Instant Genius - Why we should be doing more to prepare for contact with alien civilisations

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Are we alone in the Universe? It’s probably one of the most hotly debated questions in science today. In this episode we catch up with theoretical physicist Prof Avi Loeb, author of the new book Interstellar – The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and our Future Beyond Earth. He talks to us about the tantalising possibility that we have already observed alien technology travelling through space, why we should be doing more to look for it and what he found on his recent expedition to retrieve Interstellar material from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Are we alone in the universe? It's probably one of the most profound and hotly debated questions in science today. In this episode, we catch up with theoretical physicist Avi Loeb. He talks to us about his new book, Interstellar, the search for extraterrestrial life and our future beyond her.

He tells us all about the tantalizing possibility that we've already observed alien technology traveling through space, why we should be doing more to look for it, and what he found on his recent expedition to retrieve interstellar material from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. What is your background, you know, how did you come to think about such things? As you know, I went to an expedition to the Pacific Ocean a couple of months ago. We came back also, it was two weeks, and when I entered the private jet, The pilot greeted me and said, welcome aboard, Professor Lowe. And I said, titles are not needed here.

You can call me Avi, because fundamentally, I'm a curious farm boy. So that encapsulates the answer to your question. I was born on a farm very much connected to nature. I jog every morning at sunrise, enjoy the birds, ducks and bunnies that run around me, much more so than the colleagues that I correspond with throughout the day. and this also implies that I have no social media footprint. I don't care how many likes I get. I do feel that as a scientist,

I have the privilege of being guided by evidence, not by what people say, because the most traumatic experience I had as a kid was asking a difficult question at the dinner table and seeing the adults in the room dismissing the questions simply because they didn't know the answer to it. And I thought that by becoming a scientist, I would be able to figure it out myself.

That's really interesting. So what we're going to talk about today is the topic of your new book, Interstellar, The Search for Extrateral Life and Our Future Beyond Earth. What a fascinating topic. So as far as I can tell, this all started for you

with an object named, well, probably not, but with an object named Amuamua. So what did you find so fascinating about that? Why did that spike your imagination? Because I was surprised by the existence of this object, implied that the calculation that I've made the decade earlier was wrong. And so to me, being wrong is actually an opportunity to learn something new. For many people, it's a blow to their ego to recognize that they made a mistake.

But for me, it was an opportunity because we calculated in a paper a decade before Oumu was discovered that, in fact, there should be too few rocks from other. stars that will enter the solar system for us to detect them with the telescope in Hawaii, pan stars. And we predicted that the numbers are smaller than necessary by at least a factor of 100, up to 100 million, based on what we know about the solar system, assuming that all the stars resemble the solar system. And yet, this telescope in Hawaii discovered Omuamua, which was the size of a football field, and it passed within a sixth of the Earth's separation and that was a surprise to me. So I was intrigued. Of course, the natural assumption would have been to say, well, it's a rock from another star, but the astronomers found more about it.

It looked very weird. It had an unusual extreme shape. The amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours. And moreover, it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any cometary evaporation. There was no gas, or dust around it. And I suggested that it's pushed by reflecting sunlight. And for that, the object had to be very thin. It turns out that three years later, we did discover an object that behaved just like that, pushed by sunlight, no cometary evaporation.

And it was discovered by the same telescope in Hawaii back in September 2020. It was given the name 2020 SO, and it ended up being a rocket booster that NASA launched back in 1966. We know that object was definitely technological because we manufactured it. The question is who produced Omoa Muamua. So that gets us onto the guts of one of your most fascinating ideas. A frankly, amazingly insightful idea

that we're looking for remnants or signs of technology from extraterrestrial civilizations. So that stems from the premise that, you know, we are not special or unique. We tend to believe that we are at the center of action, that we are at the center of the universe. We believe that after Aristotle for a thousand years until Copernicus and Galileo realized that, in fact, the earth moves around the sun. And we now know also that we came to the sin, the cosmic lay. Just at the end, over the past few million years, that's when homo sapiens appeared on Earth. And that's one part in 10,000 of the age of the universe. So my point is

rather simple. If you arrive late to the play, just at the end of the play, and you are not at the center of stage, the play is not about you. And you better find other actors who can inform you about the meaning of this play. So that's what I'm seeking. In fact, on the ship that was at the Pacific Ocean that was fittingly called Silver Star, I was jogging every morning at sunrise the way I do on land. And one of the morning, I was approached and asked, it seems like you're running, are you running away from something or towards something? And I said, both, I'm running away from some of my colleagues that have very strong opinions

without seeking evidence to substantiate those opinions. And I'm running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space. So that's really interesting. So we're talking about things called UAPs or unidentified anomalous phenomena. So you just touched on there. Why do so few people study this? Why aren't they interested in it? Because it's fascinating. Well, because it touches the nerve in human existence. I noticed it when I raised my two daughters when they were young. They tended to think that they're at the center of the universe, that in fact there is nobody smarter than they are. And that view changed when we brought them to the kindergarten. And of course, they had a psychological shock. But my point is that it's important for us to adapt to the reality that we all share, irrespective of what it means, because only then we can move forward. And just denying the fact that we may have neighbors will not bring us very far. In fact, knowing that we have a partner out there may inspire

us because it's very likely that another civilization would have more than one century of modern science and technology the way we have. And we might be able to get a glimpse at our technological future by finding their relics. It's just like archaeology. Those senders of any objects that we might find near Earth may not be alive anymore. They may be dead by now because their star died or some other catastrophe happened, but we can still find those packages at our doorstep. So that's really fascinating. So sort of the crux of your idea is rather than waiting for extraterrestrial civilizations to contact us. We should actively be looking for them. Exactly. You know, 70 years ago, Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody during lunch at Los Alamos?

And of course, space is vast, you know, even the Milky Way itself is tens of thousands of light years in size, and the age of the universe is measured in billions of years, 13.8 billion years. So just imagining that he would see evidence at the dining table in Los Alamos without seeking it. I mean, it's similar to a single person at home saying, I don't have any partners by looking around. But of course, to find partners, you really need to go to dating sites. You need to look through your window or at the very least go out to your backyard and check for any objects that came from the street. And we haven't done that. Actually, only over the past decade, we discovered the first objects from outside the solar system.

And guess what? The first two appear to be peculiar. I mentioned Omuamua from October 2017, but about four years earlier in January 2014, the first object was documented by the U.S. government satellites. They recorded a fireball from a meteor, at least half a minute. at least half a meter in size that collided with Earth and was moving extremely fast, and therefore we concluded came from outside the solar system. And the US Space Command confirmed our assertion.

And even though I'm a theoretical physicist, I decided to lead an expedition, experimental project, to retrieve materials from this first recognized interstellar meteor. Why? because this was moving very fast. It was moving faster than 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun relative to the local frame of the Milky Way Galaxy. And moreover, the material strength of this object appeared to be higher than all space rocks documented by NASA over the past decade, 272 of them. So it could have been a Voyager like Meteor. In other words, imagine Voyager, the spacecraft we launched, exiting the solar system in 10,000 years and eventually running into planet like the

Earth. In a billion years, it would appear as a meteor in their sky, and it would have an unusual material strength because it's made of stainless steel, and it would move faster than usual because it was propelled by a rocket. So the point is, it's not a philosophical question. Even though I'm intrigued by philosophy, I decided to go there to the Pacific Ocean and bring the materials back. And actually, as we speak, we are finalizing the scientific paper that reports the results of analyzing the molten droplets from the surface of the object when it was exposed to the fireball that surrounded it as a result of its friction with air. And amazingly, we were able to conclude that the material it was made of came from outside the solar system.

Fascinating. How do we know it came outside of the solar system? So we used the best mass spectrometer in the world in the laboratory of Stein Jacobson at Harvard University, and we were able to figure out the composition of those molten droplets that more than 700 of them that we retrieved from a 10-kilometer region where the explosion was. And just think about it. The ocean depth is two kilometers or so in that location. and these are spherals, basically marbles, the size of the head of a pin, roughly a millimeter in size, the size of a grain of sand. And we found 700 of them on the ocean floor across a region that is 10 kilometers in size. So that was a tremendous challenge, and I salute the professionalism of all crew members,

team members, many of them, the most accomplished scientists and people who worked on expeditions in the past. And at the laboratory at Harvard, we were able to use the mass spectrometer to figure out the composition, and we found elements such as beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium at abundances that are hundreds of times larger than solar system material. And we therefore call this unique composition that was never found before in any sample of spherals of objects from the solar system. We call it belau to indicate the enhanced abundance of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium. Belau. Uranium in some of the spherals, we found at least five of them that have this composition.

Uranium is enriched by up to a thousand times its abundance in the standard composition of solar system materials. And one has to appreciate this as a huge enhancement because all the materials in the solar system came from a gas cloud that was enriched by an exploding star nearby. And we find consistency between different meteorites that came from the solar system, the building blocks of planets, the variations are up to a factor of 10, not more than that. And here we see a deviation by a factor of up to a thousand. And we see it repeated in a number of those spheres. And moreover, we see an excess of spherals along the meteor path.

We don't see it in control regions far away. And so those spherals are unique and they appear only along the meteor path that we were able to narrow down with some data from a seismometer on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. So all together, we have clear evidence that the spherals are unique with composition different than found in the solar system. We also looked at isotopes of iron and found that the ratio of different isotopes of iron deviates significantly beyond any doubt from solar system materials. And finally, I wanted to say that Berilio,

is produced by spalation, the breaking of larger nuclei, atomic nuclei, by cosmic rays, energetic particles. And the enhanced beryllium abundance may be a flag for an interstellar journey, where the surface of the object was exposed to those cosmic rays, much more so than rocks in the solar system that are protected by the solar wind from the cosmic rays. So we have several indicators implying an interstellar. origin or and the first is of course the extra solar composition of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium and also many elements between lanthanum and uranium. These are rare heavy elements.

The second is the isotopes of iron that deviate from the abundance ratio that you find in the solar system. The third is the enhanced beryllium abundance that implies interstellar travel and spallation by cosmic rays. And this combined with the velocity that exceeded the escape speed from the solar system make a very strong case that we did put our hands on materials from a large object that came from outside the solar system. This by itself is a historic discovery because never before did humans analyze materials of a large object that came from outside the solar system.

And then, of course, it raises the second question, was it artificial, technological in origin? And the way to figure it out is not just from the abundances of elements. Of course, one can take those as a recipe in a cookbook where you put those elements together in a laboratory and see what you get. That we can do. Just make a cake out of those elements at the right proportions. But the second approach, which is more promising, is to go back to that experience. edition site and search for big pieces of the object, because then you can tell the difference

between a piece of a rock and the technological gadget, because the gadget may have buttons on it. And, you know, in my last class at Harvard, I asked the students, if we find a technological gadget and it has buttons on it, should we press a button? And half of the class said, no way, please don't press any button, you know, it could affect all of us. And the other half of the class said, please do, we are very curious to know what would have happened if you press a button. I would. And then one student asked me, Professor Law, what would you actually do, given this split vote? And I said, I would take the gadget to a laboratory and study it, examine it before engaging with it. That's probably the correct thing to do.

I guess I'm a little bit too eager. Yeah. You know, one interesting point is we can potentially learn about new technologies by finding technological gadgets from other civilization. So it has commercial value potentially if we figure it out. Otherwise, it's just an opportunity for us to recognize that we are not the smartest kid on the block. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building fit for your ambition for citizens back

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But let's sort of go all the way back to where this sort of thing could have potentially come from. So let's have a look a little bit about the evolution of life. So Earth is frithing with life. But it's your opinion, perhaps we're not unique in being the world. the only living thing in the universe. Yeah, I think it's arrogant of us to believe that we are unique and special because, you know, there are billions of planets, the size of the earth, around stars like the sun, roughly at the same distance within the Milky Way galaxy alone.

And what that means is since most of the stars from billions of years before the sun, you know, we are relatively late comers to the party of life, then it's very likely that there was another civilization, that Albert Einstein was not the smartest scientist who ever lived since the Big Bang. And out of modesty, we should seek that evidence, because if we keep insisting that it's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence without seeking the evidence, it would be a circular argument. We would be left in our ignorance. And anyone looking from the outside would say, you know, they haven't gone. very far from the animal kingdom on their planet. They are still misguided by prejudice, fighting each other in zero-sum games,

the way we do conflicts between nations. It's not a sign of intelligence. I think we would be admitted to the club of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy only after starting to collaborate with each other and exploring space more meaningfully. Because only over the past decade we could see the first interstellar And already we noticed things that are unusual in them. And insisting that everything in the sky is stone, to me sounds like the stone age of science.

Very elegantly put that. So in your book, you mentioned something that I thought was interesting, that you lay out, coming off the back of that, different classes of civilizations. Could you explain that a little bit for us, please? Right. So already in the literature, Kardashian, I thought, about civilizations in terms of the amount of energy that they harvest. We use the energy that is intercepted by the earth from the sun, and that's considered

clean energy. But that's just a tiny fraction of the energy of the sun. The earth intercepts about one part in a hundred million of the energy coming from the sun. And so one can imagine that a more advanced civilization would surround the host star with a megastructure that harvests the entire energy output of the star. Freeman Dyson, who was born in England, conceived of this megastructure, and it's now called Dyson sphere.

So that is the first step, and then one can imagine on the Kardashian scale, going beyond that, and harvesting the energy of a galaxy, for example, or some people said, or maybe the entire universe, but I don't see it as a competition in terms of the amount of energy

being harvested. The way I classify civilizations is based on their ability to interact with their environment. So obviously, rather primitive forms of life take advantage of the nutrients that they find in the environment. They don't modify

the environment at all. They just adapt to it. And humans got to the point where they start changing the environment. We see it now in the context of climate change and pollution. And we actually cause damage to the environment. rather than use it for our purposes, but humans are also capable, of course, of harnessing

what nature gives us in sophisticated ways and using that for our benefit. And of course, the best example for that is modern science, where we, for example, by recognizing that mass can be converted to energy, you know, we were able to build nuclear reactors and understand how stars work. But of course, there is a long way for us to go because we simply don't know the answers to many important questions. And one of them is how to unify the two pillars of modern physics, which are quantum mechanics and gravity. And there were many attempts over the past century to unify the two pillars. Einstein was engaged in that in the last part of his life unsuccessfully.

and most recently for four decades, the prevailing paradigm is string theory, although that theory does not make any predictions about what happened before the Big Bang or what happens inside black holes. It's not testable because it doesn't make predictions. And moreover, there are no experiments on the horizon that will test it. So we don't have a predictive theory as of now, but you can imagine that an advanced scientific civilization might have it because they had more than one century of science, perhaps a millennium, perhaps a million years, or a billionaires. And in that case, if they understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, they might be able not only to create life in the laboratory, which we are getting to doing, perhaps within

a decade or so, we'll do it, but also creating a baby universe in the laboratory, so of recreating the big bang, because we might have quantum gravity engineers that know how. how to do it. And so another civilization could create baby universes, and that to me would be the Class A civilization. Not only is it understanding the environment that it lives in and taking advantage of it, but it can also recreate it. That may explain, for example, why we did have a Big Bang game. It may have been produced by scientists in white coats in some laboratory out there. And that would explain the existence of big banks, just like the existence of humans. You know, you have babies that can grow up and eventually make babies and so on.

So if we figure out the recipe of making a universe like ourselves, our own, we might create a new universe inside of which there will be scientists who will create more universes. And that could explain the big bank. So that I regard as type A civilization, and that's what we should aspire to be. But so far, we're actually destructive. You might call it type D civilization. We destroy our habitat, not even take the full advantage of it. So one thing that you say in the book, you make a very passionate argument about finding another civilization starts without willingness to try.

That's a lovely phrase. Without searching, obviously, we would never find anything. And I do think that the extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. You know, we don't know what most of the matter in the university is. 83% of it is called dark matter, a substance that we never witnessed in the solar system. And we invested billions of dollars trying to find it. We searched for supersymmetry with a large Hadron Collider and didn't find it. That was a contender for the nature of dark matter and the lightest supersymmetric particles.

We haven't found it, but nobody says it was a waste because that's the way science is done. You have conjectures and you test them experimentally. But obviously, just saying that the dark matter may be the lightest supersymmetric particle could have been regarded as an extraordinary claim and that doesn't have any evidence for it. So my point is we really need to seek the evidence. And the nature of dark matter is of much greater interest to the public, now to the U.S. government. There were hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives about those unidentified anomalous phenomena. And the word extraterrestrial was brought up many times there.

And so if it's a subject that is of interest to the government, of interest to the public, scientists have a civil duty to attend to it and clarify, you know, what may exist out there. And there should be at least the same level of funding towards finding the nature of objects near earth that look anomalous. Because these are real objects compared to the search for the nature of dark matter where we have no idea. a search in the dark. And for some strange reason that I don't fully understand, that's not the situation right now. You have a dominant community of the theoretical particle physics community engaged in studying extra dimensions for which we have no evidence whatsoever. And there are large communities of people searching for the nature of dark matter with investments of billions of

dollars in those searches. But nobody allocates funding towards the search for objects near earth that could have arrived or launched or sent by extraterrestrial technological civilization, even though our humanity sent five props over the past half a century towards interstellar space. So we already know that it's possible. So one thing I think a lot of people are going to ask is, so if we're out there actively searching for other species, sort of extrasolar species, is that scary? how do we know what they're going to be like when we meet them? Yeah, so actually Stephen Hawking about a decade ago

argued that we should be careful. And he visited my home actually just seven years ago, 2016 and had the pleasure of interacting with him. But I completely disagree with his point of view because I see the encounter with another civilization, similar to the encounter of ants on a sidewalk with a biker that passes by. I mean, the biker cares less about the ants

because they are so primitive in the way they move relative to the speed of the biker. And, you know, we already see that artificial intelligence is evolving at a rapid pace, exponentially, with a time scale of older just a couple of years. And just imagine what it would be, like in 10 years, a hundred years. So if we imagine our technological future and assign it to another civilization, you know, we don't have anything to fear from it because we don't pose any risk to them.

And they would not be threatened by us. And therefore, they would not be hostile to us. We would look so primitive. It's an opportunity, on the other hand, for us to learn from them. So I see it as a positive for us and something that we should seek, because it's just like getting a glimpse at our technological future. And the worst we can do is basically not look through our windows and just insist that there is nobody out there. So can we speculate on what this civilization might be or might look like? So people have seen Star Wars, you know,

wukies or Yoda or something, or Daleks. But I've spoken to Lord Martin Rees, who has this idea that there won't be biological entities at all. Yeah, I agree with that praise, and I don't like science fiction, by the way, because it violates the laws of physics very often. And I was in the Washington National Cathedral when Jeff Bezos was saying on the stage that he was inspired to establish Blue Origins as a result of watching Star Trek as a kid. And I was sitting next to the Director of National of intelligence, Averyl Haynes, we were all panelists in that forum. And I told her, you know, I never liked Star Trek or any science fiction because, you know, it very often violates the

laws of physics. And she said, Avi, we have to work on you, which I interpreted as if the government does have some interesting data that at least she cannot figure out, even though she has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Chicago. So at any event, coming back to your point, indeed biology as we know it, life as we know it, would not survive in space. The journey takes between stars. It takes a very long time for chemical rockets. It takes 50,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri. So we should have launched that rocket when the first humans left Africa in order for it to arrive right now to Proxima Centauri. That's a very long time. There are lots of dangers in interstellar travel, for example, cosmic rays would damage our bodies.

There are many issues related to the fact that, you know, we evolved through natural selection, Darwinian evolution on the surface of this rock that we call our home, the earth, and we are not suited for space travel. And so it makes more sense to design artificial astronauts that are equipped with artificial intelligence. That will be their brain, so to speak. and they will be autonomous and they could survive a long journey. Now, there is one caveat to all of this. There were recently worms that were found in Siberia, in the permafrost,

and they were frozen. And when they were rejuvenated, they came back to life after 46,000 years. And it may imply that in the future we might understand the biology better to make biological entities that survive very long, journeys. That's a possibility. But as of now, based on what we know, I would agree with Lord Dris and that's exactly my view as well. So by way of something up then, what are the possibilities of the human race leaving Earth and populating other planets? Oh, I think it's rather simple. We just have to change our priorities because as of now, we're investing two trillion dollars a year

in military budgets. And if we were to believe the words of John Lennon, imagine all the people living in peace and accept those words, then we would have a surplus of $2 trillion a year in the world economy. And if we decided to invest it in space exploration, I calculated that within this century,

we will be able to send a QPSAT towards every star in the Milky Way guidelines. galaxy, billions of them. To me, it illustrates the fact that a more intelligent behavior of collaboration on another planet could have accomplished this task, so we might find those packages near us. And, you know, when I went to the Pacific Ocean, the one thing I noticed is that all team members were in the same boat. We were all in the same boat, which means that everyone worked selflessly towards the success of the mission. And I think that when we find a partner out there, we might be inspired to recognize that we are all. All humans are in the same

boat, the earth, sailing through space. And therefore, we should all work together towards the success of our mission rather than fight each other. So having said that, one final question. Are you optimistic? What do you see for the future? Oh, no. I think it's very important to insist to being optimistic, simply because reality is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, I could have said there is no chance we would find these ferrels in the Pacific Ocean, like many of my colleagues argued. And if I were to believe that, I would never go there. And then I would never find anything.

And it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And therefore, I think we must be optimistic. So, in fact, the expedition coordinator brought champagne to the boat. And I asked him, why did you bring champagne? How did you know? I was very worried that we might not find anything. And he said, I was optimistic. So, of course, that must be the way we think in order for us to be successful. However, if you ask me, deep down, do I believe it's realistic to be optimistic about humanity? I wouldn't necessarily say so. I think, you know, I'm looking around at social media, at the interactions of nations.

and we have this tendency to get engaged in zero-sum game, just because we grew up of that culture. Thank you for listening to this episode, Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Avi Loeb. To read more about the topic we just discussed, check out his new book, Interstellar, The Search for Extrrestrial Life and Our Future Beyond Earth.

The current issue of BBC Science Focus is out now, pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio system. combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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