In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about the mysterious object known as 3i Atlas, which is a giant rock that can be seen from anywhere in the solar system. It is the size of Manhattan Island, and it s at 4.5 times the Earth-Sun separation.
00:00:30.000Yeah, and I said, look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island.
00:00:34.000It's at four and a half times the Earth-Sun separation.
00:00:38.000If I was able to put it out there, you know, I would be more powerful than the Pope.
00:00:44.000And 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 you half a meter in size that will allow you to see it.
00:01:24.000There 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.
00:02:08.000This is different than other scientific matters.
00:02:11.000And the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be considered seriously because they could have major implications.
00:02:25.000The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamas will do nothing.
00:02:32.000And they got data that indicated something is going on out there.
00:02:39.000But they dismissed it because of their theory.
00:02:41.000Now, 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.
00:03:04.000And, you know, this idea was already considered by the philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal.
00:03:12.000And he said, look, of course, you might think that God doesn't exist.
00:03:17.000The probability for that is small, but the implications, if God exists, the implications are so huge that we have to discuss it.
00:03:24.000That was the argument, Pascal's wager.
00:03:26.000And the intelligence agencies know that.
00:03:29.000Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again.
00:03:33.000Now, here comes an object from outside the solar system and it shows anomalies.
00:03:39.000The scientists would say we should be as careful as possible at talking about anything other than a rock.
00:03:47.000Now, they say that when they know that we launched, humanity launched a lot of space junk, you know, a lot of technological objects to space.
00:03:57.000And we also know that there are a hundred billion stars like the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
00:04:03.000Most of them formed billions of years before the Sun and are billions of Earth-Sun analogs.
00:04:09.000Now, we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals.
00:04:13.000You know, that's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this Earth.
00:04:19.000And so it's quite likely that, you know, we are not the first one.
00:04:24.000Sorry to break the news, Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
00:04:33.000And therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us.
00:04:40.000And 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?
00:04:51.000You know, thousands of light years away, it takes less than a billion years.
00:04:56.000And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it.
00:05:05.000And 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.
00:05:24.000And the reason I say that is, you know, we live at our home on Earth next to the Sun.
00:05:30.000We look around us in the cosmic street and we see a lot of houses just like ours.
00:05:52.000So let's define our highest priority, searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street.
00:06:01.000And I say, good, you can do that from the vantage point of your home.
00:06:05.000You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor's yards, but you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument that would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes, you know, on exoplanets.
00:06:21.000And think about the possibility that there was actually, there is a resident in one of those houses.
00:06:28.000You know, that resident might show up in your front door at some point.
00:06:32.000Or you might see an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that resident.
00:06:50.000You know, we should invest billions of dollars on both fronts.
00:06:56.000At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10 billion to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence.
00:07:20.000It's called sample return, and NASA has plans.
00:07:24.000We 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.
00:07:41.000By 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.
00:07:48.000The 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.
00:07:56.000And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth.
00:07:58.000So life may have started on Mars, actually, because it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water, and it could have been actually delivered to Earth.
00:08:07.000You know, we might be all Martians, and when Elon Musk considers going to Mars, it might be the second trip around.
00:08:17.000We might be going back to our childhood 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.
00:08:32.000And in fact, 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 microbes.
00:08:44.000And 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.
00:08:56.000Have 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?
00:09:08.000It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere right now.
00:09:14.000So 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, and actually, you have an object of order a meter colliding with Earth every year.
00:09:34.000Every year there is an atomic explosion size, a fireball in our atmosphere.
00:09:39.000It's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers, so it doesn't do anything.
00:09:46.000And 71% of the Earth is covered by oceans.
00:09:51.000But Yes, so these meteors, and they are quite important.
00:10:00.000Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by a giant impact by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island.
00:10:11.000And we are aware, by the way, that such an impact could endanger us.
00:10:16.000And 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 140 meters, so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs.
00:10:31.000So we think we are smart, we can see these rocks coming, but just imagine alien technology.
00:10:36.000It will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it.
00:10:41.000And that's a risk that was never attended to.
00:10:44.000And 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 3I Atlas, that could, that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin.
00:11:04.000The structures on Mars, what do you think when you look at them?
00:11:09.000When you see that one that was in the middle of the moment, I think it's very intriguing.
00:11:12.000Both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere, so the objects that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before about Earth.
00:11:38.000Even if we know that there wasn't any civilization out there over the past two billion years, because conditions are really harsh, Mars may have collected technological debris from other civilizations because it would stay on the surface.
00:11:57.000It's at least, they think, I think they think 300 meters.
00:12:01.000Yeah, but that's not enormous because quite a bit longer.
00:12:03.0003I Atlas, the size of 3i Atlas, is at least 5 kilometers in diameter.
00:12:09.000And I derived it in a paper a couple of weeks ago because we know that it's losing mass.
00:12:16.000So it's mostly from the side that is facing the sun.
00:12:21.000And you would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction, just like a rocket.
00:12:27.000And I used, together with two colleagues, 4,000 data points from 227 observatories around the Earth of 3I Atlas that monitored its motion across the sky.
00:12:40.000And we were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity.
00:15:48.000And then they would have found that he was right.
00:15:51.000And so then they would have corrected course shortly.
