The Great America Show - SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

00:00:00.080 Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Great America Show.

00:00:03.700 We're going to catch up on the latest absurdities in our body politic.

00:00:08.040 We'll also be bringing you right up to date on the puppet president's antics and aggravations.

00:00:13.780 We'll also be reaching for the stars in today's episode.

00:00:17.440 I've invited the brilliant Harvard astrophysicist and astronomer,

00:00:21.820 Professor Avi Loeb, to join us here today to explain, well,

00:00:26.220 two extraordinary incidents and discoveries.

00:00:28.980 A meteorite that hit the Earth in 2014 near Papua New Guinea

00:00:34.120 and an interstellar object that passed through our solar system,

00:00:39.120 the object named Oumuamua by the astronomers who discovered it back in 2017.

00:00:45.620 You're going to find it fascinating.

00:00:47.860 Both are objects that have been confirmed to have traveled from another solar system to ours,

00:00:54.120 the first interstellar objects to be discovered.

00:00:57.260 The first, Professor Loeb says they could well be, in fact,

00:01:02.360 physical evidence of extraterrestrial life.

00:01:05.600 We'll be taking up this fascinating story and this fascinating possibility

00:01:10.440 of life beyond Earth with Professor Loeb here today.

00:01:15.100 But let's first talk about intelligent life on Earth and some not so intelligent.

00:01:20.720 The latter seems to be in greater abundance of late.

00:01:23.440 Have you noticed?

00:01:24.140 Certainly in Washington, D.C., particularly in the neighborhood of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

00:01:31.660 President Biden has refused to condemn the call for radical left pro-abortion activists

00:01:37.020 to protest outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.

00:01:41.680 CNN reports the activists have doxed the justices,

00:01:45.600 releasing the home addresses of Republican-appointed justices.

00:01:49.800 The tactics of the Marxist left Dems are getting much closer

00:01:54.100 to those of the transnational narco cartels operating in Mexico.

00:01:59.980 Their intimidation tactics are worsening,

00:02:02.900 and only Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has ordered up stronger security

00:02:07.520 for justices who live in his state.

00:02:10.580 The Biden regime has ordered a million barrels of oil

00:02:14.080 drawn down from our strategic petroleum reserves for Europe for six months.

00:02:20.840 Biden is shipping 180 million barrels of our oil stored for national emergencies to Europe

00:02:28.820 to, as Mr. Biden put it, support the world economy.

00:02:33.460 The Marxist authoritarian Biden is doing so, as has become his custom,

00:02:38.720 without any authority whatsoever to ship oil from our reserves to other countries or country.

00:02:46.480 No discussion, no debate, no protest from Republican Party leaders, if you can believe it. 0.98

00:02:53.960 Enough idiocy in D.C. for one day, don't you think? 0.98

00:02:56.860 Let's turn to intelligent life now, both here on this planet 0.98

00:03:00.800 and the prospect of life on other planets, solar systems,

00:03:04.540 and fascinating discoveries in science that elevate our hopes, our spirits, and minds.

00:03:11.200 You may ask, what are my qualifications to be talking about such matters

00:03:15.920 as the search for extraterrestrial life, UFOs, and more?

00:03:20.560 Fair question.

00:03:22.060 Let me share with you my sole credential for taking up those matters,

00:03:26.300 joking with President Trump and asking him about transparency

00:03:30.280 in government research of alien life.

00:03:33.680 Here's the president giving me full authority in all such matters.

00:03:39.240 But I've got one question as we conclude here,

00:03:42.300 because actually a lot of my friends are very concerned about

00:03:48.300 what the federal government is doing when it comes to UFOs.

00:03:53.360 So if I could just ask you, are you going to commit more resources

00:03:58.420 to exploring UFOs and open the documents to the public?

00:04:04.720 Well, I think you're the, probably in this country, you're the UFO expert.

00:04:09.040 So I'm going to be totally guided by the great Lou Dobbs,

00:04:14.140 and I will tell you that I'll do whatever you ask me to do,

00:04:19.520 including total transparency.

00:04:21.320 And I've got to tell you, there's probably some pretty good transparency needed there.

00:04:25.820 There's no doubt about that.

00:04:28.860 Well, Mr. President, I couldn't have asked for a better answer.

00:04:32.120 Thank you so much, and I'll be calling your office soon to get that underway.

00:04:40.020 President Trump, with his great sense of humor, and I, of course, from that point on,

00:04:44.980 have always referred to myself as the administration's UFO czar.

00:04:48.920 We have with us today a man with so many credentials, it's breathtaking.

00:04:54.400 Our guest is Harvard professor Abraham Avi Loeb, a fascinating, brilliant scholar and scientist.

00:05:01.380 Avi is not only an exceptional professor of astronomy at Harvard University,

00:05:05.340 he's also director of the Institute for Theory and Computation in the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

00:05:13.780 Professor Loeb is heading up a mission as well to recover from the floor of the Pacific Ocean

00:05:19.360 the first interstellar meteorite to ever hit planet Earth

00:05:23.840 and perhaps discover evidence of extraterrestrials.

00:05:28.380 We're thrilled to have you with us, Professor Loeb.

00:05:30.800 Welcome to The Great America Show.

00:05:34.160 Thanks for having me.

00:05:35.000 It's a great pleasure.

00:05:35.620 Professor, let's start with this object that is at rest on the ocean floor

00:05:43.540 that, as I understand it, you want to pick it up through a magnet.

00:05:50.720 It's very deep.

00:05:52.140 The water is there.

00:05:54.220 Give us a sense of what you're proposing to do.

00:05:58.240 Yeah, so it's very similar to going to your backyard and finding an object that came from the street.

00:06:06.600 And the Earth acts as a fishing net.

00:06:10.000 It moves in its orbit around the sun, and every now and then it collides with an object along its path.

00:06:17.820 And, you know, very often all of the fish that we collect are from the solar system.

00:06:23.100 These are rocks that were part of the construction project of the planets.

00:06:28.240 They were just the Lego pieces that made up the planet.

00:06:32.340 But we found the very first object that collided with the Earth that came from outside the solar system.

00:06:41.040 So how do we know that?

00:06:42.600 Because government sensors, part of a missile warning system,

00:06:47.160 measured the speed of this object when it burned up in the lower atmosphere of the Earth.

00:06:53.960 And the speed was so high that when we went back in time and we could figure out that the object was never bound to the sun.

00:07:02.880 It was moving at about 40 miles per second relative to the sun at very large distances.

00:07:09.700 So it was definitely not bound to the sun.

00:07:12.620 And so we wrote a scientific paper about it.

00:07:17.600 And then a month ago, the government confirmed our conclusion.

00:07:23.080 There was a letter from the U.S. Space Command addressed to NASA saying that they agree with our conclusion.

00:07:30.120 At the 99.999% confidence, they say that the object originated from outside the solar system.

00:07:38.060 It's an interstellar object.

00:07:39.840 Now, you might think that, you know, you might think it's a rock that came from another star,

00:07:44.940 just like the rocks we found near the sun.

00:07:47.680 You know, these are nothing unusual, except this one came from another star.

00:07:53.520 But the government also released the data on the light curve of the fireball.

00:07:59.020 So when the object enters the atmosphere, it starts heating up as a result of the friction with the air.

00:08:06.180 And when it gets to the lower atmosphere, very often a meteor just burns up.

00:08:11.800 There is so much heat and stress on the object.

00:08:14.460 And so the government said that at the 18.7 kilometers above sea level, it exploded.

00:08:23.660 And they actually measured how much light was emitted.

00:08:27.800 And you can tell that there was about a quarter of the world consumption, about four terawatt of power generated in that event.

00:08:37.640 It's altogether about 2% of the energy released in the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

00:08:45.160 Sorry, what percent?

00:08:47.640 2%.

00:08:48.280 2%.

00:08:48.640 Yeah.

00:08:50.080 I mean, there are bigger objects that burn up, usually rocks that burn up in the atmosphere that generate more than that.

00:08:56.540 There was an event just a few years ago that was about 10 times the Hiroshima bomb.

00:09:03.920 So we do collide with rocks.

00:09:05.900 And depending on their size, you know, there is a large amount of energy in the explosion.

00:09:13.040 But this one was unusual in the sense that it moved very fast.

00:09:17.280 So it came from outside the solar system.

00:09:19.160 But also, it burned up relatively close to the ground.

00:09:24.680 So it penetrated through the atmosphere.

00:09:27.480 And that meant it had a very strong material.

00:09:31.580 It was made of something that is tougher than iron, actually.

00:09:36.180 We calculated that.

00:09:37.980 And so it's really mysterious, both in terms of its composition.

00:09:41.720 It seems to be an outlier, tougher than iron.

00:09:44.520 And I should say, iron meteorites are about 5% of the entire population of rocks that come from space.

00:09:52.700 So only one-twentieth.

00:09:54.480 And this one is even tougher than the iron meteorites we've seen before.

00:09:59.020 And it's the first one that we find from interstellar space.

00:10:02.720 So why is the first one such an outlier?

00:10:05.620 And moreover, it moved really fast.

00:10:07.880 Much faster than stars move relative to the sun in the vicinity of the sun.

00:10:11.720 And so altogether, it seems to be weird and interesting.

00:10:14.940 And, you know, I always think about the New Horizons, you know, this spacecraft that we launched to Pluto that will exit the solar system.

00:10:24.760 And imagine it in a billion years colliding with a planet, a habitable planet like the Earth, and then burning up as a meteor.

00:10:35.040 And, you know, it would appear as an object burning up in the sky.

00:10:40.960 But if you look for the fragments, if the astronomers on that planet a billion years from now would look, would check the fragments,

00:10:49.020 they would realize that they are made of some alloy of metals that is not made naturally.

00:10:55.400 It was artificial, New Horizons.

00:10:57.700 We should point out, too, that meteorites often have nickel alloys of various kinds for whatever the reason.

00:11:09.260 Professor, if I could just interject here.

00:11:12.000 The size of this meteor lying on the ocean floor, what do you estimate its size to be?

00:11:19.940 Based on the amount of energy released, we estimate it to be about half a meter of very tough material, tougher than iron or similar to iron.

00:11:32.100 And then when it was melted during the explosion, it probably broke to pieces.

00:11:39.620 We don't know because we haven't found them yet.

00:11:42.080 But then there was probably a rain of droplets.

00:11:46.660 So think about iron rain landing on the ocean surface, creating a lot of steam.

00:11:54.540 If you were to use an umbrella, it would not protect you against those iron droplets.

00:12:00.920 And then they would sink to the bottom of the ocean, the ocean floor.

00:12:05.220 And we can scoop them up.

00:12:07.200 That was done before for other meteorites.

00:12:10.120 And that's the exciting part, because, you know, if we were to find such an object in space and we wanted to have a space mission that will land on it and check its composition and so forth, that would cost more than a billion dollars.

00:12:27.140 But to do it in the ocean, to scoop the ocean floor, that would cost less than a million dollars.

00:12:32.060 So we are talking about a thousand times savings.

00:12:34.960 We can put our hands on the material that made this object that came from outside the solar system for less than a million dollars.

00:12:42.820 And we are currently planning this expedition on a ship.

00:12:48.120 Hopefully it will be done before the end of 2023.

00:12:51.500 I still need to get the million dollars, but that's not a lot of money.

00:12:54.780 And it will be really exciting, because imagine if we find that it was made of some exotic materials that you don't find in nature, and it looks as if it was artificial.

00:13:09.340 What do you, to that, what do you estimate the weight?

00:13:14.120 Let's just make an assumption that just before impact, or before it became iron rain, as you put it, what do you expect the density to be, the weight of this foot and a half wide object?

00:13:30.860 Right, so about 500 kilograms or so, or a ton, half a ton.

00:13:36.880 So the thing is, the density is probably about eight grams per cubic centimeter, so a little more than iron.

00:13:46.900 That's what we estimate.

00:13:48.740 But we don't know.

00:13:50.360 We simply don't know.

00:13:51.720 We will have to scoop the ocean floor and figure it out.

00:13:54.240 Now, the way to do it is to drop down a sled with a magnet and then sweep the ocean floor.

00:14:02.240 And sort of like mowing the lawn, there is a region of about 10 kilometers in size that we have to go back and forth, back and forth.

00:14:11.920 It will take us a week or so, and then we will figure out, you know, we'll collect all the fragments.

00:14:17.660 We will also probably have a remotely operated vehicle that goes on the ocean floor and takes a video and sees if there is anything unusual.

00:14:26.100 By the way, it's very easy to find such fragments, even if their size is less than a millimeter, less than the head of a pin, because the ocean floor, you know, is very deep there.

00:14:37.740 It's about a mile deep near Papua New Guinea, Manus Island.

00:14:45.280 And it's about 100 miles away from Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

00:14:49.360 And by the way, the government of Papua New Guinea is now considering approving our expedition.

00:14:56.660 We asked them to, and they seem to be very cooperative.

00:15:01.620 So the point is that the ocean floor is mostly mud and, you know, sea sand and things that are relatively uniform.

00:15:10.780 And it's very easy to identify unusual fragments that landed on this muck.

00:15:17.500 If this, the question occurs naturally from what you're saying, if you want to pick this up with magnets, and this has density beyond that of iron, what makes you think that it will respond to the magnet?

00:15:39.980 Well, that's an excellent question.

00:15:41.380 Well, in the past, when people tried to collect fragments from meteorites, explosions similar to the one I mentioned, it was very effective.

00:15:50.820 I mean, they were able to do that with a magnet simply because the fragments have usually enough iron or other metals to be attracted.

00:15:59.100 And sea sand does not.

00:16:00.800 So it's easy to separate.

00:16:02.320 But we don't know what this object was made of.

00:16:04.280 And you raise an excellent question.

00:16:06.200 So that's why we will have a video camera along with lights surveying the ocean floor at the same time as we are trying to collect those fragments.

00:16:18.100 And, you know, I would be really delighted if there was something, a big piece of it left behind.

00:16:24.640 And I actually wrote a commentary about the New Horizons, this spacecraft that NASA launched a decade and a half ago towards Pluto.

00:16:34.820 And they put actually a box in it that carried 30 grams of the ashes of Clyde Tambau.

00:16:43.420 And just imagine this spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere of another planet and then the box landing in the bottom of the ocean and the extraterrestrials finding it, those astronomers there.

00:16:55.680 And, you know, they would be very disappointed because what are ashes?

00:17:00.700 They are no different from the ashes of a cigarette.

00:17:02.640 And so they would say, well, there is this human civilization that tried to commemorate a person.

00:17:11.900 The person is, by the way, Clyde Tambau, who discovered Pluto.

00:17:15.620 And they destroyed the genetic information about that person in the form of ashes to commemorate that person.

00:17:23.560 That makes little sense.

00:17:25.180 And we don't want anything to do with this destructive civilization.

00:17:30.480 We don't want to contact them.

00:17:31.660 It, this rock lying on the bottom of the ocean or rock, it came from outside our solar system.

00:17:40.480 You have all sorts of calculations, mathematic calculations for speed, velocity, density, weight, and projections.

00:17:50.080 Does that go so far as when you look at this, the velocity of this thing, which is extraordinary, how could it be moving that fast?

00:18:01.000 You said it was unbound from the sun.

00:18:02.960 It's not responding to the gravitational pull of our central star.

00:18:08.720 And what is it responding to?

00:18:11.080 What gave it that velocity?

00:18:13.540 What mass is there out there that would send this thing hurtling through space from another solar system?

00:18:22.720 That's an excellent question.

00:18:24.640 It was moving outside the solar system twice as fast as typical stars move.

00:18:31.480 And that makes it an outlier also in terms of its speed, not just the composition.

00:18:38.020 It represents maybe less than a few percent of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun.

00:18:44.860 Now, you have to understand that in order for it to get such a high speed, it either needs to originate from a star that happens to be moving that fast.

00:18:55.460 And that means likelihood of less than a few percent, or it should have originated very close to the parent star.

00:19:03.400 So in order to kick it at that speed that it had outside the solar system, you need it to originate from within the orbit of Mercury around the sun.

00:19:17.700 Because only there you have those kinds of speeds of 40 miles per second that you could deliver to an object such gravitationally, such that it will be ejected with such a high speed relative to the local population of stars.

00:19:34.440 There is another possibility that it came from far away where, you know, stars are moving relative to us much faster.

00:19:41.340 But the point is, we don't see stars moving relative to the sun that fast very often.

00:19:48.700 Most of the stars moving relative to the sun are moving at half the speed of this object.

00:19:53.480 So it's really intriguing.

00:19:54.940 It's an outlier in terms of its speed.

00:19:57.020 It's an outlier in terms of its composition.

00:19:59.140 I should say the reason it's intriguing is because it's the first one that we find.

00:20:04.000 And then there was another one that was found called Oumuamua in 2017.

00:20:07.840 And I wrote a whole book about it because that one was found in space.

00:20:12.920 It was the size of a football field, an object that came from outside the solar system, discovered about four years later after this meteor.

00:20:21.080 And also looked very weird.

00:20:23.240 It didn't look like a comet, didn't have a cometary tail, didn't look like an asteroid, appeared to be flat in its shape and was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force.

00:20:36.440 And, you know, I wrote a whole book called The Extraterrestrial, arguing this is an unusual object.

00:20:43.360 This is an outlier, could be artificial in origin.

00:20:46.240 So I'm saying the first two objects that we found from outside the solar system appear to be weird.

00:20:52.300 So just imagine walking on the street and you see the first two people that you see are weird.

00:20:58.660 They do not look like, you know, the citizens of your country. 0.97

00:21:04.980 They came from another country and they look really weird. 1.00

00:21:07.960 So that says that we are missing something.

00:21:10.440 Maybe, you know, maybe these are artificial.

00:21:12.780 Maybe we, I mean, we should get more data.

00:21:15.400 And of course, that's why we are doing this expedition.

00:21:18.040 Well, Oumuamua is in itself a remarkable discovery.

00:21:27.600 We have the experience.

00:21:30.000 How fast was it moving through space compared to the one that you've certified as being interstellar?

00:21:39.760 Relative to the sun, it was moving at half the speed.

00:21:44.700 But that was unusual in a different way.

00:21:48.060 Oumuamua was actually in the so-called local standard of rest, which is the frame of reference that you get to when you average over all the stars in the vicinity of the sun.

00:21:59.000 So it was at rest in that frame, just like a parked car, a car that is parked in a parking lot, not moving at all.

00:22:08.700 And we were moving relative to it because the sun moves relative to the local standard of rest, like any other star.

00:22:14.940 Only one in 500 stars are so much at rest in that frame as Oumuamua was.

00:22:23.300 So the peculiarity, the oddity of Oumuamua was that in the local standard of rest, it wasn't moving.

00:22:30.620 And why would it be there if all the stars are moving relative to that frame?

00:22:35.320 And so that was the unusual thing about that.

00:22:37.840 It was the size of a football field, very big.

00:22:41.040 And I should say NASA never launched a spacecraft as big as a football field.

00:22:45.700 But it launched many more that are small, half a meter, like the one that describes this meteor.

00:22:54.140 So we're sort of tiptoeing up to this.

00:22:58.460 What is your thinking as a scientist and a brilliant scientist studying space, studying all of these planets and stars, heavenly bodies?

00:23:11.200 You're fascinated with this.

00:23:13.700 Does that also, well, what are your speculative ideas that have occurred to you about whether this might be extraterrestrial itself and be driven by some force that we don't understand or by intelligence that we have never detected?

00:23:34.880 Yeah, so I think the fundamental mistake we're making is not to be modest.

00:23:41.900 We keep thinking that we are special, unique, privileged, and perhaps the pinnacle of creations.

00:23:52.700 You know, and that's the biggest mistake, because in my view, Albert Einstein was probably not the smartest scientist that ever lived since the Big Bang.

00:24:01.880 We now know that half of the Sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same separation.

00:24:08.140 And most stars formed billions of years before the Sun.

00:24:11.520 So there were probably scientists that were smarter than Einstein that lived a billion years ago on another planet around another star.

00:24:20.560 And the civilization that benefited from their wisdom probably sent the equipment to space, probes.

00:24:27.780 And some of these probes might be around us.

00:24:30.180 And it's not a philosophical question whether they exist.

00:24:34.040 You know, people make this mistake of arguing about it and saying, oh, it's an extraordinary claim to think that there is something more intelligent than we are.

00:24:43.840 You know, that's the approach that my daughters had when they were at home at a young age.

00:24:49.260 And then I took them to the kindergarten and they found smarter kids on their block.

00:24:54.080 And, of course, they didn't like this idea.

00:24:56.480 But if you don't look through your windows, you will never figure out that you have neighbors if you keep claiming that you're special.

00:25:03.720 And so I think that's the mistake we are making.

00:25:06.480 And only over the past decade, we started having the capability of detecting objects in our backyard, you know, like Oumuamua.

00:25:15.760 That was not possible a decade ago or before that.

00:25:18.980 And only recently, we were able to see those things, the size of a football field from the reflection of sunlight.

00:25:26.200 And then the meteor, you know, again, only now we recognize that there are meteors from interstellar origin that are half a meter in size that we should look for.

00:25:36.840 So it's really a new world for us to discover.

00:25:40.980 And we just need to be open-minded and modest because I don't think we are the smartest kid on the block.

00:25:47.980 And if, you know, if I can have a wish, I'm 60 years old now.

00:25:52.760 And if I have a wish, it's to press a button on a piece of technology that came from another civilization.

00:25:59.420 It may say iPhone 60, you know, and it would be really interesting to see what it can do.

00:26:04.960 But also, you know, if that cannot be granted, at the very least, I want to find the fragments of an object that used to be technological that tell me, you know, that there is another intelligence out there.

00:26:22.320 Because, you know, one reason I seek intelligence in space is because I don't often find it here on Earth.

00:26:28.580 I would love to see what this produces, because you clearly have an idea that this is more than a rock laying on the ocean.

00:26:39.640 You clearly believe muamua was something more.

00:26:45.300 You measure forces, you measure velocities.

00:26:48.580 And scientists are drawn to anomalies, straightforwardly, because, you know, scientists are always the most curious among us.

00:27:00.780 And there are lots of anomalies here.

00:27:04.220 Is there enough of an anomaly in these two interstellar objects, near-Earth objects, if you prefer,

00:27:12.920 that suggests to you that there's a reason for hopes to rise, that we could be near, near, realizing that there is a neighbor somewhere?

00:27:25.960 I think so.

00:27:26.860 I think it's intriguing enough for us to seek more evidence.

00:27:29.660 And it's exciting.

00:27:32.220 You know, experts that are used to studying rocks all of their lives would argue it's a rock of a type that they've never seen before.

00:27:42.600 But they would be no different than a cave dweller that goes out and finds a cell phone and argues the cell phone is a rock of a type that they've never seen before.

00:27:51.920 So, to me, it's really the task that we face is to first check if the objects we find from space are natural,

00:28:06.380 whether they are made of a composition that is familiar, like a rock or something else that is familiar to us, or ices, or something else.

00:28:16.780 And if it's not natural, the other question is, is it human-made?

00:28:22.060 And if the answer to both questions is no, you know, we don't really need to reverse engineer what we find.

00:28:29.900 We just need to figure out that it's not natural and not human-made.

00:28:32.780 And that would be just like the cave dweller pressing a button and realizing that the cell phone records his voice and it's not really a rock.

00:28:41.700 Okay. Beyond that, trying to reverse engineer the object that you find depends on the technological gap between us and them.

00:28:52.340 If the gap is too big, we will never figure it out.

00:28:55.240 You know, just think about a cave dweller going to New York City, seeing all the gadgets. 1.00

00:28:59.120 It will become, when that cave dweller comes back home, it will become a myth.

00:29:05.540 It will, the family of the cave dweller will never be able to reverse engineer the gadgets that he saw in New York City. 0.99

00:29:16.140 But my point is that at the very least, we can tell that there is something else out there.

00:29:21.820 And that by itself would be a major event in human history.

00:29:26.520 So let's just be open-minded about it.

00:29:30.060 And, you know, it's just trying to figure out the unknown.

00:29:34.180 And I think that's what makes life exciting.

00:29:37.500 I think it is indeed.

00:29:40.020 And that's for all of us.

00:29:42.800 Discovery is always, to me, life-affirming.

00:29:46.740 And the stuff of space makes me always think in spiritual terms as well.

00:29:55.980 In that regard, if I may ask, do you believe in God?

00:30:00.460 Do you believe this is his design?

00:30:02.960 Or do you believe it's something else?

00:30:07.260 Well, that's very interesting.

00:30:08.660 First of all, I should say space exploration is all about spirituality.

00:30:13.020 I don't believe in a commercial motivation for space exploration.

00:30:18.080 I mean, even though Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos have business plans for space tourism, going to Mars, you know, I don't see it that way.

00:30:27.160 It's not, I mean, exploring the unknown is not about making money.

00:30:31.580 It's more about spirituality, figuring out something that you don't know.

00:30:35.780 And that's what should motivate us to venture eventually far out.

00:30:41.460 Now, in terms of God, I really think that there is an opportunity for science and religion to come together.

00:30:49.100 And my point is that, you know, our notion of God is as an entity that can create life.

00:30:56.540 If you go to the Genesis in the Bible, it's the entity that created the universe.

00:31:04.620 Okay.

00:31:05.320 That's in the first chapter.

00:31:06.540 And, you know, when working on modern physics, modern science, you know, we are getting close to the point where we will create life in our laboratories.

00:31:18.740 And we can imagine creating a baby universe in the laboratory once we understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.

00:31:26.180 There are some scientific papers on that.

00:31:27.760 So my point is a very advanced scientific civilization might appear to us like a good approximation to God, the way God was depicted in religious texts.

00:31:41.580 And once we find it, it will be just like connecting the dots, you know, because in principle, it's possible that we exist on this planet because someone seeded life on this planet.

00:31:54.500 And in religious texts, it's a sign to God.

00:31:56.960 But in fact, it may be an advanced scientific civilization.

00:32:00.580 So the point is the two concepts might be similar.

00:32:03.780 And by the way, I should say I find a lot of resonance with religious people.

00:32:07.740 People, they find this quest for the unknown to be uplifting much more so than scientists, you know, colleagues, experts.

00:32:17.500 The experts want me to agree with them that everything on the sky is rocks.

00:32:22.340 That's what they want.

00:32:23.220 They want to say anything we find, any object we find must be a rock, even if it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before.

00:32:29.920 However, people that have more spirituality are open-minded to the possibility that the unknown may reveal something new.

00:32:38.980 I guess it speaks to my immodesty, that as you speak of the prospect of a superior life form somewhere, I immediately think, wait a minute.

00:32:56.360 We're human beings, and I think there's also a possibility that it would not be quite as advanced as us,

00:33:01.940 and that we should be a little more, if you will, confident in ourselves.

00:33:10.120 And I, by the way, would be delighted to find either group.

00:33:13.920 Well, you know, I tell my students on the first day of class at Harvard, I tell them half of you are below the median.

00:33:23.780 And they are shocked.

00:33:24.900 You know, students at Harvard think that, you know, each of them thinks that they are at the top 2%.

00:33:29.620 But it's a statistical fact that in any class, half of the students are below the median.

00:33:35.840 There is no escape to that.

00:33:37.400 And so when you speak about human civilization, I would guess we're probably somewhere in the middle of the distribution.

00:33:44.780 That would be of the class, you know.

00:33:46.900 So, of course, there are other civilizations that are much more primitive.

00:33:50.400 I mean, we know about cockroaches and, you know, crocodiles here on Earth that are not as smart as we are.

00:33:56.700 We know about microbes.

00:33:57.560 So, it's possible that on other planets, you know, it all ended up in crocodiles, and that's it. 0.98

00:34:03.060 So, if we ever go there, we will see swamps full of crocodiles that are rather dumb. 0.93

00:34:07.840 You know, that may be the case on many planets. 0.87

00:34:10.300 But at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if for half of them, we would find things far more advanced than we can find in our civilization.

00:34:17.620 So, let me ask you the question as we conclude here, Professor.

00:34:22.800 Do you believe in UFOs?

00:34:28.240 I don't think, okay.

00:34:29.360 I don't think it's a matter of belief because, and I don't think it's a matter of philosophical arguments.

00:34:33.720 I think it's just a matter of getting good data.

00:34:35.760 A high-resolution image is all we need or a sample of the objects.

00:34:41.880 So, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words.

00:34:46.320 In my case, a picture is worth 66,000 words, the number of words in my book.

00:34:51.240 If I had a picture of Oumuamua, I would never write the book.

00:34:55.240 I don't need to write the book.

00:34:56.700 You know, you can just show the picture.

00:34:58.140 And by the way, I don't need to convince anyone else.

00:35:01.560 If I have the picture, I would be satisfied.

00:35:04.320 That's it.

00:35:05.240 I will go home, have dinner, and I will know the answer.

00:35:09.000 So, in terms of UFOs, you know, we are trying to collect that data to get that image with the Galileo Project that is currently funded at $2 million at Harvard University,

00:35:20.500 thanks to the generosity of various wealthy individuals that came to the porch of my home and were inspired by the vision of my book.

00:35:29.220 And what we need is about $100 million.

00:35:31.800 So, I'm still working on it.

00:35:33.400 When do you expect to launch the mission to recover this interstellar visitor?

00:35:40.420 We hope to do it before the end of 2023.

00:35:43.720 And we have currently a partner who actually was involved in the discovery of the remains of the Titanic.

00:35:53.600 But we also have another potential partner.

00:35:56.800 So, the timing will depend on who we converge with, but it will definitely be before the end of 2023.

00:36:03.680 That's wonderful news.

00:36:05.200 And where can people go to stay up with your adventures and your search?

00:36:11.700 I have a professional website.

00:36:14.160 If you just Google Avi Loeb, A-V-I-L-O-E-B, Harvard University, I have a website where I have every few days,

00:36:23.660 I have a commentary that describes the latest updates.

00:36:28.400 And moreover, I had the Galileo Project, where we do a scientific inquiry, a scientific research program,

00:36:37.340 into the nature of these unidentified aerial phenomena or UFOs that you mentioned.

00:36:43.260 We are now building the first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory.

00:36:47.460 It should be done in the coming months.

00:36:49.920 I can't wait to see it.

00:36:51.300 And as a Harvard alum, I'm excited to see the improvement in the Cambridge skyline.

00:37:00.160 Okay.

00:37:00.340 That explains the quality of all the programs that I watched with you as a commentator.

00:37:07.340 And now I understand where it comes from.

00:37:09.440 And it's very gratifying to hear that you graduated at Harvard.

00:37:15.120 And I've got to give great credit to Minidoka County High School as well, Professor.

00:37:19.500 You're very kind.

00:37:20.660 I appreciate it.

00:37:21.600 It's been fascinating.

00:37:22.880 And thank you for your time.

00:37:24.320 I hope we can visit frequently.

00:37:27.360 What you're doing interests us all, whether Democrat or Republican or something in between,

00:37:32.300 or an outlier of all kinds, we all should be interested in your study and your search for discovery.

00:37:42.400 Thanks so much, Professor.

00:37:44.040 Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University.

00:37:46.980 Thanks for having me.

00:37:48.840 Professor Avi Loeb, a great American, will be keeping you up to date here on his mission

00:37:54.480 to find the interstellar meteorite on the Pacific Ocean floor

00:37:58.320 and his search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

00:38:02.620 He's also the director of the Galileo Project.

00:38:05.820 Just Google Galileo Project and Avi Loeb, or Google Avi Loeb and Harvard to go to his website.

00:38:14.520 Here with us tomorrow to take up more heavenly issues,

00:38:18.260 Pastor Robert Jeffress to talk about the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade.

00:38:22.660 And it's important to this great nation and the American way of life.

00:38:27.880 Pastor Robert Jeffress here tomorrow.

00:38:30.020 Hope you will be too.

00:38:31.020 Until then, God bless you, and God bless America.

The Great America Show - May 07, 2022

SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

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