Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb + Eric Weinstein: UAPs, Academic Research, & Truth – Part 1 of 2 (#234)

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Join Brian Keating and his friends Eric Weinstein and Harvard's Avi Loeb for an update on the Galileo Project, NASA's recent formation of a government panel investigating UAP/UFOs and more. Resources here: NASA to Set Up Independent Study on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-... Eric Weinstein's Website https://ericweinstein.org Download the first-ever audiobook by Galileo https://BrianKeating.com/dialogue NASA is embarking on a RISKY mission to investigate UAPs https://www.axios.com/2022/06/14/nasa... Galileo Project home: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galil... NASA is putting together a research team to study UFOs https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/9/231... China Says It May Have Detected Signals From Alien Civilizations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl... Avi and the interstellar meteorite: https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/bad-as... Avi Loeb: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/imitation... Avi Loeb On scientific legacies: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-bliss... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everybody to a phenomenal out of this universe episode with my good friends, Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University and Harvard University PhD, Dr. Eric Weinstein. We are discussing the recent announcement by NASA of a blue ribbon panel to study unidentified aerial phenomena, which will be headed by Passed Into the Impossible guest, Dr. David Spurgel, who is the president of the Simons Foundation, and an incredible intellect himself. So the announcement precipitated a decision by me to get my friends who have been most vocal on this topic, Avi and Eric,

to come together to discuss what is the nature of these phenomena, not from the perspective of what are they in deciding what they are, but how do scientists go about searching for these phenomena using the tools of modern astronomy and remote sensing and other tools, technology, and methods. And then we also talk about the implications of this technology if it is real or if it is not real, and real meaning not of this earth.

And it could be not of this earth and not necessarily be in the form of some form of technology that we could exploit or could exploit us or eat us, as I'm often worried about or consumed by thinking about eating things since the pandemic started. But rather, you know, it could be an alien garbage, barge or something like that. And what's interesting to me is to note the discovery that Hobby had really pushed forward with the Galileo project, which I was initially involved with

due to time considerations and desire to really be dispassionate about the whole approach that I am not involved with them going forward. I was involved with them in year one. And it was very fruitful and important, I think, to see the project in its first year how, from an external perspective. I was never in the research side. But Eric is a member of the Galileo project research side. Obviously, Avi founded this Galileo project. There'll be links and references to some of the topics we talked about, including a discovery, possibly, of an alien civilization communication by a Chinese telescope, the detection by Avi and confirmation by the Department of Defense, I believe, of the first interstellar meteor that splashed down near Papua New Guinea. You hear about

obvious exploits with billionaires and so forth. And, you know, I'd like to stop by his porch when one of these billionaires stops by. But for now, I bid you entry into this two-part episode. And I was towing with the idea of making this second part, one that you'd have to not only be subscribed to the podcast for, but you'd have to leave a review. Because really, that's the only thing I'm asking you guys to do that will help me help you get more great guests, get more great authors on this podcast. And I intend to keep doing this. And people really enjoyed this episode when it was live on YouTube.

Please subscribe there, Dr. Brian Keating. Leave some feedback there for me. I share different types of presentations on audio versus video. But I do ask that if you are enjoying this type of conversation, that you will leave, indeed, a review on Apple Podcast after subscribing and or just a star rating on Audible, on Spotify or on Apple. That's all I ask. Not so much.

If they had like an alien fingerprint, you could leave, I would ask you to do that too. But you can't. So that is my one request, I guess my second request. Join my mailing list at briankeating.com slash list. And you'll be entered in an opportunity, a drawing to win some space dust, some cosmic debris, some schmutz from another solar system,

or maybe just our solar system, but a long time ago. And that's a fragment of a meteorite or some dust from a meteorite. I'll come with some analysis, some information about it and some ways for you to test it and play around with it at home. But anyway, that's at briankeating.com slash list. And otherwise, now I bid you entry into the Intenton Impossible Podcast two-part episode. This is part one. And let me know what you think.

Send me a comment. Send me an email. Love hearing from you. Take care. Enjoy. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bobby doors, please help. Welcome. It is your fearful host in this residual time of pandemic podcasting, joined by two phenomenal intellects, two phenomenal friends, two phenomenal thinkers that inspire me. And there's over approaching a thousand people right off the bat. And it's no surprise. They're here to see me. No, no. They're here to see Dr. Eric Weinstein, Professor Avi Loeb. How are you guys today?

Great. Thank you. Well, thanks. I last saw you both together in Miami at a Bitcoin conference where Avi, you made a stunning announcement. You said, go all in on Dogecoin. I cannot believe I followed that advice, Avi. It cost me my pension, such as it is. No, I will never give advice that I personally do not follow. Very good. So, guys, we are here to talk about a variety of topics, but I think none as important as this recent announcement that we recently heard about from none other than NASA about this phenomenal decision to actually study the UAP phenomenon and what that might entail

for both scientists who are not usually interested in such things, but kind of orthodox, sort of speak, a smaller, lowercase O. And so first, I want to get interpretation. Maybe we'll start with Avi on this reaction. You have a wonderful link. I put a link to your medium post about that's called imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And I just like that very much. So I want to get your take on it. What is going on NASA? Why do you think that they've suddenly kind of maybe, I don't want to say change your tune, but perhaps they have. What do you guys? Well, what do you think, Avi, first of all, right off the bat, what was your reaction? Yeah, it's relatively simple to understand what happened. Bill Nelson was very intrigued by unidentified aerial phenomena because as a senator, he saw some classified data that is not available to the public. And now that he became the head of NASA, he said that when the Director of National Intelligence, Avery Haines, released a report to Congress back a year ago, he said that scientists should get engaged because he believes is a serious man. matter. And of course he's the head of NASA, but someone has to translate that statement into action. And the following morning, I contacted the person responsible for science under

