Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb: `Oumuamua is EXTRATERRESTRIAL (#307)

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Please support the podcast by taking our short listener survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/intotheimpossible Watch the video of this episode here: https://youtube.com/live/86E03OzQDCo?sub_confirmation=1 Recently, Bergner and Seligman explained the behavior of the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, as a rare form of a quite common object, a comet. They claim it "began as an icy planetesimal that was irradiated at low temperatures by cosmic rays during its interstellar journey, and experienced warming during its passage through the Solar System. This explanation is supported by a large body of experimental work." But Avi Loeb disagrees: “In a new paper published recently in Nature -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05687-w Acceleration of 1I/‘Oumuamua from radiolytically produced H2 in H2O ice -- Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman suggest that the peculiar acceleration observed by the first known interstellar object `Oumuamua, can be explained if `Oumuamua was made of water ice which was partly dissociated into hydrogen by cosmic-rays along its interstellar journey. In the abstract of the paper, the authors admit that past models involving a pure hydrogen iceberg or a pure nitrogen iceberg do not work due to theoretical or observational inconsistencies. In fact, the hydrogen iceberg model was proposed in a previous 2020 paper by Darryl Seligman himself. A few months later, Avi wrote a paper with Thiem Hoang, showing that heating by interstellar starlight would destroy hydrogen icebergs too quickly and not allow them to reach the solar system from their likely formation sites of giant molecular clouds. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05687-w Read Hoang and Loeb's response paper: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Hoang_Loeb_23.pdf Essay: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/oumuamua-was-not-a-hydrogen-water-iceberg-1dd2f7a6107f https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.00092.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/24/harvard-physicist-pacific-expedition-first-interstellar-meteor Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. There was a paper that I've written with the director of AARO at the Pentagon. There is an organization collecting all the data about unidentified aerial phenomena. In that paper, we mentioned in the introduction the possibility that you can have a mother ship that releases a lot of small probes. And the reason I came across this idea is because Omuamua Shared the same distance of closest approach and the same speed as an interstellar

meteor that was discovered seven months before it in March 2017. And it was detected by the U.S. government and put in the meteor catalog, and together with my student, Amir Siraj, we identified it as moving too fast to be bound to the sun, so we identified it as an interstellar meteor of very high material strength because it burned up in the lower atmosphere of the earth. This was the second interstellar meteorore. We discovered another one from 2014. But what was special about the 2017 one is that it shared the same distance

at closest approach to the sun and the same speed at that distance as Omuamua did. But that led me to suggest a possible scenario. Of course, the purpose of any extraterrestrial technology, technological gadget depends on what the senders wanted to use it for, or it could be just based trash. You know, we, when you go to the ocean, you find a lot of plastic trash, and it indicates that there are, there is a technological civilization out there. In fact, the mass of this trash will exceed the mass of fish in the oceans by 2050, if we

don't stop throwing trash into the ocean. We will try to go there to the explosion site of that meteor and find the, you know, the, relics from it in order to analyze their composition and figure out whether it was a spacecraft. Welcome everyone to Into the Impossible. In this lively live stream episode, the inimitable Avi Lome defends himself against a paper attacking his proposition that a muamua, the mysterious object visiting our solar system in 2017, could have originated from an advanced technological civilization. Could it have been a solar sail powered spacecraft, a piece of space junk from a distant civilization, an interstellar alien probe.

In addition to learning the differences between a meteorite, asteroid, and comet, Professor Loeb points out the flaw in the paper published in nature and how bias can distort science in general. Stay tuned for this open-minded, clear-thinking dialogue on the topics of UFOs, UAPs, and techno objects. Keep in touch with Professor Keating by joining his email list at briankeating.com slash to receive his Monday Magic newsletter, and if you have a dot edu domain,

we'll send you a bit of space dust in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing. And for some extra credit, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too, where we just broke the 100,000 subscriber milestone.

Please, help us make the show better by filling out our listener survey linked to in the show notes. And let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review like this one. T.C. Cook says, such thoughtful, challenging and interesting conversations. I learn a lot every time I listen. And now, keep an open mind as our frequent guest, Avi Loeb, takes us into the impossible and the real possibility of detecting alien artifacts. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the podbay doors, please help.

I'm very happy to be speaking today with my good friend Avi Loeb, who's a professor, a renowned scientist, the director of the Galileo Project, the founder of the Galileo Project. Really, the driving force, I would say, behind so much interest nowadays in the phenomena of extraterrestrial entities, whether they be craft or perhaps searching, for hard data, not just speculation, not just cell phone camera reports, not just professional skeptics. This is what people want. They want hard data. They want access to the best. And for better

or for worse, Avi, Harvard is the gold standard, right? I mean, come on. Harvard is taken as the gold standard. And you were the chair of the department for over a decade. You've been made renowned contributions to areas of theoretical physics, of cosmology, of astronomy, and now pivoting in later stage of your career, to things that are exploding in interest among the general public. Who pay our taxes, our salary? I pay my own taxes. I almost slipped and said the public pays it. Anyway, I'm not feeling good today. I've got it cold, but I wouldn't miss this conversation for the world. We're talking with Avi Loeb. And Avi, welcome. Good morning. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to join you. And I should say that when I do my

work as a scientist. The fact that I belong to Harvard is irrelevant as much as it is for a soccer player playing for Real Madrid. The other thing I would say is that when I'm using instruments to figure out what nature is, that's just like using video cameras in the World Cup in soccer. You know, that's what FIFA is doing. It's not relying on the players to tell them whether there was a penalty or not. It's using video cameras and analyzing them. So, you know, I don't want to use. use humans as scientific detectors, I don't want to subscribe to social media and listen to how many likes I have. Well, it's great that you do what you do.

And what we're talking about today, and it really speaks about your integrity as a scientist, which is that you routinely get criticized, and you get criticized by lay people, by the media, by, you know, people that are, that want to see you fail almost. But you never really shy away. You've done more podcasts than I have. And it's really quite incredible that you have a knack for both the integrity to face challenges, but also the data to back it up. And what you're doing is to never shy away.

So the most recent claim, which is met with, I would say, it's almost met with glee. Whenever there's a chance, it's very bizarre, Avi, that people want Omuamua to go away. They want it to be some, you know, comet, some iceberg. And maybe, I mean, it has to, we have to say, maybe it could be. But there's a paper published in nature recently. And it's not the first paper. And it's not even a theory you haven't encountered before. So I wonder if we could explore these papers.

And I will, I don't know, do you want me to show the nature paper first to show the nature paper itself that was written? Go ahead and show it. It appeared on Thursday. Yeah. So when did you hear, when do you first hear about this paper out of me? Well, a dozen reporters from around the world asked for my opinion. The editor of nature never asked me to referee this paper. Okay.

And so I got a copy of it while flying back from Switzerland. And I was featured in the world Minds forum there. I had dinner with the former head of NATO with the most important architect in the world, Lord Foster, and with a number of very important people. And then on the flight back, I got an email from a reporter saying there is this paper that is about to appear in nature. So that's the first time I noticed it.

And then, you know, I was asked by others. And we can talk about the details. OK, so good. So let me call up the, I only have access at home to so many things that I need to. By the way, just a footnote on what you said in terms of criticism. When I came back from Switzerland, I also found in the mail

the following document that was sent to me a package from Rome in Italy. And it's actually a collection of all the legal documents against Galileo Galilei that was put together by the Inquisition. And this collection is actually dated 1907, and someone in Rome decided to send it to me. So what I'm saying is this social phenomena of wishful thinking, wanting reality to be one thing while the evidence goes another way,

is not new. What is new is that it keeps persisting without us learning lessons from the past. The point is, we should adhere to evidence. We should use the laws of physics as we know them in order to figure out what's going out there rather than use wishful thinking. And let me just close with two brief examples.

I was once at a thesis exam of a physics student at Harvard. And the whole purpose of the thesis was to test the popular cosmological model of cold dark matter based on the clustering of guidelines. That was the purpose to build up a test. And then I asked the student, what will happen if we apply your test to future data? And it disagrees with the data. And the answer was, then it means that I must have missed something in my modeling

because it should agree with the standard cosmological model of cold dark matter. So this is one example. And then the second one was a talk that was given a colloquium that was given at the Black Hole initiative when I was the director there by a very prominent scientist who said that here is the prediction of the swamp land landscape of string theory. Okay. For cosmology. And I said, that's great that you're making predictions. So what will happen if in the future we have data from the cosmic microve background that disagrees with your predictions? would that rule out string theory?

And the answer was, no, it will just show that my conjecture about the swamp land is incorrect. String theory must be right. And I say, what have we learned over four centuries from the trial of Galileo? Back then, people were 100% sure that the sun moves around the earth, and they were willing to prosecute Galileo for that. And what we learned from that is that debate about the interpretation of reality is the right way to proceed because eventually the truth will be revealed. Now we can look at the earth from a distance and see that it moves around the sun. So obviously nobody would subscribe to the camp of the prosecutors of Gallio, yet they were 100% sure that they're right and they put him in house arrest.

Yeah. And I often think that we get so tied up with, you know, kind of accepting the science. People say, oh, scientists say this. So if one scientist says one thing and another scientist says another thing, the public is kind of left in an ambiguous superposition of like scientists don't, either scientists don't know what they're talking about, which is very dangerous to society. Or scientists, you know, they make their whole living off of petty squabbles, which, well, when the data is incomplete, sometimes you can't. decide, okay, which side to agree with. But if someone says two plus two is five, right, we all know that's wrong. Well, I mean, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, home on. At your university, there is a gentleman, I think his name is Karim Carr. And he has many, many, many, many references

to two plus two could equal five. He's actually a math graduate student at Harvard. So we should be careful because people do accept that and it's considered almost a sign of actually it's claimed to be white supremacy to believe two plus two equals four so let's not get into that i don't want to get into culture wars but let's let's avoid two plus two especially at harvard i'd love to talk to kareem someday by the way the point i want to make is that the use of logic and the laws of physics is recognized as the scientific method okay and yeah and there are and you can show that the calculation is wrong in theoretical physics, if someone, for example, writes the energy equation, energy should be conserved. All atoms in the universe satisfy energy conservation. It's unlike interactions

between people. Human relationships do not obey any universal laws. And we know that because there are societal laws and the court system, the legal court system, is full of cases where people violated societal laws. So if you decide, and psychologists know that, if you decide that humans will behave in one way, some of them will try to violate that. So we know from human relationships that laws are not universal, but for atoms, all atoms need to satisfy energy conservation. So if this paper in nature that we will talk about does not satisfy energy conservation, I can show that it's wrong. And there is no doubt about it because any astronomer, any physicist will agree with me. So this is not a matter of debate, whether energy conservation

was satisfied in the nature paper or not, it's not a question of opinion. You can look at the equation and see, just like, suppose you get a salary and you're saying, can I support my family with this salary? And all you put into the calculation is the rent and the heating expenses, electricity expenses, and so forth, but you forget to include feeding your family. Then, obviously will not be able to sustain your lifestyle because you forgot about a term. And the same is true about energy conservation. If you're missing a term and we will talk about which term was missed, then the reality of the situation is that your calculation was wrong.

There is no doubt about it. It's not a matter of opinion. So this paper, I'm going to show it on the screen now. I don't know if you have a copy of the abstract. All I can show is the abstract because... Go ahead. That's okay. So it's called acceleration of one eye, Omuamua, from radiolidically produced,

hydrogen, molecular hydrogen in water ice. So let's go through it. If you have it there, you could take us through all these different terms. And I think it's instructive from my audience, which is the brightest in the whole universe. As you know, this audience is incredibly technically proficient. So we can go as deep and nerdy. We did an hour and a half with Martin Bauer this week on the Stern-Gurlock. experiment, obviously. So don't be afraid to go deep, okay, please.

It's really straightforward here because we're talking about things that are very intuitive. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day, get low price is guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. US only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details.

So the idea of this paper is really simple. We know that the comets are often covered with water ice. And so what this paper asserts is that you start with an iceberg made of water, which we know is common in the outer parts of planetary systems. like the solar system. And it's exposed to cosmic rays in interstellar space. As it travels to us from another planetary system, cosmic rays keep hitting it. And what they do is dissociate water, which is two hydrogen atoms bound to an oxygen. They basically separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. When a cosmic ray goes through matter, it releases enough energy to break the molecules of water into

hydrogen and oxygen. And they claim breaking a third of all water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen is very reasonable. And then they go through the calculation and show that if a third of the iceberg is made of hydrogen, and then this object passes near the sun, when it's roughly at the distance of the earth from the sun, the hydrogen would evaporate from it and give it the push. that is needed to explain the observed acceleration beyond the sun's gravity. That's called outgassing. That's the outgassing. Yeah. So usually for comets, and that's the way if you open the Encyclopedia Britannica,

a comet is defined as having a coma of gas and dust. And that is produced as a result of the warming by sunlight. If there is water ice, it goes straight from solid into gas. And together, with it, some dust is released and you end up with a coma. And that is very visible because the dust and the gas often scatter sunlight. So you see this huge tail surrounding and coma and tails surrounding the comet. That's what distinguishes a comet from an asteroid. An asteroid doesn't have that ice and you don't get evaporation. It's just a rock. And so that's the definition. But here they say, well, we suggest that in fact if you take water ice and expose it to coal, cosmic ray, you end up with a dark comet, which in a way is an oxymoron because we've never

seen a dark. I mean, the way the comet is defined is by having a comma around it. And here they say, okay, well, there is a comet. This is Omuamua, the first object that came from interstellar space. It is a comet, but what evaporates from it is hydrogen, which is transparent. And to calculate how much hydrogen comes out, they calculate the surface temperature of this ice to demonstrate that you can get evaporation. And they calculate the temperature of the surface of this iceberg, just the way you calculate the temperature of Mars. You know, basically there is a balance between the heat delivered to the surface from sunlight

and the heat radiated away from the surface when it's at a given temperature. And when you balance the two, you end up with the temperature. And the temperature is just dependent on distance from the sun. There is a little bit of energy reflected back to space that is called albedo. And other than that, energy in equals energy out in radiation, and you end up with the temperature. So you end up that the Earth has a temperature just around the freezing temperature of water, and we have a little bit of a greenhouse effect on Earth, and that's why it's habitable. And the same is true about Mars.

So that's the kind of temperature that you can get on a rock. But the abido of this, so I recall somewhere that the moon has an albedo of like 8% or something, meaning that it reflects 8% of the photons. Is that not right? That's a reasonable choice 6% typically for asteroids. The point of the matter is they calculate a surface temperature when Omu Amu was observed of about 100, 150 degrees Kelvin, above up. by balancing heating by sunlight with radiation away from the surface.

That's it. That's the paper. And one more thing to just summarize just for my benefit, Avi. The notion that what's happening is there's hydrogen obviously in water. So it's getting irradiated by is it getting cosmic ray? They mentioned ablation. Is that the mechanism that's converting then, changing its albedo? Or is that not doing the outcome? So the cosmic rays are changing hydrogen to, changing water to hydrogen and oxygen, basically

dissociating the water molecules. That happens over the millions of years of interstellar travel of this object. That's what makes it in their paper makes it different from comets that belong to the solar system because they argue the comets in the solar system are often protected from cosmic rays by the solar wind. That by itself is not a good argument because most of the long period comets come to us from the old cloud,

which is outside the protection region by the solar wind. The solar wind is being stopped at 100 times the Earth's sun separation. That's the heliosphere. And beyond that, nothing protects solar system ISIS from cosmic rays. So in fact, when we look at long period comets that come to us from the hot cloud,

we should have seen, it. We haven't seen it. All the comets that we had seen had a coma. That's how they define. You go to all the classic definitions. Nevertheless, they define a dark comet as one that was exposed to cosmic rays for a long time. And I would say most of the long period comets were experienced the same cosmic race as Samuamua did. So why? And the second point is we had seen an object from interstellar space that was just like a familiar comet. It was discovered in 2019 by Borissov, Genadee Boryssen. And the fact that we saw that comet Borisov means that you can't argue that you take a regular

comet and convert it to an invisible comet when it's exposed to interstellar cosmic rays because here is Borisov. It looks like a comet. So why is Borisov different from this one? And the last point I would make is, you know, in a way, defining an oxymoron, a dark comet is similar to me to, you know, the newspeak that was mentioned in George Orwell's book 1984, where the party's slogan was, war is peace, ignorance is strength, you know, statements that are contradictory. and saying a dark comment is a self-contradictory. But at any event, they make this point that the interstellar comets are being affected by cosmic rays, and that's why. And the point is they just forgot one thing.

And, you know, their paper appeared on Thursday in nature. And the same day, we submitted a paper to the Astrophysical Journal letters, explaining that the energy conservation equation was not properly. treated. Basically, the idea is you have sunlight hitting the surface. There is radiation from the surface. That's one cooling term. But another cooling term is you need to invest energy in dislodging the hydrogen atoms from the lattice. That is another energy loss that you need to include. And if you increase the temperature, this energy loss goes exponentially because the higher the temperature is, the easier it is to dislodge hydrogen atoms.

So once you start raising the temperature up to 100 degrees Kelvin, you get a huge evaporation rate of the hydrogen from the water, and that carries all the energy that comes in, and then the temperature would go down. So in order to calculate the temperature, you need to balance the heat input from sunlight with the energy losses from radiation and evaporation of hydrogen. Really trivial.

They forgot to include the cooling as a result of the energy needed to be invested in evaporating the hydrogen. Just like I talked before about forgetting to feed your family if you are getting a salary and claiming that will be sufficient. Right. So I'm showing the paper that you submitted with, is it TM Hong that I'm showing on the screen now. I'm sharing the paper that you submitted. So I wanted to also ask you one other thing, which is that the, you know, it's something. It's not that it's new to suggest that there's some sort of iceberg type object, right? So how does this differ from, I guess there's paper from McKellie in 2018.

And by the way, I mean, you didn't discover Omoa, right? You and there were others that... I'm a theoretical astrophysicist, and I'm just to explain the reality reported by observers. So there was a nature paper back in 2018 in June, and that's what led me to the suggestion that Oumuua is really weird. and perhaps not natural, perhaps manufactured by an exoterrestrial technological civilization. That's the straw that brought the camels back for me. Too many anomalies.

But the one that Michael Mikali reported in nature was that there is this non-gravital acceleration pushing it without a cometary tail. And the question was, what is pushing it? And I suggested that it's sunlight because the acceleration, the excess push, declined inversely with distance squared from the sun. That was a good description of it in a smooth fashion. And I said, well, that's exactly how you expect sunlight to push a very thin object.

And moreover, there was no jitter in the spin of the object and no change, no evolution in the spin, the way you see it for comets. And you need, if it was a, if it were a comet, irrespective whether the evaporating gas was visible or not, you had to evaporate about 10%, a significant fraction of the mass of the object. So it would be really difficult to hide it. And the Spitzer Space Telescope looked very deeply around that region

and couldn't find any carbon-based molecules. Whenever we have water evaporating from the surface of a comet, there is also dust and there is carbon-based molecules. So you can't just argue, oh, this one is very different. In fact, one of the authors of this paper, Darryl Seligman, he wrote a review. paper about Omuamua. And he wrote an email to me last summer saying, I just finished a review paper in a very prestigious journal

about the comet Omuamua. And I replied, what do you mean by the comet? Omuamua. We both know there was no cometary tale. How can you call it a comet? And he said, well, I have this theory that it had a cometary tale when we didn't look at it. And when we looked at it, it didn't have it.

It didn't have a cometary tale. And so I said, that's what Einstein said about the moon. Well, I said really there when you don't look at it. I mean, this is just like going to the zoo and looking at an elephant and arguing that the elephant is actually a generic zebra that shows its stripes when we look away from it. And how can that be a mainstream view in overviewing an object that looks weird? You know, you can't just say it's a comet when it's not a comet. Sometimes I feel like the child in Hans Christian Anderson's tale, you know, that said the emperor has no clothes.

Here the emperor is Omo and I say it has no cometary tale. And everyone else, like the adults looking at the parade, say, oh, yeah, it's a comet with invisible clothes. You know, it's a dark comet. To me, it's an oxymoron. One of my listeners is asking you an interesting question, Navi, could you be? Could you both be right? He's asking, could the object be an iceberg sort of towed by an extraterrestrial object? In other words, could an extraterrestrial object be associated, affiliated with this,

maybe for its source of water or something? What do you think about that idea? Well, it's possible. I don't know. So this object was the size of a football field. And the argument, if indeed it was pushed by reflecting sunlight, it had to be very thin, sort of like a sail or a very thin object. And actually, the same telescope in Hawaii observed another object that exhibited similar qualities in September 2020.

It was given the name 2020 SO. And it was realized a few weeks later that this was a rocket booster that NASA launched in 1966. And it had thin walls made of stainless steel. And that's why there was no cometary tail. And because the walls were thin, it was pushed by reflecting sunlight. So you can imagine, of course, something like a light sail that has a payload attached to it, perhaps. But my point is there is no evidence for the payload. What we see is we don't have an image of the object.

It would have been nice to have one. But given the data that we have, one simple explanation is that it's being pushed by sunlight. And you may ask, where would such an object come from? And it could be just space trash. I wrote a paper that was published two weeks ago, actually, talking about Dyson spheres. So Freeman Dyson, 60 years ago, suggested the idea that a very advanced technological civilization might build a megastructure around its host star. He was my first guest on the podcast, Avi. Oh, really?

Really. Anyway, I always admired him. I met him personally for many years at Princeton, the Institute for London, the Institute for advanced study where I was a postdoc. That's where I learned astrophysics. Anyway, so his suggestion was that an advanced civilization will try to harvest much more energy from its host star than we do. You know, even with our plans for clean energy, at the best we can harvest the energy intercepting with the earth. But he was thinking, you know, surrounding the star with some kind of a sphere. And it could be made made of tiles that are basically light sails. That's what Robert forward.

they suggest there's a variant on Dyson's idea, basically having tiles such that the radiation pressure outwards is balanced by gravity inward, so you have those hovering above the stars. And so at any event, if the civilization is using a Dyson sphere for a while, eventually it might migrate away, especially when the star evolves. And if it leaves the structure behind, the structure could be torn apart by impacts of asteroids, Or actually, if it's made of tiles of solar sails, you know, when the star evolves, when the sun will brighten up, it will push away because for the same mass, it will have much higher luminosity. So it will push away all these tiles, and they can become interstellar objects.

And one of them may have been a muamua. So it could be pieces of a broken Dyson sphere. So that's an example for space trash that could lead to very thin objects that, you know, pollute space. And every now and they accelerate? Would that type of space trash accelerate, you know, unusually? Well, it will, it will, because it's thin, all you need for it to exhibit excess push away from the sun is for it to be thin so that its area per unit mass will be high. And that's what the 2020 SO, which was the rocket booster from NASA. Yeah. And that's what it was.

And it showed that phenomena. So that's what I was suggesting that Omoa Amua was thin and therefore pushed away. We don't know what the origin of it and what was it designed for. I should, another footnote, I should mention that there was a paper that I've written with the director of AARO at the Pentagon. There is an organization collecting all the data about unidentified aerial phenomena. And we had a draft together with him. His name is Sean Kirkpatrick, which got a lot of attention just because the Pentagon is collaborating with a scientist from an Ivy League university.

At any event, in that paper, which was not yet submitted because it's under review, in that paper we mentioned in the introduction the possibility that you can have a mothership that releases a lot of small probes. And the reason I came across this idea is because Omuamua Mua shared the same distance of closest approach and the same speed as an interstellar meteor that was discovered seven months before it in March 2017. And it was detected by the US government and put in the meteor catalog. And together with my student, Amir Siraj, we identified it.

as moving too fast to be bound to the sun, so we identified it as an interstellar meteor of very high material strength because it burned up in the lower atmosphere of the earth. This was the second interstellar meteorore. We discovered another one from 2014. But what was special about the 2017 one is that it shared the same distance at closest approach to the sun and the same speed at that distance as Omuamua did. And so I thought to myself, oh, let's check the orbit because maybe it was released. Maybe it's a fragment, either naturally broken off, a piece broken off of a muamua, or it was purposely released as like dandelowing seeds, you know, like if you have a large mothership releasing probes into the habitable zone. But it turns out that when you map the orbit,

they couldn't have come from the same place. But that led me to suggest a possible scenario. Of course, the purpose of any extraterrestrial technological gadget depends on what the senders wanted to use it for, or it could be just space trash. You know, when you go to the ocean, you find a lot of plastic trash, and it indicates that there is a technological civilization out there. In fact, the mass of this trash will exceed the mass of fish in the oceans by 2050 if we don't stop throwing trash into the ocean. But that human, human-generated trash, not extraterrestrial trush. No, this one is human. But you're asking if there is an extraterrestrial equipment in the ocean, that's what we're

going to find out. And we can talk about it before. That's the first interstellar meteor. We will try to go there to the explosion site of that meteor and find the relics from it in order to analyze their composition and figure out whether it was a space route, actually, because it has material strength tougher than iron. We can talk about it more. Yeah, we'll talk about, I'm showing that paper on the screen,

your paper from August 2020 with Amir and Tim. But when you talk about the confidence interval, and apologies, we're talking with Avi Loeb, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, Brian Keating, not feeling 100% great today, but I could not miss my opportunity to share with you, my beloved audience, this conversation with a renowned friend and thinker. You talk about the probability of it not being extra terrestrial extra solar,

and you say it's 99.999, you know, 5-9%. Is there really no, you know, one in a million probably, like these objects, could they not be scattered from the Orch Cloud and some violent collisions from some interactions from local stellar systems and so forth? Is it really true that we have? I mean, I have these meteorites here, which I give away to my audience, when they sign up for my mailing list at brian keating.com slash list. I'll put that up on the screen. So if you have a dot edu address, you win one of these chunks of, this looks like Omoa, Mua, doesn't it, Avi?

This is a little guy. Well, it's a generalized version because Omuomua was the size of a football field. That's right. I couldn't fit that here. Our budget at UCSD is not as large as Harvard. But is it really so hard to get an object from another solar system into our solar system? Can you explain that? Let's talk about the first interstellar meteor, which was the first object from outside the solar system ever discovered by humans.

And it was detected by the U.S. government, as you mentioned, in 2014, January 8th. And they just cataloged it. NASA put it in a catalog of meteor. So the U.S. government monitors the atmosphere for ballistic missiles as a national security matter. And every now and then they see an object coming from out there and colliding with Earth. Earth, it's a meteor, it's a rock, usually from the solar system. In fact, every year there is a rock the size of a person colliding with Earth every year that releases as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. So we get an atomic explosion every year.

We don't hear about it, but because it happens 30 kilometers above the ocean's surface, most likely above the ocean because the oceans cover most of the Earth, 70%, but it's... But it doesn't cause much damage as such an elevation. And we just don't hear about it, but the US government knows about it. And they basically cataloged meteors that they see from the fireball that is created as a result of the friction of this object with the air. So they do catalog them. And we found this meteor from 2014 that moved too fast to be bound to the sun.

And in fact, we calculated how fast it was moving outside the solar system Before it entered the solar system, it was moving at 60, more than 60 kilometers per second, which is faster than 95% of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun. So it was moving so fast outside the solar system that you couldn't get it to move that fast as a result of an interaction with an Earth cloud object or it wasn't even moving close to any of the planets in the solar system and a passage of another star at a large separation would not give it much of a kick. In order to get a kick of, you know, older 60 kilometers per second, it really needs to interact with a star very, even closer than the separation of the Earth from the

sun, maybe by a factor of four or so. So it really needs to cross extremely close to a star, which is a very unlikely event. And so it was more, moving too fast to be bound to the sun and even too fast to be associated with any of the nearby stars, 95% of all stars. And the question is, what was it? And of course, when we submitted our paper for publication in 2019 saying this is the first interstellar object, it predated the Omuamua by almost four years, the referees in the astrophysical journal rejected the paper.

They said, we don't believe the US government. And I thought to myself, how can that be the case? If they are trying to figure out whether a ballistic missile will hit Boston or New York City, they must have very good sensors. They can't get it wrong. And I basically reached out to people over the national security fence. And eventually it was a person in the White House that they mediated the release of information. there was a letter sent to NASA by the US Space Command under the Department of Defense,

stating at the 99.99% that the aerobars were small enough, that this object definitely at the 99.99% came from outside the solar system. That's it. The error budget was extremely small. And then our paper was accepted for publication. And the US government also released the light curve of the fireball, and moreover, additional data on this meteor, and that allowed us to calculate that it actually exploded 10 kilometers above the ocean surface. And that's very low in the atmosphere compared to the 30 kilometers I was mentioned before. So that meant that there was an extremely high stress exerted on the surface of the object because it moved very fast and it was also, it experienced a density of air that is quite high at the bottom of the atmosphere.

And we calculated that the material strength of this object must have been 10 times higher than any other object in the catalog of 273 of them that the government compiled. So why would the first interstellar meteor be the toughest of all the space rocks ever, detected by these sensors. And there are two possibilities. Either it originated from a system very different than the solar system. So even in the solar system, the toughest meteors are made of iron. They are called iron meteorites. Yeah, that's where you'll get if you're coming from a million list. Yeah, they're the toughest. And this one was 10 times tougher in material strength. The question is, what was it made of? And of course, it could have arrived from some natural source, like, for example, an exploding star or two neutron stars colliding,

something that we've never imagined producing interstellar objects, or it may be an artificial alloy made of stainless steel, once again, you know, like a spacecraft. And the only way to figure out is not to argue about it on Twitter, the way some people do. I don't have any account on social media, as I said, and I don't want to argue. I just follow the scientific method.

You know, I just want to go there and collect fragments, and then examine their composition. It's straightforward. That's what a kid would do. If you have a question, you go and check it, test it. And so I said, we want to go there after the paper was accepted for publication. And then soon afterwards, a person from the general public came forward and said, on a Zoom meeting, on a Zoom call, he said, you have it.

One and a half million dollars necessary to fund the expedition. Here it is. Go ahead. Okay. So I didn't do any fundraising and this person will come with us actually on the expedition. His name is Charles Hoskinson. And he was very generous. And that's the way I raised funding also for the Galileo project, separate from the expedition. I got them a few million dollars this way. And it's nice. You, you're too, you're too modest, Avi, but I'll have to toot your horn a little bit here. So, you know, one thing that strikes me about the research that you do and the approach to the scientific method that you endeavor to uphold and why I like talking to you so much is that you're doing stuff that A, is incredibly intellectually stimulating. You're trying to do it, B, with integrity.

You're also trying to do it for the benefit of the public. And I think a lot of what we do is kind of cloistered away. And part of the reason I love doing this YouTube channel, aside from the fact I get to talk to them. brilliant people on earth, including, you know, this week alone, I'm going to have a conversation with the new superconduct. You think it's controversial, Avi, talking about Omuamua. Imagine you announce a room temperature superconductor. So I'm talking to some of the critics of that paper as well.

So anyway, but the last thing is that you do it for the benefit of the public, meaning that these endeavors are meant to maybe reduce the cost to the public. of things like a huge NASA study, which is being led by our mutual friend David Spurgel, to study the properties of extraterrestrial data, perhaps, or unidentified aerial phenomenon more precisely. But this mission, you point out in this paper from last year, is about, you know, 1% or maybe less of the Benu mission, right?

So going to Earth, it's like Elon Musk, you know, who is so ingenious. But, you know, he wants to go to Mars and live out his days on Mars. And, you know, our mutual friend Martin Rees says, you know, I hope you don't die on impact on Mars to Elon. But isn't it much more likely to find a habitable zone on Earth than to go to Mars? As cool as that would be. And I'm sure I would love to take the 20,000 ride to Mars. But you're doing this for the benefit of the public.

This is not a public taxpayer, right? This is not some international team. This is you guys and some Speedos going down to the Guinea. So yeah, I want to commend you for that. Thank you. I mean, I don't see myself, even though I'm a member of the Ivy League, I don't see myself very different than any common person, any person on the street. Because I grew up on a farm.

You know, I used to collect eggs every afternoon. I was connected to nature. I'm not trying to impress people. If I see the public interested in this subject and the government is interested in this subject, then how can the scientific community shy away from it? How can it be arguing that, you know, it's too risky. It will be a waste of taxpayers' money when the taxpayers want it. Right.

And so at the same time, you know, we are spending billions of dollars in the search for dark matter. The large Hadron Collider didn't find supersymmetry. And, you know, that's not considered an extraordinary claim. But that something like us exists or existed around the planet like the Earth, moving around the star like the sun is considered an extraordinary claim. And I say that is arrogant. It's as arrogant as saying, I don't care about the public opinion. There are more than 60% of American citizens that believe in extraterrestrial life. And I would say, this is more than the number of people believing in God. And I would also argue that, you know, most of the

stars from billions of years before the sun. So we should just look out and check if the are any packages in our mailbox. And in the past, I get hostility also from the SETI community, which is very surprising to me, because what I'm doing is looking for techno signatures, which is what they're doing, but in a different way. So they're looking for radio signals for 70 years, haven't found anything.

It's just like waiting for a phone call at home. And there may not be anyone calling you at the time that you're waiting for it. I say, let's look at our mailbox, at our backyard and see there are any packages that they're because even if the senders are not alive anymore, even if their star burned up their planet, you know, it's possible the packages arrive to us

and we can learn about them. Yeah. And I also the point. Yeah. So as you said, last time you were on with Gary Nolan, well, you know, have a link to that on the show. You discussed this many times, but you had a great line.

You said the sky is not classified. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. It's not classified.

And the ocean's not class. Well, parts of the ocean are classified. But the ocean's not caused it. I should also say that, you know, when you go to your backyard, what my colleagues are doing with respect to Amuamu is saying, oh, we've been to our backyard. We know that it's full of rocks. And I say, well, if an object arrived to our backyard,

we all agree that it arrived from outside of our backyard. That's what an interstellar object is. You know, maybe it's a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. Why would you assume that all the object that come from the street are rocks of the type that you find in your world? your backyard. And you know, we know already that most of the matter in the universe is not what we find in our solar system. Most of the matter is dark. We don't know what it's made of. We call it dark matter. We learned already that the solar system is not representative of the universe. So why would

we argue that any interstellar object must be a rock, even if it looks different than all the rocks we had seen in the solar system? That's just common sense. And what I find is that common sense is not common. So on the one end, I see people from academia attacking a very simple, you know, approach that uses the scientific method, basically trying to collect evidence. They have a problem with that. They say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And how would you get evidence if you're not searching? That's my point. I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. And what happens is that they don't fund any research in that direction. And therefore, they say there is no evidence. It's as if you would say the claim that the dark matter is the

lightest supersymmetric particle is extraordinary. And we don't have evidence for that. So we should not explore it. That's not what the mainstream of physics did. It said, this is a statement worth putting billions of dollars to testing. And then they didn't, and then they didn't find it. And nobody says that was a waste of money. Why? Because that's the way science is done. At the You're exploring the unknown. And you can't just say that the lightest supersymmetric particle is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence because to find the evidence, you need to put in billions of dollars.

So that's what's happening in the context of technological objects from extraterrestrial civilization. Nobody is willing to put the money except when I come forward with a research plan, then wealthy individuals come forward and say, here is the money. see, you know, that this is the way, the path for us to expand our scientific knowledge. And, you know, it's just straightforward. I don't see why people... No, no, it's true. And one thing I love is that you're not even shy to, you know, kind of stimulate discussion. I don't think you pick fights. I think you stimulate discussion, even with

colleagues down the hall at Harvard. And you and I talked about this, I think the first or second time you're on the podcast and you've been gracious enough to come on multiple times. But your friend Kamran Vafa and he and I had conversations and we can bring up stuff. And that's the way science should be done. Science isn't done by debates and by press releases. I can't help because I do want to take a couple questions before my voice gives out for my audience. But before I do that, I'm going to ask you a question. You have your choice.

Hashem, God. He tells you Avi, pick one. Omuamua or this meteorite. Which one would you rather have the actual proof or evidence that alien civilizations, technological civilizations exist? Well, obviously, the meteorite, because I can go there and study it. You see, Omuamua is not around anymore. If I had a close-up photograph of Omu-a-Mu-A-Mua-A-R... That's what I mean, yeah.

So a close-up photograph or proves its actual spaceship or that the meteorite is a space junk from another space. No, I'm a practical person. I don't really imagine, well, if we had an opportunity to go to Omoa, obviously I'll do that. But right now, the best way to proceed is to check what this meteor was like. Of course, we can find more objects like Omoa. We have a dating app, which is called the Verarubin Observatory, that will have a survey of the sky with 3.2 billion pixel camera in a year or so. And it will survey the southern sky every four days.

and presumably we'll find more objects like Muammu so we can get close to them, observe them with a web telescope, which is about a million miles away from Earth. So we will see the object from two directions, from telescopes on Earth and from the web telescope. And that would allow us to pin down the trajectory in three dimensions, very precisely, and figure out whether there is some propulsion or whether it's just the trajectory is shaped just by the sun's gravity. That would be a great benefit.

So there are also things to do in the future. And, you know, I was asked by a podcaster just a few days ago in a podcast called Unheard, UNHERD. We can't advertise competitors' podcasts here, Avi. Do not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just advertising one question. The question was, we hear from many of your colleagues that they are 100% sure that

the Muamua was not an extraterrestrial technological relic. And I said, well, that's a reflection on them, not on Oumuamua, because there were people during the days of Galileo are also 100% sure that the sun moves around the earth. The point is when you have incomplete data, you cannot be sure. Only believers are 100% sure. Scientists with partial data are never sure. So if you want to follow the scientific method, all you say is, I want better data in order to figure it out. out of curiosity being like a child you know we uh if we don't ask those questions we basically broadcast worldwide that we lost our childhood curiosity yeah but sometimes they're too childish

sometimes they're too child like they they want to take their toys and go home and and and they want to be jealous and petty but so obvi we have a few minutes left i've got a ton of questions 700 questions here i'll only ask you we'll do a rapid fire uh rock esty is asking um is Is it significant that of all the planets in our solar system that both Omuamua and this meteorite came to the Earth instead of say Jupiter? Oh no. Okay, it depends on the trajectory. So if you assume that it came on a random trajectory, there should be an object like it every

year coming into the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. So it's really common. However, you can reduce the number of objects by a factor of 10 to the 10 billion. or so if you imagine that they were targeting the habitable zone. So if they were sent into the habitable region where the earth moves around the sun, then there are many fewer by 10 billion. And we don't know. So we just need better statistics.

And hopefully the Verarubin Observatory will give us more examples. So someone's asking about JWST. Is anything JWST can do with regard to searching for these objects or some Not to search because the web telescope has a very small field of view of all the five arc minutes, about a tenth of a degree. And so it's a very small view. And these objects, you need to look at the entire sky in order to find one of them. And so in combination with the Verar Rubin Observatory that will survey the sky,

that could alert the web telescope to an existing object. And then it's just like having two eyes, you can gauge distance much better. The reason we have two eyes is so that we can have three-dimensional calibration of the threat that is in front of us that allows us to survive. So in the same way, web telescope and Earth-based telescope could figure the distance and very precisely to an object like a moment. Oh, great. Okay, next question. Tolab asked. This change in speed of a Muammu was small compared to a typical comet moving in an elliptical orbit. I guess my question is, do we see comets that just move? I mean, we know that are comets that have a cometary tail. Do they ever exhibit strange accelerations comparable to the corpse?

This is coming from the rocket effect that it's the same effect that is pushing rockets or jet planes. Basically, airplanes, and I once did a calculation on a fly, they throw back material so that it pushes the jet plane forward. That's basically what happens. And the same is true about rockets. and you need to carry the fuel with you. And a comet is exactly the same thing. It has water ice on the surface. It evaporates as a result of the warming by sunlight,

and then it pushes the comet away from the sun. And yes, we do see that for small enough. So the force is proportional to the surface area of the comet, and then the acceleration is the force divided by the mass. So the mass goes like the volume of the comet. And therefore, the area to volume ratio dictates how much it's accelerated. So in other words, the acceleration is bigger for smaller objects. It's inversely proportional to the size of the comet.

So for small comets, you can get much more acceleration and it's noticeable. For very big course, you don't get that. And so that is observed for comets, and that's the way they behave. And Omoa, I exhibited the same kind of an acceleration, except there was no commentary tale. And we look at things, someone's asking Brian Kelly, as a friend of the show, is asking about the pioneer space anomaly, things like that.

Are those, you know, I guess my question would be, we know cosmic rays exist and we know that, you know, these light sails can exist. Do we have any evidence that light sails could be damaged or affected by, in other words, could there be sort of a hybrid solution? Light sail, cosmic rays, could these interact in some way that could degrade the performance or change trajectory and do such things?

Yeah, we actually in the original paper suggesting that it's a very thin object, or mu muo. We actually made an estimate what is the impact of either cosmic rays or interstellar particles, dust particles, gas particles on it. And we concluded that it's quite minimal. I mean, it will not destroy the object simply because the interstellar medium is so dilute. I mean, obviously, you can have holes in the sail as a result of dust particles passing through, but it will not destroy the entire sale simply because the medium is a very rarefied out there.

That's right. So, Avi, I want to just conclude by, well, asking you, if you had to do what we call a steel man, if you had to give your, best reproduction of the criticism against you, what do you think is the best critique of the Omuamua's extraterrestrial technology? What do you think is the best in your estimation of all the critiques? Yeah. So I would argue that, well, first of all, this paper in nature that appeared a few days ago in the abstract says explicitly that past explanations of the non-gravital acceleration in the form of a hydrogen iceberg, nitrogen iceberg, dust bunny are not valid. The paper admits that.

And now we showed also that what the paper suggests, the hydrogen water iceberg, is also not valid because of energy conservation. So all of these have issues, all of the explanations. And if you wanted to explain what was observed, I would argue maybe the data was wrong. The observation reported results that are not valid in the sense that when people analyze the trajectory, they forgot to compensate for some error in the measurement. So if I had to guess, my guess would be that the original nature paper, if you don't want to admit that Omu was a very thin object, that the original nature paper from 2018 by Micheli was wrong.

simply the data that they analyzed was miscalculated there was something off and they inferred a non-gravitation acceleration but it wasn't in reality it wasn't there that would be the simplest way to resolve it without any commentary tale very good well obvi i want to thank you so much apologize for my my voice but as i said i couldn't miss it for the world to have a chance or out of this world to have a chance to chat with you. You're always such a gracious guest and one of the favorites of my audience, which is growing.

Thanks to having guests like you on the podcast, The Into the Impossible Podcasts. Growing over 100,000 viewers. I can't believe it, or 100,000 subscribers just on YouTube. And then we've got another 50 or 60,000 elsewhere. But Avi, I want to thank you so much. Reminder, check out Galileo Project on Twitter.

Check them out on their website. You can support their research, which is incredibly important. You can respond to comments and stuff and articles. I put them up. They're all in the show notes from YouTube. And subscribe to my mailing list, Briankeating.com slash list.

And you too may win a miniature chunk of Omuamua, which sticks to my cell phone magnate. There it is. Here it is, cruising through the solar system. Thank you, Brian. If we find something in the Pacific Ocean, I'll be glad to see you again and even give you a souvenir from there.

That'd be great. I'm going to send you into the Impossible Speedo that you can wear while you're swimming through the ocean there, obviously. Thank you, my friend. Goodbye. Thanks for having you. Bye, bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to The Impossible. Keep in touch by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday Magic email at briankeeting.com slash list. And if you have a dot edu domain, we'll send you the next best thing to an alien artifact, a piece of an extraterrestrial object in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment.

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