Danny Jones Podcast - #76 - Harvard's Top Astronomer Believes Aliens are Trying to Contact Us | Dr. Avi Loeb

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Professor Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard. His new book “Extraterrestrial” The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” which proposes that an interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017, may have been the creation of an Alien intelligence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, world. Today, my guest is Professor Avi Lube. Avi is an astrophysicist at Harvard, and his new book, Extraterrestrial, the first signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, proposes that an interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017 may have been the creation of alien intelligence. This man is truly a genius who is pushing the envelope in the world of astrophysics and cosmology. I hope you guys enjoy this one as much as I did. Please welcome Avi Lope. to meet you. Avi, is that how you pronounce it? Yes. So again, I just asked you before we started

recording, have you done any of these Zoom conversations in the past? Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, over the past three weeks or so, things were very hectic. I've had about 150 Zoom meetings of this type interviews with either podcasters or television or newspaper. or radio stations, and there seem to be an enormous interest in the book. And I think part of the reason is that the scientific community staffed the public on this topic of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, technological signatures, for many decades. And the public is thirsty for information. And I address this interest and it's intriguing to the public.

And hopefully the scientific community will start discussing this topic within the mainstream in the future. That's my hope. That's incredible. You know, it's funny that we reached out to you probably maybe three weeks ago and we scheduled this interview. And then late last week, I saw you pop up on Joe Rogan's podcast. right so did all of this sort of like spiral out of control after you went went and visited him well it started before that there was a report in the new york post that i did not anticipate that started lit this fire of interest and just to give you another example over the past

couple of weeks i had about 10 filmmakers and producers from hollywood contact me about the book with interest of perhaps using it for a documentary series or perhaps a film. And it's just extraordinary, the response that I'm getting. And as you know, the book that came out just a few days ago is already, I mean, it has been a bestseller on Amazon

for a couple of weeks before it came out, even before reviews came out. But now that there are, a number of reviews of the book already in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, in the New Yorker, also overseas in many outlets. And, you know, I get a lot of requests, more than I can accommodate. Basically, my day is full of interviews from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. every day and that will continue for the next few weeks based on all the commitments that I've made. But I think, you know, for me, as far as I see it, it's a platform to explain the importance

of the issues that I'm trying to bring up to that tension of the public and the science community, more than a privilege of, you know, raising my status in any way. So I see it as an opportunity to communicate. And I'll be glad to discuss with you the various issues that appear in my book. Maybe I'll just say up front that there are two major aspects of the book. One has to do with the object that was discovered in 2017 that is very weird and doesn't look like anything we have seen before from within the solar system. the object came from outside the solar system. And so I suggested that maybe it's artificial in origin, not natural.

And then the second part of the book is discussing, you know, the implications that it could have to us as the human species and why there is reluctance to consider that possibility that I just mentioned. And are we ready to receive the news? So the first time I heard about you was when, And I think Vice released an article about the Amua Muha, the long cigar shaped shiny object that was traveling through our solar system. Could you start out by explaining exactly what was this Amuamua that was traveling through

our solar system? Well, first, also I should say that I had the many years in which I worked on other topics. So for example, how did the first stars from the universe, the first light, which is mentioned actually in the first chapter of the Old Testament, the Bible, how was the first light generated in the early universe, and we can now address it with scientific means. And I also worked on black holes for many years. And the topic of the search for life or intelligent life, in particular, came to my attention only over the past few years. And I'm actually, in addition to the popular level book, we're about to publish with a former postdoc of mine, a textbook of a thousand pages

long that will be published in June 2021, that will include the foundation for future research on this subject. And so I see the most exciting frontier that should occupy center stage within the mainstream of astronomy in the future. Unfortunately, right now it's pushed to be at the periphery, and we can talk about that. So let me come back to your question, and that is Omuamua. This object was spotted in October 2017 by the Pan Stars Observatory in Hawaii, which was tasked to look for objects that may come close to Earth because they could endanger us.

Congress gave this task to NASA to find 90% of all the objects that are larger than 140 meters that get close to Earth so that we can protect ourselves by deflecting them if they are too dangerous. you know that the dinosaurs died as a result of a big rock. I heard that. And they didn't have astronomers to warn them. That's the point. So we have telescopes. We can tell in advance if an object is approaching us and devise methods to prevent that from happening.

So at any event, the pan star started this process of identifying objects and in the process of surveying the sky, found Omuomua, which is the very first object that we spotted near the earth that came from outside the solar system. And you could tell that based on the fact that it moved too fast to be bound by the sun. So it suddenly came from outside. And it was given the name of Muomua because it means in the Hawaiian language a scout or a messenger from far away. The astronomers at first, of course, assumed that it's just like all the rocks that we identified in the solar system. So it probably is a comet because most of the objects are a rock covered with ice.

They reside in the outer parts of the solar system. And the same kind of objects may exist near other stars and get ejected from those environments and reach us. But the problem was that there was no cometary tail. we couldn't see any gas trailing the object. Visually, we couldn't see it, but also the Spiterspace Telescope looked for any traces of carbon-based molecules, couldn't see it. So it was clearly not a comet.

But yet, at the same time, it exhibited an extra push away from the sun that is often associated with evaporation of gas from a comet. But since it wasn't a comet, the question was, what gives it this extra push? And I suggested that it may be the reflection of sunlight. And for that purpose, the object had to be quite thin and not naturally produced.

It has to be something like a sail that you find on a boat, which in the case of a boat, reflects the wind. But in the case of the sun, we're talking about a sail that reflects light and can be pushed. This is called a light sail, And it's a technology that we are currently developing for propulsion of spacecrafts in space. And the advantage is that the spacecraft doesn't need to carry its fuel.

