Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb Strikes Back! (#377)

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Today, Avi Loeb and I talk about the hottest topics in astronomy! We discuss interstellar travel, the Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean to retrieve spherules of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, and alien life.  Avi is a professor of science at Harvard University, theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, and cosmologist. He is also a bestselling author and a dear friend of mine. Tune in! — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible 📚 Interstellar by Avi Loeb: https://a.co/d/gN18ylO  ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One benefit of finding the most intelligent civilization in the Milky Way because we can ask them questions. My first question would be, what was there before the Big Back? The second question is, where is the nearest interstellar bar where extraterrestrials come together and have conversations? We know from our personal experience that finding a partner gives a meaning to your existence. So if we ever find a partner out there,

it could give a meaning to our existence. The universe will not appear to be pointless anymore. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Avi, we've seen, you know, tremendous interest in your book, and that's been phenomenal. And I wonder what the reaction to the book has been since we last spoke back in, I guess it was September, late August. And I want to get your take on just the popular reaction to your second book after Funk coming as it did on the heels of your phenomenal, some runaway smash hit bestseller, extraterrestrial. So tell us, please, Avi,

how has been the reaction both in critical circles and in the consumer circles? And then we'll move on to some matters that are pressing because they involve a critique, as is natural in science to get a critique. Maybe not the way it was done, but we'll get into that. So please tell us, Avi, how has been the reaction to the new book? The first book, extraterrestrial, became a bestseller in many countries, 28 editions, 25 languages. which is, and that attracted a lot of attention. I had the order of actually more than 3,000 interviews as a result of that.

Just over the past couple of months, there were three profiles, one in the New York Times Magazine, another one in The Telegraph, and the last one was in The Guardian. And there is a lot of attention. There is a documentary being prepared about my research by Netflix,

and they have been filmed for more than a year and in fact they were following me when I went to the Swiss Alps last week and they carried the camera all the way up and that was quite tedious for them and then they went with me to Washington DC as well and just yesterday so they are they keep following me there are lots of interesting things happening and you would see them hopefully when it comes the documentary comes out hopefully in 2025 Lots of things.

Then, as I mentioned, there is a play that was presented at my home about the research. It includes a song that was composed by Alan Bergman, who won many awards and wrote Yantel for Barbara Streisand. And then, in addition, there is a sculpture being made inspired by my research by an artist in Spain. And so lots of things are happening. You know, it very often happens that I go places and someone comes to me and asks for a selfie, which is something I'm not used to. It happened even on Richard Branson's Necker Island when I was there as the entertainer of a group of 40 people with a net worth, each of them, a net worth above $400 million.

And one of them came to me and said, can I understand? You were on the high side of that. You were on the higher side of it. Well, I'm at zero. You brought it up a little bit. No, I'm at zero in that scale. But one of them came and said, can I have a video selfie with you? And I'll send it to my boss.

And he never replies, but let's see what happens. And within minutes, the boss replied and said, you know, I can't believe that you are with Avalhov on this island. I follow his work all the time. And, you know, I went to buy an Apple Watch at the store just after a few minutes. That was the first time I went after the pandemic, and someone came to me and said, are you, Avilo? So anyway, people do recognize and it had impact on, and that's part of what the mission that

I have, aside from practicing science, which I should say is extremely important. You have to practice science in order to know what to advocate. There are many science popularizes who do not practice science. And there are just like commentators looking at a soccer match and telling the players how to pass the ball. And how dare they if they are not playing soccer? So my point is that aside from practicing science, I enjoy communicating to the public because, you know,

it inspires young people how exciting science could be, and it shows that science should be driven by evidence. And we can talk more about it. But this was a result of the first book extraterrestrial. My new book, Interstellar, came just a few months ago. And just to mention two tidbits from it, one I call the Hawking limit. And that is, you know, Stephen Hawking was at my home back in 2016 for Passover dinner. And he could hardly move a muscle.

You know, he could only move his eyebrows. But nevertheless, he had a machine that could translate that into words. And you could still see the human side of Stephen Hawking at one of the events, he said, I'm bored. Could we have, could we go to the hotel bar and have some fun? And he had an affair with his caretaker, you know, some years before that. So it was definitely human, but he couldn't really use at will his physical body. So that's the limit that the artificial intelligence works at right now. Without robots, you know, charge GPT or anything more futuristic could potentially imitate mental states of humans.

And so I call that the hocking limit where it's not associated with any physical motion, but actually just the mental states are human-like. So that's an interesting limit where AI systems will be quite important in society because you can develop a relationship with them. They would appear just like a human except for the physical aspect. And then, and of course for interstellar travel, that's extremely important for any probe to be, to have a brain, an artificial brain, so that the probe can decide for itself how to respond to circumstances, because the time it takes signals to travel to the sender is simply too long. Even for light, it takes thousands of years across the Milky Way galaxy. So that AI brain is really essential for interstellar travel. The other thing I mentioned in the book is classifying civilizations.

And to me, a mark of intelligence is the ability to recreate your environment. So the most, I mean, we are polluting our planet. we are sort of like these tourists that arrive at the national park and throw bottles everywhere. You know, we don't care so much about our environment as of now. Maybe now we will start. But the most intelligent way is to actually recreate the environment. So, for example, create life in the laboratory. And we are in principle, a scientific civilization can do that.

Or even better, create a baby universe if you understand how to, use quantum gravity in the lab. And it's possible that the Big Bang came to exist that way. But that's one benefit of finding the most intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, because we can learn if these things are possible. We can ask them questions. My first question would be, what was there before the Big Bang? Okay, that would be my, because it will teach us about quantum gravity, it will teach us about our cosmic roots. If they know the answer, that we'll,

That'd be wonderful. The second question is, where is the nearest interstellar bar where extraterrestrials come together and have conversations? Because Stephen Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in his book, the first three minutes, he argued at the end that the more the universe is comprehensible, the more pointless it looks. And the reason I think it looked pointless to Stephen Weinberg is because, he focused on elementary particles, on things that have no life to them. And we know from our personal experience that finding a partner gives a meaning to your existence. So if we ever find a partner out there on an exoplanet or in between stars, it could give a meaning to our existence.

