Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Did We Find Alien Technology? Avi Loeb Explains

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 Brian Keating sits down with the ever-curious Avi Loeb for a mind-bending exploration into some of science's greatest mysteries and controversies. The conversation spans everything from the evolving understanding of comets and meteors—highlighting the false starts and surprising twists in scientific history—to the tantalizing possibilities of extraterrestrial life and the intrigue surrounding potential government disclosure. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Aliens.gov: Speculation and Mystery 06:02 Satellite Imaging Unveils Unusual Objects 15:37 Alien Claims or Smokescreen? 26:16 Interstellar Object Anomalies Explained 31:46 Life Clues on Icy Object? 39:08 Academic Harassment by Editors 47:05 Finding More Interstellar Objects 54:05 Life on Mars: Earth Origin? 59:15 Life Transfer: Natural or Directed? 01:08:32 Dwarf Stars and Habitability 01:16:06 AI: Alien Intelligence's Impact 01:23:37 Technosignatures and Extraterrestrial Communication 01:29:22 Are We Ready for Answers? 01:41:38 CMB Analysis: No AI Allowed 01:44:46 Open Science via Simons Observatory - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #AviLoeb #AlienTechnology #UFO #ExtraterrestrialLife #SETI #Astrophysics #SpaceDiscovery #UAP #Interstellar #ScienceExplained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 speed. That's why I chose Google Fi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees.

Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. What do you make of the history of all this that we came to learn so late that comets were not like meteors, the comets were not in our atmosphere? They were something from far beyond. What do you make of the great scientists that can be right about some things and spectacularly wrong about other things? Well, you know, our imagination allows us to think about many possibilities and all of them except one applies to their physical reality we all share. And very often, the truth is something we resent because a virtual reality makes us happier. And that's why a lot of people prefer to take recreational drugs. I know that now the metaverse is not a business anymore, even though originally Mark Zuckerberg

assumed that people would love to live in the metaphors by putting goggles on their head. The point is physics is a way of us narrowing down possibilities, is using experimental data, evidence. And we learn about the laws of physics. And if something is relatively low in the atmosphere, there is friction on air and it wouldn't survive in that orbit. In fact, the satellites do go down if they are sufficiently low in the atmosphere.

And if there was a satellite that was launched by the ancient Romans at around the 1,200 kilometers, we would see a Roman satellite coming down. We haven't seen that. I mean, the only thing we find from the Roman Empire are archaeological relics and nothing in the atmosphere, nothing like satellite. So they didn't have advanced technologies. And of course, the farther you go back in time, you know, the higher the object needs to be in order not to come down as a result of friction with air. And what we see about the comets is that they actually move way far from Earth. We can figure out the distance because we can follow their trajectory and they are influenced by gravity. And then their distances are comparable to the Earth's sun separation when we see them.

There are basically icebergs that originate from the outskirts of the solar system where water ice was condensing around the rockyman. material. So they are sort of like dirty iceballs. And Fred Whipple, Harvard astronomer, was the first to recognize that nature of comets by going through Harvard Square during a winter day. And as you may imagine, it was snowing and the kids were throwing iceballs. And he just thought, well, maybe comets are made of the same thing. Dirty ice balls. That's what his model was all about. And indeed, that's what we now understand as comets being. There are sort of a. mixture of ice, water ice and rock. And from the early formation of the solar system, these are the relics that are far out. And of course, closer to the sun, you end up with just rocks that may have lost their eyes. These are asteroids. And so we find two types of objects quite prominent in the solar system. Either asteroids, bear rocks that and the comets that are icebergs, and those comets are losing their water as a result of getting warmed up by the sunlight as they come close to the sun,

and that results in a cloud of dust and gas surrounding them. And the dust and gas are pushed away from the sun, the dust by the solar radiation and the gas by the solar wind. And as a result, you end up with a cometary tail that is the characteristic feature of comet. So speaking of things that aren't in our atmosphere, recently posted on your medium, Avi-dashlob.medium.com,

what will be the content of the website, Aliens.gov? So it made me, I wasn't aware they were going to actually launch this website, but I went to the website, Avi, and it's really a thing of beauty. It says this site can't be released. So I'm sure that's going to pull.

put to rest all the notions that the government is, you know, concealing information about aliens. What do you make of this? Some say, you know, cynically that the attempt to disclose or announce and keep teasing and hinting and disclosure is just a giant distraction. They always accuse it of Trump distracting from the Epstein files. What do you make of all this of you? And what do you make of the content of the future content of Aliens.gov? Do you think it was a good choice of names, by the way?

Well, I think the Pentagon is thinking about releasing some information. And the Secretary of War, Pete Hexed, shortly after President Trump announced, gave a directive to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to release. Any information related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, extraterrestrial life, or anything to do with these interesting subjects, the Pentagon is planning to do that. and it's not surprising that the White House secured these domains. Now, they don't have websites associated with them because they just secured the domains in the last few days.

And the question is, what kind of content will be there? And you can think of either an optimistic best case scenario or a pessimistic worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is that we will get access to imagery with high resolution. For example, the US government's, satellites that are routinely monitoring the earth, they may have noticed objects with moving in ways that our best technologies cannot reproduce. That's quite possible because when you look

at Earth from a satellite, you know the distance, right? Because the satellite is moving and the object is moving. You can figure out the velocities and accelerations of objects that are looked at. And in fact, the resolution can be better than that 10 centimeters. I mean, can resolve objects quite well with present-day cameras on satellites. So if we had a high-resolution image of an unusual object in the way it looks, it doesn't look like human-made drones, balloons, airplanes, or anything else. And it also moves in ways that exceed the performance envelope of human-made technologies. It'll be quite intriguing. And then the question is, what is it? What kind of technologies are being employed? So that's the kind of imagery.

of videos that could be extremely revealing that we are dealing with something else and we should figure it out. And obviously I would be extremely excited if that happens and be happy to help the US government figure things out. The reason they are speaking about this as related to aliens or extraterrestrial technologies is probably because they ruled out the possibility that it relates to adversarial nations. So that's the optimistic scenario if they have access to that data. We don't know, there could also be some materials that they retrieved. I don't know if they have it or they delivered it to corporations and so forth. But one thing is clear that the government is not a scientific organization and their day job is national security.

So they put this data aside if it's not related to adversarial nations. And also, they don't want the US Congress to look over the shoulder and say, you're not performing your job. We are putting a trillion dollars into the defense budget for 2026, and you are still unable to figure out what things are. So to avoid this scrutiny, they might classify and not even let others know about it. And perhaps this release would give us some information. Another possibility, which is the worst case scenario, is that we'll see some documents that are redacted.

We know the feeling already. from the Epstein files. And that, you know, it will be full of inconclusive statements that we can't make much of without much scientific quality data. And that will only fuel conspiracy theories. And I fear that we might be in that situation. We just don't know. So let's wait and see what is the content that is provided on these websites.

I'm sure there will be something. Because both President Trump and the Secretary of War, Pete Hexat said that this will happen. And it may happen relatively soon or it may take more time. That depends on the level of classification of the information that are planning to release. And, you know, the question is, is there something that we should think about? And I don't know the answer to that because I never signed a non-disclosure agreement. And without evidence, without data, you know, I really am very reluctant to believe storytelling. We know about a lot of people who tell stories that are not substantiated.

We know about eyewitness testimonies that put people on death row and then DNA tests exonerate them. So the way science makes progress in our knowledge is not based on what people say, based on the evidence collected by instruments that have no wishful thinking, you know, that's the key here. Right. That's another Galileo quote that our job as a scientist is to measure what's measurable and then make measurable what is not yet so. And from our conversations in the past, I know that you guys have an unlock sequence,

a code, you know, kind of a rubric that you'll go through if there's an evidentiary, you know, claim made. What is the minimum standard, you know, in terms of evidence that the government should use before it posts something, you know, on aliens.gov or has some press conference and something like has it. You're advising them. What's the rubric? Go through the unlock codes. It must be, if you want to claim that it's not human made, it must be clear, there must be clear evidence for the either velocity acceleration of the object exceeding anything that humans can produce or that the imagery of the objects

appear to indicate something very different than what we are used to. to, from all the technologies that we possess. And for example, the Galileo project that I'm leading built three observatories over the past four years. And the most sophisticated one is in Nevada. We have, it has three units. And as of last month, we use three units to triangulate and figure out distances to objects in the sky.

So that is key. Knowing the distance is key. And so far, whatever imagery we have seen, in congressional testimonies had no distance measure. I mean, we could see an object moving, but you don't know if it's moving fast because it's close to the camera or because the camera is moving relative to the object. So distance is key and in any such data released by government,

I would like to know the distance so I can calculate the velocity based on the angular velocity, and then the acceleration and so forth. Also, if they have any material evidence, that would be amazing. And people might say, well, if the data was collected by classified sensors or the data is unclear, maybe we shouldn't release it, it should be classified. But my point is, if there is data from decades ago, let's say 50 years ago, it's completely irrelevant to present-day battlefields as to what technology is humans for you.

using back then. So if there was anything unusual back then, we should be able to look at it. And, you know, it's all about the evidence. And let's put it out and figure out what it means in the standard scientific way. And if there is any doubt about whether we should release it or not, I'm happy to help government figure it out. You see, I'm interested in knowing the answer. You can think of me as a kid. And if there is something that is truly out from out of this earth, I don't really care what the Nobel Committee would think about it. If they pay attention to it or not, if they invite meat for a cocktail party in Stockholm, I would really not spend time on it because this would be far more exciting for us to figure out

if we have a neighbor and if so, what can we learn from our neighbor? We can't hear you, Brian. A layperson might want to know, what do we do next? Why is this so controversial? Why do we keep getting teased? Disclosures coming. There's movies about disclosure on their bombshell revelations. And then I mean, it's, imagine if you had a press conference.