It's just being pushed by light. I should say there was another object identified in September 2020, just a few months ago that exhibited also an extra push away from the sun. and in addition to the sun's gravitational force, and didn't show any cometary tale. Turns out that this one was a rocket booster from 1966, Lunar Lander Surveyor 2 mission that was launched by NASA, and it was simply hollow and thin,

and that's why it was pushed by reflecting sunlight. So we know in that case that the object was artificial in origin, because we produced it. In the case of Umuamua, we don't know who produced it. And the other thing I should say is that from the reflected light that umuamua showed this, it was tumbling, it was tumbling over eight hours, roughly the size of a football field, from the amount of reflected sunlight, we could tell that it's most likely flat, not cigar shape. and also that it's very extreme in terms of its geometry.

It's much longer than it is wide when projected on the sky. And that fits the bill in terms of it potentially being thin surface. So have you seen on a lot of the articles online, have you seen some of the renderings that they've created of it? Oh, yeah. So the most popular rendering is that of a cigar-shaped object. And that is incorrect based on the evidence we have. have. The most likely shape is disc shape or pancake shape.

Interesting. And how far away is it from the Earth? Oh, right now it's beyond the distance of Jupiter. So it's actually right now a million times fainter than when it was close to the sun because it dims very rapidly such an object because the amount of sunlight impinging on its surface drops inversely with distance squared and then the amount of light we see reflected from it drops by another factor of one of a distance square. So altogether the object deems us inversely with distance

to the fourth power, which is very quickly. So by now we can't really see it anymore and therefore we cannot even design a mission that will chase it, but we can search for other objects. You know, when I go to the kitchen and I find an ant by looking at a small portion of the kitchen, I know that there should be many more ants out there. And so the conclusion from finding this object is that there should be many more. If we use the Pan-Stars telescope within a few years, we should find another one.

But in fact, in three years, there would be a new survey telescope called the Vera Rubin Observatory that would be much more sensitive. and therefore could find such an object every month or so. Right now, the telescope that found this Amuamua, what is the, I guess, the goal of that telescope? Is it just like generally blanketing the sky or is it particularly looking for doomsday asteroids? Yeah, so the latter, it was intended to find those near-Earth objects called NEOs. But it just started the job of doing that. And the Verarubian Observatory would go two-thirds of the way towards having a full census.

Congress tasked NASA to find 90%. But with the Verar Rubin Observatory, we'll find maybe 60% of all near-Earth objects above 140 meters in size. How much do astronomers, your colleagues, yourself, how much of your time and focus goes towards worrying about giant Earth killer asteroids? Very little. There is a relatively small community of astronomers that focus on objects within the solar system. And then out of that community, a small fraction worries about near-Earth asteroids. So it's mainly an observational effort to identify individual objects that may come close to Earth

because we can forecast their orbits using the law of gravity. And so it's sort of a practical matter to monitor and figure out which objects might come close, monitor the sky. And, you know, we can see objects based on their reflected sunlight. So the bigger the object is, the easier it is for us to identify it at a greater distance. And it also depends, of course, on the telescope size and the amount of light that you can collect within the telescope diameter. Now, if there was an object that was similar to the one that took out the dinosaurs

that hit the Yucatan, how soon were we able to find it? And is there anything we could possibly do to alter its course? Yeah, so the dinosaurs went extinct. And in fact, three quarters of the Earth's life forms were killed in that event. I mean, there was this giant rock that collided with Earth. It was roughly the length of Manhattan Island, tens of kilometers. And then as it approached the earth, probably it was a beautiful site.

but the fun of the dinosaurs stopped when it collided with Earth and caused this huge environmental damage, the Chixelab crater and sort of a change in the climate of the earth because of all the dust that was raised. But perhaps we owe our existence to that impact because it changed altogether the life forms that appeared on the surface of the earth. And such a big object can be identified far enough for us to, you know, plan years in advance what to do.

And there are various ideas about how to deflect it. You can, for example, paint a side of it in a color such that it will reflect or will evaporate more quickly. and then there will be some push on it and that will deflect it from colliding with the earth. You can detonate something on the surface of such an object and that would also push it aside. You can shine a laser beam on one side of the object and achieve the same goal.

There are all kinds of, you can also shepherd it gravitationally with a spacecraft. all kinds of suggestions for what to do. And it really depends on the size of the object and the composition as to what we want to do. You don't want to, for example, destroy it into a lot of fragments because those fragments could hit the earth

with a higher chance. You know, during the Gulf War, there was this patriot missile that intercepted the missiles that were sent, for example, towards Israel. And at the early version of these Patriot missiles, they just blasted the incoming missile into pieces, and that caused more damage than the original missile would have caused. So you don't want to do that. And we will have enough time to make appropriate plans, depending on which object is approaching us.

We will definitely not get extinct as the dinosaurs did. the human brain, even though it's much smaller than the body of a dinosaur, it's much more precious for long-term survival. Now, why is it that you think that you're the first astronomer to come out with some fascinating stuff like this, talking about the Amuamua and talking about interstellar potential extraterrestrial objects coming through our solar system? Well, first I should mention that this subject is at the periphery of astronomy. It's not funded much. And anyone that talks about the search for technological signatures is sort of marginalized. Sometimes to the point where the subject is ridiculed. And that is unfortunate because it doesn't allow new talent to enter the field

or to get funded for doing research. in this field. And it's sort of like stepping on the grass and then saying, look, it doesn't grow. So obviously we don't get major discoveries or important results because of the, this self-fulfilling prophecy, the fact that the community is not supporting it.

And I find this to be completely inappropriate because the public is extremely interested in the question, are we alone? I'm interested in the question beyond that because I think that we are probably not alone. You know, half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly at the same separation. So you have billions of Earth's sun system just within the Milky Way galaxy, our own galaxy. And then you have a trillion galaxies like the Milky Way within the observable

volume of the universe. So altogether, you know, there are more Earth sun systems than the numbers of grains of sand on all beaches on Earth. It's just huge. And the chance that we are special or unique is really minute. And out of modesty, we should consider the possibility that things like us exist everywhere as the simplest assumption, you know, a most conservative assumption. If you replicate the same circumstances, you get the same outcome. But for some reason, the mainstream community prefers not to think that way and say, you know, maybe we are unique, maybe we are special.

You need extraordinary evidence in order to. argue otherwise. I would argue that you need extraordinary evidence to assume that we are unique because whenever we thought that we were special, we were wrong in the past. We thought that we are at the center of the universe. Aristotle suggested that in his philosophy, and for a thousand years people believed it until Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth moves around the sun. And even then, the philosophers at the time didn't like the idea. They didn't look through Galileo's telescope, and they just maintain their ignorance. You know, that reality doesn't care about whether we ignore it or not. And whenever we assume that we are unique and special, we were

wrong. It's sort of like my daughters when they were infants. You know, they thought that they are unique. They have qualities that nobody else has, and they're at the center of the world. But once they went to a kindergarten, they saw other kids and they got a better perspective. So for us as the human species as civilization to mature, we need to find others and get a better perspective about our place in the universe. But many people prefer, you know, it flatters their ego to maintain the view that we are alone until proven differently. And I find that to be completely opposite to where they should be.

But by preventing any research in this subject, by ridiculing suggestions that we might not be alone, you know, you don't get anyone to work on that. And that's why I'm sort of alone standing against this mainstream. And I should say, you know, I'm not an outlier. I've worked in the mainstream for many years. had a lot of leadership positions. I was the longest serving chair of the astronomy department at Harvard between 2011 to 2020, nine years, a position that was renewed twice.

And I'm the chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the national academies. And at the same time, I think that the current view is misguided. And I think that this subject appeals to the public and the public funds science. and therefore we have an obligation to address it with the existing tools that we have, telescopes and instruments. And we can do it. Just to give you an example,

the astronomers are developing the next generation of instruments to search for, and these would cost billions of dollars, to search for oxygen, for example, in the atmospheres of planets around other stars, because the idea is that oxygen will tell us if there is life on these planets around other stars. The problem with this idea is that oxygen was rare, did not exist in the earth atmosphere at noticeable levels.

For two billion years, for half of the lifetime of the earth, for the first two billion years, there wasn't much oxygen in the atmosphere. But there was life on Earth. There were microbes. So not finding oxygen is not evidence that life doesn't exist. also finding oxygen is not evidence that life exists because you can make it by natural processes. And if you ask yourself, what would be a conclusive signature of life is if we find industrial pollution in those atmospheres, those molecules that are very complex and are produced by the industries that we have or by refrigerating systems, they are called CFCs. If we do find evidence for those, then we know that life might,

must exist. So in fact, the justification to the future, the next generation of instruments that astronomers are developing is much stronger in the context of the search for technological signatures than it is in the search for primitive life. But nevertheless, you would never find an argument or a motivation for these instruments in that context. What sort of conversations have you had or debates have you had with your colleagues or other astronomers when it comes to the pushback that you've received from being outspoken about things like this and the umuamua and intelligent life well i can give you an example there was a seminar about umu umu at harvard and uh when i left the room with a colleague of mine that worked on the solar system for

decades he said this object is so weird i wish it never existed and that illustrates to you that the properties of this object take people away from their comfort zone. And most people prefer not to change their views and not to update what they thought to be the worldview that describes the universe. And it's sort of like a GPS system when it gets to a place that it doesn't recognize. it says recalculating. And unfortunately, most of my colleagues do not recalculate. They just want to maintain their views.

So most of the mainstream would simply say business as usual. I don't care about the details. It must be a rock. To me, that sounds just like a caveman saying that when presented with a cell phone, you know, the caveman is used to work, you know, playing with rock. all of his life saying, oh, the cell phone is just a shiny rock. And the point of the matter is, since I don't find technological signatures as a speculation, I think it should be contemplated as a real possibility, put on the table, and then, you know,

one can gather more evidence to try and see if indeed it's consistent with that, and it should not be dismissed up front. And so I think there needs to be a revision in the culture right now, within the academic community. There are also parts of, for example, the physics community, theoretical physics, that engage in concepts that cannot be tested experimentally, such as extra dimensions or the multiverse or super-simps, symmetry or string theory. These are concepts that were not yet proven to be correct based on

experimental evidence. They are highly speculative. And for decades, people have been working on them and doing mathematical gymnastics or about demonstrating how smart they are. But doing physics is not about showing off as being smart. It's about understanding reality, understanding nature. And if you're trying to do that, you should be guided by evidence. Yeah, I mean, there's tons of, there's tons of money that goes into things like the LHC that they go to find the Higgs boson and all those other things. It's amazing that I would imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, the number one thing on the checklist of reasons to become an astronomer would be to find extraterrestrial life or to, or to find something out there. Well, in fact, a lot of physicists would say that they were,

attracted to doing physics because they read some science fiction stories. And I think that this is the most exciting question for us to address because it will change our perspective about our place in the universe, our aspirations for space. And it could impact many things we do, including religious beliefs. And so I think it's just a missed opportunity for scientists if they have the tools to address this question and search for technological signatures, not to do that. And that's why I speak out loud. And I use Omu Amu as an anchor to demonstrate that here is an anomalous object that didn't look like anything we have seen before. And all of the mainstream suggestions for why it looks so weird also invoked something that we have never seen before, you know, a hydrogen iceberg or a cloud of

dust. And then given that we are entertaining possibilities that were never seen before, why not also a technological origin? It's sort of like, you know, walking on the beach and most of the time you see rocks or seashells, but every now and then you stumble across a plastic bottle that indicates that the civilization might be around. So how did you first come across this, Amuamua? Well, I heard about it when it was discovered on October 19th, 2017. And after a week or so, it became quite intriguing in the sense that, you know, we realized it's the first interstellar object, looks a little bit strange in terms of its shape. And so I had a discussion with Yuri Milner, a Russian-Israeli, a science funder in Silicon Valley, about using radio telescopes to which, which he had access through a project called Breakthrough Listen,

and trying to see if there is any radio signal coming from this object, we checked it and put an upper limit of roughly the transmission of a cell phone. So clearly, Oumuwa was not transmitting at the frequencies that we were looking at, the radio frequencies. It could have been transmitting at other frequencies, could have been transmitting in a different direction. But we ruled out the possibility that anything in our direction was more than the power of a cell phone. And so at that point, I thought, well, it must be probably natural.