00:15:53.000They would have put more people under house arrest.
00:15:56.000That's probably what they would have done.
00:15:58.000Yeah, so my point is it's really important in cases like this or 3i Atlas, it's really important to get as much data as possible.
00:16:05.000Because once you reach a certain threshold, you can't shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking the way that my colleagues do.
00:16:13.000Just to give you an example, the first interstellar object was Oumuamua.
00:16:53.000In other words, a comet where you can't see the cometary tail around it.
00:16:59.000So it's just like experts, you know, specializing in zebras.
00:17:04.000And they go to the zoo and they see an elephant.
00:17:07.000So then they say, oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes.
00:17:12.000And I say, no, it's a completely different animal.
00:17:14.000You know, a spacecraft would appear differently than a rock, than a comet, because it will not have a cometary tail.
00:17:21.000It could be propelled by something else.
00:17:23.000So let me go back to the big picture that I mentioned before.
00:17:28.000So we live on this Earth, moving around the Sun.
00:17:32.000And my colleagues in academia, you know, one thing I often say is common sense is not common in academia.
00:17:39.000Because my colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo.
00:17:44.000They know very well about the possibility of black swans.
00:17:48.000And they say it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us, as smart as we are, near another star.
00:17:57.000And I say, no, it's an ordinary claim.
00:18:00.000Why would you think it's extraordinary?
00:18:02.000And by the way, if you decide not to collect evidence, not to look for it, then you will not find it.
00:18:08.000So I say, and I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.
00:18:16.000You really need to put resources to find the evidence.
00:18:19.000By not attending to this possibility, by not imagining this.
00:18:24.000And by the way, I much prefer to listen to imaginative science fiction writers, first class, because they're much more interesting than second-class scientists who don't have an imagination.
00:18:38.000And 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.
00:18:52.000And I think it makes no sense whatsoever, because the public really cares about it.
00:18:56.000My essays on Medium.com, they get a few million readers a month now.
00:19:38.000Whether 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.
00:19:46.000People are drinking all these seltzers in skinny cans loaded with sugar, but Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in a normal-sized can.
00:20:32.000Happy Dad, Hard Seltzer, Tea and Lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California.
00:20:40.000Again, we need the next Copernican Revolution, the next Galilean revolution, to realize that there is a smarter kid on the block.
00:20:49.000Okay, and it's just like the experience of my daughters on the first day to the kindergarten.
00:20:54.000At home, they thought that they're at the center of the universe because they had a, you know, their learning was based on a data set that was limited to home.
00:21:07.000It's just like LLMs, you know, artificial intelligence systems that learn from their data sets and they had limited environment.
00:21:16.000And then when they went to the kindergarten, they realized there are kids just like them, some are smarter.
00:21:21.000So we are yet to mature in that sense.
00:23:07.000It 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.
00:23:21.000So 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.
00:23:29.000We can produce artificial gravity by rotation.
00:23:32.000Now, you say, well, it will cost a lot of money, but we are spending $2.4 trillion every year on military budgets.
00:23:41.000If we were just to change our priorities and say we want to build NOAA's spaceship, in analogy to NOAA's ARC, to save humanity from the great flood or catastrophe that will happen on Earth, you build such, you put a fraction of this $2.4 trillion a year.
00:24:00.000And 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 decade, several decades, we will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better than Mars can.
00:24:19.000I want to get back to Mars because the structures on Mars, why would you think that they came from space debris rather than a prior civilization?
00:25:06.000Meaning that intelligence arose on Mars two billion years after it formed, rather than in the case of the Earth, 4.5 or so.
00:25:15.000And one thing I really want to do is if I ever have a say or go to Mars, I would like to visit those caves, the lava tubes in Mars, because they are protected from the surface, bombardment by cosmic rays and all kinds of things happening, the ultraviolet radiation.
00:25:36.000So in those caves, I want to check if there are any prehistoric paintings or any technological objects there.
00:25:47.000And 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.
00:26:01.000Well, there's 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.
00:26:10.000Those Italian scientists that have found these structures that are up to two kilometers deep.
00:26:49.000But 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 10,000 years.
00:27:01.000If you go back to that, it would be 11,000.
00:27:06.000Well, the issue is actual evidence, right?
00:27:09.000There's just not a lot of evidence because a lot of evidence just gets swallowed by the Earth.
00:27:14.000Especially 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.
00:27:39.000No, Mars is a less massive planet than the Earth, and therefore it has less gravitational grip on its atmosphere.
00:27:48.000And as to why the atmosphere was lost, there are various ideas.
00:27:53.000You know, it may have to do with an eruption on the Sun that removed it, or the magnetic field, the lack of strong enough magnetic field to retain the atmosphere.
00:28:06.000We don't know for sure, but we know it happened about two to two and a half billion years ago.
00:28:24.000So if it did have life, that life would have to.
00:28:27.000So we would have to be looking at something that's literally two plus billion years old, the remnants of a structure, which also seems kind of unlikely, right?
00:28:37.000It also seems like there probably wouldn't be much there.
00:28:52.000And I calculated the amount of energy over a few billion years that was deposited on the surface of Mars is equivalent to hundreds of Hiroshima-type nuclear explosions per square kilometer.
00:29:09.000And because you're integrating over billions of years.
