we drive, the destination is often out of our control. In

particular, the content of my creative writings surprises me and I
interpret its subconscious meanings in the same way as I would
interpret content that originated from a stranger. It is fun to watch
what comes out as a blank page gets filled up with my words. This
applies both to my literary writings and my scientific papers.
Whereas the former is the way a passenger reflects on the landscape
visible from the window of a driving car, the latter is an attempt to
make sense of how the car works under its hood or how the
landscape was shaped.

Science is our best hope for figuring out the reality we are born into,
allowing us to better adapt to it. Much of what we find around us is
circumstantial even though we tend to regard it as privileged upon
first encounter. As beautiful as it is, the transient sunrise I see every
morning is simply the result of the rotation of the Earth around its
axis. The habitable planets hosted by the nearest star, Proxima
Centauri, are likely tidally locked — showing the same face to their
star at all times. If I were to jog along the circumference bordering
the permanent nightside of these planets, I would see the sunrise
forever.

Given this cosmic perspective on circumstances, is there any

particular significance to our intelligent actions on this rock we call
our Earth, leftover from the formation of the nearest star, we call our
Sun? We now know that there are more stars like the Sun and
planets like the Earth in the observable volume of the Universe than
there are grains of sand on all beaches on Earth. But what about
intelligence?

We derive value from rarity. Gold is precious because it is a rare

metal on Earth. But it might not be so valuable on a planet which
formed near the site of a neutron star merger, where it was
generously enriched because such mergers are the most
abundant sources of gold. Similarly, the intelligence of humans on
Earth would not be as precious as we think, if it is abundant in
habitable exo-planets throughout the Milky Way. To find out, we
need to search.

The chance of finding a civilization at exactly our phase of

intellectual development is small. Most civilizations are either
inferior or superior to us. To find the former class, we will need to
visit the jungles of exo-planets, the natural environments similar to
those occupied by primitive human cultures throughout most of the
past million years. This task would require a huge amount of effort
and time given our current propulsion technologies. Chemical
rockets take at least forty thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri.

But if the most advanced civilizations started their scientific

endeavor long ago since their host stars formed billions of years
before the Sun, then we might not need to go anywhere since their
equipment may have already arrived to our cosmic neighborhood in
the form of interstellar objects or meteors. In that case, all we need
to do is become curious observers, like members of the Galileo
Project, who are currently assembling the Project’s first telescope
system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory.

The first three interstellar objects were discovered only over the past
decade. At the time of this writing, they include:

1. The first interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014–01–08, detected on

January 8, 2014 by US Government sensors near Papua New
Guinea. It was half a meter in size and exhibited material strength
tougher than iron. It was an outlier both in terms of its speed outside
the Solar system (representing the fastest five percent in the velocity
distribution of all stars in the vicinity of the sun) and its material
strength (representing less than five percent of all previous space
rocks). The Galileo Project plans an expedition to retrieve the
fragments of this meteor from the ocean floor, in an attempt to
determine the composition and structure of this unusual object and
find out whether it was natural or artificial in origin.

2. The unusual interstellar object, `Oumuamua (1I/2017 U1),

discovered by the Pan STARRS telescope in Hawaii on October 19,
2017, which was pushed away from the Sun by an excess force that
declined inversely with distance squared but showed no cometary
tail indicative of the rocket effect. Another object 2020 SO exhibiting
an excess push with no cometary tail, was discovered by the same
telescope in September 2020. It was later identified as a rocket
booster launched by NASA in 1966, being pushed by reflecting
sunlight from its thin walls. The Galileo Project aims to design a
space mission that will rendezvous with the next `Oumuamua and
get high quality data that will allow us to infer its nature. The Project
will rely on software that will identify targets of interest out of the
data pipeline Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the Vera
Rubin Observatory.

3. The comet 2I/Borisov, discovered on August 29, 2019 by the

amateur astronomer, Gannadiy V. Borisov. This
object resembled other comets found within the Solar system and
was definitely natural in origin.

It is surprising that two out of the first three interstellar objects

appear to be outliers based on our Solar system experience.
Moreover, there is intriguing evidence from government reports
on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

Our Sun, our Earth and our intelligence, are gifts of nature to which
we should be thankful, irrespective of how rare they are, because
they represent all we have for now. I express my personal gratitude
through my jog at sunrise, when all three come together to celebrate
a fresh beginning.