You know, say it was about discovery of inflationary gravitational waves at the center for astrophysics, you know, exactly 12 years ago this week. Yesterday, St. Patrick's there two days ago. Imagine, you know, and you're a part of it. You're the director of the CFA at the time. And then like nothing, we're going to make an announcement, but then we never make the announcement. Okay, we made the announcement. We had to retract basically the claim, as you know, and as I've written about. But the announcement of the announcement, it reminds me of my friend, you know, he's a bachelor at my age.

He's in his 50s. He's engaged to be engaged to be engaged. You know, it's what is the benefit? I mean, doesn't it undermine, even if it is a distraction and a sci-op, as they say from the Epstein files, which I'm in, by the way, you know, because Epstein's sponsored a. conference at UC San Diego that I was a speaker at. He didn't know me or mentioned me or anything like that. But it shows you the influence of big money. And let's say it was a distraction in the government and Trump wants to, Hegsef, whatever, whoever it is, why would they keep

failing to deliver anything? Right. So one motivation, one motivation could be that the U.S. develops a very advanced technologies and they want the public to be confused if they happen to witness those. You know, that may be what happened in Area 51. That may be, you know, in the early days of the B-2 bombers, they didn't want people to know about them. And so it's quite possible that there are very advanced tools being used already now, but the public is kept in the dark on that. And moreover, in order to confuse the narrative, they introduce the alien component. and to it. And for example, another possible reason is suppose there is a retrieval and reverse engineering program within government related to adversarial nations. Whenever there is a crash

of, let's say, a Russian or Chinese airplane or missile from Korea or whatever, there is a whole program trying to figure out the technology is being used by retrieving those materials. And of course, involve pilots and you might want to confuse the subject by saying, oh, this is just alien pilots and alien technologies that we are looking at and there is this program. And some people may not be privy of the details and they hear some people within government hear these rumors as if it's really alien material. So there could be many possible reasons to confuse the public that have to do with national security. And then there would never be any substance behind them. And so to figure out if it's a smokescreen or not, we just have to look at the evidence. And I frankly do not get excited until I see the evidence. Where is the beef? Okay. So as long as people just tell me stories, it's not convincing. But one thing is clear that there are objects and, you know, former President Obama talked about it. And the current President Trump said it's classified when after hearing him speak about it. It's clear that there are objects that the U.S. government cannot figure out. But whether there are human,

made or something else is unclear to me until I see the data. Yeah, I mean, that was very surprising on a podcast that he, you know, dropped this bombshell and then the review of the podcast or interviewers, you know, follow-up was, you know, basically like, what color is the couch at the new Obama presidential library? It was like zero follow-up. I'm like, this could be the biggest. But, you know, it turned out to be, you know, kind of a nothing burger. And he walked it back, I think.

But yeah. Now, let's say they'd come out with the evidence. and it says we haven't found any evidence of anything. There's no evidence of alien life, no evidence of alien crafts. Aliens.gov is basically a big red X. Nothing exists. Does that settle anything or does it raise more questions, you know, than an answer? No, I mean, to me, it's all about the evidence.

And if they don't show evidence, I would just ignore it and move on. Now, of course, there is a matter of national security because it's clear that, I mean, there were reports from the Director of National Intelligence, to the US Congress that are objects they cannot figure out. There are reports of military personnel, of very reliable people that see things they don't understand. So it's a matter of aviation safety. It's a question of whether we are, you know,

there is espionage in the sky. We know about the Chinese spy balloon. Okay. And so that was found by citizens because it was big, but there may be a lot of drones around that are being used for espionage in the US government is not protecting us from that. We need to know that. Okay, so in case it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials,

let's figure out what these objects are for national security. That's a serious matter. And that's why I would not feel that my time leading the Galileo project is wasted because the technologies that we develop, the sensors, the machine learning software that we develop, can be used by the Pentagon in the future to defend the nation. It's not a waste of time to figure out things that are are not well understood, even if it has nothing to do with visits by extraterrestrials.

So we need to clear this up. And I think it's a good subject for mainstream science to figure out things that the US government is confused about because we are paid by taxpayers. And also, you know, there is some remote chance that we might see something we have never expected, which is a visit by some neighbor. Right. And you mentioned that in a recent article on Medium, which I like to below. It's entitled, should we worry about interstellar predators, not just interstellar intelligence. And the money quote was for me is the main scenario we should not, we should lose sleep over, is of alien predators who noticed Earth a long time ago and decided to monitor the

situation like the rock or, you know, one of these guys. They're monitoring the situation from up close, forecasting that it may lead to the development of space technologies pose a threat to them. Why is this the most kind of, you know, kind of insomnia-inducing scenario for you? Oh, because, you know, the Earth could have been discovered by civilizations around about a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, because the transit, the probability of the Earth, I mean, depending on the orientation of the observer, relative to the Earth's Sun axis, you know, Earth's Sun, the Earth moves around the Sun in a plane, and it blocks part of the sun only for about half a percent of all possible viewing angles. So there is a chance of half a percent that an observer,

the random orientation relative to the Earth Sun system, will see the transit of the Earth, and we'll figure out that there is a habitable planet in the solar system called Earth. And given, you know, that a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy constitute about half a percent of the total population of stars. You can imagine another civilization knowing about the earth long ago, billions of years ago. And so they might tell, you know, if they have imperialistic ambitions, they might worry about us developing ultimately the technologies to pose a threat to them. And so they might leave some monitors in the solar system. For example,

in the outer solar system, we wouldn't know about it because we can see only objects bigger than a football field out to about five times the earth sun separation. Beyond that, we can't see enough reflected sunlight from them. So we don't really know what lies in the outer solar system and it could be that there are some monitors out there, technological monitors, that could respond to whatever happens on Earth relatively quickly. Otherwise, you know, if we just say, oh, they haven't started the journey because they don't know that we develop technologies. When will they know? When they detect the first radio signal that was transmitted from Earth. How far did it go? 120 light years because the first electromagnetic signals,

artificial signals, were produced about 120 years ago. So there is this bubble of about 120 light years in radius that contains of all the 20,000 stars, only 20,000 stars. Now, if we wait a millennium, then there would be a thousand times more stars engulfed within this transmission bubble of ours because the volume grows as the time cubed and this growth continues until you reach about a thousand light years which is roughly the thickness of the disk of the Milky Way galaxy after that the disk itself is two dimensional so the growth of the volume of the number of stars would go like the time squared not not the time cubed. So but at any event, if you wait a millennium, there will be a thousand times

more stars aware that we exist. Instead of 20,000, it will be 20 million. And so that's a big increase and perhaps that's why we haven't heard from any of those. Now, how long will it take any civilization within that volume that alerts them to our technological advances? How long will it take them to reach us? Well, that depends on the technologies they use. If they use a laser beam, their weapon that propagated the speed of light, they can reach us within the light travel time between their location and us. And that could be, it could be thousands of years,

you know, and if they are at the distance of 1,000 light years. So we still have some time, you know, before we will notice that. And if they use rocket technology, it could take, you know, a billion years for them to arrive at our backyard. So we have some time before we would know that they notice. us if they are at their place. However, if they realize that the Earth is a potential threat long ago and they came close to us, we might hear very quickly from them. Another scenario that we could hear from is if they produced them, you know, they self-replicating probes that go all across the Milky Way

galaxy, they can fill up the Milky Way galaxy with probes and we would see them as interstellar visitors. And so we should check those interstellar objects that arrive. into the solar system from outside. And I should say that, you might think, oh, if we don't notice a spacecraft, then we are probably safe. Not necessarily so, because you could imagine a Trojan horse situation

where the outside looks like a comet, whereas they planted some technological gadgets in the interior. That's quite possible. And in fact, if we wanted to venture to interstellar space, I would argue that we should have intercepted three-eye atlas with a capsule that we would send on a collision course with 3i Atlas and plant it deep inside 3i Atlas because 3i Atlas is moving out of the solar system at 60 kilometers per second

faster by at least a factor of 2 than any space probe that we launched. So just to give you an example, in November, 3i Atlas came close to the Europa Clipper and the juice spacecraft that were launched by the European space agency on their way to Jupiter. And they would arrive to Jupiter in 2030 and 2013. That's when these two spacecraft that humans produced. But Triadlas arrived to Jupiter this Monday. So it was next to them in November.

It's already passed Jupiter on its way out. This is clearly a better carrier for any technological gadget that we would like to send. But to be clear, we don't have any evidence that it's non-gravitational acceleration or doing. Oh, no. There is non-gravitation acceleration, but it's very small. The correction is minute to the trajectory. How much of that 60 kilometers per second is not gravitational? Practically, I mean, less than a percent of a percent.

It's pretty much negligible. Did you say that you wrote an article in Medium that I have on screen or apparently put it on screen now? there's 22 anomalies in 3-Ey Atlas before it faded from you. It hasn't really faded. It's just past you. It's still in our solar system. It's still in our front doorstep. So what single anomaly is the hardest for, you know, the detractors?

You say it's just perfectly normal, not natural thing. What's the hardest anomaly to explain naturally? Well, there are a few of those. One is geometric. The fact that it arrived in the plane of the planets around the sun within five degrees. You know, that is one in five. hundred chance. And obviously people who just assume that it's a comet would argue this is just a coincidence by chance. Another one has to do with the mass and the abundance of such

objects in order for us to detect one in the last five years. You know, this is an object that is roughly estimated at 2.6 kilometer based on the latest Hubble Space Telescope images. And given, so one can estimate the amount of mass carried by the object and it's of order or at least a billion tons. So given that mass and the number density of such objects from apparent population so that one of them would be seen over a five-year period of the survey, you end up with a certain mass per unit volume of this population of objects in interstellar space. And the other thing that was discovered is that there is a very anomalous abundance of deuterium and carbon 12 relative to carbon 13 that led two papers a week ago to conclude that it originated from a metal poor star, from a star that is old, somewhere between 10 and 12 billion years old, formed early on in the history of the Milky Way galaxy and also had very little. abundance of heavy elements. Now the problem with that is even if you take all the heavy elements in stars of that population, all the heavy elements are missing by a factor of 10 the necessary amount of mass per unit volume in interstellar space. And I'm not mentioning even the fact that the planetary disks around these stars will carry,

you know, less than 10% of the mass of the star. So you lose another factor of 10. And then, not all the objects will be of the size of three-eye atlas. If you have a mass distribution, you will lose another factor of 10. If you put these two additional factors of 10, you end up with a discrepancy by a factor of 1,000. I wrote a paper about that and submitted it for publication. A factor of 1,000 discrepancy between the needed mass budget and the mass reservoir of heavy elements in the population of stars responsible for this object.

Another thing about 3A atlas is we did some analysis of the 40, Hubble images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope. And when you remove the circular glow around the object, the comma around it, the circularly symmetric glow, you end up with three jets coming from the nucleus that are equally separated from each other by 120 degrees. A very nice symmetric system of jets. In addition to the anti-tail, again, it's opposite to what you find in comets. And so the question is, is that a network of thrusters? Why are they so symmetrically oriented relative to each other?

And then there was the nickel without iron. Before you move on, you say that for a technological object, a beam of particles might be used to block the solar wind from impacting the nucleus surface at a relative speed of 500 kilometers per second. Are you saying that this thing could be some hybrid thing where it's technology, but it's also embedded within a natural? occurring nucleus? Well, it could be, I just don't, I don't have a good explanation for the, for all these anomalies that I listed, 22 of them, including the antitail, you know, it must be really associated with relatively big particles that are not feeling the drag on the solar wind or

they're not pushed back by the solar radiation. And then you have the system of three jets and the rotation axis of this object is also pointed roughly at the sun, an unusual geometric coincidence. There are lots of unusual coincidences. At the end of the day, you might say that all of them are just chance coincidences. It may well be the case, but it makes it quite a unique object. And I don't think anytime soon, if these are just natural coincidences, we shouldn't expect to be so lucky with a giant object that, you know, by the way,

it's much more massive than Oumuua, the first interstellar object, you know, by a factor of a hundred thousand. So just think about it. You have an object that is a hundred thousand times more massive as your third object after the first object was tiny. Why didn't we see a hundred thousand objects the mass of Oumuua, you know, before we see one that is as massive as the three eye atlas? That's another interesting question. There must have been many more, small ones, than a big one based on our experience with the solar system. So the other anomalies that, you know, is kind of curious to me is that people are often, you know, kind of confused

what this object might look like if they could, quote, see it. And I guess the first thing is, you know, what was the kind of maximum visibility that it had? And what would, if anything, have made it look strange, you know, that a layperson might recognize if they look at it through a telescope, for example. Yeah. So we couldn't resolve the new.

of the object. All we could resolve is the glow of gas and dust around it, which includes the jets and includes the coma, the plume of gas surrounding it. By the way, we detected also in the plume of gas, we detected organic molecules, which was quite fascinating. And the methane that was detected. I mean, many of them are biosignatures, but methane was detected only after the passage closes to the sun, which was surprising because the volatility of methane, CH4, is in between the volatility of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. And we saw both CO2 and CO early on and then methane somehow appeared only late. And my fundamental question is, is this evidence for life on this object?

Is it possible that it carries any microbes? And the methane is the product produced by those. You know, there is definitely nutrients for life on this object. And the question is, you know, is it just a dead iceberg or there is something else there? Altogether, we haven't gotten an image of the central nucleus. The best highest resolution image was obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope. There were 40 images released between November 30th and the middle of February from the Hubble Space Telescope. And by analyzing those images, we could get a sense for the brightness profile of the coma and the nucleus.

But there was only an indirect constraint on the nucleus. We could never observe it, resolve it. And you may ask, how can we do better in the future? Well, two ways. One is to design an intercept mission, which would be within the budget of space agencies like NASA and ISA. Issa has a comet interceptor, but it just cannot maneuver by more than two kilometers per second. So an intercept mission, just like Juno could have intercepted 3i Atlas if it had all the fuel that it started from. So if you have an advanced warning, let's say six months ahead of time, you can bring a spacecraft to the path of an object like 3A Atlas.

And then coming close to it, the cameras on this interceptor could take a close-up photograph or even land on it and bring some attention. materials back to Earth so we can examine the building blocks of life, whether they exist on an object that came into the solar system after billions of years traveling through space, you know, from another star. That would be amazing. Even if it's a natural object, it's a completely new pathway for astrobiology. Nobody talks about it. I mean, the astrobiologists are focused on looking for microbes through the habitable world observatory, remote observing of the chemical fingerprints of microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets. But here is another way of learning about the building blocks of life near other stars, and that is by bringing materials from

interstellar objects that took all this time to arrive to our backyard. We should take advantage of that. And Free Eye Atlas was one of the best opportunities for that because it came in the plane of the planets around the sun. It passed very close to many of our space probes, and we could have used that opportunity to bring something from it to earth. We haven't done so. Yeah. No, I want to get back to the anti-tail because, you know, for experts out there, you know, this was one of the most difficult things for them to explain. Even Jason Wright, you're, you know, number one detractor, you know, at some level. Even he said, you know, oh, there's not 10 anomalies. You know, there's only four anomaly, you know, but that was sort of one of them. It's like, well, we don't know. And fine. Okay, so we don't know.

so it's bad when Avi says we don't know stuff. But anyway, so let's talk about this. There's a 400,000 kilometer long sunward, you know, tail, anti-tail with no known commentary analog. So what, you know, in the six months since, you know, or sorry, a year since we've been talking about this object, you know, what have the boffins, the nerds that are experts? You know, you're not an expert according to like Jason, right?

Well, no, I published a peer-reviewed paper on the physics, physical model of this antitail. What could it be? What maintains this antitail? I submitted a second paper on this as well, so it's now being referred. But I should say the first paper that we submitted was submitted to the astrophysical journal letters.

And the editor that was assigned to it, she said, this paper is not of interest to the astrophysics community at large. Okay, I said, well, maybe that's the case. So we submitted it to a different journal, monthly notices of the Royal Astronomica Society. It was accepted immediately there.

Immediately. Okay, not much. Okay, then I sent a second paper about data regarding three-a-atlas that we collected with an observer, Tony Scarmato, that indicated the rotation of the object every seven hours, submitted it to the astrophysical journal letters, got the same editor, she sent the same message. This paper is not of interest to the astrophysics community in general.

therefore I will not send it to referees. So we had to send it to another journal. Then I sent a third paper where we, together with my postdoc, discovered an interstellar meteor in the latest data from the NASA JPL catalog of fireballs. And it was very clear evidence that many standard deviations had nothing to do with the 3A Atlas had to do with an interstellar meteor. And then the same editor was assigned

All of this within a three-month period. I write papers all the time about different subjects. I send it because I thought it's significant because there aren't many interstellar meteors that we know about. And the response from the same editor was, this paper is not of interest to the general community of astrophysic. At which point I said, that makes no sense. That makes...

So I contacted the chief editor. And when I didn't get a response, I basically wrote an essay just about that. And now the entire world knows the name of that editor. And many people told me that they will stop submitting papers to a journal in which she serves as an associate editor because of the way she responded with a prejudice. Because within the practice that I have encountered before of that journal, my papers were always sent to a referee. Now, the referee may say, this is, you know, I have some objections, scientific objections, that's completely legitimate. But for the editor to block the peer review process and so that later they can say this paper was not peer reviewed and not published so that they can argue that it may not be.

That is completely inappropriate. And I call it academic harassment in the sense that the editor is imposing an opinion and not letting the community at large review a scientific proposal. And if it had been blind, you know, submission and blind, you know, perhaps then it would have been obviously accepted, at least moved on to refereeing. You know, suppose I was an editor in that capacity. And by the way, the power structure is such that the editor has all the power. I have no way to respond to an editor saying this should not be submitted for refereeing, for a peer review. I have no way to object to that because no scientific claim was made by the editor.

But it's basically academic harassment. But if I were an editor that's, if I were to think that a paper should not be published, what I would do is I would immediately identify a reviewer, who I know will say that this paper should not be published, and send it to that a reviewer, and then get the response that it should not be published, and then I'm covered.

You know, it doesn't show any bias on my behalf. But doing it three times in a row, in three months to the same author in different combinations in different contexts is what I call academic harassment. So completely inappropriate. And this is just to show a phenomenon that must be quite problematic to young scholars. The reason I'm able to fight this is because, you know, I'm sufficiently senior. I don't care about this editor.

I've never met that editor, never had an exchange with that. That editor has a bias. Imagine a young person that tries to deviate from the beaten past. some scientists that gets attacked in the same way. How would they be able to establish a career? I mean, they have no way of fighting the fight. And in fact, I heard from a lot of young postdoc students that had very similar experiences. So the anti-tail, what is the going theory now about what it could cause it?

Yeah. So what we proposed in the first paper was that the anti-tale, is made of large chunks of perhaps ice, so that these large chunks are not being, you know, they have a small cross-sectional area per unit mass because they're big. And so they don't get much of a pushback from the solar wind or the solar radiation and they don't turn around. And so that's why you get such a jet in the direction of the sun. If you imagine a technological origin for this antitail, you might say, well, the solar wind, you know, especially flares and all the coronal mass ejections, they could cause damage to electronic devices passing close to the sun.

So one way to protect them is to basically deflect the solar wind with a jet of particles. Okay. And so that could be a way of defending your electronics or whatever technology one is using from any damage created by the outflow from the star that you're passing next to. So that could be another possibility. I also did some calculations about if it was made of dust particles, how big they should be. And they should be bigger than 10 microns. And once you make them much bigger than 10 microns, if you make them a millimeter in size, you start getting into a regime where there is too much mass coming out of the object.

that you can't accommodate, that the mass loss rate is so big that the object would disappear with the necessary mass loss rate given the size of the antitails. So, yeah, it could be either particles in the 10 microns, 10 to 100 micron range, like very large dust particles,

or it could be a beam of particles that is artificially created. How massive is this thing compared to other comments? It's roughly a kilometer in radius, so it's pretty big compared to Omoa Muo that was at least 10 times smaller in radius, and then it was another factor of 10 smaller in width, you know, because it had a very extreme shape. Borisov, the second interstellar object, was a few times smaller.

So it's a pretty big thing. the biggest interstellar object that we have seen. And that raises the question of why do we see such a big thing? Or maybe we are mistaken and the object is actually smaller. I actually was on a paper this week just a few days ago that tried to estimate the size and the mass of the object based on the measured non-gravitation acceleration that it has and the mass loss rate. So when an object loses mass, you get the rocket effect if the mass is flowing in a preferred direction. just like a rocket. And so from the amount of mass being lost

that we can measure based on the plume of gas and dust around it, we can estimate how much momentum is given to the nucleus because we can also calculate the speed by which this mass is lost for a natural process, sublimation process. And so from that, if we detect the acceleration of the object, we can tell how massive it is,

because if it's very massive, it will not be accelerating much, as a result of this calculated force. If it's low mass, it will be accelerated a lot. And so we calculated the mass and the size of the object just based on the rocket effect. There are some uncertainties in this estimate, but it gives at least the size of a radius of 400 meters or so,

and perhaps more than a kilometer comparable to the estimate from the brightness profile from the Hubble Space Telescope. So you also mentioned this other object, which I hadn't heard about. Comet-26 maps might have some relationship to this object. Can you talk about the possible connection of it between this Maps object and the 3-I Atlas? Yeah, it's not likely to be connected because, I mean, the only reason to think about it is because it was only discovered in January. And you might ask, why was it discovered only in January? It's passing so, it's actually a sun grazing comet.

It's a comet that comes extremely close to the sun within a few times the radius of the sun. That's amazing. And then the question is, I mean, within a week from now, it should become very bright because it should get ablated. But that's one way of figuring out the nature of comets. If they come, if they are grazing the sun, it's like putting someone who's, nature is unclear under interrogation, you increase the pressure on the subject that you're studying. And in this case, it's the sunlight that basically evaporating any solid material, you know, including if it was made of even metal, it would have melted when it comes so close to the sun,

because the temperature there is thousands of degrees at the surface. And so we would see what this object is, how quickly it breaks up. But the fact that this object was only discovered in January raised the question of whether it's related to three, maybe it's a fragment that was peeled off three-eye Atlas, but unfortunately it has nothing to do with it because the inclination is very different. Also the size, the estimated size of this particular comet, the sun grazing comet, is comparable to that of the nucleus of three-i-atlas. So it's, we would have seen it long ago as power.

of three atlas and also you know the trajectory is very different so the the orbital planes of the two objects are different by 30 degrees that's the difference in inclination you expect in the future with reuben and other instruments we'll see you know binary comets interstellar binary comets like that definitely well it depends if they exist but we should see dozens of new interstellar objects and by the way my recommendation is that whoever is going on dates don't remember the first person that you meet on a date because you just don't have a good enough sample to decide how exceptional that person is, right? And so the lesson in the context of interstellar objects is we had only three discovered by telescopes, but now the Rubin

Observatory will increase the sample to perhaps several dozens over the next decade. And that will allow us to figure out how unusual is, for example, or more or three-eye atlas, do they really belong to populations of a lot of other objects similar to them? So just to give an example, the most detailed paper that analyzed the Hubble Space Telescope data concluded that we missed a lot of three-eye atlas-like objects because of the large abundance that they conclude in order for us to detect it. There should be a lot of those. And we missed many of them because they are much brighter than Omuamua-Mua was. And so we should have seen them and we didn't. So maybe the Rubin of Zed or you'll find many more.

And then also Muamua, we should have seen 100,000 of those small ones for every big ones. Where are these? And I'm really curious to know if there are populations of objects that contain many of them that look just like Omuamua or like 3i Atlas. And we just don't know because the sample is not big enough. And if we don't find them, that would make both of these objects quite anomalous. If we never see an object like Omuamoa or Ther Atlas, we would start asking, you know, why were we lucky to see them in the first place?

Yeah, and it's not every day we get dating advice from two astrophysic. I tell young ladies when I, you know, when I counsel them, and I, you know, giving advice to some woman who asked me for, you know, how do you meet, you know, how can I meet the perfect man? And I say, it's impossible. My wife got the last one. Okay, Avi. No, no, wait, wait.

I have another dating advice, which I think is quite important. And that is when you go on a date, aim high. Don't aim low. There are many more, you know, mediocre dating partners than exceptional ones. And you need to aim high. It's very easy to find a mediocre dating partner. Okay, now how is that related? Well, you know, most of the astronomy community

is invested in searching for microbes. In the astrobiology community, that was the first priority of the Decadell Survey to work on the Habitable World Observatory. All of that is in seeking evidence for microbes. And, you know, I am saying, let's search for something more intelligent than we are, not aim low and look for the most common thing. Now, you might say it's easier to find the most common thing.

Well, it's much more abundant, that's for sure, but it's not necessarily easier because, you know, if we happen to have a technological gadget flying through the inner solar system, the evidence might be easy to identify. So it's all a question of how easy it is to detect oxygen, methane, other gases, that are indicative of life on exoplanets and make sure that these gases are not made by geological processes compared to detecting or taking a high-resolution image of an interstellar object that will demonstrate buttons on the surface

and that is not a rock for sure. Well, yeah, I want to turn to things that could or could not be rocks here. We have an image of some debris, but perhaps something more mysterious. So on screen now, if you're watching on the YouTube channel or on Spotify. By the way, we are going to get questions from the audience in a little bit coming up soon. But there's a strange looking object. It sort of looks like a truncated cone.

And it's an image from the masked camera aboard NASA's Curiosity rover that's actually, you know, almost four years old, three and a half years old now. Right. It was taken in 2022. So they found this mysterious object. It looks like a cylinder or fragment of a cylinder. what is, as a scientist, what was your first reaction to seeing it? Technology.

I couldn't believe it. Yeah, it's hard to resist the call that it could be technology, but it could be natural. So what do you make of it? No, I think it's definitely technological, because if you look at it, it's very distinct relative to the background, a regolith or rocks near it. It's about 20 centimeters in length, and it's buried partly within the regolith, so it's not like it's sitting on top of it. And the question is whether it came off curiosity, the rover or something else that flew above this region.

And the point is it was not noticed by NASA. It was noticed by some amateur. And then when you go back to the data set collected by the cameras on board the curiosity, you find the views of it from different angles. So it's suddenly out there. And my point is, you know, this right now, curiosity is about eight kilometers away from this object. I think we should go back. I mean, at the highest speed of curiosity, it would take two days to return to that location.

But of course, there is topography to cope with. So maybe it will take, I don't know, two weeks. I think it's worth going back and checking what this object is. Because if it's not human-made, it's very curious. And after all, you know, this rover is called curiosity. And I think it's ironic that the operators of the rover are not as curious as they're supposed to be. And NASA didn't make any statement about this. They basically are completely silent, which is really strange.

I mean, what's the goal of doing sciences, if not attending, to anomalies, to things that are really strange-looking? we should figure them out. I mean, I don't know how much, how many exciting tasks they have for curiosity to accomplish in the coming weeks. But then compared to this one, I, you know, I would put this one as the highest priority. When I pointed this out based on the discovery by other people, you know, by the amateur,

it became viral within the public. I mean, a lot of people agree that this should be looked into. Oh, definitely is a fascinating object. And yeah, you have to look at their prioritization. What else is good use for the rover, which has, you know, the capability to go view it. But for me, it brought up an interesting, you know, kind of paradigm that I've been thinking about for a long time, which is that it's almost certain there's life on Mars. It's just the question of whether or not it's from Earth, right?

Because, you know, I have here this meteorite I keep promising I'm going to give to you when we meet again. But this is from the moon. You won't get this at my website, Brian Keating.com slash YT. But you will potentially get one of these. We'll definitely get one of these metal iron meteorites. If you have a dot edu email address, Briankeeting.com slash edu and you live in the U.S.

But others I do give out on occasion. But this is from the moon. I do have a piece of Mars, which is similar to the one I gave to Joel Rogan, as I joke. You know, he hasn't sent me a thank you note for it. But, you know, it might have been smoked. I can't.

He might have grounded up. done so anyway but this object came from the moon but i have martian meteorites as well not collected by rovers collected you know delivered by gravity and that's because the earth and mars exchanged material at the rate of many many tons per year so there's likely a time in the earth's history where the earth was wet and moist and full of life and mars was wet at least and and could have and warm and enough to support life so the fact that we don't observe you know martian life now can we use that to set a prior on the, you know, facundity and the fertility of rocky planets,

or is it really kind of, you know, too difficult to implore a Bayesian framework in that way? Based on what we see on the surface of Mars, there is no doubt that there were lakes, rivers, oceans of liquid water, just like on Earth on early Mars. And in fact, Mars cooled before the Earth because it's a smaller body,

the cooling is proportional to the surface area, the amount of heat that is stored in a planet, the planet scales as the volume. And a smaller body has a larger area per unit volume of the object. So that means that it cooled earlier. And if it was as fertile as the Earth, it might have developed life before Earth. And the two planets exchange rocks.

We know that for sure during that early time, because they were bombarded by asteroids. And it's possible that life started on Mars delivered to Earth. That's more likely than the other way around, I would say. And in which case we are all Martians. And when we think about going back to Mars, you know, it's like going back to our childhood home, you know, in a way. It became a desert about two and a half billion years ago when it lost its atmosphere.

So that's a separate matter because, I mean, it's a smaller object and the magnetic fields were not strong enough. And it lost its atmosphere, became a desert. But the possibility that there was life on it is very high. and in fact it may have been delivered to Earth. It might have been the same form of life. There is a whole debate about the results from the Viking spacecraft that visited Mars, collected some material. For example, I was just corresponding this morning with Steve Benner.

Stephen Benner argues that the Viking results indicate that there is life actually in the soil. And we just didn't do the right experiments, the right interpretation of the Viking experiment. And in principle, if you drop a drop of water, let's say, on the Martian soil, it would be very interesting to examine the gases that come out. Unfortunately, NASA never followed on Viking. They became very risk-averse. They didn't want to get into controversies. They sent rovers but didn't do the elementary experiments that would indicate if there is life in the soil that could be revived. And then, you know, in principle it could be there.

And the whole story of transfer of life, you know, pan-spermia, this week there was a new paper that was published saying that there was an experimental team that took some extremophiles, some micro-organisms and put them under very extreme pressure up to about. of other two gigapascals about them, you know, 10,000 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth. And they realize that they can survive. So that means that during a meteor, an asteroid impact on the surface of a planet where you get a very high pressure, a blast wave that basically chips off some surface rocks, microbes could survive.

And then there is one rock that was brought to that landed on Earth and was analyzed about 46 years ago. And it was found not to be heated. It was never heated above 40 degrees Celsius. Any microbes, any tiny astronauts in the core of this rock would have survived because it was never heated when it was chipped off the surface of Mars all the way until it landed on the surface of Earth, never heated more than 40 degrees Celsius. And so definitely the transfer of life is possible between Mars and Earth and also in other planetary systems that are densely packed like Trapist 1. It has seven planets that are close to each other. We don't know if there is life there, but if there wasn't one of them, it could have been, that planet could have infected or spread life to others. All of these are natural processes, by the way, the panpspermia, but there is also a possibility of directed panpspermia where intentionally, deliberately,

There is an interstellar gardener that decides to spread the life throughout the Milky Way galaxy, and that could be far more effective. In the context of rocks, we think about just like the dandelion seeds are being spread by the wind, and they sometimes land on fertile ground, and then they produce more dandelion seeds. But in the case of deliberate process, you can spread life far more effectively. We can do that, by the way, if we were to plant microbes in the belly of Three-A Atlas. We could have intercepted Three-A Atlas and dropped some microbes in it so that when it comes close to another star, they might spread and perhaps land on another planet far away. So speaking of Mars and the Martian, this week, the movie Project Hail Mary came out, and it is a delightful story.

I've not watched it yet, but it's from the author. of the book, The Martian. He's actually, like Mark Zuckerberg, he went to UCSD, but he didn't graduate. So, yeah, it's kind of a... Maybe it's a good thing, because otherwise we won't hear about him if you were an academic. But I'm planning to see tomorrow. Yeah, so... You never know.

Life, things that you regard as unfortunate events during your life may be actually a blessing because they direct you, yeah, in an original path. So, you know, moving on from The Martian is a blockbuster movie to I'm just showing in the background, a video interview I did with Andy Weir a couple of years ago when the book first came out. What about the scenario? I mean, it's not a spoiler to say, you know, it's about aliens and the possibility of alien microbial life that attacks the sun. What do you make of this scenario that he's outlined? Well, there could be an impact. I mean, just like the pandemic that we went through, you can.

imagine alien microbes approaching Earth, that could be a real serious issue. And that's why I would never shake the hand of an alien. If we have a visit and they happen to land in my backyard, I would never shake their hand. I don't, you know, I'm worried that they might bring disease. You know, it's just like the visit of South America by Europeans. And the biggest weapon that was used was the spreading of disease. which was pretty bad. So I would be quite worried about that.

There is also the possibility of mirror life, which is quite harmful to our bodies, that if you have a, you know, all of life on Earth has a particular helicity. The molecules are oriented in a particular way. And you could have an identical chemistry if you had the reverse orientation of those molecules, an opposite helicity.

And so if there is, a visit by life with the opposite chirality, I should say, then it could be quite dangerous to us because our body would not detect viruses or microbes that are of the opposite chirality. So we should be careful. So definitely there could be a risk to life on earth from visitors. I'm not sure about the sun because the sun will simply burn up any life form. So I don't know about the storyline there, but I would be less worried about the sun. Yeah, exactly.

So moving back to terrestrial news, you published something I thought was quite clever about the state of the union. But instead of the union, you change it to the state of the universe. What is the state of the universe right now? So first I should say that in all the textbooks about the universe, cosmology, and some of which I wrote, We think about the universe as a cold and lonely place made of matter and radiation. And we describe the dynamics of matter and radiation using the equations, Albert Einstein's equations, and then hydrodynamics and so forth. And this perspective that we have about the universe would change dramatically if we realize

that there are intelligent beings out there because then we will have an emotional connection to the universe. the universe, if they visit our backyard, we might want to visit their backyard. It will make the entire description of the universe quite different because intelligence allows for new, I mean, we often talk about free will, it allows for new realities in the future that do not resemble in any calculable way the past. The whole point about intelligence is that it involves such a complex set of considerations You can't just plug it, plug the initial conditions and end up with knowing the final what will happen. And that's why we have this idea of free will where we are responsible for

what will happen in the future. It's not like you can attribute everything to the initial conditions, put it into a computer and figure out the final outcome. So if we find intelligence out there, the perception of the universe would look different. You know, in principle, all the siblings in our family of intelligence civilizations can use, unite and decide for a brave new world where we would do something, some cosmic engineering. I corresponded about that about a decade and a half ago with Freeman Dyson about cosmic engineering. You know, what can we contemplate doing in collaboration with other civilizations? For example, coming together so that we don't get separated from each other by the cosmic expansion, you know, things like that.

But the state of the universe without knowing about the intelligent beings is pretty much depressing, I would say, because we see the universe at large expanding and not only that, but accelerating its expansion. So once the universe gets older by a factor of 10, according to the standard cosmological model, all the galaxies that we see, all the sources of light beyond our own galaxy, will move away from us faster than light. And that means that, you know, we won't know what the whereabouts of anything except for our own galaxies. Our galaxy will be surrounded by vacuum and there will be darkness outside, except for the stars that get ejected from the hypervelocity stars getting injected from the Milky Way. There will be the only tracers of what happens outside the galaxy.

And other than that, we'll have our own galaxy. And it's pretty depressing if you think about it, unless there would be some, you know, deosax machina, some unexpected behavior of the constituents of the universe. So right now, you know, the most popular idea is that we have a cosmological constant. If it's indeed constant, the acceleration will continue forever. And by the way, the most common stars are dwarf stars, about a tenth of the mass of the the sun and they could outlive the sun by a factor of a thousand. They can live up to, of all the 10 trillion years and the sun will die within 7.6 billion years.

And you may ask yourself, how come we exist near a star like the sun when the most common stars are smaller and they live longer? Why, I mean, the most likely situation is for us to exist next to a dwarf star in the future. There is much more time in the future. There are many more stars like dwarf star. How come we exist near the sun today? And one possible answer is because dwarf stars are faint. And so the habitable zone, the region where life can exist around them, is closer in.

And if you put a planet there, and in fact, we know of a planet near the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, has a rocky planet in the habitable zone, but it's 20 times closer than the Earth's sun separation. And that location, the planet is vulnerable to eruptions from the star to flares to the stellar wind. And it's possible that the atmosphere of rocky planets in the habitable zone around dwarf stars, the atmosphere gets ripped apart. It gets stripped. And so life cannot exist because the situation would be similar to Mars that we talked about before. If a planet loses the atmosphere, there could be no liquid water on the surface and becomes a desert. So it's possible that all the habitable planets around dwarf stars are basically like Mars.

They lost their atmosphere and therefore they have no liquid water on the surface, no life on them. And that's why we find ourselves next to a star that is not typical like the sun, where we can be far enough from the star to maintain the atmosphere of the Earth. The Earth is a big enough planet to keep its atmosphere. So it's a very interesting question. There would still be nuclear furnaces, stars, in existence up to 10 trillion years from now. Even when the universe gets dark and lonely,

we could still live there, our descendants would still be around near those campfires, these dwarf stars. But we might do some cosmic engineering, you know, to make our life and not just rely on those nuclear furnaces, you know, that nature gave us right now, we rely on the sun. But in the future, we might build a space platform, platform that has its own nuclear reactor. It doesn't rely on, you know, fusion in the sun.

And because the sun will eventually die, you know, and everything dies in the universe. It's really, I once went to an optometrist office and she was, the receptionist was complaining that things change too fast with the computer system. And I said, everything will change. The sun will die one day. And she said, really? Are you sure about that? And I said, of course I'm sure because, you know, how do you know that we will die, that you and I will die? It's because we go to a graveyard and you see, you know, whatever remains from people that existed before us.

They died. And the graveyard of the Milky Way galaxy is full of corpses of sun-like stars that died by now. These are called white dwarves. You can see them. There are billions of white dwarves that represent st. like the sun that died by now. So we know that the sun will die. And she said, oh, that's too bad.

It's against my religion. And I said, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we know it for sure. And so, you know, everything good lasts for a while, but then goes away. And we should make plans. If we want our civilization to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy,

we want to live the Earth. And not by going to Mars, you know, that vision that Elon Musk had, I don't think that's the right approach because it's a rock that is less hospitable for life. It doesn't have an atmosphere. It's a desert, bombarded by cosmic rays. Why would we go to a worse place from a place like Earth? The best way for us to live Earth would be to produce something like NOAAX arc. I call it NOAC spaceship where we build a platform, the size of a city that can accommodate humans, produces artificial gravity, And, you know, if we can do that, maybe another civilization did that.

And if we find those spacecraft, it will inspire us to do it. Well, you speculate in one of your articles on Medium that an AI system might detect alien signatures and that maybe alien intelligence itself could be artificial. So, you know, if we find something, how do we tell the difference between a biological artifact or from a biologically active civilization or an autonomous AI probe? How could we distinguish that? Could Galeo probe project distinguish it? Oh, yeah, that's an excellent question.

So it really depends on how long the journey was as to whether we will encounter biological or technological objects. I mean, I think most likely it will be artificial intelligence that is guiding whatever gadget comes close because the benefit of that is that it doesn't get bored. you know, the AI system can stay around. You can make it sufficiently robust so that it doesn't need to get any guidance from the senders

because the time it takes a signal to cross the gap between the sender and the craft is so large. And, you know, we are used to helicopter parenting, our rovers on Mars from the jet propulsion lab, Pasadena, but when you engage in interstellar travel, you don't have that luxury. And sort of like sending your kids out of home, you don't expect them to report back on every step. Perhaps they will send a message once in a while. But you need to have any such interstellar traveler needs to have its own brain to decide what to do under unexpected

circumstances. And I expect that to be artificial intelligence. I mean, we have exponential advances in our AI systems and just think what they may include within a century from now. So far we haven't launched to space an AI guided rover or spacecraft, but I think that's the future. And on the other hand, we might decide to use AI-assisted medicine to augment the human body such that it could survive very long journeys, you know, like millions or billions of years, and that could also be something that we encounter, some mixture of technological and biological organ. It also occurs to me, you know, feeding off of your previous comment about chirality and opposite-handedness and so forth.

But it might be that, you know, an AI wouldn't care about humans at all, and it might just care about our AIs, which will outnumber humans, you know, by the same ratio as microbes, outnumber humans pretty soon. I mean, talking less than 10 years. cares. So, you know, and if they did that, wouldn't it be much more efficient for an AI to talk to another AI? I mean, a computer could talk to another computer. I mean, we gave it these concepts and, you know, four loops and all sorts of structures and now we have AI models, LMs, neural networks. But they might have a much easier way of communicating that's at a meta level that we can't understand. Just like, you know, our dogs communicate in ways that we can't understand, right? But there are two requirements for that. One is the architecture of the two devices that are communicating need to be matched. They need to sort of connect in the way that they think. And the second is, of course, they need to have sensors that allow them to detect

whatever the other entity is transmitting. As of now, you know, the AI systems we use only has access to the Internet, It doesn't have sensors that communicate with another AI system the way the human brain does. I mean, we have ears, we have a mouth that you can speak. But in the future, maybe with robots, that will be possible. A robot connected to an AI agent could potentially serve as, you know, the analog of biological systems. And with respect to artificial intelligence, you know, we should think about it as alien intelligence. I mean, we often, you know, people discuss aligning AI systems to our guiding principles.

But to me, it sounds like trying to put lipstick on a pig in the sense that we're trying to make it resemble us, but it's really a very different entity because it's made of silicon chips and of flesh and blood. And if you ask me, what's the biggest danger in the future? I'm not so worried about job losses and things like that. I think the biggest risk from AI is that it will sabotage the human mind in the sense that it will make humans dumber. And I already see signs for that in students and postdocs that they interact with. Those that are addicted to AI agents, they are losing their edge. They are not as bright as I remember students and postdocs being a decade ago that didn't have these tools. It's sort of like you have the ability to use public transportation and you're not using your muscles.

to walk anymore. Or you're using, I mean, how often do you not use GPS in your car? How many phone numbers do you have memorized right now? Yeah, right. Now, in the context of doing science, you know, there is now a new AI agent that can write papers for you, just have to guide it and it will do all the work for you. And I know of a number of people who are using AI quite routinely, and they say that it's doing much better than their students or postdoc.

And in fact, one of them said that it's performing better, you know, it's performing 90% of the task that this distinguished researcher performed throughout his career. And so that is a remarkable milestone. I think in recent weeks, AI systems are really making a difference. And I can tell you that a few weeks ago, this meteor that I mentioned that we discovered with my postdoc, it took us 10 minutes to do the analysis asking an AI agent to help us, Whereas when I asked an undergraduate student six years ago to do the same, it took a week. And so it's definitely an amazing tool now in making science progress faster.

But we have to be careful. For example, you can't test students in the class. The question is, what is the purpose of education? So education will not be about the transfer of information anymore because you can get the information from AI. It will be more about teaching students how to think. if you want to test them, you have to put them in a Faraday cage because you don't want them to use AI or any other electronics to figure out the answers. And then you have to do it in person.

We use AI to see if they're using AI and it becomes accounting. I'm quite confident. Massad agents in every classroom. I'm quite confident that the substantial fraction of papers being written right now, maybe even more than 10% are being written by AI. and some of them are faking either the results or the calculations. And I'm not sure that the editors of journals are able to catch those. And, you know, I had the experience of seeing a paper written by some postdoc in Europe.

And I thought, who is this postdoc? How come he knows so much about asteroids? And then I looked at the other papers of this postdoc on the archive, the astrophysics preprint server. and I saw that he wrote a paper about, you know, the early universe, what happened around the Big Bang inflation. He wrote about a large range of topics. And I thought to myself, how come he's so broad? He's just a poster.

And then I realized that none of these papers were submitted for publication. These are all papers written by AI, presumably, to beef up his curriculum vita, his CV. And, you know, we have to be really careful about assessing the statements being made in scientific papers. I think AI poses a huge risk to science in terms of misinformation. And then, you know, I experienced that personally when about four or six months ago, there was a website that imitated my voice and my image, and it was AI generated. And some people created a YouTube channel that provides misinformation

and of content that I do not approve of. And then I let it go because I wasn't sure how dangerous that is. This website got a million views within a week and they made money out of it, out of my name, basically. And I continued to let it go because I was busy with science until an old lady, 82 years old, who came to my office and said, my name is Abby Rockfeller. I'm the daughter of David Rockfeller.

And then, you know, I wanted to tell you that there was a video with you, with you in it that was very attractive. I really believed it. And I shared it with my friends until one of them told me that it was completely fake. And so I was very frustrated, she said. And as a result of that, I decided to establish my own YouTube channel. So once I get 100,000 subscribers, you know, I established it about two months ago. And I have already close to 30,000.

So once I get to 100,000, then I can basically ask the authorities at YouTube. to remove all the fake channels. But the bigger problem is that the public gets fooled and misinformation prevails. And how can you judge if something is real or not these days? That's the big question. And I'm actually doing right now today, just an hour ago, we asked the volunteers

to fill up a survey regarding fake versus true images and content. Because I think that is a very serious problem the future of science. So we'll put the link to your YouTube channel and the show notes down below for the podcast and whatnot. So the final question I want to ask involves AI as well. And if, you know, it occurs to me, you know, you've spoken a lot about biosignatures and maybe a little bit about skepticism of it.

We've talked obviously a lot about techno signatures involving, you know, possibilities of these interstellar objects being extraterrestrial technology. But it seems to me. that, you know, if we move to extraterrestrial artificial intelligence and transitions from biological to digital, then we might need to look and SETI at different, you know, kind of modalities. Perhaps, you know, what would an AI techno signature? What would an AI signature be? Would it be waste heat? Would it be, you know, some sort of computational, louder limit, you know, kind of violation? Or what would it be looking, looking, what should SETI be looking for? If you could, you know,

talk sense into some of your seti to track your yeah that's an excellent question because seti was founded 65 years ago by frank drake yeah uh searching for radio signals and frankly radio communication at the time was quite important on earth for us but it was by now it's regarded as in old technology that we don't use as much for communication and uh in fact future communication will probably be uh using lasers in the optical and so forth we we have optical fibers or already on Earth. And so the question is how the advance of technology changes the means of communication of extraterrestrial. And when you look for leakage of signals, what should you look for? And there could be other technological signatures that have nothing to do with

communication. For example, if a civilization resides on a planet like Earth and wants to bring cargoes to a planet like Mars, but they want to do it with light sails, meaning giant membranes that are being pushed by radiation. It turns out that if you want large cargoes that are many tons, you want to use radio waves for that. Okay. And then how would we detect that? Well, because the beam that is pushing the light sail may have some leakage around the light sail. But how would you know that it's related to a light sail? Because you would see that the two planets in conjunction, they would appear along your line of sight when you detect the signal, because that's the direction that the light sail is heading towards, from one planet to the other.

And it could be a different wavelength, but it would be very different from a communication signal, because you would get a burst of radiation this way. And I actually was involved in a paper with James Gwilichon back in 2015 that we wrote about this. But then later I was wondering together with my former postdoc, Manasvilingam, whether some of the fast radio bursts would be related to that. Turns out that if you want to bring a spaceship close to the speed of light, you could, you need to use roughly the amount of power that is impinging on the surface of the earth from the sun and then, and shine it on a light sail that carries a giant spacecraft.

And then this beam of light when it crosses our line of sight would appear as a fast radio burst. So, you know, there is a question of whether all fast radio bursts are related to magnetars, neutron stars, or something else. And then you could look also for artificial lights on the night side of a planet. You know, there is a company now that wants to illuminate the night side of Earth by putting mirrors in space. The Russians tried that 50 years ago. The Russians tried that to get more work efficiency out. I think I also had like a 10-day work week or maybe those are Chinese. Yeah.

So now there is a company that wants to do that with 50,000 mirrors that will be a big risk to astronomy. me because they will blind the observatories if they happen to shine on those. But the point is that if you imagine a very ambitious technological civilization that illuminates the night side of a planet, you can easily tell that as the planet moves around the star because you will not just get reflected light from the dayside. You might get some light from the night side of the planet. That's something that was never seeked, never searched for. You can look for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of planet, not just for oxygen or

methane the way that the astrobiologists are thinking about, just look for molecules produced by industrial origin. And we can obviously, we should look for packages in our mailbox, you know, objects that arrived into the inner solar system. These are all the methods that were not employed by the SETI community in the past. I have no issue with the fact that they focus on what they want to do, but then I have an issue with the fact that they ban discussions on some of these methods. in their conferences.

For example, they will not discuss any unidentified anomalous subjects in the conferences. If the U.S. Congress, if the U.S. government talks about it now, I think it should become a subject of discussion within the astronomy community, within the mainstream of SETI and within the mainstream of astronomy. There is no reason for us to ignore a subject that serious people are discussing, you know, former presidents, current president, Congress, Pentagon, on intelligence agencies, you know, when there are things that are not understood by serious people, scientists could come to the rescue and figure things out. And that's what makes life

fun, you know, making it a learning experience. I often said, and I said that I gave a physics colloquium and a public lecture just two days ago at Notre Dame University. And the opening sentence of my talks was the foundation of science is the humility to learn. It's not the arrogance of expertise. And what you find in academia very often is the arrogance of expertise, as if we should know in advance the answer and we should brag and show off that we are experts on something. But the point is nobody is an expert. We should have the humility to acknowledge that nature could be more imaginative than we are. And we have an opportunity to learn if we only open our minds, if we don't insist that everything in the sky is rocks, but we say we launch space probes. We

launch space technological objects to space. Therefore, someone else might have done that. We may not be at the top of the food chain. We should be open-minded to that possibility and increase our learning data set, you know, the training data set to include technological object. And only then we would know if they exist or not, but if we insist in advance on knowing the answer, we will maintain our ignorance forever. So, you know, the final question for you before I let you go is, you know, kind of reflecting on your career and how many wonderful conversations we've had over the past, you know, four, five, six years now and I've known you and looked up to you for a long time before that.

You know, you spent your whole career looking at theories, creating new theories, teaching people, writing books, writing textbooks, building instruments, leading groups, and making the case, you know, that at least should occupy a big sliver of our intellectual capital and our, you know, financial capital. Now the government is registering domain names, and we see objects are arriving, you know, faster than we can catalog them. The Rubin Observatory, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of interesting objects in the time domain and AI, as we said, just now. It's about to change what even detection could possibly mean. It seems to me like all these threads, which were so disparate for so long,

they're finally converging into a tapestry. And I'm wondering, you know, are we living, are we the last generation that's going to wonder if we're alone? And if so, are we ready for the answer that we might get? It's quite possible that the best is yet to come and it will come soon. And that would make my life worth living, you know, if it happens. I suddenly wish it on all of us to realize if we have neighbors to know that. And if we don't find it, you know, at least I made my contribution to allowing future generations to make that discovery.

You know, the biggest thrill I have is when parents come to me and say, my kid watched you on television, now they want to become a scientist. And the reason I'm thrilled about it is here is a chance for someone without a prejudice, without them. you know, being obsessed with their ego, making a discovery of an important truth that my generation of scientists didn't discover. And so I'm always an optimist because sometimes life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you allow yourself to imagine a partner better than you are, then you might find that partner. If you say, where is everybody? I don't see anyone around me. And frankly, I'm quite exceptional.

And therefore, I shouldn't hope for anything better because I'm at the top of the food chain, which is a narrative that many people in academia and elsewhere are using. And you say that it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something better than you are. Then, of course, it's a circular argument you may be left on your own forever because you will never search for that evidence. And, you know, I can only imagine being an alien and looking down at Earth and seeing what people are obsessed with. All these fights and conflicts that make very little sense in the cosmic scheme of things. You know, we put most of our money, most of our resources on fighting each other, impressing each other on this tiny rock that we were born on,

whereas most of the real estate is way out there. And most of the interesting stuff is way out there. We're not looking out there. We are playing in our sandbox and impressing each other. And that's ridiculous. That's pretty much ridiculous. So that's why, you know, I was asked actually by Natasha Zouves, the reporter from, she interviewed me for 90 minutes from News Nation. And she said, aren't you afraid that if we encounter extraterrestrious, they will be hostile.

You might die during the encounter. because she's fearful of that encounter. And I said, well, you know, I'm happy to encounter them, even if my life will get shortened, because it will be a thrilling experience. And I prefer to have a thrilling life, short life, than a long life that is completely dull, just watching News Nation report about all the nonsense

that is going on around the world right now. You know, what's the point of living a long life that is quite dull? That's right. Yeah, the lifespan, you know, should be matched by the curiosity span. And Avi, you're one of the most curious and imaginative, creative. And really just all around fun, you know, people don't realize that Avi is out there having fun. While you're criticizing him, while you're trying to take him down while you're making video, he's just having too much fun. And you can't win. You can't beat someone who's just having fun.

Because you're not out there to win Nobel Prizes and to sell billions of dollars of books. And we'll talk about your media in the future. I think you've got a lot of interesting stuff. By the way, just an hour ago, I had an interview with a German reporter. And he said, does it bother you that there is so much anti-Semitism in the US and people attack you? And sometimes, you know, some of the YouTube videos, especially by a guy who calls himself a professor and was never in an academic position. So he's lying about himself. But then he also uses some anti-Semitic narratives.

Doesn't it bother you? And I said, no, I prefer not to mud wrestle because that gets everyone dirty. I just ignore those people. And I pretty much hope that they have a therapist that will solve their psychological problems. I'm not here to solve their problems. I'm here to seek, you know, one reason I'm seeking higher intelligence in spaces because I don't often find it here on Earth. Well, I mean, this has been great. We'll catch up again soon.

Thank you very much for another fascinating set of anomalously entertaining ideas. And we'll get to more as the year goes on. Thank you, Avi. I'm going to stick around, just talk to a few people on the podcast. But you're free to go. Shabat Shabha loam to you. And I hope to be in touch soon. Thank you so much.

Bye, Avi. So that was a lot of fun. I just wanted to point out we are continuing to grow the podcast and grow the YouTube channel. It just keeps expanding. like the universe or my waistline. I can't tell which is going faster. But it's really a really a stunning series of interviews that are coming up. I just did one with Vivian Ming, who is one of the foremost experts, neuroscientist, was here at UC San Diego, but she has gone on to do great work in terms of making both yourselves and your children, especially into robot-proofing

them to make them immune to hopefully some of the threats to their careers and to our sanity and to our own well-being that AI presents. And she's a big proponent of AI and she's worked with Google and the CIA and Facebook and all the top organization. I'll come out in a couple weeks. But on Tuesday, I'm an interview with Michael Wong, who's a co-author of a book called Times Second Arrow, where he and his co-author, both geoscientists at the Carnegie Institution, that they claim they've discovered that the second law of thermodynamics is sort of wanting. In fact, that there must be a new law of thermodynamics. So we talked about that, but where that gets interesting is that we dovetail that in with the different arrows of time that we know to exist, including biological time arrows.

And we actually got into a very interesting discussion on planetary habitability and alien life support. And so that is not to be missed. is really a unique conversation with a very broadly, you know, kind of widely and broadly discursive mind and provocative, too, to conjecture that you have discovered a new law of physics is quite astounding. So you'll be the judge I push back with my requisite love and respect, but I think it's worth really digging into, and so that'll be out early next week.

And then after that, interviews with Matt Kaplan of The Economist magazine about his new book, I told you so, which is about scientists that were doubted and even perhaps driven mad and to the brink of, and in some cases, suicide due to their ideas, which were later proven to be correct, but not taken to heart in their own lifetime. So it's quite fascinating to witness. What does that have to say about science and adoption within the public sphere right now? I think it's a very timely book. And then lastly, in the next four weeks or so, We have a book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

She wrote Plato at the Googleplex and other books as well. And her new book is about what it means to be a human being, so mattering and meaning. And what's so surprising about that, to me, is it's a real physics book. She's known as a philosopher, but she actually studied physics at Princeton and took a class with John Archibald Wheeler, who talked a lot about a form of dark matter himself called Black Holes. In fact, he invented that term. And so she took classes with him and he deeply influenced her. And so it's turned from a philosophy interview to a physics interview.

So I hope that you guys will find that really fascinating and enjoyable too. I've got some really unique guests. I'm trying to not hit the podcast or kind of circuit you could tell. I haven't had on a lot of guests that I've had on many times. In the past, I'm trying to get some new perspectives, new ideas. Everyone's talking about AI from kind of jobs and agentic and open. claw and stuff like that. And I use that too. I'm using that on a daily basis for teaching, for research. I want to get into my upcoming paper, which was written by AI. I mean, I'm going to

list AI as my co-author. And it's not related to my main research in the cosmic microwave background. But what it is related to is fundamental symmetry. So one paper I wrote with AI and one of my undergraduate students has to do with, you know, how do we know AGI is here? My claim is that it has to involve predicting some new law of physics, or at least, at the very least, being able to re-derive laws of physics that we already know to be true, for example, general relativity. If chat GPT existed in 1911, could it have predicted the effects of gravitation curve space time purely from the data that existed back then? In other words, could it exactly mimic what a natural intelligence, what Einstein did by coupling his computing device to his, you know,

embodiment, his physical form was very important to him. He did have the famous elevator thought experiment, where if an elevator broke its cable, would an observer feel any gravitational force? And that led to the Einstein equivalence principle in 1907 to 1911, and then that became core part, and in fact, the biggest part of the general theory of relativity. So my conjecture is, no, until an AI can reproduce what Einstein did based purely on 1911 and before physics, and the challenge is getting data sets that are uncontaminated training data sets. So hard to get training data that's pure and unadulterated by physics we've learned since then because Einstein appears everywhere in movies and obviously all over the internet and that's what training

data sets are used to comprise training data sets. So I think it's a fascinating article. It turns out Demis Hasibis also conjectured a similar thing, 24 Nobel laureate for you know kind of knowing if super intelligence is here. And we started working on this back in 2023. So I did write a paper with AI and my undergraduate student and I'm, you know, full disclosure. It's going to be in the paper. We'll see if it gets accepted. But, you know, to obvious point, sometimes it's just important to submit certain things. As long as they're high quality, the data integrity is there. It's mentioned that AI is a collaborator because it does allow you to scale out. With my graduate students are naturally intelligent. And so, you know, whenever they collaborate on a paper, we list them as a

co-author. So I don't say anything wrong with doing that as long as it clearly listed. I do worry about the AI slop problem, so I'm going to be very judicious, only using AI for my non-CMB-related projects. In other words, my own projects that I can have control over, so to speak, I am the PI of the Simon's Observatory right now, but I don't want to use AI for issues investigating the cosmic microwave background because I do feel like we want to keep that, you know, kind of detailed in the data analysis process and our methodology, you know, completely consonant with what's come before because the stakes are so high for what we're doing with the C&B in the Simon's Observatory to claim potentially that we see or don't see,

you know, signatures of cosmic inflation when that data set comes out, hopefully in the next two years, maybe less. I want that to be completely done in accordance with best practices in the C&B field, which to date don't use AI for doing significant heavy lifting. And it might do some literature search. I mean, there are lay tech tools that work in that field. So my philosophy with AI is I'm using that for my own, you know, self-controlled, self-directed projects, maybe some more philosophical things like this AI Einstein test. And then for test of Lorentz invariance violation using an optical polarimeter that we built here in San Diego, and that will be hopefully to reveal the constraints, limits on cosmic birefringence and polarization rotation,

and also on the variability of the speed of light as a function of polarization. So these are all things which I am not an expert in all the details of optical polarimetry, but AI can really come to the forefront there and help out in the process of methods and procedures, not in generating data. Of course, we'll generate our own data. That's the whole fun of it. And so too with the Science Observatory,

taking two years of data as of this next week with the instrument and getting to add dig your hands into the data is what makes fun to be a scientist. I don't want to have AI trusted with that or give that the fun. But there's things like literature searches and things that we might have missed,

and actually AI has been helpful in terms of the business administration of the Simon's Observatory. You know, like are we getting, you know, having the best possible safety practices, you know, with visitors that come to visit the observatory? For example, you know, I haven't, you know, studied every single public observatory on Earth and how they get there at the South Pole. You're not allowed to touch any and visit any of the observatory. So how do we do that constant with best practices, you know, do things to, you know, do things to, you're not. encourage the participation of Chilean astronomers and Chilean public. They pay a lot of their taxes to support the observatory. I think that's a great use of AI.

How can we best, you know, kind of divide up, you know, the amount of battery storage we have for electricity versus on-demand solar power? Can we use it as an uninterruptible power source? Yeah, these are all great things that are not cosmological, but they are incredibly important to the functioning of an observatory. So I am using, we are using, you know, kind of tools to help us. us in that round, but we're segregating it, firewalling it off in many cases.

And where we don't, we reserve the right to use it, but we're going to be very transparent. I think that's the key. If our collaborators, colleagues, and other experiments, if they can be, use AI as a tool and reference it and cite it and prescribe what it can do and what it can't do, and also be completely open,

transparent and accountable, which very few experiments have been completely outsourcing, open sourcing the data, but we have a mandate to do that with the Simon's Observatory. So you'll be able to look at the data, even though it's a publicly, it's a privately funded instrument for the most part. You know, most of the funding came from the privately funded Simon's Foundation. You can see my interviews with Jim Simons,

who passed away two years ago almost exactly, and David Spurgel is the current president. And that's a big mission, making the science open source in public and available. And that costs a lot of money in time to do that. Oh, we're just going to leave you, here's all our data on a desk somewhere. It costs a tremendous amount.

the time and effort. And it does, quite frankly, mean that we're not spending every single second on doing the cutting-edge science that the observatory is meant to do, but we feel it's a trade that we're willing to make to make it available to the public. Because at all levels, the public does pay our salary and allows us to do what we do. So thank you for the support. There's many, many cool things coming down the pipeline for me, for my group, many, many cool, just unique interviews. Another one is with the Madna Stock. He was one of co-founders, if not the founder of Stability AI. And he turns out to be a deeply closeted mathematician.

I knew he had some math chops, but we talked about his book, The Last Economy, which is kind of a warning cry, creedicure, to get prepared for the coming AI tsunami. And that's more than the AI kind of warning. What's the value of human intellect when there's an infinite? number of Nobel level intellects that come out. But I think, uh, well, can't wait to see what comes next. So stay tuned. And, uh, there'll be more interviews, and especially with him and his theories on physics as well. So you won't want to miss that interview we did in person last week. So stay tuned. Lots of things to come. Thanks for watching into the impossible. See you next time.

All pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Bucks slot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino and San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary.

You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion.