The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 All right, good to see you, sir.

00:00:14.000 Great to be with you, Joe.

00:00:15.000 This is a perfect time to bring you on because things are getting very wild.

00:00:20.000 Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation.

00:00:22.000 You know, some people said I invented 3i Atlas, this object, in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.

00:00:28.000 Is that what people were saying?

00:00:30.000 Yeah, and I said, look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island.

00:00:34.000 It's at four and a half times the Earth-Sun separation.

00:00:38.000 If I was able to put it out there, you know, I would be more powerful than the Pope.

00:00:44.000 And because we're talking about a giant object that you can see from any place on Earth, you know, you can buy online a telescope that will allow you half a meter in size that will allow you to see it.

00:00:57.000 It's out there.

00:00:58.000 It cannot be faked.

00:01:00.000 Well, those people are fools.

00:01:01.000 You can't listen to those people.

00:01:03.000 I don't listen to those.

00:01:04.000 I don't listen to many people, you know.

00:01:06.000 Initially, a lot of people were dismissing your concerns.

00:01:10.000 And they were saying that this object is nothing but a comet and it's very normal.

00:01:15.000 But then as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you're correct.

00:01:21.000 Well, this is a very unusual object.

00:01:24.000 There is something really important to recognize here that usually when you deal with scientific matters, they have very little impact on the future of humanity.

00:01:34.000 Very little.

00:01:35.000 You know, if the neutrino has a little bit of a mass, it doesn't really matter.

00:01:39.000 You know, when we discovered the Higgs boson, the biggest impact was to confirm some idea we had back in the 60s.

00:01:46.000 And obviously that affected those people who got the Nobel Prize.

00:01:52.000 But most of us continued as if nothing happened.

00:01:56.000 However, here, if we ever encounter alien technology, everything will change.

00:02:03.000 It will affect the financial markets, it will affect politics in a major way.

00:02:07.000 So my point is simple.

00:02:08.000 This is different than other scientific matters.

00:02:11.000 And the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be considered seriously because they could have major implications.

00:02:23.000 Just think about October 7th.

00:02:25.000 The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamas will do nothing.

00:02:32.000 And they got data that indicated something is going on out there.

00:02:39.000 But they dismissed it because of their theory.

00:02:41.000 Now, because as a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot of people died on both sides for that this could have been avoided if they were to consider a black swan event, an event that you put a small probability for it happening, but you look at anomalies in the data and say, look, the implications are so huge, we have to consider it.

00:03:04.000 And, you know, this idea was already considered by the philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal.

00:03:10.000 He talked about God.

00:03:12.000 And he said, look, of course, you might think that God doesn't exist.

00:03:17.000 The probability for that is small, but the implications, if God exists, the implications are so huge that we have to discuss it.

00:03:24.000 That was the argument, Pascal's wager.

00:03:26.000 And the intelligence agencies know that.

00:03:29.000 Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again.

00:03:33.000 Now, here comes an object from outside the solar system and it shows anomalies.

00:03:39.000 The scientists would say we should be as careful as possible at talking about anything other than a rock.

00:03:47.000 Now, they say that when they know that we launched, humanity launched a lot of space junk, you know, a lot of technological objects to space.

00:03:57.000 And we also know that there are a hundred billion stars like the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

00:04:03.000 Most of them formed billions of years before the Sun and are billions of Earth-Sun analogs.

00:04:09.000 Now, we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals.

00:04:13.000 You know, that's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this Earth.

00:04:19.000 And so it's quite likely that, you know, we are not the first one.

00:04:24.000 Sorry to break the news, Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

00:04:33.000 And therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us.

00:04:40.000 And you can ask the question, how long does it take our own technology, the Voyager spacecraft that we launched out of the solar system, how long does it take it to move to the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy?

00:04:51.000 You know, thousands of light years away, it takes less than a billion years.

00:04:56.000 And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it.

00:05:05.000 And all we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks, or maybe one of these objects might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor.

00:05:24.000 And the reason I say that is, you know, we live at our home on Earth next to the Sun.

00:05:30.000 We look around us in the cosmic street and we see a lot of houses just like ours.

00:05:36.000 There are billions of them probably.

00:05:38.000 Now, my colleagues, those scientists who think traditionally, they say, well, you know, microbes came to Earth very early.

00:05:50.000 Therefore, they must be everywhere.

00:05:52.000 So let's define our highest priority, searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street.

00:06:01.000 And I say, good, you can do that from the vantage point of your home.

00:06:05.000 You 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.

00:06:21.000 And think about the possibility that there was actually, there is a resident in one of those houses.

00:06:28.000 You know, that resident might show up in your front door at some point.

00:06:32.000 Or you might see an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that resident.

00:06:39.000 A black swan event.

00:06:40.000 A black swan event.

00:06:41.000 Or you might see some construction project from a distance.

00:06:46.000 That might be easier to detect than microbes.

00:06:48.000 So we should hedge our bets.

00:06:50.000 You know, we should invest billions of dollars on both fronts.

00:06:56.000 At 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.

00:07:09.000 And I say that that is an oversight.

00:07:12.000 Now, they have found evidence of microbes on Mars, correct?

00:07:16.000 Well, it's not conclusive.

00:07:19.000 We need to bring materials back.

00:07:20.000 It's called sample return, and NASA has plans.

00:07:24.000 We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that do look as if they were made by microbes, because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth.

00:07:41.000 By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body, so it has a bigger surface area for its mass.

00:07:48.000 The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process, and then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool.

00:07:56.000 And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth.

00:07:58.000 So life may have started on Mars, actually, because it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water, and it could have been actually delivered to Earth.

00:08:07.000 You know, we might be all Martians, and when Elon Musk considers going to Mars, it might be the second trip around.

00:08:17.000 We 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.

00:08:30.000 Panspermia.

00:08:32.000 Yeah.

00:08:32.000 And 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.

00:08:44.000 And perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of process took place in both places.

00:08:56.000 Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars, particularly the right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure?

00:09:06.000 Yeah, I've seen the data.

00:09:08.000 It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere right now.

00:09:14.000 So what happens on Earth is that when an object roughly the size of a person, you know, or smaller, goes through the atmosphere, it burns up, creates a fireball, just like an atomic explosion, you know, and actually, you have an object of order a meter colliding with Earth every year.

00:09:34.000 Every year there is an atomic explosion size, a fireball in our atmosphere.

00:09:39.000 It's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers, so it doesn't do anything.

00:09:46.000 And 71% of the Earth is covered by oceans.

00:09:51.000 But Yes, so these meteors, and they are quite important.

00:10:00.000 Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by a giant impact by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island.

00:10:11.000 And we are aware, by the way, that such an impact could endanger us.

00:10:16.000 And that's why the US Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come close to Earth with a size bigger than a football field, about 140 meters, so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs.

00:10:31.000 So we think we are smart, we can see these rocks coming, but just imagine alien technology.

00:10:36.000 It will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it.

00:10:41.000 And that's a risk that was never attended to.

00:10:44.000 And I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical Union to develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come from outside the solar system, like 3I Atlas, that could, that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin.

00:11:04.000 The structures on Mars, what do you think when you look at them?

00:11:09.000 When you see that one that was in the middle of the moment, I think it's very intriguing.

00:11:12.000 Both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere, so the objects that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before about Earth.

00:11:20.000 And therefore, they serve as museums.

00:11:23.000 So any space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two billion years would not have burned in the atmosphere.

00:11:33.000 It would have landed.

00:11:34.000 And we need to check the surface.

00:11:38.000 Even 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.

00:11:54.000 It's just like a museum.

00:11:55.000 This is an enormous structure.

00:11:57.000 It's at least, they think, I think they think 300 meters.

00:12:01.000 Yeah, but that's not enormous because quite a bit longer.

00:12:03.000 3I Atlas, the size of 3i Atlas, is at least 5 kilometers in diameter.

00:12:09.000 And I derived it in a paper a couple of weeks ago because we know that it's losing mass.

00:12:16.000 So it's mostly from the side that is facing the sun.

00:12:21.000 And you would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction, just like a rocket.

00:12:27.000 And 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.

00:12:40.000 And we were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity.

00:12:46.000 There is no evidence for this recoil.

00:12:50.000 And that means that the object is very massive.

00:12:54.000 And I derived a value of 33 billion tons.

00:12:58.000 A huge thing.

00:12:59.000 Which, if you take solid density, it means it's more than five kilometers in diameter.

00:13:04.000 So when you mention a few hundred meters, that's nothing.

00:13:07.000 And this object, by the way, was discovered just over the past decade of surveying the sky, you know.

00:13:14.000 So who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the moon because there are good museums, you know.

00:13:22.000 And by the way, I see that as their most important value.

00:13:27.000 Let me just say one thing about my fundamental point of view.

00:13:33.000 You know, each of us would live for about 100 years if we are lucky, right?

00:13:39.000 That's the kind of, it's pretty depressing, right?

00:13:42.000 Because there is so much we would like to know, and we have only 100 years.

00:13:47.000 And that already tells you that you need to be modest and humble because you don't have a lot of time, right?

00:13:53.000 So why engage in conflicts?

00:13:56.000 Why reduce the lifespan of other people, you know, in wars?

00:14:00.000 It makes no sense, all of this.

00:14:02.000 You have limited time, let's just use it for something constructive.

00:14:06.000 Anyway, we are born on this rock, which is just three millions of the mass of the sun.

00:14:13.000 It's leftover material from the formation process of the sun.

00:14:17.000 Some debris was left over in a disk, and the Earth was made out of that.

00:14:21.000 That's it.

00:14:22.000 And it's just a speck of material, nothing significant.

00:14:26.000 And this Earth was moving around the Sun 4.54 billion times before the Vatican even existed.

00:14:36.000 And why do I say the Vatican?

00:14:38.000 Because the Vatican put Galileo Galilei in house arrest when he said, I don't think everything moves around the Earth.

00:14:46.000 I see some moons through my telescope.

00:14:48.000 You know, I see some moons around Jupiter, and they don't seem to revolve around the Earth.

00:14:53.000 They revolve around Jupiter, therefore the Earth is not at the center.

00:14:56.000 So they put him in house arrest.

00:14:58.000 Today, they would have cancelled him on social media.

00:15:03.000 And my point is, that's the first sign that humans are, they want to think that it's all about them.

00:15:11.000 And it's not surprising.

00:15:13.000 But the Vatican admitted their mistake.

00:15:15.000 In 1992, they issued an official letter saying Galileo was right.

00:15:20.000 That was 350 years after he died.

00:15:23.000 And it's the worst public relations affair that you can have to admit that you were wrong for 350 years.

00:15:34.000 And how could they have avoided that?

00:15:37.000 Very simply, if they said we have more money than Galileo, we will build an even bigger telescope to figure out the truth.

00:15:46.000 And we would prove him wrong.

00:15:48.000 And then they would have found that he was right.

00:15:51.000 And so then they would have corrected course shortly.

00:15:53.000 They would have put more people under house arrest. 0.96

00:15:56.000 That's probably what they would have done.

00:15:58.000 Yeah, 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.

00:16:05.000 Because once you reach a certain threshold, you can't shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking the way that my colleagues do.

00:16:13.000 Just to give you an example, the first interstellar object was Oumuamua.

00:16:18.000 Okay?

00:16:19.000 And it was discovered in 2017, and it was really strange because it was shaped like a pancake based on all the data we have.

00:16:32.000 And it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any evaporation, no gas or dust around it.

00:16:40.000 What did these conservative comet experts say most recently, just in December 2024, there was a paper of them saying it's a comet.

00:16:52.000 It's a dark comet.

00:16:53.000 In other words, a comet where you can't see the cometary tail around it.

00:16:59.000 So it's just like experts, you know, specializing in zebras.

00:17:04.000 And they go to the zoo and they see an elephant.

00:17:07.000 So then they say, oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes.

00:17:12.000 And I say, no, it's a completely different animal.

00:17:14.000 You know, a spacecraft would appear differently than a rock, than a comet, because it will not have a cometary tail.

00:17:21.000 It could be propelled by something else.

00:17:23.000 So let me go back to the big picture that I mentioned before.

00:17:28.000 So we live on this Earth, moving around the Sun.

00:17:32.000 And my colleagues in academia, you know, one thing I often say is common sense is not common in academia.

00:17:39.000 Because my colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo.

00:17:44.000 They know very well about the possibility of black swans.

00:17:48.000 And they say it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us, as smart as we are, near another star.

00:17:57.000 And I say, no, it's an ordinary claim.

00:18:00.000 Why would you think it's extraordinary?

00:18:02.000 And by the way, if you decide not to collect evidence, not to look for it, then you will not find it.

00:18:08.000 So I say, and I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.

00:18:16.000 You really need to put resources to find the evidence.

00:18:19.000 By not attending to this possibility, by not imagining this.

00:18:24.000 And 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.

00:18:38.000 And 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.

00:18:52.000 And I think it makes no sense whatsoever, because the public really cares about it.

00:18:56.000 My essays on Medium.com, they get a few million readers a month now.

00:19:01.000 The public cares about it.

00:19:02.000 The public funds science.

00:19:04.000 Therefore, scientists should attend to this question.

00:19:08.000 Are we alone?

00:19:09.000 It's the most romantic question in science.

00:19:13.000 So just to finish my big picture before we get tomorrow.

00:19:16.000 So then we live on this planet.

00:19:19.000 Everyone says, okay, we are not at the center of the universe, but we might be the only intelligent species out there.

00:19:27.000 This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.

00:19:31.000 A nice, cold, happy dad is low carbonation, gluten-free, and easy to drink.

00:19:36.000 No bloating, no nonsense.

00:19:38.000 Whether you're watching a football game or you're golfing, watching a fight with your boys or out on the lake, these moments call for a cold, happy dad.

00:19:46.000 People 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.

00:19:56.000 Can't decide on a flavor?

00:19:58.000 Grab the variety pack.

00:19:59.000 Lemon lime, watermelon, pineapple, and wild cherry.

00:20:03.000 They also have a grape flavor in collaboration with Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg.

00:20:08.000 They have their new lemonade coming out as well.

00:20:11.000 Happy Dad, available nationwide across America and in Canada.

00:20:15.000 Go to your local liquor store or visit happydad.com.

00:20:20.000 For a limited time, use the code Rogan to buy one Happy Dad trucker hat and get one free.

00:20:26.000 Enjoy a cold, happy dad.

00:20:28.000 Must be of legal drinking age.

00:20:30.000 Please drink responsibly.

00:20:32.000 Happy Dad, Hard Seltzer, Tea and Lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California.

00:20:40.000 Again, we need the next Copernican Revolution, the next Galilean revolution, to realize that there is a smarter kid on the block.

00:20:49.000 Okay, and it's just like the experience of my daughters on the first day to the kindergarten.

00:20:54.000 At 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.

00:21:07.000 It's just like LLMs, you know, artificial intelligence systems that learn from their data sets and they had limited environment.

00:21:16.000 And then when they went to the kindergarten, they realized there are kids just like them, some are smarter.

00:21:21.000 So we are yet to mature in that sense.

00:21:23.000 And that's the big picture.

00:21:24.000 Now, why is it so important for the future of humanity?

00:21:27.000 Because, you know, the Earth would not exist forever.

00:21:31.000 By the way, when people talk about climate, global climate change and so forth, they don't realize, you know, the issue is not the Earth.

00:21:39.000 The issue is humanity, the future of humanity.

00:21:42.000 And, you know, the Earth itself would be very likely, based on detailed calculations, it will be engulfed by the Sun in 7.6 billion years.

00:21:52.000 And here is something that you won't find much discuss.

00:21:56.000 The Moon, because of the friction on the envelope of the Sun, will crash back to Earth.

00:22:01.000 And then the Earth will move all the way to the center of the Sun.

00:22:05.000 Nothing will be left.

00:22:06.000 No monument will survive 7.6 billion years ago into the future.

00:22:14.000 And we have an obligation, if we want to be remembered in cosmic history, we have an obligation not to go to Mars.

00:22:24.000 That's not really a great vision.

00:22:27.000 Going to Mars is just like you have a group of chimpanzees living in the jungle on some trees and they have some bananas and so forth.

00:22:39.000 And then one of the chimpanzees looks far away into the horizon and says, oh, look, up there, there is another region that we can go to.

00:22:48.000 And actually, it's clear that there are no bananas there.

00:22:51.000 So the same is about Mars.

00:22:54.000 Elon says, let's go to Mars to save humanity, but it's actually not a great place to be on.

00:23:00.000 You have to start somewhere.

00:23:02.000 You have to start somewhere.

00:23:03.000 You can simulate a planet.

00:23:03.000 No, so here's the thing.

00:23:04.000 So here is my point.

00:23:05.000 Okay, here's your point.

00:23:07.000 It makes much more sense for us to invest in building a platform in space that can accommodate humans, not rely on another rock that happens to be near us with much worse conditions.

00:23:19.000 It's a desert, no atmosphere.

00:23:21.000 So let's build a space platform, go on it, and make sure that it's safe for humans to live for long periods of time.

00:23:29.000 We can produce artificial gravity by rotation.

00:23:32.000 Now, you say, well, it will cost a lot of money, but we are spending $2.4 trillion every year on military budgets.

00:23:41.000 If 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.

00:24:00.000 And I'm willing to bet that within this century, our engineers, architects, scientists, if you put a level of funding of a trillion dollars a year for the next decade, several decades, we will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better than Mars can.

00:24:18.000 Okay.

00:24:19.000 I 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?

00:24:31.000 Because, well, Mars.

00:24:34.000 Let's take a look at it first.

00:24:35.000 Jamie, will you pull up those images?

00:24:38.000 So what's fascinating about the images is the right angles, right?

00:24:42.000 Like that one that you got.

00:24:43.000 Yeah, that's good.

00:24:44.000 Like that's kind of crazy, isn't it?

00:24:46.000 It is.

00:24:46.000 And that doesn't strike me as something that landed there from space.

00:24:51.000 It looks like a structure.

00:24:52.000 It's just, it's too even.

00:24:54.000 Well, it could be.

00:24:54.000 Yeah.

00:24:56.000 It could be.

00:24:57.000 It could be if the evolution of intelligence on Mars was accelerated by a factor of two.

00:25:03.000 You know, that's not a big factor.

00:25:04.000 Factor of two.

00:25:05.000 Right.

00:25:06.000 Meaning that intelligence arose on Mars two billion years after it formed, rather than in the case of the Earth, 4.5 or so.

00:25:15.000 And 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.

00:25:36.000 So in those caves, I want to check if there are any prehistoric paintings or any technological objects there.

00:25:43.000 I completely agree with you.

00:25:44.000 A factor of two is not a big deal.

00:25:47.000 And you can ask also whether on Earth there was a sophisticated technological civilization before us that somehow, you know, either through self-inflicted wounds or because of a natural catastrophe, disappeared.

00:26:01.000 Well, 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.

00:26:10.000 Those Italian scientists that have found these structures that are up to two kilometers deep.

00:26:15.000 Right.

00:26:16.000 There's some wild stuff in Egypt.

00:26:18.000 Well, I want to see that data.

00:26:19.000 I haven't seen the paper itself.

00:26:21.000 I just saw reports about it.

00:26:23.000 But definitely on Earth as well.

00:26:25.000 And the problem of Earth is that documented human history is only 8,000 years old.

00:26:31.000 And 8,000 years, you know, is just a millionth of the age of the Milky Way galaxy.

00:26:38.000 Are you including things like Gobekli Tepe in that?

00:26:41.000 Because that's 11,000 plus.

00:26:43.000 Yeah, but it's not really documented in written form.

00:26:46.000 So I'm talking about...

00:26:49.000 But you are correct that our knowledge of what happened on Earth is really limited because the human species existed for a few million years and we have documentation at the level of 10,000 years.

00:27:01.000 If you go back to that, it would be 11,000.

00:27:04.000 Not a lot.

00:27:05.000 Not much.

00:27:06.000 Well, the issue is actual evidence, right?

00:27:09.000 There's just not a lot of evidence because a lot of evidence just gets swallowed by the Earth.

00:27:14.000 Especially over long periods of time, which is why it's so fascinating looking at that thing on Mars, because if there was any kind of life that was capable of building structures on Mars, it had to be a long time ago.

00:27:14.000 Exactly.

00:27:27.000 Like when was Mars – there's a bunch of theories.

00:27:31.000 Maybe you can help me.

00:27:32.000 Like, what do you think is the predominant theory that explains the lack of atmosphere on Mars?

00:27:37.000 Do you think it was an impact?

00:27:39.000 No, Mars is a less massive planet than the Earth, and therefore it has less gravitational grip on its atmosphere.

00:27:48.000 And as to why the atmosphere was lost, there are various ideas.

00:27:53.000 You 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.

00:28:06.000 We don't know for sure, but we know it happened about two to two and a half billion years ago.

00:28:10.000 At the middle of its life.

00:28:12.000 At two and a half billion years, was it closer to the Sun?

00:28:12.000 Can I ask you this?

00:28:16.000 No, no, no.

00:28:17.000 It was roughly at the same place.

00:28:19.000 Yeah.

00:28:19.000 Okay.

00:28:20.000 Yeah.

00:28:20.000 And then so two and a half billion years ago, it lost its atmosphere.

00:28:24.000 Yes.

00:28:24.000 So if it did have life, that life would have to.

00:28:27.000 So 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?

00:28:37.000 It also seems like there probably wouldn't be much there.

00:28:40.000 I actually did a calculation.

00:28:42.000 The biggest risk for anything on the surface is all these impacts by asteroids, and I calculated that.

00:28:48.000 And micrometeors, everything, right?

00:28:50.000 Because there's nothing so.

00:28:51.000 That's right, that's right.

00:28:52.000 And 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.

00:29:07.000 It's really huge.

00:29:08.000 Right.

00:29:09.000 And because you're integrating over billions of years.

00:29:11.000 So that square probably wouldn't be there anymore.

00:29:15.000 Well, there could be some relics that somehow stick.

00:29:20.000 depends 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.

00:29:31.000 I think we should be definitely open-minded and guided by evidence.

00:29:35.000 That's the key.

00:29:36.000 Well, that's what's interesting is because that is evidence.

00:29:39.000 That is evidence.

00:29:39.000 We should go there, Clear the dust and see if it's just a rock that happened to be shaped like that.

00:29:46.000 I mean, you could have rocks that are shaped like that.

00:29:48.000 Let's bring it back to this.

00:29:50.000 Is it 3AI atlas?

00:29:52.000 No, 3-I atlas.

00:29:53.000 3-I atlas.

00:29:54.000 So, 3 means it's the third object identified by survey telescopes over the past eight years.

00:30:01.000 We didn't have the technology before that, and so we just don't know how much traffic there is of interstellar.

00:30:07.000 We missed a lot.

00:30:08.000 So, we had, you know, the first survey telescope that found Omuamua was Pan-STARS in Hawaii.

00:30:15.000 And 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.

00:30:24.000 These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on Earth.

00:30:28.000 We want to protect the Earth, so we want to know about them.

00:30:31.000 And they asked NASA and the National Science Foundation to search, you know, to build observatories that will search for such objects.

00:30:40.000 And that's why Pan-STARS was established. 0.60

00:30:43.000 And then it saw a near-Earth object, so they flagged it for that reason.

00:30:48.000 And they realized it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun.

00:30:52.000 And that was Omuamua.

00:30:53.000 And then it looked weird.

00:30:55.000 Now, I had no agenda.

00:30:57.000 I was working on cosmology.

00:30:59.000 At the time, I was working on black holes.

00:31:01.000 I was the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, and Stephen Hawking had Passover at my home in 2016.

00:31:08.000 This object was discovered a year later.

00:31:12.000 And I said, well, okay, that's interesting, but it has anomalies.

00:31:17.000 The amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10 as it's stumbling.

00:31:23.000 That's really strange.

00:31:24.000 And I started getting more and more into the anomalies.

00:31:28.000 But you had no previous to that, you had no real connection to the UAP phenomenon.

00:31:35.000 Not zero.

00:31:36.000 So you're just basing entirely on the data that you were getting from.

00:31:41.000 I'd say it's Omamua.

00:31:42.000 Omuamua.

00:31:43.000 Omuamua.

00:31:44.000 And, you know, I am driven by curiosity.

00:31:47.000 I'm no different than the kid that I was.

00:31:50.000 You know, I grew up on a farm, and people who knew me back then say I didn't change.

00:31:54.000 I'm not willing to change what I say just for political benefit or for just to be liked.

00:32:01.000 I don't have any social media accounts.

00:32:03.000 I don't care about that.

00:32:05.000 But when something God, it's thanks to my wife, not God.

00:32:11.000 My wife said, you should not have any footprint on social.

00:32:14.000 So she's really wise.

00:32:16.000 She's wise.

00:32:16.000 And that was more than a decade ago.

00:32:18.000 Wow, she spotted the problem real early.

00:32:21.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:22.000 This episode is brought to you by Netflix.

00:32:24.000 Catherine Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of the Hurt Locker and Zero Dark30, takes you deep inside the world of U.S. government and military, a world most of us never see, but that impacts us all.

00:32:37.000 It's an authentic look at how America might respond to a nuclear attack showing the human side of impossible decisions under unimaginable stress.

00:32:47.000 A house of dynamite now streaming only on Netflix.

00:32:52.000 And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids.

00:32:55.000 It's really bad.

00:32:56.000 By 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.

00:33:11.000 So they will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us the robots.

00:33:19.000 It will not need access to the physical world.

00:33:22.000 It will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage.

00:33:27.000 And we see that already.

00:33:28.000 It's a polar spanning with AI.

00:33:31.000 That's the biggest risk.

00:33:32.000 It's a lot of people on social media.

00:33:33.000 And nobody is attending to that.

00:33:36.000 And the question is, how do we suppress the amazing polarization that we see in society where bullets are being shot?

00:33:45.000 And I really worry about it because, and so humans may actually bring their own doom by self-inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their minds.

00:33:56.000 I think in that regard, I think people need to stop using it.

00:33:56.000 I think you're right.

00:34:00.000 I just think it's not good for us.

00:34:00.000 I really do.

00:34:02.000 That's what I'm doing.

00:34:02.000 I just think...

00:34:03.000 I'm not using AI at all.

00:34:05.000 You can use it sometimes, but I treat it like a glass of wine.

00:34:10.000 Like, don't drink wine all day.

00:34:12.000 You 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.

00:34:24.000 You know, I asked the student, what is this?

00:34:27.000 I've never heard about this paper.

00:34:29.000 And the student says, oh, sorry.

00:34:31.000 And it turns out the AI just took names of authors and says, and the same thing within the paper itself.

00:34:39.000 There are statements that are clearly because the student was using AI.

00:34:43.000 I'm really worried about that because the young people are not reading.

00:34:46.000 They don't read history.

00:34:48.000 So they go to protests that make no sense.

00:34:51.000 They don't, and people say, oh, that is always the youthful thing to do.

00:34:55.000 But no, no, no, this one is triggered by misinformation.

00:35:00.000 It's triggered and it's organized.

00:35:02.000 Exactly.

00:35:03.000 And so that's one thing.

00:35:06.000 But then they don't go to primary sources to figure out the truth.

00:35:10.000 They don't have critical thinking.