00:29:11.000So that square probably wouldn't be there anymore.
00:29:15.000Well, there could be some relics that somehow stick.
00:29:20.000depends what it was originally you know if the empire's state building you know even if it was enormous and made completely out of stone like the pyramids maybe that's what would be left of it Maybe.
00:29:31.000I think we should be definitely open-minded and guided by evidence.
00:30:08.000So, we had, you know, the first survey telescope that found Omuamua was Pan-STARS in Hawaii.
00:30:15.000And the reason it was constructed is because the U.S. Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to Earth.
00:30:24.000These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on Earth.
00:30:28.000We want to protect the Earth, so we want to know about them.
00:30:31.000And they asked NASA and the National Science Foundation to search, you know, to build observatories that will search for such objects.
00:30:40.000And that's why Pan-STARS was established.
00:30:43.000And then it saw a near-Earth object, so they flagged it for that reason.
00:30:48.000And they realized it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun.
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00:32:52.000And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids.
00:32:56.000By the way, the main problem with social with AI that I see is not so much that they will bring calamity on their own, it's that they would drive people to do crazy stuff.
00:33:11.000So they will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us the robots.
00:33:19.000It will not need access to the physical world.
00:33:22.000It will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage.
00:33:36.000And the question is, how do we suppress the amazing polarization that we see in society where bullets are being shot?
00:33:45.000And I really worry about it because, and so humans may actually bring their own doom by self-inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their minds.
00:33:56.000I think in that regard, I think people need to stop using it.
00:34:12.000You know, 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.
00:34:24.000You know, I asked the student, what is this?
00:36:42.000That's my point, that 3i Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Omuamua.
00:36:48.000And I immediately, as it was discovered, you know, it was July 1st, and my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba two days later.
00:36:57.000And as I was going on the plane and as I arrived there, I realized, wait, that doesn't make sense because we should have seen millions of Omuamuas before we saw this one.
00:37:08.000And 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.
00:37:19.000You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometer in diameter.
00:37:28.000You would imagine once per 10,000 years.
00:37:30.000So I wrote immediately a scientific paper.
00:37:33.000My wife was not happy that, you know, on our vacation, I was sitting on my computer, but I just couldn't resist it.
00:37:39.000And by the way, this paper I submitted for publication, that was July 3rd or something.
00:37:46.000And 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 solar system.
00:38:03.000That 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 solar system by design.
00:38:12.000And indeed, the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the Sun to within five degrees.
00:38:18.000The chance for that at random is one in 500, okay?
00:38:23.000And 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.
00:38:31.000It 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.
00:38:40.000And that's the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the Sun's gravitational assist.
00:38:47.000You know, all of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory.
00:38:54.000So I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying maybe the trajectory was designed.
00:39:00.000And the editor said, no, no, no, the paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence.
00:39:07.000So now when you listen to comet experts that say, well, this claim or that claim was never published in a peer-reviewed journal, guess what?
00:39:19.000They are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities.
00:39:27.000And I think it's inappropriate, especially in the case of alien technology, because it could be a black swan event.
00:39:34.000It could be something that affects the future of humanity.
00:39:36.000And if we behave very conservatively, we might not last very long.
00:40:41.000And 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 Sun.
00:40:53.000But we were looking at it like a cigar.
00:40:55.000We were looking almost along the cigar long axis within 10 degrees of the object sun axis.
00:42:00.000Now, explain, if you could, how we know the composition of this thing.
00:42:06.000So 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 light with different wavelengths is bent at different angles.
00:42:25.000And so you spread the light into the different colors.
00:42:28.000And if you do that, you can find the fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules.
00:42:37.000Because each atom or molecule has transitions.
00:42:41.000I 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.
00:42:55.000So this is the mandatory class, and I just taught how, you know, spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules just two days ago.
00:43:33.000Now, usually in all the comets in the past, from the solar system and also from interstellar space, there is one comet, Borisov, that was found.
00:43:41.000It's the second interstellar object, which looked just like a familiar comet.
00:44:16.000But 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.
00:44:30.000So 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, they said, well, maybe this carbonyl pathway happens in nature.
00:44:44.000We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.
00:44:49.000Is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy?
00:44:54.000It's just that somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed.
00:44:59.000Nobody would argue that you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they're produced together in exploding stars.
00:45:07.000And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, ten times more by mass.
00:45:14.000And so we just don't know, as in the case of this jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tail now over the month of September.
00:45:26.000And also, you know, why was it changing structure is not clear.
00:45:33.000There was also a very negative polarization of the light.
00:45:37.000And also, two weeks ago, I realized the arrival direction of 3i Atlas was within nine degrees of the WOW signal that was detected in 1977, which was an enigmatic, powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this Earth.
00:45:58.000It was coming from a source that was approaching the Sun.
00:46:01.000And the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of 3i Atlas is 0.6%.
00:46:09.000And I just said, well, that's interesting, because 3i Atlas was at the distance of three light days from the Earth at that time, 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.
00:46:28.000By the way, Voyager, as of now, is one light day away from Earth.
00:46:34.000One light day, the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away.
00:46:42.000And the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we are talking about tens of thousands of light years.
00:46:49.000So one day out of tens of thousands of years.