But then six months later, there was the report about it showing exhibiting an extra push away from the sun. And that could not be explained in terms of a commentary tale because we haven't seen any. And at that point, you know, that was the straw that broke the comments back in my vocabulary in terms of me saying to myself, look, it's so unusual. Maybe we should look for something out of the box to explain it. And I wrote a couple of articles in Scientific American talking about it being a technological artifact or relic. And then I wrote a scientific paper about it in October 2018 that,

got a lot of attention. We didn't have any press release. It just became viral in the media. And after that, I wrote the number of papers on the Mu, more, and its implications. So you mentioned it was moving away from the sun? Well, when we discovered it, it was already receding away from us. Yes. It's sort of like having a guest for dinner and realizing that the guest is interesting when the guest goes out the front door into the dark street. And that was unfortunate because we couldn't chase it at that point. If we were to discover it in July instead of October,

and by the way, I was visiting that observatory, the Pan Stars Observatory on Mount Haleakala in Maui, just around that time, July 2017 with my family, we were on vacation in Maui. And I gave a seminar there. And at the time, nobody knew about Omuomua. If we were to know about it, then we could have contemplating,

sending out a spacecraft equipped with a camera along its path and then getting a better view of what it looks like. Unfortunately, we didn't know. And so it was too late for us to chase it afterwards. And the moral of this story is that if we find another weird object in the future, on its approach to us, we better send a camera that we'll take a photograph of it. And, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Right.

Now, is that something that you think we'll be able to do next time one of these is coming close to us? Yeah, I think it's quite possible. And science is all about evidence and it's about reproducibility, the ability to study something again and again when it repeats. And in this case, given the fact that Pansters looked surveyed the sky for a few years before he discovered this object, we should definitely find another one that looks like it within a few years from now. Because otherwise, it's very unlikely that we found a rare object just within a few years.

Now, what were the main differences between this and other things that you see, like asteroids or comets or something like that? obviously the shape was different. Yeah, the shape was more extreme. It was projected on the sky 10 times longer than it is wide. And imagine a piece of paper tumbling in the wind, even if it's razor thin. The chance of it being exactly edge on is very small. So most of the time, you know, it would change the amount of area that you see. But the change by a factor of 10 or more is quite extreme.

And the second is that, you know, we infer that it's most likely flat based on the amount of light that it reflected as it was tumbling. What do you think it was? What do you think it legitimately was? Well, I think it was probably a very thin object artificially produced and probably dysfunctional, not something that is being used for spying on us or some other purpose. simply because it was tumbling. It was out of control in a way. But also, if you think about it, we sent out Voyager 1, Voyager 2, New Horizons,

all kinds of space junk. And a million years from now, all of this will be real junk in the sense that it will not be functional anymore. So if you wait for long times, you know, these objects that are being sent into space may not continue to be functional. They don't have enough energy supply to keep them functional.

And there might be a lot of them floating in space, just like plastic bottles in the ocean, you know, that are swept ashore and we find them every now and then. So it's sort of like waste filling up interstellar space. And every now and then we will bump into one. Now, could you define exactly what interstellar? Does that mean not bound to the sun if it's interstellar? Yeah, interstellar, well, more generally, interstellar means between stars. And in this, so in this context, you can say Omoor came from the space between stars.

It came into the solar system from outside the solar system. The question about its origin is not answered because we don't know where it came from. it was actually another weird fact about it is that it was situated in a special frame of reference it was in the local standard of rest which is the frame that you get to when you average over the motions of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun and umuamua was at rest in that frame so it's sort of like finding a car that is parked at rest in a public parking lot you cannot really tell which house it came from. Because all the stars in the case of the local standard of rest, all the local stars are moving relative to that frame. Only one in 500 stars is so much at rest

relative to the local standard of rest as Muammu was. One way to think about it, it was like a buoy sitting on the surface of the ocean and the solar system bumped into it because the sun is moving relative to that frame. And you may ask what purpose does it serve, being in that special frame. You know, one possibility is that there is a grid of such objects and they serve as roadposts. When you navigate through interstellar space, you can find your coordinates where you are relative to those objects.

Another possibility is that it's a relay station for communication, that you don't need to communicate across large distances. You just communicate by the signal hopping from one relay station. to the next. We use this approach on Earth. Now, what did you say the name of the name of the telescope that was being the new telescope, the billion dollar? Vera Rubin, oh, the name of the telescope that we survey the sky, you mean? Yeah, you mentioned that there was like a billion dollar telescope being built in Chile. Well, there is the Vera Rubin Observatory that will be much more sensitive than

the PanStar telescope that was that discovered Omomo in a war. Why? And it will be in Chile, yes. Okay. And the primary focus of that will be to discover these things before it's too late. Yeah, discover near-earth objects with much greater sensitivity than Pan Stars. And it will be able to find about two-thirds of those that the Congress tasked NASA to find. So 60% of the entire population. What are your opinions in the recent year or two? all of the different, you know, there's been Air Force pilots and based in San Diego that have come out and they've had their videos of these UFOs coming out of the water and within one second being meters away. Do you guys pay any attention to that stuff?

Well, I do. I mean, I cannot speak for others. And my view on these reports, these eyewitness reports of unidentified flying objects, UFOs that are unusual. My view is that these eyewitness testimonies come from people that are not scientists, that were not planning to find these unusual things. And we will be better served if we were to deploy scientific instruments in those sites and monitor the environment. I have two concerns about these reports of UFOs over the past decades. One of them is that now we have cameras. and recording devices that are far better than we had decades ago.

And back then, you know, the images were fuzzy, and it was difficult to be sure what it means and so forth. But with present-day instruments, it should be crisp clear. They are much better than we used to have, and they are still fuzzy and, you know, on the margin of believability. The second reservation that they have is there are far many more cameras available to monitor environments right now by orders of magnitude. You know, people have cell phones, you have drones, you have cameras on satellites, on airplanes,

in the streets of cities. And the number of video cameras looking at what's going on is many orders of magnitude larger than it used to be a decade or two ago. nevertheless, the reports on UFOs have not increased. So that concerns me that maybe, you know, all of these reports were sort of artifacts of the instruments that were used or impressions of natural phenomena.

