American Thought Leaders - The Harvard Astrophysicist Searching for Extraterrestrial Life | Avi Loeb

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is not your typical astronomer. For many years, he’s been scouring the universe for the abnormal and the unknown. “Brushing anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking,” as he puts it, is anathema for him.“One way to learn more,” he told me, “is to pay attention to the anomalies, because they may lead us to something that we’ve never thought about … Maybe they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions … or new physics.”In 2021, Loeb founded the Harvard-based Galileo Project to speed up the scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial objects. Since then, Loeb has been supervising the construction of three state-of-the-art observatories in the United States: one in Massachusetts, one in Pennsylvania and one in Nevada. They make use of machine learning models to identify unexplained anomalies and use triangulation to infer the distance of objects from Earth.“Instead of waiting for the U.S. government to release its data, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.Did his observatories find evidence of objects that might be extraterrestrial? Perhaps. They detected objects that, as he said, “arrive in our backyard from outside the solar system.” Such interstellar objects were purely theoretical before 2017, when the first one was discovered. Since then, two more have been found. This, he told me, is the new frontier in astronomy.But are these interstellar objects of natural origin? Many astronomers believe they are, but Loeb is not so sure. Take, for example, Oumuamua, the first recognized interstellar object ever discovered: Its core features are undisputedly abnormal. Oumuamua moved very quickly without a recognizable method of propulsion. And as it left the solar system, it accelerated to a degree that could not be explained by gravity alone.Loeb has been arguing that Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail propelled by solar radiation pressure and built by ancient civilizations that exist or existed beyond our solar system.“Most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. The sun formed only 4.6 billion years ago … There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive in the solar system. And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects very different from traditional SETI,” he said.SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and refers to a project dedicated to detecting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.Here are some of the many other topics we discussed in our wide-ranging interview:-What is the origin of hypervelocity stars that race through the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light? -Are there other dimensions beyond our own? -How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religious views? -Is AI a form of alien intelligence?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

One way for us to learn more is, of course, pay attention to the anomalies, because they may lead us to something that we've never thought about. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is not your typical astronomer. He's the head of the Harvard Research Program known as the Galileo Project that's looking for extraterrestrial technologies. Instead of waiting for the US government to release its data, we just look up and ask are there any objects up there that are not human-made? What can we discover from interstellar objects like the Omuamua?

The object exhibited an excess push away from the sun without shedding any gas or dust. So at this moment, what do we actually know about extraterrestrial life? Imagining God as an entity that can attend only to one child is very limiting. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yanya Kellek. Professor Avi Loeb, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought leaders. Thanks for having me. Professor Loeb, is there intelligent life out there? I very much hope so, because one reason I'm searching for a higher intelligence, I don't often find it here on Earth. And frankly, given that there are 100 billion stars like the Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy alone,

and we now know that about 10% of them have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the the same separation. And moreover, science argues that, you know, life started on Earth from a soup of chemicals. If you arrange for similar circumstances on a billion Earth's sun analogs in the Milky Way galaxy, very likely there was a more accomplished space entrepreneur than Elon Musk since the Big Bank, 13.8 billion years ago. And all we need to do is check whether there are any objects arriving to backyard that were launched by a neighbor. Professor Loeb, there are, you know, all sorts of types of messaging that are coming out from our government. We have Representative Anna Polina Luna basically agitating to get disclosures. We've had hearings. We've had, you know, both President Trump and President

Obama talk about extraterrestrial life in this cagey way. I believe President Obama even said he believes that it exists. So why this caginess, you make it sound like we don't really know? Well, we don't know because we don't have conclusive evidence that was presented to us. And there are two ways at getting to this evidence. You know, it's either in the hands of government

because the U.S. government was monitoring the sky and the oceans for many decades. And in the process of doing that, you know, the defense budget is huge. it's close to a trillion dollars for 2026. The process of collecting a lot of data, they may have noticed unusual phenomena that are quite rare. And so that's one way for us to get at the truth

about the physical reality, about our neighborhood. The second is, of course, to do the scientific work needed, invest the funds and research effort in trying to find evidence for extraterrestrials. And, you know, in 1950, the physicist and research, Rico Fermi was having lunch at Los Alamos. He was part of the Manhattan Project and stayed there later. And they were discussing extraterrestrious back then. That's 76 years ago.

And he was commenting, well, they are likely to exist, but where is everybody? And if I were next to him, I would put my arm around his shoulder and say, Enrico, that is a question that every lonely person asks. And what you tell a lonely person is don't be so presumptuous. You're not that attractive. Your partner will not come to you. You should be proactive and search for the partner. And Enrico didn't really build a telescope.

He didn't look for the evidence. You know, space and time are vast in astronomical terms. We are talking about the size of the Milky Way's tens of thousands of light years. And the age of the Milky Way is roughly 10 billion years. So you can't just ask sitting at lunch, why aren't they next to me? You have to search for them. And we haven't done that extensively.

Right now, the astronomy community decided as its highest priority to search for microbes. And they're willing to pay of the order of $10 billion or more in the next two decades in order to build a space observatory that would give us a hint about the chemical fingerprints of microbes on other planets. My point is when you go on a date,

you better aim high, not low. And therefore, I would be much happier if instead of meeting a microbe as my dating partner, I would meet a more intelligent being because then there is a chance of learning from that being and becoming better. And so I say, let's say, invest similar level of funding in the search for technological civilizations, because we can

potentially benefit much more. It will change the future of humanity. And we have the tools for that. And even though microbes might be much more abundant in the universe, it might be easier to identify a technological gadget, because you would see that, you know, it has buttons on it. It's not a rock. And so it will be very clear to us that not only life exists, but intelligent life exists. And, you know, we are all familiar with the Copernican revolution, which indicated that we are not at the center of the universe. And it might well be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. There is someone smarter than us, a sibling in our family that is more accomplished.

And that would actually bring us to a better place. So you don't believe that we've been visited? Oh, I don't know. We may have well been visited. In fact, we don't know the history of Earth. The documented human history is only 8,000 years old. And the question is, what introduced life here on Earth? Maybe it was an interstellar gardener. We just don't know that. And as far as we can do is to basically monitor the sky and check if there are any visitors to are back here. That's the minimum we can do. We've been searching for 65 years for radio signals, but that's just like waiting for a phone call. In fact, we do not use radio communication as much as we did a century ago. So I think checking for objects is a new frontier

that is enabled by the next generation of sensors that we are starting to employ right now. And this offers us a great opportunity to discover things that we've never known. things that we've never known about before. And what about President Trump's commitment, recent commitment to offer some disclosure? Like what do you think the government has been hiding, right? Obviously there's classified information that isn't available to us. Maybe I don't know if some of it is available to you or not.

Obviously you're not going to tell me that. But you know, why is this being kept under wraps? It's an interesting question. And the fact that serious people talk about this means that it's not a hallucination. It's not something that should be dismissed because apparently the US intelligence agencies, as well as the Pentagon, have evidence for objects that do not behave like human-made technologies. And as far as I can tell, I mean, I haven't seen that evidence. It may represent data from satellites that was never disclosed publicly

or materials that were collected in crash sites. But at any event, it implies that it's an embarrassment to the intelligence agencies because they get paid to figure out what flies in our sky. And if they're not able to do that, they might prefer to hide it from congressional scrutiny, for example. Also, if it's clearly not related to... to human-made technologies. They might brush it aside and say,

well, that's potentially an interesting scientific matter, what lies beyond the solar system, but that's not our jurisdiction. We are supposed to focus on national security. The government is not a scientific organization that should figure out what lies beyond the solar system. This is the day job of astrophysicists like myself, and I would love to help government figure it out

if they have evidence of this nature. So far, the only videos and imagery that were released, they were relatively low quality that is not conclusive. You cannot tell the distance of the objects that you're seeing. You cannot tell how fast they're moving, how much are they accelerating, whether they behave beyond human-made technologies. And so that's why I decided to establish or lead the Galileo project

where we built our own observatory. So instead of waiting for the government, the US government to release its data, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring, as far as I'm concerned. Of course, it's the main focus of the Pentagon,

but for me as a scientist, interested in what lies beyond the solar system, I really am eager to see if there's anything else. And then these observatories, by now we have three of them, one in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, and a third one in Nevada. Even if we don't find anything, I mean, we're looking at millions of objects every year, analyzing the data with machine learning software and trying to figure out if there are any outliers. Even if we don't find anything, I would feel that I did something important because I'm happy to provide the technology of the sensor. that we use, the architecture of the observatories, as well as the software that we develop to the Pentagon

so that they can use the same to identify objects in the sky for the benefit of national security. So this effort will not be wasted, and I believe that this subject belongs to the mainstream of science. Rather than ignore unidentified anomalous phenomena, we should focus on these anomalies because discovering something beyond this earth,

beyond this earth technological would be the biggest discovery ever made in science. It's beyond human imagination. If you made a horror movie about it, people go, I don't know, I don't believe that. That's too crazy. This book, 20 years in the making, I feel like this moment is where all the roads have been leading to. I think it's one of the great evils ever. The Nazi doctors paled. When I first heard about it, I didn't want to believe it. It's about the Chinese Communist Party's forced organ harvesting industry, basically a murder for organs industry. Have there been survivors? Can you tell us about the survivors? This crime against humanity is real, and we can end it. We can actually at least end

America's complicity in it. So please join me, spread the word, and together I really think we can make a difference. See you, March 16th. That's right. You can do it. We'll see you there. So I had a conversation impromptu with a pretty prominent but low-key person. He told me that he had been flying basically these kinds of listening missions in the 50s, okay, for the U.S. Air Force. And that he himself encountered doing this at one point something that was basically moving around his plane in a way that was impossible by their own calculation. He saw it, right, sort of around his plane. What have you heard and what do you believe about the

credibility of claims that you've heard? Yeah. So there were military personnel, including pilots, who testified in Congress, and I truly believe them. But the issue with eyewitness testimonies, and there are testimonies only also from the FBI. about events that cannot be easily explained away. These are people with integrity that you trust. And clearly they have seen something unusual. But indifference from the legal system where eyewitness testimonies can put someone in jail.

In science, you cannot rely on what people tell you. We all know about prisoners that were put on death. throw and then we're exonerated as a result of DNA testing. And, you know, humans are often misled and they might tell you a story that is not factually correct. And so we need to verify whether things like that exist by getting scientific quality data. And perhaps the US government already has that.