00:46:52.000That'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.
00:47:15.000This is called an anti-tail when it's pointing towards the sun.
00:47:19.000There were optical illusions in a situation where, you know, there is a tail which is pushed away from the sun by radiation and solar wind, but you are observing it as the Earth goes through the orbital plane of this object, of this comet, and you are seeing it from a perspective that looks as if the tail is pointed at the sun, but in fact it's just a perspective thing.
00:47:52.000But as far as I know, none seen in a situation where it's clear.
00:47:59.000And in 3i Atlas, it was very far from the Sun and Earth, and we saw it towards the Sun.
00:48:03.000There cannot be an optical illusion under these circumstances because it was approaching both the Earth and the Sun roughly at the same direction.
00:48:39.000And when you have dust particles, the ones that have sub-micrometer dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight.
00:48:48.000So why, in this case, you will have only big ones that are not getting pushed back.
00:48:53.000It could be fragments of ice that are scattering the sunlight that have nothing to do with dust, but those fragments of ice get evaporated, and so they don't have enough time to turn back.
00:49:05.000I wrote two papers on that, trying to explain it.
00:49:08.000But my point is, many scientists are not curious.
00:50:44.000When 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.
00:50:56.000I encounter a culture of mud wrestlers.
00:51:12.000I don't respond to the, I learned my lesson with Oumuamua.
00:51:15.000I 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.
00:51:26.000So 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 so that by the end of the day we'll figure out what our dating partner is.
00:51:40.000If 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.
00:51:47.000If it's something else, that has huge implications.
00:51:51.000And therefore, we should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible.
00:51:57.000What is it about your field in particular that you think motivates mudslinging?
00:52:03.000Like why are they averse to risk and why do they not just why are they not just averse to risk, but why are they 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?
00:52:22.000Well, I got a hint for the answer to your question when I wrote the first paper on Omuamua.
00:52:29.000I suggested it might be technological.
00:53:21.000Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go to California.
00:53:25.000There is a NASCAR car race where one of the racers decided to put my image with 3E Atlas with the Galileo project that I'm leading on his car.
00:54:23.000Oh, so he's like a comet fan, this guy.
00:54:25.000I told him that the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than 3i Atlas, 600 times.
00:54:33.000So, you know, it's a compliment to me to be featured on his car, but 3i Atlas doesn't care much because it's already moving 600 times faster than his car can move.
00:55:01.000So this is an image taken two days ago in my office at Harvard.
00:55:06.000Again, 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.
00:55:31.000All of this he donated to me at no cost.
00:55:34.000He wants it to be displayed in my office because these watercolors display famous scientists that pioneered New Frontiers.
00:55:43.000And he includes a statement from each of these scientists, which are really educational for the students and postdocs that work with me.
00:55:52.000I should tell you, I got an email from a U.S. Air Force pilot.
00:55:57.000His daughter, Ariana, said to him, he wrote me an email and said, Because of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist now.
00:56:07.000She saw you on television, and now she only speaks about aliens.
00:56:12.000You know, two days later, I speak with a reporter from the London Times, 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.
00:56:27.000And, you know, this is another thing that there are two things that are missed by my colleagues.
00:56:32.000One, it's an opportunity to excite the kids to get into science.
00:56:39.000I mean, when we discovered the Higgs boson, you know, it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the 60s.
00:56:45.000The Nobel Prize was awarded, but I bet you that the daughter, Ariana, the daughter of the U.S. Air Force pilot, would not be inspired to become a scientist because it's very abstract.
00:56:59.000And of course, the second one is: here is a subject that the public cares about, and the public funds science, so we should attend to that.
00:57:10.000You know, I always, since I started science, which was by chance, by the way, I wanted always to become a philosopher, but circumstances led me because I led a project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative of President Reagan.
00:57:23.000It was the first international project.
00:57:25.000And 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.
00:57:39.000But 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.
00:57:48.000And I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I'm different.
00:58:04.000The one thing that I mentioned 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.
00:58:17.000And I looked at them and I said, does it really make sense to jump up and down?
00:58:21.000Like, what are they trying to accomplish by doing that?
00:58:24.000And then the teacher came in and looked at everyone jumping and said, quiet down.
00:59:00.000Once the understanding of the composition of three eye Atlas, once that was out and people recognized that this is a very unusual object, have more people started to consider what you're saying.
00:59:14.000Yeah, I get a lot of people sending me.
00:59:45.000The issue is really that it, and that's the purpose of these attacks, is they want to discourage others, young people, from deviating from the beaten path.
00:59:54.000So they keep the herd in a tight configuration.
00:59:58.000And the risk from that is, you know, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics, you know, like half a century ago.
01:00:07.000By the way, I lived throughout half of modern physics, roughly.
01:00:12.000So 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.
01:00:47.000And sometimes nature is not what we think it is.
01:00:52.000Okay, so we should not ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes.
01:01:01.000This was a, I mean, a lot of money and effort went to that.
01:01:04.000There are thousands of papers basing their analysis or mathematical constructions on supersymmetry.
01:01:10.000And a lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well, right?
01:01:14.000Yeah, 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.
01:01:22.000Because we cannot, I mean, Einstein made, you know, three mistakes between 1935 and 1940.
