Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb: “This object came from another solar system!” (#331)

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

See the Video! https://youtube.com/live/BFuW-zfH5RU Avi Loeb joined Brian Keating after he led a Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean to retrieve spherules of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1. These samples were brought back to Harvard College Observatory over 50 spherules in total, which lay on the deep ocean floor for nearly a decade. These sub-millimeter-sized spheres, which appear under a microscope as beautiful metallic marbles, were concentrated along the expected path of IM1 — about 85 kilometers off the coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Their discovery opens a new frontier in astronomy, where what lay outside the solar system is studied through a microscope rather than a telescope. That 83% of the matter in the universe is apparently composed of dark matter which was not found yet in the solar system should teach us modesty in forecasting the nature of interstellar objects. Aliens, UFOs and Extraterrestrial Intelligence Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGKdZD30K_8pkx_wLg5vQmkAvGTUNaNm Past episode with Avi Loeb on Youtube: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible 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  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We know from the analysis of the fireball data that the government provided that it had sustained stress far greater than all other space rocks that were cataloged by NASA over the past decade, 272 of them. The point is that it had material strength above all the space rocks that we often see from the solar system. And that raised an interesting question. you know, maybe it's made of some artificial alloy, and maybe it was moving very fast just because it had the benefit of artificial propulsion. Welcome, dear listeners, to some interstellar news. Friend of the show and frequent guest,

esteemed Harvard professor Avi Loeb, has done it again. He stirred up a storm of ridicule and controversy over his latest discoveries and conjectures. As you may remember, in 2019, Avi and his student, Amir Saraj, published a paper on an object transiting our solar system, Amua Amua. The paper supported the theory that it was of interstellar origin. In 2021, he published his book,

Extraterrestrial, the first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth, in which he proposed that Amuamua could be an alien spacecraft. Now, as he's about to publish his next book, Interstellar, the search for extraterrestrial life and our future in the stars, He's returned triumphant from an expedition to the South Pacific Ocean near Papua, New Guinea, where he retrieved remnants of one of the largest interstellar objects ever to impact the Earth. Are these tiny marble-like spirals from an alien spacecraft? Are they space junk from an alien civilization?

Listen to Avi's thrilling description with how he recovered this spirals from over two kilometers under the ocean and the rigorous scientific testing being done on the precious samples and what may soon be revealed. If you want to know if we're alone in the universe and have an open, curious mind, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Pay it forward with a share to like-minded friends.

To see the video version of this interview, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too. There, you can find more episodes with Professor Loeb and episode. on the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence. And now the retrieval of interstellar objects

and the possibility of extraterrestrial technology with Avi Loeb and Brian Keating. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, hell. We are indeed live on the Into the Impossible Podcast Network, where I am being joined by my good friend and many-time guest,

and that is Professor Avi Lobby of Harvard University. Avi, you're looking tan, you're looking sharp. I want to ask you so many questions. My audience has so many questions. But first of all, how does it feel to get your sea legs back being out on the open ocean? How was that? Well, I enjoyed it.

I used to jog every morning. The only surprise was I jog at sunrise, and suddenly I noticed from my... my workout app on my watch, the time, some days I jogged slower than usual and some days faster. And then I figured out that it's actually measuring the speed of the platform that I'm running on. And that's the ship that I was on, fittingly called Silver Star. I think I'm probably the first to recognize that you can't really measure your speed when you're jogging on a ship because the GPS system gets full.

That's right. Yeah, I was able to walk across the Atlantic Ocean last week on my way back from Paris and London. But the only way I could do that was on an airplane. But we're going to talk about things that travel much, much faster than an airplane. And those are, of course, the fragments from a very interesting and mysterious object that you have discovered, identified, and are beginning to get samples returned. And I understand FedEx delivered. The meteorite was delivered by gravity.

I believe, but the samples were delivered by FedEx. So show our viewership, please, Avi, if you would, what you have in your hand, the most precious metals on Earth, perhaps. Well, I decided to share the materials with three laboratories, mainly at Harvard University. We have a laboratory with the best instruments in the world, but also with UC Berkeley and the Brooker Corporation in Germany that has some x-ray fluorescence analyzes that nobody else has.

And when I shipped the materials to Germany, I had to declare what is inside the box. And I said, sand. And then I had to declare the commercial value of it, and I said, no commercial value. It has enormous scientific value, of course. And, you know, it took millions or maybe even billions of years for this material to arrive to Earth.

By the way, it was not a matter of gravity. It just bumped into the earth as a result of its trajectory, which crossed the path of the earth. And it came actually from behind the earth. It was moving at 45 kilometers per second, and it came just as the earth was orbiting the sun from behind the earth. If it were to collide with the earth head on, if the earth, for example, if you were to reverse the motion of the earth, it would have collided with Earth at 90 kilometers per second. Very fast. And outside the solar system, it was moving at 60 kilometers per second, which is faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. So here is an object that made its sway in interstellar space faster the 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the sun. Now, that material is very precious. I have some material which is very precious, too.

This is a fragment of a stellar solar system meteorite, which was found. in Argentina, and you can enter to win it if you click this link or in the show notes. I have it. Briankeen.com slash mail. And if you're a member of the audience that has a dot edu mailing address, you will get this guaranteed. So the rest of you, non-EDU. And that's because I want to see myself as an educator, right?

So I want to get access to young minds while they're fertile and they can do the most good. And we have the most free energy to use their powers to benefit the earth. And I think a lot of what you're trying to do with this and your upcoming book, which you've graciously provided me with, an advanced copy of, called Interstellar. That is part of your mission, too, education. Well, actually, I wrote 36 diary reports from the expedition, and they were read by millions of people over the couple of weeks that I was in the Pacific Ocean. They were translated to Spanish. I received a large number of emails from people who said that it improved their understanding of how science is done because often what they hear about are in press conferences where scientists lecture to the public the final results.

And that's very different from the process of doing science where you are confronted with partial data. You don't know what to make of it. And by assembling more data, you get to the bottom of it. Just to give you an example, we had a sled. that was scooping the ocean floor. One day it came back in one of the runs, covered in white paint. It looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.

And I thought, well, maybe it bumped into a can of paint that a sailor dropped from a ship. But then I took my finger, took a sample of it, put it in a vial, and we studied the composition, the chemical composition of this quote unquote paint, ended up being biological. And then we Googled it and found that there is indeed this kind of gooey stuff that you can bump into at the bottom of the ocean. So here is an example.

You first think about a conjecture. It turns out to be wrong based on data. That's the way science is done. And people really appreciated that there was even a person from Denmark that wrote to me that he had a stroke four weeks ago. And as a result of reading my reports, he developed a desire for his... living, you know, like he got a new sense of why life is worth living. And that was very moving to me that science can provide people with meaning as long as you are honest and straightforward about the scientific process.

You're not pretending that you know everything in advance. And people connect to that. People connect to the uncertainty, whereas scientists very often remove the uncertainty. They want to just talk about things that are finalized in a final format. And we all know that that's not the way science is made. That's not the way the sausages. You know, to be polite and but respectfully disagree, oftentimes, and you pointed this out to me many times, they don't talk about things that they're certain about. They talk about things they speculate about as if they are certain about it.

So I can't tell you, I just had the opportunity and a huge honor of speaking at the Royal Institution, the longest ever ongoing lecture series, started by Michael Faraday, as you know, back in the mid-1800s. And there, most of the questions were about wormholes and black holes and I don't know why people are so obsessed with holes in the physics community, but string theory and inflation and all these things that you have worked on, by the way. But to say that we speak about things and it's all nice and neat, sometimes that's true. I think we teach our students. When I teach a lab class, I'm teaching an experiment that won the Nobel Prize in 1963, you know, something like the Davidson-Germere experiment. You know, some pre-packaged canned experiment. I know it's going to work. But oftentimes what you hear about in the media from your colleagues in theoretical physics,

mainly obvious, I have to say, not you, but many of your colleagues, and we know who they are. We won't name them. But they speak about pure speculation with the certainty of fact. So no need to respond to that. But here is my frustration which touches on yours a week before I went on the expedition, which is pretty much an experimental endeavor. We were just trying to figure out the materials that made up this unusual, meteor that we mentioned that was discovered by US government censors back on January 8th, 2014.

So almost a decade later, we are looking, searching for materials from that meteor. And my colleague, a colleague of mine, came forward and said, look, many of us think that you will not find anything, that it's a waste of money, a waste of time, and why do it? And I said, I'm not asking you to do anything. You know, I'm doing the heavy lifting. I'm going there. And you can just sit back and relax. In fact, the money that funded this expedition

was a donation by a person who would not give it to science otherwise. And so it's a win-win situation. I don't understand the negativity about collecting evidence, which is pretty much the scientific method. And why would a community of scientists or some scientists object to collecting evidence

or have a bad feeling about it? After all, that's what science is about. It's not about speculating about extra dimensions or not finding supersymmetry after investing $10 billion in the Large Hadron Collider. That's not new knowledge. New knowledge comes with collecting evidence for whatever you're seeking.

Now, your new book, which we'll get to in just a bit, is concerned with extraterrestrial life, not necessarily just extraterrestrial technology. I say just, but I don't mean that negatively. Okay, so here is an anecdote related to that. When I was jogging one day, we had a filming crew of a documentary. And they filmed me from a drone that was looking at the ship from a distance.

And then at the end, the director came to me and said, it looks like you are running. Are you running away from something or are you running towards something? And I said, both. I'm running away from some of my colleagues. And I'm running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space. So we'll talk about life in just a bit because I think I've come up with some notions. They may be speculative, but some ways that we can use kind of the reverse of what's happening here,

where an impact has occurred on the Earth from a interstellar trajectory at 99.99% confident, 99.5,9s. Whereas I'm kind of interested in the reverse. In other words, if a meteorite, interstellar or not hits the Earth, Earth, blasts up some of the surface, and it hits it in a region of the Earth surface, which is populated by that same bacterial sludge that you found or whatever it was, or stromatolite, or perhaps it hits, you know, some high-rise building, and it blasts into space some genetic material, right? So that should be floating around our solar system. I have a fragment, which I'll give you when you come to visit me, as you promised, and I have promised to visit you, too. But I have a fragment of Mars,

which costs, you know, many, many, you won't get a fragment of Mars if you joined my mailing list, but it costs a lot of money, not as much as your expedition, but it costs a lot. And that means that there are particles of the Earth on Mars, correct? So. Oh, yeah, definitely. What can we say? And then, and of course there are many objects that come from interstellar space, but it's only one in a thousand of the rocks or the objects that come from the solar system

that may have originated from interstellar space. So most of the vast majority of all the impacts on Earth are building blocks of planets, like the Earth that are floating out there like Lego pieces, and that's the one you held in your hand. The difference is that those that come from interstellar space may be quite different. And I should say this particular meteor, we know from the analysis of the fireball data that the government provided, that it had sustained stress far greater than all. all other space rocks that were cataloged by NASA over the past decade, 272 of them.

So irrespective about what it's made of, arguing about the details, the point is that it had material strength above all the space rocks that we often see from the solar system. And that raised an interesting question. You know, maybe it's made of some artificial alloy, and maybe it was moving very fast just because it had the benefit of artificial propulsion. And of course, if we imagine Voyager, that's a mission that we send to interstellar space in a billion years from now, it could collide with an exoplanet and burn up in the atmosphere as a meteor.

And of course, that would be an unusual meteor of higher material strength than natural rocks and also could move faster than most of the interstellar objects. Yes. 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's seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49.

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. My question is kind of the inverse of that. Is it possible that such a deadly meteorite hitting the Earth, blasting off our surface as the regolith I have from Mars demonstrates, could it carry some remnants of DNA or even life?

Is that possible? Oh, sure. This is called pansepermia. Now, in terms of, you know, how long can life survive in space, there are estimates in the literature. It's highly uncertain. Most estimates extend the lifespan to maybe. 10 million years, not more than that, because the material is exposed to cosmic rays and without

any nutrients or liquid water, it may be difficult, it may disintegrate. And so if it's only 10 million years, you know, traversing the Milky Way galaxy at speeds of tens of kilometers per second require, you know, half a billion years. And so if we're talking about a journey that lasted for half a billion years, any living organism would not survive that long, at least based on of the type that we are familiar with, it will just disintegrate. So, but on the other hand, if it's, for example, equipped with artificial intelligence, if it has some machinery that was technologically produced, you can imagine that lasting for much longer than living organisms. And of course, that is a completely different matter.