And then I would love to be part of a board that reviews those, you know, pieces of evidence, as long as they are quantified and documented. And then to recommend to the US President as to what to do about it or what to release to the public, there could be two phases to this analysis, one in which credible people, scientists, look into the data and recommend what it means, also what to do next in terms of analysis. analyzing it, collecting more data. And the second is what to release publicly, because any such information obviously will cause some unrest.

And in the financial markets, in the public at large, we don't want to cry wolf too often. And so, for example, there is a new frontier right now in astronomy, which is the detection of objects that arrive to our backyard from outside the solar system. The first one was announced in 2017, less than a decade ago. And since then we found two more with telescopes. There will be many more, dozens more in the coming decade from the Rubin Observatory, funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation in Chile.

And so the fundamental question is how can we decide whether any of them is technological in origin? and of course that relies on data. So I suggested a classification scale back in July when 3i Atlas, the latest interstellar object, was discovered, I said that we should classify those on a scale between 0 and 10, where zero is a definitely natural object, an asteroid or a comet, and 10 means alien technology that is a potential threat to humanity.

And even if the rank is low, we should consider a black swan event because we are all familiar with September 11th, October 7th. These are events that the intelligence agencies classified incorrectly, and they ended up having a huge impact on society, even though the intelligence agencies thought that they have a low probability of materializing. And so I recommend that we basically rank each and every interstellar object and decide whether it's a potential threat to humanity because we never know if our dating partner is friendly or hostile.

It could be a serial killer. And so that would give it a new meaning to defending Earth. As of now, we only thought about rocks that could be a risk to metropolitan areas if the rock is bigger than a football field. It could destroy a huge region, city, like region on Earth. And so we are trying to identify all the rocks that may impact the Earth,

but we haven't thought about defending Earth against alien technology because we haven't collected enough evidence at least beyond government on such objects. And so we should be, of course, aware of that. But with respect to the data the government already has, I will be delighted to look into that, And I think the decision by President Trump represents an important step forward in that context. So you don't think there's the men in black agency?

No, I think that probably the government does not know what it means. And they may have, if they have materials, they may have provided the materials to corporations. because I had a visitor to my home that used to be a senior executive at Lockheed Martin. And he noted that the idea that Lockheed Martin received materials from crash sites that may be extraterrestrial technological material is not necessarily wrong. And then I asked another former employee of Lockett Martin. He denied any such connection. So it may well be compartmentalized within those corporations.

And maybe even some of the information is not delivered to the president of the United States. I just don't know how far it goes. And there is, of course, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon that was tasked to identify and figure out past reports. And they told me when I visited them less than a year ago, they told me that they looked into all the reports and did not find, anything credible to indicate extraterrestrial technological origin, except for a few FBI reports. These are things that, in fact, Representative Anna Paulina Luna is aiming to look into thanks to

the decision by President Trump. And I'm in close contact with Representative Luna. I think she's doing excellent work, and I very much hope to assist her with my scientific knowledge if she gets access to such information. Okay, so I'm kind of imagining these kind of buckets of evidence, right? You said we have, of course, we have radio listening stations. There's not much going on there. We have, you know, these sort of people seeing these unusual phenomena. In some case, you know, they really believe they're real.

They're testifying to it under oath. It's unclear what that is. It's unclear if there has been some designation. that might be something that's disclosed. We have these extra terrestrial, pardon, extra solar objects, you know, extra solar system objects that are coming through.

Actually, one that I wanted to ask you about because you've commented on is, Omuamua, we'll get to that in just a moment. We have these sort of casual testimonies of people coming in and from Lockheed Martin and saying, hey, wait a sec. I know something that no one else knows and we don't really know what to make of them.

What other buckets of evidence are there that you're aware of? I think the most important bucket is the scientific one, where we could potentially figure out whether we have a neighbor without the assistance of the US government, just by looking up. And this path of research was opened up over the past decade with the discovery of interstellar objects. There was even before Omuamua, the first recognized interstellar object, there was actually a meteor that was identified by U.S. government satellites back in 2014

that landed in the Pacific Ocean, created a fireball that released about 1% of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. It was a half a meter-sized object, and it was moving very fast, so fast that it couldn't be bound. by gravity to the solar system. We inferred that with my student. And so I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to search for the materials of this interstellar meteor. And the US Space Command, after I reached out through the White House to them,

they provided confirmation that based on the data, indeed, this object came from outside the solar system. It had material strength that was tougher than all the meteors catalogued by, NASA. And so we went there and there will be a Netflix documentary coming out in 2026, hopefully showing the expedition that I led. We found some material with compositions different from solar system abundances of elements. But as to whether it's technological, like Voyager, or maybe just a rock, we cannot yet conclusively tell.

we would need to bring up bigger pieces. We found only tiny molten droplets from there. So that was an interesting approach. And in principle, the US government perhaps visited the crash sites and collected materials that indicate something extra solar, as you say. There is a very simple way of telling the abundances of isotopes can be checked in a very straightforward manner. That's what we did with the materials from the Pacific Ocean.

So if the US government has some materials, I can immediately tell them whether these materials came from outside the solar system. And then the question is what kind of technologies are being represented there? And that would be fascinating. You know, it will change our view about our place in the universe. Currently, we think about the cosmos as a cold and lonely place. You know, the textbooks, some of which I wrote, refer to the universe as being made of matter and radiation. something that doesn't really appeal to the human spirit. And on the other hand, if we realize that we have siblings out there,

we will get an emotional connection. If they visit our backyard, we should visit their backyard. So we will become much more ambitious. We might want to defend Earth against any risk coming from alien technology. And so I see that as a transformation that humanity will go through. I had a visit by a group of theologians that were led by the current president of the Templeton Foundation, Tim Darmilpil. They came to Harvard and asked me,

what would be the implication if we find the extraterrestrials to be out there? And I said, it will not have a huge impact on your religious beliefs. because, you know, when I had two daughters, and when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love that I have to the first one. And so, imagining God there's an entity that can attend only to one child is very limiting. And they were very happy with this answer. Do we know now more than we did even, you know, I'm thinking about the 50s, which is when, you know, there's these topics seem to have started coming up. And then there's, you know, there's even, you know, these Roswell sites and so forth of

crash sites. You're kind of telling me there's really no evidence from those places, right? No, no, it may well be that the evidence is within government. And one thing to keep in mind, whatever technologies were used by humans in 1950 are not being used anymore. They are completely irrelevant today. And so there is nothing, I mean, there is no reason to hide evidence, material or imagery from the Roswell case out of national security concerns. If there is anything unusual from 50 years ago, let's look into it because it cannot risk national security today.

And I also say that if we do identify things that behave in strange ways, It makes no sense to hide the evidence because it would be similar to finding a tennis ball in your backyard and then you go and have dinner with your family members and you hide this information from them. That makes little sense because if the tennis ball was thrown by a neighbor, that neighbor may show up at the front door or affect the life of your family members in many different ways. And I think we should all be aware of our cosmic neighborhood. When the Vatican tried to hide the information from the public about what Galileo Galilei found with his telescope, you know, they could hide it for a while. But eventually in 1992, they had to come out and say that Galileo was right

and the earth moves around the sun. It was meaningless for them to continue arguing otherwise because we had the, you know, we reached the moon two decades earlier. And so it was not good for public relations. My point is in the long term, you want to reveal information about our cosmic neighborhood to all humans, because we are all in the same boat.

And in fact, it would bring, in my view, it will bring a sense of cooperation. Because if we realize that we have a neighbor, suppose your neighbor comes and knocks on the door, then obviously it makes little sense to have a loud argument within the family. I mean, often things quite down when someone knocks on the door at home. And so that may actually calm down some of the conflicts we have in geopolitics if we all realize that there is someone else out there.

You know, one thing it just occurred to me. What about the concept of extra-dimensional life, right? Is this something that you've looked into? Yeah, so this is actually a very popular theme within the context of theoretical physics over the past 50 years. Because one of the big puzzles in physics is how to unify two pillars. One is quantum mechanics, which is the foundation for all the electronic gadgets that we're using and the computers and the AI and everything. And the second is general relativity, which is Einstein.

theory of gravity that explains gravity as the curvature of space and time. And we just don't have a theory that puts together, marries, quantum mechanics with gravity. And you might say, well, where is it needed? Why do we need them to be parts of a unified theory? And the answer is, well, when space and time are being curved very much, then quantum effects start playing a role. And that was true at the Big Bang, when the universe started, the density of matter and radiation were huge. They diverged because the universe is expanding. So just go back in time.

There was a time when everything was extremely dense. And as a result, one needs quantum mechanics to describe how gravity behaves at those early times. The same is true at the center of a black hole, which is basically a point that collects matter and has extreme gravity near it. And these singularities at the center of a black hole or at the Big Bang cannot be attended to without a unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. And also I would say, you know,

if we were to figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, we might realize new propulsion methods. And, you know, there are various ideas along these lines. We might not need rockets. We might, for example, distort space and time in ways that allow us to propel a spacecraft much more effectively with very little fuel. And so it's possible that other technological civilizations could have mastered that because they have a theory of quantum gravity.

They know how they have quantum gravity engineers. Whether we have extra dimensions or not, we don't know, but the string theory, which is the leading theory for unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, postulates the existence of extra dimensions. And also, you know, you could imagine some other means of curving space and time that does not even refer to the extra dimensions that relate to quantum gravity. So altogether, I would say our scientific knowledge we know is limited, you know, and we don't know what most of the matter in the universities.

We call it dark matter. We don't know what happened in the Big Bang because we don't have a quantum gravity theory. And so we are pretty ignorant despite, you know, of 100 years of modern science and technology. We still don't know some fundamentals. And of course, another civilization may have discovered the solution to these puzzles. And we could figure it out once we realize that they are here. We could learn from them. You might ask, how would we detect them?

Maybe they avoid our sensors because they have, they operate. in a completely different plane of technologies. But the way I approach it is just like approaching a blind date. You should not have a prejudice. You should be completely agnostic and observe the other side and look for something unusual, something that is not similar to the natural, terrestrial objects that we have seen before. When I talk about the idea of this extra-dimensional life, right, for someone that isn't familiar with theory of relativity and quantum mechanics,

how do you conceive of that even? Yeah, so just think about living on the surface of a balloon, okay, and that is two-dimensional. And you might not be aware that there is a third dimension because you are just living on the surface of that balloon. So if there is another being that is capable of taking advantage of the things, of the third dimension, then that being will, you know, cross the distance between two points on the surface of the balloon faster than you can imagine because, you know, the travel between

the two points can go through the third dimension, that connects the two points, not necessarily on the curved surface of the balloon. So there are, in principle, possibilities of navigating in more than the dimensions that we are familiar with. We are familiar with three spatial dimensions plus time. And if there are more than three, and there is a technological way of taking advantage of those, we might not realize that. Objects will appear and disappear in ways that we cannot understand.

In the three dimensions that we are familiar with, Einstein's theory of relativity states that no material object can move faster than light. However, if there are extra dimensions, you might actually travel faster than light in the three dimensions, even though you're traveling less than the speed of light in the extra dimensions. So there are lots of possibilities. And by the way, the way I think about physics is a way of setting constraints on our imagination.

Because our imagination can think of lots of possibilities in order to figure out which one is correct. We need to collect data. And you might say, oh, that's the scientific method. But many of my colleagues in academia, they are very conservative. They are not willing to consider new physics easily. And so they brush anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking. And one way for us to learn more is, of course, pay attention to the anomalies, because they may lead us to something that we've never thought about. You know, there is this, I mean, most of the funding in science is allocated to known unknowns. These are things that we know that we don't know.

But there are, based on what Rumsfeld said, there are unknown unknowns, which are even more important because these are things that we don't even recognize that we don't know. And the only way to find them is, you know, not to follow the beaten path and explore anomalies, things that we don't fully understand. Maybe they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions, as you say, or new physics. This is absolutely fascinating this part of the discussion because, you know, there's a particular way of thinking, right? For some people and scientists, I know, you know, some years back I myself sort of dabbled for about, 10 years in the biological sciences field. And some people will basically say if something is an

outlier, they actually remove that from the data set. Right. And they say, no, this is this is reality. But then there's other people, which is more like myself, who are particularly interested in those outliers and why they're that way. And I guess you kind of need both types of scientists. But, but I guess most of them tend to be the kind that remove the outliers and say, you know, that doesn't exist. That's, that's just. maybe even not real, whereas it could be a profound import, right? Yeah, so that suppresses innovation in science, and I'm very much against that.

I'm in favor of openly discussing anomalies because it's our path to new discoveries. And, you know, it's the approach of a kid that is facing the world. As a kid, as children, we were approaching the learning experience with an open mind because we didn't really know what the world is. The problem is as people become adults, they pretend to be the adult in the room, to guess in advance what something is

and to brush away all anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking because they sort of associate their status with knowing in advance what will happen. And that's true of experts. And what I say is the foundation of science is the humility to learn. It's not the arrogance of expertise. Just to give you an example,

experts that were trained on data sets that include only asteroids and comets, they would argue that any object in the sky must be a rock or an iceberg. And I tell them, look, you should expand your training data set.

Just like with AI systems, you know, they get better if you give them more data. We know that we know that we have space objects that we launched, that are technological in origin. And if you were to include them, you might imagine something else, not just rocks in the sky. And they refuse to do that. And, you know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you argue everything in the sky is rocks, everything in the sky will be rocks in your eyes. So, for example, on January 2nd, 2025, just a year ago, there was a near-earth object identified by the minor planet center. And

said it's a near-earth asteroid until a day later they realized that it follows the path of the Tesla roads the car that was launched in 2018 by SpaceX and then they said sorry we take it out of the asteroid catalog because it's a car it's not a rock and the only reason they knew that is because we launched this I mean humanity launched this car if there was an interstellar car they would definitely insist that it's a rock of a type that they've never seen before and by the way this is exactly the response of a cave dweller to finding a cell phone. Suppose you presented a cell phone to a cave dweller that is used to dealing with rocks. And that cave dweller would say this is a rock of a type that I've never seen before.

No, and this is, you know, this is, I think this is a bit of Yelan Musk's sense of humor with this, with this car kind of, you know, floating through space. But, no, listen, this is actually a good opportunity to talk a little bit about your background. okay, because this isn't all you think about. In fact, you know, one of the things I find incredibly fascinating is these, you know, hypervelocity stars that you've been studying. So, but, but just maybe tell me a little bit about hypervelocity stars, because that's not something most of us have ever heard of, okay?

And don't even kind of conceive, right? Because our stars are supposed to be stationary, right? Kind of in our minds, just like our sun. But also, and just tell me a little bit about your background, because this, as much as you are very into this, issue you have a much broader area of expertise yeah so hypervelocity stars are stars that are escaping from the Milky Way galaxy and the popular mechanism for kicking them out of the Milky Way galaxy is if they arrive close to the central black hole there is a big black hole

four million times the mass of the sun at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and if a pair of stars comes close to that black hole it will be torn up part, one of the stars will get more tightly bound to the black hole and the second star will be ejected at a high speed. And it could happen in the center of our galaxy or any other galaxy that has a black hole at its center. Now, I actually came up, I wrote several papers suggesting that stars can be kicked at the speed that goes all the way up to the speed of light. And in fact, But when two galaxies like the Milky Way and its nearest neighbor, the sister galaxy called Andromeda, when they will collide in a few billion years, the two black holes at the centers of those

galaxies will come together and spiral in. And as they get to a tight orbit, they can eject stars close to the speed of light. And I show that there is a sea, an ocean of stars moving close to the speed of light through the universe, I would have loved to be inhabiting or living on the surface of a planet that is orbiting such a star because the journey, I mean, you start from the galaxy where that star was born in and then you fly through the entire universe close to the speed of light. That's an amazing journey. And, you know, travel agencies could make a fortune by selling tickets to such journeys. But a little bit about my background.

I was born on a farm, that's why I always think down to earth, so to speak. I used to collect eggs every afternoon. I would every weekend drive a tractor to the hills of the village and read philosophy books. I was very interesting in philosophy. And then I was recruited. I was born in Israel,

and military service is obligatory, but I had the fortune of being selected to a program that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24. And during that time, President Reagan came up with a Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, and General Abramson, who was in charge of it, came to visit Israel, and I presented a project to him,

and this project was selected as the first, international project and we received funding from Washington and I visited the DC quite often. We got a few million dollars a year at the time for that project and that's what brought me to visit the US. And in one of my visits, I went to Princeton where they offered me a five-year fellowship under the condition that I'll switch to astrophysics. So I ended up eventually with a tenured appointment at Harvard. Three years after I arrived, at Harvard, they offered me tenure. And then I realized that it was an arranged marriage, you know,

but actually I'm married to my true love because I can ask fundamental questions about the universe, such as, are we alone, you know, what was there at the beginning, and answer them with using the scientific method. But that makes me very different from my colleagues. You know, I'm interested in the big questions. And I'm not... divorcing my interest from the public. I feel that I'm a member of the public. I would go back

to the farm anytime as plan B. I love nature. I jog every morning at sunrise in the company of birds, ducks, wild turkeys and bunnies. So altogether, I feel a connection to nature more than to people. I didn't have any social media footprint until a month ago when AI was used to generate fake videos of me speak in my voice and my image. At that point, I decided to create my own content on social media. So now I have it. So I, you know, you were saying some crazy things in those AI videos. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's a real problem for the future because we will be flooded with misinformation and the question is how to judge and of course the solution is to go to primary sources and that's why I'm creating my own content so people can go to my channels.

I decided to do that after an 82 years old woman named Abby Rockfeller came to my office that was a month ago and she said I'm the daughter of David Rockfeller and I saw one of recent videos and I loved it and I was so excited that I alerted all my friends to it and then one of my friends told me that it's fake and so at that moment I said okay well you know I frustrated them or not me but the AI generated fake videos frustrated an 82 years old woman I must do something about it and I created my content by now I have already more than half a million views on my YouTube channel after a month Tell me about, you know, you've already talked about the Galileo project,

but you didn't talk about it by name, okay, yet. So tell me about what the Galileo project is and how is it related to SETI, search for extraterrestrial life. You know, there's a number of these projects that are functioning and people might be wondering, you know, where they're at in their process. Right. So the SETI approach is to search for radio signals, primarily radio signals. they expanded it to search for laser signals or other electromagnetic signatures from distant planets, planets around other stars, and tens of thousands of light years away. And that was a pioneer back in 1960, you know, so it has a long history.

But that is just like waiting for a phone call. Nobody may call you from your street, especially when you're listening, and those signals propagated the speed of light. If you miss them, they are gone. However, a better approach is to check for any packages in your mailbox because those stay there. Any objects probes like Voyager, for example,

that was launched by another technological civilization, they would still stay bound to the Milky Way galaxy. I calculated that it takes Voyager less than a billion years to cross the entire Milky Way galaxy. So that means that with the 1970s technologies, you know, we can cross the entire Milky Way galaxy on a timescale that is much shorter than the difference between the ages of stars. You know, most of the stars from billions of years before the sun. The sun formed only in the last, only 4.6 billion years ago in the last one third of cosmic history. And so most of the stars are older than the sun by billions of years. There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive to the solar system.

And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects, very different from traditional city. And we were, I mean, the reason I decided to lead this project four years ago was the reports from the Director of National Intelligence to the U.S. Congress. that there are objects in the sky they cannot figure out. And I said, well, let's try and help them. And I'm happy to provide all the information we get, of course, to the Pentagon, to the intelligence agencies in case it's human made. And, you know, that could benefit them. But we are trying to see if there is anything else out there.

And so we built three observatories that the latest one in Las Vegas on top of sphere, we put an observatory. And there was actually a promo of the movie Marty Supreme, where Timothy Shalamey was standing on top of the sphere because he's playing in that movie a ping-pong player. And so they lit up the entire sphere, which is a hundred-meter radius structure. They lit it as a ping-pong ball.

He was standing on top of it, but if you look closely at the image, you would see our observatory next to him. And we just constructed it last summer. I went up there. It was really thrilling. And so that observatory by now is giving us data that is not just infrared images of the sky, but also we are able to do triangulations.

So we can look at the same object from different directions, from different units that are separated by 10 kilometers or so, and figure out the distance and figure out the velocity and the acceleration of objects. And that will allow us to find unidentified anomalous phenomena, because if we find that the performance of an object is well beyond the envelope of technological human-made objects, then we know that we are looking at something unusual. And, you know, that is information that we could in principle write about in a scientific paper. And it will obviously be a huge discovery. I was asked whether, you know, if we discover something like that, I would be waiting for the Nobel Prize to get it. And I said, no, that would be completely secondary because why would I waste my time in a cocktail party in Sweden when I can learn more about any visitors we have in our backyard?

That's far more exciting. So I will play the Bob Dylan card on this one. I would just ignore any prizes if we do find something. Well, do you have candidates? And I guess I should ask, right, do you have anything you've looked at that you've been told, hey, you're not allowed to disclose that publicly? So the answer to the first is that we haven't found anything unusual as of yet,

but I told my postdocs, and I have five new postdocs this academic year. I told them, if you find anything, call me in the middle of the night. So they have that assurance. With respect to sharing information, I'm happy to collaborate to partner with the Pentagon and any other government entity and provide them with access to the data, with access to the computer software that we develop. Because as a citizen, I would like them to benefit from what we are doing. And what we are interested in is complementary to what government is interested in. While they are focused on human-made technologies, we are focused on anything that is non-human.

And so there is no overlap and no competition and no problem with me sharing everything we have with them. So I'm very much in favor of partnership if they want to establish it. And we are for the first time this year starting to get useful data. Until now we had to build those observatories. There was a lot of time dedicated to planning the architecture of these observatories,

but now we have them and we are starting to get data. So that's a great time. And I should say also that we were funded by foundations that support basic research and by individuals who are curious about the question that we address. So no one's ever come to you and said something that you've found, you're not allowed to share it. because so far we haven't yet really reached the point that we can figure out distances. You see, that

is the key. So that was true of last week and I did establish, I have contacts in particular at Arrow in the Pentagon that I'm in conversation with and I would very much welcome any partnerships

so the door is open and, you know, I don't see it as any risk because they could have access to the data, they could look into it, and I'm not, I'm not interested in what they are interested in. Why do you think you've become controversial? Well, I can tell you in academia very clearly why. So the first paper where I talked about Omuamua, that was the first recognized interstellar object,

it was anomalous because its brightness changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours, and that implied an extreme shape that is most likely flat. Everyone agreed to that. And moreover, the object exhibited an excess push away from the sun, some non-gravitational acceleration, without shedding any gas or dust. With our space telescopes, we didn't detect any.

any gas or dust around it. So there was no rocket effect, as you find in comet. So the question was, what is pushing it? And I suggested it's just sunlight, so the object must be thin. And when the paper was submitted for publication at the most prestigious astrophysical journal, it was accepted for publication within three days. And the reviewer said, that's a great idea. But as soon as the media got attention to it, you know,

and I had a huge number of reporters at my door a few days later. As soon as the attention from the public came in, I started getting scrutinized and attacked personally within academia. And so to me, it's an illustration of a very simple fact that the strongest force in academia is jealousy. And, you know, so that is one aspect of it. Then a lot of people in academia, like for example, comet experts would oppose this idea very much because it contradicts their training data set. They are used to having rocks in the sky, so anything different than rocks would make them upset and they would try to kill it because they don't want to revise their world model.

So they would attack me personally and say, you know, you went to the Pacific Ocean. This was not really an interstellar object. We don't believe the U.S. government. That's what they said. We don't believe the U.S. government. And then you went to the wrong place and all kinds of arguments that resembles saying something bad about my sister when I don't have a sister. Just to clarify. So at any event, that was the second wave of response.

And then there are lots of zealots. These are science popularizers that are not real scientists. And that includes a number of well-known figures. If you check when was the last paper publication that Neil deGrasse Tyson had or Brian Cox in the UK had, you know, it was more than a decade ago, maybe 15 years, 20 years ago. They are not practicing scientists. Now, many of these and people with less credentials are claiming that they defend science by attacking people who are deviating from the beaten path.

And how dare they, you know, So it's just like having commentators look at the soccer match and criticizing the soccer players because they know better. The difference between the commentators and the soccer players in the field is that the commentators cannot score a goal. They have no way of scoring a goal. They can just talk about scoring a goal. But the people in the field can do it.

And I'm one of those people. I'm a practitioner of science. Every week I write a new scientific paper. I'm just describing what I'm doing and they are attacking. me instead of arguing scientifically about the merit of my ideas. And so they claim that they defend science

but these people are displaying an anti-science sentiment because they are not attending to anomalies. They are attacking practicing scientists claiming that they're scientists. There is even one that calls himself a professor even though he has

never had an academic title like that in his life. He was not good enough to stay in academia and he's attacking me. I was a tenured professor at Harvard, you know, since 1996. And he's attacking me while calling himself a professor as if he's attending to the truth. You know, that is clearly ridiculous. Many of these are mediocre scientists. And the sign of their mediocre stature is that they are making statements that are anti-science, that they are not attending to anomalies. They just want to echo what appears to be popular right now.

Now, if the mainstream view will change, they will immediately shift. They would say, of course, we always thought that unidentified objects may be extraterrestrial. I'm willing to bet because they are seeking popularity. So whatever the popular view is, wherever the wind blows, they will follow. And what I'm doing is the work of science, which is admitting when there are anomalies and trying to get more data. This is hard work. You know, going to the Pacific Ocean was hard work. All these critics have an easy job. They can just say whatever they want. You know, we've, on this program, we've looked into, we found this phenomenon to be common in other areas of science as well, the rough, rough phenomenon that you're describing.

Just to be clear, okay, because I want to understand, the thing that made Omuamua Mua unusual and caused this kind of reaction from people is that its shape was just something that people weren't ready to understand and its composition was something that that was not commonly believed to be able to exist. Is that right? The second aspect was the non-gravitational acceleration. There was a force pushing it away from the sun without any evidence for a rocket effect. no evaporation of gas or dust from it. And I said it's just the sunlight pushing it. And three years later, the same observatory in Hawaii that discovered the Muamua,

discovered another object that was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight. It was given the name 2020-S-O, discovered in August 2020. And then the scientists that discovered it took a spectrum of it. They realized that it's made of stainless steel. And then they figured, oh, this one is actually a rocket booster, an upper stage of a lunar lander mission that NASA launched in 1966. So it's definitely technological because we launched it. And I asked myself, okay, here we have an object that behaved like Omoa Muamua. We know that this object was produced by humans, but who made Omoa Muamua?

Yeah. Well, I would love to learn more. Are you still working on that or is that chapter closed? Well, unfortunately, by now this object is so faint that we can't detect it and it makes no sense to chase it. For the same reason that when you go to a bar and you see an interesting person, by the time you leave your chair and go to that person, you realize the person left the room, you know, you realize that it will take a huge amount of effort to chase that person, but there are plenty of people in the bar and you might find. someone else interesting. And so my strategy is to plan ahead for future interstellar objects, some of which might be as anomalous as a muamua was or even more. And we missed a lot of them in the past. And so I think that we should, first of all, search for them. There is the Rubin

Observatory that monitors the southern sky. There is the Argus array that will monitor in the future the northern sky. We should have a system of interceptors that can cross the path of incoming objects of interest, and then we can take a close-up photograph or even bring a sample of material or press a button on one of these objects. And all of these should be planned ahead of time. And that's my hope for the future that now that we know that such mysterious objects arrive at our backyard, we will allocate resources to... approaching them and taking a close-up photograph just before they get close to us. And a picture is worth a thousand words.

People ask me, how would you know that it's technological? Very easily, if we see buttons on it, then we know it's not a rock. And the only question that remains is whether we should press a button. Well, I don't know if I'd be pressing that button. Okay, we're going to have to wrap pretty soon, but one of the things in the last few years that has become very big is, you know, these language learning models, right? Can AI be used to infer things from data sets that already exist that we haven't basically been able to figure out before? Are you, is this something you're looking into? Definitely. And I do think that it's one way of getting through the vast amount of data that was collected

within the US government as well. But astronomers are collecting huge amounts of data right now, and one way to identify outliers is with the help of AI agents. I can tell you that two weeks ago, I asked my postdoc to look into a data set from NASA, and it took an AI agent 10 minutes to figure out the answer, whereas when I gave the same task to an undergraduate student six years ago, it took a week.

so we can already use AI agents more effectively than students. And that will accelerate the progress of science. Now, you might view AI systems as alien intelligence because they are made of computer chips, you know, silicon chips and not from flesh and blood. So when we think of them as being similar to us, it's just like putting lipstick on a pig. It wouldn't make the pig beautiful like a human, you know.

And so you might say, okay, well, AI is a form of alien intelligence. But my point is simple that we can learn much more from a truly alien intelligence because all the AI systems that we develop were trained on experiences here on Earth. either human experiences, human content, or other things that happen that are on the internet. But it's all limited to the vantage point of Earth. However, alien intelligence might have benefited from experiences well beyond Earth in interstellar space. And that's a much larger data set because there is much more real estate in outer space than

you find here on Earth. That's why I don't understand, for example, how Putin thinks, because he is engaged in a war on a small piece of territory. Whereas if he were just to look up, he would figure out that there is so much real estate beyond the earth. It makes no sense to fight over territory on this small rock, you know. And so I would much rather encounter truly alien intelligence, and I think we will learn much more from that encounter

than from our AI systems here on Earth. You know, I do have to ask this other question. I mean, the common argument that I've heard is that, you know, when civilizations, human civilizations encountered much more advanced technologically civilization, it never went well for the one that was lower in technology. So maybe I don't think everyone is excited

and as hopeful as you are. Maybe as we really finish up, if you could comment on that, please. Yeah. So I'm an optimist. And the reason I'm an optimist is because sometimes life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And therefore, I'm hoping that the encounter will be friendly. But we should obviously also prepare for the worst, like any other blind date. And I completely understand.

understand people who are worried about the potential threat from predators. Unfortunately, we've been broadcasting radio signals for a century now. So it's not as if we were shy. We were careless. And therefore, it's a bit too late for us now to be worried because we behaved in a very, you know, irresponsible way until none. Flirtacious.

Flirtacious. to keep your analogy going. Exactly. But one thing to keep in mind is whoever arrives at our backyard must be far more accomplished technologically than we are because they managed to get to us before we managed to get to them. And that's a filter that will bring only the best, I think, the most advanced technologically first to us.

Because if you think about it, we launched Voyager, but in the future we'll have much better propulsion And so when as Voyager leaves the solar system, there would be faster spacecraft catching up with it and getting farther than it. And there would be many more of them. So I think the best is yet to come as far as our technologies, but it's probably also true to alien technologies that the most likely encounter would be with a civilization

that is more advanced than we are. So it will be our responsibility to learn from them. We are sort of like ants in the cracks of a paper watching a biker that passes by. I don't think they will care too much about us if they're a farmer advanced. And it's our responsibility to learn from them and be better. Well, Professor Avi Loeb, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me.

Thank you all for joining Professor Avi Loeb and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek.