Endless Thread - Bonus: Harvard Astronomer On Why Aliens Aren't Just Science Fiction

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Superstar astronomer Avi Loeb discusses mysteries surrounding the interstellar space object known as 'Oumuamua, why it could be a probe sent by an alien civilization, and how the scientific community should be more willing to acknowledge and embrace uncertainty.

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If you heard our most recent episode, the radio drama based on a sci-fi movie script that was written by Redditors... All right, meatbags. It's time to throw you into space. You know, it was a ridiculous story about aliens and space and this mysterious interstellar object called Omuamua. There are a number of peculiarities about Omuamua that captured the attention of Avi Loeb. He's the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, and he's a superstar in his field.

Time Magazine calls him one of the 25 most influential people in space. He's published more than 600 papers dealing with various astrophysical and cosmological findings. And because he's at Harvard, practically in our backyard, we had to talk to him about this interstellar object, and my co-host, Ben, did. But despite Avi's vast knowledge in the field, he couldn't explain some of the mysteries surrounding Oumuamua. For one, when it spun around over a period of eight hours, its brightness changed by a factor of 10.

And that's much more than any object born in the solar system, such as asteroids or comets, that changed by it most a factor of three or so. Another weirdness was that no one has detected any heat radiating from Oumuwa's surface, meaning that it must be really small and shiny. Also strange is that a decade ago, Professor Loeb calculated how many objects

from other planetary systems we should expect to find in our own solar system. That number? Very, very, very low, like close to zero. The mere fact that it was discovered implies that the population of such objects is much more abundant than we anticipated unless, of course, it's on a very,

specialized orbit such that it's not a member of a population of random objects. So the suggestion here is there should be a ton of these and they should be somewhat observable unless these objects are on a very special kind of predetermined mission. Exactly. Understood. Another very peculiar fact is that this object deviated from an orbit that is just a just shaped by the sun's gravity. Deviated from its orbit,

Omuamua got pushed off its course and appeared to have its own sort of unique trajectory with no obvious explanation for it. What motivated our paper was trying to understand where this extra push is coming from. Avi published that paper in the astrophysical journal last November, and being such a prominent member of the scientific community, people paid attention,

particularly to an explanation. that Avi offered for the existence of this interstellar object. He said, quote, Oh, Muamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization. Avi's gotten a lot of grief from his peers for sharing this idea publicly. And he even admits it was just a theory.

He can't prove it. But, and here's the catch, no one can actually prove him wrong either. That hasn't stopped people from calling him, crazy though. To me, the entire discussion about Umuamua is very similar to an imaginary scene where you see a cave person being shown an iPhone. And this cave person would look at it and think that it might be a rock. A rock, right? And then would show it to other members of his or her tribe. And they would, the wise people there would still say, you know, you know,

it's probably a rock. And how dare you say something else? You know, how dare you talk about something that is different than a rock? Because rocks are everything that we are familiar with. Sure. And so to me, not even putting it on the table for discussion is a crime. Because if you look at the history of science, you know, Galileo Galilei argued that the earth moves around the sun. And he was put under house arrest for that.

Now, this, of course, didn't change the facts. It doesn't matter what is being said on Twitter, what is being said in, other social media or among scientists, this thing is what it is, right? And, you know, the earth still moves around the sun irrespect of what the church said a while ago. And the fact that Galileo suffered for it has no relevance to nature. Now, Avi did clarify that he's not suffering, not really. He can handle his colleague's ridicule, in part because he has tenure, but also because his hypothetical explanation for Omuamua that it's an alien probe,

fits his whole ideology about what science should be. The most common phase in doing scientific research is dealing with uncertainty because we don't have enough evidence, enough data to figure out the truth. And most of the time, we are just conjecturing, assuming things, and trying to figure out what is the truth. And it's similar to the work of a detective

that comes to a crime scene and tries to figure out what's going on. And many of my colleagues say, no, we should close ourselves in a room and communicate to the public only when we know the answer. I think that's actually the wrong approach because the populist movements that you see nowadays, they regard academia as the scientific elite, for example. And for exactly this reason, because we come out with our results when they are finalized, sort of like lecturing to students in a classroom. while I think we would get much more credibility if we were to show the process of uncertainty and the fact that scientists do not agree with each other when the evidence is not clear,

that would give more credibility to the process, it would look more human, and at the same time, people will connect to it and feel as if they are... Part of the conversation. Exactly. And I think it's actually much better for science to be open and transparent

rather than lecture the results to policymakers and telling them what to do, because in fact, then they can say, well, they may have cooked the recommendations in a way that would fit their political agenda rather than if they were to see the accumulating evidence and realize that scientists never agree with each other unless the evidence is overwhelming, they would behave differently. I like this approach. Now, I don't regard dealing with extraterrestrial civilizations as a speculation. And the reason is that we exist and that we know that about a quarter of all the stars

in the Milky Way galaxy have conditions similar to those on Earth. This is essentially the kind of like it's a mathematical impossibility for intelligent life not to exist. Yeah, I mean, if you roll the dice enough times, obviously. will get similar results. And I don't think that we are special. So my premise is based on cosmic modesty. And I think anyone that tries to argue

that we are alone in the universe is showing arrogance. And moreover, I think that if we find an indisputable signal from an advanced civilization, we would realize that we are not the smartest kid on the block, that there are things far beyond what we are able to produce out there. And in order to find out, you know,

if we're dealing with small technological equipment floating in space, it's very difficult to detect it from a distance, even with our best telescopes. So Umuamua, that has a size of at least 20 meters, if it's a perfect reflector, was detected only by state-of-the-art survey designed to discover rocks that are approaching Earth. And in OMAWA

sort of came by Earth on its way out. Yes, within a sixth of the Earth's sun distance and only then we could see it. So just imagine how much traffic may exist in interstellar space that we are not aware of. And my hope is that when we are able to exit the solar system,

we'll get a message back saying, welcome to the interstellar club. So that will demonstrate to us, that not only that we for the first time left our immediate vicinity, but also that there is much more out there that we were not aware of. It will change our perspective on reality. I like the idea of this as like a club that we would join, sort of like a leveling up.

Sort of like, hey, you guys made it. Welcome. That's the optimistic view. Yeah, that's very optimistic. Another viewpoint is that we don't recognize the risk. and it might not be a pleasant surprise. Are you an optimist or a pessimist in that regard? I'm an optimist.

You know where you fall on aliens, but good or bad? I'm an optimist because I think in the big scheme of things, nothing matters. I think the universe is so big and so, for example, there are many planets like the Earth, more of them in the observable volume of the universe than there are grains of sand on all beaches on earth. And therefore, I'm not particularly attached to myself. I'm willing to take risks in my research, because I see the big picture, you know, in the big scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. Let's just figure out the truth. Let's talk a little bit about the sort of theoretical argument of the possibility of a moa-a-moa being an alien probe. You're saying in your research

that is now been published and a lot of people have talked about essentially that you can't disprove it, right? Well, what I'm saying is this object, which is the very first one that we discovered near the earth originating from outside the solar system is weird, okay?

And I'm saying, why is it that the very first object which is supposed to be typical is so weird. I think we should have an option of it being artificial on the table. And obviously, I would love to have more data

on this object. But I've written many papers in the past where I would follow the path that I think is legitimate and plausible. And despite what other people say, because I was burned early in my career where I would suggest innovative ideas

and people would dismiss them and I wouldn't follow on them. And then other people would hear them and follow on them and turned out to be the hottest thing in the field. So at some point, I decided not to listen and just do what I think is right. Yeah, radical honesty.

Yeah, being straightforward. And for example, I don't see extraterrestrials as more speculative than dark matter or extra dimensions. I think it's the other way around because the whole idea behind extraterrestrial civilizations is that we exist and that there are many planets out there that have conditions similar to Earth.

That's not a speculation in my mind at all. I mean, it's a very natural extension of something we see already. We just say, if the conditions are similar somewhere else, it happens there as well. What's the big deal about? And why would that be regarded as a taboo? The answer to that, I think, is, perhaps because there is this literature of science fiction,

this notion of unidentified flying objects on earth that is completely non-credible scientifically. And because of that background, the scientists prefer to shy away from that type. But I say, no, if this is a possibility to explain something we see, we should put it on the table and rule it out based on evidence.

I don't care. I don't like science fiction myself. I don't enjoy going to the movies or reading science fiction book when I see that it violates the laws of physics. So I cannot enjoy it aesthetically. I'm not a science fiction fan. That's funny.

I'm a fan of science and I'm a fan of fiction. But putting them together is not to my taste. Because then when I recognize that something violates the laws of physics, I cannot enjoy it. But I do think that the exploration, the search for extraterrestrial civilization should be part of the mainstream of physics,

the same way that the search for dark matter is, the search for extra dimensions is. I don't see any difference aside from the sociology of science as to why one should be banned from discussion. And therefore, when I come out and put this on the table, I'm struck with surprise, because I didn't plan to have a press release on this. But by the time we were thinking whether to do it or not, I had four television

crews in my office. And I had a, when I, you know, I was on a trip to Berlin in Germany on the same day. And I had a phone call from Good Morning America and CBS this morning that evening. That was a surprise to me. The amount, the level, and I think not just for me, it seems like this story picked the interest of the public at large. And part of it, I think, is the fact that I, as a chair of the department, respected member of the scientific community, is willing to come out and discuss this subject. Also, it must be connected to science fiction. Fascination.

Consuming science fiction, right? I don't care what drives it because I do think that at the end of the day, what I'm trying to do using this platform is to explain the scientific science fiction. process. Yes. And by the end of the day, if I was able, through this communication, to bring a few more teenagers to liking science and to being perhaps scientists in the future, I rest my case. And if aliens get us there, so be it, right? And if they become politicians in Washington, D.C., it's even better. Because appreciation of science all across is important for scientists. So when people dismiss

as being artificial, they express a prejudice. They basically say the chance of it being artificial is zero to start with. The problem with that approach is that prejudice, or gut feeling, is based on

the past. And if you expect the future to resemble the past, it's a very good guide. But if you allow yourself to make discoveries of things you've never seen before, you cannot rely on your prejudice,

you cannot rely on your gut feeling. You have to examine the evidence. And just like Sherlock Holmes said, if you exclude all possibilities, whatever remains, however implausible it is, must be the truth. And so that's the way that the scientists should work. And, you know, in a way,

doing science is similar to doing art, where the outcome is not necessarily obvious. Yeah. And if you want to allow discoveries, you have to take risks in making mistakes along the way. You can't, you know, if you look at Einstein, he made a lot of mistakes that people don't remember. At the end of his career, he said that black holes do not exist. He said that gravitation waves do not exist. So he was wrong. Sure. And, you know, that's because he used these gut feelings, you know. And Galileo, for example, wanted to test the gut feelings that people had, that heavy objects fall faster than light objects.

Everyone thought that's the case. Galileo tested it in Pisa and found out that no, light objects and heavy objects fall the same rate. And so the point of the lesson from all of this is that we should not act just by our gut feeling, we should allow for innovation, we should allow for diversity of ideas when someone says, this phenomena could be explained by an artificial origin, extraterrestrial origin, We should not give a zero likelihood for that to be the case a priori.

We should collect as much evidence as possible to rule it out. I feel like it's somewhat unique to have somebody as open as you are and as accomplished as you are. So I want to throw a couple of other crazy theories your way and you just give me like a quick gut reaction since we're talking gut reactions. So we are all living in a computer simulation. I don't find this idea very appealing because... Appealing or likely? I would find it likely if we see a bug. If we see stripes in the images that indicate something to do with the software malfunctioning.

But otherwise, it looks like reality to me. And perhaps a student that failed in an exam would prefer to think otherwise. time travel is possible. That actually is a possibility that we should consider. It leads to logical inconsistencies. For example, a child can go back and kill his parents. And that is impossible, potentially, right? But perhaps when he pulls the trigger, nothing fires.

So it's possible that physics allows for time travel. in a way that will be self-consistent. We don't know for sure. There are some theorems, some conjectures, but we don't know for sure. The multiverse. It's a possibility,

but I don't like it because it leads to intellectual laziness. Anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. So if we are now conversing here, there are infinite number of replicas of us conversing in a slightly different way elsewhere. But if you allow everything to happen,

And moreover, you have no way of testing it because you can't leave the boundary of our universe. Then I regard that as a philosophical idea without any foundation in physics. Life on Earth didn't come from Earth. Oh, that's quite possible. In fact, we know that all forms of life on Earth have the same chirality. It's all left-handed. The molecules are arranged in some special way. And that one way to do that is by bringing life from outside and planting it here.

What could do that, a piece of rock that flew from Mars, for example, and landed on earth, and we know that such rocks exist could have carried life in it. But another possibility is directed seeding of life. You can imagine another civilization sending out life in tubes or producing life on a planet by sending three-d-printed. So it's completely possible. I wouldn't say it's likely, but it's possible. God or intelligent design? I don't think reality is designed very intelligently,

if you look at it. There are many things that could have been done better. And as a result, I wouldn't assign it to a divine entity of perfect qualities. because there are so many things that are just done wrong in the real world. Which you could also call bugs in the system, which could also be proof that we're all living in a computer simulation. Well, but then I don't have high respect for the architects. And so, you know, indifference from people that admire those architects,

I would be, you know, having a different view. Cats are objectively better than dogs. No, I wouldn't say that. That's my last one. Professor, thank you so much in all seriousness for spending time with us and talking about your work. My pleasure. There's one more thing we should tell you about.

We asked Avi if there would be any possibility of gathering more information about Omuamua in the future. You know, to figure out if there actually is an alien civilization who tried to reach us. His response was surprisingly optimistic. There will be a new telescope that is currently under construction called the Large Synoptic survey telescope, LSD, which within three years will have much greater sensitivity than pan stars and should see many more interstellar objects within one year of observations. And of course, once we recognize those objects, we would like to use the best facilities at our disposal to explore them.

And the importance of my paper was to alert the community of astronomy. to scrutinize the next object as much as possible and maybe even plan a space mission that will fly by the object, take a close-up picture of it, or maybe even land on it. Avi Loeb is currently the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with some more fun stuff to keep the feed warm and, you know, to keep you on your toes.

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