Avi Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist and astronomer, joins us to discuss the latest absurdities in our body politic, and the discovery of the first interstellar object to be discovered in the Pacific Ocean, the object known as Oumuamua.
00:10:57.700We should point out, too, that meteorites often have nickel alloys of various kinds for whatever the reason.
00:11:09.260Professor, if I could just interject here.
00:11:12.000The size of this meteor lying on the ocean floor, what do you estimate its size to be?
00:11:19.940Based 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.
00:11:32.100And then when it was melted during the explosion, it probably broke to pieces.
00:11:39.620We don't know because we haven't found them yet.
00:11:42.080But then there was probably a rain of droplets.
00:11:46.660So think about iron rain landing on the ocean surface, creating a lot of steam.
00:11:54.540If you were to use an umbrella, it would not protect you against those iron droplets.
00:12:00.920And then they would sink to the bottom of the ocean, the ocean floor.
00:12:07.200That was done before for other meteorites.
00:12:10.120And 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.
00:12:27.140But to do it in the ocean, to scoop the ocean floor, that would cost less than a million dollars.
00:12:32.060So we are talking about a thousand times savings.
00:12:34.960We can put our hands on the material that made this object that came from outside the solar system for less than a million dollars.
00:12:42.820And we are currently planning this expedition on a ship.
00:12:48.120Hopefully it will be done before the end of 2023.
00:12:51.500I still need to get the million dollars, but that's not a lot of money.
00:12:54.780And 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.
00:13:09.340What do you, to that, what do you estimate the weight?
00:13:14.120Let'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?
00:13:30.860Right, so about 500 kilograms or so, or a ton, half a ton.
00:13:36.880So the thing is, the density is probably about eight grams per cubic centimeter, so a little more than iron.
00:13:51.720We will have to scoop the ocean floor and figure it out.
00:13:54.240Now, the way to do it is to drop down a sled with a magnet and then sweep the ocean floor.
00:14:02.240And 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.
00:14:11.920It will take us a week or so, and then we will figure out, you know, we'll collect all the fragments.
00:14:17.660We 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.
00:14:26.100By 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.
00:14:37.740It's about a mile deep near Papua New Guinea, Manus Island.
00:14:45.280And it's about 100 miles away from Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
00:14:49.360And by the way, the government of Papua New Guinea is now considering approving our expedition.
00:14:56.660We asked them to, and they seem to be very cooperative.
00:15:01.620So the point is that the ocean floor is mostly mud and, you know, sea sand and things that are relatively uniform.
00:15:10.780And it's very easy to identify unusual fragments that landed on this muck.
00:15:17.500If 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?
00:15:41.380Well, in the past, when people tried to collect fragments from meteorites, explosions similar to the one I mentioned, it was very effective.
00:15:50.820I mean, they were able to do that with a magnet simply because the fragments have usually enough iron or other metals to be attracted.
00:16:06.200So 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.
00:16:18.100And, you know, I would be really delighted if there was something, a big piece of it left behind.
00:16:24.640And I actually wrote a commentary about the New Horizons, this spacecraft that NASA launched a decade and a half ago towards Pluto.
00:16:34.820And they put actually a box in it that carried 30 grams of the ashes of Clyde Tambau.
00:16:43.420And 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.
00:16:55.680And, you know, they would be very disappointed because what are ashes?
00:17:00.700They are no different from the ashes of a cigarette.
00:17:02.640And so they would say, well, there is this human civilization that tried to commemorate a person.
00:17:11.900The person is, by the way, Clyde Tambau, who discovered Pluto.
00:17:15.620And they destroyed the genetic information about that person in the form of ashes to commemorate that person.
00:18:24.640It was moving outside the solar system twice as fast as typical stars move.
00:18:31.480And that makes it an outlier also in terms of its speed, not just the composition.
00:18:38.020It represents maybe less than a few percent of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun.
00:18:44.860Now, 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.
00:18:55.460And that means likelihood of less than a few percent, or it should have originated very close to the parent star.
00:19:03.400So 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.
00:19:17.700Because 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.
00:19:34.440There is another possibility that it came from far away where, you know, stars are moving relative to us much faster.
00:19:41.340But the point is, we don't see stars moving relative to the sun that fast very often.
00:19:48.700Most of the stars moving relative to the sun are moving at half the speed of this object.
00:19:54.940It's an outlier in terms of its speed.
00:19:57.020It's an outlier in terms of its composition.
00:19:59.140I should say the reason it's intriguing is because it's the first one that we find.
00:20:04.000And then there was another one that was found called Oumuamua in 2017.
00:20:07.840And I wrote a whole book about it because that one was found in space.
00:20:12.920It was the size of a football field, an object that came from outside the solar system, discovered about four years later after this meteor.
00:20:23.240It 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.
00:20:36.440And, you know, I wrote a whole book called The Extraterrestrial, arguing this is an unusual object.
00:20:43.360This is an outlier, could be artificial in origin.
00:20:46.240So I'm saying the first two objects that we found from outside the solar system appear to be weird.
00:20:52.300So just imagine walking on the street and you see the first two people that you see are weird.
00:20:58.660They do not look like, you know, the citizens of your country.
00:21:04.980They came from another country and they look really weird.
00:21:07.960So that says that we are missing something.
00:21:10.440Maybe, you know, maybe these are artificial.
00:21:12.780Maybe we, I mean, we should get more data.
00:21:15.400And of course, that's why we are doing this expedition.
00:21:18.040Well, Oumuamua is in itself a remarkable discovery.
00:21:30.000How fast was it moving through space compared to the one that you've certified as being interstellar?
00:21:39.760Relative to the sun, it was moving at half the speed.
00:21:44.700But that was unusual in a different way.
00:21:48.060Oumuamua 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.
00:21:59.000So 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.
00:22:08.700And we were moving relative to it because the sun moves relative to the local standard of rest, like any other star.
00:22:14.940Only one in 500 stars are so much at rest in that frame as Oumuamua was.
00:22:23.300So the peculiarity, the oddity of Oumuamua was that in the local standard of rest, it wasn't moving.
00:22:30.620And why would it be there if all the stars are moving relative to that frame?
00:22:35.320And so that was the unusual thing about that.
00:22:37.840It was the size of a football field, very big.
00:22:41.040And I should say NASA never launched a spacecraft as big as a football field.
00:22:45.700But it launched many more that are small, half a meter, like the one that describes this meteor.
00:22:54.140So we're sort of tiptoeing up to this.
00:22:58.460What is your thinking as a scientist and a brilliant scientist studying space, studying all of these planets and stars, heavenly bodies?
00:23:13.700Does 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?
00:23:34.880Yeah, so I think the fundamental mistake we're making is not to be modest.
00:23:41.900We keep thinking that we are special, unique, privileged, and perhaps the pinnacle of creations.
00:23:52.700You 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.
00:24:01.880We now know that half of the Sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same separation.
00:24:08.140And most stars formed billions of years before the Sun.
00:24:11.520So there were probably scientists that were smarter than Einstein that lived a billion years ago on another planet around another star.
00:24:20.560And the civilization that benefited from their wisdom probably sent the equipment to space, probes.
00:24:27.780And some of these probes might be around us.
00:24:30.180And it's not a philosophical question whether they exist.
00:24:34.040You 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.
00:24:43.840You know, that's the approach that my daughters had when they were at home at a young age.
00:24:49.260And then I took them to the kindergarten and they found smarter kids on their block.
00:24:54.080And, of course, they didn't like this idea.
00:24:56.480But 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.
00:25:03.720And so I think that's the mistake we are making.
00:25:06.480And only over the past decade, we started having the capability of detecting objects in our backyard, you know, like Oumuamua.
00:25:15.760That was not possible a decade ago or before that.
00:25:18.980And only recently, we were able to see those things, the size of a football field from the reflection of sunlight.
00:25:26.200And 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.
00:25:36.840So it's really a new world for us to discover.
00:25:40.980And we just need to be open-minded and modest because I don't think we are the smartest kid on the block.
00:25:47.980And if, you know, if I can have a wish, I'm 60 years old now.
00:25:52.760And if I have a wish, it's to press a button on a piece of technology that came from another civilization.
00:25:59.420It may say iPhone 60, you know, and it would be really interesting to see what it can do.
00:26:04.960But 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.
00:26:22.320Because, you know, one reason I seek intelligence in space is because I don't often find it here on Earth.
00:26:28.580I would love to see what this produces, because you clearly have an idea that this is more than a rock laying on the ocean.
00:26:39.640You clearly believe muamua was something more.
00:26:45.300You measure forces, you measure velocities.
00:26:48.580And scientists are drawn to anomalies, straightforwardly, because, you know, scientists are always the most curious among us.
00:27:32.220You 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.
00:27:42.600But 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.
00:27:51.920So, to me, it's really the task that we face is to first check if the objects we find from space are natural,
00:28:06.380whether 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.
00:28:16.780And if it's not natural, the other question is, is it human-made?
00:28:22.060And if the answer to both questions is no, you know, we don't really need to reverse engineer what we find.
00:28:29.900We just need to figure out that it's not natural and not human-made.
00:28:32.780And 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.
00:28:41.700Okay. Beyond that, trying to reverse engineer the object that you find depends on the technological gap between us and them.
00:28:52.340If the gap is too big, we will never figure it out.
00:28:55.240You know, just think about a cave dweller going to New York City, seeing all the gadgets.
00:28:59.120It will become, when that cave dweller comes back home, it will become a myth.
00:29:05.540It will, the family of the cave dweller will never be able to reverse engineer the gadgets that he saw in New York City.
00:29:16.140But my point is that at the very least, we can tell that there is something else out there.
00:29:21.820And that by itself would be a major event in human history.
00:29:26.520So let's just be open-minded about it.
00:29:30.060And, you know, it's just trying to figure out the unknown.
00:29:34.180And I think that's what makes life exciting.
00:31:06.540And, 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.
00:31:18.740And we can imagine creating a baby universe in the laboratory once we understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.
00:31:26.180There are some scientific papers on that.
00:31:27.760So 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.
00:31:41.580And 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.
00:31:54.500And in religious texts, it's a sign to God.
00:31:56.960But in fact, it may be an advanced scientific civilization.
00:32:00.580So the point is the two concepts might be similar.
00:32:03.780And by the way, I should say I find a lot of resonance with religious people.
00:32:07.740People, they find this quest for the unknown to be uplifting much more so than scientists, you know, colleagues, experts.
00:32:17.500The experts want me to agree with them that everything on the sky is rocks.
00:32:23.220They 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.
00:32:29.920However, people that have more spirituality are open-minded to the possibility that the unknown may reveal something new.
00:32:38.980I 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.
00:32:56.360We're human beings, and I think there's also a possibility that it would not be quite as advanced as us,
00:33:01.940and that we should be a little more, if you will, confident in ourselves.
00:33:10.120And I, by the way, would be delighted to find either group.
00:33:13.920Well, you know, I tell my students on the first day of class at Harvard, I tell them half of you are below the median.
00:33:57.560So, it's possible that on other planets, you know, it all ended up in crocodiles, and that's it.
00:34:03.060So, if we ever go there, we will see swamps full of crocodiles that are rather dumb.
00:34:07.840You know, that may be the case on many planets.
00:34:10.300But 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.
00:34:17.620So, let me ask you the question as we conclude here, Professor.
00:35:05.240I will go home, have dinner, and I will know the answer.
00:35:09.000So, 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,
00:35:20.500thanks to the generosity of various wealthy individuals that came to the porch of my home and were inspired by the vision of my book.
00:35:29.220And what we need is about $100 million.