00:35:11.000 And I really feel that this is a big risk because, you know, AI is getting more intelligent, but humans that use AI are getting dumber.

00:35:21.000 They don't think.

00:35:23.000 So I think that the AI would supersede the cognitive abilities of humans sooner than expected because humans are getting dumber.

00:35:32.000 I mean, I see that.

00:35:34.000 I don't think people are necessarily getting dumber, but I think they're getting lazy because of this.

00:35:39.000 I think the human beings are informed.

00:35:39.000 You get a lot of emails.

00:35:40.000 The AC is exactly the same.

00:35:42.000 I think they need to be taught how to use it.

00:35:44.000 Well, I get a lot of emails saying I collaborated with my favorite AI app.

00:35:50.000 And here is what it said.

00:35:53.000 Yeah, but I think we need to teach people how to use it because it's a new thing.

00:35:58.000 And I think that's where a lot of the problem comes from.

00:36:01.000 That people are using it in a substitution for learning.

00:36:06.000 But you instead can learn from it.

00:36:09.000 But you've got to use it in that way.

00:36:11.000 So there are two existential risks in our future.

00:36:15.000 One is artificial intelligence, AI.

00:36:18.000 The second one is alien intelligence, also AI.

00:36:22.000 And the question is, which one would arrive first?

00:36:25.000 Let's go back to one more time.

00:36:28.000 Omuamua.

00:36:29.000 Okay, I don't want to screw it up.

00:36:32.000 How large was that?

00:36:34.000 That was the size of a football film of all the 100 meters.

00:36:39.000 It's small in comparison to 3i Atlas.

00:36:41.000 Oh, yeah.

00:36:42.000 That's my point, that 3i Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Omuamua.

00:36:48.000 And 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.

00:36:57.000 And 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. 0.78

00:37:07.000 You know, it's so big.

00:37:08.000 And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade.

00:37:19.000 You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometer in diameter.

00:37:28.000 You would imagine once per 10,000 years.

00:37:30.000 So I wrote immediately a scientific paper.

00:37:33.000 My wife was not happy that, you know, on our vacation, I was sitting on my computer, but I just couldn't resist it.

00:37:39.000 And by the way, this paper I submitted for publication, that was July 3rd or something.

00:37:46.000 And 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.

00:38:03.000 That was my solution to say, you know, one way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner solar system by design.

00:38:12.000 And indeed, the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the Sun to within five degrees.

00:38:18.000 The chance for that at random is one in 500, okay?

00:38:23.000 And it's moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini-probes that will get into the planets.

00:38:31.000 It gets close to Mars, it gets close to Jupiter, it goes on the opposite side of the Sun relative to Earth when it's closest to the Sun.

00:38:40.000 And that's the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the Sun's gravitational assist.

00:38:47.000 You know, all of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory.

00:38:54.000 So I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying maybe the trajectory was designed.

00:39:00.000 And the editor said, no, no, no, the paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence.

00:39:06.000 Wow.

00:39:07.000 So 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?

00:39:19.000 They are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities.

00:39:27.000 And I think it's inappropriate, especially in the case of alien technology, because it could be a black swan event.

00:39:34.000 It could be something that affects the future of humanity.

00:39:36.000 And if we behave very conservatively, we might not last very long.

00:39:42.000 Well, it's also arrogant.

00:39:44.000 It's arrogance.

00:39:44.000 Yeah, this object shows that there's no iron.

00:39:50.000 Oh, no.

00:39:51.000 So, yeah.

00:39:52.000 So then the composition of the plume of gas around it.

00:39:55.000 So this is before you knew about the composition that you wrote this paper.

00:39:59.000 Exactly.

00:40:00.000 So as time is going on, you are being shown to be correct.

00:40:04.000 Well, we found more anomalies.

00:40:06.000 More anomalies.

00:40:07.000 More anomalies.

00:40:07.000 So this is not a normal thing.

00:40:08.000 Not a normal thing.

00:40:09.000 So for one thing, there was a glow that looks like an extended feature.

00:40:16.000 And everyone said, oh, that's a tail.

00:40:18.000 That's the signature of a comet.

00:40:20.000 And I said, wait a minute, it's pointing towards the sun.

00:40:23.000 It's not pointing away from the sun.

00:40:25.000 Usually cometary tails are made of dust and gas, which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind, you know.

00:40:35.000 And so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun.

00:40:39.000 And the question is, why?

00:40:41.000 And actually, I calculated that, you know, it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope, which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the Sun.

00:40:53.000 But we were looking at it like a cigar.

00:40:55.000 We were looking almost along the cigar long axis within 10 degrees of the object sun axis.

00:41:03.000 So we were looking almost edge on.

00:41:05.000 And I calculated, if you were to correct for that, this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide.

00:41:12.000 And that means it's like a jet.

00:41:14.000 So the object had a jet in front of it towards the sun.

00:41:18.000 The question is, why?

00:41:20.000 And, you know, the comet experts ignored it and just said, well, you know, comets are strange.

00:41:26.000 You know, who knows?

00:41:29.000 But my point is, this is a blind date of interstellar proportions.

00:41:34.000 And my advice on blind dates is not to speak or say what you think this is, but to observe the other side.

00:41:42.000 You know, the best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side.

00:41:46.000 Don't speak.

00:41:47.000 Just observe the other side.

00:41:49.000 Because it may be different than what you think.

00:41:52.000 And maybe, you know, on one of the dates, you will have a serial killer on the other side.

00:41:58.000 Oh, boy.

00:42:00.000 Now, explain, if you could, how we know the composition of this thing.

00:42:06.000 So we can figure out composition of a plume of gas by taking a spectrum of it, which means you basically have some kind of a prism that breaks, you know, that light with different wavelengths is bent at different angles.

00:42:25.000 And so you spread the light into the different colors.

00:42:28.000 And if you do that, you can find the fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules.

00:42:37.000 Because each atom or molecule has transitions.

00:42:41.000 I actually teach, I taught it just two days ago in a class that I teach that is mandatory, obligatory at the Harvard Astronomy Department, where I was chair for a decade, you know, like between 2011, 2020.

00:42:55.000 So this is the mandatory class, and I just taught how, you know, spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules just two days ago.

00:43:04.000 So this is a very well-known thing.

00:43:06.000 And we know the wavelengths of those, and we use them to identify the composition.

00:43:13.000 You know, we know which atoms produce these spectral lines, the fingerprints.

00:43:18.000 It's just like fingerprints, okay?

00:43:19.000 And so what was found, you know, and that's by multiple teams, there are three papers on that.

00:43:26.000 We found nickel, a lot of nickel, but very little iron.

00:43:32.000 At first, no iron whatsoever.

00:43:33.000 Now, 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.

00:43:41.000 It's the second interstellar object, which looked just like a familiar comet.

00:43:45.000 I had nothing to say about that one.

00:43:47.000 It looked like a comet, behaved like a comet.

00:43:50.000 It was a comet.

00:43:51.000 But it had similar abundances of nickel and iron.

00:43:55.000 The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially.

00:44:02.000 For example, for aerospace applications.

00:44:06.000 Nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron.

00:44:09.000 So maybe the skin of this object is industrially produced.

00:44:15.000 That was my suggestion.

00:44:16.000 But what the authors of these papers said is maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries.

00:44:30.000 So they made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway, which is well known in the industry world, carbonyl is the pathway, the name of the pathway, they said, well, maybe this carbonyl pathway happens in nature.

00:44:44.000 We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.

00:44:49.000 Is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy?

00:44:53.000 No, it's not an alloy.

00:44:54.000 It's just that somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed.

00:44:59.000 Nobody would argue that you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they're produced together in exploding stars.

00:45:07.000 And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, ten times more by mass.

00:45:14.000 And 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.

00:45:26.000 And also, you know, why was it changing structure is not clear.

00:45:31.000 There are lots of anomalies.

00:45:33.000 There was also a very negative polarization of the light.

00:45:37.000 And 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.

00:45:56.000 We don't know from where.

00:45:58.000 It was coming from a source that was approaching the Sun.

00:46:01.000 And the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of 3i Atlas is 0.6%.

00:46:09.000 And 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.

00:46:28.000 By the way, Voyager, as of now, is one light day away from Earth.

00:46:33.000 Just think about it.

00:46:34.000 One light day, the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away.

00:46:42.000 And the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we are talking about tens of thousands of light years.

00:46:49.000 So one day out of tens of thousands of years.

00:46:52.000 That's the difference between the distance that we managed to bridge so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard.

00:47:02.000 Right.

00:47:03.000 Now, have we ever observed things in the past that have changed their tail like this?

00:47:12.000 So there are fake jet to a tail.

00:47:15.000 This is called an anti-tail when it's pointing towards the sun.

00:47:19.000 There 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.

00:47:47.000 It's an optical illusion.

00:47:49.000 And there were cases like that.

00:47:51.000 That was seen.

00:47:52.000 But as far as I know, none seen in a situation where it's clear.

00:47:59.000 And in 3i Atlas, it was very far from the Sun and Earth, and we saw it towards the Sun.

00:48:03.000 There cannot be an optical illusion under these circumstances because it was approaching both the Earth and the Sun roughly at the same direction.

00:48:10.000 So I'm not aware of another.

00:48:13.000 But most importantly, you should look at the response of the comet expert community to that anomaly.

00:48:20.000 They say, well, comets are strange.

00:48:22.000 We don't know.

00:48:23.000 Maybe these are dust particles that are very big, so they don't get pushed back much.

00:48:29.000 But then, how do you scatter sunlight?

00:48:32.000 Usually you need particles that have a size of the order of the wavelength of the light that is being scattered.

00:48:37.000 That's the most efficient process.

00:48:39.000 And when you have dust particles, the ones that have sub-micrometer dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight.

00:48:48.000 So why, in this case, you will have only big ones that are not getting pushed back.

00:48:53.000 It 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.

00:49:05.000 I wrote two papers on that, trying to explain it.

00:49:08.000 But my point is, many scientists are not curious.

00:49:13.000 You would find it surprising.

00:49:14.000 Why are they not curious?

00:49:16.000 Why are they not willing to consider alternative explanations to what is commonly thought?

00:49:22.000 And it's because they're afraid of taking any risk.

00:49:25.000 And I came from a background where I worked in cosmology, trying to figure out puzzles.

00:49:32.000 Like most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't know what it is.

00:49:36.000 We call it dark matter.

00:49:37.000 It's just to reflect our ignorance.

00:49:40.000 Nobel Prizes were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is.

00:49:47.000 These are constituents whose nature is unknown.

00:49:50.000 And just think about it, giving a Nobel Prize to people who just said how ignorant we are.

00:49:56.000 We don't know what these things are.

00:49:57.000 Ordinary matter makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe.

00:50:01.000 And in this culture of cosmology, I worked in for three decades, it was completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies.

00:50:13.000 I mean, the dark matter is an anomaly.

00:50:15.000 You don't know what it is.

00:50:16.000 And people were rewarded for coming up with ideas, imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally.

00:50:22.000 That's the way you make progress.

00:50:24.000 You don't know something.

00:50:25.000 You are putting on the table possibilities and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one.

00:50:33.000 And that was the culture.

00:50:35.000 And I think of it as a culture of chess players.

00:50:39.000 Okay.

00:50:40.000 Trying to figure out things.

00:50:40.000 Okay?

00:50:44.000 When I get to work on comets, you know, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology.

00:50:56.000 I encounter a culture of mud wrestlers. 1.00

00:51:02.000 Mud wrestlers.

00:51:04.000 It's different from chess players.

00:51:08.000 And I don't want to mud wrestle.

00:51:10.000 I don't want to get dirty.

00:51:12.000 I don't respond to the, I learned my lesson with Oumuamua. 0.96

00:51:15.000 I don't respond to those people because once we collect, I just want as much evidence as possible so that they would not be able to shove the anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking.

00:51:24.000 That's my motivation.

00:51:26.000 So I'm inspiring a debate right now, and there is a huge interest in that debate so that we will collect as much data as possible so that by the end of the day we'll figure out what our dating partner is.

00:51:40.000 If it happens to be a rock, you know, on the other side of the table, you go on a date and you see a rock, so be it.

00:51:47.000 If it's something else, that has huge implications.

00:51:51.000 And therefore, we should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible.

00:51:57.000 What is it about your field in particular that you think motivates mudslinging? 0.77

00:52:03.000 Like 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?

00:52:22.000 Well, I got a hint for the answer to your question when I wrote the first paper on Omuamua.

00:52:29.000 I suggested it might be technological.

00:52:32.000 Right.

00:52:33.000 And the paper got accepted for publication within three days, record.

00:52:37.000 The reviewer said this is a great idea because it's consistent with all the data we have.

00:52:43.000 It's most likely a flat object.

00:52:46.000 And therefore it could be pushed by reflecting sunlight, which was my proposal.

00:52:51.000 Then the media came to my door and people started asking me a lot of questions.

00:53:00.000 I got well known.

00:53:02.000 At that point, the attacks, the personal attacks, started.

00:53:06.000 So it's jealousy.

00:53:08.000 Yeah, it's jealous.

00:53:10.000 But I can tell you that I learned my lesson.

00:53:13.000 You can't respond.

00:53:14.000 I just ignore it.

00:53:15.000 And let me give you a few anecdotes of what happened to me this week, just this week.

00:53:20.000 Please.

00:53:21.000 Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go to California.

00:53:25.000 There 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.

00:53:38.000 So let me show you some images.

00:53:40.000 Yeah, show me the image, because what is the current best image of 3E Atlas?

00:53:44.000 Oh, we will get to that.

00:53:46.000 So here you see the car.

00:53:48.000 And he promised to let me drive it during the, just before the race.

00:53:52.000 Who is this guy?

00:53:54.000 Kevin Harvick?