But I think that it would be appropriate to deploy scientific instruments and check it out. It's really, I mean, science is about reproducibility of results. So one-time events, are not believable in science, you should be able to reproduce them by being in the same environment under similar circumstances. And I would trust instruments recording these events. You know, there is this biblical story from the Old Testament about Abraham that heard the voice of God and that voice told Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. And imagine Abraham

I'm having a cell phone with a voice memo up. If he could have pressed the button, he would have recorded the voice of God. And then instead of an eyewitness testimony, we would have the recording, and that would have convinced all of humanity that God exists. And so my point is that by recording things on instruments, you get a much more objective evidence

than all these reports that are now being declass classified from the Pentagon and so forth. We should not obsess with these old reports that were based on either eyewitnesses or instruments that are much more inferior to the instruments we have now. We should simply use our best instruments, go to these sites and see whether we see anything unusual. Well, the Pentagon actually said that they were in possession of some sort of extraterrestrial craft in the news.

New York Times article. Well, what I'm saying is that it's better, you know, Abraham said that he heard the voice of God, right? So the question is, do you believe Abraham or not? I'm saying if he had a cell phone, we could have looked at the evidence. He didn't have that and then you have to decide whether you believe the biblical story or not. And the same is true here. People report things and I don't know whether to believe them. So the only way for me to believe them, scientifically speaking, is to deploy recording devices in the same sites and see if they find something. What is your opinion on humans and how long we're going to be here on Earth? Do you think we're ever going to have to leave Earth? Oh yeah, definitely. Currently all our eggs are in one

basket and everything that is precious to us could get eliminated, extinct if something catastrophic happens on Earth. If an asteroid impacts us or if there is a, for example, a nuclear war or a climate change or something catastrophic. And it would make much more sense to spread our eggs in different baskets and go somewhere else as well and have duplicates of what we hold important and valuable here. It's sort of like the Gutenberg printing press, you know, there were very few copies of the Bible before the printing press was invented. And they were all handwritten,

and each of them was extremely precious. But once the printing press came to exist, there were many more copies, and if something bad happened to one of them, it wasn't a catastrophe. You could make new ones. And we can imagine saving life, as we know it on Earth. And the approach would be similar

to what NOAC did. You know, in the biblical story of Noak's Ark, there is the story about the great flood that endangered life on Earth. And so Noak decided to build an arc and put animals in it so that it will save them. We can, in principle, design a similar approach and build Noak spaceship that will save life on Earth. But we don't need to put elephants and whales on it. we just need to put a computer and a 3D printer. And if the computer has the information about the DNA of all life forms that we care about, then this system can go to another planet.

And in principle, it could make the life, as we know it, out of the raw materials that exist there on another planet. You don't need to bring the life with you. You can recreate them. as long as we figure out how to make synthetic life, you know, and that's not speculative because people are, as we speak, people are trying to produce synthetic life in the laboratory. And so I wouldn't be surprised if within the next few decades we will be able to do that. And so once we are able to do that, we can potentially produce life on other planets without carrying it from Earth and just, you know, using what we know about,

the genetics and so forth in making that life over there out of the raw materials there. How long do you think it would be before we would have to do that? Oh, that depends on us, how quickly we inflict the wounds on ourselves. You know, if we are not smart enough, we might not survive for more than a few centuries from now. We started developing our technologies about a century ago, and our technologies are advancing with exponentially, with a characteristic time scale of a few years. So it's quite possible that within the next century,

unless we are careful, we could develop technologies that will destroy us. And then, you know, we need to be really careful about what we do to the planet, what we do to ourselves. We don't pay that much attention to it because we are so close to when, technology started developing, but once we go a few decades into the future, we will be in a

real risk of extinction, I think, and because there would be technologies that could potentially destroy life on the planet. And then we just need to be smart enough to avoid that. And right now, I wouldn't say that we are very intelligent in the way we do our politics. there are lots of conflicts and we invest most of our efforts in fighting each other, you know, among nations and so forth. And that is not the smart approach. We should collaborate, especially on issues that science can address. You know, and you could see that in the context of COVID, right?

So when it started in China, there wasn't much sharing of information. And science is global. Science is international. It's supposed to be a mode of collaboration among nations and in promoting a better future for humanity. And I very much hope that ultimately science will prevail and suppress all these tensions among people that really could bring us down.

If you look at the world wars, there was a lot of effort dedicated to killing people, and that makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, I think especially recently, I feel like the internet has really made everything in this world so much more transparent. And I think it's it's really there's a big paradigm shift happening, especially with the recent news. I'm sure you've heard the GameStop stocks, the people online that were buying the stocks that the hedge funds bet against. And 10 years ago, this is something no one understood hedge funds. or the stock market or or what these bets on them failing even were um and people were able

to benefit off that and essentially create this massive gap this massive gap between the the billionaires on wall street and the average the average work in person blue collar worker and now it's becoming the internet has made this so much more transparent I feel like this is something that has to happen with side that's you know you you can somehow correlate it to what's happening with what you're doing. And now you released your book and you're talking to everybody about it. Well, one thing I would like to highlight in this context is we tend to think that technology and science is superior to the humanities. So humanities are in decline.

The study of philosophies, the study of literature and so forth. Young people are more attracted to science and technology. The problem is that we develop tools using science and technology that could destroy us. And the only way to prevent it is to have the humanists telling us how to guide ourselves towards a better future. For example, how to set the rules such that genetic engineering will not end up making people the type that we want and all kinds of other. issues that come up like artificial intelligence you know if we allow it to make life death decisions on medical issues we have to worry about the morality of that and you know at what level do we allow the machine to decide the fate of a person versus having people involved you know in the

past it was the doctor that made a decision and you could trust the doctor better because the doctor would be a human that that has a bigger perspective that is more balanced in a way. But if you have a machine deciding, you have to decide about a set of rules of what's moral and what's ethical and how the machine decides who dies and who lives. And there are lots of such issues with modern technologies. And the humanities, the way I see it, play a central role. And, you know, I as a young kid, I was mostly interested in philosophy. I grew up on a farm.

