Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Harvard’s Avi Loeb- Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (#113)

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization. In Extraterrestrial, Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theory and its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending journey through the furthest reaches of science, space-time, and the human imagination, Extraterrestrial challenges readers to aim for the stars—and to think critically about what’s out there, no matter how strange it seems. https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. I'm your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, doing a continuing series of pandemic podcast. Today we have a phenomenal guest, and that is Avi Loeb, who's a legend in our community, is the author of literally 700 research referee journal articles, several textbooks, a new textbook on the way. I think he was writing it as I'm doing the interview with him. He's so productive, but his book today that we're discussing is a popular science book that you're going to love called Extraterrestrial. And it's about this rather startling claim that he believes that the discovery in 2017 of an object traversing our solar system at an extremely high velocity, much higher than

even the Saturn 5 rocket achieved on its way to the moon, uh, leads credence to a claim that he makes and fleshes out in this book, that there's only one conceivable explanation for this object. It was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization. So certainly it's a controversial claim, but it also really illuminated and exposed a dark, deep secret of the scientific underbelly, in obvious opinion. When he had colleagues and even former students, et cetera, they turned their back on him, they shunned him. And I think it's really kind of a glimpse into the psychology of science, herdism, and other phenomena that you've

find in science where authorities can either be accepted without question or they can be targets of approbation and maybe even a desire to take them down a peg to get to get them back or to somehow benefit from their from their accomplishments. So we talked about a lot of things. We talked about the full theory of how he believes this object was sent, Omuamua, from a distant solar system, what it means, why he thinks is very likely that it is alien technology, not just a piece of space schmutz. We also talk a lot about the nature of science itself and risk-taking and how little risk-taking and how much, not obfuscation in the sense of making up data, but lack of transparency maybe is a better word, and how that intentionally, in his opinion,

is being undertaken by our fellow science. to maybe protect and confuse the public and even funding agencies to advance certain agendas. You're going to hear he's vehemently anti, you know, kind of extraordinary, extraordinary claims about theories of everything, such as we've been exploring on this podcast. And I think it's refreshing to get this view. We don't agree on everything. I pushed on him in a couple of situations. But it was a really fascinating conversation.

I know you're going to love. I ask you to do me one favor and one favor only. I don't have advertisers yet on this podcast. So I'm asking you to pay me back. So I don't have to necessarily go there. Maybe I would if the right opportunity approached itself. But for now, I like to have it nice and clean and only ask you to do one thing, and that's to leave a rating, review, and subscribe and for the podcast to other people.

Avi's really a fascinating person. I want people to hear about his controversial ideas. So please do that. Subscribe, leave a rating on iTunes, subscribe on YouTube and on iTunes, or wherever you get a podcast. And I hope you enjoy this episode of an out of this world,

episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Today, we are speaking with none other than Professor Avi Loeb, who is a legend in his own time. And he may be a,

a legend, even intergalactically, we're going to find out about that. He's the most productive. I think he's writing a paper as we speak. He's the author of 700 papers. I've read about 665 of those. I'm working on the remainder. By the end of the week, I should be done. But today we're talking about his book, a phenomenal book called Extraterrestrial. Avi, how are you doing today? Thank you. I'm doing very well. Actually, I should say that over the past nine months, It has been the most productive period in my life because I was at home under house arrest, so to speak, thanks to the pandemic, and didn't have to commute to work. And most importantly, didn't have to listen to remarks from colleagues that make no sense. And so I could just work on my research and write papers and essays.

And it was a very productive time. Every morning I jog out. I go to the woods and surrounded by ducks, birds, and rabbits. And it has been a very enriching period of time for me. Yeah. I've been trying to get, I've had on Ray Weiss on the podcast in the last month. I've had on Barry Barish, and I'm trying to get the Troika, including Kip Thorne. And he keeps agreeing to come on the podcast on the end of the Impossible podcast.

But he says that he can't resist how productive he's been the last few months. and he has to keep postponing our conversation ever, ever longer. So, and one of the characters in the book we'll talk about, obviously, it was no stranger to science popularization and getting stuff done, including during very difficult times. And of course, I'm speaking about my hero, and I suspect yours too, Galileo Galilei, the first observational astronomer. He plays a big role in extraterrestrial. Before we get there, Avi, I want to ask you, how'd you come up with the title? How'd you come up with the cover design, and what is it like to write a mass hit like this is sure to be when it comes to be your role, not inside the traditional role of a Harvard astronomy professor, but as a popularizer and communicator of science? So first of all, the name of the book, the subtitle, and the cover design.

Where did it come from? Yes. So I should say titles and labels are the list of my concern. So I have a lot of leadership titles. You know, I'm the director of two centers at Harvard, the chair of national committees and so forth. That's not really what I care about. You know, I'm driven mostly by curiosity. And just as I was when I was a child, you know, trying to understand the world, that's pretty much from a point of view of being modest.

You know, that's pretty much what I'm about. And the same is true about the book. The title, the subtitle, and the cover were. selected by the publisher, the editor and my literary agent. I am really, you know, mostly responsible for the content. And therefore, I would highly recommend not to pay attention or significance to the cover, judge the book by, not by its cover, but by what it has inside as the same goals. Yeah. So I usually ignore that advice and always judge the book by the cover. But you're absolutely in good company.

because this book is called the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, written by your late colleague or the forward written to it by Stephen J. Gould, of course, at Harvard. But the forward to the original edition, 1913, written by some guy named Albert Einstein. I have all these voodoo dolls here, and I'll be showing them. I had one made up of you, too, Avi. You'll get to see that at the very end if you cooperate. But no. Mori to bother.