01:01:29.000He said black holes probably do not exist.
01:01:32.000He said gravitational waves probably do not exist.
01:01:34.000And he said quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance.
01:01:39.000And all three received Nobel Prizes for the teams that proved him wrong.
01:01:46.000Those are Nobel Prizes from the past decade.
01:01:48.000Three teams, you know, doing different types of experiments and observations.
01:01:55.000But did Einstein was wrong to assume, to make assumptions or claims that turned out to be wrong?
01:02:03.000No, because that's the nature of working at the frontier.
01:02:06.000Every now and then, you know, you might be right and that will be a breakthrough.
01:02:10.000But you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks.
01:02:13.000And it's really, I mean, the whole idea of tenure in academia was based on the proposition that you want people to take risks so that they don't have job insecurity, don't worry about their.
01:02:26.000So 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.
01:02:43.000We don't want new knowledge unless it's proven beyond any doubt.
01:02:47.000But how would it be proven if you keep ridiculing anything different?
01:02:51.000You know, most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky.
01:02:57.000And then in 1803, there was a meteor shower in Liège and Bayot, a French physicist, realized it's real.
01:05:06.000So anyway, I was there just a few months ago with my research team.
01:05:12.000We 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.
01:05:22.000So you can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background.
01:05:25.000It's like a freckle, you know, on top of the sphere, the exosphere, which is the biggest display on Earth.
01:05:35.000But we measured that there is not much light pollution, actually, and we can operate this observatory.
01:05:41.000We also put an array of visible light cameras there, and it's operating.
01:05:47.000And we hope to see a few million objects over the sky of Vegas and decide whether any of them has performance that deviates from the envelope of human-made technologies.
01:06:03.000We have the sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that observatory 10 kilometers away on a triangle.
01:06:13.000And that allows us to look at objects in the sky from different directions, just like we have two eyes, so we can gauge the distance.
01:06:21.000So here we have three eyes looking at 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.
01:06:36.000I see that also as an opportunity to communicate to the public the excitement about science.
01:06:41.000That's what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal really wanted to deliver.
01:06:45.000And I'm hoping that we will find something really anomalous, you know, because as we know, the intelligence agencies are reporting to the U.S. Congress about objects they cannot identify.
01:07:21.000That's one possibility which has to do with national security.
01:07:25.000The second possibility is that it's maybe something from outside of this Earth, which would be even more significant.
01:07:33.000So either way, we need to figure this out.
01:07:35.000And I don't think I'm wasting my time leading the Galileo project to figure out whether there are anomalies 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 so that they can employ it for national security purposes.
01:08:02.000So my time was not wasted as a scientist.
01:08:05.000I'm doing something useful to society.
01:08:10.000Everything made by humans, by the way, is boring as far as I'm concerned.
01:08:13.000I want to see something from outside the solar system, which is not what the government should be about.
01:08:18.000The government should worry about national security, not about what lies outside the solar system.
01:08:22.000That's my job definition as an astrophysicist.
01:08:26.000And so 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.
01:08:51.000We have three observatories, one in Las Vegas, as I mentioned.
01:08:56.000And by the way, this is the first time it's mentioned publicly.
01:10:19.000There are some reports by FBI agents that saw really crazy stuff, but we don't have any data from instruments.
01:10:27.000And this is an office within the Pentagon which is funded to figure out things.
01:10:34.000And so obviously what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo project that I'm leading.
01:10:38.000But 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.
01:10:54.000Like until we're having this conversation, I can't believe that they're not monitoring the sky constantly for anomalous objects.
01:11:01.000Well, you remember the Chinese spy balloon that was missed, right, and shut down?
01:11:06.000Yeah, but that's so the thing to keep in mind, they are getting data on things in the sky.
01:11:12.000But if you don't have the right software now with AI, if you don't have high-quality scientists the way that the Manhattan Project employed, you might not figure out things.
01:11:22.000There is a reason why the Manhattan Project recruited the very best scientists.
01:11:26.000So I say, put a billion dollars on this or more, bring in the best scientists in the world to figure it out.
01:11:35.000I'm funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galileo project.
01:11:41.000It's a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon.
01:11:44.000But if, you know, you should think about the potential risk from drones that are used by adversarial nations, and you want to have the very best sensors using the very best AI.
01:11:59.000I just can't believe that that's not already being done.
01:12:03.000I would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already.
01:12:10.000Well, that's especially when you take in all these anecdotal stories, all these different stories of people spotting some sort of a ship, something, something that moves in a very strange way.
01:12:21.000I would think that they're monitoring this stuff all the time, and not just with radar.
01:12:25.000You see, there is an approach which is to wait for the government to figure out things or to release declassify them.
01:12:31.000So a lot of people want the government to declassify.
01:12:34.000I think it's just like waiting for Godot.
01:12:36.000You can wait forever and it will never happen.
01:12:40.000So 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.
01:12:46.000We can build observatories, look at the sky.
01:12:49.000Anything that is human-made is not of interest to me.
01:12:52.000don't care you know I I just want to see if there is anything that well it's boring up to a point if China has something that moves that you know Mach 30 yeah and can go underwater yeah These get very interesting.
01:13:06.000So my methodology should definitely be used by the Department of War to figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned.