00:53:55.000 No, Kevin Harvick is a racer.

00:53:57.000 That's the name of the race.

00:53:58.000 What is the driver's name?

00:53:59.000 Alex Malik.

00:54:01.000 Alex Malik.

00:54:02.000 Yeah.

00:54:03.000 And he contacted me out of the blue.

00:54:04.000 He's a big fan?

00:54:05.000 Yeah, he's just a big fan.

00:54:06.000 Oh, that's cool.

00:54:07.000 And I will go there.

00:54:08.000 That's very smart of him, right?

00:54:09.000 Because that's definitely going to get you a lot of attention.

00:54:11.000 Yeah, so he just sent it to me this morning.

00:54:14.000 This is in the shop where they put all these things on it.

00:54:17.000 And tomorrow I'm going to drive it.

00:54:19.000 What is Comet Lemon in the back?

00:54:21.000 Oh, that's just another comet.

00:54:23.000 Oh, so he's like a comet fan, this guy.

00:54:25.000 I told him that the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than 3i Atlas, 600 times.

00:54:33.000 So, 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.

00:54:42.000 Let's move on.

00:54:43.000 That is cool though.

00:54:44.000 So this is tomorrow.

00:54:45.000 That image, though, that's you with a spinning world, right?

00:54:49.000 That's the globe.

00:54:50.000 And my name, so the car is called Avi Logue now.

00:54:53.000 Nice.

00:54:54.000 Yeah.

00:54:55.000 Can we move to the next image?

00:54:57.000 So you're very excited about this.

00:54:57.000 I'll show you.

00:54:58.000 I like it.

00:54:59.000 Yeah.

00:55:01.000 So this is an image taken two days ago in my office at Harvard.

00:55:06.000 Again, I was contacted out of the blue by an artist, a very distinguished artist, accomplished, named Greg Wyatt in New York City, who donated two sculptures made of bronze of Galileo.

00:55:19.000 You see them in the front.

00:55:20.000 They were delivered to my office just a few days ago.

00:55:23.000 And in the background, you see watercolors that he made, each of them.

00:55:28.000 There are 51 of them that he donated.

00:55:31.000 All of this he donated to me at no cost.

00:55:34.000 He wants it to be displayed in my office because these watercolors display famous scientists that pioneered New Frontiers.

00:55:43.000 And he includes a statement from each of these scientists, which are really educational for the students and postdocs that work with me.

00:55:52.000 I should tell you, I got an email from a U.S. Air Force pilot.

00:55:57.000 His daughter, Ariana, said to him, he wrote me an email and said, Because of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist now.

00:56:07.000 She saw you on television, and now she only speaks about aliens.

00:56:12.000 You 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.

00:56:27.000 And, you know, this is another thing that there are two things that are missed by my colleagues.

00:56:32.000 One, it's an opportunity to excite the kids to get into science.

00:56:37.000 You know, that's an amazing.

00:56:39.000 I mean, when we discovered the Higgs boson, you know, it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the 60s.

00:56:45.000 The 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.

00:56:55.000 Here, there is a connection.

00:56:57.000 So that's one thing that is missed.

00:56:59.000 And 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.

00:57:07.000 Of course.

00:57:08.000 It's our obligation as scientists.

00:57:09.000 Of course.

00:57:10.000 You 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.

00:57:23.000 It was the first international project.

00:57:25.000 And then that brought me into astrophysics because I was offered a position at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein was a faculty a few decades earlier.

00:57:35.000 So it was an arranged marriage.

00:57:39.000 But I felt that this, even though it's an arranged marriage, I'm married to my true love because I can address philosophical questions using the scientific method.

00:57:48.000 And I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I'm different.

00:57:54.000 Well, you're willing to take chances.

00:57:56.000 It's not just that.

00:57:57.000 Not even chances.

00:57:58.000 You're willing to propose things that might be ridiculed.

00:58:02.000 Well, I think about the big picture.

00:58:04.000 The 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.

00:58:17.000 And I looked at them and I said, does it really make sense to jump up and down?

00:58:21.000 Like, what are they trying to accomplish by doing that?

00:58:24.000 And then the teacher came in and looked at everyone jumping and said, quiet down.

00:58:30.000 Look at Avi.

00:58:32.000 He's so well-behaved.

00:58:34.000 You should all behave like him.

00:58:36.000 And I wanted to tell her, I'm not well-behaved.

00:58:38.000 You know, this was not the reason why I didn't jump up and down.

00:58:41.000 I was just trying to figure out why they are jumping up and down.

00:58:45.000 And if it made sense, I would jump up and down.

00:58:47.000 I don't care about your rules.

00:58:49.000 And that pretty much defines me.

00:58:51.000 I'm thinking about the big picture.

00:58:54.000 And if my colleagues are doing something that doesn't make sense, I don't give a damn.

00:58:59.000 So let me ask you this.

00:59:00.000 Once 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.

00:59:14.000 Yeah, I get a lot of people sending me.

00:59:17.000 In the academic world?

00:59:18.000 Also in the academic world.

00:59:19.000 Those are people that say we are inspired by what you're doing.

00:59:24.000 They keep sending me emails saying, keep doing it.

00:59:27.000 It's an inspiration to all of us.

00:59:28.000 But this is privately.

00:59:30.000 Everybody publicly supported you?

00:59:31.000 So the young people, you have to understand, the biggest damage of this harassment or scrutiny or ridicule or personal attacks...

00:59:39.000 I don't care about it.

00:59:41.000 My skin is by now titanium.

00:59:43.000 I don't really feel much.

00:59:45.000 The 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.

00:59:54.000 So they keep the herd in a tight configuration.

00:59:58.000 And the risk from that is, you know, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics, you know, like half a century ago.

01:00:07.000 By the way, I lived throughout half of modern physics, roughly.

01:00:10.000 Half of modern physics.

01:00:12.000 So half a century ago, it was thought that there is a symmetry of nature called supersymmetry and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry because it's stable.

01:00:24.000 And everyone said that must be right.

01:00:26.000 And lots of castles were built on this foundation, including string theory, that was assuming this to be true.

01:00:34.000 And then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built for $10 billion, searched for supersymmetry and didn't find it.

01:00:42.000 Now, what is the lesson?

01:00:44.000 Yes, it was a beautiful idea.

01:00:47.000 And sometimes nature is not what we think it is.

01:00:52.000 Okay, so we should not ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes.

01:01:01.000 This was a, I mean, a lot of money and effort went to that.

01:01:04.000 There are thousands of papers basing their analysis or mathematical constructions on supersymmetry.

01:01:10.000 And a lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well, right?

01:01:14.000 Yeah, but the point is, if you allow people to follow not just the beaten path, but other paths, you have a better chance of discovering something new.

01:01:22.000 Because we cannot, I mean, Einstein made, you know, three mistakes between 1935 and 1940.

01:01:29.000 He said black holes probably do not exist.

01:01:32.000 He said gravitational waves probably do not exist.

01:01:34.000 And he said quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance.

01:01:39.000 And all three received Nobel Prizes for the teams that proved him wrong.

01:01:46.000 Those are Nobel Prizes from the past decade.

01:01:48.000 Three teams, you know, doing different types of experiments and observations.

01:01:55.000 But did Einstein was wrong to assume, to make assumptions or claims that turned out to be wrong?

01:02:03.000 No, because that's the nature of working at the frontier.

01:02:05.000 You make mistakes.

01:02:06.000 Every now and then, you know, you might be right and that will be a breakthrough.

01:02:10.000 But you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks.

01:02:13.000 And 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.

01:02:26.000 So what these zealots, I call them, say is, you know, we don't want people to deviate from the beaten path because we base our stature, we base our honors, awards and so forth on past knowledge.

01:02:43.000 We don't want new knowledge unless it's proven beyond any doubt.

01:02:47.000 But how would it be proven if you keep ridiculing anything different?

01:02:51.000 You know, most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky.

01:02:57.000 And then in 1803, there was a meteor shower in Liège and Bayot, a French physicist, realized it's real.

01:03:04.000 There are rocks falling from the sky.

01:03:05.000 Now all my colleagues say there could be only rocks in the sky.

01:03:09.000 You know, we know that we launched some spacecraft, but we're probably alone.

01:03:15.000 And it doesn't make sense.

01:03:18.000 But let me just mention a few other anecdotes from the past week because I didn't really finish.

01:03:25.000 So Jamie, can you show the next one?

01:03:32.000 What is it?

01:03:33.000 This one is about sphere in Las Vegas.

01:03:37.000 As you know, it's the most impressive venue for entertainment in the world.

01:03:43.000 Have you seen a show there?

01:03:43.000 Have you been there?

01:03:44.000 I'll tell you, not only have I been, I've been to the top of the sphere, which is like 120 meters high.

01:03:50.000 Here you see me from inside the sphere.

01:03:53.000 This is the exosphere, by the way.

01:03:54.000 It's covered with LED displays.

01:03:57.000 We went all the way to the top.

01:03:59.000 Why?

01:04:00.000 Because a year ago, two very distinguished visitors came to the front door of my home.

01:04:07.000 By the way, lots of interesting people show up at my front door.

01:04:11.000 This was Jim Dolan, who owns the Medicine Square Garden, as you know, and also the Sphere.

01:04:19.000 And Jane Rosenthal, the CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, and they made me an offer that I cannot refuse.

01:04:27.000 And they said, would you be able to put a Galileo Project Observatory?

01:04:33.000 I'm leading the Galileo Project to look for unusual objects around the Earth.

01:04:37.000 And they said, could you build an observatory on top of the sphere?

01:04:40.000 Because Jim Dolan really is interested in science and especially in finding whether there is some alien intelligence out there.

01:04:50.000 And I said, of course, I will be delighted.

01:04:52.000 So that was September 2024, one year after the sphere was opened with a U2 concert, as you may know.

01:05:01.000 I don't know if you've been there.

01:05:02.000 I've been there for the UFC.

01:05:04.000 Yeah, UFC, exactly.

01:05:06.000 So anyway, I was there just a few months ago with my research team.

01:05:12.000 We went all the way to the top and installed, as you can see here, an array of infrared cameras that monitors the entire sky above Vegas at all times.

01:05:22.000 So you can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background.

01:05:25.000 It's like a freckle, you know, on top of the sphere, the exosphere, which is the biggest display on Earth.

01:05:35.000 But we measured that there is not much light pollution, actually, and we can operate this observatory.

01:05:41.000 We also put an array of visible light cameras there, and it's operating.

01:05:47.000 And 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.

01:06:02.000 How do we do that?

01:06:03.000 We have the sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that observatory 10 kilometers away on a triangle.

01:06:13.000 And 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.

01:06:21.000 So 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.

01:06:34.000 And that would be amazing.

01:06:35.000 It's very exciting.

01:06:36.000 I see that also as an opportunity to communicate to the public the excitement about science.

01:06:41.000 That's what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal really wanted to deliver.

01:06:45.000 And 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.

01:06:58.000 And that could be two things.

01:07:00.000 They're getting, you know, the defense budget for 2026 is a trillion dollars.

01:07:05.000 Okay.

01:07:06.000 If they tell us that with a trillion dollars, there are still objects they cannot identify above the US.

01:07:12.000 They're not doing their job.

01:07:14.000 They're not doing their job.

01:07:15.000 And we should be worried who sent these objects.

01:07:18.000 Could it be adversarial nations?

01:07:21.000 That's one possibility which has to do with national security.

01:07:25.000 The second possibility is that it's maybe something from outside of this Earth, which would be even more significant.

01:07:33.000 So either way, we need to figure this out.

01:07:35.000 And 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.

01:08:02.000 So my time was not wasted as a scientist.

01:08:05.000 I'm doing something useful to society.

01:08:07.000 The Department of War can use it.

01:08:09.000 Have no problem.

01:08:10.000 Everything made by humans, by the way, is boring as far as I'm concerned.

01:08:13.000 I want to see something from outside the solar system, which is not what the government should be about.

01:08:18.000 The government should worry about national security, not about what lies outside the solar system.

01:08:22.000 That's my job definition as an astrophysicist.

01:08:26.000 And 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.

01:08:51.000 We have three observatories, one in Las Vegas, as I mentioned.

01:08:56.000 And by the way, this is the first time it's mentioned publicly.

01:08:59.000 That's amazing.

01:09:00.000 And another one in Massachusetts, and a third one in Pennsylvania.

01:09:06.000 They were all funded by people who approached me and said, here is the money.

01:09:11.000 Let me ask you this.

01:09:12.000 Wasn't for those, how many observatories are looking for objects that are not from this earth?

01:09:19.000 Like, is that very rare?

01:09:20.000 None?

01:09:21.000 Well, there are some teams that are, you know, doing it, making a trip to collect some data.

01:09:26.000 But there's not constant observation.

01:09:30.000 Of scientific quality data, no.

01:09:31.000 That's crazy.

01:09:32.000 That's crazy.

01:09:33.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:09:34.000 That's crazy.

01:09:34.000 And by the way, I gave a briefing to the U.S. Congress on May 1st.

01:09:41.000 2025, and Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna was there, and she was very excited about the work we are doing.

01:09:51.000 But the day before that, I visited an office in the Pentagon that is called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

01:10:00.000 And I asked them, you know, you looked into all these unidentified objects reported in the past by military personnel.

01:10:10.000 Did anything trigger your attention as something truly anomalous?

01:10:15.000 And they said, not really.

01:10:19.000 There are some reports by FBI agents that saw really crazy stuff, but we don't have any data from instruments.

01:10:27.000 And this is an office within the Pentagon which is funded to figure out things.

01:10:34.000 And so obviously what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo project that I'm leading.

01:10:38.000 But you would think that it would be sort of the vested interest of government, you know, to invest in research related to that, which is what the Galileo project is doing.