him, Thomas Zurbuchen, and he immediately called me and I told him, look, I'm here to make your boss happy, and I'll be glad to assist you on that. And he asked me to send a white paper, which I did, but I've never heard back from him. And now we hear the echo of that. exchange that we had and a year later NASA in its very sluggish and political manner does something now what is this something there will be a committee that will review the existing data sets and we'll recommend to NASA whether to fund the research programs that will analyze the existing data sets that are open to the public and perhaps collect new data sets and that recommendation will come

in a year or so from now because the committee will need need the nine months of pregnancy before delivering a baby, and they will start their work only in about a few months from now. So all together a year from now, there will be a report. And then in the best case scenario, NASA would say, okay, that sounds intriguing. We'll allocate a few million dollars to this research agenda. And then the Congress will have to appropriate those funds

and approve them. And then the funding will actually be provided two years from now. Okay, so I'm saying two years from now, we already have an ongoing Galileo project, a scientific research project. In two years, we will have enough data to perhaps change the charter of this study. You know, science cannot wait for government to move. Science, if it's funded properly, you know, operates much faster than that. Because we are curious. You know, I'm just like a kid.

I want to figure out the answer. I will not wait for NASA to get its answer. together. So we established the Galileo project. We'll find out what's out there. The sky is not classified. We'll figure it out. Now, you had kind of recently celebrated the, or almost celebrated the anniversary of the last time we spoke on this podcast, but that was in preparation for this announcement of the Galileo project. And I wonder, you know, if we might think that NASA is somehow, you know, really influenced by it. Obviously, the title of your post on Medium, which I have a link to in the show notes below here below.

And that is, you know, refers to imitation. So we're not talking about the Turing test here. So when you made up the idea, when you had the idea for the, for Project Galileo project, or Galileo project, was it really to cast as wide a net as possible? Or was it to focus like a laser using the astronomical tools and cutting edge technology that we now have in the community rather than having such a wide net that who knows what would be captured in your favorite seashore analogy? Well, there are two approaches that one can imagine.

One is waiting for the government to declassify that data that Bill Nelson saw. That seems to be very intriguing because not only he spoke about it, but former CIA directors and former directors of national intelligence spoke about it as a serious matter. But that is just like waiting for Godot, you know, like in Samuel Beckett's play. We can wait forever. A much better approach, I mean, is to recognize that the government. government is not releasing the data because it was obtained by classified sensors. It's not so much that the data is classed.

The data would have been classified if it indicated activity from China or Russia. The data is classified since the government cannot figure out what it means. And then the sensors used to the derive it are classified and that's why the data is not publicly shared. So I say, forget about it. Let's just collect new data. Science is about reproducibility of results. If we, a few multi-billionaires showed up at the porch of my home, gave me a couple of million dollars, you know, I decided to allocate it for this project, the Galileo project, and that's what we are using

and building new telescope systems. You have to understand, astronomers look at the sky, but they are focused on very distant sources of light. If a bird flies above their telescope, they ignore it. And we want to focus on that bird and say it's a bird. And if we see a drone, it's a drone. But if it's something else, not natural or human made, we will say it's not natural or human made. And we want high resolution, high quality data. So we use the state of the art equipment. It's not a camera on a jittery cockpit of a fighter jet. And it's not eyewitness testimonies. You can't write a scientific paper based on what people tell you. You know, we are not at ancient times now. We have to do so. So the Galileo project is basically an attempt to collect new

data, new evidence, using the scientific method, without prejudice, being agnostic about what we might find in our fishing net. We cast a fishing net. It's a fishing expedition. We don't know what we will find. It's probably a mixed bag. It will be a collection of natural objects, a collection of human-made objects. But even if one object happens to come from an extraterrestrial technological origin, that will be the most significant discovery of humanity. And that's very different from the objective of the government, which worries about national security and the safety of military personnel. So they have to attend to any report, irrespective of how good the data is. We don't need to care about the fuzzy data, you know, or eyewitness testimonies. We just want one object that has

exceptional data where you can read off the label made on Exoplanet Y. Yeah. And if you look Eric at this first of all, I want to give a shout out to Eric's mugs because last time he had on the standard model, Mexican hat, and so forth. We drank tequila on Cinco de Mayo. Today's got a donut, and that's appropriate because this is Father's Day weekend. Happy Father's Day. You guys are father figures, not only to your children, your wonderful children, but also to many people around the world, ideologically at least. But I sent out some dad jokes in preparation for this, and one of them was, what did the donut say to his lover? He said, thanks for making me whole. Eric, what is your interest in all of this?

Is it the dream of not the Galilean those, but the Einstein's, if not the Weinsteins, to traverse space and time? What is your interest? You've been one of the most foremost scientists that's been looking into this, who also plays a very important role in public discourse. So why do you care about this for those that might not be aware of it? I don't like being lied to. And I don't like being lied to in particular about it. items of national security, and I especially don't like it when it's done poorly. So one of my chief complaints is that if you really have a national security threat, you

don't call up your regular physics core for an issue of physical interest. It's sort of like everything about this topic is wrong. And I don't really like the topic because it's one of two super interesting things to me at this point. some multi-decade nonsense campaign, which would explain why we don't have any really good video photograph or artifacts that conclusively end this topic. Or it's a many-year cover-up of an understanding that we've been dealing with something almost beyond comprehension, which would explain all the indirect evidence for this.

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And it's also the case that if this is a real phenomenon of craft not manufactured on this earth, it's not an issue of technology. And I think we've become incredibly confused about life that somehow we're so focused on markets, we only think about technology, we don't think about the change in the science that would have to explain the new technology. So the way I look at this, this is an issue of public trust. I'm going to slightly disagree with my colleague, Professor Loeb, not with his conclusion

that we have to not wait for the government, but we have to pressure the government in part by doing this ourselves, because if science is going to be a public good that we cannot commercialize because it falls outside of the intellectual property rules of our country, we expect a very high level of support and a very high level of dialogue. And the intrusion of sort of bad-tempered, ill-bred children in the compact between government and science has been most unwelcome. So it's really important to recognize that whatever this is, it's important for restoring government credibility.

If there's been a giant lie that's been told for many years, we need to understand it scientifically and undo it. If it's a question of there's a real security threat, we need our best people on this. So I'm just sort of having the sense that the world has gone crazy outside of a small number of people. And I wasn't crazy, but I was stupid. I really just didn't think anything of this topic until two years ago.

So I'm very, very late to this party. And in part, one of the things, that's really important to me is that we not let the people who recognize that this was a real scientific issue early take it on the chin for being early and then immediately turn to the sort of blue chip, you know, institutional class to pridify this. And it's very important to me that we go through a process of restoring scientific credibility to people who've made eye contact with This is not necessarily have said it's aliens or it's, you know, UFOs from, from Alpha Centauri or whatever, but people who said there is something here, it is mysterious, and I've now gone deep enough into this world

to understand that you're in trouble no matter what conclusion you come to. Either you have to account for why there's no direct evidence that's worth anything, or you have to account for why there's so much indirect evidence that would be seemingly almost impossible to assemble if there was no they're there. And neither of those conclusions is a comfortable one for me. And the last thing I want to say is that you also get into this thing with the government, which I don't understand, where people reach out, they tell you that you're going to be flown out to see some site, to see some evidence, you're prepared to sign an NDA, you're prepared to sort of play ball as a good citizen and as part of the scientific core of the United States. And then everything always gets hold off and

held up and we're going to have to where there's a committee meeting and there's some people who need to be placated and this is an in I can't tell you how many times this has now happened with four or five different channels that don't even seem to be aware of each other so there's something very weird about hurry up and wait going on with this particular topic in a way that I've never seen before and I am tired of being run around if if I'm put under some agreement I can keep my mouth shut, but I'm going to be speculating about what this is up until somebody tells me what the hell we actually know about this very strange phenomenon. Okay, I'm a very naive relative to Eric.

You know, I was born on a farm. I'm still a farm boy. So my, my naivity shows up in the following. I do think that the government is incapable of hiding something it knows. Okay. You said the government is incapable, you believe that the government is not capable of covering up at this level? Yeah, my... I just wanted to clarify. Yeah, my guess is the government is incompetent.

First of all, it's split into many different sections that deal with national security, and they don't tell each other what they're doing because of national security concerns. They don't want too many people to know what each person does in government, okay? So that already introduces a lot of viscosity to transfer of information, okay? But on top of that, on this topic, there is a stigma, and people prefer not to be. prefer not to talk about it so that they maintain an image of being the adult in the room. Okay. And so that you combine these two together and it's possible the government came across evidence that once they clarify that it's not China or Russia, they say, okay, we don't want

to sound crazy. Let's just forget about it since it's not Russia or China and just leave it aside. I don't think it's a matter of, you know, anything beyond. It's just that the government is not a scientific organization. Now, for me, it's not malice, it's incompetence. Yeah, yeah. And for me, and it's all related to the fact that sensors that are used for national security, like for example, missile warning system that need to know about ballistic missile heading towards the US. You know, if they see something that looks not like a ballistic missile, they don't, you know, it's not a ballistic thing. They don't care about if it came from another planet as long as it's not threatening the life of people in the US. And so my point is that government is not a scientific organization.

It's motivated by national security considerations and things that fall outside of that are often dismissed, especially if there is a stigma on them. So now the question is we hear those reports, we hear the echoes. It's sort of like being outside the room where the adults are speaking with each other, you hear some noises and it looks like the adults are really discussing it, very seriously. So you say, okay, there is something there that they are discussing. Why are they spending so much time discussing it? You know, I'm just like a kid. I hear their adults discussing something. I want to figure out what it is. And the adults don't tell me what it is. And so I just say, okay, well, the sky is not classified. Let's just figure it out ourselves.

You know, why do we need to wait and listen? And I don't have an issue with government. They can do whatever they want. But as a scientist, you know, for millions of dollars, I can build equipment that will give me the answer. So it's ridiculous for me to ask the adults to give me the answer when I can figure it out myself. Yeah. And I mean, obviously this drew a lot of kind of controversial remarks and not the, you know, the requisite amount of snarkiness, even from, you know, colleagues and folks, but especially those looking at the budget for this new NASA program, I put the link to a piece in Axios. Written by a woman, Miriam Kramer, who I don't know, but I know her bio says it's not aliens, it's never aliens.

I don't know if she reached out to you, Avi or Eric, but... Oh, yeah, I spoke with her a lot in the past, but yeah, go ahead. This is talking about the riskiness of this NASA program, both reputationalally, you know, for the normally stayed and very impressive organization, government organization that is NASA, but also to the reputation of astronomers. Katie Mack, who's a prolific denizen of astronomy and all things related to public outreach. She said something to the effect of, you know, we shouldn't connect UFOs to astrobiology or any other thing, other than a sort of aliens of the gaps argument where people assume that if they don't have an explanation, it might be aliens. How do you react to such a statement? Well, I should say I'm most surprised by people that work on SETI because many of them objected to any scientific study of this and also resisted allowing in conferences, lectures on this subject.

it was banned. And now I say, okay, the government really wants to know the answer. How can the scientific community shy away from it? It's very often said that we shouldn't waste taxpayers' money. Well, guess what? The government and the public that pays the taxes are very curious about this. So how can scientists say, no, this is too speculative. We don't want to deal with it.

Obviously, this should be in the mainstream of science. And what you see very often are people that blog, or have presence on social media like the ones you mentioned. And they are just figuring out where the wind blows. They want to be popular. They want to get as many likes as possible. I will not mention names, but they basically say what they think people will like to hear. And I bet you that once the wind will change direction, they will change direction.

And to me, that's not the way scientists should work. It's not a popularity contest. We need to figure out the truth and we need to investigate the subjects that are of interest to government and the public and Irrespective where the wind is blowing at this moment in time because the wind will change direction in the future I've seen it many times in the context of planets that were ridiculed when I started astrophysics Gravitational wave astrophysics was ridiculed You know, it's very often that the wind is blowing in the wrong direction because it's blowing in the direction of So-called experts people that worked on things for a long while and

and want to maintain the landscape of research the same as they are familiar with. And that's counteracting innovation in science. So we should ignore that. When you look, Eric, at the transition since you and I first are talking about this over two years ago at the beginning of my pandemic excursions into podcasting, would you have expected that NASA would provide a six-figure budget? It's rumored that the budget for the NASA program is 100,000 or so, which is only one 11th of the Galileo project budget. I should say that, Eric, you are a member of the external

advisory committee for Project Galileo, I believe. I used to be, but I have since stepped down due to other requirements. But Eric, are you still involved in Galileo Project as an external kind of? No, not external. He's in the research. Oh, he's in the research. Okay, sorry. I didn't, I didn't recall. I was confusing. Completing myself with Eric. And I'm interested in. I mean, look, there are a lot of people who don't belong in science. And we sold sciences. Science is fun and science is a good time. And it's not really true.

Science is a calling and it's grueling and it's dangerous and all these things. We need the people who are trying to spread shame and fear to go back under their comforters and duvets and hide there until this gets sorted out. Nobody knows what this is. It may be a propaganda campaign on behalf of the government. Whatever it is, it's a something. And the idea that investigating it puts you at risk reputationally, I'm just going to pass over this in silence. It's embarrassing that we have such people in science.

There's not much we can do. This isn't a question of, you know, studying astrology. There's a claim that their data exists. There's a tremendous amount of firsthand encounters that, you know, are had with pretty reputable people. And one of the things I've been just shocked by is the number of completely sober individuals who once or twice in their life appeared to have had some sort of UAP, UFO experience that was effectively impossible to dismiss as swamp gas or a mylar balloon.

And whatever this is, it deserves. investigation even if what we find out is that you know that there's some mineral in the water that can induce hallucinations that look like cigar-shaped objects whatever it is doesn't matter but the most important thing is just to drive the shamers and haters out of serious scientific discourse because science is based on a certain level of trust and a certain level of professional ethics and we can't afford such people trying to steal other people's grants or trying to ding other people's reputations just to play the cutthroat academic version of the hunger games or the blogging sphere. So I think it's really important just to recognize

what we're talking about is the scientific equivalent of a mean girls lunch table in middle school. And it's very important just to drive them underground and to return fire. Like let's not take this as shame. I'm certainly not saying that we are being visited by aliens. I'm saying something is going on and whether it's a government disinformation campaign or we've been in contact with little green men for years, I can't tell you. What I can tell you is something is going on and science investigates a something. We apologize to no one and with all due respect and with all the love from science. If you're not down with that, get the hell out of our way. So, yeah, go ahead, Abby. So it's very often said to me,

claims require extraordinary evidence, which is a quote from Carl Sagan. But, you know, as much as he was a member of my department many decades ago, I completely disagree with him because extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. You know, we invested $10 billion to confirm the Higgs boson through the large Hadron Collider. Now, you could have said, well, it's an extraordinary claim. We don't have evidence for it. The Higgs boson doesn't exist. That's not the way science is done.

If there is a question that is worthwhile, either because we have good reasons to believe that something exists, or because there are reports of anomalous phenomena, in this case from the government, from other sources, then we should examine it. And unless you put funds towards it, it's just like sitting at home and saying, I don't have neighbors. Well, guess what? You have to look through your windows to find your neighbors, and you better use a telescope. So it's completely unprofessional.

And I think it reflects more on the quality of those scientists who make these statements, more than on the subject itself. And the stigma should go the other way. And thinking about the culture and not being able to dissociate it, my comment for you guys is, you know, your crosstown rival, MIT, David Kaiser. He makes a point in his recent book, Quantum Legacies, you know, that the alien kind of phenomena first percolated into the American conference. consciousness around the same time as the nuclear age, the quantum revolution, the electronics,

digital revolution. What about this current epoch? I mean, I can't escape the fact that you guys were at this Bitcoin conference where I lost all my money on Dogecoin. No, no, I'm just kidding. But we are going to talk about an NFT project that is close to both at least Avi and what I'm interested in with my recent translation of Galileo's dialogue for the first time, not translation, about audiobook and an NFT associated with it. But is there anything about the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times now that is causing this where you have senators and not the kooky one,

you have legitimate senators, you know, looking at this phenomenon, you have military. Is there anything in the air, so to speak, that is commensurate maybe to a lesser degree than in the 1940s and 50s when this first surfaced from Roswell onward? Well, I think the data gathering capabilities that we have are so much better now.

And so while in the past you could have said, oh, it's probably just a malfunction of the detector or whatever, nowadays you cannot ignore it because we have much better sensors. And if you want to ask why now, you know, I think it's the accumulation of data. It's the fact that perhaps, you know, we are developing these AI systems, you may ask, why is their activity, you know, if we are getting close to creating a conscious AI system or an AI system that is indistinguishable from the human mind, that would be of interest to extraterrestrials. For us to have a nuclear reactor, you know, it's not such a great accomplishment

because there are much bigger nuclear reactors in the form of stars out there in nature. But there is nothing like an artificial intelligence system that comes along naturally. And that's a milestone that once we have a system of that nature could attract attention. I feel slightly differently about it. I think that it may be that when you fuse nuclei, you send a signal that you're pretty close to the end of the basic rules of physics. And that's controversial because people like the idea that physics is an infinite process, not like finding all continental landmasses, where at some point you add the last one and you're done. I'm concerned that we just don't have a scientific method extended.

One of the things that Avi and I talk about is the extension of the scientific method to novel circumstances. For example, it's very rare that humans ever study something more intelligent than themselves. Speak for yourself, Eric. Speak for yourself, Eric. I'm married as well. So I do study. my wife's behavior, but that's not what I was getting at. Thank you for bringing that. What we have is a situation in which what if you're the rat in a psychologist's maze and you're trying to figure out when the psychologist provides you with sugar water or cheese.

Everything reverses. It's also the case that when we capture technology, if we capture it from the wild, we're usually talking about a chimpanzee has figured out how to fish ants with a stick. it's not usually the case that we come across something like a computer or a spaceship that has capabilities that we lack. I mean, an example of this would be like the Antik Thera mechanism, which was discovered in a shipwreck dive where it was a human civilization, but one far more advanced than any we had known about like a thousand years ago. So the scientific method has to be extended.

And one of the reasons I'm interested in the Galileo project is the discussion. about what is the responsible extension of the scientific method? It's also the case, for example, if you look at cuttlefish skin, it's probably the most advanced camouflage system found in nature. What if somebody, so in the UFO, UAP world, that would be called signature management. And what would it be like to study something that doesn't want to be studied, is more advanced than you are, is studying you while you are studying it, and knows physical laws that you know nothing of.

I just spent several days at two physics conferences at UCLA that Zvi-Burn was organizing. And in the first one, Nima Arkani-Hamed from the Institute for Advanced Study brought up one of his favorite points, which is the demise of space time. That space-time is doomed and it is only going to be seen in the future as an emergent mathematical structure, a map which is. is not the territory. The interesting thing about that, though, is if you take the point of view that space time is merely an effective theory, then you have to ask yourself the question, does the theory that renders space time an effective theory that contains space time, does that

have new degrees of freedom that something else can get access to and that we're trapped in this much lower dimensional, more compressed effective theory, while some something else is aware of a more fundamental theory. And in that paradigm, the scientific method is relatively mute on most of these topics. So we tend to believe that we're in general position, we're smarter than what we're studying,

we can repeat it many times at will, and all of these things have to be adjusted. Now we've met that a little bit with respect to things like the Big Bang and the surface of last scattering. You know, and I think Avi made a really brilliant point although he made it in a way that I might slightly disagree with. But the point is much better than my disagreement.

The point is that intelligence may be much rarer than fusion, which I totally agree with. And I think that that's a really interesting thing. But it may be also that the reason that we have summoned something to our shores is that we've indicated something that we do not know. We may think physics is going to go on forever. And whatever it is that may be watching us may know exactly how close we are to parity with it. So rather than it being tens of millions of years more advanced than ourselves, which is very much in keeping with the zeitgeist of today.

The zeitgeist of today is against individual achievement. It's against the triumph of human intelligence. It's against the idea of power laws where certain people are much more productive than teams of others, et cetera, et cetera. this thing may know that we are much farther along and much more of a threat to it than we know we are. If you think about it, what if you suddenly found that orcas had developed opposable flippers and were just miles ahead of what we thought, you know, large dolphins could do in the sea? It would give us a huge shock. What I think is that it is entirely possible that whatever the successor to space time is

allows for things that we can't yet think about, and that it may be that we're a lot farther towards learning our fundamental truth than we know, and that that may be of interest to something watching us. Yeah, if I may add to what Eric just said, you know, the one thing that marks the current time is the development of AI artificial intelligence system that may be eventually similar to the human mind. And if you ever push the baby in a stroller on the street, you would recognize that the baby, when it passes by other babies,

finds them much more interesting than yourself. And therefore, you know, if we are dealing with AI, astronauts. But Avi, my baby likes the toaster oven better than me. It's not saying much. But my point is simple that, you know, we are used to Darwinian evolution here on Earth, where random processes select the fittest, the survival of the fittest. And in fact, the extension of that, once we started developing technologies, technological selection, not natural selection, but technological selection in interstellar space. It's those gadgets that are autonomous, don't need guidance from their senders.

Then their senders may be dead by now. These are AI astronauts. And they may be also our destiny, our future. If we send out those monuments of sentient AI systems to space, I can guarantee that to you that they are much better than the monuments you find. in, for example, Harvard Square, Harvard Yard, which are monuments of past presidents and deans that try to preserve their physical image. These are static sculptures, and when kids pass by them, they usually yawn. And my point is that sending AI astronauts is our future,

and it may have been the future of other civilizations, because, you know, most of the sun-like stars from billions of years before the sun. So they were just ahead of us. Mm-hmm. And one thing I've wanted to ask you, I've been working on it in my mind since you and I had a chance to talk over a year ago when you launched the Galileo project and gave me that scoop that I appreciate so much. And that was with reference to the fact that we don't seem to see aliens in our solar system. And the reason I think that's significant in the context of what Fred Hoyle and others called panspermia seems to be at least at some level capable of establishing, you know, you know, an upper limit on evolutionary facundity, in some way. In other words, we've had life on Earth for how long? I'll be four billion years, three billion years, something like that. Yeah, hundreds of millions of years, it started hundreds of millions of years after the Earth cooled. So it was really quick, very.

And it's efficient once it gets started and replication occurs and information storage obeys. Now, we haven't searched everywhere. And your friend, Carl Sagan, that we spoke about, I have a finger puppet of him here. You know, he said absence of evidence is an evidence of absence. He said all sorts of things, like Feynman. I love when people quote Feynman. You know, he'll say something like, you know, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it.

And then he'll say, if I could explain it to you, a newspaper reporter, it isn't worth a Nobel Prize. So I don't want to make too much of these great, you know, people in the pantheon of science in history. But the fact that we don't see any life on anywhere else in the solar system even, can that be used to set some kind of a limit? on the ability for us to place Bayesian priors on the likelihood of finding life outside the solar system,

let alone technological life, or am I just way off here? No, I mean, life can be very subtle. For example, it can be under the ice of Enceladus or Europa, and we haven't drilled the ice yet to find out if there is any fish in the ocean under it. There were some astronomers suggesting last year that perhaps there is life,

in the clouds of Venus. So these are very exotic environments and the life would be quite different than we find here on Earth. But I think we are really the infancy of searching. And it may be different from Earth for sure because the physical conditions there are different. So it's sort of like going on a date

without knowing what your date would look like. And so you're looking around the room and it doesn't look like there. There is a human like yourself out there. But that doesn't mean that your dad, date is not next to you in some different form, you know? Yeah. So, Eric, when we think about the kind of motivation, perhaps, of a journalist or other non-government

organizations, how do you actually assess this? You've been very vocal about the need, as you just articulated, to not humiliate people. It's not part of science, but journalists aren't scientists, right? They'll first to admit that, hopefully. what standards of journalism do you think there need to be, if any, to report on such things without encouraging ridicule and the prosthetic forehead problem of, you know, that is worthy of ridicule at some level. What do you think can be done about this in the public social media sphere, etc? I don't know where good journalism is still being done. I mean, I sometimes look at

quanta and think highly of what's written there. But in general, I've sort of just become aghast at what Twitter has done to journalists where we now have basically activists recruited as journalists because it can sell legacy media. Obviously, the right thing is professional standards, which are tacit understandings of what you cannot do. And I'm concerned that there's something about our phones that tends everything makes everything tend in the direction of interpersonal drama and in order to get funding in order to get coverage this has to become about you know is so-and-so's reputation on the rocks tune in next week when we'll hear and this is nonsense it's completely antithetical to what science is when i look at the g-minus two

muon anomaly in the discussion I was just listening to for several days, you have these collegial groups that are, you know, sort of at each other's throats, but everything is extraordinarily professional and careful, and that whatever rivalries there are are not at this lunch table level. So I think that the basic issue is we've just got to get rid of people who, the emphasis on people who go after other people because they can't do their job either as scientists or it's journalists covering science. And we need to replace them with better paid people in trusted positions who weigh things. And it's also, I just wanted to say that there's one other community that I'm going to call

out and I don't want to get into specifics. But the debunking community is really disappointing because what it's doing is it's crowding out critique and critique really matters and snark and debunking and dragging and and uh all of this dunking on stuff is some sort of abomination that we need to get rid of what i'm curious about right now is what is our best data who holds it who may see it i applaud obviously attempt to say we should get our own data. But it's also completely ridiculous that a small number of government physicists determined by their security clearances rather than by their facility with equations seems to be in charge of this as their portfolio. And what I would say

is that it's really important for really prominent names in the theory community to start calling for an unsealing of this stuff. And I have to say that I'm very suspicious of a government trying to keep a secret and a legion of journalists who seem to be helping them by stigmatizing anyone who asks for the secret. So I just want to take a couple of other things that are really interesting. Peter Dazzick was clearly doing something in Wuhan with this virus. We haven't held hearings. We haven't figured it out. Jeffrey Epstein was doing something trafficking. children under everybody's noses. No journalist has called for even the bare minimum examination of documents related to what is probably a fictional hedge fund and whether or not he was tied

to the intelligence community. The firebombing of the federal courthouse in Portland was not covered in real time in a meaningful way given the level of violence being done to a federal building. In all of these circumstances, whether it's Hunter Biden's laptop, we've seen something really interesting, which is the appearance of anti-interesting stories, stories that are professional legacy media refuses to cover no matter how much interest is expressed by the population, which is later found that whatever the attempt to stigmatize the story, there was far more there in all of these cases than anyone had imagined. So I think we now have to look at the UFO UAP story in the light of all of these other stories.

I am absolutely positive that people were trying to firebomb the federal courthouse in Portland and that for some reason MSNBC was not keen to cover it, just the way they weren't keen to cover Andrew Yang's presidential run. Something is happening in our journalistic layer, which is causing stories to be anti-interesting. And there's nothing more anti-interesting than Jeffrey Epstein and UFOUAP. When I think about that. Okay, go ahead. Because moving away from politics into science and academia, okay? And the same approach that Eric is worried about in the context of politics and the media, you can find among mainstream scientists. So on the one hand, ridiculing the study of UAP, even though there is data and evidence. And science is all about collecting. more evidence if some evidence looks intriguing. That's all that science is about, evidence. Whereas while ridiculing that, maintaining a mainstream that is focused on extra dimensions, for which

we have no evidence, focused on some notions of space and time that were never validated by any experiment that never made a prediction that was confirmed, and yet awards and honors are given to mainstream scientists just for proposing them and then to other mainstream scientists just for invalidating them experimentally. And one example was the large XO dimensions, you know, the person who proposed it got a prize and the person who did an experiment later to show that it's there cannot be a large X or dimension got the price. So I said we went full circle here and we've proven that an idea is not correct. So why was it in the mainstream to start with? And

And what you find is a lot of the activity in theoretical astrophysics, theoretical physics, is rooted in ideas that were never tested, never validated. So I said, that's perfectly fine, you know, we can think about possibilities. That's perfectly fine. But at the same time, when there is intriguing evidence to dismiss it and ridicule it, that's inappropriate. This is a culture that prefers to live in a virtual reality. Basically, ideas that bring you pleasure.

It's just like putting goggles on your head and living in the metaverse where you are the smartest scientist in the world. But that's not the way science should be done. You should be wrong every now and then by comparing your ideas to data. And that's, you know, you should be bruised sometimes because you propose something that turns out to be wrong. And the only way to allow that is to follow data, to look for evidence. And the strange thing is that not accepting that rule and basically asking, how many angels can sit on the tip of a dance on the tip of a pin. That's an, especially in extra dimensions,

that's a completely acceptable mathematical intellectual gymnastics exercise that a lot of communities can agree on and give each other. But when you ask yourself, how can that replace this seeking experimental test? That looks to me very much, you know, the science is supposed to teach the public and government how to do, how to deal with evidence. So scientists very often say, oh, the government doesn't pay attention to evidence, doesn't pay attention to data. But if you look at the academic community, it's actually worse. And I ask myself, how is that possible? We are supposed to set an example by which we follow

evidence. If there are UAP that look intriguing, we say, okay, that's interesting. Let's figure it out. You know, that's the way scientists should approach it. But instead, no, the data is uninteresting. It's not real, forget about it, let's just work on extra dimensions. Like I say, that's completely opposite to what scientists should do. Well, I don't know if the, I mean, I push back with respect, as you know, and I do feel like it's a little bit of astroman to suggest that somebody could pivot from extra dimensions to doing the type of astronomy that even you don't do, Avi. I mean, you're not actually sitting at a telescope every night. I mean, you're a theoretical astrophysicist of the highest order, and you've written on this and you know the astronomical technology.

The question is not what I do. The question is, what do? The question is, what do I value? Okay? And I value evidence. And when there is intriguing evidence, I will not ridicule the evidence just on some hypothetical idea. So the real issue is that some people within our community prefer to work on theoretical ideas just because they flatter their ego and they prefer to shy away from data. I'm not talking about one year, two years. I'm talking about four decades. We're talking about the career of many scientists. Yeah. Okay. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,

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certain outlandish ideas, and not others, right? So there are various outlandish ideas that you're allowed to discuss in public, including conspiracies, like that Russia is running the United States through Donald Trump. That was an allowable conspiracy, that he was a foot soldier of Putin. But then there are conspiracies that you're not allowed to. Now, the same thing is true for scientific theories. There are outlandish scientific theories that have somehow diplomatic immunity from the regular scientific process and others that do not. And so we have hyper scrutiny for some and extremely lax relaxation of the rules for others.

And this is in part a mystery that there is no real scientific method that's generating this concept of the mainstream. If leading people want to work on something outlandish, that that outlandish thing becomes the mainstream. And if certain people want to take a look at evidence and go through absolutely normal scientific channels to look at something that people don't want discussed, that becomes aberrant, fringe, weird, cranky behavior. Now, the fact is that that doesn't really have a lot to do with any objective standard. It has to do with the fact that there is an Overton window in science,

just the way there is in political discourse. And, you know, if you wanted to study what causes ulcers and you didn't believe it was stress, you had to experiment on yourself at some point because that was so much a part of the orthodoxy. In all of these situations where you've seen something fall, something outlandish, we saw this with the asymmetry of the weak force. The evidence was accumulating,

but it was just this thing where nobody wanted to say, the weak force has no close. It was an emperor that we dare not question. And so in a certain sense, it's not really about extra dimensions or UFO, UAP. The question is, are we as scientists allowed to say,

hey, why is string theory allowed to go on this way, or large extra dimensions, or loop quantum gravity, but not UAP, UFO, even to gather data to dismiss it by saying we had sensors up and we found nothing.

I want to ask that. I'm sorry, go ahead. Just to close it out. I think that the real issue is it's a little disturbing to many of us that there are allowable relaxations of the scientific method and there are extremely harsh, harsh applications of scientific standards that are wielded selectively like a cop in a town, you know, penalizing people who look a certain way and enforcing the speed limit extremely aggressively and letting other people speed through at 100 miles an hour and doffing their cap to them,

encouraging them on their way. That's a real problem that we haven't addressed and nobody really wants to take up. So I want to ask Avi, you know, as a professional, professional courtesy, what do you mean by data? I mean, I have here, I'm in my office that used to be belonged to Jeff and Margaret Burbage, towering titans of astronomy and physics of the past hundred years.

Here's a plate she took on at Lick Observatory. It's a galaxy. She eventually did a rotation curve. Here's the spectrum of it. On one hand, these are smudges on pieces of glass that are very fragile. The other hand, they're pretty pictures. And on the other hand, they're data. And I want to ask you, when I hear colleagues say, we need data and the data need to be public,

and God damn it, the Hubble Space Telescope was built by NASA. And I own it. What is data? I mean, the Hubble Deepfield is a pretty picture. There's very little science. Correct me, if I'm wrong of you. I'll defer to you. you know, if I'm wrong.

But, you know, it's a pretty picture. There is data. There is evidence that can be extracted to look at distributions and number counts and colored magnitude diagram. You can do all sorts of things with it. But if you don't have the calibration, the flat field, the dark current, if you don't have all the stuff that goes into it. So I want to ask you, what data are we really talking about?

I mean, is it cell phone camera videos? Is it like eyewitness reports? What is it exactly, Avi? And then I'd like to hear Eric's taking a story. So what I mean by data is the accumulation of quantitative signals that are collected and documented by instruments that you have full control over and whose background you understand. So it cannot be a camera in a jittery cockpit of a fighter jet. It cannot be the pilot because people are not instruments. They have hallucinations.

They have wishful thinking. So you cannot write a scientific paper saying, this person told me that. I'm sorry. I mean, even if the person is sincere, that cannot be used in a scientific peer-reviewed journal. Okay. So what I mean by data is, first of all, you build instruments that you fully understand in terms of what is the background noise in the instrument so that you can detect a signal. And then you let the instrument do its job and report back the numbers that it measured.

And then you interpret those. And that's what the Galileo project is trying to do. We were asked, why aren't we crowdsourcing or providing people an app that they will put on their iPhone so that they will give us data? This is low quality data that we have no control over. We would rather build instruments that we fully understand under conditions that are fully under our control and then interpret the data that they collect because then we can say, look, this instrument, saw an object, let's say in the infrared, another instrument detected the same object in the optical.

The object was moving along the same trajectory in both instruments. It cannot be malfunction of the instrument. And we know that acceleration cannot be produced by human-made vehicles. And it cannot definitely be representative of a bird because we know the distance to this object. So these are the kinds of measurements

that will tell us it's something else. Or if we have a high resolution image image where we can see the bolts and the screws on the surface of the object. So it cannot be natural. A rock doesn't have bolts and screws on it. Or if we go and do an expedition to Papua New Guinea where we collect the fragments from the first interstellar meteor that landed there in 2014. And then we find that the composition of those fragments is some alloy that is completely artificial that you don't find in nature. Then it's something else.

So what I'm talking about are collection of quantitative measurements that indicate that it's something quite unusual. Now we did have partial evidence of that type on Omuamua, the first interstellar object reported. We have some partial information about this meteor that I mentioned from 2014, four years before Oumuwa that my student, Amir Sirajan, I discovered and the government confirmed a couple of months ago. And we know that this meteor was denser or tougher than iron because it burned only 20 kilometers above ocean level where the stress is above, well above the yield stress of iron. So we know that it was unusual, but we don't know for sure what its origin was and we know that

it came from outside the solar system. So right now we have intriguing evidence. The same as for UAP. We don't have a conclusive argument at the moment, but that's why we should be motivated to find more data. And it always reminds me of my colleague that after a lecture at Harvard about Omuamua, this colleague of mine focused on studying rocks for decades. So when he left the auditorium, he said to me, Omuamua is so weird, I wish it never existed. And that is completely the opposite to what a scientist, a true scientist, should say. Obviously, an expert would like to interpret everything based on his or her past knowledge. But if you are a real scientist, you should say, this object is so intriguing, I would like to get more

data on it. It's really exciting. Lenin reportedly said, you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. You might not be interested in aliens. But Eric, what extent should, you know, you and I've talked extensively about the general demarcation, Paparian ideas, but at what level would you say to Avi, give it up, man, Omuamua. In other words, what would it take for you and me or maybe to convince Avi? And then Avi want to ask, what would you be convinced by that Omuamua is not, as your book of the same name, phenomenal book, bestseller smash hit, extraterrestrial? What would convince you, Avi?

But first I want to ask, Eric, is that a good question even to ask? You know, more or less my experience with Avi is that when Avi gets something wrong, he's eager to say that he's got it wrong. And that shouldn't be a remarkable characteristic of a scientist. I'm sorry to say. But, you know, just the willingness to entertain being wrong, it's contagious and it's immediately recognizable. So my feeling is I don't really need to tell.

It's not like Avi's under some kind of a watch. And we have to say, like, maybe he's gone around the bend on a mua moa, I think what he's doing is that he's trying to show conviction. And might Avi be wrong? Yes, it does not shock Avi that I think he might be wrong, and nor does it threaten our relationship. I think that this just, we've got to take the MTV out of science in order to recognize that being wrong and making bold conjectures is normal.

And if you don't, if everything you've ever said is true and is right and work, you're probably not really pushing the cutting edge. I think that in terms of data, one of the great problems that we have here is that every time you try to take the perspective of somebody on the outside saying, well, maybe it's BS, maybe there's something there, I don't know. And you're talking to these people who are ex-government or aerospace contractors or in government, there's this very awkward moment where they get so frustrated. with this, they say, I just wish I could show you what we have because it would end this conversation instantly.

So the claim is made repeatedly by different people that what is held in terms of, like, I don't know, satellites that have tracked objects coming in from, you know, outside of Earth orbit at incredible speeds and non-ballistic trajectories. You know, the claim is that we have all sorts of crazy data that may not be very visual in the sense of, oh, look, a floating tick-tac, but are scientifically much more interesting because let's say you have, you know, five different sensors on the same object and you're absolutely convinced that it would be incredible to spoof all of them or it would have to be a conspiracy or something. So the claim that is made repeatedly by people in positions with security clearances and the like is that the data is completely clear that we're dealing with a real phenomenon. And that's really tough on me because I haven't seen anything that looks remotely like that. In other words, I'm so bored of these three tantalizing videos that got released and all of the cool stuff that shot on people's iPhones.

You know, the other week I saw a supposed UAP video shot out of a plane in which a giant whale broke through the clouds and splashed back into the clouds as if they were, you know, the surface of the ocean. And I thought, well, that's much higher quality than most of the UFO videos I've ever seen. So in a weird sense, the video stuff as data, to Avi's point, is completely clear that it's not very helpful. What is claimed is that there is extremely high quality data that completely settles the question of whether we're looking at something real or not. I've never seen this data. I've heard it discussed many times. People have threatened to show it to me. people have threatened to fly me to a location.

There's something that has happened every single time. So I now expect that I'm going to get some phone calls from people who claim to have this data, who claim that this is going to happen. And then it doesn't happen. And it's not just me that this has happened to. It's repeatedly with various people. So I think that in part, whatever is going on here, it's a dime that was flipped and has landed on its side for like 75 years.

And since a dime is not going to stay in an unstable equilibrium on its side, you have to ask the question, is that in fact a new piece of data? What does one make of the fact that a dime could land on its side for 70 years without clear data getting into the public's hands so that anybody with a competency can look at it and say, this is not consistent with anything known to man? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable. from magic. We hope you enjoyed part one of this special two-part episode of Into the Impossible with your host, Professor Brian Keating, in a conversation with Avi Loeb and Eric Weinstein. Please take a minute and leave this a review. We really appreciate it. Tune back in to part two for more provocative, insightful science content that you can only find here on Into the Impossible.

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