01:13:16.000And by the way, speaking about my colleagues, so there are people who said, oh, you're doing it to win the Nobel Prize.
01:15:16.000Have you seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited?
01:15:26.000The only data I'm aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies of Omuamua, of 3I Atlas, which are very different anomalies.
01:15:37.000And there was also a meteor that I discovered with my former undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, a meteor that was identified by U.S. government satellites back in 2014.
01:15:51.000And it was moving so fast that it definitely came from outside the solar system.
01:15:57.000And my colleagues were very concerned, and they said, we don't believe the US government.
01:16:05.000I said, okay, at the time I was chairing the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies.
01:16:11.000Why didn't they believe the US government about this?
01:16:14.000Because all the previous meteors they thought must have been from the solar system and therefore, you know, and the U.S. government also makes mistakes every now and then.
01:16:25.000So the U.S. government, what department was observing?
01:16:28.000This is the Space Force, the U.S. Space Command.
01:16:31.000So what I did is at a dinner, this was around 2020.
01:16:39.000And I expressed my frustration at dinner with chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies.
01:16:52.000We managed to reach out to the U.S. Space Command through the White House at the time.
01:16:58.000And we got an official letter from the U.S. 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.
01:19:07.000You can see here these molten droplets.
01:19:10.000And it turns out that 10% of them did not have the composition of materials from the solar system.
01:19:16.000And so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson.
01:19:21.000And I had a summer intern, Sophie Berkshroom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis.
01:19:29.000How did my colleagues respond to that?
01:19:31.000They 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.
01:19:42.000And so a reporter from the New York Times said, oh, they went to the wrong place because it was not a meteor, it was a truck.
01:19:52.000And I wrote to the reporter and I said, how irresponsible are you?
01:22:24.000You know, I don't change my reason for doing something just because other people misbehave.
01:22:30.000You know, I feel like I'm attending a party where the attendees are misbehaving, and all I can hope for is for a guest to show up and change the situation.
01:22:43.000You know, one reason I'm seeking intelligence in interstellar space is I don't often find it in academia.
01:22:55.000I 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.
01:23:02.000I know it's a lot of what you discuss, and I wish it was less, but it's important for people to know that you have to go through this kind of nonsense.
01:23:16.000You know, I served in the Israeli military, and we parachuted, we drove tanks.
01:23:23.000I was in a special unit that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24.
01:23:27.000And then the SDI, the Star Wars initiative, President Reagan, brought me to the U.S. And I remember while serving in the paratroopers 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.
01:23:49.000And, you know, as long as I allow young people to innovate, as long as I attract kids to science, I did my job.
01:23:59.000It's not about me, you see, it's about humanity getting better.
01:24:04.000And it will not get better with AI, as we discussed.
01:24:08.000It could get better with alien intelligence because we will realize that there is something else out there that is more accomplished than we are.
01:25:45.000Well, it's not about us cosmically when you take into consideration the vast spanse of the universe.
01:25:53.000But 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.
01:26:05.000That was the argument that I got into with Neil deGraus Tyson, where he was like, I don't think we're that interesting.
01:29:42.000I wrote to the United Nations about it.
01:29:44.000I wrote also to the International Astronomical Union to establish an organizational committee that would coordinate observations of these objects so we can figure out their nature and make sure, and then of course inform policymakers, politicians, how to respond.
01:30:00.000Because when you have a visitor to your backyard, you need to respond immediately.
01:30:04.000It's not like getting a radio signal from tens of thousands of light years away where you have plenty of time to wait.
01:30:16.000And actually the International Asteroid Warning Network just two days ago announced they will have a campaign looking at three eye Atlas with a lot of observatories on Earth between November 27th and January 27th.
01:30:32.000So I'm very glad that they decided to do that.
01:30:35.000They are related to the United Nations.
01:31:39.000The issue there is that there are severe political limitations because of the indigenous people there that are assigning religious sentiment to the mountains.
01:31:50.000So they cannot build more telescopes there.
01:31:54.000So Chile, I mean, the government in Chile is encouraging science, and we are getting a lot of useful data from Chile.
01:32:27.000I haven't talked to him, but I spoke with others, you know, Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna, Congressman.
01:32:38.000Well, in fact, Luna, Representative Luna, she called me on the phone a couple of months ago and asked me for an update on 3i Atlas, and I promised to send her routine updates.
01:32:49.000I have essays that I write every day or two about the latest, and she's very interested.
01:32:56.000And I did communicate with people around the White House.
01:33:03.000But I think the President should be aware of that.
01:33:05.000Of course, most likely most objects would be just rocks.
01:33:12.000By the way, this is the material that I brought back from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in these tubes.
01:33:57.000And he says, when I worked in government, I became aware of the fact that the U.S. government has materials in its possession that it may have given to corporations like Lockheed Martin or others of crash sites of spacecraft from outside of this Earth, including biologics, biological material.
01:34:26.000So 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.
01:34:40.000And then a day later I hear Eric Davis saying what he said.
01:34:44.000And the question is, who should I believe?
01:34:50.000So I don't believe stories because, you know, if there is a car accident, different people give you different accounts of what really happened.
01:35:01.000That's why FIFA is using cameras to monitor soccer games.
01:35:06.000They don't go and ask the players or the audience whether there was a goal in a controversial case.
01:35:16.000So 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.
01:35:49.000Explain to people what they have found and how weird some of these things are.
01:35:53.000Yeah, so Gary, in collaboration with other scientists, 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.
01:36:11.000Now, the issue I have with that is whether these materials were indeed came from the sky, from some extraterrestrial origin, or whether someone produced it, you know, or did intentionally, maybe it was another government that did something.
01:36:29.000So I really, in terms of evidence, I really need to get conclusive evidence that will convince me beyond any reasonable doubt.
01:36:38.000It's just like, you know, in solid change custody in the very beginning.
01:36:42.000But the key is that without seeking it, you will never find it.
01:36:46.000So if you have the mindset that everything in the sky is rocks now, and that everything on Earth is materials we are familiar with, either from humans or, you know, natural process on Earth, you will not invest time and resources to look for anything.
01:37:02.000And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:37:04.000Very often, you know, if you have these blinders, it's just like with a horse, you put blinders on your eyes, you can't look sideways, you don't see that there are things beyond your path.
01:38:38.000But there's a lot of people that are talking about that as if it's a real possibility that there are anomalous things they find in the ocean.
01:38:45.000They 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.
01:38:58.000Representative Tim Burchett said that.
01:39:00.000And Tim Burchett was talking about these five areas that they know these anomalous things keep coming from.
01:39:32.000Okay, speaking about nutty things, let me mention an example.
01:39:37.000You know, back in 1970, there was a graduate student at Princeton called Jacob Bekenstein.
01:39:45.000And 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.
01:41:06.000This is the biggest discovery, theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking, celebrated since, you know, for 51 years now.
01:41:18.000And he went to disprove Bekenstein and proved him right.
01:41:22.000It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of the person who benefited most from discovering that Bekenstein was right.
01:41:30.000So my point about crazy ideas is, you know, and by the way, over the past 50 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.
01:41:44.000We 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?
01:42:02.000But in addition to that, it also will help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.
01:42:08.000Because Einstein's gravity breaks down when we go to the Big Bang, when the density of matter and radiation was infinite.
01:42:15.000So, 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.
01:42:32.000If you have a recipe for a cake, you can become a baker, okay?
01:42:39.000If we had the recipe for making the Big Bang, we could apply to the job of God, because one of the defining feature of God is the ability to create a universe.
01:42:54.000And just think that what we call God could have been a very advanced scientist that did a laboratory experiment, created our universe in it.
01:43:08.000When someone from the government tells you about biologics and this crash retrieval program, don't you want to be able to see that somehow?
01:43:57.000You see, it's just like people tell me stories that I don't know whether to trust until I see it.
01:44:02.000And I'm very happy to help government figure it out because it's a misuse of their privileges to attend to data related to what's outside the solar system, right?
01:44:14.000They're supposed to deal with what happens on Earth, on the surface of Earth.
01:44:18.000National security, they are not supposed to tell us what lies outside the solar system.
01:44:23.000And I want to help them figure it out.
01:44:25.000But they don't give me that data, and I don't know if it exists because I have never seen it.
01:45:30.000And then it's a biological thing that, you know, at one point in time, there was an advanced civilization that figured out a way to survive under the ocean.
01:45:37.000You know, I really admire biology because think about our brain.
01:46:58.000So to me, we are at the infancy of understanding how much better we can go than AI.
01:47:05.000Because 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.
01:49:26.000And 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 star.
01:49:42.000And those are the ones that will be remembered by historians of the Milky Way galaxy.
01:49:47.000You can ask, what will be remembered in the future?
01:49:51.000Here on Earth, history in the next decade or more than a decade will be written by AI.
01:52:11.000Let me ask you this, though, because these are beliefs that you have, and they're not necessarily based on actual evidence, because there's not real evidence of other civilizations.
01:53:54.000And therefore, let's get inspiration not from what we hear about stories of things that happen on Earth and so forth, not by the limited data set that we have on Earth, but collect as much data as possible about our cosmic neighborhood so that we can be inspired.
01:54:26.000Well, I wrote a paper about that and I said, yeah, we should attack this question along several fronts.
01:54:35.000One of them, you know, we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky.
01:54:41.000We need a copy of it in the northern sky so we have a full alert system that would notify us of interstellar objects coming in.
01:54:48.000We need interceptors, 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.
01:55:03.000And in fact, the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter was almost capable of doing that.
01:55:08.000So I realized that, wrote a paper about it, told the representative Luna about it, and she wrote a very gracious visionary letter to the interim administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, encouraging NASA to try and use Juno to observe and get close to 3i Atlas.
01:55:25.000If Juno had all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with 3i Atlas.
01:55:35.000And I spoke with the principal investigator of Juno, and he promised me that they will also use their radio antenna to look at 3i Atlas in the radio, just to see if there's any transmission.
01:55:46.000Yeah, so interceptors, 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.
01:56:01.000If I showed you a picture of something that looks technological, 3i Atlas has bolts on its surface and buttons that you can press, you will not argue with me that it's a comet.
01:56:11.000So we need cameras that come close to the object, potentially even land on it, bring materials back to Earth.
01:56:20.000And of course the ability to detect it, to detect such objects at large distances.
01:56:25.000That investment is at a level of billions of dollars to do that in space.
01:56:32.000My argument is once the first encounter is verified, we will have a trillion dollars per year for that because we invest $2.4 trillion in military budgets.
01:56:44.000And when we know that there is alien technology that is putting Earth at risk, then we should allocate a significant fraction of our military budgets to have a system that protects the Earth.
01:57:04.000We are dealing with technological gadgets.
01:57:06.000So it should be much more sophisticated.
01:57:09.000So I'm saying, let's start with the level of billions of dollars just search.
01:57:15.000If 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.
01:57:27.000But in addition to that, of course, we should look for technological signatures in other ways.
01:57:32.000And I wrote papers about it over the years.
01:57:34.000I suggested searching for artificial lights.
01:57:37.000You know, you look at a planet, it's illuminated by the star from one side.
01:57:42.000So as it moves around the star, it's just like the moon, you know, you can see it, the illuminated side from different angles.
01:57:49.000However, 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 starlight.
01:58:04.000So that's another thing you can search for.
01:58:07.000You can look for, you know, the traditional way was looking for radio signals, which is just like waiting for a phone call.
01:58:15.000You know, nobody may call you when you're listening.
01:58:24.000Then in addition to that, I wrote a paper saying, look, we are planning to invest $10 billion in searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in atmospheres of exoplanets.
01:58:40.000That's what the astronomy community defined in the 2020, the Cadillac survey is the highest priority, and it's called the Habitable World Observatory.
01:58:48.000And I said, okay, well, it's nice to search for those chemical fingerprints of microbes, but we can also search for the chemical fingerprints of industrial pollution.
01:58:58.000In the Earth atmosphere, we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made.
01:59:25.000I mean, obviously it will be amazing to find that life exists elsewhere, but we can learn much more from an intelligent neighbor than we can learn from microbes.
01:59:35.000What are the best images that we have of 3i Atlas?
01:59:39.000The best one so far was released by the Hubble Space Telescope, and it shows this jet pointed towards the sun.
02:02:06.000And 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.
02:02:15.000You know, this object is a gift from interstellar space because it comes in the plane of the planets around the Sun.
02:02:23.000And 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.
02:02:35.000It's behind the Sun when the Earth, you know, when it comes closest to the Sun.
02:02:40.000Anyway, 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.
02:02:55.000And just, you know, I get a request for four to eight interviews every day from television, from podcasts and so forth.
02:03:03.000So 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?
02:03:16.000And I said, you know, it's much more likely not to be related to extraterrestrial intelligence, but to terrestrial stupidity.
02:03:27.000Because this has to do with a government shutdown.
02:03:31.000Makes no sense whatsoever for scientists, especially since the PI, the principal investigator, is from the University of Arizona.
02:04:36.000But moreover, more importantly, it's watching, you know, the camera was looking at the glow around 3i Atlas sideways because it was moving towards the sun.
02:04:47.000So we can actually see what exactly it was doing on October 2nd.
02:04:52.000And 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.
02:05:25.000So what the Webb telescope told us, you know, from the data, I took a spectrum of the gas around it, found that it's 150 kilograms per second that this object is losing in the side facing the sun.
02:05:39.000And out of that, 87% is carbon dioxide, CO2, CO2.
02:05:46.000And 9% is CO, carbon monoxide, which is really dangerous to humans.
02:06:20.000And I said, that's not a clear detection.
02:06:23.000Another one was making some assumption about how much dust there is that blocks ultraviolet light.
02:06:29.000And based on that, they got a result that there is a lot of water.
02:06:33.000And then the Webb telescope actually measured the composition and found just 4% by mass water.
02:06:38.000So I was attacked when I said it's probably not real that these teams are reporting things, but they are not real, even though they made press releases.
02:06:46.000But then Webb demonstrated that it's only 4% by mass.
02:06:49.000Okay, so that proved my point, even though I was not a member of those teams.
02:06:57.000And then the question is, is there any dust?
02:06:59.000If there was dust particles that are half a micrometer in size, roughly the size of the wavelength of visible light, these kinds of particles scatter sunlight very effectively.
02:07:12.000If 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.
02:10:14.000I want to figure out what it is and get as much data as possible on it.
02:10:18.000Right, but if you imagine a spaceship, you would imagine something that has some sort of geometric structure to it, right?
02:10:25.000Well, Rendezvous with Rama is a book that was written by Arthur C. Clarke.
02:10:30.000And in it, 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.
02:10:45.000Arthur C. Clarke was an amazing visionary science fiction writer.
02:10:49.000And 2001, Space Odyssey is an amazing film that he made with Stanley Kubrick.
02:13:19.000That's a very perfect way of phrasing this whole thing.
02:13:22.000I'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.
02:13:33.000And I should just mention that, you know, there are all kinds of technologies that I can imagine that we don't even have.
02:13:41.000And for example, if a civilization has an ability to create a negative mass that produces repulsive gravity, then you can propel a spacecraft without any fuel.
02:13:57.000In fact, I'm working on a paper now with a group of collaborators, applied physics, on this.
02:14:04.000And you could also potentially imagine time machines with negative masses.
02:14:08.000So there are lots of things we don't know.