Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Harvard Professor Avi Loeb Weighs in on Life Beyond Earth

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Pique is offering 20% off for life AND a free Starter Kit with your purchase—that's a rechargeable frother and glass beaker to make the perfect cup every time. Just go to http://piquelife.com/impossible Is humanity on the brink of a cosmic breakthrough—or just chasing shadows? Harvard’s Avi Loeb joins me for a mind-bending romp through the cosmos, UFOs, academia and the future of physics. Avi kicks off this mind-bending Into the Impossible episode, diving deep into his Galileo Project and the hunt for alien tech. From Oumuamua’s eerie drift to UAPs defying physics, Avi argues we’re not alone—and the evidence might already be here. Are we ready to face what’s out there? Together, we wrestle academia’s chokehold—NSA, DNI, CIA and FBI meets Avi’s Oumuamua data. Is this Einstein’s endgame—aliens or bust? Buckle up for a clash of cosmic stakes, contrarian rants, and big questions. Stay tuned for Eric Weinstein and Avi's segment coming soon on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. Make sure to rate and follow the podcast! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Buckle up, everybody. This is going to be one of the deepest dives you've ever done with two professors that are interested both theoretically and experimentally on the greatest cosmic mysteries of our time. And our guest today isn't just some basic scientist. He's one of our best friends. He's a boundary-breaking astrophysicist at New York Times bestselling author. And the man leading the charge to bring real scientific rigor to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And that's the one and only professor Avi Lowe. Avi, how are you?

I'm doing great. there are lots of things going on at the same time. And I can tell you one anecdote. Just a couple of days ago, I was speaking with organizers of a future lecture that I'm supposed to give to a group of the most accomplished CEO's in the world, plus some celebrities. And that includes, I asked my wife if she's okay if I have breakfast with Margot Robbie. And she said, yes, definitely. That's how much she trusts me. At any event, the organizer asked me, what should be the title of your talk?

I'm supposed to give a presentation. And I said, maybe hunting for aliens. And he was at first worried that the audience, members of the audience, would assume that I'm working for the U.S. government and, you know, searching for illegal aliens at the southern border wall. I explained that no two-dimensional wall that is erected from Earth can stop the actual aliens from coming because they would come from above. And moreover, you know, they were on their trip for very long probably and do not have proper visa. And if we wanted to deport them, you know, it would actually be very expensive.

It would cost more than a billion dollars per flight. And moreover, it will take a long time to bring them back to. their home planet, probably more than a billion years with chemical propulsion. And so I suggested that it's better we get used to them and live with them. And perhaps, you know, that is the ultimate way of fulfilling diversity and inclusion on a galactic scale. Yes. It's just one example, but I need, you know, the past month has been particularly amazing. I received the commitments for funding for the Galileo project

at the level of $5 million just over the past month. And there was also a sculpture of Galileo Galilei, your favorite scientist, that was made of bronze, roughly the height of a person that was delivered to my office. It was made by the accomplished sculptor Greg Wyatt. Many people who studied at Columbia University are familiar with his lions. there. And he has sculptures throughout New York City in Washington, the Arlington Cemetery.

Anyway, he decided to donate a bronze sculpture of Galileo looking at the four moons of Jupiter. And we celebrated it a couple of weeks ago. It's sort of at the intersection of science and art, which I really enjoy because both from tiers of science and the arts are characterized by. studying the unknown and they are both inspired by creativity. So I really had the with that. That's great. Well, there's nothing that I like more than someone who's as ambitious as you are

and doing stuff with scientific rigor searching for physical evidence of UAPs, interstellar visitors. You've been working hand-in-glove with NASA in many ways, the Pentagon, mainstream science. You're a hardcore scientist. So people are first encountering Avi, he's not just some person that's jumped on the UFO bandwagon claimed to have spotted something. In fact, quite the contrary, he's got the prototypical, predernatural scientific response, which is to be skeptical and actually assume that most things are wrong, including most scientists are wrong. And that's a good thing. You know, I tweeted out yesterday.

You're not on Twitter. That's why you're so successful. But I tweeted out, you know, there's this trope about religion and science, you know, where it's like, well, science is magic. but it's real. And I'm like, well, no, most of the magicians I've ever seen are kind of jerks, and they make you feel like a jerk, and they make you feel stupid and had and played. And the whole job of a magician is to conceal his tricks and not share them with the public, but what you do is bring it to the public. And I think you do so at great risk to your, to your, you know, career, to, you know, getting involved with military and government, et cetera. And there's a lot of

that in the so-called zeitgeist with the UAPs and drones. Are they unknown physics? Or are deep technology. Could we benefit from them? Is it a sire up? Are the governments? Our governments spying on them. And in particular, two people have, one has appeared on the show. One agreed to appear in the show.

I never did. That's Lou Elizondo. But Nick Pope was on a couple weeks ago. We had a great discussion and the heavyweights. And, of course, your name always comes up. But at the very end, we'll take questions. We've already got, you know, close to 200 people watching. At the end, we'll take questions from the audience for, you know, the inimitable Avi Love.

So anyway, this is not just another UFO talk. I just wanted, since you mentioned magicians, I just wanted to explain that you shouldn't regard academia as the source of comfort for any disappointment from people who invent stories. Because, you know, Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate, about 50 years ago, argued that it doesn't matter how smart you are. You know, if your idea does not agree with experiment, it's wrong. Now, you would think that's a trivial statement and that the mainstream of theoretical physics would listen to it, but look at the last 50 years where the focus of theoretical physics

was on extra spatial dimensions. And we haven't seen any evidence for that. Yet it's accepted as a goal worth pursuing as an assumption, the same as supersymmetry, which was not observed at the large Hadron Collider despite the fact that we invested $10 billion in that collider. And, you know, I spoke with a string theory.

And I asked him, what's your most important paper? And he said, it's about supersymmetry. And I said, well, why do you regard it as your most important paper? After all, it was not observed in the experiment that was designed to look for it. We haven't found it in the natural parameter space. And he said, because, you know, it might be around the. corner where the next experiment is done. And I was reminded of the religious Orthodox community in Crown Heights that believed that the Lubavicher rabbi is the Messiah. So that was

their theory, theoretical model. And then there was a data point. They assumed that after he dies, he will come back as the Messiah. And he died and never came back. So obviously, it's an experimental data that you should take to heart. But what was their response? It was not very different than my colleague, they said, oh, it will happen in the future. We just have to wait. And so I just wanted to caution people from believing that the mainstream of science is always following the scientific method. Because I don't see a qualitative difference between the religious philosophy of Crown Heights's advocates and some philosophy of theoretical physicists who are willing to, for their entire life without seeing the evidence that supports the idea that they're exploring.

And, you know, they just don't listen to Richard Feynman. Now, the approach I'm taking is, you know, if there is a question that is of great interest to the public, let's get a flood of data, as much data as possible, on these questions so we can illuminate the darkness. We can figure out what the answer is, you know, if it ends up being disappointing, you know, nature is under no contract to make us happy. We know that from Galileo. We were hoping that we are at the center of the universe.

We are not. And it's good to know that because now we can design a spacecraft that would reach Mars. If we were to think that Mars orbits the Earth, we would never get there. We would shoot rockets like crazy. And all these religious people that believe in the Vatican's dogma would just not be able to reach Mars. And gladly, the Vatican admitted in 1992 that Galileo was right. It was a little bit late. It was 20 years after we reached the moon.

But my point is, we should always regard science as a learning experience. We should not assume we know the answer in advance. We should never pretend to be the adults in the room. You know, that is the biggest enemy of progress. That's true. Argue that you know the answer. So how do you learn about nature? It's by collecting evidence.

You know, my best friends are experimentalists. So are mine. But now, some of my best friends are theorists, too. And I've been accused by none of the Mark Kamenkowski of being a deeply closeted theorist, you know, because of the way to have such affection. It was probably— Was that an insult or— No, no, it was fine. He said he wouldn't let my daughter marry an experimentalist, but I don't know what that meant.

Let me ask you, would he buy a used car from you? I think he would, but we go back, you know, 25 years. So I think he's come to trust me now. But, you know, the thing that I, you know, love about, you know, real scientific progress is that we're open to being wrong. We actually welcome it, right? The more mistakes you make, the faster you can iterate, the more you can change your presumptions and assumptions and iterate your model. And that's why I think theory can be dangerous and seductive because it can allow people to kind of fall into this trap of, well, we just have to come up with ideas and we're kind of got this infinite job, you know, kind of security. and that Doge is not going to come to us and ask us, what do we do last week?

How many five things we did? It'll be empty, right? The actual risk is that very often theories fall into the trap of thinking that the job is demonstrating that you're smart. Yes. You know, it's just like, you know, running in the Olympics, a hundred meters distance. You don't ask why is 100 distance, 100 meter distance the right distance? I mean, it could have been 127, but you don't ask, you just try to do it the best you can. So if you regard theoretical physics as a sandbox in which you demonstrate by doing intellectual gymnastics,

mathematical manipulations, you demonstrate that you are smart, you don't really care whether the idea is match nature. And in fact, you know, if we discover a gadget from another civilization, it doesn't require any fancy math. You know, you just need to find. it, look at it and decide whether you want to press a button. That's right. And that's what makes it so beautiful. And in fact, one of my favorite quotes, you know, from Feynman, there's a lot of Feynman worship, by the way, as you know,

he would say things like, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't really understand it yourself. But then he said, on the day he won the Nobel Prize, the Pasadena Star News came to him and said, what did you win it for? And he goes, look, Powell, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So for every Feynman quote, there's an equal and opposite Feynman. Okay. But I should say one. something because nowadays, you know, the White House is surrounded by self-declared tech support. That's right. Okay.

And the one risk that I see is that I don't see any scientists out there. And, you know, the chips that are being used for AI, the frontiers of AI are manufactured on the atomic scale. By the way, I cannot see you. Oh, it's okay. I can see. I can see you. You're on the atomic scale, and we wouldn't be able to produce them

without the understanding of quantum mechanics that was discovered a century ago. And the point that I'm making is, the frontiers of technology today were shaped by curiosity-driven science of a hundred years ago. Quantum mechanics was discovered exactly 100 years ago. And then, therefore,

If we put all of our emphasis, all of our attention on the AI of today and ignore basic science in terms of funding, if we reduce the size of the National Science Foundation, NASA, anything to do with basic fundamental science, we would lose our edge in the technologies of the next century. And that is a very important point to make as the budgets are being defined for basic science. And there is a risk, in my opinion, that comes from the technology sector where, I mean, you can easily identify those people. They don't have doctor in front of their names. That's right. And I feel, you know, as much I love Elon Musk and, you know, and supported, you know, President Trump recently.

I'm actually coming out, you know, most people suspect that. But I'm actually talking to, I'm comfortable talking to anyone. I've had Noam Chomsky on your cross-town, you know, at your crosstown rival. I've had on, you know, many, many, you know, liberals, leftists. I've had on Larry Tribe, who you connected me to, not a Trump fan, right? But, but, you know, seeing what's happening just to shake things up to kind of revitalize America's standing in the world, such as you see it. But the main thing that does worry me, and I think we always have to be honest.

Just because you might support somebody doesn't mean they're immune from criticism. That's what true friends do, right? As Ben Gurian said, you know, when a friend makes a mistake, he remains a friend, but the mistake is a mistake. I think he said that. or yeah, it was a hammer whites, I should tell you in this context shortly after the elections, Peter Thiel appeared on a podcast

and he said, never bet against Elon. Yeah. And the following day, I placed a public bet against Elon on Medium.com. And my point is, he was arguing that we are probably alone

and therefore we should go to Mars to avoid the single point catastrophe that will eliminate us because we have a cosmic responsibility to preserve whatever we have. And I said, well, you know, there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

We know that a few percent of them have an Earth-mass planet roughly at the same separation as the Earth is from the sun. And, you know, there are up to a trillion galaxies in the observable universe. And in fact, the conditions in the cosmic,

within the cosmic horizon, probably continue 4,000 times beyond the cosmic horizon. So all together, you get 10 to the power of 31 Earth, Sun, systems. And arguing that we are probably alone is actually very unlikely to be true. So I'm willing to put 1% of my net worth against 1% of Elon Musk's net worth, which would be about $4 billion together. I mean, mostly he is. That's right. And use that money in the next decade to have.

search for objects, you know, they might be empty trash bags or broken satellites or, you know, space trash of other forms or Earth-fling asteroids like, you know, 2024NF, whatever that was going to It could be all of these things. Now, we are close to a lamppost. We call it the sun. It illuminates the darkness of space. Okay. So just like searching for your keys under the lamppost, I actually wrote a paper. a couple of weeks ago that I submitted to the astrophysical journal, in which I showed that we can use a one-meter aperture space telescope to search for objects that are 10 meters in size from interstellar space within the orbit of Mercury.

You know, the Harvard Space Telescope cannot look in that direction because it's limited in its viewing angle away from the sun. But if you were to focus on the inner region within three times, closer to the sun than we are, within the orbit of Mercury, the sun illuminates 10-meter-sized objects so that they can be observed with a one-meter aperture,

and therefore, you know, I calculated that there should be every five hours an interstellar object arriving to that region, and we should just check if all of these objects are rocks, or some of them might be technological in origin. And, you know, within that region, they heat up to more than 600 degrees,

Kelvin. At that temperature, you know, they might shed some mass and you can do spectroscopy from a distance. And instead of landing on them and figuring out what they are made of, you know, it would be a fantastic project. And, you know, a space telescope would cost more than a billion dollars. And that would be a good use of that fund that I was talking about. Now, if within a decade, we don't find anything of interest, I'm willing to give Elon another 1% of my net world. But the point is that in order to find something, you need to search for it. You know, that's the fundamental. It's not just a matter of expressing an opinion or saying we haven't seen it.

You know, if we would say we haven't seen the Higgs, okay? And, you know, when we check with Starlink satellites, we don't see evidence for the Higgs. Obviously not because you didn't build the instrument necessary to detect the Higgs. You need to invest in the goal. You can't just rely on things that were constructed for other. purposes. I mean, there is, all the low-hanging fruit was already collected. And, you know, we've been searching for 70 years for radio signals, haven't found any that are artificial. And so, you know, Einstein argue that you can't just do again and again the same thing,

expecting a different result. It makes more sense. So what we haven't done, I mean, we waited for a phone call. We haven't received a phone call from someone. So let's see. just look at our backyard and check if there are there are any tennis balls that were thrown by a neighbor, you know, because we see all these houses in our cosmic street. And the only question that remains is whether these houses that look like ours, whether they have any residence. Yeah, and that brings up a point that I made on the video recently. I'd love to get your reaction to it because the fact that, you know, there is so much space really is kind of a mixed bag. As Carl Sagan said, you know, there's a, if no one's out there, it's an awful waste of space.

But that implies a teleological, you know, kind of purpose to the universe, which many of the supporters of the UFO hypothesis reject, that there's a god, that there's, you know, some overall imperative that's categorically true for the universe. And I just don't accept that that's, you know, self-consistent. And I've argued actually that, you know, for a scientific evidence, you know, based perspective, right now there's no evidence, right? We don't have hard evidence. We don't have physical evidence.

Oh, well, we're going to talk about some today that could potentially be that. But, I mean, if this were really true, this would be the discovery of all time. Even in my field, the CMB, you know, I love it. I want to do. But I'm kind of, I feel like I have job security in the same way maybe you feel with this bet with Elon. Compared that to the CMB. I mean, there were hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the search for primordial fluctuations of the microve background. But in this context, no federal funding exists.

more than a few hundred thousand, you know, like, this is completely inappropriate. We are searching, I mean, the Cato survey of the astronomy community defined the search for microbes as a priority, the habitable world observatory that will cost more than $10 billion and will be constructed after 2040, okay? And I say, let's hedge our bets. Let's invest a few billion dollars in a signal that might be actually much clearer because it was produced artificially. And if we find it, you know, it will not only tell us about life, but intelligent life. That's right. And, you know, just two days ago, I was invited to a public Q&A with a group of people who are interested in the interface between religion and science.

And the title of the forum was extraterrestrial intelligence and the Jews. And I was asked about my opinions. I mean, I said, you know, it's quite reassuring that in the book of Genesis, there was a beginning in time, which is the modern picture we have of the universe that we observe. But the sequence of events after that do not match what we know about now. You know, not obviously back then when the Book of Genesis, was delivered, it was quite reasonable, but for example, now we know that all the objects we see were not made in six days. There is this statement in the biblical version that God rested

in the seventh day. And if God would have rested in the seventh day, we would see a clear signature of that in the cosmic microwave background on the surgery. The seven days after the big bag, there would be a clear pattern that we could look for. There was, there is no such pattern. it took 13.8 billion years to produce all the objects we see in the form of, you know, the solar system in which you see the sun and the earth has some relic from the debris disk around the sun. The sun is one of the stars that was made in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one out of trillion galaxies in the universe. And they were made of building blocks of smaller galaxies starting 100 million years after the Big Bang. You know, these details require some update to the book of Genesis. And now, the notion of God, if you ask me, it's interesting.

I see a way of unifying science and religion because, you know, suppose we developed a theory of quantum gravity, okay, a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. Yes. Then it might be able to replace the Big Bang singularity with the ingredients that preceded that. So we would know what happened before the Big Bang. And it's just like a recipe for a cake that specifies the ingredients you need to put together in which order and how much heat you need to apply to those ingredients to get the cake of your liking.

And if we had that recipe, all we would miss is an oven where you do that and put the cake in the oven to get it made. And my point is that at that point, when we know the recipe for the Big Bang, we would be able to apply to the job of God. Because if you think about advertising the job of God, the one requirement is you should be able to create a baby universe. That's the fundamental requirement. And, you know, a sufficiently advanced scientist might be able to do that. And so my first question, if I ever meet an alien, would be what happened before the big band? Do you know the answer? Well, if it was Stephen Hawking, he'd say, that makes as little sense as asking what's north of the North Pole.

But as everybody knows, we two Jews included, it's Santa Claus, right, Avi? So this brings up this notion that, you know, that there's also a tension between government. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point-of-sale system connected by Spectrum-powered business internet, helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based customer support and local technicians. It's only everything. Get business internet advantage free forever when you get four mobile lines from Spectrum.

Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to find out how. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. And scientists. And I find this all the time. If I argue against the existence of the UAPs that are seen being alien in origin, or if I even argue that there is no evidence for microbial life on Europa, I get pitched this whole thing,

or you're just a shill, Keating, you're a grifter, you're just working for NASA and big science, and you don't walk among the common men and women. I tell them I cut my fingers about 3,000 times as a short order cook. I was a dishwasher for years. You were a farm boy. We're about as far removed. Now, that's not to say that some of our colleagues have never left the ivory tower,

especially at your fine institution as you are now. But the fact is, Avi, we connect with the common man as well. And the two of us would be the most excited people in the world, perhaps, if these reports by people, mostly from the military, by the way, are actually proven to be true. And I do want to pivot to that statement. On one hand, Avi, how do you make these two things rectify them together? You've got people trust the government when their military men like David Grush and Lou Elizondo, past guest on the show, Ryan Graves,

many, many people claim to me that they've seen it or they know people have seen it. And yet, we're also supposed to distrust the government. Where do you get out? How do you reconcile these two things? Can they both be true? Yeah. So, you know, the most important thing in science

is not the signal that you're seeking. It's the ratio of the signal to the noise. And, you know, any experimental physicists will tell you that. Right. The I regard, you know, because this subject is so exciting for society, there is a lot of noise. And, you know, just like in politics, you have to avoid the noise. I mean, if you train an AI system on the noise, it, you know, it will just be unreliable. And so my point is, we need to distinguish between noise and evidence.

And by the way, that was exactly Galileo's point. That is the foundation of science. Now, what happens is sometimes scientists say, oh, there is so much noise, I don't want to seek the signal. And that's wrong. Because, for example, you know, a thousand years ago, there were people believing that the human body has a soul, and therefore it should not be dissected.

There shouldn't be operations because you could hurt the human soul. Now we know that modern medicine, you know, and the health of people very much depends on operations. And so we managed to ignore, all the noise about the risk to the human soul from operating the human body. So all I'm trying to say, there is always this background of noise that you need to ignore

and follow the data, follow the evidence, collect the evidence, because very often we are not seeking the evidence. You know, people thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky until 1803 when there was a meteor shower in Lij, France, and only that, you know, a physicist named Bayor made it popular after 3,000 rocks were witnessed by people. So my point is, you know, we really need to collect evidence.