The universe will not appear to be pointless anymore. And, you know, we could learn from that partner. And, you know, this is my romantic version or reason to find the partner. I do think that it will help us. Yeah, I think the existential loneliness and aspects of feeling like we lack free will and also the ultimate questions. This is what makes us humans. And I want to point out to my viewers and actually to my channel members at YouTube,

you can watch a video. I made a video about you, Avi, not about your research, but your work with Vagozi, I believe it was, on falsifying inflation using the Cosmic Graviton background. That comes out tomorrow morning, unless you are a channel member, which I love and appreciate. We've got dozens and dozens of them. Then you can watch it basically now. That's great for that. I'll let you know. Thank you so much. I should tell you that I have a follow-up paper. I'm working on right now. And so you have a little scoop here. Oh, wow. I mean, we tend to assume that the universe was always the same in all directions,

that it was expanding the same rate, and that's called the isotropy, that the universe was always isotropic. But if you allow a small level of anisotropy, of the universe expanding in one direction a little faster than in the other direction, turns out that early on the different different was larger actually and we just found the solutions for that and what happens is along one axis the short axis you can actually get to a singularity before the other so the other axis can actually expand at the time that the short axis collapses they can bounce and so you can get a graviton background with different properties than you expect in an isotropic universe

And so, you know, that's the fun of doing science that you never know what you might discover tomorrow. And actually, the reason I went to Washington, D.C. is because I had an insight about something that could be useful to people over there. But that's completely unrelated. It's related to gravity, but not to anything we discussed so far. We need to get into the meat of the subject matter today, which has to do with the, claimed, I will call it the back reaction to the discovery of spherals of a likely extrasolar composition in the Pacific Ocean site of the C-NAS 2014 bolide. So first of all, let's give a quick recap, because I know you've got a limited amount of time. I want to be respectful. We have a lot to cover. Can you summarize the steps, if you will, that led you to believe that the bolide

discovered and with samples collected from Papua New Guinea, that that was likely to be of extra solar origin. Right. So this was the fireball from the object that was roughly the size of a watermelon was observed by U.S. government satellites on January 8th, 2014, almost a decade ago. And for five years, nobody paid attention, but we calculated that the speed of this object was so high that it was unbound to the sun. So it came from interstellar space, and moreover it was moving faster than 95% of the stars near the sun at 60 kilometers per second. So that gave us the inspiration to go out there to the Pacific Ocean and look for the materials of this object. So I led an expedition and, by the way, it took a year of very hard work to plan it,

to receive the funding at $1.5 million, to have the best engineers and navigators involved. and eventually to design the machinery, the tools to collect any molten droplets from the surface of the object when it exploded as a result of its friction on air, when it produced this fireball, which carried about a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. And so we were looking for millimeter-sized particles, the size of a grain of sand, at the bottom of the ocean, which was roughly a mile deep at that location. about 60 miles from Papua New Guinea. And the region that the Department of Defense defined

for the location of the fireball was about seven miles large. So just think about it, searching across such a huge volume of water and looking for millimeter-sized particles. It sounds hopeless. A lot of people said, you will not find anything. Nevertheless, we went there, we went there and then we ended up finding those molten droplets, most of which are background, okay, background particles that are not related to the meteor, but we found an enhancement along the meteor path. So we made the map and indeed found an excess of spherals.

And moreover, in that region where the excess was, we found a composition of elements from the periodic table that is distinct, that was never reported in the literature it has rare elements enhanced by factors of hundreds relative to the standard solar composition and we had to give it a name because nobody in the literature described that before and we called it belau composition because beryllium lampanum and uranium are enhanced uranium by a factor of almost a thousand relative to the standard solar composition now you ask okay so what does it mean we couldn't match it to rocks on Earth. We couldn't match it to rocks on Mars or on the moon or asteroids.

And we argued this implies that it may be extra solar in origin, completely independently of the evidence about the meteor speed being unbound. And the question then is, what is the origin of this object? And in fact, I wrote a scientific paper that was submitted for public that suggests a natural origin. That has to do with a magma ocean planet, a planet where the rock was molten. Actually, the Earth was in that state early on

when it was bombarded by heavy collisions, and the moon was made out of one of these collisions. And just imagine another planet with molten rock, then some elements are a sink to the core of the planet, which is usually iron because they have affinity to iron, leaving behind other elements. And those elements left behind are in the crust of the planet. And those are the elements we found enhanced in the Belau composition.

So the suggestion was maybe it originated from some exoplanet that had molten rock all across the volume of the planet. But then the question is, how do you kick it out of that planetary system, at a speed that is faster than the speed of stars, the typical speed of stars. And we came up with a very interesting possibility that, you know, the Earth, when the Earth, when it's closed, well, we have the moon around it. So the moon raises tides in the oceans. Okay, we are all familiar with the tides. But if you were to replace the moon by the sun, just put the sun next to the earth.

obviously the tides would be stronger, but not strong enough to destroy the earth by gravity, by the gravitational tide, because the density of the sun is lower than the density of rock. Okay, so it cannot destroy the earth. If the earth comes close to the sun, it will be swallowed once it enters the sun, but it will never be disrupted just by the force of gravity. However, the most common stars are ten times lower, in mass than the sun. They are called dwarf stars and they are the most common and they are 10 times smaller in size. So it ends they end up being a hundred times denser than the sun and they can

destroy the an earth-like planet that comes close to them. They will shred it into, we call it Spaghetti-Fi the planet make a spaghetti-like stream of rocks and half of the mass of that planet will be ejected to interstellar space. We calculated the speed and amazingly, it's 60 kilometers per second. So that could be an origin for this meteor because you expect the highest velocity fragments to be kicked out at the highest speed from the crust, from the outer layer of that planet.

Of course, there could be also an artificial origin. We don't know for sure that it's natural. And you can imagine, melting a computer screen or melting a semiconductor and obviously the abundance of rare elements will be quite different from that of common rock. So to find out the origin, we need to find bigger pieces of the meteor and we are now starting to plan the next expedition to find those. The machinery that we will use will be bigger and more expensive, but we are hoping to do that in 2024. And then, you know, I'm always guided by

evidence and I always claim that it's a lot of hard work. You know, we spent two weeks in the Pacific Ocean. I didn't sleep much during during those two weeks because we had 26 runs where we lifted, you know, a sled covered with magnets from the ocean floor after it attracted the magnetic particles, these ferroats that we found and we would scrape the magnets and put it back on the ocean floor. That was a lot of hard work. And the reason I bring this up is because a lot of the critics, first of all, they didn't do any hard work. They just express an opinion. You know, they don't have access to the spherals. They just say, oh, well, maybe it's coal ash. That was the most recent argument. Maybe it's called ash. Well, we checked. We have 60 elements, okay, from the

periodic table that we analyze. And I can tell you with confidence that it's not cold ash. The critics were looking at three elements out of the 60 and saying, oh, well, it looks not so far. But if you look at the 60, it's clearly not coal ash. We didn't find coal ash. We found real spherals from a meteor. And we can talk about why critics behave this way, which is really not professional. I mean, they attack on a personal level and so forth. But if I had to summarize it in one word, I would say it's jealousy. Hello, students of the impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little homework assignment to interrupt your

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It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show. Jealousy. So when I look at the paper, this is, we should acknowledge again, the mastodons in the room. Steve Dash, Alan Jackson. I'm happy to talk to them. You know, when you and I hang up, I'm happy to talk to them anytime.

They're always welcome as long as they adhere to the rules of decorum and don't make ad hominem attacks. But they present a paper last month, I believe it was, which is called a critique of your paper. I'm not going to read the whole title. But they go through 10 different claims that would all have to be true in order for your claim to withhold scrutiny. So I want to go through those really quickly, and you tell me just agree or disagree. So first one you agree with, I'm sure the author's claim that the bolide was interstellar, moving too fast to have been bound in orbit around the sun when it struck the Earth. Agreed, right?

Yes. You assert that the significant quantities of materials from the bolide would have survived atmospheric entry to be deposited on the sea floor, mostly as millimeter size ablation spheroids. You already said that. You claim to know the position of where these spherals were deposited to within an area one kilometer by 10 kilometers long. The authors claim that a statistically significant excess of spherals twice as many were collected along the assumed path compared to control regions. Agree?

Yeah. The authors measured iron isotope ratios and 11 spherols, including three, Belau spherals, and find them to lie along the terrestrial fragmentation line with errors of less than 1%. and show fractionations consistent with iron loss by vaporization during entry. Right. One of these spherals, S-21, was found to be a compound sphere. Three spirals stuck together while molten. The authors present back of the envelope calculation consists. This is also consistent with fireball formation.

Right. Authors measure the chemical enrichments of the below and other elements, and assert that this composition is not found in any terms. sample. And they claim Belau is associated with the Sum path of the bolide absent from regions far from the path and therefore not associated with the fireball. The authors claim Belau compositions would be uniquely consistent with formation in the magma ocean of a differentiated extrasolar planet. Now, I don't agree with this one. So be careful agreeing to this. Do you claim that they would be uniquely consistent with formation in a magma ocean? Or wasn't that just one hypothesis?

That's one possibility. And that's why we need bigger pieces. I just wanted to give credit in terms of some of those statements. You know, I've been working part of our team includes Dr. Roald Tuggle. He's the head of, he's leading the work at the Brooker Corporation in Berlin, Germany for us. He's using the best X-ray mass, X-ray fluorescence device that the world has to offer. and then my colleague at Harvard, Professor Stein Jacobson, who has a group of postdocs working with him, and they're using one of the best mass spectrometers in the world for the analysis.

So very often, you know, the critics are referring just to me, but I wanted to explicitly say that we are talking about multiple people contributing. A lot of people, actually, there are tens of people on the paper, and they include also a collaboration with the University of Technology in Papua Anugini, the head of the mining engineering department there, Dr. Jim Lamb, is part of the analysis theme. So there are lots of people involved. For some reason, these critics prefer to attack me. But anyway, they know about this group. I can, oh wait, I just need to mention. Now, why, how do I know that they know? Because Steve Dash wrote emails, personally,

emails to Dr. Jim Lamb after I mentioned him in one of my essays to Professor Stein Jacobson, trying to dissuade them from being part of this scientific research project. And I ask you, how is that ethical? How is that part of, how should I say, constructive scientific discourse? He was basically harassing my team members and telling them what you're doing is wrong, what you said is wrong and you shouldn't do it. He was actively sending them emails. Now they are senior people, but he also sent emails to junior people, student, my student, my post dog. And he is a senior faculty sending, intimidating students and I just wanted to bring this up because this is completely inappropriate and very aggressive

behavior that has nothing to do with science. It's the question whether you should intimidate young scholars who are part of a research team examining materials to which you have no access following a project that took months to prepare two weeks to collect the materials and then months to analyze the materials. This is a lot of of work and you attack them through direct emails to them, telling them not to do that. And I just wanted to bring this up because this is not in the public domain, but I can tell you I have access to those emails and I just decided not to mud wrestle because I will get dirty if I might wrestle.

There is this approach of the eagle, you know, that when there is a crow on the back of the eagle, that pecks at its neck. The eagle doesn't fight the crow off. The eagle rises to greater heights where the oxygen level is low enough for the crow to drop off the back of the eagle. This is the approach that I'm trying to take. Basically doing the science to the best of my ability,

I may make mistakes, wrong inferences, but that's part of doing science. Yeah. And my point is, okay, you can disagree with me, but to attack young, scholars personally through direct emails to them, threatening them and intimidating them, this is bullying and this is unacceptable.

But this is being done by those critics that you just mentioned. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Well, again, I don't like hearing that. I mean, we all live under this fantasy that scientists are somehow exalted individuals with access to special wisdom just because we have special knowledge. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I always say that scientists are like children. They have these wonderful qualities of curiosity, of imagination, of wanting to explore the world with wonder. But just like a child, they also are petty.

They're jealous. They don't like other people's toys unless they get to have better toys. And, in fact, they'll do nothing more to get pleasure sometimes than take down arrival. Now, I'm not calling Dr. Das, Professor Dash, a child. I am inviting him. I'm throwing an invitation out there. If you would like to refute that, I follow him on Twitter. my DMs are open, Professor.

So you're welcome and you'll get a fair hearing. Avi, you can attest to that. I've challenged you as a friend. I still push back. The biggest damage that, forget about the spherals. You know, that's not really important here because what he's doing is sending a message that you dare not deviate from the beaten path that he defines as the dogma. Because if you deviate, I will aggressively send you emails and tell you what I think

and why you shouldn't do it. Okay? And that is very damaging because the next time that the same postdoc student works on dark matter or works on the beginning of the universe, those, after going through a traumatic experience

of this type where a senior person behaves this way, those young people will not dare anymore. They would worry about their job prospects. And that is very damaging for the nature of innovation in science. That's what bothers me. And it's surprising. It's not so much the debate about this. particular items. On one of Steve Dash's most recent tweets, he posts a claim from somebody else's

post, but he retweeted a claim about Jesus and how Jesus was, claimed that your love for God was measured by your love of your neighbor and even your enemy. So I wonder if Professor Dash takes that advice to heart. Anyway, the invitation's open. I'll give him a fair hearing, and I will confront him with those as I've confronted you with things I disagreed with you about. And that's what friends do, and that's what science is all about. Anyway, getting back to his paper. So he says that none of these claims withstand scrutiny, not any one of those 10 that I mentioned. The first thing he says is that the bolide probably wasn't interstellar. He says, probably, which is kind of strange that he's claiming that this claims that proves that your claims are incorrect. He says uncertainties

and the velocities of objects in the, I'm going to just put this up on the screen because I know it's boring for people that are just listening, but let me put this up on the screen. There it is. Okay, you might not be able to see this, Avi, but you've probably seen it before, so I'm not going to. Okay, the obelide probably wasn't zero. Uncertainties and velocities are not reported, but these can be estimated separately, and they're large. There's a greater than 0.1% probability that it's not interstellar, which sounds small, but a catalog of a thousand solar system bolides, the odds are high that one. Okay, so that's just 0.1% converted to 1 in 1,000, appear to be interstellar velocities, and that appears to be that one, the 1, 2014. What do you have to say to that, that you miscalculated?

The uncertainties are overestimated your answer. This is not me because the data was collected by the US Space Command. That's the organization that gets paid. Its annual budget is bigger than that of NASA. It's supposed to advise the US president about any ballistic missile that is heading from North Korea towards the US. And suppose they were wrong by a factor of three as Steve Dash and colleagues argue in their velocity measurement. they would advise the president of Mexico about a missile heading to Washington, D.C. I would be really worried writing a scientific paper or posting this on the archive,

claiming the government doesn't really know what they're doing for a budget of 10. Let me just think that his point. The government has been known to make mistakes, right? Okay, sure, sure. So that's exactly right. So I asked them in 2019 if they can confirm the uncertainty in the data. So they went back for three years analyzing the data and came back with a letter to NASA stating that they are confident that the 99.99% after looking back at the data that indeed this object was interstellar. So, you know, I don't, I have no ability to access classified data, but they went out of their way.

You know, this is not their day job to help the frontiers of science. They are supposed to protect the nation against the national security threats. Nevertheless, they took the time to do that, to write a letter to NASA. And, you know, all I can say is that when we analyze data in the scientific literature, we often have to trust the observers, the experimentalists, that report about it. So they reported about it. They are a trustworthy organization that, you know, could have gone back to the data and looked at it. And it's not just the satellite data.

And by the way, many of the critics say, oh, we are talking about ground-based data. No, it's not ground-based. It's also satellite data. And they combine multiple sensors. We don't have access to it because many of the sensors are classified. But they went back, checked it, and confirmed this is an interest object. That's my answer. And it seems like it could be approached from a Bayesian framework that we teach our, you know, freshmen, right?

I mean, what is the false positive rate? What is the false negative rate? And it's surprising me for an expert in, you know, in calculations of the sort that he just says, you know, quotes vague things like greater than 0.1 percent. Again, extend an invitation. If you know him out there, please send him my way. Okay. Next one, he says that none of it would have survived entry if it were traveling at the speeds reported. And then at least 99.8 percent and probably greater than six nines would have been vaporized in the atmosphere leaving insignificant quantities to be deposited.

That seems like it could be addressed through a simulation. He just says it's great. Probably. I'm surprised again by the couching the wiggle words here. Why does he say probably? What do you react to that? First of all, the number of spheros that we recovered from the meteor path is fully consistent with a tiny fraction of the materials surviving with most of it being evaporated.

In fact, we wrote a scientific paper. The dash was, you know, resisting and pushing back against. where we did a very detailed model with an undergraduate student that worked with me for a summer, and we posted it on the archive, where we calculate the size distribution of the spherols. What we found is similar in magnitude to what we forecasted based on a detailed physical model, where we included the evaporation of material, the size distribution that you expect, solving the energy, momentum, friction equations for those, fragments that may form based on all that is known in the scientific literature.

So we actually did the hard work of a few months writing a scientific paper. We couldn't do better than that except go to the place and look for any spheros. So we did the calculation. It's a small fraction of the total mass. And yes, what we found is consistent with that. Okay. So the next one that he claims back is they claim, I should say, Jackson and, and, the location of the Bolides path is far more uncertain.

than you realize. And it's almost certainly miscalculated. The CNOS database reports two locations for the fireball and they're 55 kilometers apart. If we pick one location, there are still large inherent uncertainties, sound waves trying to pinpoint it using sound waves 90 kilometers away. So that seems like it could have some validity. What is the response to that? Right. So the Department of Defense provided the region that was seven miles in size. And there were three flares in the fireball separated by a tenth of a second, this object was moving at 40 kilometers per second. So over a tenth of a second, it would move about four kilometers, you know, like a few miles. And if you have three flares, obviously the explosion was spread across the region that was, you know, of the order of seven

miles or so. So that's why the localization could not have been better by the Department of Defense. But we also analyze data from a seismometer in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, just to figure out the distance of the explosion based on the fact that the sound waves arrive later than the light. We see that in lightnings, you know, the sound from the explosion, you know, the thunder that we hear arrives to us later and we can tell the distance of the lightning based on the delay. And that's what we used in figuring out the path of the meteor. But more importantly, we had 26 runs, 26 back and forth scans of the region, and we tried to spread it wide enough so that we were not restricting our attention.

We went even 20 kilometers away from the location of the meteor path in both directions. So we tried to move away from the meteor path as well. And the map that we made was based on that. Mm-hmm. Okay. So the next claim he makes here, the next point that he makes, is, oops, let me close that, okay, getting some reports that people can't see it out there. Put a thumbs up if you're able to see this conversation on YouTube because claims that people aren't able to see it. So leave a thumbs up and leave a thumbs up anyway and please do subscribe

to the channel. As I said, I'm going to have another conversation with Avi, base in Avi's work tomorrow for the channel and that will be a deep dive into the physics of inflation. So Avi does it all. It's not only interstellar meteorites. By the way, you went to great lengths, millions of dollars and tens of people to get your meteorite sample. I can give a meteorite sample to any of my guests who happened to win it, or my audience members who happen to subscribe at Brian Keating.com. So please do that. Okay, next one.

The specific iron ratios are a smoking gun for the spherals or originating in our solar system. The fact that all these samples align within less than 1%, it's a weird symbol there, by the way, of the terrestrial fractionation line, including Belau spirals, they measured, indicates a greater than four nines and a half probability that all the spirals, including Belau, are from our solar system. What do you say to that? This is an important issue. We had very, so the preprint that they are referring to just considered 10% of the spherals. We just posted the preliminary results. Now we're going through the 90%, the remaining 90%. So the report about the iron isotel ratio was really a very preliminary report in one of the spherals.

And it's true that in principle, if you have different stars exploding in different locations in the Milky Way galaxy, you will end up with different isotope ratio for iron because different isotopes of iron originate from different processes, like type 1A supernovae or AGB asymptotic giant branch stars. we expect variations if this object came from far away. And so it's still, what I would say on that is that what was reported in the preprint is very early, preliminary analysis of one of the spheroes, and we are now engaged in the full analysis. So we will report whatever we find.

You know, when my colleague Stein Jacobson comes back to me with results, we just report them. And here again, I should mention, Dash is very proud of, claiming that he was pushing against our paper. And in one of the arguments, someone looked back at our map and said, oh, actually, the map does not represent exactly the color bar next to it. And maybe they tweaked the colors. And I went, I mean, that map was produced by my postdoc, Laura Domini. And I went to her and said, and she said, well, it would have been so much more work for me to actually tweak the colors.

You know, that critic actually magnified the map and tried to look for a different color. She said, that would be so much. I just used an off-the-shelf program to plot this map. And so it just shows you the level of negativity. I've never heard, you know, I had more than a thousand scientific papers. I've never heard someone being motivated to use a magnifying glass, look at the plot and say, oh, you were fudging this, because the color scheme does not.

And, you know, it's not me. It's a postdoc that came to my group from Stanford, extremely talented, brilliant. She was using the best tools that exist for plotting. And this person blames us. So I'm just saying there is a lot of negativity that you don't find in the context of other studies. And they are putting the bars to fly.

You know, as we say in Yiddish, the higher you fly, the easier you are to shoot at. And I think the next, but the next one, Avi, I think this is an own goal, Professor Dash and Jackson. So you claim, and I'm saying you, Professor Dash, they claim that all of these have to be true. Okay. So I'm showing it online. To claim an interstellar origin for the spherals they collected, all the links in the chain of logic above would have to withstand scrutiny. And he says none of them do.

Okay. But now this claim is that one of the spherals is a comprehensive. pound spheroel. Three spherals stuck together while molten. That's your claim of avi with your team. And you present a back of the envelope calculation that's consistent with a formation of fireball. Just speaking logically, Professor Dash, this is a total logical fallacy and own goal. The triple spherals, even if the triple spherules are not, it doesn't mean that the entire claim is wrong. I don't know how he could make that assumption. It's like saying, you know, if you don't have a Bernie Sanders sticker on your car, you can't claim that you're a Bernie Sanders support.

order. If this is true or false, it doesn't either refute or neglect the base hypothesis, correct? So in other words, even if, let's say he's right here on his point number six, he says the triple Spirol S-21 almost certainly did not form in a fireball event. Let's say he's right, okay, which you obviously don't think he's right. But let's say he was right. In that case, that spheral is not a compound sphero. Does that mean that the other ones are not interstellar in origin? I mean, isn't that a logical fallacy, Avi? I completely agree. And this one was the biggest sphero

that we analyzed in that preprint and 1.3 millimeters in size. And we looked at it first and it showed this Belauzv composition. And then we found it in other spherals that do not look like it. So we're talking about a class of spherals that has a composition.

By the way, you know, it's really analysis that requires a huge amount of effort to get to those measurements. So, I mean, if you just look at the scientific literature on spherals, you would see that nobody analyzed so many spheres at the level that we do. We have actually 750 of them. It's a factor of 10 more than the number of spirals in a typical paper on meteor sites,

you know, and we go a factor of 10 more. We brought them from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. You know, it's a huge effort and just ridiculing it and bullying people who engage in that. You know, after such a heroic effort, I think what I would say to that is people who try to terrorize practicing scientists will not get their way. You know, we will continue the scientific work irrespective. How many emails Steve Dash sends to members of my team because they know the truth. they know what we are doing and they know the level of scientific integrity that we're investing in this. The next one, he says, despite your assertions, the Belau patterns have been seen before in cosmic

spirals of solar system origin from the Indian Ocean. Again, would this, if true, you always have to ask yourself this question as a scientist, if this is true, would this invalidate the base hypothesis, your hypothesis, the prior hypothesis, that these are extraterrestrial in origin? So he's admitting that they could be that these things have been seen before in, but only in our solar system, that doesn't invalidate that they could originate from other objects in the solar system. And they're not even dissimilar to anthropogenic coal ash. I assume he covers that more depth in the paper. I'm not sure why that's relevant. I can tell you, the coal ash claim was made by someone who wrote a research note, which is basically an unrefered two-pageer saying,

oh, I found a paper in the literature where if I look at three elements, they seem to roughly match the element abundances that were in the Belausferos. That's the claim. Based on three elements, comparing them sort of qualitatively,

and that's it. It has some tick-marked, and it's a research note that is a couple of pages long, not refereed, and then Steve Dash hangs his hat on that. And to that, I say, you know, you should be smart

in fighting the right, battles. You know, that's because if you were to be very aggressive on a wrong statement, you know, it just shows you your vulnerability. You know, it exposes your weakness, which is basically to look for anything negative to say. And on this, you know, we compared 60 elements. And I have it, you know, we didn't post it yet because it will be part of the next paper. But we clearly see that it's not collage. He doesn't have access to the materials. And he makes this. very strong statement went out to the press there were a number of reporters who mentioned it you know the one thing that reporters do not realize is that in science it's not about it's not like politics where

oh someone says something therefore i should present both opinions it's not like that because if one side invested months of work to do the hard scientific work and the other side was sitting on his you know a chair and and and and was just expressing an opinion and saying oh maybe it's collage It's not a matter of giving equally opportunity to both sides, right? You need to put some weight on the amount of effort. And those people that have access to the materials. Obviously, they can examine the materials. We have the data.

That's the basic point, that science is driven by data, not by opinion. And as much as Steve Dash does not like the fact that we are doing science, we will continue to do the science. Of course. I view you as an irrepressible force of nature. The last one has some kind of ring of authenticity to me as a question. I want to ask you because I'm not an expert, but now going back to my meteorite, which again can be yours if you join my, if you win the giveaway that I have in my

lesson. I'll send you one for free. I keep promising you on me. But here's a meteorite here that I collected the hard way. I went to Amazon and bought, no, I get that from a special dealer. I get them from a special dealer. They're prime. They're prime. But this particular sample is the fragment of the Campo de Scello event, the explosion of a bolide about 7,000 years ago in Argentina, found about in the 1500s. The outside of this, you know, kind of has these nodules. Some of it has thumbprints on bigger sections of it. But I imagine if I, if I cut it open, if I fragmented it, they would look different inside in that the exterior, this part of it, was exposed to the harsh interstellar weather of cosmic rays and that induces what's called spolation.

I want you to explain spolation a minute, but wouldn't the skin depth to spolation preclude the interior of this meteorite or the bolide that you saw, wouldn't that be make it harder for cosmic rays to spallate and then make the belau material? Or am I getting this wrong? I think of it in terms of skin depth, penetration. Let me start from clarification. The below composition originated from the source, not from the travel through interstellar space. Sorry, he's wrong then. He says that the abundance in these spirals, so he claims that you claim the high abundance was produced by spalation of atoms and meteoroids by cosmic gamma rays is indicative of cosmic

gamma ray irradiation during its passage to interstellar. So he's wrong. You don't assume. Yeah. And by the way, I mentioned to you this paper that I wrote where I explained it in terms of, you know, a differentiated planet where a molten lava or magma ocean, which he actually mentioned the previous point, you know, that was responsible for the separation of elements and maintaining those belau compositions in the crust that was then ejected through the disruption of the

planet. So all of that argues that it's at the source, you know, the below composition is from the source. It has nothing to do with the travel through interstellar space. And with respect to spallation, this is just a simple process where you have energetic particles, for example, cosmic rays, protons that are moving at the speed very close to the speed of light and they collide with the nucleus and breaking it up and in fact there are some elements like beryllium which are enhanced as a result of energetic particles colliding with with material and like and breaking it up you know a heavier nucleus and we do see enhancement of beryllium but that could happen at the source. It doesn't have to be from spalation. 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 prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. So the other in context that he puts into it, would any of its survive entry? He does a back of the envelope calculation and says it was about the mass of half a giraffe.

Okay. That's an interesting mass measurement, 450 kilograms. And therefore, it's only 48 centimeter sphere and diameter equivalent. Now, if it's going at 140 times the speed of sound, he says, in Jackson, the meteoroid would have completely vaporized in the atmosphere. Yeah, that's the calculation we did with the summer intern, Emery Tillinghusk. And you can look at that paper and we did the calculation. So indeed, as I said, most of it is vaporized, but we went through, you know, the equations that describe what's left from that. And that would depend on the material strength. So if you assume a rock, you get one answer and we

derive that in the paper. If you assume that it's made of stainless steel, the way, that the Voyager spacecraft was or any some you know artificial alloy that is related to an alien spacecraft you know then the answer would be different so we know that this object by the way exploded in the lower atmosphere and must have had a very high material strength to survive down to there and it was tougher than iron meteorites so actually with a student that approached me at a conference in Stanford two weeks ago that was a student of them material that he's doing a PhD in material science. And he was inspired by my talk about the expedition.

So he came to me and said, how can I help? And I said, well, you have a computer code to calculate material strength given a composition of material. And so let's simulate what this meteor was made of and see if indeed it was of very high material strength. So we're doing this. And to that I say again that when you deal with innovation, in science, it inspires young people. They come to me and want to work with me. Two of my postdocs, Laura Domeni and Richard Cloette, they told me that when I called them to offer them the postdoctoral fellowship, you know, that was the thing that they hoped for their entire career. Before that, because

they had no opportunity to work on these subjects. So these people, these young scholars are inspired by innovation, but then comes an arrogant senior person and tries to intimidate them. And that's what I find inappropriate. Good. Okay, Avi, I know you've only got about 10 minutes before your next appointment. So we have a couple of questions and from the audience and we'll take some, somewhere about academia. We can take some of those if you like, somewhere about Israel. We can take some of those if you like. So the, well, the first thing I want to get your reaction to is there have been some reactions online about the implausibility of statements made by David Grush and others that there's crashed alien spacecraft and and so forth. And the argument

seems to go along these lines. And I want to get your reaction logically to them. One of them is that these aliens are so sophisticated. They can make a spacecraft that can travel interstellar distances, but then they crash on Earth. I want to point out, I'm a pilot. I fly little tiny Cessna's around, okay? I'm not like my past guest, you know, when I went ahead on Hazard Lee or had on Ryan Graves and these are great heroes. These are military fighter pilots of the highest order. I'm nothing like that. But I'll point out that if you look at the FAA's accident database, where do you think the most outlying probability is for a crash of a commercial pilot piloted plane, not an amateur like me, a commercially trained pilot, somebody flying in which of the phases

of flight, takeoff, cruise flight, or landing, which are the most likely to cause an accident? What would you say, Avi? Probably landing. Landing. It's like six to eight times more perilous. In other words, these accidents tend to occur during the landing phase. So I like to point that out to people that snicker and sneer, including people like Brian Green, who I had on last week on the podcast, I did a wonderful interview with him in person at Columbia right before there was a huge protest against Israel. But at any rate, there, so I'd just like to point that out. Even human pilots crash more during landing and military pilots as well. So anyway, I think that's kind of a ridiculous argument.

Well, it also depends. It depends how many things are flying. You know, if there are lots of them, then the chance, even a small chance would lead to some evidence over decades of time. And, you know, it's all about evidence. You know, people try to have an opinion. That's a very easy thing. The difficult part is collecting the evidence. If the government has, so do you want my opinion on Grush?

Actually, I wrote last night when I returned at 10 p.m. from Washington, D.C., I wrote an essay with a title, and you can find it on Medium.com, with the title of new physics or misinformation. That is the dilemma that we face when listening to the testimony of Grush in front of the House of Representatives. Now, you know, it's completely plausible that he is sincere, that he just reports what he heard from 40 people who told him about things that happen. And then he exaggerated the significance of those and misinterpreted some. And as a result, I mean, he didn't witness it himself. He didn't see the materials. Yet he claimed that there are, there is material in biologics in crash sites.

And, you know, as a scientist, I must say that this is not convincing. I need to see the evidence. If the government has this, I really want to know about it, to see it. That's part of the Schumer Amendment, the UAP Disclosure Act, if there is something to it. But there is another possibility that there is a campaign of misinformation, that some people want the public to believe in things that are not real. And we know that in politics, you could have an agenda of that nature, just to mislead the adversarial countries

or to make the public distrust anything they hear so that if there are programs to develop new technologies that the US government is funding through the military industrial complex, you know, that it will be lost in the noise. If someone sees something, they will not talk about it because of the stigma associated with very advanced technologies

perhaps coming extraterrously. So that could be in the background. background. Now, this Schumer Amendment is being resisted by some people in Congress. And the fundamental question is whether this resistance is superficial. They just do it for political reasons. I mean, even though it was proposed by the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, it was bipartisan. There was support for it in the Senate. But it's also possible that there are people who know what the government has. They deal with highly classified information. And, you know, and, you know, they know that there is nothing to substantiate Grashe's claims.

So they go to the chairs of those subcommittees and tell them, look, you know, this would endanger national security. If there will be a committee that will oversee what the government does and ask for all the information, some of it may leak to our adversaries and this is not good for the country. So then there would be opposition, but you would not really understand why there is this opposition. Of course, there are people who claim there is a conspiracy. the government is trying to hide.

I personally, I tend to believe the government is incompetent to hide something of that nature for so long, especially if it involves biological materials. Yeah, it would be a conspiracy, you know, that would dwarf the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Right. Okay, I have to ask you this question. It's from a listener on YouTube, Herwig, Ervig de Wild. So he's asking, he's saying, basically, we don't even know if what he grabbed off the bottom of the sea is anything to do with a bolide. yet you Avi are jumping to alien technology.

Is that what you're saying? Is this alien technology or claiming it? I'm not claiming it. I'm saying it's a possibility. Now let me explain where I'm coming from. Just like you, Brian, I worked early on on cosmology where, for example, we don't know what the dark matter is. That's the 83% of the matter in the universe.

We have never witnessed it in the solar system. So in that culture that I worked on for decades, people were proposing different types of dark method. It could be primordial black holes. It could be a very light particle like the axione. It could be massive particles like weekly interacting, massive particles. It could be all kinds of things. And when you were to propose observational signatures of a hypothesis, everyone would cheer because it allows experimentalists to pursue and rule out possibilities. So it's an integral part of doing science to propose possibilities so that we can rule them out and figure out the truth eventually because one of them might be true.

So the way I approach this subject is if I see an object, a meteor that was moving faster than 95% of the stars that had material strength tougher than iron meteorites, I say we should live on the table the possibility that it is a Voyager-like meteor. If Voyager were to collide with a planet like the Earth, it would burn up in the atmosphere of that planet as a very tough object because it's made of an artificial alloy. and it would move faster than usual because it was propelled by a chemical rocket. So that's all. I'm saying let's leave it on the table.

Then the public gets extremely excited. And then some reporters report about it as if I'm saying that. And then my colleagues are arguing that I'm saying that. But I never said that. Listen to my podcast interviews. See what I write on Medium.com. And you will never see that as me arguing that it must be an alien spacecraft. I'm just saying this is a possibility we should live on the table.

Just like in the case of dark matter, you would never dismiss weakly interacting massive particles as a possibility because you don't know the answer. Okay. We have one question from a friend of the show, Ross, at Event Horizon. He wants to know who were you meeting with yesterday in Washington, D.C.? Oh, there were a number of people. Some of them were in Congress. Some of them were in the Senate.

What I should say, and some of them were in the Department of Defense. What I should say is I was amazed like come at least two of these meetings. These are high level officials. So they would come to me and say, I follow what you do and I really admire your work. And I never imagine that I will meet with you. Now, I could never imagine that they would say that because these are people, you know, within at high level. you know, within the US government that, so apparently they do appreciate the innovation that I'm pursuing.

And I never take it for granted because, you know, overall, I'm just driven by curiosity. That's all that motivates me. I'm just a curious farm boy trying to figure out the world, given the opportunity to be a scientist so that, you know, I can answer questions myself. I don't need to listen to Grush telling me what lies outside the solar system. really. I mean, Grasch, when he expressed himself as if what he's talking about is a result of

extra dimensions or the holographic principle, you know, this didn't sound, I know these ideas in the context of string theory, we have no experimental clue to support them, they're completely speculative, unrelated to any phenomena at low energies, low space-time curvature that we have near Earth. So that sounded like far-fetched to me. But, you know, I just believe that evidence will guide us. us to the answer and we should collect it rather than say it's an extraordinary claim and therefore since there is no evidence we should just shy away from it which is pretty much what all the critics are saying I say you know we need to seek the evidence so extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary effort it's a lot of hard work and that should be celebrated the

hard work of science where we don't know the answer in advance we don't have an opinion we just work on collecting the evidence so what I feel is that instead of that being celebrated within academia, you know, the hard work, I see people like Dash ridiculing it, pushing back. However, within government, people are supportive, you know, at every, I always receive positive feedback. Within the public, people are extremely supportive. So, once again, we come back to where we started. Something is wrong in academia. Yeah, indeed, we do. And I guess the question I have for you is where do you go from here in both the search for these materials origins first and foremost? And then where do you go in academia?

Is there a home? Is there a place for ideas that can survive the kind of onslaught that we've witnessed in the last two months? It's just been absolutely shocking. I mean, some people are saying, oh, the donors just have to. And I was asked by, you know, people, well, what if the Jewish donors just stop? I found that very insulting. It's a very offensive trope that Jews are mainly interested in how their money is used. And if we don't have a happy state of affairs, then the Jewish banking bankers and the elders of Zion, we'll just cancel.

Let me explain one very simple fact. I was at Harvard University for 30 years, okay? 30 years. Claudine Gaye came to Harvard University eight years ago. Okay, she doesn't own Harvard University, even though she's the president. I feel that this is my home, and if someone comes to my home and violates my principles, I don't live home because of that. I will try to change the intellectual climate we live in for the better.

Okay, that's my answer. But with respect to the future of the, the, the, the, your research, we are planning an expedition. It will probably cost at least twice or three times the previous cost, probably around four to five million dollars because we need a much more sophisticated equipment to find bigger fragments of the object. And once we find them, we can easily tell the difference between a rock and an artificial technological gadget. Because a gadget could have have buttons on it. And I actually asked students in my class whether if we find a gadget,

whether we should press any button on it. And half of them said, please don't, because it will affect all of us. Half of them said, yes, please do, because it might be chat GPT 100. And then one student asked me, what would you do, Professor Lowe? And I said, I will bring it to a laboratory and examine it. No worries. And actually, after we examine it, I promised Paula Antonelli, in the spirit of love, the aliens, to put it on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

Because for us, it will be modern art to just witness that. Very good, Avi. Well, this has been a treat. But I really salute you for your courage and also just the intellectual striving for truth that I always associate with you. And you've got millions of fans around the world. You're always welcome here on the podcast. We're overdue for a dinner together, for a lunch, for whatever we can arrange, hopefully on the East Coast or the West Coast. Maybe you'll come out here in the winter and you'll get away from it all in southern.

Thank you so much. And if I could just mention my mantra is maintain your childhood curiosity and never pretend to be the adult in the room. That's the first thing that I advise young people. But the second is, you know, let's work together rather than hate each other. You know that it's the source of all the problems we discussed, starting from the Middle East, going through what happens on campuses, and ending up with scientific discourse. Let's just be positive rather than negative. And this will solve all of these problems. Yes, I agree.

Science is our greatest hope or possibly our greatest source of probability for demines. I hope we'll choose the wise path. Avi loeb, we have your website, Avi dash lobe, Lowe, L. OEB.medium.com. It's on the screen. And Avi, thank you so much. Stay safe over there. I worry about your safety on campus, to be honest with you.

No worries. My skin is now made of titanium after I survived the attacks by death. Not Belau? It should be made of Belau. You should have a Belau suit. Yeah. All right. Litroh.

Lerot. Shalom, Avi. Thank you. 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. Our citizens back.