New York Times reporting: In his new book, the astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. In October 2017, a telescope in Maui, Hawaii, captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search. By Farhad Manjoo.