Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Another Alien Asteroid | Avi Loeb

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Starting point is 00:00:50 happy a couple of months ago when I attended a gathering of about 100 CEOs. and some of the most accomplished in the world and some of the most accomplished celebrities. And at the coffee break, I saw Margot Robbie. And I had no way of starting a conversation with her because I don't have much in common. She's a very successful actress. But then someone came with my book to sign it and she noticed it. And she said, oh, are you Avilaub? I really wanted to hear your talk.

Starting point is 00:01:27 but I have to go to a wedding and would you mind telling me about your work? And for 20 minutes, we discussed my work, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In the middle of it, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, showed up and he wanted to shake her hand. He ignored me altogether.

Starting point is 00:01:49 And she wasn't really into money. She wasn't interested in learning more about Nvidia. She really wanted to know whether there is extraterrestrial intelligence. And to me, that is the greatest satisfaction because I address a question that the public and everyone cares about.

Starting point is 00:02:07 I'm not afraid of being ridiculed. In fact, just a few days ago, I wrote an essay with two psychologists trying to analyze why astronomers in the mainstream have a problem dealing with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Starting point is 00:02:24 The mainstream of the astronomy community, decided in the Decadal Survey of 2020 to dedicate of the order of $10 billion over the next two decades to build the Habitable World Observatory to search for microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets, the chemical fingerprints of microbes. And I have nothing against microbes and I have nothing against searching for them. I just find them boring and I think we should hedge our bets and search for intelligent beings out there with roughly the same investment of funds. And in fact, this second path to discovering life in the universe was not recommended at all. It's in the periphery of mainstream astronomy.

Starting point is 00:03:11 However, the public sees it as one of the most exciting questions of science. So you ask yourself, why is it that academia shies away from it? And in this paper that is posted on Medium.com with two psychologists, Omar L. Dadi and Gershon Tenenbaum, we actually analyze the mainstream experts. And we offer an explanation for why there is so much pushback. And, you know, I'm not a therapist. I advise those that, you know, have fever when they hear about suggestions that there might be technological objects near Earth.

Starting point is 00:03:49 I suggest them to find a therapist, to calm them down. Because the point is this is a scientific possibility that we, we should explore like any other scientific possibility. You know, we dedicated billions of dollars to the search for specific types of dark matter. We haven't found it. We searched for supersymmetry with a large Hadron Collider, you know, at the cost of $10 billion. We haven't found it. Did anyone say that was a waste of money or time?

Starting point is 00:04:13 Here is a question the public cares about. Let's address it the scientific way. Absolutely. I think, you know, there's nothing that says, you know, people's attention more, that gets people's attention more than mentioning Margo, Robbie. I should say that. She was accused of being, you know, very mid. Whatever that means, I don't know. Well, I find her priorities. I found her priorities to be in the right place. She cares about science more than money. Yeah. And so let's just get into. You have this article.

Starting point is 00:04:43 I posted it in the YouTube description down below. People can find that. After the episode's over, we'll have more things and so forth to go to it. But what's the thing that you think that the scientific the community is overlooking when it comes to this object. First of all, describe the object. It has this unusual name, but it's very logical, and describe the two predecessors, one of which is inexorably connected to your career. Right. So interstellar objects were discovered only over the past decade or so, because we had surveys that were looking for near-earth objects as a threat. We know the dinosaurs were killed by a giant object, roughly 10 kilometers. in diameter that impacted the Earth 66 million years ago.

Starting point is 00:05:28 We are smarter than dinosaurs. We have telescopes. We can get an early warning. And that was the agenda of building the several survey telescopes, one of which was pan stars in Hawaii that discovered the first interstellar object, or Muamua, in 2017. After that, an amateur astronomer found an object that was a comet, Very similar to the comets in the solar system.

Starting point is 00:05:56 His name is Genadi Borissov, and that comet, interstellar comet, was named after him. So the first one, one eye, Omuamua was one, and the second one, two-eye, Borisov, was found. It was a comet. Omuamua was anomalous. It was pushed away from the sun without having any cometary plume of gas or dust. and it wasn't clear what's pushing it. And I suggest maybe it's very thin. It's just the sunlight pushing it.

Starting point is 00:06:29 And we see that human made the space trash is actually pushed by reflecting sunlight. In fact, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered an object called 2020 SO that was a rocket booster from 1966 pushed by sunlight. So if we produce space objects that are pushed by sunlight, why not consider aliens doing that? But the third one was discovered on July 1st, 2025, this year, just a few weeks ago.

Starting point is 00:06:59 And the reason I realized it was discovered very quickly is because I was invited for a two-hour radio interview on coast to coast. And they asked me to wake up at 3 a.m. to speak with them. And I actually woke up at 2 a.m. I usually wake up early for my morning job. before sunrise every day I jogged three miles. So I was up and then I noticed someone that attended the interview that I had sent me an email and said there is a new interstellar object at least a candidate at that time. That was just the night over which it was realized by a few amateur astronomers that indeed the Atlas survey that's a telescope of half a meter, which by coincidence discovered the third interstellar object, three-eye atlas.

Starting point is 00:07:57 And the reason it's an interesting coincidence is because during the same time, the Rubin Observatory, which is roughly the same place in Chile, they are neighboring each other. Celebrated the survey telescope in the world was inaugurated. This small telescope that is only half a meter, whereas Rubin is 8.3,000, meters in diameter. So this small telescope discovered an interstellar object. Now Rubin can follow up on it and see it as well. Why did he discover this tiny telescope? This object is 4.5 times the Earth's sun separation in terms of distance. The reason is it's very bright for its distance. In fact, if you assume that it's a solid object, like an asteroid, a rock, then it has to be 20 kilometers in

Starting point is 00:09:05 diameter. And that's twice as large as the asteroid that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. Just think about it. Such an asteroid hits the earth once every 66 million years. We get impacts by asteroids the size of a meter or so every year. So there are many more small objects than big objects. And the minute I realized that, the same morning, you know, when I realize, oh, this one is so bright, I calculated the size 20 kilometers. I said, this makes no sense because there are a million objects, the size of a muamua, tens of meters for every object that is 20 kilometers in diameter in the main asteroid belt of the solar system.

Starting point is 00:09:51 So I said, we haven't discovered a million of muamua's before we discovered this one. How come it's so big? It makes no sense. And at the time, just a couple of days later, I was, supposed to go with my wife on vacation. It was the 4th of July. She wanted us to go to Aruba. So here I am at a hotel in Aruba,

Starting point is 00:10:13 thinking about this interstellar object. And I decided to write a paper on the 4th of July and submitted to the archive, submitted to research notes of the American Astronomical Society. I basically made a very simple point. I said, this object cannot be an asteroid to any kilometers in diameter. If it's a solid object, it must be something else. And I calculated there is not enough matter in rocks in interstellar space to account for a 20 kilometer one that we will detect

Starting point is 00:10:49 over a survey of a decade. You know, the Atlas surveyed for five years or so, we would never find a 20 kilometer object because it would mean that there is more mass in interstellar rocks than And all the metals in the Milky Way galaxy per unit volume cannot account for that. In fact, it's about a quarter of the mass in stars that you need per unit volume. And most of the mass in stars, 98% of that is in hydrogen and helium. So you can't have a rock that big detected from interstellar space once a decade. It's just not possible by orders of magnitude. So I wrote this paper.

Starting point is 00:11:32 I also said we should have seen a million of Muammu's like objects. And my suggestion was, well, maybe it's a comet that is very small, less than a kilometer, then there wouldn't be a problem with a mass budget. And it spews out a lot of dust and gas. So you see it as a bigger object just because it's a comet. But when I looked at the images, they didn't look like Borisov, the comet that we have seen before. There was no clear cometary tale that surrounds it. There was a little bit of fuzz around this object. And that fuzz actually was looked at. There were two papers that took

Starting point is 00:12:14 a spectrum of the object and they didn't see any signature of molecules associated with gas surrounding comets. They didn't detect any spectral fingerprints of gas. The only thing they saw is the object is red. So the reflected sunlight from it obtained reddening. Now, reddening is something you see for Kuiper Belt objects in the outer part of the solar system. It's a result of the surfaces of these objects that are icy being bombarded by cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

Starting point is 00:12:53 And you end up with organic molecules forming and objects appearing red. So a red color doesn't mean that we are looking at a cloud of dust. It could mean that, but it could also be that it's the surface of an object that was impacted by cosmic rays. So we don't know for sure whether it's a comet or not. And then I realized, well, this object is strange in many other ways. And that led me to collaborate with two colleagues, Adam Hebert and Adam Crowell on a paper. that I posted today. It will hopefully appear on the archive.

Starting point is 00:13:33 I wrote a medium essay about it. Where I described eight anomalies about 3i Atlas. And if I wanted to summarize these anomalies, my basic message would be, if you are planning an annual vacation, do it before October 29th. Take your vacation before that date. Why? Because this is the time that three-eye Atlas will arrive closest to the sun.

Starting point is 00:14:05 And guess what? It will arrive closest to the sun when the Earth is on the opposite side of the sun. So why would it do that? One possibility. It doesn't want to be observed by our telescopes from Earth when it gets close to the sun. fighter pilot technique of going into the sun to elude your, before there was stealth and before we had advanced technology in World War II, fighter pilots would always attack with the sun behind them, correct? That's interesting. No, but here there is a more practical reason.

Starting point is 00:14:41 People may be aware of something called a berth maneuver. What it means is that if you want to use your engine in order to accelerate, or decelerate, the best time to activate your engines is when you're moving at the highest speed, because then you get the biggest boost in kinetic energy for the engine that you have, for the thrust that you impart on your spacecraft. So that means you need to do it closest to the sun, okay? And you know, we do it for space missions, this maneuver in order to boost them up in in velocity so they can escape from the solar system.

Starting point is 00:15:24 But you can also do it to break, to decelerate. So if you have an interstellar object coming, then closest to the sun, that spacecraft could break and get into a bound orbit and, in fact, visit the inner planets like the Earth. So if they want to do it, that would be the point where they would break. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top. priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connection stays strong even when

Starting point is 00:15:57 the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. That is also a good point for them to move very fast relative to Earth because this object is also on retrograde orbit. It moves in the opposite direction to the motion of the Earth around the sun. So the Earth is moving at 30 kilometers per second around the sun. We know that for a while. And then this object would move at 68 kilometers per second in the opposite direction. That means the relative speed would be 98 kilometers per second.

Starting point is 00:16:42 No chemical rocket that we launch from Earth can reach that speed. The highest speed that we can reach with chemical rockets with a reasonable amount of fuel given the rocket equation, you know, which tells you that you need to increase the amount of fuel exponentially to just benefit a little bit in speed. The maximum speed is a third of that 98 kilometers per cent. We can't really... Somebody said that's proof that it's not made by technology, anything like ours. And in fact, that would be more evidence that it's naturally occurring, not a nitrogen iceberg, but it could be something natural, correct? Well, yeah. But then I'll just finish saying one more thing about the orbit. This orbit, the plane of the orbit of 3i Atlas,

Starting point is 00:17:30 is aligned with the ecliptic plane, the plane, the orbital plane of the earth. So it's on a retrograde orbit, the opposite direction of motion relative to the earth, but it's in exactly the same orbital plane to within five degrees. The chance of that is 0.2% that you know the two angular momentum vectors of the orbital motion of this object and the earth would be

Starting point is 00:18:00 aligned within 5 degrees it's a very small chance and this object came approaches us from the direction of the galactic center which has a lot of crowding by stars so if you wanted to hide yourself

Starting point is 00:18:16 you will come from the direction of the galactic center where there are lots plenty of stars, so early detection is difficult. And then once, you know, terrestrials, earthlings recognize you, you are moving so fast, they can't reach you, which is the situation we're in right now. We cannot launch a rocket that will reach this object in time. And it could do a maneuver just when we can't see it behind the sun. When you put together all of these coincidences, now it turns out also that, let's assume the orbit was drawn randomly. Okay, so you take it. exactly the orbital parameters that this object has, you just change the time of arrival.

Starting point is 00:18:57 So you assume that the time of arrival is random. And then you ask yourself, what's the chance that it will come so close to all the inner planets like Mars, Jupiter, Venus? It turns out that the chance of that happening, it comes really close to all three of them, except the Earth, because the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun. The chance of that is 0.005%. So out of all arrival times, there is a very special arrival time that is associated with 3-I Atlas

Starting point is 00:19:34 in which it passes really close to these planets. And guess what? With just a ballistic missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile, the type that the Iranians are using, you can launch something from this object at less than five kilometers per second and reach any of these planets, Venus, Jupiter, you know, or Mars. So, I mean, one possibility is that it's a maneuver that allows it to send frogs from a mothership, you know, to those planets.

Starting point is 00:20:13 Now, why is this hypothesis at all worth considering? Now, I'm not claiming that it's not a comet. It may well be a comet, and we will be know about it. Once it gets closer to the sun, we will see the cometary tale. We'll be sure it's a natural object. But it's worth thinking about this, you know, for the same reason that Pascal had the wager about God. You may know about it. Pascal basically argued that, you know, what are the benefits and the downside of,

Starting point is 00:20:47 thinking about God. I mean, the benefits if God exists are tremendous because that would have huge implications. The same is true here, implications for humanity. We have to consider this possibility. We have to get as much data as possible. It's possible that this object is just a comet. That's the most likely situation.

Starting point is 00:21:05 But it's an interesting exercise to have because there will be 50 other objects that Rubin Observatory will find and we are developing a methodology. And I actually wrote an essay just a week ago, how to distinguish a spacecraft from a rock. You know, what would be the signatures of a spacecraft that you can look for and distinguish it from a rock? And, you know, we should check all 50 objects that we find. If one of them happens to be a spacecraft, you know, obviously it would have huge implications for humanity.

Starting point is 00:21:40 I don't think I would spend any time going to Stockholm if that happens to. be the case because it would be far more important to figure out what we are dealing with than to pay attention to a price given by humans to humans. Well, I think that's wonderful. You've touched on all my favorite hot button issues on me, but let's get into some. We've got a thousand people watching already, and we just barely have gotten started. You mentioned, and this is Brian Bate, I think, all the way. You mentioned this might be related to what's called the dark forest hypothesis. I did a video recently about all the different reasons that we might not have seen aliens. I had a sort of dark petri dish hypothesis, which is that we're all kind

Starting point is 00:22:25 of microbes in the in the petriverse, which is what I called it. And bacteria wades war on each other just as well. Talk about the dark forest hypothesis. Let's start at a layperson level because there's undoubtedly a few lay people out there among a thousand people watching. What is the dark forest hypothesis? And how does it change the way that we look for extraterrestrial life, including Ms. Rock, which you may get a fragment of if you go to my website, Brian Kade.com. I'll give one to Avi next time I see you. But Avi, what is the dark bars? Yeah, so it's one of the proposed solutions to Fermi's paradox. Enrico Fermi, in 1950, had lunch at Los Alamos. He was not afraid discussing extraterrestrials with his colleagues.

Starting point is 00:23:06 You know, that was not ridiculous. My great colleague, Herb York, who was with him here from San Diego. Yeah. It just shows you that. this is a question that we should all address. It should be part of the mainstream. This should not be ridiculed. It's ridiculous for us to ignore it. It's actually not intelligent for us to ignore the possibility that we are not the smartest kid on the block. That is a sign of non-intelligent scientist to ignore that possibility. But at any event, Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody? And one possible solution is that our cosmic neighborhood is full of aliens.

Starting point is 00:23:46 You know, there are many of them out there. But they are silent. And that explains why the SETI community was searching for radio signals. They didn't find anything because all these civilizations are afraid of predators. I mean, some of them were bruised probably in engagements. And, you know, it's just like a dark form. You don't know if you are at the top of the food chain. There might be an animal more powerful than you.

Starting point is 00:24:13 It's dark. You don't know what's out there. And the best strategy for survival would be to avoid contact, to be silent, for nobody to recognize that you exist. Now, obviously, the biggest threat to you would be a young, emerging technological civilization, because they might become more powerful than you are. So you really want to do a reconnaissance mission to, you know, nearby stars to figure out if there is any potential risk looming on the horizon. And three-eye Atlas actually arrived into the solar system. And here I'm talking about the outer boundary of the solar system, the outskirts of the or cloud, which is, you know, the boundary is 100,000 times the Earth's sun separation, 100,000 AU.

Starting point is 00:25:04 If you take 60 kilometers per second, which is the interstellar speed of this object when it entered the solar system, it would take such an object about 8,000 years to cross the entire 100,000 astronomical units. So 8,000 years. That's roughly when humans started to document their history on Earth. So this object entered, you know, came within halfway to the nearest star. about 8,000 years ago, and then enter the solar system on its path towards the sun. And of course, you know, if it's by design, then we cannot do the statistics, assuming that it went on a random trajectory and then you get that if it's 20 kilometers in diameter, there isn't enough mass in rocks to account for such an asteroid.

Starting point is 00:25:58 Instead, if it came straight into it on a plunging orbit towards the sun, there is no statistical argument that you can use to figure out how much mass there is in objects like that, because by design, it came in our direction. And so in a way, you know, this could be evidence for the dark forest if this object is technological, and we need to find out by collecting more data. And it's just a useful exercise of also demonstrating to the public that science can be helpful in saving humanity. I mean, we are all aware of issues related to climate change, issues related to AI. But I'm offering here one additional issue.

Starting point is 00:26:48 When we discover interstellar objects, we should check whether any of them might be technological in origin, because there is a possibility that we're, we are not alone. Soon I'll ask you what I've always wanted to, but probably never asked you what you would say upon first contact if it was indeed found to contain alien intelligence. Before we get there, what is kind of the best hope of mankind say, what is the best case scenario for this object?

Starting point is 00:27:15 Right. So there are two possibilities. If you believe in the dark forest hypothesis, which was, by the way, was popularized in a book, the dark forest by Xi Jin Liu who also wrote the books about the three body

Starting point is 00:27:34 probe and Netflix documentary so you know it's obviously you know there is the possibility that they are very friendly you know and and they just come to visit us

Starting point is 00:27:51 in which case we should accept them with open arms And if you're an optimist, you know, going on a blind date, if you go on a blind date, always assuming that your partner has good intentions, you know, maybe you will be lucky and you will be right. But I assume that many people who went on blind dates found there is some probability that your partner will not be necessarily with good intentions. and that's the second possibility, right? And in that case, you know, it's an existential threat. We have to worry about it because we don't know how advanced their technologies are. We don't know their intentions.

Starting point is 00:28:36 And, you know, here on Earth, we serve in restaurants on the menu, animals that we think are less intelligent than we are. You just find a cow, you find, you know. I had a difficult time actually looking at the menu of a fish restaurant in Boston that had an octopus on the menu because octopi are, you know, they are quite intelligent and eating them is not, you know, with an easy heart. At any event, we eat animals that we think are less intelligent than we are. Just think about another species visiting us.

Starting point is 00:29:12 They could put us in their soup. Yeah, I know. maybe the proof of their lack of intelligence or the limits of their intelligence is that they don't know that they're on the menu, as Stephen Hawking once put it. So here's what I want to ask you. You are at the arguably the top university, the East Coast version of UC San Diego. And you have very strong resources because you're so persuasive. I've often said, I've heard it said, actually, Avi, I've never mentioned this to you. But if you're good at salesmanship. That has a dirty connotation, but I don't think it should. I think I have to sell

Starting point is 00:29:49 things as a scientist to the public, to funding agencies. It doesn't mean I'm deceptive, but I've heard it said once by someone like Jim Simons, actually, that if you're good at salesmanship, you can basically do anything, and your colleagues who aren't as good as you will hate you for it. And I'll ask you, you have resources at your disposal, you have great people at your disposal, little brilliant minds like Margot Robbie and Jensen Huang and everything else. What would you use to do? What would you do if we found out that you have one hour to sort of communicate with this object? What would be the first question, the first comment or what would you do if you found out

Starting point is 00:30:29 there was indeed extraterrestrial intelligence associated with either creation of or the navigating thereby of this object three eye atlas? Well, first I should say my work is really easy because this subject is of great interest to wealthy individuals and to the public. And the way I see it is that the mainstream of the astronomy community is shooting itself in the foot by saying let's not discuss it. So they're avoiding a subject that could bring huge funds to research. And I can say that because I'm getting those funds. I don't rely on funds obtained from the National Science Foundation or from NASA. I'm getting wealthy individuals.

Starting point is 00:31:14 You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Starting point is 00:31:33 Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. My front door at home that come to see me and are providing me with the research funds that I'm using in the Galileo project. And there is a missed opportunity here.

Starting point is 00:31:55 And all I'm saying is even within federal funding, if the astronomy community were to hedge the bets and allocate a significant fraction of the funds, not just to the search for microbes, but to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, there would be much more enthusiasm in the public among taxpayers to fund those projects. But coming back to your question, which is the more serious one, you know, I really am seeking a higher intelligence in interstellar space because I don't often find it here on earth. That's one reason I do that. And the question that I would like to ask such a higher intelligence, the first one, would be what happened before the Big Bang.

Starting point is 00:32:35 So, you know, with a Simon's observatory, you are searching for the clues at what happened after the Big Bang. I really want to know if they know what happened before the Big Bang. Because for that, I mean, you might not have any observational clues, but if they have a theory of quantum gravity, it would educate us about, you know, what happens inside a black hole. Well, you know that tractate Haggiga says it's forbidden to speculate on what happened before days were created. But luckily, you know, rabbis don't review our grant proposals. No, I spoke with rabbis and I also spoke with members of Christianity today that came to ask me, what will happen, you know, if we discover extraterrestrials? And my comment was, you know, it wouldn't change your belief in God because, you know, I have two daughters. And when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of my love to the first one.

Starting point is 00:33:31 So to imagine that God can attend to only one child, so to speak, in the entire cosmos, is really the meaning. I mean, there must be a lot like us. We might not be the smartest in our family. There might be siblings that we wish to meet. They might be more accomplished than we are. And the religious people accepted that. They have no issue with that. But the thing about what happened before the Big Bang is once you have that recipe, you can figure out what God.

Starting point is 00:34:01 may have done before the you know the story that you find in the old testament you know what you in fact you can you can play the role of God it's like having a recipe for a cake if you know how to make a cake all you need is an oven so in this case you will need to create the maybe plank temperature plank density medium in an accelerator that we currently cannot really accomplish but if you know the recipe you might aspire to bake that cake, to create a baby universe. So that would be my first priority.