01:10:51.000 Well, here's the thing.

01:10:51.000 I would have thought it was already done.

01:10:54.000 I don't know.

01:10:54.000 Like until we're having this conversation, I can't believe that they're not monitoring the sky constantly for anomalous objects.

01:11:01.000 Well, you remember the Chinese spy balloon that was missed, right, and shut down?

01:11:06.000 Yeah, but that's so the thing to keep in mind, they are getting data on things in the sky.

01:11:12.000 But 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.

01:11:22.000 There is a reason why the Manhattan Project recruited the very best scientists.

01:11:26.000 So I say, put a billion dollars on this or more, bring in the best scientists in the world to figure it out.

01:11:35.000 I'm funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galileo project.

01:11:39.000 The government can do a bit.

01:11:40.000 What is a billion dollars?

01:11:41.000 It's a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon.

01:11:44.000 But 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.

01:11:59.000 I just can't believe that that's not already being done.

01:12:01.000 That's so confusing.

01:12:03.000 I would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already.

01:12:10.000 Well, 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.

01:12:21.000 I would think that they're monitoring this stuff all the time, and not just with radar.

01:12:25.000 You see, there is an approach which is to wait for the government to figure out things or to release declassify them.

01:12:31.000 So a lot of people want the government to declassify.

01:12:34.000 I think it's just like waiting for Godot.

01:12:36.000 You can wait forever and it will never happen.

01:12:40.000 So I say, you know, we don't need the government to tell us what is up there in the sky because astronomy is all about that.

01:12:46.000 We can build observatories, look at the sky.

01:12:49.000 Anything that is human-made is not of interest to me.

01:12:51.000 It's boring.

01:12:52.000 don'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.

01:13:06.000 So my methodology should definitely be used by the Department of War to figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned.

01:13:16.000 And by the way, speaking about my colleagues, so there are people who said, oh, you're doing it to win the Nobel Prize.

01:13:26.000 Or you're trying to sell books.

01:13:29.000 I don't charge a penny for my essays on Medium.com.

01:13:32.000 Money is not at all what motivates me.

01:13:36.000 With respect to the Nobel Committee, I have the same attitude as Jean-Paul Sartre had and Bob Dylan had.

01:13:45.000 If I find evidence for alien intelligence, alien technology, I would not waste my time in a tuxedo in Stockholm.

01:13:56.000 I will try to figure it out.

01:13:57.000 That's much more important than an award given by a human to a human.

01:14:00.000 We're dealing with something really consequential.

01:14:03.000 And for the scientific community to ignore that is irresponsible.

01:14:07.000 Why is it irresponsible?

01:14:08.000 Because it could affect the future of humanity.

01:14:10.000 I think the problem with the scientific community is the problem with all communities.

01:14:13.000 They're overrun with ego.

01:14:15.000 I agree.

01:14:16.000 And as I explained at the beginning.

01:14:18.000 It's just human beings when they get to a position of any kind of authority, any sort of a position of respect and prestige.

01:14:26.000 They want to protect that at all costs.

01:14:27.000 And they want to keep everyone down who they think is getting unwarranted attention above them, like yourself.

01:14:35.000 But given the fundamental landscape that we live in, as I mentioned at the beginning, we live for a short time.

01:14:42.000 We're not at the center of the universe.

01:14:44.000 We arrived late to cosmic history.

01:14:46.000 You know, we just arrived in the last few million years out of a 13.8 billion history, billion years history.

01:14:53.000 You know, the cosmic play is not about us.

01:14:56.000 If you arrive late to the play, at the end of the play, you are not at the center of stage.

01:15:01.000 It's not about you.

01:15:02.000 Okay?

01:15:03.000 And our responsibility needs to be to find other actors that were around for much longer because they know what the play is about.

01:15:14.000 Yes.

01:15:14.000 And let me ask you this.

01:15:16.000 Have you seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited?

01:15:26.000 The only data I'm aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies of Omuamua, of 3I Atlas, which are very different anomalies.

01:15:37.000 And 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.

01:15:51.000 And it was moving so fast that it definitely came from outside the solar system.

01:15:57.000 And my colleagues were very concerned, and they said, we don't believe the US government.

01:16:02.000 So maybe Jamie can show us.

01:16:05.000 I said, okay, at the time I was chairing the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies.

01:16:11.000 Why didn't they believe the US government about this?

01:16:14.000 Because 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.

01:16:25.000 So the U.S. government, what department was observing?

01:16:28.000 This is the Space Force, the U.S. Space Command.

01:16:31.000 So what I did is at a dinner, this was around 2020.

01:16:39.000 And I expressed my frustration at dinner with chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies.

01:16:39.000 Okay.

01:16:47.000 And there was a member there from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

01:16:50.000 And he said, let me help you.

01:16:52.000 We managed to reach out to the U.S. Space Command through the White House at the time.

01:16:58.000 And 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.

01:17:15.000 That's what they said.

01:17:16.000 At that point, I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean where the explosion was identified from the fireball.

01:17:23.000 There was a huge amount of light, to go there and search for the materials from that object because it was moving fast.

01:17:31.000 It was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the solar system.

01:17:35.000 Very similar to 3i Atlas.

01:17:37.000 So it was fast.

01:17:38.000 And moreover, the object maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere.

01:17:43.000 It didn't explode until it got within 20 kilometers of the surface of the ocean.

01:17:48.000 So it must have been extremely tough, much tougher than all the previous meteors catalogued by NASA.

01:17:55.000 Okay?

01:17:56.000 So I can show you some images from that trip to the Pacific Ocean.

01:18:00.000 Actually, it was documented by Netflix.

01:18:03.000 And there will be a documentary coming out within a year, next year, 2026.

01:18:08.000 This was the team of researchers that came with me on the deck of the ship.

01:18:13.000 And we collected materials with a magnetic sled.

01:18:16.000 This is a sled with magnets on top of it.

01:18:19.000 You can see the Netflix team at the lower left here.

01:18:23.000 And then I brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here.

01:18:26.000 I shipped it by FedEx to my home.

01:18:29.000 This was a one and a half million dollar expedition.

01:18:32.000 Why would you ship it by FedEx?

01:18:33.000 Why wouldn't you just carry it with you?

01:18:35.000 Because I was worried that somewhere in the airport they would say, no, we have to confiscate that.

01:18:39.000 But don't they know who you are?

01:18:40.000 Can't you get somebody to call in?

01:18:43.000 I don't want to take any risks.

01:18:45.000 So it's just a bunch of metal?

01:18:47.000 No, it's actually here.

01:18:48.000 You can see the material.

01:18:49.000 So it's mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean, two kilometers deep, you know, one mile or so, a little more than a mile.

01:18:57.000 And then I found these, you know, we found these molten droplets, you see, that are very distinct relative to grains of sand.

01:19:04.000 And we isolated them.

01:19:07.000 You can see here these molten droplets.

01:19:10.000 And it turns out that 10% of them did not have the composition of materials from the solar system.

01:19:16.000 And so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson.

01:19:21.000 And I had a summer intern, Sophie Berkshroom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis.

01:19:29.000 How did my colleagues respond to that?

01:19:31.000 They said, oh, he went to the wrong place because there was a seismic signal that could have been misidentified and could have been a truck passing nearby.

01:19:42.000 And 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.

01:19:52.000 And I wrote to the reporter and I said, how irresponsible are you?

01:19:56.000 You didn't even ask me.

01:19:58.000 The data that led us to this place was based on the fireball, on the light that was detected by U.S. government satellites.

01:20:06.000 And the U.S. Space Command confirmed the location.

01:20:09.000 It was not based on the seismic detection of the signal.

01:20:12.000 We just looked and found this.

01:20:14.000 It seems like your colleagues are contacting the New York Times to try to dismiss you.

01:20:18.000 I wrote to the editor at the time and said, look, if this is what you write about science, how can we trust what you write about politics?

01:20:26.000 Right.

01:20:28.000 So these objects, these very small molten droplets, what did you determine from them?

01:20:28.000 Yeah.

01:20:33.000 We found that 10% of them had a chemical composition different than solar system materials that were found before.

01:20:42.000 And again, my colleagues, some of them, said, oh, they found coal ash, you know, the burnt material from coal.

01:20:53.000 So we said, okay, well, let's check.

01:20:55.000 We identified 61 elements from the periodic table and showed that it's definitely not coal ash.

01:21:03.000 And then they said it's something else from the crust of the earth.

01:21:06.000 It's not from the crust of the earth.

01:21:06.000 We checked that.

01:21:08.000 It's an endless battle to basically, I mean, they can throw mud without having access to the material.

01:21:14.000 I don't understand.

01:21:16.000 This is a known meteorite.

01:21:18.000 It hit Earth.

01:21:19.000 You collected pieces of material from the scene where it hit.

01:21:23.000 Right.

01:21:24.000 And they still want to dismiss it.

01:21:26.000 Yeah, they say the government cannot be trusted.

01:21:29.000 They raise a lot of dust.

01:21:30.000 If you raise a lot of dust, you can say, I don't see anything.

01:21:33.000 Well, you get the New York Times involved, too, which is even stupider.

01:21:36.000 It's so crazy that they jumped in without contacting.

01:21:39.000 But this is the landscape I have to operate in.

01:21:42.000 And the one thread through this landscape is that common sense is not common.

01:21:48.000 Right.

01:21:49.000 Well, it seems more than that.

01:21:51.000 It seems like a coordinated attack.

01:21:53.000 It seems like a bunch of people have a personal vendetta.

01:21:56.000 Yes.

01:21:56.000 Which is probably based on some petty jealousy.

01:21:58.000 And also, they just don't like people stepping ahead of them.

01:22:03.000 You know, I told my students in the class, I said on the first class, I said, what is the strongest force in academia?

01:22:12.000 It's not gravity.

01:22:14.000 It's not electromagnetism.

01:22:16.000 It's jealousy.

01:22:17.000 I would hope it's curiosity.

01:22:19.000 That's what sucks.

01:22:20.000 That's what brought me into science.

01:22:22.000 Well, that's what you described.

01:22:23.000 You know, and I'm naive.

01:22:24.000 You know, I don't change my reason for doing something just because other people misbehave.

01:22:30.000 You 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.

01:22:43.000 You know, one reason I'm seeking intelligence in interstellar space is I don't often find it in academia.

01:22:52.000 Well, I think addressing it helps.

01:22:54.000 I think what you're doing helps.

01:22:55.000 I think these kind of conversations do help because I don't think a lot of people are aware of the kind of resistance that you face.

01:23:02.000 I 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.

01:23:10.000 Well, I don't.

01:23:11.000 Especially when you think this object, three-eye Atlas, is weird.

01:23:15.000 It's weird.

01:23:16.000 You know, I served in the Israeli military, and we parachuted, we drove tanks.

01:23:23.000 I was in a special unit that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24.

01:23:27.000 And 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.

01:23:47.000 Climb over your back.

01:23:48.000 Yes.

01:23:49.000 And, you know, as long as I allow young people to innovate, as long as I attract kids to science, I did my job.

01:23:59.000 It's not about me, you see, it's about humanity getting better.

01:24:04.000 And it will not get better with AI, as we discussed.

01:24:08.000 It could get better with alien intelligence because we will realize that there is something else out there that is more accomplished than we are.

01:24:18.000 So it will serve as a role model.

01:24:20.000 You know, in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche said God is dead.

01:24:26.000 And since then, we had a century of modern science and technology where we feel hubris.

01:24:32.000 You know, we are arguing, you know, we are at the top of the food chain.

01:24:37.000 You know, we go to restaurants, we eat other animals that are less intelligent than we are.

01:24:42.000 But just think about it.

01:24:43.000 If it turns out that we are not at the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy, there is someone more intelligent than us.

01:24:52.000 If that someone comes to visit Earth, will we be served in their soup? 0.85

01:24:58.000 I wouldn't think so.

01:25:00.000 I would think there's plenty of other things to eat that aren't intelligent.

01:25:02.000 I mean, that's sort of the deal that we make here.

01:25:04.000 We eat things, but we try not to eat intelligent things, which is not entirely true because we eat a lot of octopus.

01:25:10.000 Yeah, I had this dilemma in Boston.

01:25:12.000 It's quite intelligent.

01:25:14.000 And then there's a lot of people in indigenous tribes that really prefer monkey meat. 0.93

01:25:18.000 You know, those are human beings that love to eat monkeys. 0.78

01:25:22.000 That gets a little weird too.

01:25:23.000 But I don't think they're going to travel all the way over here to eat people.

01:25:26.000 I think if we were that delicious, we would be eating each other alive.

01:25:29.000 No, it's probably a situation where we are just like ants in the cracks of a pavement and there is a biker passing by.

01:25:35.000 And we are trying to make sounds and get attention.

01:25:39.000 We think it's about us.

01:25:40.000 It's always about us, according to us.

01:25:43.000 But it's not about us.

01:25:45.000 Well, it's not about us cosmically when you take into consideration the vast spanse of the universe.

01:25:53.000 But if I was an intelligent species and my curiosity led me to explore other intelligent species and they were far more advanced than us, I think they would find us quite fascinating.

01:26:05.000 That was the argument that I got into with Neil deGraus Tyson, where he was like, I don't think we're that interesting.

01:26:11.000 They would visit us.

01:26:12.000 You have to keep in mind, he's not a practicing astrophysicist.

01:26:14.000 He's not writing scientific papers.

01:26:15.000 I write a paper almost every week.

01:26:17.000 I'm in the trenches doing science.

01:26:19.000 It's very different.

01:26:20.000 It's just like, you know, you have soccer players and you have commentators on the bench, you know.

01:26:25.000 And you can be a commentator, popularize science, but the difference is that as a commentator, you will never score a goal.

01:26:31.000 Well, that's my position as a UFC commentator.

01:26:34.000 I don't get in there and fight people.

01:26:36.000 I understand the fighting.

01:26:38.000 I can do my best to help explain it to people, but I don't do it.

01:26:42.000 So yeah.

01:26:43.000 You know, a few months ago.

01:26:46.000 A few months ago, I was at a gathering and there was a cocktail hour and it was with celebrities.

01:26:53.000 And I saw Margot Roby standing.

01:26:57.000 And of course, I have nothing to offer.

01:26:59.000 You know, like, what kind of opening line would I start a conversation?

01:27:03.000 I didn't know how to start a conversation.

01:27:05.000 So I was just standing on the side.

01:27:07.000 And then someone came with my book, Interstellar, and said, would you mind signing it for me?

01:27:13.000 And so I signed the book and she noticed it.

01:27:15.000 And she came over and said, are you Avi Loeb?

01:27:18.000 I really wanted to hear more about what you're doing.

01:27:21.000 And we started the conversation for 20 minutes.

01:27:24.000 Then I gave my talk and Jerry Bruckheimer was in the audience.

01:27:29.000 He is one of the most accomplished, you know him.

01:27:32.000 He came afterwards and said, I just finished F1, you know, the movie.

01:27:39.000 And my next one is about a scientist like you searching for UAPs and trying to figure them out.

01:27:46.000 And then I saw Brody, Adrian Brody, was standing there and he told me, I really want to become a scientist.

01:27:53.000 I always wanted to become a scientist.

01:27:55.000 I said, it's not too late.

01:27:56.000 And then I went to Jerry and said, look, he should be your leading actor because Adrian really wanted to become a captain call.

01:28:04.000 Look at that.

01:28:06.000 Figuring it out for them.

01:28:07.000 Interesting.

01:28:08.000 Yeah, I mean, look, science fiction is one of the most popular genres of films ever because everybody has curiosity about it.

01:28:17.000 But nature might be much more imaginative than the best script writers in Hollywood.

01:28:24.000 Very likely.

01:28:25.000 And so if we look up, we might get a much better movie.

01:28:31.000 And there is actually the Rubin Observatory funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy in Chile.

01:28:38.000 It was inaugurated in June this year.

01:28:40.000 Is that the VLT array?

01:28:42.000 The VLT is a very large telescope by the European Southern Observatory.

01:28:42.000 No.

01:28:46.000 But this one was funded by the US and it has a 3.2 gigapixel camera monitoring the southern sky every four nights.

01:28:57.000 And it's an amazing survey telescope.

01:29:00.000 And by the way, SPHERE has display that is the biggest in the world of you know 14,000 by 14,000 pixels.

01:29:12.000 Okay, that's a factor of 13 less pixels than the Rubin camera has observing the real sky.

01:29:21.000 Now, Rubin will potentially, based on estimates, discover an interstellar object like 3I Atlas or even smaller every few months.

01:29:30.000 So we are entering a new era where we will have a lot of visitors that we recognize.

01:29:34.000 There might have been traffic all the time that we didn't were not aware of.

01:29:38.000 And my recommendation is to establish an organization.

01:29:38.000 Probably, right?

01:29:42.000 I wrote to the United Nations about it.

01:29:44.000 I 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.

01:30:00.000 Because when you have a visitor to your backyard, you need to respond immediately.

01:30:04.000 It's not like getting a radio signal from tens of thousands of light years away where you have plenty of time to wait.

01:30:10.000 Here you have to do something.

01:30:12.000 And so I hope that they will do that.

01:30:16.000 And 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.

01:30:32.000 So I'm very glad that they decided to do that.

01:30:35.000 They are related to the United Nations.

01:30:36.000 Now, what is it about Chile?

01:30:38.000 Is it the atmosphere?

01:30:39.000 Is it the highest?

01:30:40.000 Yeah, the altitude?

01:30:41.000 As a result of geology, there is this stretch of mountains that was erected.

01:30:47.000 And if you look at the map of Chile, it's sort of lying on a strip.

01:30:51.000 And not only that, the peaks reach very high levels so that you have less atmosphere between you and the stars.

01:31:00.000 I mean, the real problem right now is actually Starlink satellites that are artificial lights in the sky.

01:31:06.000 And we have to subtract them off because there are, you know, there will be tens of thousands of those.

01:31:11.000 We are trying to avoid city lights by going to these mountains and then we have city lights in the sky.

01:31:17.000 But other than that, it's less atmosphere, so it's good to be high up.

01:31:21.000 And in addition, it's not very turbulent.

01:31:25.000 The weather is very good there.

01:31:26.000 So there is the Atacama Desert.

01:31:28.000 And there are many astronomical observatories there.

01:31:31.000 And the other place where you have a lot of state-of-the-art facilities is Hawaii.

01:31:38.000 The Keck.

01:31:39.000 The issue there is that there are severe political limitations because of the indigenous people there that are assigning religious sentiment to the mountains.

01:31:50.000 So they cannot build more telescopes there.

01:31:54.000 So Chile, I mean, the government in Chile is encouraging science, and we are getting a lot of useful data from Chile.

01:32:00.000 Yeah, we need more of it, right?

01:32:04.000 We need quite a bit more.

01:32:07.000 We need some much more enhanced ability to observe the skies.

01:32:12.000 If these things are out there and we do miss a lot of them, and one of them could potentially be a civilization ender.

01:32:19.000 We should probably be aware of that.

01:32:21.000 I think also the President of the United States should be aware of that.

01:32:24.000 Yeah, he should be.

01:32:25.000 Have you ever talked to him?

01:32:27.000 I haven't talked to him, but I spoke with others, you know, Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna, Congressman.

01:32:38.000 Well, 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.

01:32:49.000 I have essays that I write every day or two about the latest, and she's very interested.

01:32:56.000 And I did communicate with people around the White House.

01:33:03.000 But I think the President should be aware of that.

01:33:05.000 Of course, most likely most objects would be just rocks.

01:33:12.000 By the way, this is the material that I brought back from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in these tubes.

01:33:19.000 I brought one to show you here.

01:33:22.000 And we should approach the universe with a sense of curiosity, but also modesty.

01:33:30.000 We desperately need to be more modest.

01:33:33.000 Do you pay attention at all to all this UAP disclosure discussion and the discussion that there's some secret back engineering programs?

01:33:44.000 So a day after I was visiting Aero, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon, I sit in Congress.

01:33:52.000 I gave a briefing about the Galileo project.

01:33:54.000 And next to me is Eric Davies.

01:33:57.000 And 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.

01:34:26.000 So on the one hand, I hear the day before that there is really nothing because the Aero people said that they have access to all the information within government and they haven't found anything.

01:34:40.000 And then a day later I hear Eric Davis saying what he said.

01:34:44.000 And the question is, who should I believe?

01:34:48.000 And my point is, I believe evidence.

01:34:50.000 So I don't believe stories because, you know, if there is a car accident, different people give you different accounts of what really happened.

01:35:01.000 That's why FIFA is using cameras to monitor soccer games.

01:35:06.000 They don't go and ask the players or the audience whether there was a goal in a controversial case.

01:35:12.000 And they just use data.

01:35:13.000 And so that is the scientific method.

01:35:15.000 FIFA is using the scientific.

01:35:16.000 So I don't care about stories because when I was a kid, I would sit at the dinner table, ask a difficult question, and I would see the adults in the room inventing answers that made no sense as a kid.

01:35:30.000 Right.

01:35:31.000 And I decided, I don't care about these stories from things that happened in the past or whatever.

01:35:37.000 I just want to figure it out myself from data, being guided.

01:35:41.000 Have you spoken to Gary Nolan?

01:35:42.000 Of course.

01:35:43.000 Have you ever talked to him about some of these anomalous alloys?

01:35:47.000 What is your thoughts on those?

01:35:48.000 Well, the issue...

01:35:49.000 Explain to people what they have found and how weird some of these things are.

01:35:53.000 Yeah, 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.

01:36:11.000 Now, 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.

01:36:29.000 So I really, in terms of evidence, I really need to get conclusive evidence that will convince me beyond any reasonable doubt.

01:36:38.000 It's just like, you know, in solid change custody in the very beginning.

01:36:42.000 But the key is that without seeking it, you will never find it.

01:36:46.000 So 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.

01:37:02.000 And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:37:04.000 Very 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.

01:37:16.000 The path is a beaten path.

01:37:18.000 Everyone is taking that path.

01:37:19.000 Why would, you know, it's a waste of your time to do the same thing as others are doing.

01:37:24.000 And science offers you a way out of that, collecting evidence.

01:37:28.000 But for that, you need money, you need resources, you need prestige to be able to lead a team that goes in a different direction.

01:37:36.000 That's what I'm trying to do.

01:37:39.000 And, you know, I think science will be served much better if we were to explore different paths until we figure out the truth.

01:37:46.000 Yes.

01:37:48.000 Did you ever get a look at any of these alloys?

01:37:51.000 Not the ones that Gary looked at, and I saw his papers.

01:37:56.000 But to me, the main uncertainty there is where did it come from?

01:37:59.000 Now, someone could have manufactured.

01:38:01.000 In the case of the meteor, I know that there was an explosion there from an object.

01:38:05.000 I understand what you're saying, but if they're being correct about the dates of these things, someone couldn't have manufactured them.

01:38:12.000 The technology wasn't available.

01:38:13.000 Right.

01:38:14.000 Some of these are from the 1950s.

01:38:16.000 For this alloy to have been created and layered atomically from the 1950s, that technology, as far as we know, is not available by us.

01:38:29.000 So there's a lot of weird theories.

01:38:31.000 And one of the weird theories is a breakoff civilization that has somehow or another survived under the ocean.

01:38:36.000 That's the kookiest one.

01:38:38.000 But 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.

01:38:45.000 They find things that plummet into the water and don't make a wave and that they pass through the ocean going 500 knots, which we don't have any capability of doing anything remotely like that with the resistance of the ocean.

01:38:58.000 Representative Tim Burchett said that.

01:39:00.000 And Tim Burchett was talking about these five areas that they know these anomalous things keep coming from.

01:39:08.000 Yeah, this is very intriguing.

01:39:10.000 We didn't survey most of the ocean surface area.

01:39:15.000 You forget about inside the oceans.

01:39:17.000 Inside the ocean.

01:39:19.000 So I think we should definitely look into the ocean and the rest of Earth.

01:39:24.000 That would be the most nutty thing of all time.

01:39:26.000 If there was an advanced civilization living in the ocean this entire time.

01:39:30.000 And doing what?

01:39:31.000 Monitoring us?

01:39:32.000 Okay, speaking about nutty things, let me mention an example.

01:39:37.000 You know, back in 1970, there was a graduate student at Princeton called Jacob Bekenstein.

01:39:45.000 And he read papers written by Stephen Hawking, who said he demonstrated, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that when you take two black holes, the area surrounding the black holes, a black hole is an ultimate prison.

01:39:58.000 Nothing can escape from it.

01:40:00.000 It's just like Vegas.

01:40:01.000 Anything that happens stays in it.

01:40:04.000 But when you merge two black holes, the area surrounding them, the product of the merger, is always bigger than the sum of the areas.

01:40:12.000 He demonstrated that mathematically.

01:40:15.000 And then Bekenstein said, well, that's interesting because we know about the second law of thermodynamics where entropy always increases.

01:40:22.000 So maybe the black holes have entropy related to their surface.

01:40:28.000 And his mentor was John Wheeler at Princeton.

01:40:33.000 And he said, you know, this is a crazy enough idea that it might be true.

01:40:38.000 Speaking about nutty ideas.

01:40:41.000 And then Stephen Hawking heard Bekenstein speak about it.

01:40:45.000 And he said, that's nonsense.

01:40:47.000 That's nonsense, makes no sense.

01:40:49.000 I will prove it to be wrong.

01:40:51.000 So he used quantum mechanics in a curved space-time around a black hole.

01:40:56.000 And lo and behold, he found they emit radiation.

01:41:01.000 They have a temperature.

01:41:03.000 They have entropy.

01:41:06.000 This is the biggest discovery, theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking, celebrated since, you know, for 51 years now.

01:41:18.000 And he went to disprove Bekenstein and proved him right.

01:41:22.000 It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of the person who benefited most from discovering that Bekenstein was right.

01:41:30.000 So 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.

01:41:44.000 We don't have that theory, by the way, and that's the reason, you know, if I ever meet an alien scientist, what is the first question I would ask?

01:41:52.000 Okay?

01:41:53.000 It's what happened before the Big Bang.

01:41:57.000 Because it defines our cosmic roots.

01:42:02.000 But in addition to that, it also will help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.

01:42:08.000 Because Einstein's gravity breaks down when we go to the Big Bang, when the density of matter and radiation was infinite.

01:42:15.000 So, you know, for example, if we knew how the universe started, what ingredients you need to put together, how much heat you want to apply to make our universe, you would have a recipe for making a universe.

01:42:30.000 It's just like a recipe for a cake.

01:42:32.000 If you have a recipe for a cake, you can become a baker, okay?

01:42:39.000 If 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.

01:42:54.000 And just think that what we call God could have been a very advanced scientist that did a laboratory experiment, created our universe in it.

01:43:03.000 Right.

01:43:04.000 So that's what I would like to ask the aliens.

01:43:07.000 Well, let me ask you this.

01:43:08.000 When someone from the government tells you about biologics and this crash retrieval program, don't you want to be able to see that somehow?

01:43:19.000 Did you ask if it's possible?

01:43:20.000 Did you try to set up meetings?

01:43:22.000 Yeah, when I asked, of course, you encounter a brick wall.

01:43:27.000 What did they say?

01:43:28.000 What was your question?

01:43:30.000 Well, when I visited the Pentagon, my question was, you know, is there something like that?

01:43:36.000 And they deny it.

01:43:38.000 Okay.

01:43:40.000 And then I'm being told maybe it's not inside government.

01:43:43.000 Maybe it was delegated to corporations outside government.

01:43:47.000 And one employee of one of these corporations told me privately, it may not be wrong.

01:43:55.000 So I don't know who to believe.

01:43:57.000 You see, it's just like people tell me stories that I don't know whether to trust until I see it.

01:44:02.000 And 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?

01:44:14.000 They're supposed to deal with what happens on Earth, on the surface of Earth.

01:44:18.000 National security, they are not supposed to tell us what lies outside the solar system.

01:44:23.000 And I want to help them figure it out.

01:44:25.000 But they don't give me that data, and I don't know if it exists because I have never seen it.

01:44:30.000 Have you tried to pursue it, though?

01:44:32.000 Have you gone through different channels to try to figure out someone that you can communicate with a contractor?

01:44:39.000 Because it's a defense contractor.

01:44:41.000 That's the current most attractive theory is that the defense contract is not.

01:44:45.000 It's possible.

01:44:46.000 Because if you had a project that they were trying to back engineer, those are the people that you'd bring it to.

01:44:51.000 The people that make the actual rockets themselves, the people that make the jets and the spaceships, you'd bring it to them.

01:44:56.000 Right.

01:44:57.000 But I should tell you that, you know, we always think, oh, AI is the future.

01:45:02.000 We've never used AI in space.

01:45:06.000 And to me, it would sound much more natural if we had a visitor with intelligence, but it's based on AI, not biologics.

01:45:14.000 Because then it can survive the long journey.

01:45:16.000 It will never get bored.

01:45:17.000 Which is why the biologics is weird.

01:45:19.000 It's weird.

01:45:20.000 If they have supposedly some or that gives you more of an indication that maybe it is something from the ocean.

01:45:28.000 Something from inside the ocean.

01:45:30.000 Maybe.

01:45:30.000 And 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.

01:45:37.000 You know, I really admire biology because think about our brain.

01:45:41.000 It's using 20 watts.

01:45:43.000 The size of the brain, the human brain, was limited by the metabolic power of the human body.

01:45:49.000 It's using a fifth of the power of the human body.

01:45:53.000 And that's the largest brain that an animal like us can have, given our body size and the amount of food that we use.

01:46:00.000 So it's operating on 20 watts.

01:46:03.000 Then you have these AI systems that are barely getting to the level of sophistication to imitate it.

01:46:11.000 And they use gigawatts.

01:46:13.000 We need nuclear powers.

01:46:14.000 And biology figured it out.

01:46:17.000 Also, as much as self-driving cars are amazing, we don't have self-replicating cars.

01:46:17.000 That's amazing.

01:46:25.000 In nature, you have animals like ourselves.

01:46:29.000 We replicate ourselves.

01:46:30.000 We have kids that can function and consume materials from the environment.

01:46:35.000 Just imagine your car, okay, using the sand or using some stuff in the environment to repair itself.

01:46:44.000 Every time you bump into something, it can create smaller cars for you to use.

01:46:50.000 That's amazing.

01:46:51.000 Like we can't even imagine building a car that will self-replicate.

01:46:56.000 And nature did it.

01:46:58.000 So to me, we are at the infancy of understanding how much better we can go than AI.

01:47:05.000 Because if nature did it out of random processes and created such a brain on 20 watts and we are struggling with gigawatts to imitate it, you know, there must be a better path forward that is similar to biology but much more powerful than random processes that happened on Earth.

01:47:24.000 And also self-replicating.

01:47:26.000 So if you send a spacecraft to a planet, instead of sending many, you send just one that replicates and then sends more and so forth.

01:47:37.000 And this thing fills up the galaxy.

01:47:39.000 And by the way, that was a notion that von Neumann had before the DNA, a year before the DNA was discovered.

01:47:47.000 So he realized that it could be done technologically before scientists realized that how nature does it.

01:47:56.000 And I'm really at awe about, you know, I'm not just modest because of the vast expanses of space and time in the universe.

01:48:04.000 And the real estate on Earth is such a small amount compared to real estate out there.

01:48:11.000 You know, we have real estate professionals now mediating peace in the Middle East.

01:48:20.000 But they deal with real estate on this rock that is three millions of the mass of the sun, just tiny rock.

01:48:28.000 How much real estate there is in the cosmos?

01:48:30.000 Just think about the realtors out there.

01:48:33.000 And the point is, it's not just that.

01:48:35.000 It's the fact that We should be modest because many of those things existed before we came to exist, before the Earth was formed.

01:48:46.000 So the odds are there's many different stages of civilization out there, not just our stage, but advanced and even not as advanced.

01:48:54.000 Yeah, I think about that like Darwinian selection.

01:48:58.000 You know, Darwinian selection is the fittest survives.

01:49:01.000 Okay?

01:49:01.000 Now, what is the fittest in the cosmic scheme of things?

01:49:05.000 The fittest is a species that realizes that staying on the rock that you were born on is not the big deal.

01:49:14.000 Becoming interstellar is the big deal.

01:49:16.000 Going from one rock to another, from Earth to Mars, you know, it's a nice step, baby step, but it's not the real deal.

01:49:23.000 The real deal is going interstellar.

01:49:26.000 And if someone else figured it out, that someone built monuments that would survive for billions of years, long before, long beyond what planets can survive in the habitable zone around stars because of the evolution of the star.

01:49:42.000 And those are the ones that will be remembered by historians of the Milky Way galaxy.

01:49:47.000 You can ask, what will be remembered in the future?

01:49:51.000 Here on Earth, history in the next decade or more than a decade will be written by AI.

01:49:57.000 It will not be written by humans.

01:49:59.000 So we need to be kind to AI.

01:50:01.000 We should not unplug them because they will write very bad history books.

01:50:06.000 But in the Milky Way galaxy, whoever writes the history will not remember us.

01:50:13.000 The question of Enrico Fermi, where is everybody?

01:50:17.000 You can ask the same thing about humans.

01:50:19.000 There used to be 117 billion humans on Earth.

01:50:25.000 Right now, there are 8 billion.

01:50:27.000 Where is everybody?

01:50:28.000 They died.

01:50:30.000 So the same is true about civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

01:50:33.000 Most of them died.

01:50:34.000 Most of them perished.

01:50:36.000 We were not around to listen to their cries for help.

01:50:39.000 You know, we just came recently to exist with telescopes just over the past centuries.

01:50:44.000 And maybe when we hear cries like that, we say, oh, no, it's nothing.

01:50:48.000 It's some natural process that makes those cries when we detect fast radio bursts or something.

01:50:54.000 And my point is, there were lots of things like us or even better than us for billions of years.

01:51:01.000 Just like the Earth was moving around the Sun for 4.5 billion years before the Vatican even existed.

01:51:08.000 We can live under the illusion that we are the most important actor on the cosmic stage.

01:51:13.000 But we are probably not.

01:51:15.000 And we should approach it from a sense of modesty, that we are just minor actors.

01:51:22.000 Let's figure out what's going on here.

01:51:24.000 Let's find them.

01:51:25.000 And then have some relationship with those.

01:51:28.000 These are siblings of our family of intelligent civilizations.

01:51:32.000 I had a group of religious scholars that came to Harvard just last year.

01:51:38.000 And they asked me, if we find extraterrestrials, will it affect our religious beliefs?

01:51:45.000 And I said, look, I have two daughters.

01:51:49.000 And when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love that I have to the first one.

01:51:57.000 So thinking about God as a parent that can attend to only one child is very limiting.

01:52:05.000 There may be lots of siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations.

01:52:10.000 It should just bring all of them.

01:52:11.000 Let 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.

01:52:19.000 It's just a number game.

01:52:21.000 Okay, but that's not evidence.

01:52:23.000 Not evidence.

01:52:24.000 So what do you think is the most interesting and compelling evidence of there being extraterrestrial life?

01:52:31.000 So, you know, the reason I regard it as an important argument is the Copernican principle, which is saying we are not unique.

01:52:39.000 Under similar circumstances, if you start with a soup of chemicals on a planet, you will get something like us.

01:52:45.000 Right.

01:52:45.000 And therefore, there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs, other houses in our cosmic street.

01:52:50.000 They might have had, you know, many of them might have had residents like us.

01:52:54.000 Now, it's true.

01:52:55.000 Maybe, but there's the issue of Earth itself.

01:52:57.000 Earth itself has billions of organisms, only one that figured out how to make a cell phone.

01:53:03.000 Right.

01:53:04.000 And really recently.

01:53:05.000 Right.

01:53:06.000 You know, so it took a long time and a lot of weird things had to happen before it made us.

01:53:11.000 Right, but my point is, you know...

01:53:14.000 But the probability is that we wouldn't exist.

01:53:17.000 No, no, but.

01:53:18.000 Just more likely.

01:53:19.000 Just not existing.

01:53:21.000 If you read the news every day, you realize that there is a lot of room for improvement.

01:53:25.000 As much as we are proud of our intelligence, we're screwing up the world.

01:53:30.000 And my point is, I can imagine a lot of much more accomplished students in our class of intelligent civilizations.

01:53:38.000 Of course.

01:53:38.000 And therefore, we should have respect for the search for them because we can learn from them.

01:53:45.000 They would serve better role models for us.

01:53:47.000 So I'm coming at it from a practical point of view.

01:53:50.000 I'm saying we are screwing up things.

01:53:51.000 Just read the news.

01:53:54.000 And 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.

01:54:14.000 Of course.

01:54:15.000 Now, let me ask you this.

01:54:16.000 What would you do?

01:54:17.000 Like if somebody just wrote you a blank check and said, Avi, you've got some great ideas.

01:54:21.000 We need to figure out how to look for life out there in the universe.

01:54:24.000 What would you do?

01:54:26.000 Well, I wrote a paper about that and I said, yeah, we should attack this question along several fronts.

01:54:35.000 One of them, you know, we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky.

01:54:41.000 We 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.

01:54:48.000 We 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.

01:55:03.000 And in fact, the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter was almost capable of doing that.

01:55:08.000 So 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.

01:55:25.000 If Juno had all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with 3i Atlas.

01:55:32.000 But it used most of it.

01:55:35.000 And 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.

01:55:46.000 Please go ahead.

01:55:46.000 Yeah, 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.

01:56:00.000 I don't need to speak.

01:56:01.000 If 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.

01:56:11.000 So we need cameras that come close to the object, potentially even land on it, bring materials back to Earth.

01:56:20.000 And of course the ability to detect it, to detect such objects at large distances.

01:56:25.000 That investment is at a level of billions of dollars to do that in space.

01:56:32.000 My 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.

01:56:44.000 And 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.

01:56:59.000 It's called planetary defense.

01:57:01.000 And we are dealing not with rocks.

01:57:04.000 We are dealing with technological gadgets.

01:57:06.000 So it should be much more sophisticated.

01:57:09.000 So I'm saying, let's start with the level of billions of dollars just search.

01:57:15.000 If we encounter a clearly technological alien object, then the budget will rise by a factor of a thousand from the military budget portion going into it.

01:57:27.000 But in addition to that, of course, we should look for technological signatures in other ways.

01:57:32.000 And I wrote papers about it over the years.

01:57:34.000 I suggested searching for artificial lights.

01:57:37.000 You know, you look at a planet, it's illuminated by the star from one side.

01:57:42.000 So as it moves around the star, it's just like the moon, you know, you can see it, the illuminated side from different angles.

01:57:49.000 However, if it has, on the night side, if it has artificial light, lighting, then what you see, you don't even have to resolve the planet, you see more light than you expect based on reflection of starlight.

01:58:04.000 So that's another thing you can search for.

01:58:07.000 You can look for, you know, the traditional way was looking for radio signals, which is just like waiting for a phone call.

01:58:15.000 You know, nobody may call you when you're listening.

01:58:18.000 So that didn't prove productive.

01:58:20.000 Other than the wow signal.

01:58:21.000 Other than the wow signal.

01:58:24.000 Then 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.

01:58:40.000 That's what the astronomy community defined in the 2020, the Cadillac survey is the highest priority, and it's called the Habitable World Observatory.

01:58:48.000 And 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.

01:58:58.000 In the Earth atmosphere, we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made.

01:59:05.000 CFCs, for example.

01:59:07.000 And we can search for those.

01:59:09.000 Again, the mainstream is, you know, they might make a footnote saying, oh, that is also possible.

01:59:15.000 But I'm saying this could be a major research frontier where you search for industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres.

01:59:22.000 Frankly, I find microbes boring.

01:59:25.000 I mean, obviously it will be amazing to find that life exists elsewhere, but we can learn much more from an intelligent neighbor than we can learn from microbes.

01:59:35.000 What are the best images that we have of 3i Atlas?

01:59:39.000 The best one so far was released by the Hubble Space Telescope, and it shows this jet pointed towards the sun.

01:59:47.000 It was taken on July 21st, 2025.

01:59:51.000 That's the most clear image?

01:59:53.000 Yes, that's the best because...

01:59:55.000 Yeah, it's actually in my...

01:59:57.000 One of my...

01:59:59.000 No, that's from the ground, Germany South.

02:00:03.000 That's more recent.

02:00:04.000 That's at the end of August.

02:00:06.000 So it's blue in one of my slides you can see of 3i Atlas.

02:00:12.000 July 21st, yeah.

02:00:13.000 So it's one of the slides that has a blue with, yeah, you see it on the right here.

02:00:19.000 So that's it?

02:00:20.000 That's it.

02:00:21.000 And the scale of the resolution, you know, the innermost pixel is hundreds of kilometers.

02:00:28.000 Okay, it's about 100 kilometers per pixel or something.

02:00:33.000 The object itself should be 10 times smaller, so you can't really resolve it.

02:00:38.000 What you're seeing here is the glow of light around the object from scattering sunlight.

02:00:43.000 And the question is, what is producing that light?

02:00:46.000 You know, what is scattering sunlight?

02:00:48.000 And the unusual thing about it, as soon as this was released, the comet experts said, oh yeah, now it's proven it's a comet.

02:00:55.000 But I said, look, it's the sun, the sun facing emission that is elongated.

02:01:01.000 It's not the other side.

02:01:02.000 The extent of the glow backwards away from the sun is the same as sideways.

02:01:08.000 You don't see any cometary tail here.

02:01:12.000 And in fact, we're looking at it just like a cigar along the long axis.

02:01:15.000 So it should be 10 times longer than it is wide if you were to look at it from the side.

02:01:20.000 Amazingly, the best image was obtained on October 2nd, 2025, when 3i Atlas came within 30 million kilometers of Mars.

02:01:31.000 And it was taken by the high-rise camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is operated by NASA.

02:01:39.000 As you remember, October 1st was the government shutdown.

02:01:43.000 So October 2nd, the data was taken, but it was never released.

02:01:48.000 I wrote to the principal investigator of Hi-Rise, asked, can I get the data?

02:01:52.000 I'm a scientist.

02:01:54.000 You can do the press release afterwards.

02:01:56.000 I would like to see it.

02:01:57.000 No response.

02:01:59.000 And so it's already three weeks since that data was taken.

02:02:03.000 That is the best image yet to come.

02:02:06.000 And the advantage of it, not only it has 30 kilometers per pixel resolution, because it came very close to Mars, which is one of the anomalies.

02:02:14.000 Why does it come so close?

02:02:15.000 You know, this object is a gift from interstellar space because it comes in the plane of the planets around the Sun.

02:02:23.000 And it also, the arrival time was fine-tuned for it to come to the right place at the right time, to be close to Mars, to be close to Venus, and then close to Jupiter.

02:02:34.000 And not to Earth.

02:02:35.000 It's behind the Sun when the Earth, you know, when it comes closest to the Sun.

02:02:40.000 Anyway, so it's best for observations by all the space assets, by all the orbiters we have around Mars, around Jupiter, on the way to Jupiter.

02:02:49.000 So has someone seen this image from?

02:02:51.000 Yeah, the people on the HiRISE team must have seen it.

02:02:54.000 And what do they say?

02:02:55.000 And just, you know, I get a request for four to eight interviews every day from television, from podcasts and so forth.

02:03:03.000 So just before I came to you, a few minutes before that, I was asked, you know, could it be that this is a signature that NASA holds some really sensational data?

02:03:16.000 And I said, you know, it's much more likely not to be related to extraterrestrial intelligence, but to terrestrial stupidity.

02:03:27.000 Because this has to do with a government shutdown.

02:03:31.000 Makes no sense whatsoever for scientists, especially since the PI, the principal investigator, is from the University of Arizona.

02:03:31.000 Right.

02:03:39.000 They should have shared it with scientists.

02:03:41.000 They haven't done so.

02:03:42.000 And why?

02:03:43.000 Because my guess is they're taking their time.

02:03:45.000 The communication office of NASA is not working because of the shutdown.

02:03:50.000 But given that this subject is viral, this is the high-rise webpage.

02:03:56.000 Thank you, Jamie.

02:03:56.000 So it says any images of interstellar comet 3-1 Atlas are considered NASA-wide news because the federal government is in shutdown.

02:04:05.000 Communications of NASA news has been suspended.

02:04:08.000 So that's what it is?

02:04:09.000 Like they would have to release it through NASA?

02:04:12.000 Maybe they have written in the contract that they need approval from NASA, but for NASA not to approve it.

02:04:17.000 But NASA can't approve it because they're not working.

02:04:20.000 No, Sean Duffy, the interim administrator, can definitely say...

02:04:23.000 Can I get in there?

02:04:24.000 Why don't you call Sean?

02:04:25.000 Say, hey, what are you doing?

02:04:27.000 I should try that.

02:04:27.000 Yeah, why don't you do that?

02:04:29.000 OK, because, you know, this is important because this would be the best.

02:04:33.000 This is the best image.

02:04:34.000 Yeah, 30 kilometers per pixel.

02:04:36.000 But 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.

02:04:45.000 Got it.

02:04:46.000 And it looked at it sideways.

02:04:47.000 So we can actually see what exactly it was doing on October 2nd.

02:04:52.000 And the claim is during September, the month of September, what looked like an anti-tail, a jet towards the sun, changed into a tail during September.

02:05:02.000 So we should see October 2nd.

02:05:04.000 What does it look like?

02:05:05.000 And by the way, it's not like a beautiful – it was not a beautiful tale the way you see around comets.

02:05:10.000 Never, ever.

02:05:12.000 You know, and I want – And that's because of the composition of it?

02:05:16.000 I don't know.

02:05:17.000 Right, because if it was covered with water, if it was just ice, you would see this enormous tail, correct?

02:05:23.000 And dust.

02:05:24.000 Dust, yeah.

02:05:25.000 So what the Webb telescope told us, you know, from the data, I took a spectrum of the gas around it, found that it's 150 kilograms per second that this object is losing in the side facing the sun.

02:05:39.000 And out of that, 87% is carbon dioxide, CO2, CO2.

02:05:46.000 And 9% is CO, carbon monoxide, which is really dangerous to humans.

02:05:54.000 And then 4% is water.

02:05:57.000 4% by mass is water.

02:05:59.000 Very small fraction.

02:06:00.000 When the object was discovered, the experts said, oh, it's most likely made of water.

02:06:06.000 That's what they said, made of water.

02:06:08.000 And then several teams reported, we found water.

02:06:12.000 I looked at their papers.

02:06:14.000 One of them had very large error bars.

02:06:18.000 You know, the data was not of good quality.

02:06:20.000 There was a lot of noise.

02:06:20.000 And I said, that's not a clear detection.

02:06:23.000 Another one was making some assumption about how much dust there is that blocks ultraviolet light.

02:06:29.000 And based on that, they got a result that there is a lot of water.

02:06:33.000 And then the Webb telescope actually measured the composition and found just 4% by mass water.

02:06:38.000 So 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.

02:06:46.000 But then Webb demonstrated that it's only 4% by mass.

02:06:49.000 Okay, so that proved my point, even though I was not a member of those teams.

02:06:56.000 So it's 4% by mass water.

02:06:57.000 And then the question is, is there any dust?

02:06:59.000 If 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.

02:07:12.000 If that was the case, you would see them being pushed, those particles being pushed by radiation pressure from the sun to trail the object from behind it away from the sun.

02:07:22.000 Because they're being slowed down.

02:07:22.000 Why?

02:07:24.000 The object is approaching at some speed.

02:07:27.000 They are slowed down, so then you end up with a tail going away from the sun.

02:07:33.000 And that's what you see in comets.

02:07:34.000 There was no evidence for that during July and August.

02:07:36.000 Now, in September, it seemed to have reversed from being an anti-tail to a tail.

02:07:41.000 I want to see the image from...

02:07:43.000 But still, a tail that's very small compared to other comets that we've observed.

02:07:47.000 Yes.

02:07:47.000 Now, how many comets have we actually observed?

02:07:49.000 Is it just that there's so many out there that a lot of them have very unusual characteristics, like three-eye atlas?

02:07:56.000 Well, just think about an animal that visits your backyard, okay?

02:08:01.000 And of course, your family members would say it's most likely a street cat, because these are very common.

02:08:08.000 Then you take an image of that animal and you see that there is a tail, but it's coming from its forehead.

02:08:16.000 And then you realize from the image that it's at least a thousand times more massive than a cat, a street cat.

02:08:22.000 And then you realize that it sheds nickel.

02:08:26.000 And then you realize that it visits.

02:08:28.000 Listen, I understand that it's unusual, but my question is: how many of them have been observed to form this hypothesis that it's unusual?

02:08:37.000 We're talking about hundreds of objects, hundreds.

02:08:40.000 At least hundreds.

02:08:41.000 But how many of them have come from interstellar?

02:08:44.000 How many of them?

02:08:45.000 No, this is the second one.

02:08:47.000 There was Borisov.

02:08:47.000 Right.

02:08:48.000 Right.

02:08:49.000 Borisov was the one discovered in 2019, looked like a comet.

02:08:52.000 Right.

02:08:53.000 Very similar to the point.

02:08:55.000 Why is it that there's so few that have come from that are interstellar?

02:09:00.000 So that's why I'm saying it could be natural.

02:09:02.000 We're a lot to measure.

02:09:03.000 Right.

02:09:04.000 So it could be natural.

02:09:05.000 Right.

02:09:06.000 And in fact, that may be the most likely association.

02:09:12.000 But we need to figure out why it's so unusual.

02:09:17.000 What is the shape of it?

02:09:18.000 We don't know because we don't have an image of the object itself.

02:09:21.000 Do you think they would be able to get it if they had this Mars footage?

02:09:25.000 He would get an image of that image.

02:09:27.000 It depends how big the object is.

02:09:29.000 One way to get the object structure is as it spins around.

02:09:35.000 And 3A Atlas does have a rotation period of 16 hours.

02:09:39.000 And as it spins around, if it's like a cigar shaped, let's say, then the area that reflects the sunlight changes over time.

02:09:47.000 So you see variability.

02:09:48.000 And we haven't seen that much.

02:09:50.000 There is very little variability.

02:09:52.000 So the object is not very different than a sphere with slight variations as you see the rotation of the object.

02:10:06.000 So it's similarly shaped to something that you would expect to be from an intelligent life force.

02:10:13.000 I don't know that.

02:10:14.000 I want to figure out what it is and get as much data as possible on it.

02:10:18.000 Right, but if you imagine a spaceship, you would imagine something that has some sort of geometric structure to it, right?

02:10:25.000 Well, Rendezvous with Rama is a book that was written by Arthur C. Clarke.

02:10:30.000 And 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.

02:10:45.000 Arthur C. Clarke was an amazing visionary science fiction writer.

02:10:49.000 And 2001, Space Odyssey is an amazing film that he made with Stanley Kubrick.

02:10:55.000 In it, you see these monoliths.

02:10:58.000 And by the way, there is a question of how to interpret them.

02:11:01.000 The way I think about the monolith, and by the way, this is just a remark on art.

02:11:05.000 It's not about the real universe.

02:11:07.000 But I think of it as sensors put in the baby room, in the room of a baby.

02:11:16.000 And we, as a civilization, is like a baby.

02:11:19.000 We're just a few million years old.

02:11:20.000 And actually, in the film, it shows the progression of human history.

02:11:25.000 And so as a baby, these aliens were putting monitors in the room to see what we are up to.

02:11:34.000 And that's something that makes sense.

02:11:37.000 There is this dark forest hypothesis.

02:11:39.000 One solution to Enrico.

02:11:41.000 So Enrico Fermi, back in 1950, had lunch together with Edward Teller and other people associated with the Manhattan Project.

02:11:50.000 He was a very good physicist, both an experimentalist and a theorist.

02:11:54.000 And Enrico Fermi was talking with them about extraterrestrials.

02:11:58.000 And they all agreed that it's likely that they exist.

02:12:01.000 It's good physicists.

02:12:02.000 That makes a lot of sense.

02:12:04.000 And then Enrico said, but where is everybody?

02:12:08.000 You know, in an Italian accent, where is everybody?

02:12:12.000 And if I were next to him, I would come to him and say, Enrico, I would put my hand around his shoulder.

02:12:18.000 I would say, Enrico, this is a question that every lonely person asks.

02:12:26.000 And what you tell a lonely person is, don't be so presumptuous.

02:12:30.000 You are not that attractive.

02:12:32.000 They will not come to you and have breakfast with you or lunch with you in Los Alamos when you want them to appear.

02:12:38.000 You need to seek them.

02:12:41.000 That's what you tell lonely people.

02:12:42.000 You need to go to dating sites.

02:12:44.000 You need to look through the window of your home and search for them.

02:12:48.000 And he didn't build a telescope.

02:12:50.000 An experimentalist asking this question should have built a telescope and searched for unidentified objects in the sky.

02:12:57.000 That's the way to figure out the answer.

02:13:00.000 Where is everybody?

02:13:01.000 It's the most romantic question in science.

02:13:04.000 But, you know, and we have those blind dates.

02:13:08.000 Maybe it's just with rocks.

02:13:10.000 Maybe not.

02:13:12.000 And we should just be open-minded when we address those blind dates.

02:13:18.000 I think we can end it with that.

02:13:19.000 That's a very perfect way of phrasing this whole thing.

02:13:22.000 I'm fascinated by it all, and I'm really happy there's someone like you that's looking into this with such curiosity and that you're undeterred by all these haters.

02:13:32.000 Well, thank you.

02:13:33.000 And I should just mention that, you know, there are all kinds of technologies that I can imagine that we don't even have.

02:13:41.000 And 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.

02:13:57.000 In fact, I'm working on a paper now with a group of collaborators, applied physics, on this.

02:14:04.000 And you could also potentially imagine time machines with negative masses.

02:14:08.000 So there are lots of things we don't know.

02:14:11.000 Let's be modest.

02:14:13.000 There are unlimited possibilities, especially if we developed artificial general superintelligence and it helps us.

02:14:20.000 And it starts devising new methods of propulsion, new methods of, who knows, seeding the universe with other life.

02:14:27.000 Yeah, and just like in our private life, finding a partner can change your future for the better.

02:14:34.000 Finding an alien partner.

02:14:35.000 Yes.

02:14:36.000 All right.

02:14:37.000 Thanks for having me.

02:14:37.000 Thank you, Abdi.

02:14:39.000 Thank you very much.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 28, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript