Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - EXCLUSIVE: Avi Loeb Claims He May Have PROOF of Alien Technology (#342)

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Watch the video of our conversation https://youtu.be/nlrDky-fCtc?sub_confirmation=1 Once again, I had the pleasure of speaking to one of the world's most famous and perhaps most controversial astrophysicists – Avi Loeb! For those of you who don’t know him, Avi is a professor of science at Harvard University, theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, and cosmologist. He is also a bestselling author and a dear friend of mine. Avi just published Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars. In it, he explains why we need to become an interstellar species to ensure our survival and lays out a plan for how we can settle among the stars. As usual, we take some time to judge a book by its cover and discuss what went into the making of this book. We also dig into the recent Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean to retrieve spherules of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, led by Avi, and discuss whether they found evidence of alien technology! For your chance to win a real meteorite 💥 join my mailing list here 👉 http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 Interstellar (00:44) On extraordinary evidence (08:13) Does Avi have proof of alien life?! (13:55) On David Grusch and government obligations (28:01) Internet hate, constructive criticism, and the scientific method (42:01) More on Interstellar and what it means to become an interstellar species (1:10:56) Elon Musk’s plan to make humankind interplanetary (1:15:12) On space archaeology(1:21:08) Rapid fire audience questions (1:39:20) Outro (1:50:57) — Past episode with Avi Loeb on Youtube: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

well-be that are still sentient cosmic neighbor in the Milky Way galaxy chose to swipe us left while monitoring the daily news on the universal civilization scale dating app. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Welcome, Avi. How are you doing today? Doing great. Nice to see you again. It's great to have a friend on. It's great to have a brilliant author on. even if you are at Harvard, you know, we make exceptions for the most brilliant among us.

I've had a surfite of Harvard guests, but you're always one of my most popular. Thank you again. Well, fundamentally, I'm a farm boy, as you well know. And when I went to the expedition, I bought a private jet, and the pilot, as I entered the jet, said, welcome aboard, Professor Loeb. And I said, you don't need any titles here. Just call me Avi. And because fundamentally, I'm just a cure. farm boy. And I say that to you as well. Yes, I know. And there's a lot of a lot of things to discuss today. I'll just say I'm the first person in my family like you, probably, to go and get a PhD in advanced astrophysics. So, you know, when they say everything you need to know, you learned in kindergarten, it's not true. Today, we're talking about a phenomenal book that just came out as of

their release of this video. Let's see if I can get my high speed non-harvard grade cameras to focus. And called Interstellar. Avi, as you know, we have a theme in this very podcast where we do what is forbidden since the time of Gutenberg himself, and that is to judge books by their covers. So today I'm going to ask you to judge for us. What went into the making of this book? The title, the subtitle, and the beautiful cover art on this wonderful book. Well, the title is actually a very good hint as to the content of a scientific paper that summarized. the results from the expedition to retrieve fragments or spherals from the depth of the Pacific Ocean. And we can talk more about that.

But it relates also to anything that comes from outside the solar system. It's sort of like our cosmic street. And this is the key word that we have to keep in mind because only over the past decade, we were able to find such packages that came from outside of our home. and at our doorstep near earth. And amazingly enough, they do not look similar to the rocks that we had seen in our backyard. And therefore, they might have been sent to us by someone. We just have to figure it out.

And maybe we will find a postal address that indicates they came from outside the solar system. We can talk about that. In fact, as we are speaking, I'm writing that paper that I'm talking about. And I know the content, but I cannot reveal all the details. we can talk about that, but they relate to the postal address. And then the subtitle of this book has to do with the implications of finding that we have a neighbor in our cosmic environment to the future of humanity. And even the search itself, just like the search for a partner in life, can change you.

And I believe that it will be the biggest change in the history of humanity because it will make us, humble. Perhaps we will realize that we are all in the same boat. That's what I realized when I went to the Pacific Ocean with all the team members that worked selflessly for the success of the mission. And so my hope is that it will bring humanity to a better place. Instead of us fighting each other on this boat that we call Earth that is sailing through the ocean of space, we will realize that there is someone else out there, and therefore it makes sense for us to work together so that then we can explore space and visit whoever that is. Yeah.

This book has many wonderful illusions, and I've enjoyed all of your writing, including your technical writing, your papers, your textbook, astrobiology textbook, and many other of your writings. You're one of the most prolific authors I know. You're writing a book with your right hand as we speak right now. I understand. But I wanted to start with a reference that was made in this wonderful book to pop culture, which is, which was just so surprising to me. And it's not giving too much a way to say that this quote demonstrates that you are very much in tune with popular culture. And you say the following towards the end, you say, it may well be that are still sentient cosmic neighbor in the Milky Way galaxy. This is speaking of the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations or ETCs, as you call them. It may be that an ETCC, chose to swipe us left while monitoring the daily news on the universal civilization scale dating app. Avi, do you have a Tinder account?

Is there something we should know about that your beautiful wife will be shocked to learn about, or your daughters when they're searching on Tinder? I have two daughters. The answer is I have two daughters, yes. By the way, I always enjoy the latest of the day rather than, you know, I'm not so proud of the fact that we sent music from the 60s on the, on the golden record because I believe that nowadays we have much better music.

And I always get bored by watching old films. So to me, the edge of the frontiers in anything, including music or science, is always exciting and thrilling. And that's what we want to communicate. And so I use that also in my book. But more to the point, there are ways by which humanity can behave better. And one of them is, you know, right now we are allocating two trillion dollars a year to military budgets. And if we just listen to John Lennon, who said, imagine all the

people living in peace. And instead of relying on John Lennon, you know, I can imagine this message coming from outside, from a more intelligent species that is not wasting resources on fighting each other on a surface of a rock that they happen to be born on. So if we realize that it makes more sense for us to work together and avoid conflicts, then we will have a surplus of two trillion dollars a year that we can use to send a probe to every star in the Milky Way galaxy within this century. That's what I calculated. So it's actually, you know, if you ask what would bring us most prosperity, the first thing is that we will start working with. with each other rather than fighting each other.

And that includes not just fights between nations, but also within a nation. When I jog every morning and I do it at sunrise, I see signs in the yards of my neighbors. And they always say the same thing because they post them because they expect their neighbors to agree with them. But actually the actual challenge is to post a sign that you know your neighbors do not agree with. So I can imagine my neighbors going to another neighborhood and living there, and they would probably be very cautious at putting the same sign. And I say that's actually the foundation of a democracy, the foundation of, I would argue also the culture of universities,

the academic culture, where people should engage with those who do not agree with them rather than the other way. And we tend to segregate towards tribes, And that is also, of course, assisted by the media. People read the news that agree with their views, and the reporters are trying to tune the news to their liking. So it's more of a commercial product rather than a description of reality. And unfortunately, that brings us to a bad place where there is huge polarization.

A faction of society believes that they are not being attended to, a fraction outside academia, for example. And there is this tendency to argue that, academia is part of the elite. And I don't agree with that because I came from a farm, you know, and I believe that I'm no different than any other person. I'm just curious and I've been given the privilege of following my curiosity independently of what other people say. Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned that the street signs. I, too, live in a neighborhood just like you with a lot of Trump signs. So it's very unsurprising to me. No, I imagine these are

signs we believe in science, we stand with Ukraine, et cetera. So I always say, yeah, put a, I stand with Israel or put a sign up, you know, this is Trump country. You'll see how they agree with you in such a neighborhood as Cambridge or Boston. But you mentioned the Voyager Disc. And we have in the book a mention of Andruyan, who is quite spectacular. And she's actually been a guest on the show many years ago, along with her daughter, Sasha Sagan, they're both Carl Sagan's relatives, the late great Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan makes an appearance in this book as well many, many times. And I wanted to start there because when we see claimed often, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is attributed to Carl Sagan.

I don't know about you, Avi, but when I'm studying the cosmic microwave background or I'm looking for primordial magnetic fields and radio telescope data, I don't have like a special drawer. you know, that says extraordinary evidence, you know, pull here, there's just evidence. So, what do you make of that quote, which appears in this book? Is there such a thing as extraordinary evidence or is it just like when people say, it's logical sense? I mean, that's kind of redundant as I saw it. I do think that it's all about the evidence and the quality of the evidence, but when people make that statement, and by the way, Sagan advocated for it, unfortunately, they're not seeking the evidence. It's a circular argument. And my response is that extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.

And Carl Sagan was actually junior faculty in my department several decades before I arrived. He lived in my town in Massachusetts near Harvard. And, you know, I do appreciate the fact that he was a pioneer at his time that people did not believe in studying the kind of things that he was advocating for. But I just don't think that this argument brings us to a good place because you can argue also that dark matter is an extraordinary claim. We haven't seen it. But nevertheless, we invested billions of dollars trying to find what it is. We haven't witnessed it in the solar system.

We believe it exists because we see that gravity is much stronger than you can associate with matter that we can see. But it's also possible that gravity is modified. And for some reason, the mainstream of cosmologists fell to the notion that the dark matter is a set of particles. We haven't seen yet. And we invested, you know, the most popular was the lightest supersymmetric particle. We looked for supersymmetry with a large hardron collider at an investment of $10 billion. And guess what? We haven't found it.

Okay. So was that a waste of money? Was that an extraordinary claim that should not have? been attended to. No, we tried to find the evidence. We invested huge sums of money. We didn't find it. So if we are pursuing a theoretical idea because it looks compelling or because the implications are large, it's not because we already have evidence for it. It's because we find this intriguing and exciting. It's like a detective story. Try to figure it out. And there is nothing more exciting than trying to figure out if we are alone. Okay. And in that context, I would argue,

should invest billions of dollars in that search, rather than pushing it aside and saying, it's extraordinary to think that we have partners. I think it's the other way around. I think it's arrogant to think that we are alone and we should invest in the search. And, you know, if we were to invest billions of dollars for the next several decades, we would be, and not find anything in the worst case scenario, we would be at exactly the same point as dark matter searches are right now. So you can't on the one hand, say, say, oh, dark matter searches are part of the mainstream, while at the same time, say, searching for partners like us, because we know that we exist, is actually fringe signs. You can't say that.

Why? Because most of the public cares more about whether we have any cosmic neighbors. And if you are using taxpayers' money, actually, the right thing to do is invest more in the second question. And that's not the situation right now. And, you know, I feel that it's even worse than that, that in the mainstream of particle physics, of theoretical particle physics, you have people contemplating ideas that have no foundation in experiments. We don't know if there are extra dimensions. We don't know if string theory is the right direction at all. But yet we are engaged in it for four decades. And there is a whole community of people working on mathematical gymnastics.

And why is that legitimate? Why would you call that an ordinary claim that requires the attention of a thousand people in mathematical physics? It's not obvious at all that this is physics. And yet you have popularizes of science claiming that it's the frontier of physics. So I just see those circumstances as academia not being honest. And honesty is saying anything that is not a result of exercise. experimental data is a theoretical concept, and we can evaluate the significance of it by the implications that it will have if we find one thing or another. And, you know, using this metric,

I think that the search for partners, cosmic partners, should be our highest priority. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. So this is a statement about such just titanic revelations that could be possibly revealed by you and other team members. on the Galileo project that you founded in direct.

And it's a stunning headline. Harvard scientist, which is the way you're always described, says he may have proof of alien life in a new study. And he says, quote, we should welcome it. Professor Avi love said his full paper would likely be released in the next month. Avi, can you break this news now? Are you prepared to break this news or should my audience wait patiently for it? As you said, the public has a right to know.

It's their money. It's their data. Not in the case of this particular mission, because that's privately funded. But the notion stands, as you said exactly. People are more generally interested in the lightest partner in the universe than they are, an intelligent partner in the universe, than they are in the lightest supersymmetric particle in the periodic table of subatomic particles. Tell us, Avi, what can you say about this shocking claim?

So let me explain the context. I'm a theoretical astrophysicist, meaning I'm a person of ideas. yet I see that nobody is pursuing the subject that we talked about experimentally, which should be the way that science gains new knowledge. I mean, we can think of ideas, but most importantly, we should check whether they match reality. And so I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to find the relics of the first recognized interstellar meteor. So let me break it down.

A meteor is an object that collides with Earth and burns up in the atmosphere of Earth generating a fireball, similar to an atomic explosion if the size of this object is the size of a person roughly. The amount of energy released is roughly the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. And obviously the context of that can be seen in the latest movie Oppenheimer. But of course, there are many more objects smaller than that size and fewer objects larger. We know that an object the size of Manhattan Island collided with Earth 66 million years ago and basically decimated the most life forms, including the dinosaurs. So we want to know more about how many objects collide with Earth, but what happened almost a decade ago in 2014, the US government satellites, which are monitoring Earth for national

security threats such as ballistic missiles, notice the fireboard from a meteor of a an object roughly at least half a meter in size. The one unusual fact about this meteor was that it was moving very fast. And translating the measured velocity by the US government satellites to the velocity of the object relative to the sun, we realized, together with my undergraduate student at the time, Amir Siraj, after I asked him to go through the catalog and look at the fastest objects, we realized this object actually was moving faster than the escape speed, the speed necessary to escape from the solar system. So that means that it came from outside the solar

system. It was not bound gravitationally to the sun. And also we calculated that outside the solar system, it was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the local frame of the galaxy, the local standard of rest. And that's faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. And moreover, from the fireball data that was released by the U.S. government, a few years later, there was a letter from the U.S. Space Command to NASA saying, indeed, we confirmed this assertion that the object was interstellar at the 99.99% confidence. We calculated from the data on the fireball that it was tougher than all space rocks cataloged by NASA over the past decade, 272 of them. And the way we concluded that is because the stress exerted on the object by air was the highest before it disintegrated.

It was able to maintain its integrity to very high rum pressures. And that implies that it's made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites. So what is it? I mean, one obvious thought that came to my mind is that it could be a voyager-like meteor. Just imagine another civilization sending voyager like a... spacecraft and within some billions of years it collides with earth and it will appear as a meteor but of unusual material strength because it's made of stainless steel and unusual speed because it was propelled by a chemical rocket to start with so this led me to organize this expedition and it cost

one and a half million dollars which were donated by charles huskinson and we rented a ship ship that was fittingly called Silver Star, and we went there to the meteor site. The U.S. Department of Defense localized it within a seven-mile region. And within that region, we were able to even narrow down the path of the meteor to within another mile or so in terms of the width by a factor of 10, using data from a seismometer on Manus Island in Papua, in Pau, Guinea, which happened to be about 17. or 60 to 70 miles away from that location. So we went there and we designed a magnetic sled with basically a sled that weighs 200 kilograms,

has a width of roughly a meter, and we attached magnets on both sides. And we dragged it across lines of 10 kilometers in size or 7 miles in length. And we went back and forth. And the first, we wanted to collect, of course, magnetic particles from that meteor. And at first, we did not collect anything because the cable that connected the sled to the ship lifted it. And it was kiting. And so we managed to solve that problem. We had an exceptional team of really high-level professionals, the best in the world.

and they realized that going with the current of the ocean allows us to keep the sled on the floor. And then after the second day, we started collecting materials. Most of the materials were volcanic ash, black powder, but among them, we were able to filter out using a mesh. The tiny volcanic particles let them go, and we were left with bigger particles. And once we put them under a microscope,

we realized that we have some molten droplets from the surface of the meteor because they looked very distinct from the background. What's the confidence level in that now, Avi? I know that the trajectory is over five-nine's confidence level, but what's the confidence level that the actual spirals you have came from the meteor itself? Right. So the important thing is we went back and forth like 26 times. So we crisscrossed that region of seven miles in size.

And amazingly enough, we found a concentration of the spherals per amount of background that we collected from the ocean floor to be just along the meteor path. So we found twice as many spheres along the meteor path as we found everywhere else per amount of mass collected of magnetic ash, magnetic particles. And the fact that it coincided, I mean, we had control regions far away. We also had control regions around the meteor path. And the fact that the yield of spherals was doubled along the meteor path gave us an initial confidence that it is related. Okay.

But then, most importantly, we analyze the composition of these spherals. And I should say on the ship, we had an instrument to do that. an X-ray analyzer, which was blind to some elements, but it indicated that most of the material is iron. But when we came back, I mean, on the ship, we found about 50 spherols. So, you know, and we had limited time, but once I brought the sample back,

I had a summer intern named Sophie Bergstrom, who was supposed to shadow me because she wants to become a science journalist, and she wanted to see how the science is done, and I invited her to spend the summer. And she told me at some point that if she can be helpful, she'll be glad to participate in the science. And I arranged the tweezers and a microscope for her,

and she went over the samples that we collected. And she found 650 new spherals. So that's more than a factor of 10 above the number that we found on the ship. Amazingly enough, that allowed us to do the statistics much better. And we concluded what I mentioned before with the map that we created. But now we had a lot of spheres to examine at Harvard University. And I shared materials with University of California at Berkeley,

with the Brooker Corporation in Germany, and with the University of Technology in Papua, New Guinea. But as of now, we did the most detailed analysis at Harvard University in the laboratory of Stein Jacobson, who is a world-recognized expert on such matters. And so the first question that we are attempting to answer, and you will see the results in the paper, is the material composition in terms of elements and radioactive isotopes. Is that consistent with solar system materials or not? Is it interstellar in origin? And we have a clear answer to this question, and I cannot reveal it. You'll come back on, hopefully, and we'll do a quick interview about that. But let me ask you a question.

Since presumably other solar systems have their formation origin stories, as you like to talk about, then they must have some things in common with ours. And the question I would have is if they also originated from the internal collision, perhaps, within a solar system of two rocky, heavy objects with some kind of metallic, high density cores, how could you distinguish that one, you know, it's not going to come tagged with, you know, made in, you know, solar system, you know, A, it's going to have exactly, you know, because they all originated from a supernova type two, probably, you correct me if I'm wrong, type 2 supernova eventually that produced iron and nickel.

So how could you actually assay, as Galileo would call it? How would you assay the difference between the actual metallic types in order to tag it, geo-tag it or cosmos tag it? The star that exploded in a different region of the Milky Way galaxy was probably of a different mass and the yields were different. But most importantly, the planet, if it's a natural object that was formed from a materials on a planet far away, you know, may have had a different history of, you know, the amount of time it's spent in a molten phase and then with materials segregating in it.

What I can tell you is we have a very clear signal. And this signal cannot be confused with solar system. Wow. And the details are to be shown in the paper. The point is the periodic table is not just iron and a few elements around it. There are lots of elements, and you can create a very distinct fingerprint when you look at the entire periodic table that deviates significantly from the solar system composition. Because everything in the solar system came from the same gas cloud that was enriched by a nearby star that exploded. And it shares very similar patterns, including in terms of the ratio of isotope.

And so it's not just the element abundances, but also isotopes. And while I cannot elaborate, all I can say is that there is a way of clearly differentiating between interstellar origin and solar system origin and the details are to be seen in the paper. Now, of course, the second important question that you alluded to is whether it's technological in origin. And that's, you know, obviously if you imagine an object like Voyager, that collided with Earth and its surface was molten, you would expect different abundance patterns

because it was made of stainless steel. And the same is true with semiconductors or computer screens. If they melt, you would see some very unusual signatures. Yeah, I mean, could you say, I know you have to wait for the paper, but could you say something about the alloy composition? Yeah, so all we can at this point can do is examine the abundances of different elements in the periodic table.

I mean, in principle, one can do reverse engineering. One can take those elements that we find at the abundances that we find, put them together in a laboratory and check the material strength and see what it gives you. I would argue that irrespective whether it's technological or not, it's already a historic finding if we demonstrate that it's interstellar, because it's the first time that humans put their hands on the materials from a big object that came from outside the solar system. never before unless David Grush is telling the truth and the U.S. government has it already,

but I haven't seen it. Well, that's my next question, Avi, actually. Now, you and I talked just briefly after the events of the testimony. I've had on Ryan Graves, who did testify, as you know. And because of that, I think, you know, I think it's interesting to my audience to get a sense of from you as an external person to the field of, you know, pilots and witnessing extra solar potential extra solar system technology. And even as it says here, non-human biological material. Now, that's pretty wide. I remember Zeldovich, I think, said, although you'll know better than me,

said, you know, when you call something non-something, it's like saying that's a non-dog animal. It's too, it's too broad, right, Avi? But tell me, what did you make of grossest testimony? It was shocking. Well, unfortunately, he did not have access to any of the evidence, any of the materials. And he just spoke with 40 people that told him a story. And of course, the good news is that he conveyed the contact information of those people to Congress people who asked for it during the hearing. So that implies that within the coming months, hopefully they'll follow on and contact those people and can get to the bottom of it. And the question is, where are the materials held if this is true? And can we get access to those materials?

If they are held by corporations, they might not be easy to access. I mean, there is a legislation proposed for December in the defense bill that the committee of nine people will have authority to ask for those materials or information about them from outside government. This would be a committee under the president. And that would be interesting as well to see what comes out from that hook, you know, whether it catches any fish. The point about the corporations, if they hold the material evidence, is that it's just like the relationship between a psychiatrist and a patient. A psychiatrist never solves the problem of the patient because otherwise the payment will stop, you know.

And the same is true about corporations that get funded by the Department of Defense. And my personal trainer. My personal trainer is like that too. He keeps giving me pizza after every repetition. Or the dentist always has chocolates in the reception. So my point is any such data should be released openly to the science community so that we can get to the bottom of what it means. And the reason is simple because anything that came from interstellar space, you know,

doesn't adhere to national borders because it started the job. journey probably before humans existed. And so whoever sent it doesn't care how we split the land. It shouldn't be a matter of national security. It should be information shared by all humans, which is basically science. And I very much hope that if there is anything, it will be shared with scientists like me that would be happy to help government figure it out. But it's also possible that the story is fabricated. Until you see the evidence, you never know. People have motivations for inventing storylines that

I mean obviously when you have a car accident people involved provide very different reports that's why the World Cup Women's World Cup uses cameras to infer whether there was a goal or not and the US team was kicked out

based on data from a video camera not based on what the player said or the audience said so that's the way science should be done and not based on what people say to Grash or what Grush understood from the stories that he had. It needs to be substantiated by evidence. And until we see the evidence, we don't know.

But I want to push back on you. If you could repeat what you said, the famous phrase that you used when we spoke with Gary Nolan about a year ago. And I hope to have Gary on again with you. But you could repeat what you said, please. The sky is not classified. The oceans are not classified. And therefore, we have an opportunity to figure out the truth without relying on government to tell it to us. And that is my approach as a scientist.

I think it's possible that we will learn what lies outside the solar system by figuring out the composition of the spherals at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It's a depth of more than a mile than waiting for politicians in Washington, D.C. to tell us. I want to push back, as you know, with love and respect. I think some cases the sky might be classified. And sometimes the ocean needs to be classified. I mean, after all, I can't go down to San Diego Harbor and cruise off the coast where my friend Jocko Willink, who sent me this bottle of Malk brought it to me when he came over once. You know, I can't just go there and say, hey, Seals, how you doing? Let's go play.

Let me look at those dolphins with the football helmets filled with MRI cameras. And it is classified for our security. I want to take us back. You talk a lot about my hero of science, Galileo, and he's your hero too. I know that. And Galileo pushed back against the equivalent of, you know, the world government at the time, which was the Catholic Church. And they, to some extent, had an obligation to provide not only for the dissemination

of scientific information, okay, maybe that's their goal, maybe that's not their goal. But at some level, governments have an obligation to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, meaning that they have an obligation to pursue peace and to provide peace on Earth. Now, that sometimes might mean, according to some, that we don't reveal all of our national secrets. You know, the kind of data that's collected by a KH1, KH11 spy satellite, it's about the same quality as the Hubble Space Telescope, as you know, way better than me. But tell me, Avi, don't governments have some obligation to keep something hidden from their population?

I mean, can you make the argument that some information? Can you envision information, a discovery maybe made by you or some, are your competitors even, that would be so traumatic for the infant earth, after all, that the aliens won't swipe left on us. What can you imagine the case for actually segregating information, classifying data from the sky? I think that is a misguided approach because it resembles going out to your backyard when your family was isolated since you were born. And then you go check the rocks in your backyard

and suddenly you notice a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. Now you're facing a dilemma. Will you bring the news back to your family, which obviously will create some shock? Because they always were under the belief that they're isolated, nobody's around. Or will you maybe keep it secret?

And my decision would have been to definitely share it with my family because some family members might want to at that point close off the curtains to maintain privacy or maybe step outside and greet the neighbor and learn something new by speaking to the neighbor on where they came from, what insights they have. Or the neighbor might show up at your front door one day

so you can't avoid it. Or the neighbor might influence your life. And indirectly, it's part of the reality that you live in with your family. and you have to share that information. And the same holds for our cosmic neighborhood because it will change our perspective about our place in the universe.

It would affect our aspirations for space. This is science. Science is knowing what the universe is like. And you cannot filter science. You cannot just say this is knowledge that should be hidden because that's what the church wanted to do in the case of Galileo. they didn't want his view that, you know, maybe the Earth is not at the center of the universe to be known to the public.

And so they wanted to suppress that. And obviously it's not the right approach because now we live it at the space age. And if we were to continue to maintain the view of not letting the public know about it, then we would design our space missions based on the assumption that the Earth is at the center of the solar system, we would never reach Mars because Mars doesn't move around the Earth. And, you know, I think it's our duty to attend to the facts of the reality that we live in, even if it's not flattering. Even if we look at the mirror and see pimples on our face, we should not put makeup

because we want to figure out, you know, what the reality is. And that's what science brings to the table. It brings us a better sense of reality. You might say, okay, well, we have some sense of reality, but it's shallow. By using the methods of science, we can get much deeper understanding of where we live and what to do about it. And, you know, that includes figuring out that the sun will die one day and we will have to move out of Earth if we want to survive as a civilization. It also includes mitigation of global warming if we can do that. It includes anything global, you know, realizing what the risks from AI might be to,

society, anything to do with the reality that we live in is really essential. It's the bread and butter for our survival because we need to adapt to it. If we deny it, you know, if the dinosaurs didn't, obviously they didn't look up, they didn't have telescopes and they could have denied this rock approaching them because they didn't want to collect any data. They were very proud of their existence and look what happened to them. That's not a fate that we want to imitate. Yeah, they had a Galileo project that wouldn't have happened. Speaking of pimples, by the way, speaking about Galileo, I should tell you that it's also, I was asked recently, do I believe in God? And my reply was, it depends what you mean by that.

Obviously, I do believe that there is a more advanced technological civilization that could be a good approximation to God. And when you look at the Old Testament and you find a story like Moses seeing the burning bush, you know, with a Galileo project that I'm leading, could have assisted Moses because that was a turning moment for him to realize that maybe there is a superhuman entity based on the fact that the bush was burning and never consumed. And of course, with the Galileo project infrared sensors, we could have informed Moses on the temperature of the bush, the amount of energy emitted during time, and could have advised Moses whether, you know, it's a natural phenomena or, you know, a phenomena generated by a superhuman entity. But as to whether it's a god in the traditional sense or perhaps a higher-level technological entity, that remains to be seen.

Well, I don't want to get too Art Bell on you, but you did mention the Torah, the Old Testament, so I can't resist asking you this question. There are some that speak of what are called the Nephalim, which you can probably talk about better than me. Did you ever read that story and have any kind of reaction to it? There's a story about giants. There were the mighty men, the men of renown, but they're described as giants in the Hebrew.

Obviously, me telling you about Hebrew is kind of like me telling you about theoretical astrophysics. How do you interpret that? I mean, obviously, literally, there are giants, you know, compared to, you know, someone who's a little person, as they're called nowadays. But what does that mean to you? this concept of Nephilim, the giants. Well, it's interesting. And there are other stories in the Bible about, you know, about entities that could have, you know,

done miracles that were not fully understood, angels and stuff like that. And it is possible in principle that there was an encounter with some technological gadgets that people misinterpreted as, you know, superhuman entity. We don't know because we don't have the data. It's just like the report. at the House of Representatives, where the pilots were telling us what they saw,

it's eyewitness testimony and it looks intriguing, but it's not sufficient to assess what it means. And the same is true about obviously historic evidence that was reported by humans. Humans are not good detectors. And unfortunately, we can't go back to the biblical times and check what really happened. So we just need to think forward, to look forward. And, you know, the one thing I hope is that if we encounter something that came from far away that is far more advanced than we are, that could be the Messiah, you know, that will make humanity better. It will bring a more prosperous future. We tend to think, especially within Judaism, that the Messiah was born on earth, will be born on earth, or was born already.

I mean, depending on which sect you are. I mean, obviously, there are some people in Brooklyn that believe that the Messiah was born there and will come back. The point is, maybe the true story of the Messiah is that it's extraterrestrial. Because once we have an encounter with a superhuman entity, it will inspire O in all humans, and similar to religious O, and it will make us humble

and realize that we can reach a more prosperous future. and that sort of are the signatures of a messianic era. And so my hope is that we will have it in our lifetime. Well, to Daraba, Rabbi Lov. Speaking of Brooklyn, which is in Manhattan, I want to show you, well, first of all, I want to show you this article headline in the New York Times, the paper of record after the San Diego Union Tribune. And it's not altogether flattering.

But one thing I was going to point out, Avi, because you know, you must know that you are controversial in some circles, that people, whether it's jealousy, whether it's people that are envious of your success, of your renown, they are snarky, they attack you. And there's a whole cohort of people. You're not on Twitter, which explains why you can write so many wonderful books. But I am. And sometimes I forward you stuff from various outlets. There's a whole underground network of people that love to, would like to see you fall. And they'd like to see this experience of Schadenfreude be materialized, whether for their own psychological needs or maybe there's some truth to it at some level. But I wonder, you know, you don't let that affect you. And part of that is very refreshing to me because I find I do get troubled sometimes by people attacking me on the internet and maybe I should spend, you know, less time on it is the message. But one of the things I want to point out to people is that Avi is a scientist, a thorough scientist, meaning that I pointed out things that in a lesser sort of intellect, a more thin-skinned person would probably cause a negative

reaction, maybe compromise friendship. But I knew I could point out to you the various typos and things that I found. And not only did you not attack me and be defensive, you were like, oh, thank you. I'll take care of that. And I think that's a sign of a great scientist. And so I I want to commend you for that. Thank you. I should say, for example, I wrote 43 diary reports during the expedition. And on the sixth day, I basically said, where are the spherals? So I was admitting that we haven't found what we were looking for and that it could be a failure.

The mission can be a failure. And I was doing it sincerely. And gladly, the following day, we found the first spherald. So what I'm trying to say is, I'm as honest as I can. And some people, you know, I think they are motivated mainly by jealousy. And they, for example, attacked me for writing about this scientific expedition because they said you should have waited until you got the results and reported them in a scientific paper. And I say no, because the public sees it as a detective story and they like detective story.

So I show how science is done where you can make mistakes along the way and eventually evidence should guide you. And I see that as an educational exercise for showing the public how science is done. And a lot of people thanked me for that. There was one person who said, you know, I had a stroke a few weeks ago and reading your diary reports gave me strength to live. And, you know, that's very moving. So I connect to the public this way. But I also use it as a teaching moment for my colleagues in academia because they forgot what science is about. It's not about showing off.

It's not about saying we are always right, and here is what we found, as if there are lectures in a class, they talk down to the public. No, it's not about that. It's about showing that the scientific inquiry is work in progress. It's done by iterations. There are mistakes along the way, and eventually evidence should convince us, just like a detective looking for the explanation. So that is the most important thing, and I think, you know, and then the approach that I take to

those people who attack me by now, after having so much experience, you know, I had more than 3,000 interviews over the past two years. The best approach is that of the eagle. You know, the eagle often has a crow on his back. And the crow is the only bird that can sit on the back of an eagle and peck at the eagle's neck. And so the approach of the eagle is not to fight off the crow, but to rise to greater heights where the oxygen level is low so that the crow drops off the back of the eagle. And for me, it's exactly that method. Rising to the highest level of science is the way to get my critics off my back so that they will stop pecking at my neck. And doing the science in the best possible way is collecting the evidence, bringing the materials back

and analyzing it. You know, and on the day that I came, from the expedition. There was a scientific paper published in the Astrophysical Journal saying the government measured the wrong velocity. It's actually three times smaller. This object is made of stone, the meteor that I was seeking. It's made of stone and the U.S. government doesn't know what they're talking about. And moreover, the data must be wrong because otherwise we can't fit it with a model for a stone. So what I wanted to say, I held the spherals from that. meteor in my hands at that time and I knew that I made mostly of iron. So I knew the paper is wrong but why would anyone publish in the astrophysical journal a paper when that person knows

that I'm going on an expedition to find them? Why not just wait? It just shows you that the negativity is motivated by something else. I prefer to believe that it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm Jewish. Yeah, but the other thing I wanted to say is that just yesterday, you know, there is a new profile that will be cover story in the New York Times magazine about my research coming out in a week. And as part of the fact checking, I had a conversation yesterday about, you know, there was a model that was proposed several months ago that was published in nature, that in fact, omuamua, the first reported interstellar object, the size of a football field, that had an non-gravitational acceleration was just a water iceberg that was transformed by cosmic rays

into hydrogen and oxygen, broken. I mean, the molecules were broken off, and then the hydrogen provided it with propulsion that was observed as the non-gravitational acceleration when it came close to the sun. And what we showed a day after this paper was published is that they made a huge mistake in the energy equation. there is a term that is millions of times bigger than the terms that they included. And that is cooling by the evaporation of hydrogen. The fact that you need to dislodge the hydrogen atoms from the surface of this iceberg

is taking away some of the energy that the surface receives from the sun. And that at the temperature that they calculated by omitting this cooling of more than 100 degrees above absolute zero, this term is actually millions of times bigger than the other terms. So clearly a mistake. On that day, I wrote to all the reporters that they talked about celebrated the success of this nature paper. And I said, look, they made a mistake in the energy equation. And I heard back from one reporter who said, oh, we don't want to confuse our readers. We will not make any amendment to our report.

and I said, you don't need to say anything other than Avilob, you know, just wrote a paper that disputes the energy calculation. But anyway, they decided not. Then another reporter said, I approached the authors of the original paper, and they told me that they are not willing to make any comment about your paper until it's refereed. And I said, fine. Then we waited a few months. The paper was referred and accepted for publication with the same content. I came back to that reporter, never heard back. Okay, so it's more about conveying the message that maybe a lot of people want to hear,

which is maybe it was just a water iceberg rather than doing the math correctly. And what happened in the fact-checking is the reporter involved in the story in the New York Times magazine about my career was telling me, you know, I tried to approach the authors of that paper, and I couldn't get. a comment from them after your paper is already accepted for publication and published. But I reached out to another expert on the subject. And that expert said, in this equation, there is a term that should have been considered as time-dependent, whereas in the equation it was considered as constant. And the reporter said, does that actually change your conclusion?

because that person said that you can't trust the result. And I said, this term needs to be millions of times smaller. So if you change a coefficient that is of all the unity by a factor of a few, even by a factor of a hundred, it would not make this mistake go away. You need to change it to bring it down by a factor of millions. And I said, look at figure one. We are showing that. We are showing that the term that was omitted was much bigger than anything else at the

temperature that they calculated, therefore the temperature must be much smaller. To me, it illustrates the following fact that the so-called expert wanted to raise enough dust so that they can claim that they can't see anything. It has nothing to do with substance. That expert did not put a time dependence because that expert, if they were to put a time dependence, you would realize immediately that it doesn't solve the problem because you need to reduce that term by millions. And just to show you that people are trying to tackle me in any possible way. They're not doing the math correctly. And they are just making claims that are not substantiated by...

And I should say, you know, I'm still down to the trenches. I'm doing my research. I'm not a blogger. I'm actually doing scientific research publishing in scientific journals. So that's the way I deliberate. Especially, you know, kind of odious to me was a claim made by Steve Desh in this article, who is an astrophysicist at Arizona's state. State University. He says people are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb's wild claims. Well, I think Avi,

the multimillion seller of your first book and your appearance is one of the most popular guest on Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan, et cetera, you know, belize that puts the lie to that fact. People are not sick of it. They're very interested. He goes on to say something I think is very, it's almost mendacious. It says it's polluting good science, conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism, sucking out all the oxygen from the room. Then he says, Dr. Desh edited that several of his colleagues were now refusing to engage with Dr. Loeb's work in peer review, the process by which scholars evaluate one another's research to ensure that only high-quality studies are published.

It's a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method, he said. It's so demoralizing and tiring. Avi, who's breaking down? Who is the one who's undermining them? and who are the people that say we should only trust things that are peer reviewed. And now they're saying we refuse to peer review it. That seems an antithetical Mr. Dash or Dr. Dash. I actually don't know who he is.

But I'd be willing to have him on and I'd love to talk to him to get an impression from him because Professor Dash, if that's what he is, I think that you are completely out of line. To say that you won't even peer review, that's a bare minimum for a scientist. And to say you won't engage with data once it's submitted, that's almost as if you are evoking, this index of forbidden books from the time of Galileo and Bruno. What say you, Avi? Yeah, what I say is I never wish Dash to be sick. I wish him prosperity and good health.

And any sickness that he encountered should be discussed with his therapist. You know, I remember we had a junior faculty member in our department decades ago. And, you know, everyone believes in dark matter being particles. And there was a paper published about perhaps gravity is modified in the context of some modified Newtonian dynamics. And that person was sick of hearing about this alternative. And I ask you, why would you be so emotional about a completely logical possibility? You know, if we see that gravity cannot be accommodated by known matter, there are two

possibilities. Either, you know, the law of gravity is modified, which is a possibility, or there is matter. And the only way to address the choice between these two possibilities is by trying to find proof for one or the other. And it shouldn't make you sick to consider an alternative. Why would anyone be upset and emotional? It's only because that person is a true believer in one of the possibilities. But that's more the realm of faith, you know, of religions, of cults. It's not the realm of science. In science, we should be guided by evidence and we should discuss in a very collegial way why the evidence does not support one possibility versus the other. But if there is no evidence, if the evidence is intriguing, if there are anomalies, the discussion should be open.

And I came from this culture of trying to figure out the dark metta in cosmology. And I know that a lot of people suggested ideas that are out of the box. And that was actually encouraged. As a young person, I got tenured while working on such issues, you know, at Harvard University, where they didn't tenure for 15 years before me. And the point is, we don't know something. So we are trying to think about possible explanations. And then we examine them experimentally.

That's the scientific method. But you can't say, I will never re-free a paper that suggests that the dark matter is an axiom. and not a weakly interacting massive particle because I believe. I won't even peer review it, Avi. I won't even peer review it. That's what he's saying. Yeah. And that is completely opposite to the scientific method,

to the openness of mind that should be accompanying blue sky research. And I say, you know, these people who claim to protect science are actually not representing science. They are opposite to the scientific method. Because all I did was say, maybe this meteor came from out. outside the solar system based on the government data. I respected the data from the U.S. government because the U.S. Space Command is the organization paid more than NASA to figure out if there are any national security threats. And if they were wrong by a factor of three in the case of this fireball, then I would never sleep at night because I would say, you know, tens of billions of dollars are allocated to an organization that advises President Biden about ballistic missiles.

I would say, you know, that's what they're saying in the scientific paper, in the astrophysical journal as a couple of months ago. That's exactly what they were saying, that the U.S. Space Command doesn't know what they are talking about. But I said, I don't argue with that. I respect the U.S. Space Command. I say, I trust you. I will go there and check if I find materials.

I go there and you know what happened. A few months before I went there, I was invited to give a lecture. where at Arizona State University. And the person who invited me said we would very much like to hear about your forthcoming expedition. And the person who invited me

is a very distinguished physicist that I respect greatly. And I said, you're sure I'll be delighted to give this. And then half a day before, he told me, your host will be Steve Dash. And I said, I'm constantly... as we say. I said, I'm not giving this talk.

I don't feel safe in the company of this person because I know what he's saying. And I said, here is a solution for you. In order not to disappoint your audience, please ask Steve Dash to give the talk instead of me about Omuamua. And he said, great, I'll ask him, because you are declining. I said, yeah, please give him the floor.

As a result, Steve Dash gave the talk in which he said explicitly that I will not find anything. in this expedition to the Pacific Ocean. He said that explicitly on video recorded publicly. Now, I went there, I found materials. Someone came to me and said, you know, can you give me an example of a person who criticizes the expedition?

Because now you found it, and I witnessed what you found, and it looks very convincing. I said, yeah, please go to that video where Steve Dash says, that you will not find anything, that I will not find anything. And now it's not only documented thanks to the fact that I gave in the floor, but it will also appear in a documentary.

Well, they say, Living Well is the best revenge. Avi, let me ask you this. What I would say, what I would say is that bullying has a price. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

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They had, you know, 40 law professors just protest a speech on happiness by a friend of mine Dennis Prager recently, and they all boycotted his speech, and they actually fired the woman who invited him, as far as I understand. So Arizona State is not, you know, typically associated with academic freedom. But I do wonder if his peers in the physics or astrophysics department, wherever he may be, realize that he can be swayed by perhaps personal animus and not by, you know, the legitimacy of peer review, which is the foundation of bedrock on which science stands. So, but let me ask you if not, it could be the case that people react to things like I'll show you now as evidence of, well, this Avi Loeb character, he is not doing things properly,

going back to New York City. now I will show you this video, which is on your website. But this was in Times Square, was it not? And was this, can you see this, Avi? This video. Avi Love, the search for interest. So this is obviously a promotion for your upcoming book, which will be out today. Galaio Project, are we not alone?

So they're complaining that this type of thing is not proper in science. I say the fine. Hold on. Let me just, let me just comment before. I want you to have the most of the oxygen. But unlike Steve Desh, who's, You know, well, I think you're sucking up too much of the cyanobacteria's greatest creation three billion years ago.

When we as scientists, we have a term in science, which is called a science popularizer. You've heard that term. Our friend Neil deGrasse Tyson and people like Bill Nye, et cetera, I always say, well, that's weird because there's no such thing as like a sports popularizer. There's no such thing as a movie popularizer or a TikTok popularizer. They're influencers, but they're not popular. Why is that? because we scientists have been given the greatest script ever written by supernatural forces,

or if you like, by Mother Nature herself. And we're the worst actors. We are the worst actors. We don't engage with the public. We act as if we're super brilliant scientists, squirled away doing specialized things like insects that cannot be scrutinized by ordinary plebs. And I think we do that to great, great disservice, not only to science, but to society. Because as you said earlier, it gives a misimpression of how science is actually done. Science is done with tons of wrong turns and blind alleys. And actually most of the time we're wrong. And especially theorists, I have to say that as an experimentalist, because my job is not to be right or wrong. It's to prove people like you wrong. And actually a good scientist like you will welcome that. So what do you say

to people that say, you shouldn't be promoting something like this? It's unseemly, Avi. Don't do this. Well, I can explain the context. It was very simple. On the day that I went to the expedition, I got a phone call from someone who said, I'm very excited about your research, and I'm offering you this slot in Times Square. And the same is true about the funding that I got for the expedition, one and a half million dollars. I said, we want to do this expedition. It's an important one, because it's the first recognized interstellar meteor. And a few months later, I had a Zoom call with Charles Hoskinson who said you have the money. I didn't do fundraising.

I didn't advocate. I didn't approach anyone in Times Square. They approached me. You didn't take money away from anybody. You didn't steal money. Right. No, this is all donations, meaning that people are inspired by the message, exactly the opposite of what is being said.

It's not me promoting myself, but me saying what I think. And hearing back from the public a very loud echo. that says, please continue. And that is explicit in many emails that I get every day. And to me, it means the following, that I should continue. And because I'm following the scientific method by collecting the evidence, analyzing it and putting it in a scientific paper, but while I'm doing it, I'm also showing the public how it's done.

There is no harm in doing so. And if anyone has issues with the findings, they should wait for the scientific paper and raise those issues, but not before that. Because if they say it must be a stone when it actually is iron that makes most of the material, then I would call it the stone age of science, meaning everything in the sky is stones. And just think about it if they were shown the data on dark matter that we have. They would try to fit it with stones and suggest not enough matter and say that data must be wrong. Clearly, that's the wrong conclusion. And when Fritz-Swicki suggested there is

another substance, I'm sure these people would just attack Swiki more, actually, than they attacked me. When Galileo suggested something different, he was obviously put in house arrest. So it keeps repeating. What I'm complaining about is that we don't learn from history. I mean, the entire academic culture was established on the idea that you give people tenure so that they can pursue ideas out of the box, try to pioneer paths that were not taken before, so that we can gain new knowledge in directions that we didn't expect. I'm intrigued by facts, by anomalies, and I want to find more data so that we can substantiate the meaning of those anomalies. That should not make anyone sick, because otherwise you are behaving like a faith-based professional, someone who

knows the answer in advance and gets sick whenever the evidence proves otherwise. I turn back to the book because I want this book to sell and to get all the attention that it definitely deserves. But before we do that, I do want to point out to those of you who are meteorite aficionados that I actually give out meteorites. This is a fragment of IM2. No, I'm just kidding. It's a fragment of a muamua. That would be great. How much would you pay for a fragment of a muamua, Avi? Well, it's priceless. But it's more. It's more. It's more. for the knowledge. I, you know, I don't need, I will send it back just like you catch a fish and you send it back into the ocean. I would send it back again. It's just that I want to know what it was

made of it and I don't want to make any money out of it. So I want to share this meteorite with my audience. I send them to anybody who's got a dot edu email address at briankeetting.com slash edu. You can get your own meteorite. I will send it to you because I'm trying to connect young people that are so inspired by the type of research that you and I do and actually get them hands-on material, which we have chemo. We have x-ray fluorescent spectroscopy of these proving it's real. And when I'm on Rogan, I'm giving him a fragment of Mars, which, you know, I'll give you when you make me, you know, a 10-year professor at Harvard someday. But I want to show this pattern, because if you cut open this meteorite that I'm holding up here, you will see this following pattern.

It's a very, very famous type of, you know, really a signature, an imprimatur, a piece of such an object when cut across is called a Woodman-Statin pattern. It's been known since the 1800s. And I believe that these are sort of only really processed for things that are grown or nucleate and crystallize in outer space because the zero gravity allows these to be huge, huge single. These are single crystal boundary layers, I think, right, Avi? Yeah. So tell me, if you had a spheral and can you cut it open, can you treat it with the acid like they do here? And can you therefore rule out that it's not some interstellar alloy?

made by, you know, Apple computer on some other planet? Yes. Okay. All right, good. So I had this idea. I want some credit for this because I asked you about this last month. I thought it was a cool test. So I'm on the right path.

And you will see some images in the paper. Okay. And moreover, I should say there is another signature of a meteor that came through air, through the atmosphere that didn't originate on the surface of Earth, let's say from some geological activity. and that is that some elements evaporate and are getting lost while the object is heated as it passes through the air. And these are volatiles. And in principle, you can tell the difference between even solar system materials that came from outside of Earth and materials that were made out of the crust of the Earth.

and it's because those elements are lost while the object is heated up as it passes through air. And we use that, by the way. We are looking for the loss of volatized, this is a signature of something that came from outside Earth. But we are looking beyond that at signatures of something that came from outside the solar system. Very good. So when I look at objects like this as an experimentalist, and I know you're aware, I'm not telling you something you don't know. but as Richard Feynman said, you know, the first principle is you should not fool yourself

and the second principle is you're the easiest person to fool. I wonder, Avi, can you explain the most significant systematic effects? Can you talk about systematic effects that could convince you fooling yourself as I've been fooled many times as experiment? What ways do you preclude or prevent yourself from being fooled by systematic effects? You speak exactly like my wife. that's exactly what she's a lovely brilliant woman then of yeah what can i say she married you you know i married her that's the biggest compliment and you dedicate the book to her and your daughter's lotum so yeah so that's exactly the question of course for that purpose we visited control sites meaning regions that have nothing to do with the meteor and we did exactly the same thing of

collecting magnetic particles from the ocean floor and the main purpose was to compare those in terms of their composition to those spherals that may be anomalous that came from IM1, the first interstellar meteor. And the purpose is exactly along the lines that you suggested. We need to make sure that in the background, we don't find anything like the spherals that are found along the meteor path.

And moreover, that the statistics of spherals found along the meteor path, on top of the background, because along the meteor path, you will also find background. But the statistics should be such that is consistent with the compositions. So let's say you take a hundred spherals, examine the composition, and you know that 50 of them should be background. You should see that indeed the composition of 50 of them, roughly 50, up to Poisson's statistics, is background, meaning solar system stuff that you find everywhere.

And 50 is unique. So that's a way to verify that. indeed the surplus of spherals that you find statistically along the meteoropath is associated with an origin different than the background. So exactly to your point. Very good. And we're going to take audience questions that have been pre-submitted on YouTube. You can submit it at Dr. Brian Keating in the future. And you can also submit it to me at Instagram, Dr. Brian Keating and Twitter. But before we go there, let's talk about a couple of more questions that I have. Do you have a few more minutes?

Sure, definitely. Okay, great. So interstellar, becoming an interstellar species. Maybe you could explain, what does that really mean? or can you commit to a prediction on when that would happen? The book is halfway, I would say, it's divided into three parts, and some is based on existing evidence written before you made this expedition. Obviously, books are written months and years in advance. So this interview is actually more novel, new in the sense of breaking results. But nevertheless, can you commit to some of the predictions that you make in the book?

When, if you could say, when is your best guess that we would become interstellar? Yeah, so I think the key development that needs to be made is to send to space gadgets or probes that are autonomous. You know, we currently use Perseverance Rover and its helicopter ingenuity on the surface of Mars. And this, and the way we operate them is by engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. sending them commands to these gadgets. That's like helicopter parenting, literally speaking. We are parenting a helicopter over there. I mean, this would not work if we were to send a probe to the next star system

because it will take four years for the signals to get there and four years to come back. By then the mission is over. So you really need autonomous systems that can think for themselves, meaning having artificial intelligence. And I call these AI astronauts. Once we get there and have AI astronauts, that you process the data around them

and make decisions on their own. You know, the situation is very similar to dandelion flower sending seeds. There is no embolical cord connecting the seeds to the dandelion flower. The nature does it in a very simple way. The flower sends the seeds with the wind, and they do their job that they were intended to do on their own. They don't send information back.

In much the same way, I can imagine sending AI astronauts to space that are autonomous. They pursue the goals that we give them. Of course, there is some blueprint architecture involved in sending them. We want to accomplish something. So one thing we can do is let them go to places where they can use raw materials to recreate life. as we know it, including complex forms of life. And instead of caring, you know, currently our thinking is, let's put everything that is precious to us,

just like Noak's spaceship, you know, Noak's Ark, in the biblical story, he put all the animals there to preserve them from the great flood. And you can think of doing the same in the context of a spaceship, putting the most precious life forms on a spaceship so as to preserve them, and that includes humans. But there is a better way. And that is if you know how to print humans, how to print life as we know it, with a 3D printer.

If you have a recipe for that, just like a cookbook, what you do is send AI astronauts to another location where the conditions are similar. And they use the raw materials to produce whatever you want. And it's just like the printing press of Gutenberg, that it would be a huge revolution in the sense that we recreate what we enjoy having here on Earth rather than carry it in a very, brute force way on a spaceship being vulnerable to all the hazards of space like cosmic rays, the emptiness of space, non-nutrients and so forth. It's better to send technological gadgets to extend the longevity of humanity. So the way I see it is once we make this step forward of sending AI astronauts, that will be the time when we will go interstellar. So you, interstellar versus interplanetary, our friend Elon Musk,

hopefully future guest someday on the podcast. I'd love to chat with him because he's never actually talked to a real physicist like you or me as far as I understand. He's talked a lot with Lex and with Joe Rogan and stuff, but talking with a peer and he was an undergrad and a pen in physics. So I'd love to talk to him, but he's talked about, you know, making humankind interplanetary. First of all, do I have it right that you're quite skeptical? As am I about that? And second of all, Avi, would you like to live forever? I have to think about it, because there are a lot of... Why wouldn't you?

Why might you not? Oh, because, for example, I don't want my tenure in academia to be forever because I want young people to think freely, and so they should have positions. And if we would live forever, then there would be no open positions, right, in academia. Just as an example. You could always retire. Also, there are some obnoxious personalities that I would not like to have, you know, forever in terms of living with.

And so I have to weigh the pros and cons. You know, for me, it's all about learning. I see life as a learning experience and I get a thrill by understanding something that was not understood before. That really is the meaning of life for me. But why not keep that going in forever? I mean, the question is... That could be an option. I have to think, you know, that would be interesting, yeah.

Okay. So Elon's not here to defend himself, but he's often said, and if you keep pressing him, it's hard to know why he's doing what he's. doing. Obviously, he owns a chemical rocket company, so that's quite useful, you know, kind of a market segment for him, shall we say. But when we think about living forever, oftentimes I hear on a personal level, people don't want to live forever. There's a saying in Latin, Memento Mori, which means, remember, you're mortal, you're going to die, which is what a courtesan to the, to the emperor to the emperor, would whisper to the emperor as he walked around the streets of Rome. Remember, sire, you're going to die. In a way to emphasize the beauty of the present moment,

And so I've often thought when I hear Elon talk about these things, the question is never answered. Why should we want to become an interplanetary species? He talks about it because he wants to preserve the fragile spark of consciousness. Great. But if it's good for human beings to be mortal, for our time to be limited to May of Esram to 120, right? Why is it not good for humanity, Avi, to be limited to a finite duration? So first, I would like to say that death is not the only way to. maintain modesty and humility. I mean, you can live forever and still be modest. And for me,

the key is because our knowledge is limited. I'm modest, trying to be as modest as possible about what I assume about the universe at large. As a result, you know, even if I live forever, it wouldn't change the fact that we are so ignorant at the moment. We don't even know what the universe is made of, not to speak about the fact what existed before the Big Bang, what lies inside a black hole. You know, some of the most fundamental questions. And yet we award Nobel prizes to people who just figure out how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is, that black holes exist. You know, these are primitive ideas compared to the actual content, the intellectual content that we don't know, which is what is the dark matter? What is the dark

energy? What happened before the Big Bang? You know, like what is inside a black hole? These are the fundamental questions that we are ignorant about. So instead of celebrating the little we know, we should be modest in the fact, you know, just given the fact that we don't know so much. And even if we live forever, that will keep us modest, I think. Now, the problem I have with Elon is different. Well, obviously he wants to establish a new place where humans live. And of course, NASA is thinking also about the moon as an intermediate step before going to Mars. The problem with Mars, it doesn't have an atmosphere. If you were to try to live on the surface, you face two problems.

There is no protection from cosmic rays. So within a few years, every human will die there in spacesuits. It's not protected. And the second problem is temperature changes by hundreds of degrees between day and night, on the equator, on Mars. You cannot live under these circumstances. much better to get into caves, like those lava tubes. And, you know, we came from caves on Earth,

and if we go to Mars, we might go back to caves. But life could have started on Mars, you know, before it came to Earth. And in that case, we were just going back to our childhood home in some way. I'm most curious about going to these caves and checking if there are any prints on the walls, prehistoric paintings, because I want to know if anyone lived on Mars before us. But I agree with you that just going to Mars is not a huge accomplishment in the sense that it's just a little bit farther from the sun. So what's the big deal? That will not preserve humanity once the sun, you know, more than a billion years will expand because at that point, you know, even Mars will be too hot for us.

The point is we want to be on perhaps a space station that allows us to adjust the distance to the furnace, the sun, or we want to go to another star like Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, where the lifetime of the star is, you know, hundreds of times or thousands of times longer than the sun. And the most common stars are dwarf stars, depending on their mass. They have a lifespan of trillions of years. And we have one next to us. So why not go there?

And then we have security in terms of the heat input that we get for, you know, trillions of fears, which is much safer than the sun. The last topic from the book of my questions, and then we'll take my audience questions. I'll read them to you, is revolves around a term that you coined that's very evocative, as many of your what they're called neologisms. It sounds dirty, but it's not dirty. But your neologism space archaeology, what does that mean? And would that make you, if such a field could be created at Harvard or elsewhere,

Would that make you, you know, Professor Indiana Jones Loeb? What is space archaeologist? I should say that this relationship to Indiana Jones already was hinted at me when I went on this expedition because that was like going after some lost treasure, you know, and I gave a... To be fair, that's called being an experimentalist. Yeah. You know, at the last class of my freshman seminar, at Harvard in the spring of

2023. I asked the students, you know, if we find a technological gadget on the ocean floor and there are buttons on it, should we press a button. That was my question to them. And it felt like Indiana Jones speaking to the class before going on a treasure hunt. So the answer to your question is actually

related to the fact that the sun within a billion years will boil off all oceans on Earth. And most of the stars like the sun formed billions of years before the sun. So by now, if there is a planet like Earth around them, by now the planet is desert, just like Mars. It had a civilization potentially like ours, but it couldn't stay there because the star boiled off all the oceans on those planets.

And so there were lots of tragedies over cosmic history. And we didn't know about it because the human species just came to exist over the past few million years. So we haven't heard those cries for help. And the important point is if those civilizations sent probes like spacecraft or the type that we sent, like Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, New Horizons, all these spacecraft that exit into the interstellar space, if they did it before they perished, those packages can reach us, but they will belong to a sender who is not around anymore.

So in a way, it's just like archaeology, where you have relics from Caldial, from civilizations that are not around anymore. And that's the context, except instead of digging into the ground, you dig out into space. Very interesting. And speaking about relics and stuff, my brother, Kevin, my beloved older brother who loves your content, he sent me this, I told him I was talking to you, and he sent me this image, which I don't know, can you see it now? This is a meteorite that crashed Earth 3,500 years ago during the Bronze Age.

and it was immediately carved into an arrowhead. So they made these things quite functional. This actually happens a lot to the Gabon meteorite that I showed earlier with the Women's Satin patterns and other things. This is very hard to get high purity metals of great strength, as you know, most of them are not quite as strong as I am one. We're going to find out why in a couple of weeks, a couple days after this interview airs, of course.

But what do you make of the fact that like if Voyager crashes on on another planet somewhere deep in this. What makes you think they're going to, you know, not carve it into, you know, something for their 10-legged, you know, 10-footed, 10-fingered digits to manipulate, just like our primitive cultures did? In other words, are we assuming too much about these aliens that they're actually far? What if they haven't gone through the Great Filter? Talk about the Great Filter and talk about what you think they might do to Voyager 1 when it gets there.

Right. So the Great Filter is the ability of civilization to destroy. itself once it gets to a certain level of technological advance. And of course, before that point, it's rather primitive. Now, in interstellar space, you might realize there is probably a rule similar to Darwin's survival of the fittest, in the sense that only those civilizations that manage to escape from their planet or send probes that escape from the planet are the ones to be remembered and in some sense survive, at least in memory, if not in practice, by

self-replicating probes perhaps. So, you know, it's much more likely to find civilizations that are more primitive, of course, because, you know, maybe they'd never figured out how to live their planet, and they would stay that way. And when they see Voyager, they would make tools like the one you're showing. One interesting... And by the way, that's a weapon of war, right? Yeah.

This is an arrowhead. This is a weapon of war that they carved as soon as they found it. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's unfortunately the psychology of humans to be indoctrinated in zero-sum games. We inherited it from the jungle where we had limited resources, limited food. And if someone gets a banana, the other person doesn't have it. But now we have a reality of abundance, in principle, enabled by technology and science. And the thing that science brings to the table is that it's an infinite sum game,

that the more knowledge we have, the more, you know, all of us can prosper. We're not taking away anything by gaining new knowledge. You know, maybe we're taking away the peace of mind of Steve Dash, but that's a price to be paid. But humanity as a whole, by gaining new knowledge, by taking risks to figure out things based on evidence, we'll get a better adaptation to the reality and have a better life. And that's the promise of science.

And I should say the one outcome of the expedition is by identifying the traits, the fingerprints of an interstellar object, one can go back to all the meteorites that were documented in history and check whether any of them has those fingerprints. And we don't have velocity information about how they came to collide with Earth, how far. fast they were moving ahead of time. We don't have that because the US government didn't have their satellites looking at those. But if we identify some patterns in the abundance of elements, in the abundance of isotopes, then we can go back and check if any of the meteorites that are known to us are interstellar. And then, of course, we might find some really unusual objects. Oh, and I should say, obviously a big object is so much more valuable than spherals. Spherals are just the droplets molten off the surface of the object, but if we find a big piece,

we can easily tell the difference between a piece of a rock and a technological gadget that may have a label made on some exoplanet or may have buttons on it. And yeah, to that point, just one more image to show before I take you into a voyage, into my lovely and beloved audience, the most brilliant audience in the known multiverse. Before I take questions from them to you, Avi, I did just get a very, very exciting piece of data. This was actually broadcast somehow. Don't ask me how I do these things, but this was actually transmitted faster than the speed of light to this studio where I'm recording the Into the Impossible podcast.

And that is this shows perhaps why we haven't been in touch with an alien civilization. Can you see this, Avi? This shows the alien that you were talking about. He's quite upset. He's about to swipe left on Earth. He sees all the wars and famines and battles. And he sees that arrowhead meteorite there. Well, seeing the image of this alien, I would be happy if they were to swipe us left,

because I don't think that day. That's right. You're afraid. Let's put it this way. It's a mutual decision. It's not just for the aliens to decide to swipe left on us. We can swipe left on them. Yeah.

Although Hawking thought we should be careful. Your friend Stephen Hawking, can you comment on what Stephen Hawking was so nervous about if the Tinder was swiping right, interstellar Tinder? What was he worried about? You had a great, very close relationship with him. Talk to us about Stephen Hawking

and his perspicacity, when it came to alien civilizations. Yeah, so about a decade ago, Stephen Hawking commented that we should be careful at transmitting signals to interstellar space because you never know who is listening and there might be a militant alien civilization out there that will come to us and destroy humanity as we know it.

Now, I'm not so fearful of that because I think that any advanced technological civilization that could potentially reach us or send gadgets that will reach us, would not care about us. Because the journey takes millions of years or up to billions of years with chemical rockets, the type of propulsion that we use right now. First of all, to get to us, anything should have been sent long before humans came to exist. But even if they respond to some TV commercials that we send out unintentionally,

you know, we would not pose a threat to them. There are so many planets around so many stars out there that, you know, we will be indistinguishable from ants on a pavement. And they would arrive to us just in case they have some interest that goes beyond us. We are, you know, we tend to think that everyone focuses on us. But my point is out of modesty, you know, any encounter with a more advanced civilization would be to our benefit,

because it's an opportunity for us to learn about our technological future, about how to get to them. If they arrive to us before we got to them, it means they're much more advanced. That's why I always say when people say, oh, you astronomers are concealing evidence, and you would never share this evidence because you work for big astronomy. I always say, no, you're actually completely inverse. The scientists should be the most interested in this, because it would allow you to circumvent the physics of the 22nd, 23rd, through 29th century, perhaps, to get to a level of true understanding of the base layer of reality.

I should mention one caveat that I realized. There is the Rubin Observatory about to become operational in 2024. And among many other things, it surveys the sky and will identify objects coming close to Earth. Right. And I asked someone who is familiar with the software, and I said, will it recognize objects like Omuamua that are coming from outside the solar system? And that person said, no, actually the software that we developed to analyze that data is only trying to fit the data for objects that are bound to the sun. So this is just like saying, you know, maybe there are things interesting out there, but I will not look for them.

That's really a surprising situation. And as a result, we are developing the relevant software with my postdocs. So I say, we need to take matters to our own hands as scientists. If we want something to be discovered, we can't just rely on others doing the right thing. Because very often what our colleagues are doing is trying to reproduce what is already known. So if we know about rocks bound to the sun, that's what they would look for. Own it all. Pay off your home. Travel for life.

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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. The last question I want to get into before we turn to our audience questions is is really, you know, kind of this, this ultimate thing where we have, you know, the, the conflicts that are plaguing us on Earth. I always phrased it until recently, Avi, I said, you know, the problem is that what happens below the Von Kerman line stays below the Von Kerman line in that we have nuclear, you know, a nuclear winter, which is an atmospheric event. COVID-19 respiratory, you know, pandemics propagate in the atmosphere below the von Korn Korn Korn.

Carmen line. And of course, you know, there, there's no shortage of things to be appareled and paroled by global warming, which is obviously of below the Von Carmen Line phenomenon. To this, you added AI. And so I don't know how to segue that into my list of von Carmen line pertinent things, but maybe not everything needs to fit into my rubric after all. But I want you to answer the last question, you know, is kind of, you know, when you move discussions like this from the shadows, it can provide a wake-up call. It can, you know, kind of be a slap in the face, a diagnosis, a prognosis, like you might get from a real doctor, not like the two of us.

But tell me, Avi, you know, what sense could this be a wake-up call for humanity to tackle the great problems, as I say, that exist below the Von Karmine line? Well, once again, coming back to the Old Testament, the Bible, you know, it is said there that God created humans in its image. We are creating AI in our image. And we are startled at what we find. It's just like looking at the mirror and saying, look at this face. To me, sorry to interrupt it.

To me, it's like when I talked to one of my kids and they realize something, whether it's about YouTube or whether it's about science, that I never taught them. I'm like, how do you know this? You didn't learn it for me. I guess there are other teachers that they learned from. Well, the problem really lies in education, in the sense that we, you know, obviously when we have kids, we don't want to expose them to what happens, you know, on the street, like all the crime. But what we do with these AI systems is we train them on the Internet, which is not different than the street,

in the sense that, you know, very often social media amplifies negativity, amplifies biases, amplifies racism. And as a result, if you train these AI systems on whatever is out there, you will not get good behavior. Even if it pretends to be good behavior behind your back, it may not be. And the way I see it is just like educating kids. You want to limit the training set to what you want these systems to be like in the future. You want to give them the values that you appreciate. That's exactly the purpose of the education system.

That's why we send kids to schools. it's so that they will gain knowledge of things that we want them to emulate, to use in the future. And the same should happen with AI. There should be some regulations about what materials these systems can be exposed to. And we should train them in a way. Even on artificial text, we can write the text that we want them to follow, rather than put them in this wild west environment of the internet, which is the mistake we are making right now.

because when we see what happens as a result, you know, it doesn't look really helpful or satisfactory and it makes some people upset. And it could create the crime and also in the hands of the wrong governments, it could lead to catastrophes. So it's really all about limiting the scope of this amazing technology that we are developing. I see it as a risk.

I don't think that Washington, D.C. pays enough attention to it because they lack the technical skills. Obviously, the corporations are trying to make a profit, and the public is excited because they can do things that they couldn't do before. I'm not so worried about it taking jobs, because that was always the case with new technologies. You have to adapt to the changing reality, but it's more about risks to society once you expose these systems to negativity

that it finds on the Internet. And in principle, it could fool you, because right now, the number of connections in GPT4 is similar to the number of synapses in the human brain. You get a system with similar complexity. And once we go beyond that phase, of course, we might not be able to understand at all how it gets to its conclusion. So we have to regulate how we train it and how to incorporate it into the legal system. That's the other thing that we don't have laws that deal with crimes committed by AI systems.

And one way to deal with it is if the AI system is still in the training phase, it remains like a kid. And in that case, you blame the parents, the manufacturers, the trainers for any crime committed. But if the system becomes autonomous, self-learning and completely independent of the training set, then you have to somehow punish the system by taking it out of this operation, you know, just not allowing it to be in society, maybe retraining it. I mean, that's the whole idea behind prisons that you try to retrain criminals. We need to adapt to this reality. And by the way, right now, philosophy departments still teach ancient Greeks. I think that, you know, since ancient Greeks, the great philosophers did not have computers at the time, we should instead teach AI.

And the ethics of AI. It's about philosophy of the future, not philosophy of the past that we should engage in because we have new challenges. Many of them are philosophical about ethics, about how humans should interact with AI. We see the damages from social media to the mental health of youngsters. So it's just because we are careless with these new technologies. We let the commercial businesses develop them without guidance. And that should come from philosophy departments, actually. Very good, Avi.

Okay, we've reached the final segment. We're going to ask a bunch of questions. Maybe we could do these rapid fires. you've been so generous with your time, but I know you've got things to do after this interview. So I want to just thank you and express my Hakara Tatov to you. First question comes from Timothy O'Brien, 6 on YouTube. Updates on the telescope you're building. Have you been constrained at all by the U.S. government?

Not at all. So far, the messages I got from the U.S. government are all supportive and encouraging. In fact, some representatives came to my home and we showed them what we are doing. It's all in the open. And right now we have one operating observatory at Harvard University with infrared, optical, radio and audio capabilities. And we are creating machine learning software that will analyze objects in the sky and classify them into known familiar objects like birds, drones, balloons, airplanes.

So this system is now being perfected in the coming months. And we are already in the process of creating complex. of it and placing them in various locations. We have interest from five donors to make copies. We need many more. We want to make tens of such systems, maybe a hundred. And so we need more donations to proceed in that direction. We also have a lower cost system that was developed at Wellesley College

by one of the collaborators on our team of Galileo Project, Professor Wes Waters. I would say that we are at a very important juncture right now of starting to collect data, making more systems placing them in interesting locations. So stay tuned for the coming year. And of course, there is a NASA report about to come out. And my expectation is that they will say that a scientific inquiry of the type that is being followed by the Galileo project is what we need. So next question comes from a listener on Twitter or a fan of ours on Twitter.

and his name is Zagros, sex, sesgian. I can't pronounce it. It sounds like a Hungarian. By the way, Avi, do you know that they said once that aliens had been discovered already? And they're called Hungarians, right? That was the old joke. Okay, anyway, and I'm part Hungarian, so I got to take credit for that. Okay.

Brian, you once asked Avi, I think this is in our first interview. What would convince him that Omuamua isn't an alien craft? and his response was something along the lines of, if we sent one of our crafts to check it out, and it turned out to be a rock, has that change? Is that unreasonable to try to do such a thing? Yeah, I mean, it's really, we can't do it now

because it's too far away, we can't see it. You know, it's really all about the quality of the data that would convince us one way or another. And what I'm focused on right now is finding the next Omoa, dating the next Omoa, with a Rubin telescope and getting more data on it. And of course, looking for interstellar meteors. These are objects that came from outside the solar system and they collided with Earth.

And we currently have the one that we explore that we have another one that we might explore in the near future. Next comes from awakening to reality. How have they addressed the Papua New Guinea results being upset with them over removing valuable materials? As I understand, Avi, it's like 30 grams worth. Oh, no, it's actually even less than that. because each of the spherols is less than a milligram, and we had the 700 of them, so it's less than a gram. In fact, it's outside the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea,

and we were in contact with the PNG government when we organized the trip for eight months and going all the way to the top level of the PNG government, and they realized there is no commercial value, there is no biological context, value to this material that we are trying to collect. And so they basically directed us for a partnership with the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea, which we have right now.

And I just had a visit by Dr. Jim Lamb, who is the head of mining engineering in the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea. And we are collaborating. We gave him some materials. So it was all a result of someone who was not in the loop. that was talking about it as if we took, but in fact, we went all the way up to the highest level of government when we coordinated this visit.

They were fully aware of it. They had no issue. It's just academic. You know, the search for spirals from meteors was done many times before in the history of geology and oceanography. And there is no, there was never legal, there is no legal issue here. So, okay, last. two questions from the audience. One comes from Twitter, someone named Gonzalo Chavez,

and he's asking about a Ukrainian study that has claimed to record spinning objects and luminous objects. And he claims an open source Galileo equivalent project has recorded similar, but Avi said they are artillery. Can you comment on whether or not your findings on that have changed at all in the last eight or so months since we talked last. Yeah, so the most important thing in science, as Brian, you know very well, it's not whether you detect things. It's how the signal that you detect compares to the background, to the noise. So it's all about signal to noise ratio. And when going to Ukraine, one has to realize there is a lot of noise. Why? Because it's a war zone. So you first have to calibrate the

noise, meaning bullets, artillery shells, drones, balloons, all used for military purposes, including espionage. And until you understand the background, the elevated level of noise there would make you be fooled. You would think that you're seeing something unusual, but in fact, it's just noise. So it's not about claiming to see something. It's about seeing something that is completely distinct from the environment that you live in. Now, what did these astronomers report about? For example, they reported about dark objects.

Dark objects at a distance of about 10 kilometers, moving at 15 kilometers per second, having a size of 10 meters. And I said, well, how do you measure the distance? And you look at the paper, and they measured it in a way that was quite approximate. And I said, okay, well, if it's approximate, then the distance must be smaller. Because if you had an object moving faster than the escape speed from Earth at the distance of, 10 kilometers and it was 10 meters in size, it would create a fireball. That's what a meteor is, okay? And you can't avoid it. If you wanted to block light and be dark,

it must also interact with the molecules of air. So I said there should be a fireball. It cannot be a dark object. Therefore, since it's a dark object, it must be closer. And if it was 10 times closer, it's at one meter in size and it's moving at one and a half kilometers per second.

That's roughly the speed of artillery shells. Or if you bring it closer, it could be a bullet. And so without having precise distance measurements, you can't infer. And people often say, well, maybe it's new physics. And I say, well, to figure out new physics, you really need exquisite data. You can't have incomplete data and argue it's new physics. That's not acceptable in science.

So two things. One, you don't want to go to noisy environments because you will be fooled more often. And second, you want to have exquisite data before arguing for new physics, which is clearly implied. if you claim there is no fireball. It's a dark object moving at 15 kilometers per second. And then there was one object that they did identify a distance to from two stations. That was a bright object. They found the distance that is similar to the distance of satellites.

And spy satellites should be common in that arena or communication satellites. Maybe it's Elon Musk's satellite. That's right. Yeah, it could be, you know, he's starting up a new successor to Starlink now that it's already obscuring all of our CMB bands at low frequencies. Avi Lobb, I want to thank you for being such a gracious multi-time guest on the podcast. We look forward to your upcoming appearance when you'll discuss the results of the paper on the chemical, compositional alloy technological content of the newly discovered spherals.

After multiple independent, you know, randomized controlled trials and all the safeguards that I know you're employing, it's just a great thing. Avi, if people want to donate financially to the project, are there opportunities for small donors? I know your doorstep is very crowded with billionaires that come to your doorstep. So, you know, that's why you haven't invited me there. But I would like to also solicit, as you know, in the Jewish tradition of Sadaka, it's most important actually to get more small donations than big donations. So is there a venue that people could support you?

Obviously, it's not you. It's the Gallaudet project. Is there a way for small donors to contribute and have a stake? in the outcome financially. Yeah, definitely not me because we had a conference celebrating the second year anniversary of the project and one of the participants came to me at the end and gave me a check of $5,000,

which I immediately cashed with the administrator of the Galileo project, and it was put into the research fund of the Galileo project. But we do have a button with the label support us on the Galileo project website at Harvard University and you can just follow the instructions there, and if it's a small donation, if it's a big donation, more than $10,000,

then you can email me, of course, and I will direct you to the relevant people at the development office at Harvard University. Well, we started off the conversation talking about the Voyager record and this gentleman here, Carl Sagan. I want to end with it as well, pertinent to this book, which is such a delight to read. It's an incredible work.

of scholarship as well as a detective story, an adventure story, a story of the Israeli Indiana Jones. And Carl said the following about books. He said, a book is made from a tree. It's an assemblage of flat, flexible parts called leaves imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it, and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking directly and silently inside your head directly to you writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions binding together people citizens of distant epochs who never knew each other books break the shackles of time proof that humans can work magic so avi another magical book has has been delivered by you not through gravity or interstellar propulsion but nevertheless

i encourage everybody to pick it up and actually the audiobook is due out as we speak and then you can actually have the voice, a literal voice inside your head, right, Avi? And it's not made of any tree, so it saves the trees. And I should say we should all be waiting for a letter in our mailbox that has a postal address from outside the solar system. Avi, I can't wait, and you'd be the first person I would call if that happens to show up here in Southern California.

Avi Lobb, Professor Bear Professor at Harvard University, author of so many wonderful books and papers. I want to thank you for spending so much of your time with me, and I wish you the best of luck with this book. Thank you so much. It has been such a great pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening.

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