Bryce Zabel is one of my favorite contemporary seekers after truth, as regards the whole matter of the possibilities of extraterrestrial intelligence. It is refreshing to have a person of his intellectual equanimity, training and qualifications (both 'street creds' and academia) weighing in on this ever-more- important subject.

In a similar vein is astrophysicist, astronomer and philosopher Avi Loeb, who in his excellent, recently published book ('Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth', 2021, IBSN 9780358278146), examines the possible implications of what may well be an artificially created entity (the extra-solar system object 'Oumuamua' that entered our system at a speed in excess of 25,000 mph on a most unusual trajectory that took it around our sun and back out of the system again). His conclusions are both extremely astute and sagacious.

As usual, I came across this seminal book of Loeb's rather after the fact, but it deserves to be read by anyone and everyone who has even a vestige of interest in Zabel's thesis, here.

Loeb, born in a Jewish kibbutz and now a Canadian citizen, is a self-declared secularist and for a person such as myself, who also maintains a secular orientation to life, his arguments are most compelling indeed.

As he reminds us (something also previously remarked upon by Isaac Asimov), “..any sufficiently advanced civilisation will appear to us as an approximation of God.”

[A related brief article by Loeb that is worth reading (in Scientific American) appears here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/advanced-extraterrestrials-as-an-approximation-to-god/ ]