Yeah. I'm actually asking, you know, whether or not the non-observation of life in our solar system. So the non-observation of life so far on Mars, is that not possible in sort of a Drake equation fashion or maybe just a Bayesian estimation? Can we limit the probability of the existence of life outside of our solar system? And the fact is that Mars had liquid water on it, we believe. It had, you know, potential to support, you know, a microbe, you know, airdropped onto Mars two billion years ago, could have survived potentially. But can we not say something about the overall global odds? I've never seen this. I've seen the Drake equation. I've seen. No. I mean, what we know is that Mars has a lower surface gravity. So it couldn't retain its atmosphere. And a couple of billion years ago,

it lost its atmosphere. Now, before that, it had liquid water on the surface. And what forms of life it had, we don't know. And that's part of the mission of the NASA rovers that are being sent. Frankly, I mean, personally, I believe that we have a better chance of finding traces of any early life on Mars in the caves, in the so-called lava tubes, which are these caves that are underground, protected from cosmic rays, and are not really affected by the extreme temperature variations on the surface after the atmosphere was lost. And I'm particularly interested in going into these caves, the lava tubes, and searching for any wall paintings because maybe intelligent life developed on Mars twice as fast as it did on Earth. You know, a factor of two is not a big

factor. And of course, today they would not be able to survive. There is no atmosphere or the liquid water evaporated. But if they existed, we might find some wall paintings. And then, And moreover, we might find some skeletons in these lava tubes. So that's my personal interest going with a drone into these labatubes and examining them. But we cannot say at the moment how to calibrate. We cannot say whether there was life on Mars and how advanced it was until we find any traces of it. Just one thing to keep in mind. Suppose there were cities on the surface of Mars, you might say, oh, we don't see any

rise. Well, the point is that any square kilometer of Mars was bombarded by 20 Hiroshima atomic bomb explosions, associated triggered by asteroid impacts. I calculated that in a couple of billion years. You basically get 20 atomic explosions per square kilometer, and any high rise would be demolished as a result of that. So not to speak about, you know, any living, creatures and obviously without an atmosphere or liquid water they would have a hard time surviving. Yeah. Well, reportedly

inside one of those lava tubes on Mars, the scientists discovered four words etched on the walls of the tube. You know what they were, Avi? It said please like and subscribe. So if everybody is out there and you're interested, first of all, I put up Avi's Medium site on the screen. You could go over

there, Avi-dash lobe. And of course, you can win a meteorite if you go to Briankeen.com slash mail. And I first want to start off of some images. So I have an image here. I always like to joke about, you know, it's a very interesting image. I'll just pop on the screen.

You won't be able to see it. But it's Meteor Crater, Arizona. Have you ever been there, Avi? No, I've seen images, Sophie. So if you remember the images, there's a huge, you know, one plus kilometer crater. And then I always joke, you know, so cool that it's struck right next to the gift shop.

And, of course, you know, they built a gift shop later. But my question for you is, you know, when you look at these objects, you know, when you find this object, you should go through the calculations that led you to conclude or in the government to agree with this calculation, that this was interstellar, but then that you found in Papua New Guinea around the most likely trajectory impact zone, you actually found these sphero. Is it a just-so story?

Is it just like this gift shop appearing next to the meteor crater in Arizona? And if not, why? So let me explain. of all, from the crater, you only infer the kinetic energy, the energy carried by the object that impacted the Earth. And that doesn't tell you separately the mass of the object and the speed that it came at. It tells you the product of the mass times the speed squared.

And that's all that you can learn from the size and the shape of the crater. So when examining impacts on Earth, can't really tell where these impactors came from. We can't say whether it's solar system origin or interstellar origin outside the solar system. What was special about the meteor from 2014 is that the US government satellites and other sensors detected it when it exploded in the atmosphere and could measure its speed. And they measured the speed of 45 kilometers per second in some direction and we went back in time and realized that it was not bound to the sun. It was

moving faster than the escape speed from the sun. And moreover, it was moving very fast, even outside the solar system. So we put that in a paper, and the paper was not published because the referees argued, well, we don't know the uncertainties in the government data. And obviously, the government doesn't want adversaries to be aware of the sensors that it's using, so it didn't reveal the uncertainties. And it took them three years to end up confirming, as you said, at the 99.99% confidence that indeed the aerobjudgeet is extremely small, which is what I expected, because they are responsible. Their day job is national security. They have to figure out if a ballistic missile is heading towards Washington, D.C. So they have very precise data. They put

their reputation on the line, but I should say on the day that we came back, there was a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal by two astronomers who argued that they are trying to fit the government data with their model for stony and iron meteorites. And they cannot do that. And therefore, their conclusion was the data must be wrong. The speed that was measured must be a factor of a few smaller. Now, the way I was brought up is if your model doesn't fit the data, then you revise the model.

But instead, what they say, quite arrogantly, I should say, is the data must be wrong, because our models for solar system rocks do not fit it. Well, I said that long ago. I said the material strength of this object was different than solar system rocks. That's why the models didn't fit it. And just think about the rotation curve of the Milky Way galaxy. You might argue, oh, the rotation curve of the Milky Way galaxy cannot be fit with assuming ordinary matter that we find in the solar system. And therefore, the data must be wrong.

Well, no. Cosmologists all over the world, by now it's 90 years, are worried about what this matter might be. call it dark matter. That's a main area of research with billions of dollars dedicated to finding what the dark matter is. But if we were to use the same logic, we would say we don't see this matter in the solar system as of now, and therefore, the data must be wrong. And, you know, that kind of logic perhaps is adequate for traditional fields that focused on space rocks. But intellectually, that's not suitable for exploring the universe beyond the solar system, because we know that 83% of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't find in the solar system.

And moreover, we launched probes out of the solar system, so why not allow for the possibility that this object may be a voyager from an exoplanet? If you were to take this object in the spirals, how do you say it's spheroial? Spherols. So let me explain. These are just the molten droplets from the surface of the object that were melted when it was exposed to the extreme heat from the fireball. And the fireball released a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. So I'm going to show on the screen from your medium piece. I'm going

to show an image of some of the images that you sent me, and including some of the microscopy and so forth. Let me first show the boat and show you on the boat with a magnet. So you can't see it, but my audience sees it. And it's from your medium website. So let me, put that up on the screen now. So it's a series of boats. It looks like it has a gantry that you guys lifted stuff on and off of. Talk about the magnetic sled. Get into the details. Nerd out with us, please. What is this black sled? What does it do? How could it possibly contaminate what you saw? Are there, are there systematic involved? Please explain. Right. So we decided, I mean, the ocean is, has a depth of two kilometers.

And think about it. We are trying to find droplets that are a fraction of a millimeter across the region that is 10 kilometers in size. That's the region over which the sphere, any droplets were spread from the explosion. And then that sounds like an impossible task, but the idea was to use a method that was tried before and basically use a magnetic sled, a sled that is full of magnets on both sides,

neodynium magnets, and we dragged the sled with a cable that was attached to the ship. to the ship, to a winch. And at first, in the first two days, we had difficulties keeping the sled on the floor, on the ocean floor because there was a force, the tension of the cable was lifting it and the opposing gravity.

And we figured that we had an exceptional team of engineers and people that are the best in the world for ocean expeditions. And they figured the method of basically going with the current and keeping the sled on the ocean So that was in the first couple of days, and then we started collecting materials. And basically what we will do is lift the sled. You can see it in the middle panel here, lift it from a two kilometer depth.

By the way, the cable went five kilometers because the sled was dragged far away from the ship. And so we would bring it back up after usually eight hours, when we were going over kilometer line and so we were basically scanning in each run a line whose length is 10 kilometers but the width is one meter the width of the sled the sled had a weight of about 200 kilograms and we added some lead at the front of the sled just to keep it on the floor and so we started collecting materials and the most common the most abundant material that was magnetic that we had to scrape from the magnets was volcanic ash. It was black powder.

And the way we would approach it is once we put the sled on the deck, we would remove this material from the magnets and put it in vials or in a bucket, and then dry it up from the water that was used. We would use actually later on a vacuum cleaner to suck all the particles that were on the magnet That was a very effective method, actually. And then we would dry them up and use a mesh with a size that is a quarter of a millimeter to

separate, to basically filter out all the tiny particles associated with the volcanic ash. And then we were left with particles that are bigger than a quarter of a millimeter. And at that point, you know, we didn't see anything unusual by eye. And I wrote an essay, one of my 36 diary reports, it was after the sixth day, I said, where are the spherals? Spherals are these droplets that melt from the surface of meteors as a result of the extreme heat that the surface is exposed to. And we expected them to be there, and we didn't see them at first by eye. But then we started looking in the seventh day through a microscope. And amazingly enough, the geologist on the team ran down the stairs and called me and said,

Avi, we found a sphero. And I went up the stairs and saw it on the digital display of the microscope. And I immediately hugged the person who found it, Ryan Wood, because I knew from my experience in the kitchen, I washed the dishes every day. I knew that if I see an ant in the kitchen, there should be many more ants out there. So after seeing the first feral, surely enough, within hours, we found many more. And all together, about the 50 of them in the samples that we collected over 26 runs. And there is more material, actually, that we haven't had a chance to analyze.

For example, this material that I'm showing here, that was collected. just a few hours before we left. And so we didn't have a chance to analyze it. So we have a team of people here at Harvard. And you can see here the images. These ferols look spherical, and they have these beautiful colors of gold, blue, brown, and black.

And my daughter, as soon as she saw it, she said, could I have one on a necklace? And I said, well, these are half a millimeter in size. It's very difficult to thread them. And so what we are doing is looking at them through an electron microscope. And we, in fact, we did that on the first day we came back. We landed at San Francisco Airport,

and I went immediately with a group of team members to UC Berkeley, where they have some electron microscopes and mass spectrometers. And we looked at the images. And amazingly, in one of the spheres that was found along the meteor path, I should say most of the spirals that we found were along the expected meteor path, that we localized by using seismometer data from Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, we could tell the distance of the explosion

from that seismometer based on the time delay. And that gave us the most likely path to within a kilometer. And we found most of the spirals next to it and very few spheres far away, like tens of kilometers away. So that is one indication that these spirals are related to the meteor

and are not background. because when we went to very distant lines, we didn't find spherals like that, okay? And these ones are mostly iron. And so this paper that came out saying the government data is wrong when we came back also concluded that it's most likely not iron that this meteor is made of. And guess what?

They made this statement in a published paper on the day that we came back with materials, spherals from this meteor that show us that most of it is iron. And that was based on an X-ray fluorescence analyzer that we had on the ship, which basically shines x-rays that penetrate a hundred, tenth of a millimeter, into the surface of these spirals and excites the electrons in whatever atoms this surface is made of, and you can learn about the composition from that. You can tell which atoms are there from the spectral lines, the fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints that these atoms have.

And so that allowed us a preliminary test of the composition that indicated mostly iron in contradiction to this paper. And moreover, the fact that we found these ferals next to where the government said the meteor exploded, confirms that the government, you know, I sleep better at night. I know that the government has good sensors. Now, would the meteorite have detonated an airburst like most, you know, munitions would be detonated or detonated? nuclear weapons would be detonated, would have been an airburst event? Yeah, so there was a fireball which was noticed by satellites and by ground-based sensors, and that's what the US government used to infer the properties of this meteor.

And there was also a blast wave generated as a result of the explosion that, as I said, we found the data from the seismometer in Papua New Guinea that we used to infer the distance. And so as an explosion, it was just like any other explosion in the atmosphere. And by the way, there is an atomic explosion, energy equivalent explosion, just like an atomic bomb. Every year, by a rock the size of a meter or two, the size of a person, roughly, that comes from the solar system, colliding with Earth every year. Every year we have an atomic explosion in our atmosphere, but it's usually at very high elevation. 30 to 40 kilometers so we don't notice any damage but every now and then there is a one that gets

closer to sites where humans reside and you hear about it in the news and by the way this is the reason i noticed this meteor historically uh i was interviewed about the meteor that exploded above the bering sea back in december 2018 so in January the middle of January 2019 a month later after the holidays, there was a radio station in New York City that wanted to speak with me about that meteor. And I didn't know much about meteor, so I went online, and I found this catalog that NASA compiled of 273 meteors. And I asked my student, undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, to check whether the highest, the fastest meteors in that catalog could have originated from outside the solar system. just because I was intrigued by Omuamua that was discovered a couple of years earlier. And so he looked into it and immediately we found this meteor that we call now IM1 for interstellar meteor 1.

And it was a complete coincidence. I didn't plan it. I just noticed this catalog and we looked into it. And then by now this is the site that we visited and found spherals from. When you were to look at, say, an object that you can purchase, say, online a meteorite, you can cut them open, and you see these very, very famous patterns, which their technical name is called Widman-Statin patents. They're basically found in all-metal iron-nickel objects. So this would be indicative of a natural formation. I mean, this basically comes from the very same meteorite you'll get if you join my mailing list.

and you're one of the lucky winners. Let me shrink that so we can see each other. So if we were to cut this in half and treat it with some acids and so forth, you'd see this. Are these spirals expected to display the wooden staten patterns as well if they are naturally occurring? In other words, if they're not technological in origin? Well, the first question we're asking is, is the material different from solar system materials? Okay, and we can answer that either based on the composition of elements within the spherals or radioactive isotopes because for example in the UC Berkeley analysis of the mass spectrometer we already found uranium and lead and as you know

uranium comes in two isotops 235 and 238 235 decays into lead 107 whereas 238 decays in lead 107 whereas 238 decays in into lead 106. And by measuring the relative abundance of these different isotopes, you can infer the age of your sample. So because the lifetime is different for the different isotopes of uranium. The 235 lives for 0.71 years, the giga years, billions of years.

And the 238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, roughly the age of the solar system. And so that's a very good kind of clock that can be used to infer the duration of the journey. And when I checked two spherals that were on the path of the meteor, it looked as if their age estimate is larger than the solar system. But that's something we can do much better with the analysis of more spherals. As we find radioactive isotopes in them, we can date them. We can compare the relative abundances of isotopes to those found in the solar system. So the solar system was originated from a common cloud of gas that was enriched with very specific isotope ratios, very narrowly confined isotopes, for example, of chromium or iron.

And by studying the spherals that we have, we can differentiate between them and solar system material. But beyond that, if we demonstrate an interstellar, first of all, if we demonstrate an interstellar origin just based on composition, I should say this is the first time that humans put their hands on materials that originated from a big object that entered the solar system. That would resolve once and for all the doubts that are being raised about the interstellar origin, irrespective what you think about the government's ability to measure velocities, if we find that the composition indicates materials that originated outside the solar system, that's it. Okay. And that would be a historic discovery because it's the first time,

big object exploded and we found the materials to be outside from outside the solar system. Okay. And of course at that point there is a second question. Could it be that it was an artificial object that it was manufactured by a technological civilization? Just imagine droplets melting off semiconductors or an electric circuit. They would have abundances of rare elements that would be very different than the abundances you find in nature. Okay, so in principle, just from the composition, you can say something about the technological origin, but that's an indirect assessment and a much better approach is to find a big piece of this object lying on the ocean floor. And you can think of these spirals as rose petals that romantically direct you to your partner, which is the big piece left over from the meteor. So we know where to look, and that would be the target of a future expedition.

where we will use instead of a sled with magnets, that kind of sled cannot really pick up anything big. We will use an imager using sonar to look at objects at the bottom of the ocean in the area that we suspect the meteor may have landed. And if we find it, of course, we could tell if it's a rock or a technological gadget. Because a technological gadget could have a label saying made on planet water, It could also have buttons on it. And I asked students in my class at Harvard in the last class of the semester, of the spring semester, I asked if we find a gadget and it has buttons on it, should we press a button?

And half of the class said, no way, don't do that because we are worried about what may happen. And the other half of the class said, oh, we are very curious. Why don't you press a button? We want to see what will happen. And then one of the students asked me, what would you do, Professor Lowe? And I said, I would bring it to a laboratory and examine it before engaging with it. Yeah, or bring it to a rival university's department chair and have her open it up. Okay, so we have a lot of questions from folks online, and you have a limited time because you're going to Australia virtually in just a bit.

But we have a question, a couple questions from David Axe, who's a journalist with a Daily Beast. He's just asking, you know, what's the probability that it's not interstellar? In other words, the combination of the spherals having another origin and a natural origin and the combination of these spirals being not related to the interstellar meteor. And the fact that the interstellar meteor may not be truly interstellar. We can't say 100% confidence. So if you add together these probability, multiply the probability, but not being.

Right. So here is what we know. First of all, we know that the velocity information about this meteor indicated that the 99.99% according to the US space command that it's interstellar. So that's one data point we have. Another one is that we found most of the spheres near the meteor path, the likely path of the meteor not far away.

And I'm talking about a contrast by a factor of 10 or so because in one of the lines along the meteor path, which was perfectly aligned with the meteor path, we found 11 spirals. And in background lines that went to control regions, we found at most 1 to 2. So to me, that's an indication that we were, you know, bull's eye on that particular run that found 11.

But of course, you know, it could be that there was another meteor in that location, Who knows, but the chance for that would be quite small. So rather than quantify in terms of probability, I'm explaining what is the evidence we have, but the best evidence would be if we find isotope ratios or composition in terms of elements that clearly differentiates these spirals from solar system spheres

because there is one, based on the statistics, there should be one interstellar object per thousand of solar system objects, of the same size, just based on the fact that interstellar objects were found once per decade. Okay? In the catalog of NASA, you know, we found this and another candidate, that's it, over the past 15 years or so. So with that kind of impact rate and using all the numbers we have, we estimated that one in a thousand is interstellar. And that means that if you find an interstellar composition, in other words, a composition that came from far away, I would say at the 99.9% that would say it's interstellar

because only one in a thousand of meteors should be interstellar, and you find it just at the place where this explosion took place. And the US government claimed at the 99.99.99. So I would say it would be very certain at that point. So I would just wait a few weeks. I know that David might be anxious to know the answer, quickly, but then, you know, we just need to wait for the evidence. That's the work of science. And one thing I saw is that many scientists prefer not to wait. I mean, first of all, they told me

not to go there. And even though I, you know, I was doing the heavy lifting. Now they're saying, oh, you found something else. And I say, just, you know, relax, sit back. You know, in a few weeks, we'll know. Why are you so happy to make negative statements all the time? Mm-hmm. When you were on last time, you gave one of the great all-time quotes on The Into the Impossible podcast. You said, the sky is not classified. You still stand behind that. But the seafloor is classified. In fact, the Navy here in San Diego classifies wide, wide swaths of it. Have you dealt with any governmental officials, either in New Guinea or in the United States, or been contacted by any people that, you know, dress even better than you do with pens that click like this to make you forget. Have you been approached by governments because it is a sensitive thing that involves sonar, multi-channel sensors, multi-messinger processes, and material science and so forth? Have you been contacted by any governments that you can disclose? First, I should say that finding the truth about interstellar space is easier at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, two kilometers deep,

than it is based on government officials. You know, you can't really, I mean, David Grush came up with a story. We don't know. It was just here. hearsay, we don't have any direct evidence. However, you know, I came back with materials, okay? So just to show you that it's better to be a scientist than a politician. Science is better than politics. But do you doubt his story, by the way? I mean, are you skeptical of his claims, Grush's claims?

Oh, no, I'm not skeptical. I'm intrigued. But on the other hand, you know, I cannot just rely on hearsay. The point is if he was, he was himself was never exposed. to direct evidence. Yeah, he doesn't claim to. It's just people may have fooled him and he may be completely sincere, but someone told him stories that are not real. That's possible.

Anything to do with humans providing the evidence, you know, to me, can be doubted. That's why in science we use instruments. We can't write a scientific paper based on what people say. So that's different from the legal system, where you can put a person in jail based on what people say, and we know that a lot of people are put for the wrong. reason in Jay. Yeah. That's why Galileo said, yeah, coming back to your question. Yeah. I got only encouragement. First of all, the Department of Defense wrote this letter to NASA, which came to

my defense. Okay. So here is a government organization helping the scientific process of supporting, you know, a scientist who is interpreting their data. And I found that to be very generous on their side, they put their reputation on the line, it was not part of their day job. Anything to do with interstellar space has nothing to do with national security, right? And they are paid to deal with national security. So they took time away from their day job and did that, wrote a letter. That doesn't convince astronomers. They still can write a paper a few weeks ago saying they don't believe the U.S. government,

but I'm saying the U.S. government did an effort here to help us. And I listen to them. And the other thing I should say is, you know, I received some emails, including from the Pentagon, during the expedition, saying great work, keep up with the science. And, you know, on the one hand, I don't know if government has any information that is being hidden from us. I don't believe conspiracy theories. But at the same time, I would say, you know, that doing science the way it should be done by collecting evidence is the way to expand. our knowledge of interstellar space. And frankly, I don't care about

whatever is manufactured by humans. And so if it says made in China, that's something that Washington, D.C. should deal with. I don't care about it. It's as uninteresting to me as a bird, okay, if I find it in my telescopes, cameras that we built at Harvard University. So I'm just trying to follow

what the science is all about collecting evidence rather than having a prejudice, rather than tweeting about things that you believe in, because social media will not reveal the truth. It's the scientific exploration through instruments, collecting data. And that's the way, you know, cosmology is done. That's where I came from. Black hole research is done.

That's where I came from. So I thought it would be a piece of cake. You know, if there is data that seems anomalous in this case, just like in the case of dark matter, if, you know, so I see Omoor Mu, not being a comet, I would say it's not a comet, so what could it be? And then instead of the approach taken in the cosmology community, where people talk about the nature of dark matter in many different ways,

when I suggested something different from space rocks, there was a huge pushback. And I don't understand that, quite frankly. 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 oceanfront 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.

So speaking of the government and so forth, there was a question from one of my listeners. I'm just calling up the article that he posted for me by Douglas Dean. Johnson, that non-Earth, a Senate intelligence bill gives holders of non-Earth origin or exotic UAP material six months to make it available to AARO. All right, what does this impact, if any, on the spirals that you found? Well, this is really interesting. The first question is, does government have such materials and, you know, are they related to a meteorite that they had access to?

But it doesn't say whether these meteorites are natural or technological in origin. And six months is a long period. So what I can say is we already have access to a meteorite that most likely came from outside the solar system. We'll find out what it was made of and we will let everyone know. I mean, so that's the beauty of science that it deals with open data, open knowledge. And I'm not hiding anything. What you see is what you get. Once we figure out the composition, we will let it out.

And by the way, I spread it among three laboratories with people that do not have any agenda that are completely neutral to what the data might bring. These are experts in studying meteorites. And they will just tell me what their instruments find. Okay, so it has nothing to do with people. And yet I see a lot of people saying, oh, we think it's that. We think that's not the way science is done. It's by using instruments.

We have the spirals in our hands, put them under the microscope, the electron microscope that can resolve scales of hundreds of atoms, you know. And we are able to do mass spectroscopy that will give us trace elements down to a level of 10 parts in a billion or something. You know, so we will do good science out of this. And that's the way science is done. We have the instruments. We're doing it right now. Just sit back and relax. Okay. So all these people that want to say something negative, don't say it. Wait until we come out with the results. And then we can debate what they mean. It's reminiscent of what the namesake of the Galileo Project. This guy, Galileo, Galile said. He said, measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not already so. On the issue of what I would say provenance, perhaps, on the in the chat room is my good friend, Kurt Jiamungle. He and I did a wonderful interview with Jim Semivan, who is a former CIA operative,

and a very famous, you know, musician Tom DeLong of Blink 182. And, yeah, he was, in my mind, credited with, you know, bringing a lot of the modern interest in UAP, UFO type phenomena to the public's attention appearing on the front page of the New York Times not too long ago. He's got his own to the Stars Academy and so forth. But while he was on the call, and I hope to do a part two with him and hopefully my good friend, Kurt, and other people that are in this field because so much has happened in just two years since we did that interview, less than two years.

But on that call, he said he has alien artifacts, including alien biological specimens, except he could not vouch for the provenance. He said the provenance had interruptions in it. In other words, he had not, he couldn't verify the chain of command going back to the origin of where this object came for. And he admitted it. It wasn't like, you know, some gotcha moment. He himself admitted it.

And I'd love to follow up with him more on that. But what about to those who say, well, you can't Avi vouch for the provenance of these spirals either. You got them. You scraped them up. Maybe, you know, somebody malicious, you know, planted them or what steps is, are being taken to ensure the provenance that there's no molestation of this stuff, that there's. There's no, that nothing gets interjected, it disperses some oil from a technician's hand.

What steps to ensure the integrity of these data points are being taken? That was very important for me. And a few weeks before the expedition, I sent a memo to all team members that nobody touches the sample without my permission. And I just wanted to maintain the integrity of the sample. And when we, I was on all runs, you know, I was monitoring how we scraped the magnets and it was all done straight to a bucket that was immediately brought up to the analysis room where it was dried up. The material was dried up and filtered. And we made sure that there is no contamination whatsoever.

And I should say that it's very difficult to imitate material from, you know, another. planetary system or we should see what we find in this composition but you need to plant the rare elements at some very particular abundance pattern and we can easily tell if that was you know played with and also to make those just to give an example one of the spirals that we looked at through an electron microscope at UC Berkeley it had those ridges on the surface that are dendrites basically and from the spacing of these ridges and by the way this is half a millimeter in size but we could see them very clearly and from the spacings you can tell the temperature that was that this material was exposed to and during the

explosion and we can compare that temperature to what we infer based on the properties of this meteor there are lots of ingredients that a lot of details that you can find in the spherals about in terms of their morphology what they are made of for example we by looking inside one of them we found spheres inside spheres, just like Russian balls. And the reason is that at first, these smallest droplets, the size of a few hundred atoms, condensed, solidified,

but then they were engulfed with molten iron, and that glued them together. And then a bigger drop came over and engulfed it. So to make such a thing in the laboratory, even if you are very ambitious, I think I would, you know, it would be a very difficult task to make it, because you need huge temperatures that are provided by atomic explosions, for example. But we can tell the difference between the droplets from an atomic explosion based on the radioactive elements.

And anyway, there are lots of details, and we will put them in a scientific paper to be submitted to peer review, the way science is done, hopefully within a month. And so everyone will have access to that, and that's the way you do science. I should say it gives them, the one thing I wanted to bring up is this type of research, gives inspiration to artists because just a couple of days ago there was a sculpture from Spain who decided to build a giant sculpture inspired by my research. And also behind me there is a letter that I received from Alan Bergman who wrote the windmill of your mind and won four Oscars, three Grammys, two. I mean, all possible prices, awards. And he is writing a song for a play that is almost completed about my research with the hope that it will be presented on Broadway.

And, you know, there is, of course, there is also the documentary being made. But I should say the public at large is very inspired by, first of all, the fact that this research resonates, with their interest. So science can be exciting. That's my point. Science can be exciting. It doesn't need to be boring. And it can also resonate with what people want to know. And just, you know, the fact that I'm funded without using the conventional pass of applying to federal grants, just from individuals that come to the porch of my home and provide the funding. You know, that is an illustration of how this subject appeals to the public. Yeah, definitely. Okay. I know you I don't have that much time left, so let's do some quick lightning round questions.

A reminder, you can always ask me questions on Instagram or Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating, here in YouTube, subscribers, I'll try to get to you first. So I've one from Andy Mode, I'll put that on the screen, for one such interstellar meteorite to hit us. There must be huge amounts of similar objects passing through the solar system. Can you speculate on that, Avi? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, this object, as I mentioned, came from behind as the Earth was orbiting the Sun, based on the rate of impacts,

we can infer that there should be a million such objects at any given time. If you look now at a snapshot, a million objects, half a meter in size, from interstellar space within the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Now, we can't see them. They are dark to our telescopes because they don't reflect enough sunlight.

We could see Omoomua because it was 200 times bigger. Okay, so it had an area that is 200 square times bigger than this meteor. And 200 square is a big number. It's four times 10 to the four, you know, and that allows telescopes on Earth to see the sunlight reflected of an object the size of a football field. But our telescopes cannot detect the amount of sunlight reflected

of a half a meter-sized object, and we have a million of those right now, within the orbit of the Earth around the sun. And so, of course, we can design observing strategies, perhaps, you know, going into space. That would be a very fertile field of research in the future. But what we found with this expedition is that instead of using telescopes to learn about what lies outside the solar system, we can use microscopes.

That's a completely new window into the universe. So, yeah, and then along those lines, I'm going to echo a question posed by echoes in lo-fi. He or she's asking, will Galaya Project be studying meteor fragments and exotic mathematics? metals found in the Unita Basin, and will you be collaborating with the landowners other than Skinwalker? Let me rephrase that question. Let me ask a question. A low-cost way to, you know, see, you know, without going to the expedition on the ocean again.

I couldn't go with you. I get seasick on a paddleboard, but I'm sorry, I can't go with you. But just test every terrestrial meteorite, stony metal, test every single object that you can get a fragment of. I'll sell you one of these, you know, for a Harvard T-shirt maybe. But can we just go into the storehouse at Arizona State University? Here is the interesting point that once we understand what makes something interstellar in terms of composition, okay, based on the analysis of this meteor, then we can go back to reservoirs of meteors that we had on Earth, okay? And check if any among them could have been interstellar in origin based on our understanding of this one. And that would be a very interesting thing to do because in the past, when people collected meteors, they may have classified a small fraction of them as a rare class of space rocks that belong to Earth, to the solar system, you know?

And perhaps that small fraction represents the small fraction of interstellar objects that impacted the Earth over the billions of years that the Earth existed. So, yeah, I think that is a very good question that would allow us perhaps to identify some small subclass of the meteorites that we have on Earth as interstellar. Okay, now I'll take some questions from my audience on YouTube on the chat comment section. Avi, can you, and please feel free to answer briefly if you need to, Avi. Can you please speculate on why entities visiting the Earth seem to be. be so interested in us, military, nukes, cattle. That's from Anonymous Bevy. So in this case of the meteor, I would argue that if it's a technological gadget, it's not functional. You know, it's just like Voyager would be in a billion years colliding with

an exoplanet. So it's just space trash. Think of it, a space trash, just like the plastics in the ocean. You know, our civilization is producing plastics. And by 2050, there will be more mass in plastics in the oceans, then the mass in fish. So don't eat fish from the ocean after 2050 because it may contain a lot of plastic. That's why Montgomery Burns invented the OmniNet on the Simpsons many years ago. Okay, Avi, this comes from Paolo de Sousa. If the analysis of the spirals and other retrieved materials comes back as natural materials are inconclusive, will the next expedition to the site of IM1 be conducted anyway?

No, I think it will happen if we find it to be interstellar. Otherwise, there is another candidate between Portugal and Azores that we identified, and it's another potential target. The US government did not confirm that one. So we have something to do no matter what, but let's see first what we find from the composition. Yeah. Okay. Then if it does come back as interesting or, you know, possibly valid to consider as an interstellar object and so forth, this is from awaiting aliens 762, so 764, so don't think it's completely impartial person. But when they're asking, when you go back next year to look for a larger object, what will be the methods and tools and technology that you would add to the expedition? Would you use the same ship? What kind of tools is on your dream? yacht besides the president of Harvard, you know, providing one for you. No, I mean, we thought about that already and thought of using a sonar that would have a

frequency of high frequency so that we can identify, you know, if it's 30 kHz, identify rocks and separate them from anything different. And then we could also have an ROV, some imaging device that is hovering over the surface and surveying the region of interest, we have to decide based on the amount of money that we will have. Obviously, if we find this object to be interstellar, based on composition, we will have the money,

no doubt, irrespective of how ambitious we are, because a lot of people would like to know the answer. So it all hangs on what we might find. And as I said, I gave it to laboratories I trust, you know, whatever they deliver back, I mean, it's not up to me. And whatever they bring back will be reported in the scientific paper. And we will know hopefully within a month. Okay.

This comes from Mike 9,678. What are your opinions on UAVs or UAPs, et cetera? Are they from another planet? What's your most likely, you know, Bayesian sense, Avi? What if you had a, you know, guess, you put a gun to your head? What do you think they are? Well, so Sean Kirkpatrick, in his life, latest testimony to the NASA study committee, he said that only a few percent of these unidentified

anomalous phenomena are truly anomalous. A lot of them are presumably balloons. You know, we saw the Chinese spy balloon, but there are many more balloons or drones or airplanes. They can figure them out. And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, of course for him, it's very important to make this assessment because of national security interest. That's why Congress funds error, the all anomaly domain resolution office. But for me as a scientist, I'm exactly interested in the opposite, in the tiny fraction of objects that cannot be explained and could be of extraterrestrial origin. And even if it's one out of a thousand, that would be of great interest. So in the Galileo project, we already have a functioning observatory and we are planning to make more of them.

And in fact, just before I joined you, we had a conversation, a discussion within the research team of the Galileo project about how to treat anomalies. And my view is, if we don't have good enough data, we will simply report objects that we cannot be explained as a known type of objects of like birds or balloons or drugs. So we will just say that they are outliers. There are anomalous. We can't figure them out. But if we have good enough data, for example, we have triangulation, we have information about the temperature of the object, the distance, the speed at which it was moving. If we have a lot of information, then we could potentially make a more significant statement that it cannot be a human-made technological gadget. And, you know, in that case, if it looks like a technological gadget and it doesn't seem to be human, then it would suggest an extraterrestrial origin.

So all I would say is we need to develop the capabilities to figure this out using instruments. And, you know, people talk often about the Nimitz incident where people saw objects moving really fast. And I say if you go on a highway and you see a black car in front of you and then you see a black car behind you, you might say, wow, this car really, you know, was moving really fast. but it may not be the same car unless you have the license plate you can't tell absolutely okay Avi it's coming to the end of the time that you have before your next appearance and I want to just say that you will be appearing

on the podcast next month for the release of this book which I am devouring as we speak in all formats that your publicity team has provided to me interstellar the search for extraterrestrial life and our future in the stars And the last question I have from the audience has to do with the role that the New Guinea government is playing. Are you involved with them? Are they participating in any way?

Do they have provenant? Do they have access to the samples? What's their role? So we established a collaboration with the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea. And in fact, we have the head of the department there. We are planning for him to visit us very soon and be part of the analysis and we'll share some materials. So we have a collaboration with people over there because what we have, I mean, we collected 35 milligrams of these spheres. This is really tiny amount of materials.

But it's to be shared with the scientific community at large, including with scientists in Papua and Guinea, which we hope to get involved with our analysis. So, and all together, we see it as a collaborative project to advance scientific knowledge. It has no commercial value whatsoever. It was a tiny amount of materials that we retrieved. Just tell them it's laced with fentanyl. Just tell them it's laced with fentanyl. You cannot give it to it. Well, it belongs to someone outside the solar system, you know, and let's figure out who that is.

Yeah, what if they say you have to return it to where it came from, Avi? What are you going to do then? Is Harvard have the budget for that? Oh, actually, my dream, if you ask me what, I mean, Elon Musk says that he dreams of dying on Mars. My dream is to board a spaceship that will make it to another planet and appear as a meteor in the sky of that planet. And then a scientist over there would pick a particle of dust from my body, from the ash produced by the explosion out of my body. And I would feel very honored to be studied by a scientist on an exoplanet. That would be my greatest honor.

So just to summarize, I look forward to speaking with you again in a month, and hopefully then we will know more about the composition of this meteor. So stay tuned, and I'll be back with more details. All right, Avi, I'm going to take us out with Shooting Star by Bad Company. Wonderful song. Avi, thank you so much. Best of luck. And have a wonderful summer, Avi. I'll talk to you next month. Thank you. Looking forward to it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday Magic email at briankeating.com slash list. And if you have a dot-edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth,

forged in the fire of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Thanks to all our viewers and listeners for helping us reach 150, thousand subscribers on YouTube and putting us into the top 1% of science podcasts. Please keep it growing by subscribing and sharing with friends. We love reading your reviews and suggestions. Follow Professor Keating on Twitter at DR Brian Keating. That's Dr. Brian Keating. And remember to always be curious. 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 for citizens back.