Starting point is 00:34:37 Then, of course, the second one is, you know, where is the nearest meeting place, the hub, where I can meet extraterrestrials. You know, I would really enjoy the conversation and learning from them, figuring out what their problems are, what their life experiences are. I see it positively because I believe that in life, it's better to be an optimist

Starting point is 00:34:58 because life is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy. But maybe I'm naive. You know, Stephen Hawking was really very afraid of contact. I think of it this way. You know, we are short-lived. We just live a century or so at best. You know, let's just have the most fun. Let's learn the most.

Starting point is 00:35:18 And, you know, by meeting neighbors, we can have a significant, you know, jump in our understanding of the cosmos that would take us a lot of time to learn ourselves. I want to talk to you about a conversation I had with Govert Schilling yesterday. You endorsed his most recent book, Target Earth. And I brought up the fact that there are three major impacts. Let's see if I can. That there were three major impacts that at least were related to the formation of this conversation taking place. I don't see why I'm not able to get this video up.

Starting point is 00:35:55 Hold on the second here, Avi. So there's three impacts that, at least in my mind, have been responsible for the fact that we've had the ability to have this conversation. The first was that there was this impact called VEA, which took out the early solar system's first initial constituents, shall we say. In other words, the pre-existing Earth here. I'll play the video one more time. You can't see it, but I'm showing a large object the size of Mars. or something hitting the early Earth, right? So that was collision number one that formed our moon,

Starting point is 00:36:32 which is obviously quite critical to our existence in many ways. The next one was the late heavy bombard. The next level of kind of not consultation with aliens or something like that, but would have been responsible for the next generation of life on Earth or even to avoid death and destruction. So another interesting idea that I had over the past week is the following. You know, we are planning, or at least the astronomy community in the US, is planning to spend more than $10 billion over the next two decades in the habitable

Starting point is 00:38:08 world observatory to find whether there is life on planets far away. Okay, by observing their atmospheric composition. They are very far away. And if we find oxygen or methane, or other molecules, we might actually be fooled by geological processes that produce these molecules. But here is another method to find whether there is life around other stars that I thought about just over the past week. The method is if there is an interstellar object that is coming close to Earth,

Starting point is 00:38:46 for example, if it comes behind the motion of the Earth around the sun, then the relative speed of this object relative to Earth, Earth would be not big. The escape speed at the Earth's location is 42 kilometers per second. So you could have an interstellar object moving at 42 kilometers per second at the location of Earth and the Earth is moving at 30. The difference is just 12 kilometers per second, which is something that a rocket can easily accomplish. So we can in principle send a mission, just like the Osiris Rex mission that we sent to the asteroid Benu. And we can land on this interstellar object.

Starting point is 00:39:29 Now, when we brought 120 grams of material from Benu to Earth, it was examined in laboratories. And just half a year ago, there were a number of papers, one of which was in nature and the other one elsewhere, that they reported that you can have these building blocks on a rock. And in addition, there is a Martian rock that was analyzed decades ago that didn't heat up by more than 40 degrees Celsius. And microbes could have survived. So here is an interesting possibility.

Starting point is 00:40:34 Suppose there is an interstellar object that we land on. We bring some materials back to Earth, just like Osiris Rex did for the asteroid Benu. and then we examine those materials and find evidence for microbes or evidence for the building blocks of life. It would be really interesting to see if those are the same building blocks of life as we know it. This is a completely different approach to finding evidence for life, primitive life, near another star. Okay. So it's not based on remote observing. It's based on taking a sample from an interstellar rock.

Starting point is 00:41:09 and that's in the case of, you know, primitive life, microbial life. And of course, if it's a technological gadget, then we can learn much more. So that's what I wanted to bring up in this context, but I also calculated in the same essay that I wrote about this idea on medium.com, I calculated what's the chance that Earth was hit

Starting point is 00:41:34 by an interstellar object, you know, And I found that there should have been tens of impacts by objects the size of a Muamua or Borisso, but not of the size of a three-eye Atlas. And, you know, those could have brought life to Earth. Who knows? Maybe life was brought from another star. We just don't know that. So in terms of, you know, what your colleagues and you will be looking for in the next few months,

Starting point is 00:42:05 just before I take some questions from the audience. So a reminder, can ask questions here on Twitter, X, whatever you call it, as well. Down below, I'll take some of the good ones. And don't forget, you can win your own fragment of an interstellar meteorite. Maybe not interstellar, but it's an actual meteorite. If you go to Brian Keene.com slash YT or X, you'll win it. Guarante to win one if you have a .edu email address. I'd love to give these out because it's a tangible piece of something older than the Earth,

Starting point is 00:42:30 and people don't realize that you can see these things. You can collect these things. I'm going to be interviewing Dante Loretta, who's the PI of the Benu Mission Return sample in just a few weeks. As I said, I interviewed Govert Schilling yesterday. You gave a beautiful endorsement of his book. I was sharing with him some of those encounters. What's the latest on Amuamua? Is there anything that has been learned since the seven, eight, what is it, eight years now since it was discovered?

Starting point is 00:42:58 And then you put forth your astonishingly bold hypothesis of it being extradictory. terrestrial. What do we know now about Omoa that we didn't last year when we talked the last time about this topic? We don't know much because it became very faint and we couldn't really observe it beyond the early 2018. So we just saw it for a few months. And the astronomy community thought that it's a rock. First, a comet and then when it was not a comet, an asteroid, but then it was pushed away from the sun. The bottom line is there are too many questions that we have no answer to because there is no way of getting more data on it. And as a result, you know, the current approach

Starting point is 00:43:37 of the mainstream of comet experts was summarized in a paper, written, published in December, 2024 that argued, maybe it's a member of a class of dark comets, meaning comets that don't have a cometary tail that is visible, which is an oxymoron because a comet is identified by the cometary tail and there wasn't any around So actually in that paper, there were a number of dark comets that were reported close to Earth. And with a colleague of mine, this is a paper in preparation.

Starting point is 00:44:09 We're actually demonstrating that most of them are space missions by the Soviets and the Americans over the past 50 years. Most of them are debris, space trash that was left around. And you can call them dark comets, but they are not comets. Right. So, yeah. So we have some questions from the audience, most brilliant in the known universe. Don't forget to subscribe. You would be surprised, Avi, only like 30% of the people that are addicted to the show actually click that little button.

Starting point is 00:44:39 And, you know, a doctor say, be like Avi, exercise your digits, push that thumbs up button too. Okay, Avi, Bob Gray is asking, could we land on Atlas? Could we land on 3i Atlas? Or is it moving too fast? Yeah. So it will move at perihelion, closest to the sun, at about 98 kilometers per second, in the opposite direction relative to Earth. And there is no way that we can reach it with chemical rockets.

Starting point is 00:45:07 In fact, we could have had a chance to intercept it if we would have detected it at least a year earlier. And perhaps if it's by design, if this orbit was selected, it was selected such that the object would move very little in the sky when it's far away and it's in the direction of the galactic center. So we would notice it. And indeed we didn't notice it. With the Rubin Observatory, we can do better and perhaps detect many more interstellar objects. But my point is that right now, we detected it so late that there is no way with chemical rockets to even intercept it. You know, I was, we include some plots in our paper that you can find in my medium essay.

Starting point is 00:45:52 And you will see from these plots that we lost the opportunity. If we were to detect it a year earlier, we could have intercepted it. Okay. So ammo cat dog, which is a name I almost chose for my newly acquired cat slash dog, asks, is it possible to view it through an amateur-sized telescope? I mean, the Atlas telescope is only a half meter, right? So there are a lot of amateurs I know that have half meter bigger telescopes even. We're building one here in San Diego, actually, to do polarization of asteroids.

Starting point is 00:46:22 But tell me, obviously. Yeah, could we see it? The answer is definitely yes, especially if it's a comet. Because if it's a comet, as it gets closer to the sun, it may start to get activated. There will be more heat deposited on its surface, and you will start to see those plumes of gas. coming off it. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're

Starting point is 00:46:54 building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. And then it will reflect more sunlight. So definitely watch out. And the coming months are the most exciting. We could see it from Earth until October 1st. Okay. So the coming months are interesting.

Starting point is 00:47:13 It will get closer to the same. sun and then we won't be able to see it during the month of October. That's when it's the brightest. But as I mentioned before, it just happens to be blocked by, I mean, there is an eclipse of this object by the sun. That's an unusual solar eclipse, an eclipse by the sun of an object behind it, instead of what we are used to. We are used to eclipse in the other way. So this object will be eclipsed until the end of October, but then in November you can see it again. and in December, the Earth comes back to the other side of the sun and it will get to the closest distance to this object

Starting point is 00:47:53 if it's a rock or a comet, you know, so that it doesn't change course. Of course, the reason I said you should take a vacation before October 2090s is if it happens not to be a comet. So if we don't see a cometary tale, that would be really intriguing. Irrespective of the trajectory, just the fact that it's a 20 kilometers, object. You know, it cannot be, there is not enough mass in rocks in interstellar space to give you

Starting point is 00:48:20 a 20 kilometer object every decade. And what I'm saying is by orders of magnitude, I'm not talking about a factor of two, orders of magnitude, several orders of magnitude off, the numbers just don't match. So if it's not a comet, it's really strange and we should be worried about it being technological. Okay, so the next question was the Amuamua stuff from Snack Entity, who asks, let me add that up back there. Snack entity says, if the stuff about Amuamua is still scientifically legitimate, what do you obviously think about the UFO activity and the recent claims from even the Pentagon that some of it, at least, was an intentional psychological operation meant to haze our soldiers, which is reprehensible, But does this, did recent disclosure, you know, kind of nothing burger in some sense,

Starting point is 00:49:17 did that cause you more or less belief in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence or just cast doubts about the stupidity of natural intelligence? Well, the point is I don't rely on people. I want to rely on data. And that's why I established the Galileo project. We have three observatories, one in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, a third one that we are now assembling in Nevada. And we will collect data about these UAPs and be able to tell if all of them,

Starting point is 00:49:49 millions of them every year that we will monitor. We will have the largest data set ever collected in the coming year. We will be able to tell you whether one in a million seems not to be human-made. If all of them are human-made, so be it. I will not feel as if I wasted my time because whatever we learn can be useful for the Department of Defense. they cannot identify all the objects. That's a national security concern. And my point is the machine learning software that we develop,

Starting point is 00:50:21 the assembly of sensors that we put on our observatories. I will be delighted to give it to the Department of Defense for them to improve our safety. National security needs to be informed about any objects that were produced by adversarial. Serial nations. So I would not feel that the time was spent, it was wasted because they can use it. But on May 1st, 2025, just a few months ago, I actually gave, I attended a briefing in the US Congress. And I spoke for 20 minutes saying, look, this is an issue of importance for national security.

Starting point is 00:51:03 But if we do find that one of these millions of objects is extraterrestrial in origin, that would be the biggest discovery in science. So it's just the icing on the cake. And it's clear to me that this should be done by scientists. So people say, well, the Department of Defense invested billions of dollars in sensors. My point is, it's not about the sensors. It's the question of how you analyze the data. You know, we all know that you really need the best minds to work on a problem in order to solve it. It's not the hardware that is doing the analysis. It's the people who apply AI software. And, you know, the best example is the Manhattan project that recruited the most talented physicists. And I said to the congresspeople that were there, I said, look, if you think that it's a national

Starting point is 00:51:50 priority, I recommend investing a billion dollars in figuring out the nature of unidentified anomalous phenomena. That's what I said on May 1st in the U.S. Congress. And I said, look, that would serve well the Department of Defense because you will be able to attract the best minds in physics to do the job over a period of a few years. Just like the Manhattan Project, if you think it's a national priority, we should do it. So, Avi, if you were the kind of monarch, melek for a day, and you had access and control over every major observatory in space on Earth,

Starting point is 00:52:27 landers, probes, et cetera, but you only have a day. And you could coordinate one day's worth of all the astronomical glass on Earth in space and elsewhere, perhaps. What would you do? Military, civilian, what would you do? What would be your top priority and how would you deploy this vast arsenal

Starting point is 00:52:47 of telescopic technology? It would be the same as my priority right now, searching for objects near Earth or within the solar system that are moving in ways that appear to be anomalous. These are outliers that do not look like rocks. You know what I discovered just a few months? ago that there is a whole class of objects that is labeled as empty trash bag objects.

Starting point is 00:53:14 Apparently, you know, some amateur astronomers see objects that are moving in zigzag motions. They think it must be broken pieces of satellites that are being pushed by reflecting sunlight. So they call them empty trash bag objects. And they just ignore them. It's not reported. You can't find the data. Why? Because maybe it's important for national security.

Starting point is 00:53:37 So when people say there are no anomalies, it's because they are brushed under the carpet, either because they might be of national security relevance, so the government keeps them secret, or astronomers, just anything that doesn't behave the way they expect, they ignore. What did they do about Oumuuma? They said, well, it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. Now, some say it's a dark comet. Just by assigning the word comet to it, even though there is no evidence that. it was a comment, you say, I can brush it under the carpet of traditional thinking. That's the

Starting point is 00:54:13 wrong approach. That's actually anti-science, the way I see it, because as a scientist, you should be curious. Science is the privilege of maintaining our childhood curiosity. So when there are things we don't know, we should admit it. We don't know what the dark matter is. We don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what some of these objects that show non-gravitational acceleration, like Omuamua, where? We should admit it. We don't know. And what does it means? It means we should collect more data on objects like it so that we can figure them out. That's the approach of science. It's not the ridicule, the pushback against alternative explanations. We should have the technological option on the table that we are not alone, that there are things

Starting point is 00:54:54 like us that existed for billions of years. Why should we have that on the table? Because we exist. And we know that, you know, there are billions of Earth's Sun analogs in the Milky Way galaxy alone. and most of the stars from billions of years before the sun. So how dare we be so presumptuous to think that we are unique and special? You know, my daughters, when they were young, they thought that they are unique and special because they were at home. We paid attention to them. They saw other houses in our street, but they never imagined that there are children just like them in those houses.

Starting point is 00:55:30 And they had a psychological shock on the first day in the kindergarten. And my point is, we see other houses. We see Earth's Sun analogs. And the mainstream of astronomy, believe it or not, claims that they have no residence. These are empty houses. And it's an extraordinary claim to imagine that they are neighbors. And I say, no, it's actually an ordinary claim. And let's just find, let's collect evidence.

Starting point is 00:55:54 Let's put a billion dollars or $10 billion towards figuring out whether these houses have residence. So I can't resist, but to ask you questions that are not related to extraterrestrial intelligence. if you'll indulge me, Avi, how often, you know, we only get to talk every so often. But recently I had on the former spokesperson of the DESE experiment, Kyle Dawson, who's a professor at University of Utah. And as you know, there was recently a claim that they have 4.2 Sigma evidence that excludes a cosmological constant. So what does this mean? How did you react to this information? Tell me what papers you've already written about it because you have just the most prolific of any living,

Starting point is 00:56:35 scientists that I get to talk to of the honor of talking to. But, you know, what does this do for our buddy old Einstein over there? What is he, is he thrown out the window or not? And then we'll get into AI. I still want questions from the audience. Avi is going to be generous, a few more minutes. So put into more questions in the chat and Avi, take it away. What are this new result on dark energy? So the real problem with the DESE report was not so much that the dark energy has an evolving equation of state. You know, the cosmological constant, has a simple equation of state where the pressure equals minus the mass density. However, the DESE results suggest that the proportionality constant is actually smaller than minus 1.

Starting point is 00:57:20 Okay. Now, this is called phantom in particle physics, phantom behavior. It violates the null energy condition. It's a huge problem because if you have a proportionality constant less than minus one, you can potentially build a time machine, you can produce negative masses. I had a conversation with Juan Madsena just last month at the conference, and it's just untenable for all we know about quantum field theory, cosmology, and so forth. So having a proportionality constant less than minus one is really a serious issue in physics, and it's sort of like imagining that you have negative masses, which we cannot imagine.

Starting point is 00:58:08 So I would suggest a different solution. In fact, I wrote a scientific paper that suggested a different solution. I knew it. Yeah. Instead of, and, you know, that paper, we are now writing the follow-up paper to that as we speak, in fact, in this week it should be completed. And that is done with Xinjiang Cheng, We wrote a paper suggesting that the problem is not with a dark energy, it's with a dark matter.

Starting point is 00:58:38 So if you allow the equation of state of the dark matter to evolve instead of the dark energy, then you could get the same result regarding the DESE data. And we showed how it's possible and we are now even examining the possibility that it will resolve the Hubble tension, which is a completely different problem. My issue with the DESE results is this proportionality constant called W being less than minus 1 because it creates huge problems for fundamental physics. And, you know, one thing, you know, as a theoretical astrophysic, one thing you should always keep in mind is, you know, just minimize the casualties to traditional physics. You can't say, oh, we break everything.

Starting point is 00:59:28 This is the result from the X. you have to think about a way of accommodating the result with a more conventional explanation. Yeah. I talked to Lawrence Krauss recently about his new book, The War on Science, and you'll be happy to know that Harvard plays a big role in that book. I won't spoil it. It comes out in two weeks. But there's considerable doubt on his part on these four-point, whatever Sigma claims. And he pointed out, I was part of an event, perhaps, as one way to call it, as were you. That was 5 Sigma announced there at lovable Harvard University's CFA when you were the issue is really systematic. I mean, often people quote the statistical errors, but we might be

Starting point is 01:00:12 misinterpreting the data. For example, they are mixing different data sets, including supernovae, which might not be as reliable, because we don't understand the physics of supernovae standard candles. By the way, Adam Riss told me privately that the reason he and you know, went in the direction of using supernova, type 1A supernovae to as a cosmological ladder, as distance indicators, is because he was a student in my class when I came to Harvard, the first class on cosmology. And I basically explained to the class that we can learn about cosmological parameters by measuring distances. And he, you know, realized that's a great thing for him to pursue for his PhD. and later on post-Docan, he got the Nobel Prize for it.

Starting point is 01:01:00 So he thanked me for mentioning that in my class. And you don't think we'll have to give it back, right? He won't have to give back his Nobel Prize, I hope. No, no, no. He discovered it. I didn't discover it. I just suggested. He won't have to give it back if Tark Energy turns out to be not a cosmological constant.

Starting point is 01:01:15 No, he could get, if the Hubble tension pans out, he could get a second Nobel Prize, you know. Yeah. Okay. First cause, first cause asks you, could an intelligence, Biches accumulates so much data, information, that it creates a gravitational black hole. Basically, talk about the notion, both of which were coined by the same guy, John Archibald Wheeler. Did you know Wheeler when you were at Princeton? Yeah, I met him on occasion, but I was not closely. I didn't collaborate with him.

Starting point is 01:01:48 Yeah, so he talked about information, it from bit, the creation of the universe, the black hole. He coined the term, was responsible for coining the term. director or the former director of Black Hall Initiative. Tell us about that. Could own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million

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Starting point is 01:02:27 Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Enough. Data, AI, singularity, cause an actual singularity in space time. Right. So a black hole has a characteristic size. It's like a prison from which you cannot escape. Another analogy, it's like Las Vegas.

Starting point is 01:02:44 Whatever happens in it stays in it. Okay. And so the size of a black hole was already figured out by Carl Schwarzschild, the 1916, shortly after a few months after Einstein came up with his equations, and he sent a postcard to Einstein from the front of the battlefield during the First World War, and Einstein published it, and then he died a few months later. But the point is there is this Schwarchild radius of the event horizon of a black hole, which you can derive actually by saying, you know, how do you know if a rocket escapes from Earth?

Starting point is 01:03:17 I got this question this morning, actually, and I explained, a rocket escapes from Earth, if its kinetic energy exceeds the gravitational potential energy. So the kinetic energy is one per unit mass is one half, the velocity squared. The potential energy is Newton's constant G times the mass of the Earth divided by the radius of the Earth, GM over R. And if half V squared is bigger than GM over R, the rocket escapes. Now imagine equating V to the speed of light. That's the maximum speed that you can have. That means, that if the object, if you have a point mass, there is a radius inside of which the escape velocity

Starting point is 01:03:59 would be bigger than the speed of light. Because GM over R would exceed one half C squared. That's exactly the Schwarzschwarzschild radius. So inside the Schwarzschwarzschild radius, even photons, particles of light cannot escape. Why is that important? The Schwarzschild radius is proportional to the mass of the point mass in the middle, the black hole.

Starting point is 01:04:20 So you can ask, how much do I need to pack that mass in all, what kind of density do I need to reach before the black hole would form? I need to bring all this mass within the Schwarzschild radius. So the mass density that I need to accomplish is the mass of the object divided by the volume associated with Schwarzschild radius, which is 4 pi over three. It's the volume of a sphere, 4 pi over three times the Schwarzschild radius cubed. And the Schwarzschild radius is proportional to mass. Okay. So the mass over the mass cubed is one over mass squared. So small black holes require huge density to make them.

Starting point is 01:05:03 If you ask what is possible with stars, we can reach densities comparable to nuclear densities, you know, in a neutron star. And if you just increase the mass of a neutron star, eventually it will collapse to a black hole. These are the kind of black holes we find with the LIGO experiment, black holes that have a mass bigger than that of the sun. Because only then, you know, somewhere between a few times the mass of the sun, up to hundreds of times the mass of the sun. There was just a recent discovery of a black hole with a few hundred solar masses

Starting point is 01:05:37 by the LIGO collaboration. So only there, you know, you can pack this mass within the Schwarzsche radius by the collapse of the core of a star. But if you go to a mass less than the mass of the sun, you need to reach densities that exceed nuclear densities. We don't know how to do that. So in terms of engineering, if you wanted to make a black hole up to, you know, with the kind of density of water, let's say. Suppose you wanted to bring water into a small enough region. How big is that region?

Starting point is 01:06:13 It turns out that this would be a way of making a black hole that is roughly 100 million times. mass of the Sun. If you bring it to within the orbit of Jupiter, if you fill the orbit of Jupiter with water, that would be a huge swimming pool, then you get a black hole of a hundred million times the mass of the Sun. The problem is there is not enough water in the Milky Way galaxy to do that. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is four million times the mass of the sun. So you really need a giant black hole if you want to lower the density to acceptable values like the density of water. If you want to go to nuclear density, then you can make a solar mass black hole. You can bring the mass down from a hundred million to one solar to a few solar

Starting point is 01:06:56 masses. If you want to reach even smaller black holes, you must establish densities that exceed nuclear densities. We don't know how to do that in the laboratory. It's not clear you can do that. If we could have done that, we would be able to make tiny black holes. You see, if you want to make a black hole, of a few solar masses, you need a lot of material. You need to bring huge amount of mass into that volume. And that's difficult to do engineering-wise. On the other hand, if you want to make a reasonable mass black hole, let's say the mass of an asteroid, then it turns out that a black hole, the mass of an asteroid, like 3i Atlas, would need to have a size, roughly the size of an atom, the schwartzschwarzsched radius, the size of an atom. Can you believe that?

Starting point is 01:07:45 It's a tiny, you know, so such a black hole would fit inside a hydrogen atom. And wouldn't it evaporate incredibly? Wouldn't it evaporate very quickly due to hawking radiation? No, so hocking radiation starts being effective when the mass is equivalent to a mass of an asteroid that is a few hundred meters in radius, so less than a kilometer, less than three-eye atlas. That's where Hawking Evaporation starts being important on the time scale of the age of the universe. But black holes more massive than that, it could survive for the duration, you know, for the age of the universe. And it's possible the dark matter is made of them. We don't have a way of ruling out asteroid mass black holes that have the masses somewhere around an asteroid between a diameter of 10 kilometers up to the mass of the moon.

Starting point is 01:08:43 That's a range of masses for which the dark matter can be made of primordial black holes that were made in the Big Bang. The reason we can make them early on in the universe is because the universe itself had these huge densities. So you could have in principle formed such black holes early on. I want to ask you just a couple more questions before I let you go. I know it's getting late over there. And I want to thank you for your time. There's evidence that suggests, at least from my guest, David Wiltshire, that perhaps we live, in a non-representative part of the universe.

Starting point is 01:09:15 Or maybe it is representative, that we're in a void, that we perhaps experience time differently. And that plays a trick in his timescape model, implying that we actually are not experiencing an accelerating expansion at all. Forget about a cosmological constant. What do you make of his theory? I mean, a lot of people don't agree with him.

Starting point is 01:09:35 I think it's, you know, ulterior, you know, kind of alternate explanation. What do you make of the timescape model? Yeah. So as a theory, it's perfectly fine. And in fact, I remember discussing it decades ago. The problem with this theory is that we observe, we map the distribution of galaxies, the trace the matter in the universe.

Starting point is 01:09:56 And we don't see a big enough void to account for the cosmological discrepancies we have. So in order for this to be effective, it needs to be a substantial fraction of the size of the cosmic horizon. Let's say a third of it, a tenth of it. We just don't see a deficit in the distribution of galaxies, in shells, spherical shells surrounding us. We could have seen it, and then it would have explained perhaps the anomalies that we see, but we just don't see it in DESE, for example. You can look at the distribution of galaxies. It looks pretty uniform on very large scales, larger than hundreds of millions of light years.

Starting point is 01:10:36 Another topic I've been spending some time on, I just don't have enough time. to work out on myself, but I figure you probably wrote a paper about it, so I don't need to. And that's that the CMB, a large fraction of the CMB, at least on Twitter, was claimed from a paper written by some astronomers and theoreticians in Europe, and I believe, that the CMB is actually not what we think it is, the thermal radiation left over from the heat that we call the cosmic micro-ray background entirely, that it's actually a large fraction at a minimum in their conservative model, 1.3% comes from early galaxies, the impossible early galaxies that led some people to say the Big Bang never happened. But now they're claiming that these galaxies that Web Telescope

Starting point is 01:11:20 observes are actually not just a foreground, but they're incredibly large contributors to the CNB's energy density. What do you make of a job, Avi? I mean, should I just hang it up now, become a podcast. You don't have to worry about it. I mean, I will not necessarily tell you that AI will not replace you one day as a scientist, but as of now, your job, you have job security, because the thing is that if you inject energy that comes from galaxies, it will not have the thermal spectrum, a so-called Planck spectrum that we measure for the cosmic microbe background. And the Cobi satellite that first detected the anisotropies in the brightness of the microbe background, also detected or searched for distortion,

Starting point is 01:12:11 spectral distortion in the cosmic microbe background. And the limits are at the level of one part in 100,000. So we see a perfect Planck spectrum that is the most perfect black body spectrum that was ever detected in the cosmic microwave background. If that radiation obtained a significant contribution from early galaxies, it would not be a perfect black body.

Starting point is 01:12:35 because galaxies emit over a broad range of frequencies, but they don't emit at 2.7 degrees Kelvin. What they're saying, as I understand, I'd love to have the authors on, so if you're watching out there, please get in touch with me. I'd love to have you on the show. I have a response to them that I just don't have time to release it. There's so much interesting. It's such a great time to be in science, right, Avi.

Starting point is 01:12:59 I mean, we are so blessed you and I to do what we do, to get paid for, you know, I get paid a little bit less than you do. I'm sure at Harvard over there. But nevertheless, I always felt like it was cheating. It was like being paid to taste ice cream, which you no longer eat because you're so much more disciplined than me. But, Avi, this is the greatest time to be alive, right? I mean, we have AI assistance.

Starting point is 01:13:19 We have brilliant students. We have experiments. But it's also a dark time. I want to get into the darkness of the, of the, your colleague. By the way, just one other point that I wanted to mention with the spectral distortion. You have to account for the energy budget. There is just not enough energy. density in the radiation coming from galaxies to distort them.

Starting point is 01:13:39 If you look at the plot of the amount of energy pyramid volume in the microbeacon, the amount of energy per unit volume emitted by galaxies, they make a very tiny contribution to the energy budget of the universe. Anyway, go ahead. These guys are saying, you know, I think there's other reasons to be suspicious. They don't talk about the CMB polarization, results. They don't talk about Doppler shifts. They don't talk about the acoustic peaks.

Starting point is 01:14:00 They don't talk about Compton Y, Y, Sondi, Zeldov, at least as I can understand it. I've reached out to Renan Barkana at Tel Aviv, or hopefully he'll get on, because they do talk about 21 centimeters, et cetera. But they claim that these early galaxies, when they thermalize, they produce my favorite substance. No, no, no. So in the 21-centimeter context, what Renan Barkana is working on, by the way, he was one of my mentees early on in his career. That's the radio background. So there, for the 21-scentimeter, you need to know how much radio background there is.

Starting point is 01:14:30 And it's possible that in some frequencies, very low frequencies, you get dominion. anti-mission by galaxy. But that's not the microbeckerm where most of the energy of the microbeckern is. No, they're claiming that these galaxies, if they form a redshift of 12 to 15 in the web field, that they will then produce dust, you know, basically star formation, which will construct, you know, micrometeorites, dust, et cetera, pollute their local interstellar environments, make them very, so they'll emit at something like 30 Kelvin, you know, which is the temperature of dust in our galaxy, as you've taught me and other people have taught me. And then that, gets redshifted by a factor of 10 because they're at redshift of 10.

Starting point is 01:15:07 I'm just waving hands here. I'm an experimentalism. There is not enough energy in stars emitted by stars to account of the microbeckrad background. That's my point. Even if you process all the energy that the stars of the early galaxies would give you, it would never reach the level of the energy density of the cosmic microrebecca. They should check these numbers. Okay.

Starting point is 01:15:27 Great. Very quickly, someone's asking just a rapid update on the Galileo project. maybe give a quick overview of what it is. Because someone asked me in the comments on this one, which I can't remember. There's 2,000 people watching right now. But they did ask me, Avi, couldn't you use magnetic sensors to see if this object, I mean, these meteorites.

Starting point is 01:15:46 In fact, yesterday we had a paper on the archive, the astrophysics preprint server. We had a paper yesterday that reports about our first implementation of a magnetic sensor. So just check it out. Search for my name. You'll find this paper from your name. yesterday. All right, that's Morgan Chatee Byers. Okay, Avi, I mentioned that there are some dark,

Starting point is 01:16:08 dark time ahead. We've, we've had a, this movie is really good. It keeps playing in the background, my crashing meteorite. We've, your colleague and my friend and past guest, an upcoming guest, Stephen Pinker, he'll be on the podcast in September for his new book, which I'm excited to bring to all of you out there. He mentioned in an op-ed in the New York Times. that I got to speak about with Peter Solovey, who was the past president of Yale University, we got to talk about it, and it was called Harvard derangement syndrome. And that Trump, and contrast to Trump derangement syndrome, which I think your friend and colleague Lawrence Tribe might have suffered from at one point or another, but he was also on the podcast many

Starting point is 01:16:54 years ago. Hope to get him back. Thanks to you. As many guests do come on, George Church was just on, and his episode will be out soon. Thanks to you. David Reich is coming on. Thanks to George Church and many other great guests. So Avi, is it a dark time for science? Have you been through this before? Is this unique? Harvard's getting in the bullseye for, you know, partially justifiable reasons, I have to say, as a Jew who did get, you know, kind of harassed and forbidden from certain parts of my campus. You had it much worse. Your campus had it much worse. I don't know about you personally. But talk about the Trump sanctions. Yeah, go ahead. No, I think this is a self-inflicted wound. I think Harvard, in a way, brought up.

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Starting point is 01:18:08 And it didn't need to do that. Scholarship should be apolitical, especially when dealing with science. We shouldn't get into a political agenda. And the issue is, and I said that to the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber, when I met with him after October 7th, to tell him what I think, how Harvard should correct course. this was one of the points I made that we should focus on scholarship and Harvard had additional an additional agenda items and so just like many other colleges and universities you know it was not focused on what it's supposed to do which is excellence research scholarship of course in political

Starting point is 01:18:52 science you can express opinion you can always express opinions but it should not be tilted to one side of the political spectrum. And I mean, obviously, this was going on for a long while. And the October 7th events sort of put it in bright light. And so what happens now is a consequence of that and the elections, consequence of the election. There is a second aspect to it, which is that people associate these political motives

Starting point is 01:19:28 with the way scientific organizations are being managed. Okay? And so as a result, science suffers, because it's considered as occupation of the elite and the COVID-19 pandemic did not demonstrate that the experts really knew what they were advising necessarily, medically speaking. And moreover, it looks like these, you know, academic environments are dominated by a particular, side of the political spectrum.

Starting point is 01:20:00 And science suffers from that. And again, I say, science should not be political. Science should appeal to all sides of the political spectrum. We should have right-wing scientists. We should have left-wing scientists. They should work together because science is about collecting evidence, figuring out what the physical reality is all about. And it has nothing to do with politics.

Starting point is 01:20:26 and therefore, you know, we should populate our ranks with all stripes of the political spectrum. I think, you know, all you can have arbitrary political opinion and be an excellent scientist, which is not necessarily the view that, you know, you would get from people that dominated the culture that we had over the past recent, past decade. They would say they would demean the other side. And that is a self-inflicted wound. And so I think that there is a path forward, which is to focus on scholarship, to promote excellence in science. To bring, by the way, one, I actually congratulated the National Science Foundation

Starting point is 01:21:09 for 75 years anniversary since its establishment. And I think that in addition to federal funds, it's possible nowadays, something that was not possible 75 years ago, which is to... to establish a national fund for fundamental science supported by corporations or wealthy individuals that could have some rights as to the discoveries made, the benefits to technologies that are made out of science. The way that Bell Labs discovered many Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries over the 50 years that it operated. And it was part of a corporation Bell Labs.

Starting point is 01:21:53 So I suggest, since there are so many wealthy individuals, multi-billionaires, let's tap them by addressing exciting questions that are of interest to the public. The public will support science if we address the questions that are of interest to the public and not shy away from the public into the ivory towers that we have right now. So I think there is a good path forward which involves engaging with the public, engaging with the billionaires that could be excited about science, establishing, bringing funds into science that are not only from taxpayers through the government. That's, for example, the way I pursue my science.

Starting point is 01:22:38 All of my funding is coming from donations, from individuals. And I think that can be generalized, given the climate we have now. It wasn't the case 75 years ago. It was the technology boom associated with. the internet that allows, and I know many of these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that got extremely wealthy, that would be really enthusiastic if we pursue the kind of questions the public cares about. Very good, very good. Okay, last question from the audience and then we'll wrap up. Okay. Stephen Daedalus asks Professor Love regarding possible non-human intelligence, what's more likely

Starting point is 01:23:14 to happen first according to you, direct contact with mankind or definitive evidence? brought by indirectly by scientists like you on the Galileo project? I think that interstellar travel takes a long time at the kind of speeds that we can envision, given our technologies, and therefore it will not be biological creatures that would visit us. Most likely it will be technological gadgets powered by artificial intelligence. We are entering that age. We haven't used artificial intelligence in space,

Starting point is 01:23:49 as of yet, but it will definitely be used in the future. We will have robots in space that think for themselves. Instead of sending astronauts, these gadgets will be able to decide without asking for permission from engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. That is the way I see space exploration in the future with AI. And I think other civilizations might have done that already. And so if we meet and counter intelligence from outer space, it will be artificial intelligence.

Starting point is 01:24:26 And our AI systems can help us figure out what their AI systems are doing because they might feel some kinship to those foreign AI systems. But it should be interesting for us to learn what other accomplished in our cosmic neighborhood because we might not be at the top of the food chain, especially now if you look at world politics, we are probably not the envy of our neighborhood. There must be more intelligent civilizations out there. And the way I think of it is that natural selection

Starting point is 01:25:00 that we realized operates on Earth will also potentially apply to interstellar space. And what that means is, I'm closing here what we started from, it means that we should monitor interstellar objects. And if 3-I Atlas happens to be from a predator civilization, we should figure this out as soon as possible. Well, we'll leave it on that cliffhanger. We won't tell you what we found inside of the alien bodies on the autopsy. Everybody check out the article in Medium.

Starting point is 01:25:34 Check out the technical article. You guys are some of the most brilliant minds in the known multiverse. And I think it's a treat to get guests like Avi on the podcast. And like I said, we have many great guests coming up, George Church. We have Stephen Pinker, just to name the Harvard ones, David Reich. And just those three from Harvard talking about extraterrestrial life, but also terrestrial life. How did it get here? We have an interview with Michael Levin, who is a crosstown neighbor of Avi's at Tufts University and not far away.

Starting point is 01:26:03 And this summer, we're going to have just a cavalcade. We have Stephen Wolfeb from coming back on Sabina Hassenfelder, many, many other great guests. So I do wish you a great summer until we see each other again, Avi. We share extraterrestrial material. and an infection. So go to my website. And keep looking up. Don't look down.

Starting point is 01:26:22 Yeah, don't look down. Look up. All the amateurs. Look up at three-eye Atlas. We want to figure out what it is. It's coming soon. So maybe we'll do a live stream when that comes around in October, right? Yeah, that'll be fun.

Starting point is 01:26:34 Thank you, everybody. Be well. Thank you, Avi. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items. Then, review your list and carefully choose each one.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Another Alien Asteroid | Avi Loeb

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