And then circumstances brought me into physics and astrophysics. But I value these areas of humanities like philosophy very much. I think they are essential for guiding us to a better future. Without them, we could be nerds developing all kinds of tools that will kill us as a civilization. Yeah, so how did you transition from studying things like black holes to studying what you're studying now? How did you make that transition? Well, it was by chance because, for example, I was studying the first generation of stars in the universe, the first stars that formed that lit up in the universe early on.

And those stars had an impact on their environment. They basically broke the hydrogen atoms around them into their. constituent electrons and protons. And then if you want to see the scars left by the first stars on their environment, you want to image the hydrogen around them. And hydrogen emits faint radio waves. And therefore, I worked on a frontier that talks about, you know, tries to map the hydrogen in the early universe.

And for that purpose, you need to develop radio observatories. These observatories are sensitive at radio frequencies of around 100 to 200 megahertz. And it so happens that these radio observatories operate at exactly the same frequency band as FM radio stations and TV stations. And one concern was that there would be interference from TV and radio stations on Earth. But then it occurred to me that the same observatories could in principle eavesdrop on another civilization, you know, on a planet around another star that transmits those radio waves. And so I wrote a paper about it. That was my first encounter with the search for technological signatures.

Then I visited Abu Dhabi for the inauguration of a new campus for NYU. That was around 2012 or so. And then the tour guide, when we looked, when you went around, the tour guide was bragging that the city, lights there are visible from the moon. They are so bright. And so that gave me the idea of checking how far can you see a city with the Hubble Space Telescope, for example. And we found with Ed Turner, a collaborator of mine, that in principle the Hubble Space Telescope can see a city like Tokyo on Pluto, you know, the edge of the solar system of planets.

And that was an interesting idea that you can look for artificial lights as a signature of another civilization. And you can identify this artificial lights, not as reflected sunlight, by the way the source deems as it changes its distance from us. So that was my second paper. And then the third one on this subject was when astronomers talked about searching for biological signatures in the atmosphere. spheres of planets and then it took care to me that technology you know if you look for industrial pollution that would imply there is an industrial civilization there and so I wrote a paper about that and and so gradually drifted in this direction that was 2015 and and then over the past few years especially because of a muamua i published a lot on this subject and in about the half a year

I will have a book, a textbook out of more than a thousand pages with my former postdoc, Manas Vilingam, that lays the foundation for future studies on this subject of the search for both primitive and intelligent life. You mentioned earlier when you were talking about 3D printing and printing organisms or basically duplicating ourselves on other planets. Now, I've heard reports of of people who have worked at S1 and Area 51 have obtained crafts that are very small, saying that only really tiny beings that have no reproductive organs. Is it possible that other beings are printing these sort of cadavers or? or basically like humanoids, but aliens that can travel long distances through different solar systems

that don't have to stay alive, they don't have to eat. You know, everything is possible, and there are lots of possibilities outlined in science fiction stories. And the key as a scientist is to look for evidence. And that should guide you as to which possibilities are real. which are illusions or our imagination of what might be out there. It's sort of like a detective story. You can have a lot of possible, an infinite number of possibilities,

and you just saw them out and figure out which one is realized by collecting clues and evidence, you know. And we could think that we are wealthier than Elon Musk. We could have a lot of money. And the only way to figure out what we actually have is to go to an ATM machine and check it out. And so the ATM machine represents an experiment where you actually check what you have. And that's what guides modern science, evidence and clues. Many times scientists prefer to have ideas that do not stand up to the scrutiny of experiments.

and that's legitimate as long as the ideas can be tested in principle. The frustration I have is that some parts of the physics community right now, there are hundreds of people working on ideas that will never be tested in their lifetime. And that to me could be a waste of their time because it's imagining things that they may not exist. If we were to go and put ourselves on another planet, which planet do you think it would be? Do you think it'd be Mars or would it be a proxima B? So there are two planets that are closest to us and in principle could have life on them or we could imagine going there and changing conditions such that we could live there.

They are Mars and Venus on the two sides of the Earth. Mars used to have an atmosphere and probably had conditions similar to Earth. early on in its life. But then because it's 10 times less massive than the Earth, it couldn't hold on to its atmosphere. So the atmosphere evaporated. And then it lost the potential for liquid water on its surface because you can't have liquid water unless there is an atmospheric pressure.

And so even if there was life on Mars, it couldn't continue. There was no liquid water available. And the perseverance mission will actually get there in February 2021 in about in less than in a few weeks actually. And we'll figure out whether there was or maybe there is some left over signatures of life in the Martian soil. And so that would be very exciting. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing the results from this mission. But then going there for us, for humans, would require a lot of adaptation because just standing on the surface of Mars, without an atmosphere, without a strong magnetic field that Mars doesn't have, we will be exposed to energetic particles, cosmic rays, that could damage. Within a year, you will have a substantial damage to the cells in your brain, and you need protection from that.

And one way to protect our bodies is to go underground, to go into a cave or to build some infrastructure that will protect us. There is not enough attention given to that. So just sending humans to Mars without proper protection would be irresponsible. It's sort of like a death sentence. You don't want to do that. So we need to come up with solutions to protect people that go there. But potentially it's a place that we could then modify. such that we could live there.

And you can imagine not necessarily going to a planet. You can put some platform in space. You know, we started in the jungles of Africa and we ended up in apartment buildings in cities. That's a big leap over a period of 100,000 years. I don't see the leap from an apartment building, you know, in a city in Manhattan to going to space as big. as the leap from Africa to an apartment building, you know, so we could do it.

It will require some time, but, you know, 100,000 years is a huge period, you know, over which we will have technologies that are far superior to what we have now. So I'm quite optimistic that we could adapt to living in space, but it will take some time. And then Venus, Venus right now on the surface has, you know, it went through, greenhouse effect and the surface is extremely hot. It cannot sustain liquid water. You cannot live on the surface of Venus. There was some suggestion that maybe there is life in the clouds of Venus. So the only way for us to inhabit Venus would be to terraform it, to change the conditions such that it's not as hot as it is. But then, of course, we can go to Proxima B. We can go to another

star. The nearest star is Proxima Centauri and it has a habitabre. planet next to it. And that planet is so much the star that it has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. And my daughter say that the

strip that separates those two sides is the most would have the highest real estate value because it would be a permanent sunset strip and have a house there. You can see the sunset forever. For dummies like myself who have never heard of Proxima B

or Proxima, the other one. Can you explain where they are and what they are? Yeah, Proxima Centauri is a member of a three-star system that is the closest to the sun. Right now, I mean, it will continue to be the closest star system

to us for about 100,000 years. So every 100,000 years or so, there is a new star coming closest to us. And then it's passing. And right now, Proxima Centauri is the nearest, and it's actually a dwarf star that is only 12% of the mass of the sun. So it's much fainter.

Most of the stars are much smaller and fainter than the sun. So we live next to an unusual star. Most of the stars are like Proxima Centauri. And it has roughly half the surface temperature that the sun has. Only 3,000 degrees Kelvin, compared to almost 6,000 that the sun has. And therefore it emits mostly infrared light.

The sun emits mostly visible light. That's why our eyes are tuned to visible light. But the creatures, if there are any creatures on the habitable planet next to Proxima Centauri, they should have infrared eyes, which would be very strange for us to see, actually. And if there is any grass growing there, it will be dark red. So if you think about interstellar travel agencies, designing trips. If most of the

living creatures are living near dwarf stars that are the most common, they are used to red to dark red grass. And they will never come to a planet like ours that offers green grass. That will

not be a desirable tourist destination because they don't like this color. They enjoy having a vacation on a dark red grass. You know, and that may explain why we haven't seen any visit us. Can you explain a little bit more? What would the eyes of the beings on that planet look like? Why would they be, what would an infrared eye look like? I don't know. It would look shocking to us. It would look very different

than our eyes. So our eyes were developed over time to take advantage of most of the light produced by the sun, which is visible light. But if you're are next to a star that produces mostly infrared radiation, then evolution would lead you to be sensitive to that kind of light. You know, this is the kind of light you get from warm objects, you know, like soldiers have those goggles that are sensitive to infrared radiation at night. At night there is not much visible light because you are on the other side of the earth where the sun is not around. You know, but objects are warm enough

to emit infrared radiation. And you can see them with these goggles. That's what they saw, you know, people that have infrared goggles can see the heat emitted by bodies that are warm. And that's the kind of infrared radiation that the star, Proxima Centauri, is mostly emitting. So, of course, if we had goggles,

infrared goggles, we would see that radiation very clearly. But those animals, creatures that may be born there, they have those sensors, infrared sensors that they are born with, because that gives them an evolutionary advantage. The reason we have visible light eyes is because it gives us an advantage. We can survive better if we see the light from the sun because it's reflected of objects, so we can protect ourselves. there is something endangering us, we can avoid that danger by seeing that object. And that's why

we have sensitivity to visible light, which is the most common type of light near the sun. But if we were next to Proxima Centauri, it would not offer us much advantage. And then probably we would not survive. And animals that have infrared eyes would survive because they can see the danger. If there is another animal coming to eat them, they would be able to escape because they're sensitive to infrared light, which is the most common form of light in their environment. Real quick, I wanted to go back to the mission you just spoke about that's about to arrive in Mars in a couple weeks now. What is the purpose of that mission? They're looking specifically for life? Right. So this is the perseverance mission. And yes, one of the highlights of this

mission is to search for signatures of life. And there were previous missions. going back almost 50 years, that had some tentative evidence that perhaps there is something in the Martian soil that is going through metabolism, that is living, because they took a sample of that soil, and they noticed that there is some gas coming out of it that may indicate life. and when they hit that soil to a high temperature, suddenly that goes away. And there was a suggestion that maybe it indicates that there is life in that soil.

And so the perseverance mission is equipped with all kinds of instruments that could then search for life that may exist right now, but also search for life that may have existed before. You know, if there were rivers or ponds, in the location where perseverance lands, then there might be some leftover signatures of life that may have existed there. And we don't know exactly how it might look.

It might be skeletons or something else. But the idea is to search for it. And it would be very exciting to see what they find. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like we're doing everything we can possibly do within our means to do these types of studies and to try to find extraterrestrial life and to find out if we're the only ones here or not. Well, primitive life, I should say,

because technological signatures, we are not doing enough. That's what I started from. I've heard you compare stagnation of the scientific community to technology or to corporate commercial technology. You know, companies like SpaceX, for example, which obviously are funded and they generate a profit compared to science and the communities that you're involved in. Can you speak a little bit to that? Yeah.

So one would expect the academic world to take more risks than the commercial world because companies are mainly focused on making a profit. Whereas in academia, there is this concept of. tenure where the professor has a secure job. And the purpose of that was that once you get to that phase, you can explore blue sky research and take risks and allow yourself to be wrong if it doesn't end up the way you wanted. Unfortunately, most of my colleagues in academia do not take risks because they want to get honors and awards, and they want to maintain an image of someone that doesn't make mistakes. And they build echo chambers that repeat their voice,

making it louder so that their reputation is improved. But at the same time, they don't innovate much, because innovation implies taking risks and being wrong sometimes. And at the same time, in the commercial sector, or you find companies, as you mentioned, like SpaceX or Google or many others that have groups of people that are thinking, that are taking risks and checking ideas out of the box.

And the reason they do that is because they recognize that the next major discovery that will make them a big profit would come in unexpected directions. So they are taking risks because even though some of the directions fail, if one of them ends up being real, it would compensate for all the losses associated with the failed directions. And if companies recognize the value of that, academia should have recognized it much more. And it's quite unfortunate that there is not as much innovation in academia as it should

as there should be. And that's why I'm trying to promote an open mind in the context that we discussed before of searching for technological signatures, but more generally, I think it's extremely important, for example, for federal grants to be given also to people that have risky propositions, people that consider ideas out of the box.

NASA, for example, very often funds projects that can declare ahead of time what they will discover, what they will find, and that's contradictory to the nature of discovery. Very often you discover things that you haven't expected. You cannot tell in advance to the funder what you will find or else what you're doing is very boring. So I think the funding agencies should also allocate

some fraction of their funding to risky propositions to out-of-the-box thinking and allow for that. It all comes together in a culture where innovation and risk-taking is appreciated. Yeah, it almost doesn't make sense. It almost seems like somebody like Elon Musk would have way more to lose by venturing outside the box than a researcher or a scientist would. It seems like they wouldn't have as much to lose.

I completely agree, but it's human nature that drives people in academia towards being less innovative, less risk-taking, because this way they can maintain an image that makes no, you know, of some unreputable so that they get honors and awards. And by the way, one way to not make mistakes is not to put skin in the game. So not to be engaged in predictions that can be tested experimentally and proven wrong. And that's why you find this culture of people that work on subjects that are sort of esoteric have no connection to reality and cannot be tested experimentally. because that's much more attractive. You can just demonstrate that you are smart

and never be proven wrong. Isn't that the point of science to be proven wrong? Yes, I would argue that, and that's what I argue, yes. And that's what I practice. I don't just preach, but it's not easy to change the culture, and I think it should change, and I hope it will change. And my book discusses that as one of the most important messages of the books. So I very much encourage people to have a look in it.

And you talk about Einstein as well. Yeah, I mean, Einstein in the last decade of his career, when he was the most experienced, and obviously he was the leading scientist of his generation, made three mistakes. And these were major mistakes that we now know are completely wrong based on experiments. You know, we detected gravitational waves,

and he claimed they don't exist. we detected black holes. He claimed they don't exist. And we also detected spooky action at a distance in quantum mechanics. And he claimed it doesn't exist. But that's part of being at the frontier. You never know in advance, you know, what is the right direction. And even if you're the smartest person around like Einstein was, you make mistakes.

And that should be tolerated because if you look at Einstein, you know, he also made important breakthroughs at the same time or before that time. And so the other thing is his generation was putting skin in the game. You know, he was making predictions and they were tested. The current generation wants to always be valued as smart without putting any skin in the game. So they, you know, a lot of physicists, theoretical physicists are doing intellectual gymnastics. They're using sophisticated mathematics. And that serves the role of demonstrating they're smart.

but it doesn't necessarily describe nature. Do you think some of the reason that you're getting a lot of backlash is because people are threatened by you coming out and talking about this? Maybe they see Avi getting all this attention and talking about this, but they've never gotten this amount of attention from anyone about any of their ideas? Well, one aspect of that is jealousy, of course, for that attention. But another one is because I address my main message is that we should be modest, that science is a learning experience and that making mistakes is okay.

That's part of the scientific process. We should be just like kids trying to understand the world and willing to not be so attached to our egos. So I'm trying to remove that connection between the ego of a scientist and the profession. We are trying to understand nature. We should engage in a dialogue with experiments. We should not consider it as an evaluation.

of our abilities. It's not about us. It's about understanding nature. And it's a dialogue with experiments. And we just have to start from a point of modesty, you know, and that modesty is communicated to us by looking at the universe. You know, we are so small, we are so short-lived. How can anyone be arrogant? Okay, that makes no sense to me. How can anyone be racist? You know, that also makes no sense to me because just based on the color of his skin, you decide what the person is. I mean, that's completely ridiculous. So people have this tendency of wanting to feel superior to other people, either by demonstrating that they are smart or by demonstrating that their DNA may be superior to others, all kinds of ways of demonstrating superiority. And it all drives,

it all stems from their ego. And what I say is just leave that aside. That causes the worst in human nature. You know, all of the wars, all of the, the worst things that happen in human history were driven by ego. We should try to push it aside, be as modest as possible, which is what the universe is telling us. Stay modest. You are not at the center of anything. And we might be rep—we might not be the smartest kid on the block. I'm trying to convey this message, and the pushback is in part because people are too attached to their ego. It bothers them, takes them out of the comfort zone. They want to feel as if they are respected, smart, never make mistakes, never have to revise their view of the universe. Just like the philosophers during the days of Galileo.

They didn't want to look through the telescope because they were happy believing that they're at the center of the universe. They were comfortable where they were. Exactly. It's sort of like my daughters saying, we don't want to go to a kindergarten. you know, at home, if we have a small enough environment, at home, we feel as if we are, you know, the smartest kid, there is nobody like us, we feel great, that's our comfort zone. We will never go out. And, you know, that's sort of the tendency, not to explore, because then you feel proud of yourself. You can be arrogant if you limit your view to a small

environment. But it's, it goes against the fundamentals of science because staying, staying comfortable inhibits growth. Exactly. That's my point. Exactly. And that's why I have this battle. And by the way, I'm getting a huge response from the public, a lot of emails, also from people in academia that feel the same, mostly young people, because young people are not attached as much to their ego. And, I'm hopeful for the future. You know, I do not care how many likes I have on Twitter. I just am focused, you know, just like basketball coaches advice their team players. Keep your eyes on the ball, not on the audience.

And that's what I'm trying to do. Now, you don't even have any social media, right? No, I don't because my wife asked me not to have any, and I respected that. And I don't miss that because it frees my time. and also allows me to be more creative without being biased by the herd view. So for my audience that you don't have any social media, so people that are listening or watching this, what can you suggest to them to learn more about what you're doing

or to find more of your writings or your books? Yeah, they can go to my website by putting my name on Google, Avilob. And I have a main website where I list my, commentaries in scientific American. I publish roughly once a week or once every two weeks. I also have scientific papers, more than 800 of them listed there. And books. And they are welcome to say anyone is welcome to send me an email and I'll be glad to correspond. So in general, I do have communication with a broad audience, but not through social media. That's amazing, man. Well, hey, I'm super grateful for you having this conversation with me.

I really appreciate it. I've learned a lot from you. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.