Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb: Breaking News! (#169)

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Breaking news today has been announced from Harvard University, courtesy of none other than past guest and frequent friend of the show, Professor Avi Loeb. We're going to get into everything that's happened since the last time he was on the podcast when his wonderful book came out, extraterrestrial. But today, he is joining us to make a special announcement. And I actually have a connection to Avi about special announcements, and it has to do with an announcement he helped to make in 2014 on March 17th. I'll remember the day for the rest of my life.

And it was about 400 or so years after 450 years or so after Galileo Galilei his birth. And that announcement was about a refracting telescope named Bicep 2. And Avi was a big part of that announcement. But today he's making an announcement, also connected to Galileo Galilei. And I don't know much about it, but it is so exciting to hear the announcement that was just made alive from CFA and elsewhere. Avi, first of all, how are you doing, my friend? And what is this big announcement? What does it have to do with the maestro, my hero, Galileo, Galilei?

Thank you, Brian. It's great to be with you. And the reason we chose the name Galileo for this project is because it has a potential of revolutionary. our worldview. I'm not saying we will definitely discover something as fundamental as Galileo discovered, which was basically the case that we might not be at the center of the universe. Prior to him, it was very flattering to the ego for a lot of people to believe that we are at the center, and it started with Aristotle and many other people. And then Galileo argued otherwise, and of course, the response was quite negative.

if he was living today, he would have been cancelled on social media. But instead, the philosophers at the time refused to look through his telescope. They basically argue that they know the answer without that and put him in house arrest, so that he would not communicate his message to a lot of people. And what that accomplished is that their ignorance was maintained for a while. But the earth continued to move around the sun. And the lesson we learn from that is that looking through new telescopes is a good idea, rather than closing the curtains on our windows and saying, you know, the answer.

So we might say we are the smartest in the universe. There is no smarter kid on our cosmic block and close off the windows, but that doesn't remove any smarter kid from our neighborhood. It only maintains our ignorance. And in much the same spirit, what this project, the Galileo project, is proposing is to open the curtains on our windows and look out and search for evidence. Now, it might well be that we are the smartest kid on the block. There is nobody else, as a lot of my colleagues argue. And of course, that would be reassuring.

It will enhance our self-esteem. But on the other hand, the answer may be different. And science is based on evidence. I should remind, I was asked in a forum a few weeks ago, how do I define an intelligent culture? And my definition was it's a civilization that follows the guiding principles of science, namely cooperation and sharing of evidence-based knowledge. And there are two components to it. One is cooperation and sharing, which we don't practice very often along human history.

if you see the most common phenomenon that you find is people trying to feel superior relative to each other, fighting each other, not cooperating. And the second part of this is evidence-based knowledge. So again, people tend to believe that they know the answer in advance without the evidence. They prefer to stay in their comfort zone. And what this project advocates is searching for evidence. And the reason that this project was announced is because there were two interesting events over the past four years or so. First, in October 2017, there was the first object discovered from outside the solar system in the vicinity of Earth.

It was given the name Omuamua, which means a scout in the Hawaiian language because the telescope discovered it was in Hawaii. And that's what my book was about. this object didn't look like a comet or an asteroid, nothing like we have seen before. And even the scientists that tried to explain it as a natural object had to invoke something that we've never seen before, like a hydrogen iceberg, nitrogen iceberg, or a cloud of dust particles. But this was the first one that we found. And clearly, it's not like the rocks that we often find in the solar system.

So it could be of artificial origin. And then the Pentagon sent a report to Congress, admitting that there are some objects in the sky that may be real, but we don't know the nature of. And, you know, that's an amazing admission by the government that they're not doing their job, because their job, the intelligence agencies, are supposed, to figure out what flies in the sky, right?

It's a matter of national security. So here they come out, not only admitting that they see things that they haven't yet fully explored, but in fact they see things that they cannot explain. And that's when this subject should move away from the talking points of politicians, national security advisors, or military personnel, to the realm of science. Because you would never go to a plumber and ask the plumber to bake you a cake, right? So for the same reason, you wouldn't ask politicians or military personnel to explain what they see in the sky. That's the profession of astronomers.

And that's the rationale behind this project, the Galileo project, looking at the sky and figuring out the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena or Omuamua-like objects. These are objects near earth that could potentially be equipment sent by another civilization. But if it ends up being something else, at least we explained it. And right now, you know, there is a dense fog that prevents us from realizing what these objects are. So I don't know if I told you this last time, but when I was preparing for a video that I made about the dialogue on two chief world systems, I first consulted Amazon.com where your book extraterrestrial was number one bestseller. And I couldn't find, to my consternation, the audiobook version of any of Galileo's books. So I'm pretty industrious, and Galileo is my hero.

And I said, well, someone's got to do this for the old man and make an audiobook get with the 21st century. And I couldn't figure out how to do it. And long story short, I figured out a way to do it. But I said, I can't do it alone. I have to reach out to my colleagues, to my friends. I reached out to Carlo Rovelli, who rivals you for book sales. And Carlo's an Italian physicist, of course, of immense renown and wonderful writer. And he and I, along with my good friend Lucio Piccherillo, is another Italian physicist,

along with Jim Gates, Frank Wilczek, and many other. But we are reading those three voices for the first time in human history. And Avi, I have to tell you, I get the chills when I read passages like this that really should inspire all the world to take what you're doing so seriously. This is Galileo, one of the best writers, not science. science writers, writers in human history. He said this, Avi, I want to get your reaction. Happy are, he's talking about theorists and other philosophers of the Ptolemaic or a peripatetic school, as they used to call them. He said, happy are these people, and much to be envied for this. For if a knowledge of everything is naturally desired, and if being informed is the same thing as taking credit for being informed, then they enjoy a very great knowledge. They can persuade themselves that they know and understand everything in complete. defiance of those who recognize their own ignorance of what they do not know. These people, perceiving that they know only the tiniest portion of what's knowable, exhaust themselves in working

and studying and mortify themselves with, as Avi just said, experiments and observations. This is exactly what you're doing. You're saying, let the observation be the judge. Let that be the stamp of truth. The sign of nature is truth. So I want to ask you, this project, it sounds very panoptical. It sounds like it is encompassing techno signatures and biosignatures. It could do, it can slice, it can dice. Where is the main focus going to be? Or is that the idea to bring together observers, experimentalists, theorists, phenomenologists, and to get them in a room and not debate like the pissing contest, who's right, you know, I'm better, I'm smarter than you, but to do it for the love of science. Is that the ultimate goal of the Galileo project? Well, actually,

it relates very closely to what you've just read because there was an article in nature astronomy and not so long ago, just a few weeks ago, by a philosopher making arguments why Omuamua is not likely to be a technological relic. And I look at it and I say, you know, we should have learned a lesson that it's not a matter of philosophy.

In fact, there is a very simple way to settle the issue. And that is to take a high resolution image of an object like Omuamua or of UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena. Just get a megapixel image. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing,

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saying made in country why. And that's all. It's not a philosophical argument. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In my case, a picture is worth 66,000 words. That's right. number of words in my book. So I wouldn't need to say anything if we had a megapixel image of a mua mua. And guess what? I just wrote a scientific American essay about it. If you were to have an object the size of a person at a distance of a mile, then with a one meter diameter telescope, you could resolve a millimeter feature on that object. So you can get a megapixel image and see a feature the size of the head of a pin

on the surface of this object. And that's all I want. It's a very simple thing. So I went online and I checked, you know, what is the cost of a meter-sized telescope? And I got to a website that has it and it just says, add to the bag

if you want to buy it and it's half a million dollars. Now there must be people that are willing to add that telescope to their bag and pay half a million dollars for them. It must be just peanuts. Yeah, you get frequent fire miles. Yeah.

My point is simple. With enough money, you can do it. So now, I realize that shortly after the Pentagon report was released. And then the miracle happened, which is, two weeks ago, three people or a few people approached me and said, here is the money. You can do with it whatever you want. Now, you must understand,

this is very rare in academia. I've been department chair for nine years. I've been in academia for several decades. I've never seen something like that. So what happened to me was one day I get an email from the administrator of the astronomy department at Harvard saying you have a new account with new research funds. And I say to her, what do you mean I have a new account? Could you please let me know who gave me that money so I can thank that person? And she says, I don't, you know, I'm not sure. Firstborn daughter is missing, right?

They took your first one. So I said, look, this is an elementary request. I'm just asking, please inform me of the email address, of the person that gave me this money so I can thank that person. I mean, I don't understand why that should be so complicated. And then eventually after a day, I got the information. And then I get another message saying, I want to introduce to you this multibillionaire that they wanted to ask you questions about your book.

And I said, fine, I'll be glad to meet with him if it comes to the porch of my house. And then he came a few days later. And he also decided to help. And so within a period of two weeks, without doing any fundraising on my part, I had $1.75 million. And then I said to myself, okay, well, that's a good sum of money. With that, I can actually have a project. And then I started recruiting colleagues, starting with Ed Turner at Princeton and others.

and we ended up with an excellent team of exceptional instrumentalists and mainly astronomers. And we have already had a lot of discussions. And we're planning, first thing, which instruments we want to use, you know, what size telescopes. And then, of course, they will be connected to cameras, which will fit the data into computer systems that will filter out because there will be a huge flood of data and you can't keep all the data, and then you have to track objects of interest. So artificial intelligence will play an important role in this. Yeah, and of course, one of the surreptitious reasons I wanted to get Galileo's words is because with the rise and advent of artificial intelligence and programs like GPT3, it's now possible to take documents of historical note and put them into GPT3 and query it.

So my goal, and I talked about this with Carlo yesterday, is to create. create Galilei-I-O. In other words, artificial Galileo, where we can feed in and teach him Heisenberg's uncertainty relations and see if he can get some kind of insight into it that we might be missing. Because, you know, I think we tend to lionize and venerate individuals, but we do so at the time.

You know, we make Feynman into a hero and people, you know, worship these great people from, you know, Einstein, Carl Sagan, Marie Curie is here. But, you know, I always find that this notion, Avi, and I think I want to talk to you about this now, you got a lot of backlash for your book, which I thought was undeserved and unfair, and I want to get into some of the controversy, so to speak. But one thing that Marie Curie told me, she didn't tell me, but her fame is famous for,

she said, be more interested in ideas than people. In other words, don't ask what's the motive of Avi Loeb or Brian Keating, doing what they're doing. and yet science is made of people. And like you said, scientists are curious and scientists are inquisitive and imaginative, all these wonderful qualities that are unique to science in some ways, but not only to scientists, they also are found in children. And just like children, children are wonderfully curious and inquisitive

and they don't play well with others, and they're jealous, and they don't share, and they want credit. And how do you balance this? How do you balance the... First of all, talk about some of the vitriol that you received and put it in context. How much of it was pure jealousy? How much of it was legitimate?

Because you know this, and you said, I put the data out for all the sea. So some of it is legitimate. So talk about that. How do you balance the trolls from the legitimate critics of which there are a few? Oh, definitely.

I mean, I'm very much in favor of those scientists that paid attention to the anomalies of a mu-o-o-mo-and-try and try to explain them as a natural object. And, in fact, I think that's great because the objects they suggested were never seen before. We've never seen an hydrogen iceberg and nitrogen iceberg or a dust cloud. And therefore, it should motivate us to take data. And of course, if we see any of them, it means that there are nurseries of these objects

that we've never imagined before because they're very different from the solar system. We've never seen such objects in the solar system. And they must be very common. So to me, that's the way that we do science, right? If we know that there is dark matter out there, various people suggest different options for what the nature of dark matter is. And you put those options on the table and you design experiments that will try to solve them out.

And if you think it's weakly interacting massive particles, which was the dominant view when I started in astrophysics back in the 1980s, that's fine. And then you invest hundreds of millions of dollars searching for weekly interacting massive particles. You don't find it. Okay, we didn't find it. But it's part of the scientific inquiry. And the same thing should be done with Omuamua like objects.

There are several possible interpretations. All of them invoke something that is new. And we learn in the process. The worst that we can do is say business as usual, let's ignore the anomalies. Like one of my colleagues said when we left the room of a seminar about Omuomu. He said, Omoa is so weird. I wish it never existed. And that's the wrong approach because you should be excited about the opportunity to learn something new.

And I should say I had a thousand interviews over the past six months. Yep. And it was, you know, I was only 10% of them. That's amazing. No, the reason I bring this up is the waters was very turbulent. Like every day I would wake up at 5 a.m. jog for half an hour in the company of birds, rabbits, ducks, and wild turkeys. and a single fox that I saw. And then come home and starting at 8 a.m. until 7 p.m.

I would have back-to-back interviews, which was only possible during the pandemic. So it was a very demanding period of time. And on top of that, I had to cope with all the very harsh criticism from people that don't attend to the anomaly. So I'm completely at peace with those that try to explain it as a natural object. Now, one thing I wanted, an anecdote that I wanted to bring up is an orthodox Jewish magazine in New York City in Brooklyn called Ami. And he interviewed me for an hour and then put a cover story about my book in their magazine, the weekly magazine. And when a colleague of mine at Harvard, Stefan Greenblatt, who is a Shakespearean scholar, when he saw it, He said, well, it looks like the Orthodox are more open-minded than some of your colleagues.

We'll put a link to that, of course, in the show notes below that article. You know, not too many people get, you know, front page or front cover of Ami magazine and also publish an astrophysical journal, Avi. But I do want to make the point. I have seen this as well and get your reaction to it. But when you think about how, you know, many people are excited about UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena, I saw a study before the Pentagon report came out. And it said something like, you know, 30 to 60 percent of American public wants the Pentagon to spend more money on it.

And I was just thinking, you know, just being mischievous as I am. You know, imagine if it was like God, like searching for God, like evidence for God or whatever. But, you know, I don't think so many people would be so interested in spending money on it. So there's a thing that used to be nonpartisan, right? Support of science, you know, sometimes support of, you know, mom and apple pie, so to speak. That was like everything could be supportive, but now people are so entrenched. And of course, and I had your, you know, a fellow author, Michio Kaku, on the show this spring. And I asked him, I said, Michio, you know, like string theory's been around for a long time.

And yet we've had wonderful new results, G-minus 2, LHCB, Snow Lab Plus, all these wonderful experiments, Hubble Tension. How come I don't see, like, the string theorist predicting these things in advance? They always say, yes, you can go back, you can get it, you can find it in there. And I'm like, you can find things in the Bible codes too. But anyway, but nevertheless, I said, Mitchie, how come we can't, like, by what criterion? Why about rubric? Shall we judge when to stop a project, be it the scientific method that is, as it's applied to string theory, to cosmology, inflationary, gravitational wave searches. And your colleague at Harvard, Peter Galanson,

wrote a wonderful book, How Experiments End. But I, I really interested in why experiments should end. In other words, what is the criteria? What is the rubric of the, when should we stop searching for a muamu or stop trying to determine what it is? Because I think we need to know what the terms are. We can't just say, we'll search forever. As Michio said, I would fund searches for string theory and searches for alternatives with equal amounts. Well, that's not really an answer. You know, as the Yiddish say, if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit by traffic on both sides. So I want to ask you, when should we stop searching as just a paradigm. I don't mean specifically Oumuua, but when would we stop searching

for its origin? What would bring us to that conclusion? Right. It's very simple. I mean, we just started, of course, studying interstellar objects like Omuamua. It was the first one, and we saw another one called Borisov. But the point is with the Vera Rubin Observatory, we're likely to find many more. And as we find more, you know, we can, for example, identify an object on its approach to us, a year in advance, and then send a spacecraft, equipped with a camera that will take a close-up photograph. Just like Osiris Rex took a photograph of the asteroid Benu and actually landed on it and picked up a sample,

and that it will deliver to Earth in 2023. And so just imagine us taking a close-up photograph, seeing that it's an artificial piece of equipment, just like a plastic bottle on the beach. Yeah. And the landing on it, and then importing the text. technology to Earth. So how many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley would change their plans as a result of learning a new technology that can be used to make more money? And it will revise our view about our place in the universe, about our relations with each other, because suddenly, if we recognize a smarter kid next to us, you know, all the differences between us do not make much, are not significant, you know.

and so it will change international relations. It will change the way people view our place in the universe, our aspirations for space, our theological and philosophical beliefs. It would have a huge impact. You know, very different from the dark matter. The dark matter is an axon and not a weekly interacting massacific. It won't change your daily life in any way. So my point is, how can we ignore this question

when we have the capacity to examine it scientifically? And that's pretty much the agenda behind. the Galileo project. And what I want to do is bring this subject to the mainstream and of science. And I should say, you know, when the Pentagon report came out, Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, appeared on CNN and said, now scientists should look into those UAP and figure out their nature. So I tried to contact people under him without much success. I said, here I am to serve and help you make your boss happy.

I didn't receive much feedback from that. And, you know, part of it is that federal agencies rely on committees composed of mainstream scientists that are not taking risks, are not willing to potentially be proven wrong. obviously, you know, the tendency is to preserve your image and not to become a controversial, not to discuss subjects that are of interest to the public that might not lead to what you're expecting. But if you look at the dark matter search, you know, that's also a search in the dark. So why should the search for the nature of those weird objects be anything different than any other, you know, search we do in the context of astronomy or science more generally?

I think it belongs to exactly the same approach. And in fact, it's of great interest to the public. And as demonstrated by the fact that I got funded without doing any fundraising, it means that there is an opportunity here to fund science. And guess what? I get a huge number of emails from people that are interested in contributing to the project. And scientifically, you know, just being part of it. And so what that means is that there will be many more kids drawn into science if you were to allow for this subject to be discussed.

So how is it possible that the scientists not only ridicule any discussion about it, so they are basically declining the possibility of getting more funds and blocking the acceptance of this subject from being discussed in a way that young people are. reluctant to engage in it because they worry about their job prospects, about the way they would be looked at and so forth. Yeah. Well, just to be pushed back respectfully, as I always do, to say that, you know, when I've had a lot of conversations online with folks about this problem and this issue and so forth, I have two different issues that I have to confront. One is that I often have to teach people about the scientific method. In other words, people will say to me, well, here's this video, and I don't care about this guy, Mick Webb,

who debunked it, or the SETI Institute, Seth Shostack, or Jill Tarter, we'll get to later, but because they're self-interested. They want to find, you know, they want to find out if the object is, you know, is a radio signal. Their self, that's their money.

So as Upton Sinclair said, it's hard to convince a man or a woman of something, to believe in something when their job depends on them not knowing something. And in this, so they're basically impugning that. And then the other type of person that I get is people that say, give me the data. Like, I need the data.

And I say, like, and Avi, I've never said this to you, but I want to get your impression if I'm being foolish. You look at the Hubble Deep Field. It's beautiful. You've written about it. You've rhapsodized about it. I don't consider it data. In other words, it's a form of data.

It's an image. It's a beautiful picture. It's something that's inspiring. And yeah, you can count up the number of galaxies. You can see their rough color. But it's not what you would use or I would use as data. It's not calibrated flat field. You know, we don't know what went into it.

It's just an image. right? And that's not its purpose in the context of inspiring science and love and people, as you just talked about. So I get that. Like, give me the data. I'm like, it's a cell phone image. Like, it's not going to tell you anything. So that's exactly, that's an excellent point, Brian, that you're making. And in fact, it was the subject of one of my recent Scientific American articles that is about to appear. And the point is, you know, I was, someone asked me about UAP in the context of Oumuuma, whether Oumuumuwa's data is in a way similar to an unidentified object.

And I said, no, it's a completely different nature because, you know, Omuamua's data was collected by telescopes over which we have full control in the standard scientific way. And most of the UAP reports, or what used to be called UFOs, most of them were obtained by amateurs, for example, even the best reports were obtained by cameras that were jittery in a fighter jet. And that's not an environment where you can reproduce the trajectory of the fighter jet. And also, eyewitness testimonies are subject to a lot of uncertainties to do with, you know, human psychology because people can have hallucinations.

They can fill in the noise. Yeah, fill in the noise. Right. Or actually people tend to ignore facts when they do not, for example, flatter their ego or when they contradict their notions. So in science, you rely on instruments, collecting quantitative data. And the instruments have to be under full control. That's the way scientific experiments. So the Galileo project is exactly after that.

installing telescopes in various geographical locations in the standard way that astronomy is done, except you're not looking at a very distant object far away that is barely moving on the sky. You're looking at something that moves close to you, much more on the sky. And so the search method is different, the software that will be used to look for interesting objects is quite different because, you know, in astronomy, if something flies above your head and moves quickly, then you just ignore it. Here we will focus on such things. And when we talk about, you know, how soon after kind of this interest came up, of course, it's not really soon, as you'd point out in your Scientific American article earlier this month,

you know, people have worried about these things if they're Trojan horses, if they're, you know, humanoid and so forth. But the other bias that I think is hard to overcome is whether or not the scientist would be not the most interested people that there are in this endeavor. In other In other words, if you and I could shortcut and go down the hall and you could tell Kamran Vafa, past guest on the show, that, you know, he should switch into, you know, into some other field, which he'd be very successful out no matter what he does, and he's a wonderful friend. But strength theories didn't pan out. It's actually, you know, a Q theory that will be invented in six years from now,

you know, with some bright undergraduate here at San Diego or there at Hart. So in other words, we would love nothing better than a wormhole that connects us to future knowledge. that we can better life on earth. Because that's the ultimate goal of this, right? If not to better Earth, what else do we have, Avi? I mean, we don't know there's anything. I think it's expanding our knowledge of reality. And, you know, the best example is Bernie Madoff.

Yes. So Bernie Madoff had a beautiful idea. He said, give me your money and I'll make more of it irrespective what the stock market does. Okay. So it was so beautiful that people gave him the money. I mean, what else do you expect? I mean, if people are willing to give you money,

it means that they really believe your ideas. Highest accolade, yeah. Yeah. So he was happy because he got their money. They were happy. Otherwise, they wouldn't give him the money. The idea was beautiful. Everyone was happy.

When did the idea stop making sense? When the experiment was done. So they asked for the money back and then the idea didn't pan out. And then he was put in jail. So my point is to figure out which idea are Ponzi schemes, meaning they do not apply to reality. You need experiments. That's the only way to make progress.

Yeah, you speak my language, yeah. Yeah, so I can give you an example that we had a colloquium where a string theory said, well, there is some connection between the landscape of string theory and inflation. And I said, great. So now, suppose we measure the cosmic microev background and find something different. would that rule out string theory? So that person said, no, it will just rule out the conjecture that I'm making in connecting string theory to the cosmic micro background.

String theory is always right. And so my point is, if you don't put skin in the game, then you don't make progress. You have to make predictions such that if they're proven wrong, you realize the idea didn't pan out. And that's the way we expand our knowledge. That's a very fundamental facet of physics. And you can't just say it's a nuance. If we all agree that this is an exciting idea,

we can dedicate the entire careers to that subject. That is not a viable argument. You want to figure out whether you were going in there, whether you took the right exit in the highway. That's the fundamental question. And you use this metaphor panning out, and that comes from gold panning, not far from where I am here in Southern California,

1849 when the gold rush took place. But people back then would need something called an assayer. So an assayer, and it's actually the title of Galileo's fourth book called El Sagittori. And that means the sagacious one or the assayer. So what is an assayer? Avi, it's someone who has a worthless piece of rock. And with that rock, you scrape a piece of something that's supposed to be gold on it. And if it doesn't leave the right mark, the king could cut off your head.

But nevertheless, the rock is worthless. and yet it has infinite value, because that allows you to test theories, hypotheses, conjectures. So I've undertaken in my role as public outreach that I do here as the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center, I have taken upon myself what I call the assayor project. In Galileo's footsteps, you know, I'm one nano-Galelago, but the point being, I look at string theory. I do a pro-string theory video essay. I do an anti-string theory video essay. I have on a guest like you, I have Lee Smolin, Carlo Revelli, or then I'll have on Stephen Wolfram and I'll have on one of his critics, Sabina Hasenfelder. And so I'll go through all these different scenarios because actually that's the only way.

If you just have a debate, like, have you ever been convinced, Avi, to vote against the politician that you supported ahead of time? No, I've never been convinced by some debate. Like, I already knew who I was going to vote. By the way, this was the Socratic method, the debate. Yes. And by the way, you know what happened to Socrates. Yes, I know. So he was blamed for corrupting the youth and then was put in jail and was forced to drink poison.

That's right. He drank, right? And today, Socrates would have been canceled. That's right. The claim against him was that he did not believe in the gods of the Athenian people. That's right. And so too with... And now we use his approach.

And it just shows you how short-sighted humans are, that at the time when a genius like Socrates proposes a way of thinking that is later adopted as a very popular way. And at the time, he is basically forced to drink poison. And that's the view that guides me because, you know, when I was in the military age 18 in Israel, I served in the paratroopers in the first three months. And I remember the statement that sometimes you need to put your body on the barbed wire so that other soldiers will march forward. And, you know, if I suffer some pain on social media, it doesn't bother me because the longer-term goal here has such an impact on humanity, that it's worth it. Yeah, I looked at it and I thought I had this conversation also with Carlo, and I said,

imagine back 1864, there's a young guy on Twitter, his name is James Clerk Maxwell, and he's got this theory of electromagnetic waves for equations that are beautiful. He's very mathematical, hard to understand, difficult to comprehend. A few people understand it. And best of all, Avi, as you know, he has a beautiful way that mechanically describes how these waves propagate through the ether, and they have gears and whirlpools and eddies and so forth. So imagine this. This is ridiculous. This is an idiot. Canceled. And then for a hundred years or more, we'd be literally in the dark because we would have ridiculed and attacked the man. And I see that happening a lot. I see a lot of criticism.

And Carlo kind of surprised me. He's very much a menshe, a gentleman. He said, look, string theory or loop quantum gravity, you know, who knows what's right, but back then they didn't know what was right. And so we were talking about Schrodinger v. Heisenberg. And sometimes you only know, as Soron-Kirkegaard said, you only can make sense of the past by looking back from distance in the future. And I think of the telescope as the ultimate, you know what Galileo called the telescope,

up, right, Avi? The name in Italian was the perspective tube. So you get a perspective on the past by looking back on it. And I feel like we're so quick to judge folks today. And I want to respond to some things because you're not on social media. That's why you're so productive with 700 papers and a giant book that I'm hoping we're going to get to in just a bit. But you got a lot of chrism. And some of it was just kind of, I mean, it seemed like it was ad hominem and people were kind of taking glee in it. And there's an Italian expression that Carlo teaches me, and it's the higher you fly, the easier you are to shoot down. What part of it, you know, because there's a famous debate that you had with Jill Tarter and back in the winter. And people were saying, like, almost conflating their hostility towards your idea with treatment of Jill, who I love and is a hero of mine, endorsed my book, and is really a hero of millions of men and women around the world.

But, like, how was that taken out of context or what's that relationship like now? nowadays, of you guys, you know? We, we, with Jill, I mean, it was not personal at all, and I really admire her work over the years. And it was fundamentally about my point that we can get more funding to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And, you know, my latest experience demonstrates that. And I just wanted us to work together. And that's, that was the purpose. Now, of course, you know, when I'm embedded in so many interviews and I'm exhausted, it might be interpreted in the wrong way. That was not at all my intention. But, you know, the idol for me is Ed Purcell. He was a physicist

that got the Nobel Prize for the MRI. And Ed Purcell at some point decided to look for the 21-scentimeter line of hydrogen. So he basically put a horn antenna through the window of his office. And around the same time, there was a visitor from the group of Jan Ort. And Jan Ort, that group was looking for the 21-centimeter line of hydrogen from the Milky Way galaxy, and they couldn't detect it. And then Ed Purcell detected it. So he communicated to that person that they are not doing it right. And he explained how they should do the analysis of the data and how they should collect the data.

So they did it and found the same line. And then Ed Purcell published his paper, discovery paper, which is of fundamental importance to astrophysics and cosmology. He published it back to back with their paper. So instead of, you know, that's unimaginable in today's climate where people try to compete with each other and take credit from each other. And that's, you know, really the ideal mode of cooperation that I can imagine in science, you are not really after your ego. That's not the issue. The issue is not speaking about the individual

and trying to elevate your image so that you can get awards, prizes and so forth. It's more about advancing our knowledge. And you know what Ed Purcell said? We want to detect this line. I did it first, but I can explain to my colleagues how to do it. So then both of us can share the fan of reporting about it.

And it was not about his ego. It was not him demonstrating that he's smarter than the competitors. And frankly, I would find it hard to believe that nowadays you can find someone that behaves that way. And if there are two experiments trying to detect the same signal, they will try, first of all, to do it first. They will not help their contemporaries in any way.

And that's unfortunate because even in the case of Omoa-Mua, you know, obviously, Okay, there are various interpretations. Let's work together. Let's collect more data, more evidence. Why should it be so controversial? Why can't we treat it just like dark matter? Well, we have multiple possible interpretations, and we have multiple experiments trying to collect more data,

and it's collegial, and it's part of the mainstream. There is nothing controversial about that, and it's as such in the dark, you know? So I would much rather live in that kind of an environment, but I'm trying to bring it to fruition by advocating this to be a part of the mainstream, but I confront all this resistance. And, you know, my hope is it will be similar to other frontiers that I promoted in the past. For example, I worked on the first stars, the epoch of realization,

when only a few people around the world were interested in it early in my career. And now it's mainstream. I worked on imaging black holes. And I wrote the first paper together with Avery Broderick about imaging the black hole in M87, which ended up being imaged. That was the first paper detailing what you might see. And, you know, at the time, nobody was paying too much attention to it. And I also worked on gravitational wave astrophysics. And in January 2013, I gave an overview on this subject at the winter school in Jerusalem.

them. And another lecturer in that winter school stood up and said, how dare you waste the time of these students on this subject when it will never be important for them throughout their careers? And then two and a half years later, the LIGO experiment detected the first gravitational wave, and now it's the hottest topic. And these students were still doing their PhD at that time. So my point is simple. This pattern of people resisting and not allowing innovation has repeated throughout my career on multiple fronts. But the one thing that is different on this subject, which I didn't realize in advance, is that people take it emotionally and attack me personally. And that was not the case in the other subjects on the first. The stakes are lower. Yeah, the stakes are lower there. It doesn't, as you said before, it doesn't affect your daily life the way that, yeah, discovery of and other civilization in the universe would impact everybody. you know, I don't know how long, you know, I like to think of Avi, you know, when I talk with Sarah Seeger, I talked to somebody else about Sarah Ruhkeheimer recently, and I think about, well, what would happen the day after we make a discovery? And I think it'll be very different, a biosignature versus a techno signature, a biosignature, we kind of already know what happened. And this is part of my problem with science popularization by the media, is that, as had the case with Bicep 2, the story breaks on front page, New York Times. The retraction is, if it ever comes, is B-17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads.

In other words, I meet businesses nowadays to say, you detected inflation on Bicep 2? That's amazing. Like, they're physicists, let alone my godmother or something. So the point that I'm trying to make is I believe that these entities should have sort of a budget for PR, and that budget should be, you know, to popularize their discovery, but they should retain a retainer in reserve for the contingency that their result may be wrong, and they may have to retract And nobody does this. I think it should be part of basic ethics as a scientist. Our lawyer friends do it. I had on Larry. You introduced me very cordially to Larry Tribe earlier this year. And we had a great conversation. And I said, you know, do you guys learn ethic? He's like, yeah, of course. Medical ethics, business. How come there's no scientific ethics? No, that's an excellent point.

And by the way, the progress of science relies a lot on innovation. And we should create an atmosphere where young people should be allowed to deviate from the beaten path and think outside the box. That should be the culture that we advocate rather than ridicule anything that deviates. And by that we send a very strong message to young people. If you want jobs, just follow the path that we laid out. And that's a very bad message. I mean, obviously, eventually innovation. takes place, but it's much slower, and that's not good.

And I should say that, you know, my experience is that you have to stick with it and pay attention to the ball rather than the audience if you're going after the truth. Because many times in my career, I really was swayed by what my colleagues are saying, and it ended up going in the wrong direction. And so it's really important to maintain independence and think critically about what you hear. And, yeah, the last thing I'll say about that is, you know, the title of one of Feynman's, my favorite of Feynman, is like, what do you care what other people think? And I think it's a form of kind of, as people talk about nowadays with alien civilizations, great filter. Like, you learn a lot about who your real friends are and who you can trust and so forth from when you need them.

A friend is someone who you need is there for you, not just when the times are good. I want to talk about moving from that now to talk about this wonderful new book, which I've learned a lot from. And it's kind of like dangerous to me, obviously, because I get so interested in these things. And I should be, you know, I should be doing other things, but then reading about, you know, calculations of minimum mass for a planet that could host a star. And you have in here, it's so funny, because you have all these guests, Moia McTeer, who's been a guest on my podcast, Sarah Seeger, who's been a guest of the podcast. And I just want to ask you about the genesis of this book. Who is it for? I mean, I can read it.

I'm a professional, but is it a popular? I mean, should people who loved extraterrestrial pick this up, besides, you know, fattening the bank account, which I'm sure that people make a lot of money from a 750-page text? But no, is this for the same audience as extraterrestrial, first of all? No. So this is a textbook intended for people that do research on the search for life. And by the way, microbial life obviously is no problem. problem for the human ego because we can still feel superior.

So when perseverance searches for microbes on Mars, that's great. Everyone embraces that. But if we find, you know, some piece of iPhone. Yeah. If we find an AI system that outsmarts us, obviously people will not feel so happy about that. And I think that's a fundamental difference. And I agree.

Sorry, I didn't get to finish the thought I was making before. just because I interrupt myself, but with regard to press conferences. So in 1996 or five, there was a press conference for the discovery of macrobial life evidence on Mars found from Antarctic rocks that were collected by a project in the Allenlands Hills. And to this day, it's not resolved what those are. But I think it's noteworthy that, let's say 50% of the people that heard that press conference from Bill Clinton on the front loan of the White House that was shown in the movie contact by Carl Sagan and Fast Guest and Drouian on The Into the Impossible podcast.

But they probably still think that that was discovered. In other words, it was never retracted. So I think it's kind of our obligation, though, as scientists. We should have some kind of budget to retract, even for microbial. I mean, there's a lot of people who believe that is still a valid scientific discovery. Right.

That's definitely the case. So this textbook that is called Life in the Cosmos, that is over 800 pages long, I was written by me and my postdoc, my former postdoc, Manas Vilingam. And the intention was to include both the search for microbial life, primitive life, and the search for intelligent life in one book. And there was such a book much shorter than this one, written by Shoklovsky and Sagan. Yeah, I have a... Yeah, and that was in the mid-1960s.

And since then, there was no such book. And we decided that it's time to update our knowledge and summarize it in a way that they would serve the community of researchers working on this, both on the search for microbial life, which is much more mainstream, and the search for technological signatures. And let me give you an example. It's often thought that if you build instruments for searching for microbial life, they cannot really be used for the other. purpose. But here is an example. Suppose you build those very expensive telescopes that the astronomy community is now contemplating

that would aim to find traces of the fingerprints of oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of habitable planets around other stars. And the first thing to realize is that

oxygen was not very abundant on Earth in the first two billion years. So for half of the age of the earth, there wasn't much oxygen, even though there was a lot of microbial life. So if you don't find oxygen, it doesn't tell you that there is no microbial life. And the second point to make is oxygen could be produced by chemical processes that have nothing to do with life. So it's actually, you know, even though you might need to invest billions of dollars to build those telescopes, it will not give you a definitive answer. But if you find CFCs, those very complex molecules produced by coolants or industries here on Earth that, by the way, destroy the ozone layer, if you find those on an exoplanet, then that would imply industrial life. And you can search for those using the same spectrographs that you're using to search for oxygen.

So my point is simple that, you know, to motivate. those expensive telescopes, why not contemplate also the search for technological signatures? And they should be as mainstream as biological signatures. And speaking about SETI that you mentioned before, the search was mainly for radio signals, but that's just like trying to have a phone conversation. And for that, you need a counterpart to be alive at the time that you're having the conversation. And if most of the civilizations are dead by now, if they originated around stars that predated us by billions of years because most stars form billions of years before the sun,

then the chance of meeting another civilization at the same technological phase that we are going through is very small. So most of the time you will hear silence. But if on the other hand, you're doing archaeology, then you can find objects that were left behind by civilizations that existed in the past. And it's just like plastic bottles on the ocean that keep accumulating, all the time. And you can look for them, even if the sender is not around anymore. And that's what I think makes more sense to do space archaeology. And that's what we are trying to do with the Galileo project. One paper, you know, I'm always like, I wish I could get Avi to spend more of his time on the CMB. But there's got it, there's no connection between the CMB and the origin of life. Nope, I was wrong.

Avi Lobbe 2013 solo paper the habitable epoch of the early universe. Do you remember this paper? It came out right after Bicep 2, Avi, do you remember it? And in it, you say something fascinating that one of my former colleagues and dear friends, Mayor Shimon Tel Aviv University, pointed out to me, said, thermal gradients are needed for life.

This is in your paper. These can be supplied by geological variations on the surface of rocky planets. And you talk about sources of free energy and so forth. But you say, these internal heat sources. In addition to that, heating by a nearby star may have kept the planets warm without the CMB, but you could say that the CMB at late times, at early times rather, would have been warmer, and that would have allowed maybe liquid water on an otherwise cold planet. Have you updated that? Is that paper, you know, is there any sort of, you know, follow on to that, like the interplay

between the cosmos and the microcosmos of microorganisms? Yeah, so the thing that I realized the one day in the shower, I usually get my ideas there, is that, you know, the universe is cooling as it expands. And if you go back in time, it was hotter. We know that. But then I thought to myself, actually, if you go back when the universe was smaller by a factor of a hundred, then you get to room temperature. Yeah. The temperature now is roughly three degrees. And back then it was 300, which is room temperature. And if there were any planets then, then you might have liquid water on the surface, irrespective whether they are close to a star that warms them up. So the habitable region would actually be the entire universe at that time.

Now, the only limitation is whether there are planets at those early times. It's 15 million years after the Big Bang. Turns out that my own work demonstrated that the first stars formed later, about 50 million years later. And so if you assume the standard cosmological model, the way we, have now, then you would never get any planets made 15 million years after the Big Bang. And that's unfortunate because life would have been quite interesting back then. You would basically be immersed in a bath of radiation left over from the Big Bang that keeps

you warm. And you wouldn't have seasons. It will just be warm or you can sit on the beach and enjoy yourself. Exactly. And who wouldn't like to do that? Of course, we can do that almost any day of the year here, Avi, in sunny San Diego. Wish you were here for one of these book launches. Your next book, I'm sure you're writing many more wonderful things to come.

But I just want to close with kind of the big picture. I want to take you back to the late summer of 1609 in northern Italy with Galileo Galilei. You have a moment now to talk to him and say, whatever you want to say to him, What would you tell the maestro, and what would you talk about? What would you be most fascinated by to exchange with him, scientists to scientists, father to father, human to human? What would you most like to talk to him about if you could? Well, I would try to get his lessons of life, so to speak,

from the experience that he went through, because apparently we haven't learned those lessons. And we are repeating the same mistakes that were made around Galileo at the time. And the question is why? Because humans, you know, you might say they have some intelligence, right? So they should learn from experience. And the way I see it is because there are some forces, psychological forces, that drive us away from the right behavior.

And those are, you know, feeling hurt when we learn something that doesn't quite line up with what we expected. We have a problem with that. we feel that it's taking us out of our comfort zone because we know something and now there is something that looks anomalous completely different and we just don't want to go there and you know the question is how to get people to cooperate when a revolution takes place and that's pretty much what Galileo went through and I believe that if we allow data to come in and now I can thank the very generous donors that gave me that money that enables this.

If we allow data to come in, we will discover something new. So the self-fulfilling prophecy is if you don't search, you will never find. And on the other hand, if we do search, we will find something. And I believe that within my lifetime, there is a chance that we will get our hands on a technological relic from another civilization. And that would be amazing. So I have something to wait for, not the response of my colleagues, not flattery from people around me, rather allowing nature to give me new knowledge by looking at it. And that's all.

And I don't need anything more than that. That's beautiful, Avi. I want to close with the words of Galileo. And he was an amazing human being, amazing writer. He said, I do not presume to be able to adduce. all the proper and sufficient causes of those effects, which are new to me, and which, consequently, I have had no chance to think about what I am about to say. I propose merely as a key to open portals to a road never before troddened by anyone in a firm hope that minds more acute

than mine will broaden this road and penetrate further along it than I have done in my first revealing of it. And maybe, Avi, maybe you're in that tradition, your students, the millions of people that you inspire around the world. Maybe you are that future person, are your teammates and your, and your, and your students and the people that you call colleagues. Maybe you're those people that will unlock the key, have the key to unlock the portal, Galileo talked about. I want to wish you, Hatslaka, much success. And congratulations, Avi. It's a wonderful thing. And it's a delight that I was able to break the news on the Into the Impossible podcast after your press conference today. Thank you so much for having me. I had great fun.

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