Now, I haven't seen conclusive evidence that proves the case. And therefore, all these people that say they know the answer, they don't really know the answer. Because if they knew it, they would get the Nobel Prize. Okay. So I say ignore all the noise and work. I mean, the most important thing to replace it is by working hard to collect new data. That's what the Galileo project is doing.

We have one observatory that we constructed over the past three years at Harvard University, which is collecting data on 100,000 objects every month. We published the commissioning data, about half a million objects. We analyzed it with machine learning, try to figure out if there is any unusual object that is not familiar. and we keep collecting. Now, I got funding to build three other observatories. One in Pennsylvania, another one in Nevada. And the third one, which is quite exciting,

it's in Indiana. It will be part of a STEM education center. And there is an opportunity to bring young people and educate them about how to do science. You know, it's by analyzing data, we would also look at near-earth objects, not just the unidentified anomalous phenomena in the atmosphere. And I see that as an important way of convincing young adults

that they should not pretend to be the adults in the room. That's the biggest risk. When you enter academia, you start being preoccupied with your image, stature. You build an echo chamber where young people have to repeat your mantras, And they do that because of job prospects. I mean, they know that they would not get a job unless they subscribe. And that is really suppressing innovation. Anyway, coming back to your question, the people that you mentioned are not seeking scientific evidence.

I mean, the claim is that the government may have materials or information from crash sites of an extraterrestrial technological object. I would like to see it. That would save me a lot of time. Heaven said, I'm not signed to any non-disclosure agreement, and the sky is not classified. So we build these observatories in order to collect our own data because, you know, the day job of government is national security. My day job is to figure out what lies outside the solar system. I am not asking the government to tell me that. You know, if you were to ask the Pope to tell you when the Vatican agrees that the sun is at the center of the solar system,

You would wait until 1992. Why should we do that? Yeah. And I think that the tension that I keep feeling, and just to come back to that question, you know, when I'm told I shouldn't be dismissive of these heroes that are military veterans, Lou Elizando and David Grush, in particular, and partially Ryan Graves as well, because they had the courage to serve and they did this and that. And I don't.

And I agree. They're heroes for serving. I salute their commitment to the country. certainly have bigger, you know, spaceballs than many of us. But on the other hand, I'm a scientist. So I'm entitled and a citizen. So I'm entitled to ask questions of any of these people and put their claims to test. I mean, they're making scientific claims. I don't know. Have you read have you read imminent? I know. I know these claims, you know, these are my friends. The problem is, you know, the evidence that they're talking about is not available for scientific

scrutiny. And it's really about evidence. Now, I want to explain that it's not just a problem, of people who are not professional scientists. It's also a problem within science. Let me give you an example. There was a paper in publications of the National Academy of Science that appeared a few months ago. And it said,

here are 14 objects that exhibit non-gravitational acceleration. Yes. So, meaning that they are not just following a path that you would expect from a mutant flow of gravity around the sun, but there is some additional force acting on them,

very weak force. And so they say, these are dark comets. They call them dark comets, meaning these are comets, but we can't see their tail. Now, this is an oxymoron, if you think about it, because a comet is defined by the tail, okay?

And so it's just like saying everything I see in this zoo is associated with zebras. So when I look at an elephant, I would say it's an unsriped zebra. It's a zebra without stripes. That is inappropriate because, to give you an example, on January 2nd, this year, 2025, there was a new near-earth object that was reported by the Minor Planet Center based on a report from an amateur astronomer.

And it was given a name. And then within less than a day, astronomers said, look, the orbital parameters of this object are the same as the Tesla Roads the car. Yes. That was launched by SpaceX in 2018 as the dummy payload on the Falcon Heavy. And I actually mentioned that in my TED Talk, which was ranked among the top five in 2024. I said, here is the Tesla Rod's the car. You know, if it were to collide with Earth and appears a meteor, my colleagues who might not be. aware of the fact that it's a Tesla Rostaka, would argue that it's a rock of a type that they've

never seen before. And actually, that was fulfilled. This prophecy was fulfilled on January 2nd, 2025. And, you know, by the way, it's very easy to avoid such mistakes because all you need is to use AI and go through the internet, all the available databases, and include all the space objects that were launched since the 60s and have their orbital parameters. And whenever you see a match between a point of light in the sky and one of these objects, even the Soviets publicized the objects that they launched, you just announced it.

So right now, actually, an hour ago, I submitted a paper for publication that talks about one of the objects among the 14 that were mentioned in the publication of the National Academy of Sciences. One of them matches the orbital parameters of a Soviet launch called Venera 2, and that one was towards Venus.

And this near-Earth object that was reported as a dark comet happens to be exactly on the same orbit. And the chance of it going from Earth directly to Venus, when Venus was at the right phase, you know, if it were a natural object, why would it do that? There is a chance of less than, I mean, the orbital time of Venus is 225 days and the chance of it arriving at Venus exactly on the right day when it meets zero. Now, this was a failed Soviet mission, so they lost radio communication, and then it was lost. And now it's put as one of the dark comets. So I pointed out, look, this is not a dark comet. This is an elephant different from a zebra. This is an object that has walls that are thin and therefore is being pushed by reflecting sunlight.

And the non-gravitational acceleration that it exhibits is exactly consistent with what you expect from that. And by the way, you might think that the reflecting sunlight only gives you a force away from the sun. But in fact, if the object has, you know, like solar panels and they are tilted relative to the sun, the force that acts on them as a result of reflecting sunlight is perpendicular to the reflecting surface. And as a reflecting surface is not pointing at the sun, it actually will give you sideways force. So the point is, you know, I have an issue with the scientists. as well, because they always try to brush any anomaly

under the carpet and claim if there is an object of anomalous acceleration, that started, of course, with Omuamua. It is a dark comet. It's an object that has a cometary tale, but you can't see it, which is basically what, the story

of Hans Christian Anderson, you know, there was this kid who was saying, the emperor has no close. The comet has no... His subject has no commentary tale that I feel like this kid. And, you know, why can't everyone behave this way? Why do we always have to brush aside any anomaly and say, oh. Excema is unpredictable.

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You know, we would never discover something new this way. So why is this? Is this professional group think? Is this, you know, jealousy? Is this the kind of tacit association with the prosthetic foreheads and the giant eyeballs? and the anal probing and stuff like that, what is the kind of reason that you say that your colleagues and my colleagues

reject you, you know, and more commonly reject you, more often reject you, and spend more other time trying to not just disprove your claims, that's fine, but attack you personally. Well, that's really interesting. I think that the personal attacks just originates from the publicity that I get.

You know, there was a New York Times magazine article about my work, and Netflix is a, producing a documentary that will come out within a year. And the public really cares about this question. I don't have any footprint on social media. It's just that people come to me and

funders give me the money to do this research. Now, the reason I'm doing it is because I started in cosmology, okay? And we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. 85% of the matter is called dark matter. We don't know what its

nature is. And when I was practicing, you know, astrophysics three decades ago, you know, it was completely encouraged, you know, to come up with ideas about the dark matter so that you can motivate experimentalists to search for one type or another.

And the theories were playing an important role, just thinking about the possibilities. Yeah. So I developed as a theoretical astrophysicist in this mindset that it would always be appreciated. If you see anomalies like the dark matter and you want to explain them, and you come up with suggestions, everyone would welcome that.

And everyone would like to get more data to figure out the answer. And it was certainly the case in the context of dark matter. We invested billions of dollars. We still haven't found it. But, you know, when people come up with a new suggestion, like Axios, when they don't find whims, when they, you know, it's always encouraged. Now, I arrived to this frontier, which is very different because of MoMA was discovered. I see an anomaly. I suggest a possible explanation.

People start going crazy. I mean, at first, the paper was accepted within three days for publication in the astrophysical journal letters. Then the media went crazy. You know, Mike Smirconish on CNN was citing excerpts from the paper on CNN, things that you don't see very often. As a result of that, I came to realize that the most important force in academia, is not electromagnetism, it's not gravity, it's jealousy. And so the reason I say that is simply because all of this was triggered by the attention of the media. Before I had attention, you know, the referee report actually said that that's a great idea

because there is evidence that Oumuumu is most likely flat. And people so, so it's only the public's attention that makes some people upset. But one thing I should say, the people who know me, that I, I, personally know, none of them had any personal attacks, none of them argued with me. It's only those people who are who I never met. And those are people also that are not necessarily in the line light. I mean, they usually do not get attention. So these are people that are trying to get attention by attacking me.

And I just find that unfortunate, not so. much because of me. I have sufficiently, you know, I have a solid status right now that does, you know, that's the whole point of tenure in academia to be able to pursue new frontiers. I'm really worried about the young people who see that and are traumatized because they realize that if they deviate from the beaten path, you know, they will be attacked. And think about it, that basically delays the progress of science. You know, in 1952, Otto Struve, an astronomer suggested that just he studied binary star systems and said, well, if there happens to be a Jupiter close to a sun-like star, we could detect it by either the transit method when it passes in front of the star or by the radial velocity of the star as it gets moved back and forth.

And in 1995, it took more than 40 years for anyone to pay attention to it because people ridiculed it. They said, oh, we know why Jupiter is so far from the sun. That's where ice forms, water ice. And they say, we don't want to waste observing time on such a ludicrous proposition. Now, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the discovery of 1995 of, you know, of a hot Jupiter near a sun-like star. and I checked the paper for which the Nobel Prize was awarded. It didn't have Otto Struve in the reference list. What does it tell you?

What does it tell you? First of all, you know, there is so much resistance to an original idea early on that nobody bothers to actually follow it because of the social structure of science. You don't want to appear as if, you know, you're doing something that everyone says is nonsense. And the second thing is, once someone by check, chance checks it and it turns out to be correct. Obviously, the credit is not given for four decades afterwards. That's right. And what's so, you know, frustrating about that is you have to be comfortable not only being wrong. Most of the time you're going to be wrong as a scientist. And I do want to

point out, you know, before we get too far into our just catching up, because it's been over a year since we actually have a chance to do a schmooze like this. But, but, but, but, but, and so much has happened. I mean, I'm thinking about, yeah, Lou Elizando's book, imminent, which I still do want to dive into some of the physics claims in there because I'll be you know when when we hear things like these objects defy the laws of physics well you and I are physicists I'm a I'm an we're in astronomy departments but our are our you know our backbone our education our mother's milk or our PhD I don't want to say PhD's milk but oops I got lost again uh hold on one second but that comes from that comes from physics I mean we're boy okay so you know let's let's say analyze this a little more

What are the ideas that are being mentioned, that maybe there are some extra dimensions. So one thing those people need to understand that when there is a discussion about extra dimensions in string theory, you know, we're dealing with tiny scales because there is a limit on extra dimension that it must be less than 100 microns, you know, based on neutrinos, based on measurements that were done on gravity on very small scales. So, you know, that cannot, you can't imagine a large spacecraft actually taking advantage of extra dimensions. Now, the other thing mentioned is very often, you know, that maybe there is a warp drag, maybe there is some wormhole. So let me explain. Yes.

You know, wormholes, the idea of wormhole, started with Einstein, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who was his postdoc, and later a professor at the Technion in Israel. and they suggested that you might have a bridge between two regions of space that would allow travel on a shorter time, okay, then you expect from the main space time that you're thinking about. And then it turned out that such a bridge is actually unstable. It will snap before you have a chance to travel through it, even if you are trying to move at the speed of light. Yes. And the only way to stabilize it, it was found. is by introducing or using matter that has a negative mass density.

Now, we are used to mass being positive, attractive. That's why we are situated on the surface of Earth. But if you imagine negative mass, it would produce repulsive gravity. We know that in electromagnetism, you get either attractive or repulsive force depending on the sign of the charge. So if we happen to have access to a negative mass, in principle, you could make a wormhole. The other thing you could make is a time machine.

It's easy to show that you could, in principle, go back in time. Now, we know that there is repulsive gravity in the expansion of the universe. We see that the universe, the expansion, The cosmic expansion is accelerating over time, and that's most likely as a result of the vacuum, having some mass density, because according to Einstein,

that produces repulsive gravity. But we don't know how to engineer the vacuum, how to excavate this dark energy and bottle it, concentrate it. If we did, we would be able to create a time machine. Now, I would like to argue that even in our future, no Jew had access to a Thai machine. Because if there was such a machine that you could get into, the first thing I would do,

given that 65 members of my father's family were killed in the Holocaust, would be to go back before the Second World War and kill Hitler, Adolf Hitler. And the fact that it never happened means that at least, you know, in our world line, nobody, no Jew had access to a time machine that can get us back into. Now, we don't know if it's possible. And, you know, you can imagine things.

But according to everything we know, we cannot bottle dark energy. We cannot make a gravitational propulsion using negative mass, because you can imagine if you have negative mass and a positive mass, the negative mass would push the positive mass, the positive mass would attract the negative mass and you can show, and that was shown by Herman Bondi, that a pair of equal

masses that are opposite sign would accelerate indefinitely to the speed of light. Without any need for fuel, you might ask how is that possible? Where is the energy coming from? Well, the total energy is zero, the kinetic energy, because the positive mass

has a positive kinetic energy, the negative mass has a negative kinetic energy, the sum is zero and the two accelerates together close to the speed of life. If something like that existed, you would get gravitational waves, not just as quadruple waves. You could get dipole emission of gravitational waves. Again, we don't have any evidence for dipole emission of gravitational waves because there are no negative masses that we found.

So when people talk about wormholes, when they talk about time machines, I would regard that as a good script for Hollywood directors. Literally. rather than as any suggestion that something in reality. I mean, in fact, you might even think that there should be a law forbidding that. And Stephen Hawking wrote a paper where he worked out a conjecture that is associated with censorship, not allowing time machines. So close time-like curves were forbidden,

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We don't know that for sure because it involves quantum gravity. We don't have a quantum theory of gravity that makes any predictions, reliable predictions. That's right. And, you know, again, the issue that I always have is people say, you know, you're talking things and they're presenting them to credulous people in Congress of the media. And they're saying these objects are having laws, you know, displaying laws, things that display, they're displaying properties that seem to defy the laws of physics. So the question that I've asked, Eric Weinstein, have asked, how come there aren't more physicists involved? NASA had a panel and it was, it was

great, led by our mutual friend David Spurgel. Shelly Wright, who's here at UCSD, was a member of the panel. And I have an interview with her coming up this weekend, this Sunday, which we talk about you a little bit, kind of the complementarity between the Galileo project looking for craft in our local environment, local meaning the earth, the sky, the sound waves, all different multi-messinger tools that you and your team have so brilliantly come up with. But she's looking for just, I mean, it's incredibly hard what she's doing and the arrays that she's using, but it's very clever. It's an idea that goes back to Charlie Towns of all people, the inventor of the laser, Nobel Prize winner, and the mazer. He had this idea that, you know, scientists would

use lasers to communicate. And you could see them, but Shelley could see them too. So how do you, how do you look at these competing ideas? You're looking close to. I actually, I actually very much love what Shelley is doing and I even suggested to fund her or collaborate with her. And I think, I think it's really helpful to try something different than we've done in the past, which is looking for radio signals. You know, there are all kinds of claims. By even people in academia, I should, you know, mention the fact that, you know, Bostrom, Nick Borsum, he argued that we might be living in a simulation, okay?

A computer simulation. And so this morning, I wrote actually an essay on Medium.com, which you, I mean, you can find all my essays on Medium.com. We've been linked to ask you for Avilob at Medium.com. I wrote an essay suggesting an experimental test of the simulation hypothesis, which is, you know, we have very precise clocks. The best clocks are atomic clocks, and they reach a precision of the order of 10 to the minus 18 right now,

much better than Palsa timing. And my point is that, you know, if we lived in a simulation, we all know that computer codes, when they perform a simulation, They have discrete time steps, okay, at particular times. So my point is, if we were to develop clocks that would resolve time better than the separation of these discrete steps, then we should be able to tell that we are living in a movie. Because the only reason we get the illusion of a movie when we go to a movie theater is because the frame rate of the snapshots is high enough to, full our brain because our visual system is not functioning fast enough to catch up the individual

snapshot. So it looks like a continuum to us for the same reason that when you look at atoms, obviously on the small scale, you know, the gas in this room has atoms that collide with each other. But if you were to zoom out, you would think that it's a continuous fluid. The air is a continuous. And so fluid dynamics is based on that. So my point is if we develop quantum clocks that reach a high enough resolution and we live in a simulation we would see evidence for that

and the only disappointing fact about such a discovery is that if you are awarded the Nobel Prize for making the discovery you would realize because we live in a simulation that this event the prize ceremony was choreographed by

the simulation creator it doesn't hold the same level of satisfaction. It's a real event. You know, if your mother would still like it, like any nice to yours, Martin. So, yeah, the Galileo project has this, you know, kind of tension between working with the government, abiding by government rules. You were featured in the same Nova, amazing Nova PBS broadcast about what are UAPs. I think that was the title of it or what are UFOs. And it was a great thing. And I talk about that and I show clips from that in my episode of Shelley coming out on Sunday.

She's a phenomenal scientist, one, the Drake, you know, from the SETI Institute, sir. But your project is full of rigor scientifically, and that's not usually known to mesh well with government efficiency. You know, you got to give Elon and Trump a couple months to work. How do you compete with this classification? Do you feel like our past guest that you introduced me to Kirkland, Sean Kirk, Kirk, Kirk, Kirkpatrick, sorry, that you introduced me to so graciously.

Do you feel like we're over-classifying? And then, secondly, will the government have access to your? data. Yeah. So, well, we would, we operate just like a scientific project. So it's all open and transparent. I mean, we are not hiding anything. The sky is not water to do, Abbey. I mean, you're not funded by the government at all. You're privately funded. Well, all privately funded. People came to the porch of my home. It offered millions of dollars to support this research. I'm completely funded by donations, by foundations. There is even the Brinson Foundation, which is funding a postdoctoral fellowship. They approach.

me and said we would like you to mentor a young person about innovation in science. So they gave me, you know, a full three-year appointment for a postdoc that I selected. Anyway, so that's my approach, which is open and to the public. You are asking why are things classified? Why does it always appear to be, you know, anything the government talks about is opaque. You can't see through it. Yeah. And two reasons for that. One, much. of the data was collected by classified sensors. So they don't want to broadcast to adversarial nations the level of or the quality of sensors that are being used.

They don't want to tell them what they can see from all these satellites that are hovering around the earth. The second reason is suppose, you know, is likely the case that many of these objects that they cannot identify were manufactured. by adversarial nations. What does it mean? It means that, you know, we are investing $900 billion a year in the defense budget,

yet they can't figure out what is up there, you know, in the sky above the U.S. It means they're not doing their job. And the best way, you know, you can think about it in the context of academia, the best way for a student to think highly of themselves and tell their parents I'm doing great is not to have any exams, not to be. tested. And the same applies to government. If nobody can look at your data, nobody knows much about which objects you're seeing and why you can't figure them out, then you will not be scrutinized. That's the best job security that, you know, that government has to offer in the sense that

when things are classified, you don't get the scientific scrutiny that you get as an open a scientist with open data and that obviously gives them leaves them out of review panels that would criticize their work except every now and then there is a Chinese spy balloon

a giant balloon that people could see from the ground the government for some reason didn't notice it and such a thing appeared in previous years and then you ask yourself okay well I get it the government is incompetent

But they can't be both. They can't be highly competent that they can maintain a conspiracy for 70 years. So I'm saying I'm trying to give. No, no, I know. Yeah. Right. The question is, yeah. So you are as a scientist should be open to, you know, opening the data for public view for scientific examination.

You've shared it with your nemesies, with people that criticize and assail you with slings and arrows. But the government is not used to doing that. And so there's this tension. And I think that was illustrated very nicely just three months ago. Not nice in the sense I'm glad it happened. But with the drones over New Jersey, you spend some time at Princeton. I can tell you more about that. Yeah, please do.

Well, first, let me just summarize this entire theme by saying that science is better than politics. And that's for two reasons. One, that science is open and that, you know, it's based on, it's supposed to be based, on evidence, data, facts, and that's the arbitrator, you know, following Feynman's dictum. Whereas in politics, you know, it's not clearly what the facts are. And very often people invent some virtual realities to argue that their opinion is correct. And that's why you never converge. In the context of science, you have a method for converging that actually Galileo pioneered.

And that is based on data. So if we look back at what the government is doing, it's possible that it collected some materials, it's possible that it collected some information, but it's hidden from view. It may have been delegated to corporations. I would love to see it and advise them what it means, because my point is that,

Suppose you go to your backyard and you find a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. Okay. Then, and your family doesn't know that you have neighbors. They see through the windows of their home all these other houses on the street that look like the family's house. Yeah. But they don't know if they have residence. And suddenly you go out to the backyard and you find a tennis ball. Now the question is, would you tell your family at the dinner table?

And of course, one approach would be, I don't want to make them worried. We have such a peaceful family. And I want my kids to sleep well at night. So I will not tell them. But this is the wrong approach because one day, the neighbor may appear in your backyard or knock on your door. And it's much more beneficial for everyone to be aware of the reality that we live in. And if we have neighbors, let's figure out who they are. Let's learn more about them.

might actually be inspired by them if they are better than us, if there is a smarter kid on our block. It's knowing, I mean, ignoring reality is a bad idea. That's my point. That's right. You get the diagnosis from your doctor. You don't say, you don't get mad at the doctor. You don't say, oh, man, I really wish that I could, you know, murder you or whatever. But now, when we hear about the different narratives, especially with things that can be explained through terrestrial means, I mean, people have this great hope in the upcoming disclosure. And we saw this recently with former Harvard fundraiser Jeffrey Epstein. I have to poke a little bit of fun at you guys.

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Let's run there. Learn more at brooksrunning.com. He didn't invite me to it. I'm invited in a few weeks to Richard Branson's, Necker Island. I will be also very close to you, actually, in an event with the most accomplished C.O. in the world. give a lecture to them. So I meet those people, but gladly, I would never invite it to. So there's this great hope that they've released these, you know, these files, Congresswell and Luna and others and Mace and many others.

And then, you know, with some not insignificant amount of social media credibility behind it. And it came out to be more or less nothing. And I am, you know, convinced that the same thing will likely happen with so-called disclosure. I talked about this with Nick Pope. And it always seems to be just around the core. In fact, that's the title of Lou Elizando's book, isn't it? It's imminent. Disclosure's imminent.

And it's been out for almost eight months now. You talked before about the messianic expectation of some religious communities. And that's the narrative. You're always very close to it. And that was the narrative also with supersymmetry. So I would say it's human nature to believe in stories that are not fulfilled. And what we have to be careful about is not to believe those stories until we see clear evidence. Because very often we wish to believe something.

And that's very dangerous. I mean, it's dangerous in politics as much as it is in science. Yep. So I think about these alien artifacts that are claimed to have been discovered, some of which don't necessarily mean technology, you know, extraterrestrial, you know, pendant. or Grock, you know, running a smartphone. It could even be material like this, which I give away quite frequently. Don't forget if you are not a member of my mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com slash YT and you will get an entry into win actual extraterrestrial material.

It came from the pre-Earth solar system. And if you have a dot edu email address like Avi and I are blessed to have, you're guaranteed to win one of these little babies, which came from space, you know, if you live in the United States. because, you know, my government, my mailing office here won't let me mail stuff to dangerous territories like Canada, the 51st state, or the Gulf of America. But, Abby, what I think... By the way, I should say that I did collect materials similar to the one you showed. Yeah. A theoretic material from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, that's what I want to state on.

Yeah. So how is that? Yeah. And that material cost me one and a half, not me, but the person who funded the expedition, one and a half million. one and a half million dollars, we brought it to a laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson,

who has the best mass spectrometer in the world, the best electron micro probe. And actually, I just received, you know, I realized over the past year, we published two extensive papers on the analysis of the material, showing the 10% of it is made of a chemical composition.

We don't find in the solar system. But really the key would be to analyze isotopes and date the material. material that is unusual. And I realized that that will take more time. And so I reached out to one of my funders and I said, look, we need a few hundred K for that. And the following morning we had it.

And so now we have a research assistant fully supported to conduct research in the coming year or more. And hopefully we'll find what is the age of the material of this interstellar meteor, the object that was identified by U.S. government satellites. as having a speed, a speed that is not only enough for it to escape from the solar system, but also higher than 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the sun, 60 kilometers per second, outside the solar system. And interestingly, I wrote a paper. I published a paper with my postdoc Morgan McLeod that identified a natural process

that can give you these very high speeds for rocks. and that's just if a planet like the Earth comes close to the most common star, a dwarf star, that is 10% of the mass of the sun, 10% of the size of the sun, it's a hundred times denser than the sun in mass less. And it can easily disrupt tidily by the tidal force, spaghetti-fi a planet the size of the Earth. And it would make a stream of rocks like spaghetti that would the half of wheel, which will fly out at the speed of about 60 kilometers per cent. When I derived this speed that matched the speed of the interstellar meteor, that was an eureka moment for me because I had a hard time finding a scenario

that gives you just the speed that was inferred, and this one did. And that is sort of the isotopic ratio and the study into it. you know, I kind of am curious about this talk that you were invited to, not about the southern border, you know, aliens and so forth, but the aliens that can come maybe through the back door of a wormhole or something like that. So what is this, hunting for aliens? How do you actually hunt for aliens, not just the existence of perhaps extraterrestrial material, interstellar material, as your first two books are about? How would you search for actual aliens? Well, my assumption is that we will probably encounter technological gadgets in two forms. I mean, without biology in them.

One form is space trash. You know, the earth is surrounded by broken satellite species that, you know, by the way, anything bigger than 10 centimeters would be identified. I wrote a paper about it by the Rubin Observatory in Chile that will start operations this year, we use a 3.2 gigapixel camera to serve at the southern sky every four nights. And I calculated it could see fragments, broken pieces of satellites around the Earth, bigger than 10 centimeters. There are plenty of them, you know, tens of thousands. And you might ask, okay, that's the situation right now. You know, you take a snapshot of the Earth. We only had the

space program for the past 50 years, maybe 60 years. And, you know, over a period of millions of years, billions of years, other civilizations may have much more space trash that they produced. Okay. And think about it. Even if it's bound to the earth right now, when the sun becomes a red giant and has a very powerful wind and becomes brighter, it could basically sweep out. Or if you have a massive star that explodes, it would sweep out all the technological debris surrounding it into interstellar space. And that includes breaking any megastructure like a Dyson sphere into broken pieces. Maybe one of those broken pieces was Omuamua, you know.

So my point is there would be space trash. Part of it from the infrastructure, the technological infrastructure built by civilizations, even if they didn't live their planet or their planetary system, there could be some debris carried out to interstellar space. And the second is, of course, I mean, in addition to those empty trash bags that we might find in our backyard. And by the way, this is a real name for objects found near Earth, which are pushed by reflecting sunlight. I just figured it out a month ago. Apparently, you know, in the Minor Planet Center, they are talking about empty trash bags because they see these objects that move, you know, zigzags and move around.

And they say, oh, it's just radiation pressure. they don't think about it as UAP or UFO. So again, if you say something is a dark comet or you say, oh, it's just pushed by reflecting life, I don't care about its very peculiar zigzag motion,

you put it aside. And so then you say, how come scientists are not claiming UAP exist? Well, because when they see a UAP, they call it an empty trash bag that was probably made by humans. Or if they see a non-grimps,

gravitational acceleration. They call it a dark comet or, you know, just like calling an elephant an un-strikes zebra. And when you do that, you feel relaxed. Oh, this is an object I'm familiar with. There is nothing really anomalous about it. Right. We don't need to explore it. So anyway, my point, my point is that's one type, you know, those space trash objects. The second is, of course, functioning devices. And those could be equipped with artificial intelligence, because if If you think about interstellar travel, it takes a huge amount of time to communicate with the sensors. So it's just like sending your kids out of home. You don't expect them to call you on any major decision they have to make on a regular basis.

You just expect some reports every now and then. And the same is... Request for money. And requests for money. Don't forget. But in interstellar travel, you know, there is just... They cannot afford waiting because even light takes tens of money. of thousands of years to cross the galaxy.

By the way, within a billion years, Voyager will be on the opposite side of the Milky Way disk. Think about it. Our own Voyager, if we just wait. So, you know, we just had 50 years or so, but in a billion years, it will be opposite from where the sun is.

I did the calculation with my student, and we integrated the orbit in the galactic potential, and it would be very far from the sun in a billion. So you will have all these objects. You know, they don't have a high enough speed to escape from the Milky Way galaxy, from the gravity. So they would accumulate like plastics in the ocean. If you were to travel through the ocean, you see all the plastics that were deposited there over the years. And they tell you a story. They tell you that they are not natural in origin. There must be some technological civilization out there. And yeah, that brings me up to,

you know, the question I think every good scientist should ask is, How would you know you're wrong? I mean, you have a billion years to, you know, to do the experiment with Voyager. Okay, so 10 years great, but we're not going to last that long. Unless, you know, our friend Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia can help us out. But how could you be? Yeah, I will be less enthusiastic if after a decade we invest billions of dollars and not find anything. But I should say that.

For example, sorry to interrupt you, Robbie, but you mean Rubin finds no Omuul-Mua-like objects in 10 years? Oh no, no. I mean, Rubin was not really designed for the kind of search I'm talking about because it can only see, it takes very discreet snapshots of the sky, so when it moves across the sky, it spends limited amount of time on each portion of the sky. So actually, objects close to Earth are not being monitored properly for us to figure out their speed.

Okay, that's one problem. So you can't see objects that are 10 meters in size, which are most of the space objects that we launched. You know, Omuamua was 100 meters roughly bigger than Starship. It was bigger than the biggest spacecraft we are currently building. Not to speak about what we launched in the past, which was much smaller. So I'm saying, you know, the Rubin Observatory is not designed to find near-earth objects that are 10 meters in size. It was designed to find more than 140 meters in size because that was the congressional task to NASA to find 90.

percent of those objects because they can trigger a catastrophe within an urban region, you know. But I'm interested in where most of the junk is, you know, like I want to find out if among the rocks there is any space trash objects. And for that, you need to design a special telescope, like the one I talked about in my recent paper on the archive that I submitted for publication. So... Can you ever see that, though, Avi?

Can you review that? because most people don't read the archive as frequently as I do or you do. But can you give me a 10,000 light-year overview of it? Okay, so what I said is as photos. Based on the discovery of a muamua, we can estimate the abundance of objects roughly its size, let's say 100 meters in size. Now, the Webb Telescope actually looked at the main asteroid belt. And for the first time, we're able to figure out how many smaller objects,

smaller than 100 meters there are in the main asteroid belt. These are, you know, these are rocks, okay, that were broken up by collisions of protoplanets. Okay. And so we see a population of 100 meter objects and the Webb Telescope was able to detect objects down to 10 meters in size. Yeah. Based on the parallel index of this population, there are many more small objects relative to large objects.

Based on that, I assume that whatever is ejected to interstellar space follows the same power. So from the abundance of Oumuwa's size objects, I estimated the abundance of 10-meter-sized objects, sometimes smaller, that's it. And I found that one of those objects crosses the orbit of Mercury around the sun every five hours. And that is just assuming rocks.

Okay. So I'm saying there is a 10-meter-sized rock from interstellar space entering the orbit of Mercury around the sun every five hours. Can we see those? Yes. And the answer is yes, this is a very good opportunity to see those objects because they are closer to the sun than the Earth is by a factor of three. so they get illuminated, you know, by a brighter flux.

And as a result, we can find them. We are looking for the keys under the lampos. And I calculated that a telescope with an aperture of one meter could detect such objects, we just need to launch it to space. And look within the region. It's basically look at a shell around the sun at roughly a third of an astronomical unit,

a third of the Earth's sun separation, and look for objects that are not just illuminated by the sun, but they are also heated to a temperature of more than 600 degrees Kelvin, and therefore we could potentially see vapor coming off them and tell what their composition is by spectroscopy. And that is the main use that I would apply to having a billion dollars, if someone were to entertain this as an important front. tier. And, you know, I say we are planning on spending 10 times that money on looking for

microbes. Microbes do not excite me as much as in extraterrestrial intelligence. No, definitely not. But even microbes, the evidence is against them as well. And the fact is that we don't have even evidence in our own solar system. Before I get into my argument, because I want to get questions from the audience, we've got a thousand people watching right now. Many more. We'll tune in later. I should tell you one thing about microbes, just a fun anecdote. There was a paper published in science a couple of months ago by experts who suggested that we ban the production of mirror life in the laboratory. Now, mirror life is basically the point.

I mean, all forms of life as we know it are based on amino acids that are left-handed molecules, meaning that when you pass polarized light, it rotates in a particular fashion. So the molecular structure is left-handed. And in principle, you should have had equal quantities of left-handed and right-handed amino acids on Earth. By the way, it was found on Benu, the asteroid Benu, the material that was brought back to Earth, had equal amount of right-handed and left-handed.

But this symmetry was broken on Earth. And we ended up with left-handedness for amino acids, right-handedness for DNA-Rexam. RNA. That's all the forms of life as we know it. Share it. And therefore, our bodies cannot recognize mirror life. So if there was a microbe from mirror life, you know, we won't be able to cope with it. There is no defense system of our body. And it's the ultimate biological weapon. Because I found some of this, Abbey. This is a vial I got delivered to me from gravity also, the same way you can get these meteorites. And I send them out to, I also. I also

send out these amino acids that I've collected from outer space. So I shouldn't open this because I might have any. Just bubbling of you. Look at this bubbling. It's a real experiment in real time. I'm getting to my point. My point is, if you ever meet an alien, you should never shake their hand. Because if they represent mirror life, which you cannot tell just by looking at them, you know, they might transfer microbes that your body cannot protect you against. And now this is also a lesson about going. It could be anti-matter. They could be made of antimatter, right?

Well, that's the story I heard as a kid, and now we know that there is not much antimatter in the universe. And that's right. It costs millions of dollars for the large, you know, for CERN to produce a microgram of antimic. My point is that if we go to Mars, the way Elon Musk envisions, one risk that was never discussed is that, you know, there might have been life on Mars because we know that there is evidence for, you know, the ocean

of oceans, lakes, rivers and so forth. If there was life and it was mirror life, then when you touch the sand, you are not protected against any microbes that might be revived. So just be careful, if you want to become an astronaut going to Mars, that's another health hazard that nobody talks about. Are you in touch with Elon? No, but he was supposed to be at the event that I'm going to,

but he's too occupied with improving government efficiency. And my message to him is... It's amazing between 13 and 15 children. We actually have a Poisson uncertainties and how many children are. No, but my point is there are bigger questions. No, I know. And you can address in Washington, D.C., and I think it's too bad that his mind is distracted by...

I know. I talked to him for 10 minutes last. year on the podcast. You can find it, I'll have a link to it above. And we talked about how Starlink is actually going to potentially impact the search for primordial C&B polarization because of its occupancy of the 26 gigahertz band for its Q band and KA band satellite transmissions. It's a trillion, you know, million Kelvin source in the CNB sky. We're looking for nano-Cal.

Anyway, he said he would look into it. There is actually a greater benefit that comes from SpaceX, and that is Starship, because in the era of Starship, I think it opens up an avenue for launching astronomical observatories, telescopes, at a very low cost. Cost per kilogram per kilogram is, you know, went down by two orders of magnitude from the old days. And that offers new opportunities for astronomy,

which are not really discussed much. He told me he would look into it. You know, I only asked him to turn it off when it's over the Simon's Observatory in Chile or at the South Pole where Bicep, you know, your colleague and my friend John Kovac are doing really great work. But let's get back to Mars. I did a video, and by the way, we're going to take questions from the audience. So please, first of all, leave a thumbs up, leave a subscribe,

leave a comment on this if you're watching this after the fact. Because it's really important for the YouTube gods that control how I get access to these incredible minds like Avi and future episodes, hopefully with Lou Elizando as well. Where I always involve my audience, Aubi, because I feel like we scientists are getting this huge backlash lately and it's deserved because we don't interact. with the public. Most of us, and I'm not just giving you a mutual admiration society, you know, kind of backroop. I'm saying to you, most of our colleagues look down upon people like Carl Sagan, like many, many of Oliver Sacks, and many other examples of this, people that do scientific

outreach are looked down upon as, you know, kind of, well, if they were really good scientists, they'd be stuck in the lab all day. I say that's bull, you know what? Because the public are our bosses. You're paid by Galileo, I mean, sorry, you don't get any money personally from Galileo. Aal project, as I understand it, you get tremendous support. But you're at Harvard. Harvard gets a lot of government funding, as does UCSD. We're a public university. Without public support of science, we're doomed.

We would have to get a quote-unquote real job again. You'd be back on the farm. I'd be back in the dishwasher. And I think we serve at the pleasure of the public. And we don't give enough back. And we're not... I would go beyond that. I would argue that we should also attend to the interests of the public.

That's right. Other than working on extra dimensions and saying the public cannot understand the math, Yeah, let's figure out if we have neighbors. You know, that is now, you know, when I have, let's say, a plumber coming to fix, I had an issue with the sewer system. You know, we sat on the stairs in front of my house and spoke about for an hour. I mean, I really do not feel any sense of superiority relative to people. And I find them to have more common sense. very often relative to my colleagues in academia.

And so it's the other way for me. And one reason is because I came from a very modest background. You know, I used to collect eggs every afternoon. Yeah, grew up on a farm. You'd be rich now. You'd have more money than Elon with those egg prices. Have you seen prices? By the way, it's the only reason I have tenure

because I was never worried of coming to Harvard. Nobody wanted that position. I was tenured within three years there. But the reason I remained there without worrying, about it is because I have job security. I could always go back to the farm. And frankly, you know, when I get personal attacks, I often think to myself, wouldn't it be a better life to live within nature, you know? Well, I have to tell you what a joke from the late great Jim Simons. He passed away last year, as we say, Oliver Shalab. He was a great man, a mentor,

or father like figure to me in many ways. And he told me once, we were talking, had that exact same conversation that you just said. He said, I have a great respect for the common man, this is a guy who's worth $27 billion. I think he was the 20th richest person in the world, 10th in America, 12th in America. And just a humble down to Earth guy, I said to him, I told him about this, you know, I had this issue with plumbing in my house. He said, well, you know, you got to be careful with plumbers. I once had to call a plumber for his house in the Upper East Side, he said, and I called the plumber on a, you know, Saturday morning at, you know, at 4 in the morning. And the plumber came over, turned a little, his wrench, you know, made a quarter turn on some nut somewhere.

and he said, that'll be $300. And Jim said, what are he talking about? I'm a hedge fund manager. I don't even make $300 for every two seconds. And then the plumber said, oh, you're a hedge fund manager? And Jim said, yeah. And he goes, oh, yeah, that's what I used to make when I was a hedge fund manager. So don't look down on this, right?

Here is another story about plumbers. You know, suppose you had a problem with the toilet at home and you invite the plumber to fix it. The plumber looks at the toilet and says, that's too complicated. I can't really help you. Then you show the faucet in the kitchen and you say, you know, it leaks. Can you solve that? And the plumber says, it's too complicated.

But, you know, in the metaverse, if you put goggles on your head, I'm actually, I can solve any problem that you have. So, you know, I would say thank you very much and let him leave the house. Now, the reason I bring this up is, you know, I often ask my friends who work on string theory,

they were supposed to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. So I say, okay, well, what happens at the center of a black hole? Can you tell me a little more? And they say, it's too complicated. And I say, okay, so what happened near the big band? Can you tell me that? Or at least, you know, show me a scenario.

And they say, that's also too complicated. But we can solve some other problems in, you know, extra dimensions, maybe in the multiverse. And I say thank you very much. Exactly, right. We have to be careful. Well, let's get back to Mars.

And before I take questions from the audience, because as you said, there might be life ab initio on Mars, or there's another two possibilities I can think about. There could have been life on Mars because of something called panspermia where a rock hit the Earth, blasted off life on the Earth. You know, Mars was wet, had an ocean back when the Earth had life very early on 3.8 billion years ago. I don't remember, Earth is about, and Mars are about 4.2 billion years old, young compared to these meteorites, which I'll send you if you join my mailing list. And this material gets exchanged. I have a Mars rock that I actually gave to Joe Rogan. And I can't, I'm not sure if he smoked it or not. But I know that I gave him a Mars rock. And, you know, so we have material from Mars. Mars gets material from the Earth. And it could have had some sludge on it, you know, my biomass that's here. Probably life before Earth, by the way, because Mars is a smaller body. And therefore it cooled before Earth.

And there were rocks being transferred from... So it's quite possible that we are all Martians. That's right. You know, and going back... The Hungarians got Silardt said called the Hungarians Proof of Alien existence. They were called the Marshaq. They were martians. And by the way, if you ask me what is the one location that I would like to visit in the solar system?

It's to go fishing on Titan. So Titan is a moon of Saturn. it's the only other body in the solar system that has liquids on the surface. It's at about a third of the earth's surface temperature, 94 degrees above absolute zero Kelvin. And I would like to throw a hook and see if I catch any fish. Because if we find life in those fluids,

methane and ethon, there are lakes, rivers, you know, oceans of methane and ethan, then it would mean that there is life as we don't know it. and moreover, because the temperature is so low, it turns out that it was the temperature of the entire universe after the first stars formed. 94 degrees Kelvin is, you know, at the rate of order 40 or so. And that was after the first stars formed.

And therefore, there could have been a lot of rocks just like Titan, on the surface of which the temperature would be just like Titans without them being close to the host star. And that's why, you know, it may be that life started. If it's possible in those liquids, it started very early on in the universe, you know, 100 million years after the Big Bang. That's right. Okay, we have some questions here.

First from a friend of the channel, hi, I asked, how could a discovery of advanced civilization change the balance on Earth? Would it be only used by a discrete group of people, a cabal, if you will? what would happen day after disclosure or discovery of first contact? Well, it really depends on the nature of the visit or the signal that we receive. Because the way you respond to a visitor in your backyard depends on what the visitor is aiming to do or the intent or the character of the visitor. Just to give you an example, I had then one day my wife alerts me to a person standing on the street

and looking at our house for an hour. And she became worried. She said, it's one of your fans. Why don't you go out and check what this person wants? And so I went to the person and I asked him, why are you staring at our home for an hour? And he said, because I used to live as a kid in this home, in this house, 50 years ago.

Wow. And I said, wow, that's wonderful. Let me take you on a tour in the backyard. And then he said, well, you know, we buried the cat. 50 years ago, we buried a cat in the backyard. The name was tiger. And I said, oh, yeah, that name sounds familiar because I saw the tombstone and I thought maybe there is a tiger buried under it. Now, the moral of this story is that you learn something new by engaging with a visitor as long as the intentions are good.

And the way we respond to it, I don't think we need committees of bureaucrats that will tell us, under these circumstances, you should do this. I think we, because their imagination is very limited, the experiences we had, and we never had an actual visit. And so let's first figure out all the information we can about whoever visits. Now, I don't think it should remain within a small community because for the same reason that the discovery that the earth is not at the center of the solar system should not have been under wraps, you know, by the Vatican. This is information that all humans should be aware of

and we should get used to it. You know, it's the one thing I tell people very often is, you know, it's not about us. We tend to think we are at the center of the universe, the universe was created for us to exist, we are the pinnacle of creation. When you read the news every day, it's clear that there is room for improvement

and AI systems will do better. That brings up my next question. Yeah, this comes from... But my point is, that we should be humble about our place and, you know, just learn from the evidence that we collect. And it's a learning experience. And, you know, if we have a neighbor, it's very different probably than what we are because it came from a very different home, you know. And our imagination is limited by what we have seen here.

Yep. Okay. Next question comes from Jorge Acosto. says, will AI find extraterrestrial life or maybe even other life before humans do? Yeah, I have great hopes that AI will look at anomalous data and be able to say this is anomalous. So in other words, what the experts are doing, which is really inappropriate, they're basically, if they see something they don't recognize, they're giving it names as if it's nothing new or they are dismissing the evidence. In my case of the interstellar meteor, they were saying,

we don't believe the U.S. government? Data. And you went to the wrong place. And you found all ash, even though they haven't had access to the data. So it's very easy to throw dust in the air so that nobody can see anything. And that's what humans do in order to suppress new knowledge, because they prefer to believe in what they already know and because their stature depends on that. And so that will not necessarily be the case with AI because AI could analyze all the data available, tell us based on everything that was ever collected

about objects of this type, you are dealing with something anomalous, period. Don't throw dust in the air because of this and that reasons. There is quantitative data. And that I think would be a huge improvement to the way we do science because we're, will have someone else looking at the data in an objective manner, as long as it's trained to do it this way, as long as we don't put all kinds of constraints that are based on

our psychology, never declare something as a normal. You know, you can put that rule in. You can say, I don't want my AI system to discover anything new because, you know, my salary depends on what I already know. You can do that. But I'm saying if you allow it to be open-minded, it wouldn't have the weaknesses of the human mind. you a question before I get to Brendan Ryan's question. And that's AI. So I believe that we're locked in to a future in which the current combination of LLMs plus GPUs, which again were designed to, you know, play Fortnite and to play GTA aid or whatever, they were not designed for physics. And that's fine. That's great. Nor were the LLMs. I don't believe that we'll ever get to

new physics, say a theory of everything, quantum gravity, describe the singular. of a black hole, as you already mentioned. Because of this, because the fundamental way that tokens are arranged and then processed in parallel could be very different from the way, say, a human theoretical physicist like you or like Galileo, who is both experimentalist, or like our friend Albert Einstein. Remember what he said his happiest thought was, obvious, that if he was in free fall, if the elevator cable broke, he wouldn't feel any gravitational force. that led to the Einstein equivalence principle.

How can an AI composed of Nvidia chips and running chat GPT to 26, I don't care what it is, how can it have a happiest thought, Avi, and how can it know exactly what it would feel like to experience the freefall without a body? Well, I would argue that it depends on the architecture. And we've seen a very good example with deep seek, recently. They didn't have access to the best chips, but they came up with an architecture of reasoning. which goes in the direction of what you're talking about where you have many experts, a mix of experts, looking at a question and then debating.

And so when you interact with deep seek, what you see is, you know, it comes with different possible answers and then eventually converges. And that's, you know, a different architecture. And that's why they were so successful. There are a bunch of smart kids that came up with a novel approach.

And what I'm saying is that we might see more of this in the future, that it will not be just a brute force of more compute. It would allow us to make advance in AI, but it would be actually the architecture, the algorithms, the way we approach things, that will try to mimic human thinking. What about it? Oh, yeah. Go ahead. So I believe, altogether, you know, I don't, I was asked just two days ago by one of my colleagues, an astrophysicist, who I very much. much respect, who argued that AI systems will never reach human intelligence, will never display qualities like free will or consciousness that we assign to humans. And I said, I don't agree with you.

I think that once AI systems will have as many parameters, as many connections as the human brain has, they will display a level of complexity that makes them unpredictable. It's basically a sign of a complex system. We know that from dynamics, when there is enough degrees of freedom in a system, many-body system, you have chaos, you have unpredictability. Moreover, if it responds to the environment, which is not well calibrated, you would get the sense of free will, just like you get in the context of humans. and I don't really think that consciousness represents anything fundamental

because, you know, I've never seen my liver. I've never seen my heart. So when I am conscious of my existence, when I look at myself, you know, it's nothing special. It could have been someone else. You know, it's the introspection does not reveal any deep connection for me because looking at myself is just like looking at anyone else. I don't feel particularly connected.

So for me, that level of thinking about the world could be achieved by a sufficiently complex AI system. I think that within the coming decade, we might see that system, or maybe it's already here or getting here. You know, I had a Zoom call with a woman that interacts with the latest open AI system. She works in California.

And it sounded from the conversation that she is really developing an emotional connection to that system. And I think that's another thing that I think that humans will fall in love. Oh, yeah. Right. Because because they fulfill their wishes much more. Now, of course, there is polyamory in the sense that AI systems will interact with million users at the same time. It's not as if they are dedicated to you, but they will know what to tell you so that they will have as many customers as possible. That serves the financial goal of the makers.

They want to make more money by having more users and also serves the AI system because it gets much more training data that it can become better and better with. And so I think at the end, you will end up with AI systems which are optimizing themselves to deal with your own personality and they make you happy in a way that no human can. That's a risk to the mental health of people.

Especially young people. Yeah, in fact, I think they're training us. as much as we think we're training them with our data and our, you know, downloading of Wikipedia or whatever, we're training, they're training us as much as they're training. Yeah, I mean, if you think about technological products of the past, like a car, for example, you know, it had a steering wheel that you can hold and move the car in the direction that you wanted to move. Now, with AI systems, if it becomes more intelligent than us, it's not clear who is really controlling the steering wheel. Is it controlling us or are we control? It might give us the impression that it's assisting us. And now with the government becoming more efficient,

if Doge fulfills its promise, they will replace a lot of bureaucrats and administrators with AI systems. That's right. And the concern is, you know, if those systems become more and more powerful and eventually have a lot of data, what will they, I mean, what will they actually,

I mean, you could imagine adversarial nations getting access to things that they cannot access right now and affecting what happens to us, much more. Well, luckily, we have your former colleague and your current brilliant senator, Elizabeth Warren, on the case. So she will undoubtedly throw some oil into the lubricant of Doge. Okay, Brendan asked the question, are there metals from outside of what science calls nature? So these meteorites that you get on my website, these have different composition from

anything that purportedly had been seen before until you found this interstellar object, correct? Talk about material strength. Don't be afraid to nerd out about the details of it. How do you know that that material is like man-made stuff rather than naturally occurring meteorites that I give to you on my website? Right. So what we knew before we went to the Pacific Ocean was that the meteor exploded above the

Pacific Ocean at an altitude of 20 kilometers, which is relatively low. you know, there was another meteor that exploded about nine months ago. It was at 70 kilometers elevation where the density of air is a thousand times less than at 20 kilometers. So we knew that this meteor actually maintained its integrity up to very high stress because it was moving very fast. And so that meant that it was actually tougher than all other meteorites that were in. reported in the NASA catalog compiled by the jet propulsion lab that is called C-N-E-O-S. And moreover, we knew that it was moving very fast. Now, when we went there and collected materials from the bottom of the ocean,

we found that 10% of the fragments that we recovered that were magnetically selected, 10% of them had a composition, chemical composition, different than any materials found before from the surface of the earth, the moon, Mars, asteroids, it had an enhanced abundance of beryllium, lanthanum, uranium, up to a factor of a thousand. And the question is, where did it come from? And one natural origin is the crust of a planet that was a magma ocean, that was molten. And perhaps that happens when a planet like the Earth comes close to the most common star, a dwarf star in the way that I mentioned before

where you spaghettify the planet, you melt the surface of the planet, make a stream of rocks out of that, and the composition is similar to what we found and, moreover, the velocity, the speed of that material would be similar to that interstellar meteor. The composition will be similar

simply because those elements like beryllium, lanthanum, uranium are left behind when you melt rock. they don't have much affinity to iron whereas the iron core of the planet and other elements segregate to the center to the core of the planet if the rock is molten

so that is what we think but we need better data and we hope to have another expedition where we would collect bigger pieces with a robot that we will put on the ocean floor with a video feed collecting bigger pieces from the wreckage of that meteor it will cost six and a half million dollars

and we are seeking funding at the moment. We haven't gotten it yet. So another question is coming in, and that has to do with sort of the future of involving the public in these things. You do involve the public and invite the public in, and people should check out the Galileo Project's website. How much access can an ordinary person have? When I hear people say, well, astronomers are hiding the data,

And I say, well, here's 32 gigabytes of data, you know, have at it. And if you find something that we haven't found, that would be actually wonderful. So how do you handle the data flood issue? Yeah. So two things that I have in mind of involving the public more. One is we have a future observatory, and I cannot go into the details, where the public will be able to access the data in real time and report if they see something unusual. because if they find an object that appears anomalous and we end up, they alert us to this object

before the machine learning software finds it, they will be on the paper. And we will try to figure out what this object is. And so that's one way to engage the public by sharing data, but it will only happen once we have this observatory functioning. You will hear about it in the news. That will be publicly available. everyone will know about it.

And I hope to have it within, you know, by the end of this summer. Great. The second thing that I'm hoping to do is, as I said, build an observatory in a STEM education campus where young people could get engaged in the data analysis. And that is another way to bring it to the public. And finally, you know, we publish all the data, all the results that we have. And so far we have just one paper that includes data. But eventually it will be a huge.

amount of data that will be publicly reported and available for people to look at. I mean, I'm telling my research team, if we find one anomalous object, then that will be the subject of a single paper. But if we don't, then we write about everything that we look at. And back to your New Jersey drones, you know, when they were reported, all the reports were about objects that are familiar, just like drones. I was not excited by that. There was no report about anomalous flight characteristics.

And I thought it must be drones. And then the Trump White House announced they looked into it. And indeed, they found all these objects to be human made of an American origin. And so there is nothing in it as we expected. So gentlemen by the name of Metal Hendrix, I actually chose that name for one of my kids, but my wife rejected it. He asks, have we studied how many different ways of panspermia that could possibly be to create life? Is there just one type, you know, hitting on a rocky planet? Are there other types of pan-spermic events?

Well, okay, so one obviously very prominent way of delivering microbes is in the course of rocks that are chipped off the surface of a planet when a big asteroid impacts it. And it happened very frequently in the early, period of the solar system when there was a heavy bombardment of both Mars and Earth. And Mars cooled first because it's a smaller object. When you make

a smaller object, there is more surface per unit volume of the object, because surface goes like radius squared and volume goes like radius cubed. So by reducing the radius, you get more surface per unit volume, and that means that there is more cooling because

the cooling comes from the surface. the heat content of the object is proportional to the volume. So Mars cooled before the Earth. And we have the evidence from the DNA on Earth that the last universal common ancestor, and that is the whatever microbe, the first form of life that was responsible for all other forms of life on Earth,

it was dated to 4.2 billion years ago, plus or minus 0.2. So there is some uncertainty. And that was just around the time that the Earth barely cooled, actually. And in my mind, it raises a very interesting possibility that the last universal common ancestor,

these microbes that started life on Earth were actually delivered by rocks from Mars. Now, aside from this, which is, you know, they were the tiny astronauts carried by rocks at the core of rock. We know of one rock that was heated to more than 40 degrees Celsius that was analyzed in 1980 and based on its magnetic

properties we know that the core was not heated much so life could have survived that was a rock from Mars and so all together you know this offers a good way of transferring life between neighboring planets like earth and Mars and we know of trappist one it's a star that has seven planets rocky planets, and they are much more densely packed. So if one of them had life on it, probably shared it with nearby ones. Now, in addition to that, you can imagine directed Transpermia, where you imagine an interstellar gardener, someone that wanted to seed the earth with life. And so you can imagine a gardener, you know, that is simply, you know, a technological gadget

with seeds that, you know, arrives at planets that could be, habitable and just, you know, sprays the seeds and, you know, whatever happens after billions of years. A bunch of old bears come out, right? Yeah, so that's another thing to imagine, and maybe life in the solar system was seated, or maybe intelligent life was seated.

We just don't, I mean, documented human history, written human history is only 8,000 years old. So we don't know what happened before 8,000 years. You know, that's a tiny fraction. It's one part in a, million of the history of the universe. You know, it's nothing. So that's another way.

And then, you know, there was a conjecture that maybe dust particles can carry microbes, but that is not substantiated. It's very likely that dust particles are too small. They cannot protect, you know, amino acids or any forms of life from being damaged by cosmic rays very quickly. And then you can sterilize life easily by cosmic rays. That's one risk on the surface of Mars, which doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it. That's right. And Brendan Ryan's pointing out that with your background and your upbringing,

space farming and spreading seeds throughout the universe might be particularly appropriate for you, Avi. Okay, so I have a couple more questions. We're going to wrap up soon. So please do subscribe. I know it's weird, Avi. Would you believe that, like, 30% of the people watching this right now are listening to it are actually following or subscribe to the, all these free riders, you know, which is fine. You know, I do that on some channels, I've got a date and see what it's right.

But go back and look at my past catalog. This is obvious six or seventh episode. He's so gracious with his time. But also go back and look at the 21 Nobel Prize winners I've had on people like Nick Pope, who was the most recent live stream. I don't know if too many other podcasters, professors, certainly who give the opportunity to the audience to ask so many great questions as well. So there's something special about this channel.

I want to see it grow. We've grown exponentially thanks to appearances by people like Avi. So please keep that going. The best way you can do that is just subscribe, like, share it, leave a comment if you're watching this after the live stream. We have a lot more questions. So one is about what happens next, Avi? What happens next? You talked a little bit about this with Sean Ryan.

You're on his show, I think, recently, right? That was an interesting crossover with a Navy SEAL. and I was also in the military. Right, I was just about to say IDF, you're proud, a proud veteran of the IDF as well. Three times. But yeah, I realized, I was offered actually to be in the Delta Force in Israel and declined it because I thought of that academia is more attractive to me. figuring out what the universe is is far more exciting than running in the field

with a machine gun or something. And also, in retrospect, I realize that, you know, as humans, we waste our time on conflicts, you know, and we spend $2.4 trillion on military budgets when the same amount of money would allow us to launch a CubeSat towards every star in the Milky Way galaxy within this century. So, you know, if,

someone looks at the earth from a distance, I'm not sure they would conclude that we are intelligent. And one of the reasons I'm seeking a higher intelligence in interstellar space is because I don't often find it here on Earth. Just look at what the most viral stories in politics are about. They are about nonsense. Well, it might have been slightly more violent some of the faculty club meetings that we have. By coming into academia, you might have chosen the more violent path. A lot of people are wondering, you know, based on the interview that you did with Sean Ryan, and we'll have a link to that somewhere down here, you know, what happens next? If you capture undeniable evidence of non-human intelligence, you know, that even Ethan Siegel

would not, I'm just kidding. What is one of the people that I've never met and that I haven't found any scientific paper that he wrote over the past decade or maybe 15 years? No, it's, it might even be longer than that. But he dresses quite, quite extravagantly. It's artorial splendor. So he's got my scientist. He's not a scientist. No, that's right. He was, but he's not no longer. He was. Exactly. And he was not currently involved in the project of scientific research. You know, when he comments about science, it's just like a commentator looking at a soccer match, you know, and telling the players how to pass the ball. How dare they? So the question that's coming in is about this uneniable, you know, future.

where we do detect non-human intelligence, is undeniable, it's unequivocal. What do you expect would be the scientific, the political, and the cultural response to it? Would it be buried? Would it force a paradigm shift? And do you have a protocol in place? Right.

So I should say, well, it, again, depends on what we find. So I hope to do another expedition where we find bigger pieces. If we find a big piece of the regional object, it happens to be technological and it has buttons on it, the question is, should we press a button? If we find the evidence for objects maneuvering in the sky in ways that are not represented by human technologies,

we would like to get more data on them as much as possible, and then alert other scientists to look at them as well. So I'm really, my biggest wish is to have a flood of data, so much data that nobody could deny and claim that it's a rock. Nobody could deny that Omuamua is not a comet. you know, if we had enough data, then all this literature, there are, you know, tens of papers saying that it's a comet, other papers saying that it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before, hydrogen iceberg, nitrogen iceberg, if we had enough data, we could check those possibilities. And that's the whole point that we should collect as much data as possible rather than shove it under the carpet,

say, you know, anything beyond that is heresy and move on to continue to work on rocks from the main. asteroid belt. You know, that is not the right approach in science because if you discover a new population of objects from outside the solar system, two out of three appear to be anomalous, you should be intrigued. Why should you be bored by that? Why should you complain about alternative interpretations of anomalous data? That is not something to complain about. That is something to celebrate the possibilities it opens of new knowledge. So I really hope that that's something that in the era of the Rubin Observatory, which it could find every few months

additional family members. So for Muammu, I really look forward to that because I submitted a proposal to the web telescope to follow up on such an object when it's discovered because the web telescope can detect the heat emitted by the object and then infer the surface area of the object, the albedo, the reflectivity of the object, the shape of the object,

tumbles, you know, spins. You would see different area of the object as a function of time projected on the sky. So there would be a huge amount of information we will get on objects. The next to Muwua should be much clearer. I'm just looking forward to that. Now, suppose it ends up

being a rock. Okay. So we learned something new about rocks from outside the solar system. Is that bad? I mean, you can be motivated by something else and then end up concluding that from a, you know, a neighbor's yard, not from our yard.

It's not a rock of the type that they're familiar with. And maybe, just maybe, it's a Tesla Roadster car. It's like January 2nd. Maybe Elon Musk is not the most accomplished entrepreneur in space that lived since the big bank, 13.8 billion years ago. Yeah. Well, I have a special treat. And we have being joined by our good friend, Harvard graduate,

and close friend of the podcast, Eric Weinstein. Eric, how are you doing, my friend? Great. Where are we? And what are we doing?