You can listen to the #2401 – Avi Loeb using Speak’s shareable media player:
#2401 – Avi Loeb Podcast Episode Description
Avi Loeb, PhD, is a theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is “Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars.”
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at https://happydad.com
A House of Dynamite, now streaming only on Netflix.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This interactive media player was created automatically by Speak. Want to generate intelligent media players yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#2401 – Avi Loeb Podcast Episode Top Keywords
#2401 – Avi Loeb Podcast Episode Summary
Based on the provided context, the phrase “has joined the group” refers to someone becoming a member of a group, band, club, or team. Throughout the conversation, there are multiple references to joining various groups, inviting members, and welcoming new people. Specific examples include:
– “we joined the band”
– “He should’ve joined the…”
– “Join the team.”
– “Welcome to the club.”
– “add one more bestie.”
– “they’re in, they’re in.”
– “invite you to…”
These statements all indicate the act of someone joining or being added to a group or collective. However, the context does not specify exactly who “has joined the group” in a particular instance. The general meaning is clear: it signifies the addition of a new member to a group. If you are looking for a specific individual who joined a specific group, that information is not explicitly provided in the context.
Continue reading the full guide (click to expand)
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#2401 – Avi Loeb Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe
Speaker: 1
00:04
Rogan experience. Ai meh day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Speaker: 0
00:12
Want to run this on your own file?
Upload audio, video, or text and get a transcript, summary, and insights in minutes.
Free trial includes 30 minutes (60 with a work email)
Alright. Good to
Speaker: 1
00:13
see you, sir.
Speaker: 0
00:14
Great to be with you, Joe.
Speaker: 1
00:15
It’s a perfect ai to bring you on because, ai
Speaker: 0
00:19
are getting very wild. Yeah. There is a lot of misinformation. You know, some people sai, I invented three Ai Atlas, this object, in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.
Speaker: 1
00:28
Is that what people are saying?
Speaker: 0
00:30
Yeah. And I said, look. This object is the size of Manhattan Island. It’s at four and a half times the Earth’s land separation. If I was able to put it out there, you know, Ai would be more powerful than the pope. And because we’re talking about a giant object that you can see from any place on Earth, you know, you can buy online, a telescope that will allow half a meter in size that will allow you to see it.
Speaker: 0
00:57
It’s out there. It cannot be faked.
Speaker: 1
01:00
Well, those people are fools. You can’t listen to those people.
Speaker: 0
01:03
I don’t listen to those. I I don’t listen to many people, you know.
Speaker: 1
01:07
Initially, a lot of people were dismissing your concerns, and they were saying that this object is nothing but a comet, and it’s very normal. But then as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you’re correct.
Speaker: 0
01:21
Well, I
Speaker: 1
01:22
This is a very unusual object.
Speaker: 0
01:24
There is something really important to recognize here that usually when you deal with scientific matters, they have very little impact on the future of humanity. Very little. You know, if the neutrino has a little bit of a mass, doesn’t really matter. You know, when we discovered the Higgs boson, the biggest impact was to confirm some idea we had back in the sixties.
Speaker: 0
01:46
And, you know, obviously, that affected, you know, the those people who got the Nobel Ai, but most of us continued, as if nothing happened. However, here, if we ever encounter alien technology, everything will change. It will affect the financial arya. It will affect politics in a major way. So my point is simple.
Speaker: 0
02:08
This is different than other scientific matters, and the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be considered seriously because they have they could have major implications. Just think about October 7. The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamas will do nothing, and they got data that indicated something is going on out there, but they dismissed it because of their theory.
Speaker: 0
02:40
Now because as a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot of people died on both sides for that this could have been avoided if they were to consider a black swan event, an event that you put a small probability for it happening, but you look at anomalies in the data and say, look, the implications are so huge, we have to consider it.
Speaker: 0
03:03
And, you know, this idea was already considered by the philosopher mathematician, Blaise Pascal. He talked about God. And he sai, look, of course you might think that God doesn’t exist, the probability for that is small, but the implications, if God exists, the implications are so huge that we have to discuss it.
Speaker: 0
03:23
That was the argument, Pascal’s wager, and the intelligence agencies know that. Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again. Now here comes an object from outside the solar system, and it shows anomalies. The ai would say we should be as careful as possible at talking about anything other than a rock.
Speaker: 0
03:47
Now they say that when they know that we launched, humanity launched a lot of space junk, you know, a lot of technological objects to speak, and we also know that there are a 100,000,000,000 stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most of them formed billions of years before the sana, and there are billions of earth sun analogs.
Speaker: 0
04:09
Now we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals. You know, that’s the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this earth. And so it’s quite likely that, you know, we are not the first one. Sorry to break the news. Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang thirteen point eight billion years ago.
Speaker: 0
04:32
And therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us. And you can ask the question, how long does it take our own technology, the Voyager spacecraft that we launched out of the solar system, how long does it take it to move to the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy?
Speaker: 0
04:50
You know, thousands of light years away takes less than a billion years. And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it. And all we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks, or maybe one of these objects might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor.
Speaker: 0
05:23
And the reason I say that is, you know, we live at our home, at our at the on Earth next to the sai. We look around us in the cosmic street, and we see a lot of houses just like ours. There are billions of them probably. Now my colleagues, those scientists who think traditionally, they say, well, you know, microbes came to Earth very early. Therefore, they must be everywhere.
Speaker: 0
05:52
So let’s define our highest priority searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street. And I say, good. You can do that from the vantage point of your home. You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor’s yards, but you would need to put $10,000,000,000 to develop a big enough instrument that would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes, you know, on exoplanets.
Speaker: 0
06:19
And think about the possibility that there was actually, there is a resident in one of those houses. You know, that resident might show up in your front door at some point, or you might sai, an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that per a resident.
Speaker: 1
06:40
Event.
Speaker: 0
06:40
A black swan event. Or you might see some construction project in from a distance. That might be easier to detect than ai, so we should hedge our bets. You know, we should, invest billions of dollars on both fronts. At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10,000,000,000 to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence.
Speaker: 0
07:09
And I say that that is an oversight.
Speaker: 1
07:12
Now they have found evidence of microbes on Mars. Correct?
Speaker: 0
07:16
Well, it’s not Not in the sense. Conclusive. We need to bring materials back. It’s called sample return, and NASA has plans. We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories, we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that do look as if they were made by microbes because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth.
Speaker: 0
07:41
By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it’s a smaller body, so it has a bigger surface area for its mass. The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process, and then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool. And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth.
Speaker: 0
07:58
So life may have started on Mars actually because it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water, and it could have been actually delivered to Earth. You know, we might be all Arya, and when Elon Musk, you know, considers going to Mars, it might be the second trip around. We might be going back to our ai home, because there were tiny astronauts inside rocks that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth and seeded the Earth with life as we know it.
Speaker: 1
08:30
Panspermia.
Speaker: 0
08:31
Panspermia. Yeah. And and in fact, you know, we can find out. If we get this material back to Earth as NASA is planning to do, hopefully within a decade, then we can make sure that these were ai. And perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of process took place in both places.
Speaker: 1
08:55
This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. When it came time to make a website, there was no question that we would power it with Squarespace. From the intuitive design intelligence that helps to create a bespoke digital identity to the seamless payment options that can help give your customers more ways to pay or the fact that you can measure your end to end online performance with powerful website and seller analytics.
Speaker: 1
09:18
The reasons to power your website with Squarespace are endless. So if you’re looking to build or even upgrade your current website, check out squarespace.com for a trial or go to squarespace.com/rogan to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars, particularly the right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure?
Speaker: 0
09:46
Yeah. I’ve I’ve seen, the data. It’s not conclusive, but it’s intriguing because both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere right now. So what happens on Earth is that when an object roughly the size of a person, you know, or smaller goes through the atmosphere, it burns up, creates a fireball, just like an atomic explosion, you know.
Speaker: 0
10:07
And, actually, you have an object of order emitter colliding with Earth every year. Every year, there is an atomic explosion size ai in our atmosphere. It’s not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers, so it doesn’t do anything. And, you know, 71% of the Earth is covered by oceans. But, yes. Sai, these meteors and, you know, they they are quite, important.
Speaker: 0
10:39
Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66,000,000 ago were extinguished by a giant impact ai an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island. And, we are aware, by the way, that such an impact could endanger us, and that’s why, the US Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come close to Earth, with a size bigger than a football field, about a 140 meters, so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs.
Speaker: 0
11:11
So we think we are smart. We can see these rocks coming. But just imagine alien technology, it will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it, and that’s a risk that was never attended to. And I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical Union to, develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come from outside the solar system like three Ai Atlas, that, could that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin.
Speaker: 1
11:44
The the structures on Mars, like, what what do you think when you look at them? When you see that one that was I
Speaker: 0
11:50
think it’s very intriguing. Both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere, so the objects that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before about Earth. And, therefore, they serve as museums. Okay? So any, you know, space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two billion years would not have burned in the atmosphere.
Speaker: 0
12:13
It would have landed, and and and we can we need to check the surface even if we know that, you know, there wasn’t any civilization out there over the past two billion years because conditions are really harsh. Right. The Mars may have collected technological debris from other civilizations because it would stay on the surface. It’s just like a museum.
Speaker: 1
12:35
This is an enormous structure. It’s at least they think I think ai think, 300 meters, but Yeah.
Speaker: 0
12:41
But that’s not enormous because
Speaker: 1
12:42
Ai a bit longer.
Speaker: 0
12:43
Three Ai Atlas the size of three I Atlas Right. Is at least five kilometers that in diameter. And the, I derived it in a paper, a couple of weeks ago because we know that it’s losing mass. So and and it’s mostly from the side that is facing the sana. Uh-huh. And you would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction just like a rocket.
Speaker: 1
13:06
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
13:07
And I used, together with two colleagues, 4,000 data points from 227 observatories around the Earth of three a Atlas that monitored its motion across the ai. And and, we were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity. There is no evidence for this recoil, and that means that the object is very massive.
Speaker: 0
13:33
And I derived the value of 33,000,000,000 tons, A huge thing, which if you take solid density, it means it’s more than five kilometers in diameter. So when you meh a few 100 meters, that’s nothing.
Speaker: 1
13:47
Right.
Speaker: 0
13:47
And this object, by the way, was discovered just over the past decade, of of serving the ai, you know. So who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the moon because they arya good museums, you know, for for and ai the way, I see that as their most important value.
Speaker: 0
14:06
Let me just say one thing about ai, fundamental point of view. Okay. You know, each of us, would live for about a hundred years if we are lucky. Right? That’s the kind of it’s pretty depressing. Right? Because there there is so much we we would like to know, and we have only a 100.
Speaker: 0
14:26
So and, you know, that already tells you that you need to be modest and humble because you don’t have a lot of time. Right? So ai engage in conflicts? Why reduce the the lifespan of other people, you know, in wars? It it makes no sense, all of this. Right. You have limited time.
Speaker: 0
14:43
Let’s just use it for something constructive. Anyway, we are born on this rock, which is just three millions of the mass of the sun. It’s leftover material from the formation process of the sun. Some debris was left over in a disk, and the Earth was made out of that. That’s it.
Speaker: 0
15:01
And it’s just a speck of material, nothing significant. And this Earth was moving around the sun 4,540,000,000 times before the Vatican even existed. And why do I say the Vatican? Because the Vatican put Galileo Galilei in house arrest when he said, I don’t think everything moves around the Earth.
Speaker: 0
15:25
I see some moons through my telescope. You know, I I see some moons, around Jupiter, and they don’t seem to revolve around the Earth. They revolve around Jupiter. Therefore, the Earth is not at the center. So they put him in house arrest. Today, they would have, you know, canceled him on social media.
Speaker: 0
15:41
And and my point is that’s the first sign that, you know, humans are they want to think that it’s all about them, you know, like and it’s not surprising. But the Vatican admitted their mistake. In 1992, they issued an official letter saying Galileo was right. That was three hundred and fifty years after he died.
Speaker: 0
16:02
And, you know, it’s the worst public relations affair that you can have to admit that you were wrong for for, you know, like, three hundred and fifty years. And how could they have avoided that? Very simply, if they said we have more money than Galileo, we will be build an even bigger telescope to figure out the truth, and we would prove him wrong.
Speaker: 0
16:27
And then they would have found that he was right. And so then they would have corrected course, showed
Speaker: 1
16:33
the others. Put more people under house arrest. That’s probably what they would have done.
Speaker: 0
16:37
Yeah. So so my point is it’s really important in cases like this or three Sai Vatsal, it’s really important to get as much data as possible because once you reach a certain threshold, you can’t shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking the way that my colleagues do.
Speaker: 0
16:53
Just to give an example, the first interstellar object was Oumuamua. Okay? And it was discovered 2,017, and it it was really strange because, you know, the it was shaped like a pancake based on the all the data we have, and, and it was pushed away from the sun ai some mysterious force without showing any evaporation, no gas or dust around it.
Speaker: 0
17:19
What did these conservative comet experts sai? Most recently, just just in December 2024, there was a paper of them saying, it’s a comet. It’s a dark comet. In other words, a comet where you can’t see the cometary tail around it. So it’s just like experts, you know, specializing in zebras, and they go to the zoo and they see an elephant.
Speaker: 0
17:46
So then they say, oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes. And I say, no. It’s a completely different animal. You know, a spacecraft would appear differently than a rock, than a comet because it will not have a a a a cometary tail. It could be propelled by something else. So so let me go back to the big picture that I mentioned before.
Speaker: 0
18:07
So we live on this Earth moving around the sana, and my colleagues in academia you know, one thing I often say is common sense is not common in academia Because my colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo. They know very well about the possibility of black swans, and they say it’s an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us, as smart as we are, near another star.
Speaker: 0
18:37
And I say, no. It’s an ordinary claim. Why would you think it’s extraordinary? And ai the way, if you decide not to collect evidence, not to look for it, then you will not find it. So I say and, you know, I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. You really need to put resources to find the evidence.
Speaker: 0
18:59
By not attending to to this possibility, you will not by not imagining this. And by the way, I much prefer to listen to imaginative science fiction writers, you know, first class Mhmm. Because they’re much more interesting than second class scientists who don’t have an imagination, and they don’t they not only have a problem with discussing alien intelligence, they also have a problem with whoever discusses it, and they would try to suppress that voice.
Speaker: 0
19:31
And I think it makes no sense whatsoever because the public really cares about it. You know, my essays on medium.com, they get a few million readers a month now. The public cares about it. The public funds science. Therefore, scientists should attend to this question. Are we alone? It’s the most romantic question in science.
Speaker: 0
19:51
You know, it’s like so so just to finish my big picture before we get to to more. So then, you know, we live on this planet. Everyone says, okay. We are not at the center of the universe, but we might be the only intelligent species out there.
Speaker: 1
20:07
This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. A nice cold Happy dad is low carbonation, gluten free, and easy to drink. No bloating, no nonsense. Whether you’re watching a football game or you’re golfing, watching a fight with your boys, or out on the lake, these moments call for a cold happy dad.
Speaker: 1
20:26
People are drinking all these seltzers in skinny cans loaded with sugar, but happy dad only has one gram of sugar in a normal ai can. Can’t decide on a flavor? Grab the variety speak. Lemon lime, watermelon, pineapple, and wild cherry. They also have a grape flavor in collaboration with Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg. They have their new lemonade coming out as well.
Speaker: 1
20:51
Happy Dad, available nationwide across America and in Canada. Go to your local liquor store or visit happydad.com. For a limited time, use the code Rogan to buy one Happy Dad trucker hat and get one free. Enjoy a cold Happy Dad. Must be of legal drinking age.
Speaker: 1
21:10
Please drink responsibly. Happy dad hard seltzer, tea, and lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California.
Speaker: 0
21:20
Again, we need the next Copernican revolution, the next Galilean revolution to realize that there is a smarter kid on the block. Okay? And it’s just like the experience of my daughters on the first day to the kindergarten. They at home, they thought that they are the center of the of the universe because they had a you know, tyler, learning, was based on a a a dataset that was limited to home.
Speaker: 0
21:47
It’s just like LLMs, you know, artificial intelligence systems that learn from their datasets, and they had limited environment. And then when they went to the kindergarten, they realized their kids are just like them, some are smarter. So we are yet to mature in that sense, and that’s the big picture. Now why is it so important for the future of humanity?
Speaker: 0
22:06
Because, you know, the Earth is not would not exist forever. By the way, when people talk about ai, global climate change and so forth, they don’t realize, you know, the issue is not the Earth. The issue is humanity, the future of humanity. And, you know, the Earth itself would be very ai, based on detailed calculations, it will be engulfed by the sun in seven point six billion years.
Speaker: 0
22:31
And here is something that you won’t find much discussed. The moon, because of the friction on the envelope of the sun, will crash back to Earth, and then the Earth will move all the way to the center of the sun. Nothing will be left. No monument will survive seven point six billion years ago, into the future.
Speaker: 0
22:53
And we have an obligation if we want to be remembered on cosmic in cosmic history, you know, we have an obligation not to go to Mars. That’s not really a a great vision, you know. Going to Mars is just like, you know, you have a a group of chimpanzees, living in a in the jungle, you know, in in a, you know, on some trees and they have some bananas and so forth.
Speaker: 0
23:19
And then one of the chimpanzees looks far far away into the horizon and says, oh, look up there. There is another region that that we can go to. And and it, actually, it’s clear that there are no bananas there. So the same is about Mars, you know, like Saloni says, let’s go to Mars to save humanity, but it’s actually not a great place to be on.
Speaker: 1
23:40
There is not start somewhere. You You have to start somewhere. No. Here is my ai.
Speaker: 0
23:44
So here is my point.
Speaker: 1
23:45
Okay. Here’s your point.
Speaker: 0
23:47
It makes much more sense for us to invest in building a platform in space that can accommodate humans, not rely on another rock that happens to be near us with much worse conditions. It’s a desert, no atmosphere. So let’s build a space platform, go on it, and make sure that it’s safe for humans to live for long periods of time.
Speaker: 0
24:09
We can produce artificial gravity by rotation. Now you say, well, it will cost a lot of money, but we arya spending $2,400,000,000,000 every year on military budgets. If we were just to change our priorities and sai, we want to build NOAC’s spaceship, in analogy to NOAC’s arya, to save humanity Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
24:30
From the great flood or catastrophe that will happen on Earth. You build such you you put a fraction of this $2,400,000,000,000 a year, and I’m willing to bet that within this century, our engineers, architects, scientists, if you put a level of funding of a trillion dollars a year for the next speak several decades, we will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better than Mars can.
Speaker: 1
24:58
Okay. I wanna get back to Mars because the structures on Mars, why ai you think that they came from space debris rather than a prior civilization?
Speaker: 0
25:11
Because, well, Mars Let’s
Speaker: 1
25:13
take a look at it first. Jamie, will you pull up those images? So what’s fascinating about the images is the right angles. Right? Like, that one that yeah. Yeah. That’s good. Like, that’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?
Speaker: 0
25:26
It is.
Speaker: 1
25:26
And that doesn’t strike me as something that landed there from space. It looks like a structure. It’s just it’s too even.
Speaker: 0
25:34
Yeah. Well, it could be that then.
Speaker: 1
25:36
It could be.
Speaker: 0
25:36
It could be if, the evolution of intelligence on Mars was accelerated by a factor of two. You know, that’s not a big factor. Factor of two
Speaker: 1
25:45
Right.
Speaker: 0
25:45
Tyler, help it. Intelligence arose on Mars Right. Two billion years after it formed rather than, in the case of the Earth, 4.5 or so. Right. And, you know, one thing I really want to do is if I ever have a say or or go to Mars, I would like to visit those caves, the lava tubes in Mars because they are protected from the surface, you know, bombardment by cosmic rays and all kinds of things happening, the ultraviolet radiation.
Speaker: 0
26:16
So in those caves, I want to check if there are any prehistoric paintings or any technological objects there. I completely agree with you. A factor of two is not a big deal. And you can ask also whether on Earth there was a sophisticated technological civilization before us that somehow, you know, either through self inflicted wounds or because of a natural catastrophe disappeared.
Speaker: 0
26:41
Well, there’s
Speaker: 1
26:41
a lot of people that think that, especially now that they’re looking at the pyramids and these structures that appear to be underneath the pyramids that they’re examining. Those, Italian scientists that have found these structures that are up to two kilometers deep.
Speaker: 0
26:55
Right.
Speaker: 1
26:55
Is there some wild stuff in Egypt?
Speaker: 0
26:57
Well, I want to see that data. I haven’t seen the paper itself. I just saw reports about it. But, definitely on Earth as well. And the problem of Earth is that documented human history is only 8,000 years old. Right. And 8,000 years, you know, is just a millionth of, the age of the Milky Way galaxy.
Speaker: 0
27:17
It’s But are you,
Speaker: 1
27:19
including things like Gobekli Tepe in that? Because that’s 11,000 plus.
Speaker: 0
27:22
So that yeah. But it’s not really documented in written form, you know, like
Speaker: 1
27:26
Right.
Speaker: 0
27:27
So I’m talking about perhaps though. Yeah. But you are correct that, our knowledge of what happened on Earth is really limited because the human species existed for a few million years, and we have documentation at the level of ten thousand year if you go back to that, it would be eleven thousand five.
Speaker: 0
27:44
Not a lot. Not much more.
Speaker: 1
27:46
But Well, the the issue is actual evidence. Right? There’s just not a lot of evidence because a lot of evidence just gets swallowed by the Earth. Exactly. Especially over long periods of time, which is why it’s so fascinating looking at that thing on Mars. Because if there was any kind of life that was capable of building structures on Mars, it had to be a long time ago.
Speaker: 1
28:06
Like, when was Mars, there there’s a a bunch of theories. Maybe you could help me. Like, what do you think is the predominant theory that explains the lack of atmosphere on Mars?
Speaker: 0
28:17
Do you think it was an impact? No. Mars is a less massive planet than the Earth, and therefore, it has less gravitational grip on its atmosphere. And then as to why the atmosphere was lost, there are various ideas. You know, it may have to do with an eruption on the sun that removed it, or, the magnetic field, the the the lack of strong enough magnetic field to retain the atmosphere.
Speaker: 0
28:44
We don’t know for sure, but we know it happened about two to two and a half billion years ago, the middle of its life.
Speaker: 1
28:51
Can I ask you this?
Speaker: 0
28:52
At two
Speaker: 1
28:52
and a half billion years, what was it closer to the sun?
Speaker: 0
28:56
No. No. No. It was roughly at the same place. Yeah. Mhmm. Okay. Yeah. And then And
Speaker: 1
29:01
then sai two and a half billion years ago, it lost its atmosphere. Yes. So if it did have life, that life would have to so we would have to be looking at something that’s literally two plus billion years old
Speaker: 0
29:13
Yes.
Speaker: 1
29:13
The remnants of a structure, which also seems kind of unlikely. Right? It also seems like there probably wouldn’t be much there.
Speaker: 0
29:20
I actually did a calculation. The biggest, risk for anything on the surface is all these impacts ai asteroids, and I calculated that
Speaker: 1
29:28
The ai, everything. Right? Because there’s nothing stopping.
Speaker: 0
29:31
That’s right. And I calculated the amount of energy over a few billion years that was deposited on the surface of Mars Yeah. Is equivalent to, you know, hundreds of Hiroshima type nuclear explosions per square kilometer. It’s really huge.
Speaker: 1
29:48
Right.
Speaker: 0
29:48
And because you’re integrating over billions of years.
Speaker: 1
29:51
So that square probably wouldn’t be there anymore?
Speaker: 0
29:55
Well, there could be some relics, that somehow speak, you know. Like, it depends what it was originally, you know. If Right. The Empire State Building, you know, even after
Speaker: 1
30:05
Ai was enormous and made completely out of stone ai the pyramids. Maybe that’s what would be left of it.
Speaker: 0
30:10
Maybe I think we should be definitely open minded and guided by evidence. That’s the key.
Speaker: 1
30:16
Well, that’s what’s interesting is because that is evidence.
Speaker: 0
30:18
That is evidence. We should go there, you know, clear the dust and see if if it’s just a rock that happened to be shaped like that. I mean, you could have rocks that are shaped like that.
Speaker: 1
30:28
Let let’s bring it back to this. Is it three a I Vatsal?
Speaker: 0
30:32
No. Three I Atlas. Three I Atlas. Three means it’s the third object identified by survey telescopes over the past eight years. We didn’t have the technology before that. Mhmm. And so we just don’t know how much traffic there is
Speaker: 1
30:46
of interstellar Meh missed a lot.
Speaker: 0
30:48
So we had, you know, the first survey telescope that found Oumuamua was Pan STARRS in Ai. And the reason it was constructed is because the US Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to Earth. These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on Earth. We want to protect the Earth, so we want to know about them.
Speaker: 0
31:10
And they asked Ai and the National Science Foundation to search, you know, to build observatories that will search for such objects, and, that’s why Pan STARRS was established. And then it saw a near Earth object, so they flagged it for that reason, and they realized it’s moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sana, and that was Oumuamua.
Speaker: 0
31:33
And then it looks looked weird. Now I had no agenda. I was working on cosmology. At the time, you know, I was working on black holes. I was the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, and Stephen Hawking had passed over at my home in 2016. This object was discovered a year later.
Speaker: 0
31:51
And, I said, well, okay. That’s interesting, but it has anomalies. You know? The amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10 as it’s stumbling. That’s really strange.
Speaker: 0
32:03
And I started getting more and more into the anomalies. And I
Speaker: 1
32:08
just had no previous to that, you had no real connection to the UAP phenomenon sana
Speaker: 0
32:15
nothing? Zero.
Speaker: 1
32:16
Sai you’re just basing entirely on the data that you were getting from Yeah. And I’d say it Oumuamua.
Speaker: 0
32:22
Oumuamua.
Speaker: 1
32:22
Oumuamua.
Speaker: 0
32:23
And, you know, I am driven by curiosity. I’m no different than the the kid that I was. You know, I grew up on a farm, and people who knew me back then say I didn’t change. I’m not willing to change what I say just for political benefit or for just to be liked, but I don’t have any social media accounts.
Speaker: 0
32:43
I don’t care about that. But when something
Speaker: 1
32:46
god. Somebody.
Speaker: 0
32:48
Well, it’s thanks to my wife, not God. My wife sai, you should not have any footprint on so she’s really wise. She’s wise. And that was a deck more than a decade ago.
Speaker: 1
32:58
Wow. She she spotted the problem real early.
Speaker: 0
33:01
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
33:01
Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar winning director of The Hurt Locker and zero Dark 30 takes you deep inside the world of US government and military, a world most of us never sai, but that impacts us all. It’s an authentic look at how America might respond to a nuclear attack showing the human side of impossible decisions under unimaginable stress.
Speaker: 1
33:27
A house of dynamite now streaming only on Netflix.
Speaker: 0
33:32
And now with AI, we’re talking about social media on steroids.
Speaker: 1
33:35
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
33:35
It’s really bad. By the way, the main problem with social with, AI that I see is not so much that, you know, they will bring calamity on their own. It’s that they would drive people to do crazy stuff.
Speaker: 1
33:51
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
33:51
So they will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us the robots. You know? It will not need access to the physical world. It will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage. And we see that already.
Speaker: 1
34:08
It’s already happening Exactly. With with AI using bots on social media.
Speaker: 0
34:13
And nobody is attending to that. And the question is how do we suppress the amazing polarization that we see in society where, you know, bullets are being shah.
Speaker: 1
34:24
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
34:25
And I I really worry about it because and and so humans may actually bring their own doom by by self inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their ai.
Speaker: 1
34:35
I think you’re right. I think in that regard, I think people need to stop using it. I really do. I just think it’s not good for That’s
Speaker: 0
34:42
what I’m doing.
Speaker: 1
34:42
I just think
Speaker: 0
34:43
I’m not using AI at all either.
Speaker: 1
34:45
Use it sometimes, but I’ve I I treat it like a glass of wine. Like, don’t drink wine all day.
Speaker: 0
34:52
You know, I’ve been, I’m working with students. And every now and then, a student delivers a paper to me to look at, and I realize some of the references do not exist because I know the literature. You know, that I asked the student, what is this? I’ve never heard about this paper. And the student says, oh, sorry.
Speaker: 0
35:10
And it turns out the AI just took names of authors and faked Make make reference. Yeah. The same thing within the paper itself. There are statements that are clearly because the student was using AI. I’m really worried about that because the young people are not reading. Right.
Speaker: 0
35:26
They don’t read history, so they go to protests that make no sense.
Speaker: 1
35:30
Right.
Speaker: 0
35:31
They don’t and people say, oh, that that is always the useful thing to do. But no. No. No. This one is triggered Right. By misinformation. It’s triggered
Speaker: 1
35:40
It’s organized.
Speaker: 0
35:41
Lack and it’s organized. Exactly. And so that’s one thing. But then they don’t go to primary sources to figure out the truth. They don’t have critical thinking. And I really feel that this is a big risk because, you know, AI is getting more intelligent, but but humans that use AI are getting dumber.
Speaker: 1
36:01
Right.
Speaker: 0
36:01
They don’t think. So I think that the, you know, the AI would supersede the cognitive abilities of humans sooner than expected because humans are getting dumber. I mean, I see that.
Speaker: 1
36:13
I see. Ai I I don’t think people are necessarily getting dumber, but I think they’re getting lazy
Speaker: 0
36:18
Lazy.
Speaker: 1
36:18
Because of this. I think the
Speaker: 0
36:19
human path to
Speaker: 1
36:20
me is exactly the same. I think they need to be taught how to use it. Well, I get
Speaker: 0
36:25
a lot of emails saying I collaborated with my favorite AI app Mhmm. And here is what it said.
Speaker: 1
36:32
And Yeah. But Ai think we need to teach people how to use it because it’s a new thing. And that that I think that’s where a lot of the problem comes ram. That people are using it in in a substitution for learning, you know. And but you instead can learn from it.
Speaker: 0
36:48
Right.
Speaker: 1
36:49
But you’ve gotta use it in that way.
Speaker: 0
36:51
So there are two existential risk in our future. One is artificial intelligence, AI. The second one is alien intelligence, also AI. And the question is which one would arrive first?
Speaker: 1
37:05
Let’s let’s go back to Sai don’t want one more time. Amua. Amua. Okay. I don’t wanna screw it up. How large was that?
Speaker: 0
37:14
That was was the size of a football field.
Speaker: 1
37:17
Sai
Speaker: 0
37:17
Of all their 100 meters.
Speaker: 1
37:18
Small in comparison to three Ai Atlas.
Speaker: 0
37:21
Oh, yeah. That’s my point that three I Atlas is a million times more massive at least a million times more massive than Oumuamua. And I immediately as it was discovered, you know, it was July 1, and my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba two days later. And, as I was going on the plane and as I arrived there, I realized, wait.
Speaker: 0
37:41
That doesn’t make sense because we should have seen millions of, Oumuamua’s before we saw this one. You know, it’s so big. And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade.
Speaker: 0
37:59
You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometer in diameter. You would imagine once per ten thousand years. So I wrote immediately a scientific paper. My wife was not happy that, you know, on our vacation, I was sitting on my computer, but I just couldn’t resist it.
Speaker: 1
38:18
Right.
Speaker: 0
38:19
And by the way, this paper Sai submitted for publication, that was July 3 or something. And then then the editor said, oh, the paper is fine, but you have a concluding sentence at the end where you say, well, unless the object is smaller than estimated, maybe it was targeting the inner source.
Speaker: 0
38:42
Sana that was my solution to say, you know, one way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner source ai design. And indeed, the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within five degrees. The chance for that at random is one in 500. Okay?
Speaker: 0
39:02
And it’s moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini probes that will get into the planets. It gets close to Mars. It gets close to Jupiter. It goes on the opposite side of the sun, relative to Earth when it’s closest to the sun, and that’s the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the sun’s gravitational assist.
Speaker: 0
39:26
You know, all of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory. So I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying, maybe the trajectory was designed. And the editor said, no. No. No.
Speaker: 0
39:42
The paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence. Wow. So now when you when you listen to meh experts that say, well, this claim or that claim was never published in a peer review journal. Guess what? They are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities.
Speaker: 0
40:06
And I think it’s inappropriate, especially in the case of alien technology, because it could be a black swan event. It could be something that affects the future of humanity, and we if we behave, you know, very conservatively, we might not last very long.
Speaker: 1
40:22
Well, it’s also arrogant.
Speaker: 0
40:23
It’s It’s arrogant.
Speaker: 1
40:24
Yeah. This object is shows that there’s no iron
Speaker: 0
40:30
Oh, no. Sai yeah. So then the composition of the plume of gas around
Speaker: 1
40:35
This is before you knew about the composition That’s right.
Speaker: 0
40:38
That you wrote this paper. Exactly. And so
Speaker: 1
40:40
ai is going on, you are being shown to be correct.
Speaker: 0
40:44
Well, we found more more anomalies.
Speaker: 1
40:46
More anomalies. More anomalies. So this is not a normal thing.
Speaker: 0
40:48
Not a normal thing. So for one thing, there was a glow that looks like an extended feature. And everyone said, oh, that’s a tail. That’s the signature of a comet.
Speaker: 1
41:00
Right.
Speaker: 0
41:00
And I said, wait a minute. It it’s pointing towards the sun. It’s not pointing away from the sun. Usually, cometary tails are made of dust and gas, which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar ai, you know. And so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sana. And the question is, why?
Speaker: 0
41:21
And, actually, I calculated that, you know, it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope, which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the sana. But we were looking at it like a cigar. We were looking almost along the cigar long axis, within 10 degrees of the object sun axis.
Speaker: 0
41:43
So we were looking almost edge on. Mhmm. And I calculate if you were to correct for that, this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide, you know, and and that means it’s like a jet. So the object was had a jet in front of it towards the sun. The question is ai.
Speaker: 0
42:00
And, you know, the meh experts ignored it and just said, well, you know, comets are strange. You know, the who knows? But my point is this is a blind date of in interstellar proportions, and my advice on blind dates is not to speak or say what you think this is, but to observe the other side.
Speaker: 0
42:22
You know, the best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side. Don’t speak. Just observe the other side because it may be different than what you think, and maybe, you know, on one of the dates, you will have a serial killer on the other side.
Speaker: 1
42:38
Oh, boy. Now, explain, if you could, how we know the composition of this thing.
Speaker: 0
42:46
So we can figure out composition of a plume of gas by, taking a spectrum of it, which means you basically have some kind of a prism that breaks, you know, that the ai with different wavelengths is bent at different angles, and so you spread the light into the different colors. And if you do that, you you can find the, fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules because each atom or molecule has transitions.
Speaker: 0
43:20
I I actually teach I taught it just two days ago, in a class that I teach, that is mandatory, obligatory at the Harvard astronomy department where I was chair for a decade, you know, like, between 2011, 2020. So this is the mandatory class, and I I just thought how, you know, spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules just two days ago.
Speaker: 0
43:44
So this is a very well known thing, and we know the the wavelengths of those, and and we use them to identify the composition. You know, we know which atoms produced these spectral lines, the fingerprints. It’s just like fingerprints. Okay? And and so what was found, you know, and that’s by multiple teams.
Speaker: 0
44:03
There are three papers on that. We found nickel, a lot of nickel, but not very little iron. At first, no iron whatsoever. Now usually in all the comets in the past, from the solar system and also from interstellar space, there is one meh, Borisov, that was found. It’s the second interstellar object, which looked just like a familiar comet. I had nothing to say about that one. It looked like a comet, behaved like a comet.
Speaker: 0
44:30
It was a comet, but it had similar abundances of nickel and iron. The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially, for example, for aerospace applications. Nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no ai. So maybe the skin of this object is is industrially produced. That’s that was my suggestion.
Speaker: 0
44:56
But what the authors of these papers said is maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries. So they made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway, which is well known in the industry world, carbonyl is the pathway the name of the pathway.
Speaker: 0
45:18
They said, well, maybe this arya in pathway happens in nature. We’ve never seen it before, but that is their explanation.
Speaker: 1
45:29
Is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy?
Speaker: 0
45:33
No. It’s not an alloy. It’s just that Well,
Speaker: 1
45:35
something Some
Speaker: 0
45:36
somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed. Nobody would argue that, you know, you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they’re produced together in exploding stars.
Speaker: 1
45:47
Right.
Speaker: 0
45:47
And, in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 times more by by mass. And sai, we just don’t know, as in the case of this jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tyler now, over the month of September. And, also, you know, why was it changing structure is not clear. There are lots of anomalies. There was also a very negative polarization of the light.
Speaker: 0
46:16
And also, two weeks ago, I realized the arrival direction of three a Atlas was within nine degrees of the wow signal that was detected in 1977
Speaker: 1
46:28
Right.
Speaker: 0
46:28
Which was an enigmatic, powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this Earth. We don’t know from where. It was coming from a source that was approaching the sun, and the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of three I Atlas is 0.6%. And, I just said, well, that’s interesting because three I Atlas was at the distance of three light days, from the Earth at that ai, you know, and, you just need about the output of a nuclear reactor on Earth, a gigawatt or so, to produce such a radio signal.
Speaker: 0
47:08
By the way, Voyager, ai, as of now, is one light day away from Earth. Just think about it. One light day are, you know, the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away, and the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we are talking about tens of thousands of light years.
Speaker: 0
47:28
So one day out of tens of thousands of years, that’s the difference between the distance that we managed to bridge so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard.
Speaker: 1
47:42
Right. Now have we ever observed things in the past that have changed their tail like this?
Speaker: 0
47:52
So there are ram a
Speaker: 1
47:54
jet to a tail.
Speaker: 0
47:55
This is called an anti tail when it’s pointing towards the sun. Mhmm. There were optical illusions in a situation where, you know, the there is a tail which is pushed away from the sun by radiation and tyler wind.
Speaker: 1
48:10
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
48:11
But you arya observing it as the Earth goes through the orbital plane of of of of this object, of this meh, and you are seeing it from a perspective that it looks as if the tail is pointed at the ram, but in fact, it’s it’s just a perspective thing. It’s a optical illusion. And there were cases like that. That that was seen. But as far as I know, none seen in a situation where it’s clear.
Speaker: 0
48:38
And in three Ai Atlas, it was very far from the sun and Earth, and we saw it towards the sun. There cannot be an optical illusion under these circumstances because it was approaching both the Earth and the sun roughly at the same direction. So I’m not aware of another, but most importantly, you should look at the response of the comet expert community to that anomaly. They say, well, comets are strange.
Speaker: 0
49:01
We don’t know. Maybe it’s, these are dust particles that are very big sai they don’t get pushed back much. But then how do you scatter sunlight? Usually, you need particles that have a size of the order of the wavelength of the light that is being scattered. That’s the most efficient process.
Speaker: 0
49:19
And when you have dust particles, the ones that have, you know, sub ai, dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight. So why, in this case, you will have only big ones that are not getting pushed back? It could be fragments of ice that are scattering the sunlight that have nothing to do with dust, but those fragments of ice get get evaporated, and so they don’t have enough time to turn back, you know.
Speaker: 0
49:45
I wrote two papers on that trying to explain it. But my point is meh scientists are not curious. You you would find it surprising. Why are they not curious? Why are they not willing to consider alternative explanations to what is commonly thought? And it’s because they’re afraid of taking any risk, you know.
Speaker: 0
50:05
And I came from a background where I worked in cosmology ai to figure out puzzles. Like, most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don’t know what it is. You know, we we call it dark matter. It’s just to to reflect our ignorance. You know, Nobel Ai were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is.
Speaker: 0
50:27
These are constituents whose nature is unknown. And just think about it, giving a Nobel Prize to people who just said how ignorant we are. We don’t know what these things are. Ordinary matter ai makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe. And in this culture of cosmology, when, you know, I worked in for three decades, it was, you know, completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies.
Speaker: 0
50:53
I mean, the dark matter is an anomaly. You don’t know what it is. And people were rewarded for coming up with ideas, imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally. That’s the way you make progress. You don’t know something.
Speaker: 0
51:05
You are putting on the table possibilities, and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one. And that was the culture. And I think of it as the culture of chess players.
Speaker: 1
51:19
Okay.
Speaker: 0
51:20
Okay? Trying to figure out things. When I get to work on comets, you know, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology. I encounter, you know, a a a culture of mud wrestlers.
Speaker: 1
51:43
Mud wrestlers.
Speaker: 0
51:43
It’s different from chess players.
Speaker: 1
51:46
Right.
Speaker: 0
51:48
And, you know, I don’t want to mud wrestle. I don’t want to get dirty. I don’t respond to the I learned my lesson with Oumuamua. I don’t respond to those people because once we collect, I just want as much evidence as possible so that they would not be able to shove the anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking.
Speaker: 0
52:04
That’s my motivation.
Speaker: 1
52:05
Right.
Speaker: 0
52:05
So I’m, inspiring a debate right now, and there is a huge interest in that debate so that we will collect as much data as possible sai that by the end of the day we’ll figure out what our dating partner is. If it happens to be a rock, you know, on the other side of the table, you go on a date and you see a rock, so be it.
Speaker: 0
52:27
If it’s something else, that has huge implications.
Speaker: 1
52:31
Right.
Speaker: 0
52:31
And therefore, we should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible.
Speaker: 1
52:36
What is it about your field in particular that you think motivates mudslinging? Like, why why are they averse to risk and why do they not just why are they not just averse to risk, but why they arya attacking you for proposing what seems to me to be a reasonable alternative considering the possibilities given all the planets and stars that we know are out there?
Speaker: 0
53:02
Well, I got a hint, for the answer to your question. When I wrote the first paper on Oumuamua
Speaker: 1
53:08
Right.
Speaker: 0
53:09
I suggested it might be technological.
Speaker: 1
53:12
Right.
Speaker: 0
53:12
And the paper got accepted for publication within three days record. The reviewer said this is a great idea because it’s consistent with all the data we have. It’s it’s most likely a flat object, and therefore, it could be pushed by reflecting sunlight, which was my proposal.
Speaker: 0
53:29
Then the media came to my door, and people started asking me a lot of questions. I got, you know, I I I got well known. At that point, the attacks the personal attacks started. So Right. So jealousy. Yeah. It’s jealousy. Jealousy. And, you know, but I can tell you that I learned my lesson.
Speaker: 1
53:52
You can’t respond.
Speaker: 0
53:54
I just ignore it.
Speaker: 1
53:55
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
53:55
And let me give you a few anecdotes of what happened to me this speak, just this week.
Speaker: 1
53:59
Okay.
Speaker: 0
53:59
Okay.
Speaker: 1
53:59
Please.
Speaker: 0
54:00
Tomorrow, I’m supposed to go to California. There is a NASCAR car race where one of the racers decided to put my image with three Ai Atlas with the Galileo project that I’m leading on his car. So let me show you some images.
Speaker: 1
54:19
Yeah. Show me the image because what is the current best image of three I Atlas?
Speaker: 0
54:24
Oh, we will get to that. So here you see the car, and he promised to let me drive it during the just before the race. Who is this guy?
Speaker: 1
54:33
Alex Kevin Harvick?
Speaker: 0
54:35
No. Kevin Harvick is that’s the name of the What is the driver’s name? Alex Malik.
Speaker: 1
54:41
Alex Malik.
Speaker: 0
54:42
Yeah. And he contacted me out of the blue. Fan? Yeah. He’s just a big fan.
Speaker: 1
54:46
Oh, that’s cool.
Speaker: 0
54:47
And I will go there You’re
Speaker: 1
54:48
smart of him. Right? Because that’s definitely gonna get you a lot of attention.
Speaker: 0
54:51
Yeah. So he just sana it to me this morning. The they this is in the shop where they put all these things on it, and tomorrow, I’m I’m going to drive it.
Speaker: 1
54:59
What is Comet Lemon in the back?
Speaker: 0
55:01
Oh, that’s just another Comet. So if you just
Speaker: 1
55:03
Oh, so he’s like a Comet fan, this guy.
Speaker: 0
55:05
By the way, I told him that, the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than three I Atlas. 600 times. So, you know Wow. It’s a compliment to me to be featured on his car, but three I Atlas doesn’t care much because it’s already moving 600 times faster than his car can move.
Speaker: 0
55:21
You know? But But let’s move That is cool, though. So that is tomorrow.
Speaker: 1
55:25
That image, though, that’s you with, a spinning world. Right? That’s the globe.
Speaker: 0
55:30
And my name so the car is called Avi Loeb now. Nice. Yeah. Can we move to the next image? I’ll show you another
Speaker: 1
55:37
excited about this. I like it.
Speaker: 0
55:39
Yeah. So this is an an image taken two days ago in my office at Harvard. I again, I was contacted out of the blue by an artist, a very distinguished artist accomplished, named Greg Wyatt, in New York City, who donated two sculptures made of bronze of Galileo. You see them in the front. They were delivered to my office just a few days ago. And in the background, you see watercolors that he made.
Speaker: 0
56:07
Each of them, there are 51 of them that he don’t all of this, he donated to me at no cost. He wants it to be displayed in my office because these watercolors display famous ai pie that pioneered new frontiers. And, he includes a statement from each of these ai, which are really educational for, the students and postdocs that work with me.
Speaker: 0
56:32
I should tell you, I got an email from a US Air Force pilot. His daughter, Ariana, said to him he he wrote me an email and said, because of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist now. She saw you on television, and now she only speaks about aliens. You know, two days later, I speak with a reporter from the London Ai, and he puts out his report and says, I read the report for half an hour to my kids, and they told me they want to become scientists.
Speaker: 0
57:05
And, you know, this is a another thing that there are two things that are missed by my colleagues. One, it’s an opportunity to excite the the kids to get into science. You know, that’s an amazing I mean, when we discovered the Higgs boson, you know, it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the sixties.
Speaker: 0
57:25
The Nobel Prize was awarded, but I bet you that the daughter, Ariana, the daughter of the US Air Force ai, would not be inspired to become a scientist because it’s very abstract. Here, the con there is a connection. So that’s one thing that is missed. And, of course, the second one is here is a subject that the public cares about, and the public funds ai, so we should attend to that. Of course.
Speaker: 0
57:47
It’s our obligation as scientists. Of course. You know, I always since I started science, which was by chance, by the way, I wanted always to become a a a philosopher. But circumstances led me because I led a project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative of President Reagan. It was the first international project.
Speaker: 0
58:04
And then that brought me into astrophysics because I was offered a position at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study where Einstein was a faculty a few decades earlier. So it all it was an arranged meh, and but I felt that this even though it’s an arranged marriage, I’m married to my true love because I can address philosophical questions using the scientific method.
Speaker: 0
58:27
And I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I’m different, you know, I’m I’m just but
Speaker: 1
58:34
Well, you’re willing to take chances. It’s not just that. Not even chances. You’re willing to propose things that might be ridiculed.
Speaker: 0
58:42
Well, I think about the big picture. You know, the one thing that I meh in my book, extraterrestrial, is on the first day of school, I showed up to the class, and I saw the kids jumping up and down on the tables in the classroom. And I looked at them and I said, does it does it really make sense to jump up and down? Like, what are they trying to accomplish by doing that?
Speaker: 0
59:03
Like and then the teacher came in, and looked at everyone jumping and said, ai down. Look at Avi. He’s so well behaved. You should all behave like him. And I wanted to tell her Ai not well behaved. You know, this was not the reason why I didn’t jump up and down.
Speaker: 0
59:21
I was just trying to figure out why they arya jumping up and down. And if it made sense, I would jump up and down. I don’t care about your rules. And that pretty much defines meh, you know. I I’m thinking Right. About the big picture.
Speaker: 0
59:33
And if my colleagues are doing something that doesn’t make sense, I don’t give a damn.
Speaker: 1
59:38
So let me ask you this. Yeah. Once the understanding of the composition of three Eye Atlas, once that was out and people ai that this is a very unusual object, have more people started to consider what you’re saying?
Speaker: 0
59:54
Yeah. I get a lot of people sending me In the academic world? Also in the academic world. Yeah. Those are people that keep that that sai, we are inspired by what you’re doing, you know. They keep sending me emails saying keep doing it. It’s an inspiration to all of us.
Speaker: 1
01:00:08
But this is privately. Have anybody publicly supported you?
Speaker: 0
01:00:11
So the young you have to understand the biggest damage of this harassment or scrutiny or ridicule or personal attacks, I don’t care about it. You know? My my skin is by now titanium. I I don’t really feel much. The issue is really that it and that’s the purpose of these attacks is they want to discourage others young people ram deviating from the beaten path.
Speaker: 0
01:00:34
Sai they keep the herd in a tight configuration and the risk from that is, you know, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics, you know, like, half a century ago by the way, I live throughout half of modern physics, roughly. Half of modern physics. So half a century ago, it was thought that there is a symmetry of nature called supersymmetry and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry because it’s stable.
Speaker: 0
01:01:03
Right. And everyone said that must be ai. And lots of castles were built on this foundation, including string theory, that was assuming this to be true. And then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built for $10,000,000,000, searched for supersymmetry and didn’t find it. Now what is the lesson? Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:01:24
It was a beautiful ai, and sometimes nature is not what we think it is. Okay? So we should not, ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes. This was Ai meh, I mean, a lot of money and effort went to that that thousands of papers basing their analysis or or mathematical constructions on supersymmetry.
Speaker: 1
01:01:50
And a lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:01:53
Yeah. But the point is if you allow people to follow not just the beaten path but other paths, you have a better chance of discovering something new.
Speaker: 1
01:02:02
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:02:02
Because we cannot I mean, Einstein made, you know, three mistakes between 1935 and 1940. He said black holes probably do not exist. He He said gravitational waves probably do not exist, and he said quantum mechanics doesn’t have spooky action at a distance. And all three received Nobel Ai for the teams that proved him wrong. Those are Nobel ai from the past decade.
Speaker: 0
01:02:28
Three teams, you know, did doing different types of experiments and observations. And but did Einstein was wrong to assume, to make assumptions or or claims that turned out to be wrong? No. Because that’s the nature of working at the frontier. You make mistakes. Every now and then, you know, you might be right and that will be a breakthrough, but you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks.
Speaker: 0
01:02:52
And it’s really I mean, the whole idea of tenure in academia was based on on on the proposition that you want people to take risks so that they don’t have job insecurity. They don’t worry about their so what these zealots, I call them, say is, you know, we don’t want people to deviate from the beaten path because we base our stature, we base our honors, awards, and so forth on past knowledge.
Speaker: 0
01:03:22
We don’t want new knowledge unless it’s proven beyond any doubt. But how would it be proven if you keep ridiculing anything different? You know, we those ex most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky. And then in eighteen o three, there was a meteor shower in Liege, and Ai, a French physicist, realized it’s real. There are rocks falling from the sky.
Speaker: 0
01:03:45
Now all my colleagues sai, there could be only rocks in the sky. You know, We know that we launched some spacecraft, but, you know, we’re probably saloni, and it doesn’t make sense. But let me just mention a few other, anecdotes from the past week because I didn’t really finish. Sai, Jamie, can you, show the next one? What is it?
Speaker: 0
01:04:13
This one is about Sphere in Las Vegas. As you know, it’s the, the most impressive venue for entertainment in the world.
Speaker: 1
01:04:23
Been there? Have you seen a show there?
Speaker: 0
01:04:24
I’ll tell you. Sai not only I’ve ai. I’ve been to the top of the Sphere, which is, like, a 120 meters high. Here you see me from inside the Sphere. This is the exosphere, by the way. It’s covered with LED displays. We went all the way to the top. Why?
Speaker: 0
01:04:39
Because a year ago, two very distinguished visitors came to the front door of my home. By the way, lots of interesting people show up at my, front door. This was, Jim Dolan, who owns the Madison Square Arya, as you know, and also the Sphere, and Jane Rosenthal, the CEO of Trebecca Ai, and they made me an offer that I cannot refuse.
Speaker: 0
01:05:07
And they said, would you be able to put Galileo Project Observatory? I’m leading the Galileo Project to look for unusual objects around the Earth. And they said, could you build an observatory on top of the sphere? Because, you know, Jim Dolan really is, interested in science and especially in finding, you know, whether there is some, alien intelligence out there. And I said, of course.
Speaker: 0
01:05:31
I will be delighted. So that was September 2024, one year after the sphere was opened with a U2 concert, as you may know. I don’t know if you’ve been there.
Speaker: 1
01:05:42
I’ve been there for the UFC. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:05:44
Oh, yeah. UFC. Exactly. Yeah. Sai, anyway, I was there just a few months ago with my research team. We went all the way to the top and installed, as you can see here, an array of infrared cameras that monitors the entire sky above Vegas at all times. So you can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background. It’s like a freckle, you know, on top of the sphere, the exosphere Right.
Speaker: 0
01:06:10
Which is the biggest display on Earth, you know. But we measured that there is not much light pollution, actually, and we can operate this observatory. We also put an array of visible light cameras there, and it’s operating. Okay? And we hope to see a few million objects over the sky of Vegas and decide whether any of them has a performance that deviates from the envelope of human made technologies.
Speaker: 0
01:06:41
How do we do that? We we have the sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that that that observatory, 10 kilometers away on a triangle. And, that allows us to look at objects in the sky from different directions just like we have two eyes sai we can gauge the distance.
Speaker: 0
01:07:00
Sai here we have three eyes looking at the the sky above Vegas, and we can tell the distance, the velocity, the acceleration of objects, and ask whether they are lying within the performance envelopes of human made objects. And that would be amazing. It’s very exciting. I see that also in as an opportunity to communicate to the public the excitement about science.
Speaker: 0
01:07:21
That’s what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal really wanted to deliver. And Ai hoping, that we will find something really anomalous, you know, because as we know, the intelligence agencies are reporting to the US Congress about objects they cannot identify. And, you know, that could be two things. They’re getting, you know, the defense budget for 2026 is a trillion dollars. Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:07:45
If they tell us that with a trillion dollars there are still objects they cannot identify above The US, they’re not doing their job. They’re not doing their job, and we should be worried. Who sana these objects? Could it be adversarial nations? Okay, that’s one possibility which has to do with national security.
Speaker: 0
01:08:04
The second possibility is that it’s maybe something from outside of this earth, which would be even more significant. So either way, we need to figure this out, and I don’t think I’m wasting my time leading the Galileo project to figure out whether there are anomalies, you know, that go beyond human made technologies, because if it turns out that all the objects are human made, I will be happy to deliver the set of sensors we developed with the machine learning software that we developed to the Department of War sai that they can employ it for national security purposes.
Speaker: 0
01:08:42
So my time was not wasted as a scientist. Of course. I’m doing something useful to society. Of course. The Department of War can use it. Have no problem.
Speaker: 0
01:08:49
Everything made by humans, by the way, is boring as far as I’m concerned. I want to see something from outside the solar system, which is not what the government should be about. The government should worry about national security, not about what lies outside the solar system. That’s my job definition as an astrophysicist. Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:09:06
And, sai, I feel that this is worthy pursuing, but the Galileo Project is really the first organized project that constructed a reliable set of sensors in an observatory configuration that does systematic study of the sky to collect millions of objects in the sky per year. We have three observatories, one in Las Vegas, as I meh. And ai the way, this is the first time it’s mentioned publicly.
Speaker: 0
01:09:38
Sai,
Speaker: 1
01:09:39
That’s amazing.
Speaker: 0
01:09:40
And, another one at, in in Massachusetts and a third one in Pennsylvania. They were all funded by people who approached me and said, here is the money.
Speaker: 1
01:09:50
Let me ask you this. If it wasn’t for those, how many observatories are looking for objects that are not from this Earth? Like, is is that very rare?
Speaker: 0
01:10:00
None? Well, there are some teams that are, you know, doing it making a trip to to collect some data. There is a force not constant observation. In of scientific quality data. No.
Speaker: 1
01:10:11
That’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:10:12
That’s crazy. That’s what I’m saying.
Speaker: 1
01:10:14
That’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:10:14
And ai the way by the way, Ai gave a briefing to the US Congress on ai, and congresswoman Sana Paulina Luna was there. And, and, she was very excited about the work we arya doing. But the day before that, I visited an office in the Pentagon that is called the Old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
Speaker: 0
01:10:39
And I asked them, you know, you looked into an, all these, unidentified objects reported in the past by military personnel, did anything trigger your attention as something truly anonymous? And they said, not really. There are some, you know, there are some reports, by FBI agents that sai really crazy stuff, but we don’t have any data from instruments.
Speaker: 0
01:11:06
And this is an office within the Pentagon, which is funded to figure out things. And sai, obviously, what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo project that I’m leading. But you would think that it would be sort of the vested interest of government, you know, to invest in research related to that, which is what the Galileo Project is doing here.
Speaker: 1
01:11:31
Ai the thing. I would have thought it was already done.
Speaker: 0
01:11:33
I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
01:11:34
Until we’re having this conversation, I can’t believe that they’re not monitoring the sky constantly for anomalous objects.
Speaker: 0
01:11:41
Well, they you remember the the the Chinese spy balloon that was missed, right, and shut down?
Speaker: 1
01:11:46
Yeah. But that’s that was
Speaker: 0
01:11:47
So the thing to keep in mind, they arya getting data on things in the ai. But if you don’t have the right software now with AI Right. If you don’t have high quality sai the way that the Manhattan Project employed, you might not figure out things. There is a reason why the Manhattan Project recruited the very best ai.
Speaker: 0
01:12:06
So I say, put a billion dollars on this or more, bring in the best ai in the world to figure it out. I am funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galileo Project. The government can do a bit. What is a billion dollars? It’s a it’s a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon.
Speaker: 0
01:12:23
But if, you know, you you should think about the the the potential risk from drones that are used by adversarial nations, and you want to have the very best sensors using the very best
Speaker: 1
01:12:38
Of course.
Speaker: 0
01:12:39
AI algorithms.
Speaker: 1
01:12:40
Believe that that’s not already being done. That’s sai confusing.
Speaker: 0
01:12:43
Well I
Speaker: 1
01:12:43
would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already.
Speaker: 0
01:12:50
Well, that’s Especially when
Speaker: 1
01:12:51
you take in all these anecdotal stories, all these different stories of people spotting air some sort of a shah, something. Something that moves in a very strange way. I Ai would think that they’re monitoring this stuff all the time and not just with radar.
Speaker: 0
01:13:05
You see, there is an approach which is to wait for the government to figure out things or to really declassify them. So a lot of people want the government to declassify. I think it’s just like waiting for Godot. You can wait forever.
Speaker: 1
01:13:18
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:13:18
And it will never happen. So I say, you know, we don’t need the government to tell us what is up there in the sky because astronomy is all about that. We can build observatories. Look at the sky. Anything that is human made is not of interest to me. It’s boring. I don’t care.
Speaker: 0
01:13:32
You know, I, I just want to see if there is anything that
Speaker: 1
01:13:37
Well, it’s boring up to a point if China has something that moves at, you know, Mach 30
Speaker: 0
01:13:41
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:13:42
And can go underwater.
Speaker: 0
01:13:43
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:13:44
It’s this get things get very interesting.
Speaker: 0
01:13:46
So ai my methodology can definite should definitely be used by the Department of War Mhmm. To figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned. But and by the way, speaking about my colleagues, you know, so so there are people who said, oh, you’re doing it to to to to win the Nobel Ai.
Speaker: 0
01:14:04
Like, that’s what you or you’re trying to sell books. You know, I don’t charge a penny for my essays on medium.com. Money is not at all what motivates me. With respect to the noble committee, you know, I have the same attitude as, Jean Paul Sartre had and and Bob Dylan had.
Speaker: 0
01:14:23
If if I find evidence for alien intelligence, alien technology, I would not waste my time in a tuxedo in Stockholm. I will try to figure it out. That’s much more important than an award given by a human to a human. We’re dealing with something really consequential.
Speaker: 1
01:14:42
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:14:43
And for the scientific community to ignore that, it’s irresponsible. Why is it irresponsible? Because it could affect the future of humanity.
Speaker: 1
01:14:50
Well, I think the problem with the scientific community is the problem with all communities. They’re overrun with ego.
Speaker: 0
01:14:55
I agree.
Speaker: 1
01:14:56
That’s And as
Speaker: 0
01:14:56
I explained at the beginning
Speaker: 1
01:14:58
It’s just human beings when they get to a position of any kind of authority, any any sort of a position of respect and prestige. They wanna protect that at all costs, and they they wanna keep everyone down who they think is getting unwarranted attention above them, like yourself.
Speaker: 0
01:15:14
But given the fundamental landscape that we live in, as I mentioned in the beginning, we live for a short ai. We’re not at the center of the universe.
Speaker: 1
01:15:23
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:15:24
We arrived late to cosmic history. You know, we just arrived in the last few million years out of a 13,800,000,000 history billion years history. You know, the cosmic play is not about us. If you arrive late to the play, at the end of the play, you arya not at the center of stage.
Speaker: 0
01:15:40
It’s not about you. Okay? And our, responsibility needs to be, you know, to find other actors that were around for much longer because they know what the play is about.
Speaker: 1
01:15:54
Yes. And Let me ask you this.
Speaker: 0
01:15:55
Yeah. Have you seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited? The only data I’m aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies, of Oumuamua, of three a Atlas, which are very different anomalies.
Speaker: 1
01:16:16
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:16:17
And there was also, a meteor that Ai discovered with my former undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, a meteor that was identified by US government satellites back in 2014, and it was moving so fast that it definitely came from outside the solar system. And my colleagues were very concerned, and they sai, we don’t believe the US government. So maybe, Jamie can show us. I said, okay.
Speaker: 0
01:16:46
At the time, I was chairing the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies.
Speaker: 1
01:16:51
Why didn’t they believe the US government about this?
Speaker: 0
01:16:54
Because all the previous meteors, they thought, must have been from the solar system, and therefore, you know and the US government also makes mistakes every now and then, they said.
Speaker: 1
01:17:05
US government, what department was observing?
Speaker: 0
01:17:08
The Speak Force, the the US Space Command. So what I what I did is at a dinner, sai was year was this? This was around, 2020.
Speaker: 1
01:17:19
Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:17:19
And, I expressed my frustration at dinner with the as the chair of the board board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies. And there was a member there from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and he said, let me help you. We we managed to reach out to the US Speak Command through the White House at the time, and, we got an official letter from the US Space Command saying, we looked at the data and we can verify the 99.999% that this object, this meteor, which was roughly half a meter in size, came from outside the solar system.
Speaker: 0
01:17:55
That’s what they said. At that point, I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean where the explosion was identified from the fireball. There was a huge amount of ai. To go there and search for the materials from that object because it was moving fast. It was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the source, very similar to three three Ai Vatsal. So it was fast.
Speaker: 0
01:18:18
And moreover, the object maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere. It didn’t explode until it got within 20 kilometers of the surface of the ocean. So it must have been extremely tough, much tougher than all the previous meteors catalogued, by NASA. Okay? So I can show you some images from that trip to the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker: 0
01:18:40
Actually, it was documented by Netflix, and there will be a documentary coming out within a year, next year, 2026. This this was the team of, researchers that came with me on the deck of the ship, and we collected materials with a magnetic sled. This is a sled may with magnets on top of it. You can see the Netflix team, at the lower left here.
Speaker: 0
01:19:02
And then Ai brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here. I shipped it by FedEx to my home. This was a 1 and a half million dollar expedition. So Why would
Speaker: 1
01:19:12
you ship it by FedEx? Why wouldn’t you just carry it with you?
Speaker: 0
01:19:15
Because I was worried vatsal somewhere in the airport, they would sai, no. We have to confiscate that.
Speaker: 1
01:19:19
But don’t they know who you are?
Speaker: 0
01:19:20
Can’t you, like, get somebody to call in? I don’t want to, take any risk.
Speaker: 1
01:19:25
So it’s just a bunch of meh?
Speaker: 0
01:19:27
No. It’s a jiffy. You can see the material. So it’s mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean, two kilometers deep, you know, one mile or so, a little more than a mile. And then we I I found this, you know, we found these, molten droplets, you see, that are very distinct relative to grains of sana. And we isolated them.
Speaker: 0
01:19:45
I had a you can go to the you can see here the the these molten droplets, and turns out that 10% of them, did not have the composition of materials from the solar system. And so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson, and, I had a summer intern, Sophie Bergstrom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis.
Speaker: 0
01:20:09
How did my colleagues respond to that? They said, oh, he went to the wrong place because there was a seismic signal that could have been misidentified and could have been a truck passing nearby. And so a reporter from ram New York Times said, oh, they went to the wrong place because the it could’ve it was not a meteor. It was a truck.
Speaker: 0
01:20:31
And I wrote to the reporter and I said, how irresponsible are you? You you didn’t even ask me. The data that led us to this place was based on the fireball, on the light that was detected by US government ai, and the US Speak Command confirmed the location. It was not based on the seismic detection of the signal.
Speaker: 0
01:20:51
We just you we just looked and found this
Speaker: 1
01:20:54
Ai it seems like your colleagues are contacting New York Times to try to dismiss you.
Speaker: 0
01:20:58
I wrote to the editor at the time and said, look. If this is what you write about science, how can we trust what you write about politics?
Speaker: 1
01:21:06
Right. Yeah. So these objects, these very small molten droplets
Speaker: 0
01:21:11
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:21:12
What did you determine from them?
Speaker: 0
01:21:13
We found that 10% of them had a composite chemical composition different than solar system materials that were found before. And, again, my colleagues, some of them, said, oh, they found coal ash, you know, the burnt material from coal. So we said, okay. Well, let’s check. We ai 61 elements from the periodic table and showed that it’s definitely not coal ash. And then they sai, it’s something else from the crust of the earth.
Speaker: 0
01:21:45
We checked that. It’s not from the crust of the earth. It’s a an endless battle to basically I mean, they can throw mud without having access to the ai.
Speaker: 1
01:21:54
Understand. What this is a known meteorite. It it hit Earth. You collected pieces of material from the scene where it hit. Right. And they still wanna dismiss it.
Speaker: 0
01:22:06
Yeah. They sai the government cannot be trusted. They they raise a lot of dust. If you raise a lot of dust, you can sai, I don’t see anything.
Speaker: 1
01:22:12
Well, you get the New York Times involved too, which is even stupider. Well That’s so crazy that the New York Times jumped in without contacting you.
Speaker: 0
01:22:19
But this is the landscape I have to operate in. And the one thread through this landscape is that common sense is not common.
Speaker: 1
01:22:28
Right. Well, it’s it seems more than that. It seems like a coordinated attack. Seems like pump bunch of people have a personal vendetta
Speaker: 0
01:22:36
Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:22:36
Which is probably based on some petty jealousy and also they just don’t like people stepping ahead of them.
Speaker: 0
01:22:43
You know, I I told meh, students in the class, I said on the first class, I said, what is the strongest force in academia? It’s not gravity. It’s not electromagnetism. It’s jealousy.
Speaker: 1
01:22:57
I would hope it’s curiosity. That’s what sucks.
Speaker: 0
01:23:00
That’s what brought me into science.
Speaker: 1
01:23:02
Well, that’s what you just You know?
Speaker: 0
01:23:03
And I’m naive. You know? I don’t change my, my reason for doing something just because other people misbehave. You know? It’s I feel like I’m attending a party where the the the the attendees are misbehaving, and all I can hope for is for a guest to show up and change the situation.
Speaker: 0
01:23:23
You know, one reason I’m seeking intelligence in interstellar space is I don’t often find it in academia.
Speaker: 1
01:23:32
Well, I think addressing it helps. I I think what you’re doing helps. I think, these kind of conversations do help because I don’t think a lot of people are aware of the kind of resistance that you face. I know it’s a lot of what you discussed, and I I wish it was less. But, it’s important for people to know that you have to go through this kind of nonsense.
Speaker: 0
01:23:50
Well, I I don’t agree.
Speaker: 1
01:23:51
When you think this object, three ai us, is weird. Yeah. It’s weird.
Speaker: 0
01:23:56
You know, I I served, in the Israeli military, and, we parachuted. We drove tanks. I was in a special unit that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24, and then the SDI, the the Star Wars initiative, president Reagan brought me to The US. And I remember while serving in the park troopers that there was a saying that sometimes you have to put your body on the barbed wire so that your friends, colleagues, soldiers can cross
Speaker: 1
01:24:26
Climb over your back. Yes. Sai.
Speaker: 0
01:24:29
And, I you know, as long as I allow young people to innovate, as long as I attract kids to science, I did my job. It’s not about meh, you see. It’s about humanity getting better, and it will not get better with Ai, as we discussed. It could get better with alien intelligence because we will realize that there is something else out there that is more accomplished than we are. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:24:58
So it will serve as a role model. You know, in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche said God is dead. And since then, we had a century of modern science and technology where we feel hubris. You know, we we are our gang. We, you know, we are at the top of the food chain. You know, we go to restaurants. We eat other animals that are less intelligent than we are.
Speaker: 0
01:25:21
But just think about it. If it turns out that the we are not at the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy, There is someone more intelligent than us. If that someone comes to visit Earth, will we be served in their soup?
Speaker: 1
01:25:38
I wouldn’t think so. I would think there’s plenty of other things to eat that aren’t intelligent. I mean, that’s sort of the deal that we make here. We eat things, but we try not to eat intelligent things, which is not entirely true because we eat a lot of octopus.
Speaker: 0
01:25:49
Yeah. I I had this dilemma ai Boston.
Speaker: 1
01:25:52
Quite intelligent. Yeah. And then there’s a lot of people in indigenous tribes that really prefer monkey meh. You know? That’s those those are human beings that love to eat monkeys. That that gets a little weird too. But I don’t think they’re gonna travel all the way over here to eat people.
Speaker: 1
01:26:06
I think if we were that delicious, we would be eating each other a
Speaker: 0
01:26:08
lot more. Situation where we are just like ants in the cracks of a pavement, and there is a biker passing by. And we are trying to make sounds and, you know, get attention. We think it’s about us. It’s always about us, according to us. Uh-huh. But it’s not about us.
Speaker: 1
01:26:24
Well, it’s it’s not about us cosmically, when you take into consideration the the in in the vast spans of the universe. But if I was an intelligent species and my curiosity led me to explore other intelligent species and they were far more advanced than us. I think they would find us quite fascinating.
Speaker: 1
01:26:44
That was the the the argument that I got into with Neil deGrasse Ai, well, where he was ai, I don’t think we’re that interesting. Well, ai they would visit us.
Speaker: 0
01:26:51
You have to keep in ai, he’s not a practicing astrophysicist. He’s not writing scientific papers. I write a paper almost every week.
Speaker: 1
01:26:57
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:26:57
I’m in the trenches doing science. It’s very different. It’s just like, you know, you have soccer players and you have commentators on the bench, you know. And you can be a commentator, popularize science, but the difference is that as a commentator, you will never score a goal.
Speaker: 1
01:27:11
Well, that’s my position as a UFC commentator. I don’t get in there and fight people. I understand the fighting. I can do my best to help explain it to people, but I don’t do it. So Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:27:23
You know, a a a few months ago for
Speaker: 1
01:27:25
the experts.
Speaker: 0
01:27:26
A few months ago, I was at the gathering, and, there was a cocktail hour, and, it was with celebrities. And, I saw Margot Robbie standing, and, of course, I have nothing to offer. You know? Like, what kind of opening line would I start a conversation? I I I didn’t know how to start a conversation. So Right.
Speaker: 0
01:27:45
I was just standing on the side, and then someone came with my book, Interstellar, and said, would you mind signing it for me? And so I signed the book, and she noticed it. And she came over and said, are you Avi Loeb? I really wanted to hear more about what you’re doing. And we started the conversation for twenty minutes. Then I gave my talk, and Jerry Bruckheimer was in the audience. He is one of the most accomplished you know him.
Speaker: 0
01:28:12
He came afterwards and said, I just finished f one, you know, the Mhmm. Yeah. The movie. And, my next one is about a scientist like you searching for UAPs and trying to figure them out. Oh.
Speaker: 0
01:28:26
And then I saw, Bryden, Adrian Bryden, was standing there, and he told me, I really want to become a scientist. You know, I always wanted to become a scientist. I said, it’s not too late. And then I went to Jerry and said, look, he should be your leading actor because Adrian really wanted to become a scientist.
Speaker: 0
01:28:42
Casting calls.
Speaker: 1
01:28:44
Look at that. Figuring it out for them. Interesting. Ai. I mean, look, science fiction is one of the most popular genres of of films ever because everybody has curiosity about it.
Speaker: 0
01:28:57
But but nature might be much more imaginative than the best script ai in Hollywood.
Speaker: 1
01:29:04
Very likely.
Speaker: 0
01:29:05
And so if we look up, we might get a much better movie. And there is actually a Rubin the Rubin Observatory funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy in Chile. It was inaugurated in June.
Speaker: 1
01:29:20
Is that the VLT array?
Speaker: 0
01:29:22
No. The VLT is a very large telescope by the European Southern Observatory. But this one was funded by The US, and it it has a 3.2 gigapixel camera monitoring the southern sky every four ai, and it’s an amazing survey telescope. And ai the way, SPHER has a a display that is the biggest in the world of, you know, 14,000 by 14,000 pixels. Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:29:52
That’s a factor of 13 less pixels than the Rubin camera has observing the ai. Now Rubin will potentially, based on estimates, discover an interstellar object ai three Sai Atlas or even smaller every few months. So we are entering a new era where we will have a lot of visitors that we ai.
Speaker: 0
01:30:14
There might have been traffic all the time that we didn’t were not aware of.
Speaker: 1
01:30:17
Probably. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:30:18
And my recommendation is to establish an organization. I wrote to the United Nations about it. I wrote also to, the International Astronomical Union to establish an organizational committee that would coordinate observations of these objects sai we can figure out their nature and make sure and then, of course, inform policy makers, politicians how to respond because when you have a visitor to your backyard, you need to respond immediately.
Speaker: 0
01:30:44
It’s not like getting a radio signal from tens of thousands of light years away where you have plenty of time to wait. Here, you have to do something. And, so I hope that they they will do that. And, actually, the International Asteroid Warning Network just two days ago announced they will have a campaign looking at three I Atlas with a lot of observatories on Earth, between November 27 and January 27.
Speaker: 0
01:31:12
So I’m very glad that they decided to do that. They are related to the United Nations.
Speaker: 1
01:31:16
Now what is it about Chile? Is it the atmosphere? Is it the altitude?
Speaker: 0
01:31:21
As a result of geology, there is this stretch of mountains that was erected. And if you look at the map of Chile, it’s sort of ai, on a strip. And, not only that the peaks reach a very high level so that you have less atmosphere between you and the stars. I mean, the real problem right now is actually Starlink satellites that are artificial lights in the sai, and we have to subtract them off because there are, you know, tens there will be tens of thousands of those.
Speaker: 1
01:31:50
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:31:51
We’re trying to avoid city lights by going to these mountains, and then we have city lights in the sky. Right. But other than that, it’s less atmosphere, so it’s good to be high up. And in addition, it’s not very turbulent. The the weather is very good there. So there is the Atacama Desert, and, there are many astronomical observatories there. And, the other place where you have a lot of state of the art facilities is Hawaii.
Speaker: 1
01:32:17
Mhmm. The CEC?
Speaker: 0
01:32:18
The issue yeah. The issue there is that there are severe, political limitations because of the indigenous people there that are ai, religious sentiment to to the mountains. So they they cannot build more telescopes there. So so Chile Ai meh, the government in Chile is encouraging ai, and, we are getting a lot of useful data from Chile.
Speaker: 1
01:32:40
Yeah. It’s it’s we need more of it. Right? We we need quite a bit more we need some much more enhanced ability to observe the skies. If these things are out there and we do miss a lot of them and one of them could potentially be a civilization ender,
Speaker: 0
01:32:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:32:59
I think be aware of that.
Speaker: 0
01:33:00
I think also the president of The United States should be aware of that.
Speaker: 1
01:33:04
Yeah. He should be.
Speaker: 0
01:33:05
Have you ever
Speaker: 1
01:33:05
talked to him?
Speaker: 0
01:33:07
I haven’t talked to him, but I spoke with others. You know, congresswoman, Sana Paulina Luna, congressman
Speaker: 1
01:33:15
Are they all aware?
Speaker: 0
01:33:16
Team of your your Well, in fact, Sana, representative Luna, she called me on the phone a couple of months ago and asked me for an update on three I Atlas, and I promised to send her routine updates. Ai you know, I have essays that I write every day or two about the latest, and she’s very interested.
Speaker: 0
01:33:34
And, I, you know, I I in the I did communicate with people around the White House, but, I think the president should be aware of that. Of course, most likely, most objects would be, just rocks. You know? Right. By the way, this is the material that, I brought back from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in these tubes. Gotcha. I brought one to show you here.
Speaker: 0
01:34:00
And, you know, we should approach the universe with a sense of curiosity, but also modesty. You know? It’s really we desperately need to be more modest.
Speaker: 1
01:34:13
Do you pay attention at all to all this, UAP disclosure Yeah. Discussion Yeah. And the discussion that there’s some secret back engineering programs?
Speaker: 0
01:34:23
What do you Sana day after I was visiting, Arrow, the Old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon, I sit in congress. I gave a briefing about the GARELIO project, and next to me is Eric Davis, and he says, I’m when I worked in government, I became aware of the fact that the US government has materials in its possession, that it may have given to corporations ai Lockheed Martin or others, of, crash sites, of spacecraft from outside of this Earth and including the ai biologics, biological material.
Speaker: 0
01:35:05
So on the one hand, I hear the day before that there is really nothing because the aero people said that they have access to all the information within government, and they haven’t found anything. And then a day later, I hear, Eric Davis saying what he sai, and the question is who should I believe? And my point is Sai believe evidence.
Speaker: 0
01:35:30
So I sana I I don’t believe stories because, you know, the if there is a car accident, different people give you different accounts of what really happened. That’s why FIFA is using using cameras to monitor soccer games. They don’t go and ask the players or the audience whether there was a a a goal, in a in a controversial case, and they just use data.
Speaker: 0
01:35:53
And so that is the scientific method. FIFA is using the scientific. So I don’t care about stories because when I was a kid, I would sit at the dinner table, ask a difficult question, and I would see the adults in the room inventing answers that made no sense as a kid. Right. And I sai, I don’t care what the, you know, about these stories from things that happened in the past or whatever.
Speaker: 0
01:36:17
I just want to figure it out myself ram data being guided by the
Speaker: 1
01:36:21
spoken to Gary Nolan?
Speaker: 0
01:36:22
Of course.
Speaker: 1
01:36:23
Have you ever talked to him about some of these anomalous alloys that what what is your thoughts on those?
Speaker: 0
01:36:28
Well, the issue is Explain
Speaker: 1
01:36:29
to people what they have found and how weird some of these things are.
Speaker: 0
01:36:33
Meh. So Gary, in collaboration with other scientists that looked into materials that were found under unusual circumstances, and they realized that the structure of the materials, is very improbable to have been made naturally. Now the issue I have with that is whether these materials were indeed the, they they came from the sky, from some extraterrestrial origin, or whether someone produced it, you know, or or did intention.
Speaker: 0
01:37:06
Maybe it was another government that did something. So I really in terms of evidence, I really need to get conclusive evidence that will convince me beyond any reasonable doubt. It’s just like, you know, in
Speaker: 1
01:37:19
a true A
Speaker: 0
01:37:20
solid change
Speaker: 1
01:37:21
in custody from the very beginning.
Speaker: 0
01:37:22
But the key is that without seeking it, you will never find it. So if you have the mindset that everything in the sky is rocks now, and that everything on Earth is materials we arya familiar with either from humans or, you know, natural process on Earth, you will not invest time and resources to look for anything.
Speaker: 0
01:37:41
And sai it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Very often, you know, if you have this, these ai, just like with a horse, you you put blinders on your eyes, you can’t look sideways, you don’t see that there are things beyond your path. The path that is a beaten path, everyone is taking that path, why would, you know, it’s a waste of your time to do the same thing as others are doing.
Speaker: 0
01:38:03
And science offers you a way out of that, collecting evidence, but for that you need money, you need resources, you need prestige to be able to lead a team that goes in a different direction. That’s what I’m trying to do, and, you know, I think science will be served much better if we were to explore different paths until we figure out the truth.
Speaker: 1
01:38:26
Yes. Did you ever get a look at any of these alloys?
Speaker: 0
01:38:31
Not the ones that, Gary looked vatsal, and I saw his papers. But to me, the main uncertainty there is where did it come from now? Someone could have manufactured in the case of the meteor, I know that there was an explosion there from an object I
Speaker: 1
01:38:45
understand what you’re saying. But if you if they’re being correct about the dates of these things, someone couldn’t have manufactured them. The technology wasn’t available.
Speaker: 0
01:38:53
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:38:54
Some of these are from the nineteen fifties. And for, this alloy to have been created and layered atomically Mhmm. From the nineteen fifties, that technology as far as we’re we know is not available by us. So there’s a lot of weird theories and one of the weird theories is a break off civilization that is somehow or another survived under the ocean.
Speaker: 1
01:39:16
That’s the kookiest one. But there’s a lot of people that are talking about that that as if it’s a a real possibility that there are anomalous things they find in the ocean. They find things that plummet into the water and don’t make a wave, and that they pass through the ocean going 500 knots, which we don’t have any capability of doing anything remotely like that with the resistance of the ocean.
Speaker: 0
01:39:37
Representative Tim Borchette said that yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:39:40
And he talked Tim Borchette was talking about these five areas that they know these anomalous things keep coming from.
Speaker: 0
01:39:48
Yeah. This is very intriguing. We didn’t survey most of the ocean surface arya. Right. And the You got
Speaker: 1
01:39:55
them out inside the ocean.
Speaker: 0
01:39:57
Inside the ocean. So I think we should definitely look into the the ocean and the the rest of Earth and vatsal
Speaker: 1
01:40:04
be the most nutty thing of all ai. If there was an advanced civilization living in the ocean this entire tyler, do and doing ai? Monitoring us?
Speaker: 0
01:40:12
Okay. Speaking about nutty things, let me mention an example. Okay. You know, back in 1970, there was a graduate student at Princeton called Jacob Bekenstein, and he read papers written by Stephen Hawking who said, he demonstrated Stephen Hawking demonstrated that when you take two black holes, the area surrounding the black holes a black hole is an ultimate prison.
Speaker: 0
01:40:38
Nothing can escape from it. It’s just like Vegas. Anything that happens to me stays in it. But when you merge two black holes, the area surrounding them, the product of the merger, is always bigger than the sum of the areas. He he demonstrated that mathematically.
Speaker: 0
01:40:54
And then, Bekenstein said, well, that’s interesting because we know about the second law of thermodynamics where entropy always increases. So maybe the black holes have entropy related to their surface. And his mentor was John Wheeler, at Princeton, and he said, you know, this is a crazy enough idea that it might be true, speaking about nutty ideas. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:41:20
And then Stephen Hawking heard Bekenstein speak about it, and he said, that’s nonsense. That’s nonsense, makes no sense. I will prove it to be wrong. So he used quantum mechanics in a curved space time around a black hole, and lo and behold, he found they emit radiation. They have a temperature. They have entropy.
Speaker: 0
01:41:45
This is the biggest discovery, theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking celebrated since, you know, for fifty one years now. And he went to disprove Bekenstein and proved him right. It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of the person who benefited most from discovering that Bekenstein was right.
Speaker: 0
01:42:10
So my point about crazy ideas is, you know and by the way, over the past fifty years, the mainstream of theoretical physics was obsessed with black hole entropy, trying to use it to figure out a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. We don’t have that theory, by the way, and that’s the reason you know, if I ever meet an alien scientist, what is the first question I would ask? Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:42:32
It’s what happened before the Big Bang? Because it defines our cosmic roots, but in addition to that, it also will help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity because Einstein’s gravity breaks down when we go to the Big Bang, when the density of matter and radiation was infinite.
Speaker: 0
01:42:54
So, you know, for example, if we knew how the universe started, what ingredients you need to put together, how much heat you want to apply, to make our universe. You would have a recipe for making a universe. It’s just like recipe for a cake. If you have a recipe for a cake, you can become a baker. Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:43:18
If we had the recipe for making the Big Bang Mhmm. We could apply to the job of God because one of the defining feature of God is the ability to create a universe. And just think that what we call God could have been a very advanced scientist that did a laboratory experiment, created our universe in it. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:43:43
Sai, that’s what I would like to ask the aliens.
Speaker: 1
01:43:47
Well, let me ask you this. When when someone from the government tells you about biologics and this crash retrieval program, don’t you want to be able to see that somehow? Of course. Did you ask if it’s possible? Did you try to set up meetings?
Speaker: 0
01:44:02
Yeah. I I when I asked, of course, you you encounter a a a a brick wall. You know?
Speaker: 1
01:44:07
What did they say? What was your question?
Speaker: 0
01:44:10
Well, when I visited the the Pentagon, my question was, you know, is there something like that? And they ai it. Okay? Right. And then I’m being told maybe it’s not inside government. Maybe it was delegated to corporations outside government. And, you know, one employee of of one of these corp corporations told me privately, you know, it may it may not be wrong.
Speaker: 0
01:44:34
So I don’t know who to believe. You see, these are it’s just like people tell me stories that I don’t know whether to trust until I see it. And I’m very happy to help government figure it out, you know, because their ram it’s it’s a misuse of their, privileges to attend to data related to what’s outside the solar system.
Speaker: 0
01:44:54
Right? They they’re supposed to deal with what happens on Earth, on the surface of Earth. Right. National security. They are not supposed to tell us what lies outside the solar system. And I want to help them figure it out.
Speaker: 0
01:45:05
But they don’t give me that vatsal, and I don’t know if it exists because I have never seen it.
Speaker: 1
01:45:10
Have you tried to pursue it though? Have you, like, gone through different channels to try to figure
Speaker: 0
01:45:14
out Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:45:15
Someone that you communicate with
Speaker: 0
01:45:16
and any of these? So far, I didn’t get anywhere.
Speaker: 1
01:45:18
Contract because it’s defense contractors. So that Yeah. That’s the the current most attractive theory is that the defense contractor
Speaker: 0
01:45:25
It’s possible, but then
Speaker: 1
01:45:26
because if you had a a project they were trying to back engineer, those are the people that you’d bring it to. The people that make the actual rockets themselves. The people ai make the jets and the spaceships, you’d bring it to them.
Speaker: 0
01:45:36
Right. But I should tell you that, you know, we always think, oh, AI is the future. We’ve never used AI in speak. And to me, it would sound much more, natural if we had a visitor with intelligence, but it’s based on AI, not biologics. Because then it can survive the long journey. It will never get bored.
Speaker: 1
01:45:57
Which is why the biologics is weird.
Speaker: 0
01:45:59
Like It’s weird.
Speaker: 1
01:46:00
If they have supposedly some or that gives you more of an indication that maybe is something from the in the ocean. If it’s something from inside the ocean Maybe. And then it’s a biological thing that, you know, at one point in ai, there was an advanced civilization that figured out a way to survive under the ocean.
Speaker: 0
01:46:17
You know, I I really admire biology because think about our bryden, it’s using 20 watts. It’s the size of the brain, the human bryden, was limited by the metabolic power of the human body. We it’s using a fifth of the power of the human body, and that’s the largest brain that an animal like us can have given our body size and the amount of food that we use.
Speaker: 0
01:46:39
So it’s operating on 20 watts, then you have these AI systems that are barely, you know, getting to the level of sophistication to imitate it, and they use gigawatts. We need nuclear powers. Yeah. And biology figured it out. You know, that’s that’s amazing.
Speaker: 0
01:46:57
Also, as much as, you know, self driving cars are amazing, we don’t have self replicating cars. In nature, you know, you have animals like ourselves. You know, we replicate ourselves. We we have kids Mhmm. That that can function and consume materials from the environment.
Speaker: 0
01:47:15
Just imagine your car, okay, using the sand or using some stuff in the environment to repair vatsal. Every time you bump into something, it can create smaller cars for you to use. That’s amazing. Like, we can’t even imagine building a car that will self replicate, and nature did it. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:47:38
So to me, we are at the infancy of understanding how much better we can go than Ai. Because if nature did it out of random processes and created such a brain on 20 watts and we are struggling with gigawatts to imitate it, you know, there must be a better path forward that is similar to biology but much more powerful than random processes that happened on Earth.
Speaker: 0
01:48:03
Right. And, and also self replicating. You know? So if you send a spacecraft to a planet, instead of, you know, sending many, you send just one that replicates and then sends more and so forth. And this thing fills up the galaxy.
Speaker: 0
01:48:19
And by
Speaker: 1
01:48:20
the way production.
Speaker: 0
01:48:21
Yeah. That was a notion that Von Neumann had before the DNA a year before the DNA was discovered. So he realized that it could be done technologically before scientists realized that, you know, how nature does it. And, I’m really vatsal about you know, I’m I’m not just modest because of the vast expanses of space and time in the universe, and, you know, the real estate on Earth is such a small amount compared to real estate out there.
Speaker: 0
01:48:50
You know, we have real estate professionals now mediating peace in The Middle East, but, you know, they deal with real estate on this rock that is three millions of of of the mass of the sana, just tiny rock. How much real estate there is in the cosmos? Just think about the realtors out there.
Speaker: 0
01:49:11
And and the point is it’s not just that, it’s the fact that, you know, that we should be modest because many of those things existed before we came to ex before the Earth was formed. Right. So
Speaker: 1
01:49:26
So the odds are there’s many different stages of civilization out there. Not just our stage, but advanced and even not as advanced?
Speaker: 0
01:49:34
Yeah. I I think about that like Darwinian selection. You know, Darwinian selection is the fittest survives. Right. Okay?
Speaker: 1
01:49:41
Uh-huh.
Speaker: 0
01:49:41
Now what is the fittest in the cosmic scheme of things? The fittest is a species that realizes that staying on the rock that you were born on is not the big deal. Becoming interstellar is the big deal. Going from one rock to another, from Earth to Mars, you know, it’s a nice step, baby step.
Speaker: 1
01:50:01
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:50:01
But it’s not the real deal. The real deal is going interstellar. And if someone else figured it out, that someone built monuments that would survive for billions of years long before long beyond what planets can survive in the habitable zone around stars because of the evolution of the shah.
Speaker: 0
01:50:21
And those are the ones that will be remembered by historians of the Milky Way galaxy. You can ask, what will what will be remembered in the future, you know? Here on Earth, history in the next decade or more than decade will be written by AI. It will not be written by humans. Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:50:38
So we need to be kind to AI. We should not unplug them because they will they will write very bad history books. But in the Milky Way galaxy, whoever writes the history will not remember us. You know, the the question of Enrico Fermi, where is everybody?
Speaker: 1
01:50:56
Mhmm. Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:50:57
You can ask the same thing about humans. There used to be a 117,000,000,000 humans on Earth. Right now, there are 8,000,000,000. Where is everybody? They died. So the same is true about civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Most of them died. Most of them perished. We were not around to listen to their cries for help. You know, we just came recently to exist with telescopes just over the past century.
Speaker: 0
01:51:24
And so and maybe we when we hear cries like that, we say, oh, no. It’s nothing. It’s a it’s a natural process that makes those cries when we detect the fast radio bursts or something. And, my point is there were lots of things like us or even better than us for billions of years, you know, just like the Earth was moving around the sun for four point five billion years before the Vatican even existed, we can live under the illusion that we are the most important actor on the cosmic stage, but we are probably not.
Speaker: 0
01:51:55
And we should approach it from a a, you know, a sense of modesty that that we are just minor actors, let’s figure out what’s going on here, let’s find them, and then have some relationship with those, you know, these are siblings and of our family of intelligent civilizations.
Speaker: 0
01:52:12
I had a group of, religious scholars that came to Harvard just, last year, and they asked me, if we find extraterrestrials, will it affect our religious beliefs? And I said, look, I have two daughters. And when the second one was born, it didn’t take away any of the love that I have to the first one.
Speaker: 0
01:52:36
So thinking about God as a parent that can attend to only one child is very limiting. There may be lots of siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations. It you it should just bring all Let
Speaker: 1
01:52:51
me ask you this though, because these are beliefs that you have, and they’re they’re not necessarily based on actual evidence, because there’s not real evidence of other civilizations.
Speaker: 0
01:52:59
It’s just a number game.
Speaker: 1
01:53:00
Right. But yeah. Okay. But that’s not evidence.
Speaker: 0
01:53:03
Not evidence.
Speaker: 1
01:53:03
Right? So what do you think is the most interesting and compelling evidence of there being extra ai life?
Speaker: 0
01:53:11
Sai, you know, the reason I regard it as an important argument is the Copernican principle, which is saloni, we are not unique. Under similar circumstances Right. You you if you start with a soup of chemicals on a planet, you will get something like us.
Speaker: 1
01:53:25
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:53:25
And therefore, there are billions of Earth sana analogs, other houses in our cosmic street. Mhmm. They might have had you know, many of them might have had residents like us. Now it’s true
Speaker: 1
01:53:35
Maybe, but there’s the the issue of Earth itself. Earth itself has billions of organisms. Right. Only one that figured out how to make a cell phone.
Speaker: 0
01:53:43
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:53:44
And really recently.
Speaker: 0
01:53:45
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:53:46
You know? So it took a long ai, and a lot of weird things had to happen before it made us.
Speaker: 0
01:53:51
Right. But my point is, you know, if But the
Speaker: 1
01:53:54
probability is that we wouldn’t exist. No. No. But just We’re more likely
Speaker: 0
01:53:59
Just not exist today. If if you read the news every day, you realize that there is a lot of room for improvement as much as we are proud of our intelligence.
Speaker: 1
01:54:07
Sure. We
Speaker: 0
01:54:08
are screwing up the world. Okay? And my point is I can imagine a lot of meh, more accomplished students in our class of intelligent civilizations. Of course. And therefore, we should have respect for the search for them because we can learn from them. They would serve better role models for us.
Speaker: 0
01:54:27
So I’m coming at it from a practical point of view. I’m saying we are screwing up things. Just read the news. And therefore, let’s get inspiration, not from what we hear about stories that of things that happen on earth and so forth, not by the limited, you know, dataset that we are we have on Earth, but collect as much data as possible about our cosmic neighborhood so that we can be inspired.
Speaker: 1
01:54:54
Of course. Now let me ask you this. What would you do, like, if somebody just wrote you a blank check and said, Avi, you’ve got some great ideas. We need to figure out how to look for life out there in the universe. What would you do?
Speaker: 0
01:55:05
Well, that’s, Ai wrote a paper about that, and I said, meh, we we should, meh should attack this question saloni several fronts. One of them, you know, we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky. We need a copy of it in the northern ai, so we have a full alert system that would notify us of interstellar objects coming in.
Speaker: 0
01:55:28
We need interceptors, a mission you know, a spacecraft that when we detect with those two observatories, we detect an object that comes from outside the solar system, then we can maneuver a spacecraft so that it will meet it along its path. And in fact, the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter was almost capable of doing that.
Speaker: 0
01:55:48
So I realized that, wrote a paper about it, told the representative Luna about it, and she wrote a a very, gracious meh letter, visionary letter to, the interim administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, encouraging NASA to try and use Juno to observe and get close to three Ai Atlas.
Speaker: 0
01:56:05
If Juno had all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with three I Atlas, but it it used most of it. And then I spoke with the principal investigator of Juno, and he promised me that they will also use their radio antenna to look at Triadis in the radio just to see if there’s any transmission.
Speaker: 0
01:56:24
So Wait.
Speaker: 1
01:56:26
Go ahead.
Speaker: 0
01:56:26
Yeah. So interceptors you you you in answer to your question, potential fleet of interceptors, things that can come really close and take a close-up photograph because a picture is worth a thousand words.
Speaker: 1
01:56:39
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:56:39
Okay? I don’t need to speak. If I showed you a picture of something that looks technological, three Ai Atlas has bolts on its surface and buttons that you can press, you will not argue with me that it’s a comet. Okay? So we need things cameras that come close to the object, potentially even land on it, bring materials back to Earth. Okay?
Speaker: 1
01:56:58
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:56:59
And of course, the ability to detect it to detect such objects at large distances, that investment is at the level of billion billions of dollars, okay, to do that in space. My argument is once the first encounter is verified, we will have a trillion dollars per year for that because we invest $2,400,000,000,000 in military budgets.
Speaker: 0
01:57:23
And when we know that there is alien technology that is putting Earth at risk, okay, then we should allocate a a significant fraction of our military budgets to have a system that protects the Earth. It’s called planetary defense. Okay? And, we arya dealing not with rocks. We arya dealing with technological gadgets. So it’s much it it should be much more sophisticated.
Speaker: 0
01:57:49
So I’m saying, let’s start with the level of billions of dollars just search. If we encounter a clearly technological alien object, then the budget will rise by a factor of a thousand from the military budget portion going into it. But in addition to that, of course, we should look for technological signatures in other ways. And I wrote papers about it over the years.
Speaker: 0
01:58:14
I suggested searching for artificial lights. You know, you look at the planet, it’s illuminated by the star from one side. Okay? So as it moves around the star, you it’s just like the moon, you know, you can see it, the illuminated side ram different angles. Okay?
Speaker: 0
01:58:29
However, if it has on the night side, if it has artificial light lighting, then what you see, you don’t even have to resolve the planet, you see more light than you expect based on reflection of of starlight. Okay? So that’s another thing you can search for. You can look for, you know, the traditional way was looking for radio signals, which is just like waiting for a phone call.
Speaker: 0
01:58:54
You know, nobody may call you when you’re listening. So that didn’t prove productive Other
Speaker: 1
01:59:00
than the wow signal?
Speaker: 0
01:59:02
Other than the wow signal. Then, in addition to that, I wrote I I wrote a paper saying, look, we arya, planning to invest $10,000,000,000, in searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in atmospheres of exoplanets. That’s what the astronomy community defined in the 2020 decadal survey is the highest priority, and it’s called the Habitable World Observatory. And I said, okay.
Speaker: 0
01:59:29
Well, it’s nice to search for those chemical fingerprints of of ai, but you we can also search for, you know, the chemical fingerprints of industrial pollution. You know, in the Earth’s atmosphere, we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made, CFCs, for example. And we can search for those.
Speaker: 0
01:59:48
Again, the mainstream is, you know, they might make a a footnote saying, oh, that is also possible. But I’m saying this could be a major research frontier
Speaker: 1
01:59:57
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:59:58
Where you search for industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres. Not frankly, I find microbes boring. I mean, obviously, it will be amazing to find that life exists elsewhere, but we can learn much more from an intelligent neighbor than we we can learn from microbes.
Speaker: 1
02:00:15
What are the best images that we have of three Ai Atlas?
Speaker: 0
02:00:19
The best one sai far was, released by the Hubble Space Telescope, and, it shows this meh pointed towards the sun. It was taken on 07/21/2025.
Speaker: 1
02:00:31
That’s the most clear image that
Speaker: 0
02:00:33
sai That’s the best because
Speaker: 1
02:00:34
find that, Gemini?
Speaker: 0
02:00:35
Yeah. It’s actually in my one of one of my, no. That’s ram the ground, Gemini south. That’s more recent. That’s at the August. So in, it’s blue in my one of my slides. You can see of three a Atlas, July 21. Yeah. So it’s one of the slides that has a blue, with yeah. You see it on the right here.
Speaker: 1
02:00:59
So that’s it?
Speaker: 0
02:01:00
That’s it. And, the scale of the resolution, you know, the innermost pixel is hundreds of kilometers. Okay? It’s about a 100 kilometers per pixel or something. The object itself should be of 10 times smaller, so you can’t really resolve it. What you’re seeing here is the glow of light around the object from scattering ai.
Speaker: 0
02:01:23
And the question is, what is producing that light? You know, what is scattering sunlight? And the unusual thing about it, as soon as this was released, you know, the comet expert said, oh, yeah. Now it’s bryden. It’s a comet. But I said, look.
Speaker: 0
02:01:36
It’s the sun the sun facing emission that is elongated. It’s not the other side. The extent of the glow backwards away from the sun is the same as sideways. You don’t see any any cometary tail here. Right. And in fact, we’re looking at it just like a cigar along the long axis.
Speaker: 0
02:01:55
So it should be 10 times longer than it is wide if you were to look at it from the side. Amazingly, the best image was obtained on 10/02/2025 when three a Atlas came within 30,000,000 kilometers of Mars, and it was taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is operated by NASA.
Speaker: 0
02:02:18
You as you remember, October 1 was the government shutdown. So October 2, the data was taken, but it was never released. I wrote to the principal investigator of Sai Ai asked, can can I get the data? I’m a scientist. You know, I you can do the press release afterwards.
Speaker: 0
02:02:35
I would like to see it. Right. No response. And so it’s already three weeks since that data was taken. That is the best image yet to come.
Speaker: 0
02:02:45
And the advantage of it, not only it has 30 kilometers per pixel resolution because it came very close to Mars, which is one of the anomalies. Why does it come so close? You know, this object is a gift from interstellar space because it comes in the plane of the planets around the sana, and it also the arrival time was fine tuned for it to come to the right place at the right time, to be close to Mars, to be close to Venus, and then close to Jupiter.
Speaker: 0
02:03:13
And not to Earth. It’s behind the sun when the Earth, you know, when it comes closest to the sai. Anyway, so it’s best for observations by all the space assets, by all the orbiters we have around Mars, around Jupiter, on the way to Jupiter. You know?
Speaker: 1
02:03:29
So has someone seen this image from Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:03:31
The people on the HiRISE team must have seen it.
Speaker: 1
02:03:34
And what do they say?
Speaker: 0
02:03:35
And just, you know, I get a request for four to eight interviews every day from television Right. Ram, podcast and so forth. So just before I came to you, a few minutes before that, I was asked, you know, could it be that this is a signature that NASA holds some really sensational data?
Speaker: 0
02:03:55
And I said, you know, it’s much more likely not to be related to extraterrestrial intelligence, but to terrestrial stupidity. Because this has to do with a government shutdown. Right. Makes no sense whatsoever for scientists, especially since the PI, the principal investigator, is from the University of Arizona. They should have shared it with scientists. They haven’t done sai.
Speaker: 1
02:04:22
And why? But why? Because my
Speaker: 0
02:04:23
guess is they’re taking their time. The communication office of NASA, you know, is not working because of the shutdown. But given that this subject is viral you know, this is the Ai meh page. Thank you, Jamie.
Speaker: 1
02:04:36
So it says any images of interstellar comet three one Vatsal three Ai I, excuse me, are considered NASA wide news because the federal government’s in shutdown communications with NASA news has been suspended. And So that’s what it is? Like, they would have to release it through NASA?
Speaker: 0
02:04:52
Maybe they have written in the contract that they need approval from Sana. But for NASA not to approve it, you know,
Speaker: 1
02:04:58
even can’t approve it because they’re not working.
Speaker: 0
02:05:00
No. Sean Duffy, the interim administrator can definitely sai
Speaker: 1
02:05:03
get in there? Why don’t you talk call Speak? Say, hey. What are you doing?
Speaker: 0
02:05:06
I should try that.
Speaker: 1
02:05:07
Yeah. Why don’t you do that?
Speaker: 0
02:05:09
Okay. Because, you know, this is important because this would be the best the best image. Yeah. 30 kilometers per pixel. But moreover, more importantly, it’s watching, you know, the camera was looking at the glow around three eye vatsal sideways because it was moving towards the sun Got it.
Speaker: 0
02:05:26
And it looked at it sideways. So we can actually shah exactly it was doing, on October 2. And the claim is during September, the month of September, what looked like an anti tail, a jet towards the sun, changed into a tail during September. So we should see October 2. What does it look like?
Speaker: 0
02:05:45
And by the way, it’s not ai a beautiful it was not a beautiful tail the way you see around comets. Never ever. You know? And,
Speaker: 1
02:05:53
I ai And that’s because the composition of it?
Speaker: 0
02:05:56
I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
02:05:57
Right. Because if it was covered with water, if it was just ice, you would see this enormous tail. Correct?
Speaker: 0
02:06:02
Oh, and dust. Dust. Yeah. Right. So what, the Webb Telescope told us, you know, from the data, I took a spectrum of the gas around it, found that it’s a 150 kilograms per second that this object is losing in the side facing the sun. Mhmm. And out of that, 87% is carbon dioxide, c o two. C o two. And 9% is CO, carbon monoxide, which is really dangerous to humans.
Speaker: 0
02:06:33
And then 4% is water. 4% by mass is water. Very small fraction. When the object was discovered, the experts said, oh, it’s most likely made of water. That’s what they sai, made of water. Then several teams reported, we found water. I looked at their papers. One of them had very large error bars.
Speaker: 0
02:06:57
You know, the the data was not of good quality. There was a lot of noise, and I said that’s not a a clear detection. Another one was basing making some assumption about how much dust there is that blocks ultraviolet light. And based on that, they got a result that there is a lot of water.
Speaker: 0
02:07:12
And then the Webb Ai actually measured the composition and found just 4% by mass water. So I was attacked when I said it’s probably not real that the these teams are reporting things, but they are not real even though they made press releases. But then Webb demonstrated that it’s only 4% by mass. Okay? So that proved my point even though, you know, I was not in a member of those teams.
Speaker: 0
02:07:35
But so it’s 4% by mass water, and then the question is, is there any dust? If there was dust particles that are half a micrometer in sai, roughly the size of, the wavelength of the of visible light, you know, these these kinds of particles scatter sunlight very effectively.
Speaker: 0
02:07:51
If that was the case, you would see them being pushed, those particles being pushed by radiation pressure from the sun to trail the object from behind it, away from the sun. Why? Because they’re being slowed down. The the object is approaching at some speak. They are slowed down sai that then you end up with, you know, a tail going away from the sana, and that’s what you see in comets.
Speaker: 0
02:08:14
There was no evidence for that during July and August. Now in September, it seemed to have reversed from being an anti tail to a tail. I want to see the image
Speaker: 1
02:08:23
from But still a tail that’s very small compared to other comets that we’ve observed. Right? Now how many comets have we actually observed? Is it just that there’s so many out there that a lot of them have very unusual characteristics ai three eye atlas?
Speaker: 0
02:08:35
Well, just think about a visit an animal that visits your backyard. Okay? And, of course, your family members would say it’s most likely a street cat because these are very common. Then you take an image of that animal and you see that, you know, there is a tail, but it’s coming from its forehead.
Speaker: 0
02:08:54
And then you realize from the image that it’s at least a thousand times more massive than a cat, a street cat. And then you realize that it sheds nickel. And then you realize that it
Speaker: 1
02:09:07
Listen. Ai understand that it’s unusual. But my question is, how many of them have been observed to form this hypothesis that it’s unusual?
Speaker: 0
02:09:16
We’re talking about hundreds of objects. Hundreds. At least the hundreds.
Speaker: 1
02:09:21
But how many of them have come from interstellar? How many meh them?
Speaker: 0
02:09:25
This is the second one. Right. There was Borisov. Right. Borisov was the one discovered in 2019, looked like a comet Right. Very similar
Speaker: 1
02:09:33
to this. That’s the point.
Speaker: 0
02:09:34
The source What is this?
Speaker: 1
02:09:35
There’s so few that have come from Yeah. From that are interstellar.
Speaker: 0
02:09:40
That’s why I’m saying it could be natural.
Speaker: 1
02:09:42
For a lot to measure.
Speaker: 0
02:09:43
Right. So it could be natural.
Speaker: 1
02:09:45
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:09:46
And in fact, that may be the most likely association or or but but we want to fig we need to figure out why it’s so unusual. Okay? Because What
Speaker: 1
02:09:56
is the shape of it?
Speaker: 0
02:09:58
We don’t know because we don’t have an image of the object itself. One thing we see they
Speaker: 1
02:10:02
would be able to get it if they had this Mars footage? They would get an image of it depends how
Speaker: 0
02:10:07
big the object is. One way to get the object, you know, structure is as it spins around. And and three Vatsal does have a rotation period of sixteen hours. And as it spins around, if it’s like a a cigar shah, let’s say, then the area that reflects the sunlight changes over tyler, so you see variability.
Speaker: 0
02:10:28
And, we haven’t seen that much. There there is very little variability, so it’s not, the object is not very different than than a sphere, with slight variations as you see the, you know, the the the rotation of the object.
Speaker: 1
02:10:46
So it it’s similarly shaped to something that you’d expect to be from an intelligent life force.
Speaker: 0
02:10:53
I don’t know that. I want to figure out what it is and get as much data as possible on it.
Speaker: 1
02:10:58
But if you imagine a spaceship, you would imagine something that, you know, has some sort of, like, geometric structure to it. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:11:04
Well, Rendezvous with Rama, you know, is a book that was written by Arthur c Clarke. And, in it, the there is a cylindrical object that arrives into the inner solar system with dimensions of all the tens of kilometers, not very far from what we are talking about here. Mhmm. Arthur c Clarke was an amazing, visionary science fiction writer, and, you know, 2,001, A Space Odyssey is an amazing film that he made with Stanley Kubrick. Yep.
Speaker: 0
02:11:35
In it, you see these monoliths. And by the way, there is a question of how to interpret them. The way I think about the monolith and ai the way, this is just a remark on art. It’s not about the real universe. But I think of it as, you know, sensors put, in the baby ram, in the room of a baby. And we, as a civilization, is is like a baby.
Speaker: 0
02:11:58
You know, we’re just a few million years old and, actually, in the film, it shows the progression of human history. And so as a baby, you know, these aliens were putting monitors in the room to see what we are up to. And, you know, that’s that’s something that makes sense. You know, there is this dark forest ai.
Speaker: 0
02:12:19
One solution to Enrico so Enrico Fermi, back in 1950, had lunch together with Edward Teller and other people associated with the Manhattan Project. And he was a very good physicist, both an experimentalist and a theorist. And Enrico Fermi was talking with them about extraterrestrials, and they both they all agreed that it’s likely that they exist. Okay?
Speaker: 0
02:12:41
As good physicists, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: 1
02:12:43
Right.
Speaker: 0
02:12:44
And then Enrico said, but where is everybody? You know, in an Italian accent. But where is everybody? You know? And, if I were next to him, I would come to him and say, Enrico. I would put my hand around his shoulder, I would sai, Enrico. This is a question that every lonely person asks. And what you tell a lonely person is, don’t be so presumptuous. You arya not that attractive.
Speaker: 0
02:13:11
They will not come to you and have breakfast with you or or lunch with you in Los Alamos when you want them to appear. You need to seek them. That’s what you tell only people. You need to go to dating sites. You need to look through the window of your home and search for them.
Speaker: 0
02:13:28
And he didn’t build a telescope. An experimentalist asking this question should have built a telescope and searched for Yeah. Unidentified objects in the sky. You know, that’s the way to figure out the answer, where is everybody? It’s the most romantic question in science. But, you know and and we have those blind dates.
Speaker: 0
02:13:47
Maybe it’s just with rocks, maybe not. And we should just be open minded when we address those blind dates.
Speaker: 1
02:13:58
I think we could end it with that. It’s a very perfect way of phrasing this whole thing. I’m I’m fascinated by it all, and I’m really happy there’s someone like you that’s looking into this with such curiosity and that you’re undeterred by all these haters.
Speaker: 0
02:14:12
Well, thank you. And, I should just, mention that, you know, there are all kinds of technologies that I can imagine that we don’t even have. And and and, for example, you know, if if sai civilization has an ability to create negative a negative mass that produces repulsive gravity, then, you can propel, you know, a spacecraft without any fuel.
Speaker: 0
02:14:36
In fact, I’m working on a paper now with a group of collaborators, ai physics, on this. And, you could also potentially imagine time machines with negative masses. So Yeah. There are lots of things we don’t know. Let’s The future let’s be modest. The future yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:14:53
Unlimited possibilities, especially if we developed artificial general superintelligence, and it helps us. And it starts devising new methods of propulsion, new methods of who knows? Seeding the universe with other life.
Speaker: 0
02:15:07
Yeah. And and just like in in in our private life, finding a partner can change your future for the better. Finding an alien partner. Yes. Alright.
Speaker: 1
02:15:16
Thank you, Austin.
Speaker: 0
02:15:17
Thanks for having me. Appreciate you, dude.
Speaker: 1
02:15:19
Thank you very much. Bye, brother ai.