Just teasing. that point, but Galileo, do you know what the original title for this book was, Avi? No. It was on the flux and reflux of the tides in oceans and ferns. I don't know what a fern is. I kind of looked it up, but he was forced by essentially the index of the Catholic Church's Inquisition to change it to a much more appropriate and interesting title, in my opinion, the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems. And I've actually seen an original copy this a colleague of ours, Professor Jay Passacoff at Williams College. He donated a copy to the

Williams College Library. He was, of course, a student of Donzel Menzel at Harvard, whose position you have basically, right, as chair. So it's quite delicious to talk to you and recollect these things about great scientists, including Galileo. You make the point in the book, not directly comparing yourself to Galileo, of course, that would be immodest and so forth. But you do compare the reaction by colleagues who should know better and should have the comity to trust somebody like you. It's not like you're a crackpot. I get emails every day. I'm sure you do too.

Professor Loeb, Einstein was wrong. I can show you how he's wrong, but I'm not good at math. So if you help me, I'll split the Nobel Prize with you. And I actually talked to Harvard alum Adam Reese, and he said, yeah, how do you think I won the Nobel Prize? But what do you make of this? Sometimes, you know, people attack for obvious reasons. Actually, Galileo was wrong about the tides, as you know. That was an incorrect piece of evidence.

What do you make about people that have a bit of knowledge and really just kind of disregarding you and your claims in this book that we've been visited by not only intelligence, but technology from an alien civilization? Right. So the example I like to bring up is a book that was written about Einstein's theory of relativity in the 1930s arguing that it's wrong and there were you know several tens of people signed on the book and when Einstein was asked about it he said why do you need so many people it's sufficient to have one kid make the argument and explain why I'm wrong I don't need the

crowd of people you know so a crowd gives people the authority you know and that was true in the days of Galileo, the philosophers, the church, you know, they were the crowd, and he was a single individual trying to argue something that was not popular at the time. And he said, look through my telescope. Look at the evidence. And the earth actually, I think, moves around the sun. And they said, we don't want to look through a telescope. We know the truth. And they put him in house arrest. And of course, the point of the matter is that it did change the fact that the earth continues to move around the sun. It just maintained their ignorance. So we can bury our head in the sand. We can put blinders and not look at reality. But the fact that we ignore reality doesn't change

reality. Reality stays the same. The duty of a scientist is to find out what the world is, not to close or put blinders on our view, not to avoid looking through telescopes, not to dismiss anomalies when they are found. And, you know, it's a lesson from history. And it's very unfortunate in the current culture of science, this is not the guiding principle. Instead, you know, so you might say, okay, maybe the scientific community is very conservative. And to that I would argue great, because believing that if you reproduce the conditions on Earth on billions of planets, you know, We now know that half of the stars like the sun have a planet of the size of the Earth at a similar distance from its star. And therefore, liquid water may exist on its surface in the chemistry of life as we know it.

And you roll the dice billions of times. What's the chance that we are the only ones? You know, very small. So the conservative view would be to say that if you reproduce the conditions on Earth, you get the same outcome. Let's go and search for it. That is supposed to be the mainstream view. and instead it's a fringe view and the mainstream says

don't ever talk about alien technologies, don't even speak about the possibility that you know, we might be common out there because, you know, we don't want to talk about it. There is a taboo and anyone that talks about it

immediately gets dismissed or ridiculed. And, you know, frankly, I don't care how many likes I have on Twitter because, as I said before, if you ignore reality, it doesn't matter, you know, and the duty of me as a scientist is to behave just like a kid, you know, I don't care about what my colleagues say and, you know, try to understand. And by the way, making mistakes is part of being a scientist.

You know, if you look at Einstein at the end of his career in the 1930s, he made three mistakes. He argued that black holes don't exist, the gravitational waves don't exist, and that quantum mechanics doesn't have action, you know, at a distance, spooky action at a distance. he was wrong on all three counts, but that's part of being at the cutting edge of science. So my point is, as basketball coaches say, we should keep our eyes on the ball and not on the audience. So I want to highlight a passage that you have in the book, which is kind of reminiscent of some statements I've made to others on the podcast, including colleagues of yours across the way in the physics department like Humman Vafa, who's been on the show, recently, we'll get to that. But it's a statement attributed to this guy, this finger puppet.

This is Carl Sagan. And I had his wife, his widow, Andruyan, on the podcast. And I had his daughter on the podcast as well. But he's reputed to have saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I've never sat around in my laboratory and said, okay, my grad students, you know, my post. Let's wait. That's evidence. But let's wait for the extraordinary evidence. What do you make of that saying and how flipping our colleagues are often to dismiss things? Maybe there's a chance they're wrong or a chance they're right, but to dismiss it as, well, this is so much bigger or more important. And who, by the way, gets to say what counts as, you know, extraordinary, except for those that want to make a judgment call? So what do you make about

that often use trope that extraordinary claims require we go into the special file cabinet marked extraordinary evidence? Well, as you said, I think extraordinary is a label that is very subjective because even if you talk about dark matter, you know, weakly interacting massive particles might be extraordinary to one person and quite natural to another person. So we should look for evidence. Let's put it this way. We should be guided by evidence.

And we should not dismiss evidence that has anomalies just because it's not extraordinary. Because if you want to believe only things that have extremely high resolution and you would never converge in science, you know, look at the evidence that was found in favor of Einstein's theory of generativity by Eddington, right? It was very marginal for the deflection of light by the sun. And in fact, one of the experiments did not support Einstein. And nevertheless, Eddington fudge did and argue that there is support. And, you know, then general relativity. was accepted. Now, would you argue, well, that was an extraordinary claim, and therefore we shouldn't believe Eddington? No, it turned out that generativity was correct. So I would say, let's just be guided by evidence, not talk about extraordinary, and whenever there is something anomalous that we cannot explain naturally, we should discuss possible explanations. If you look at the opposite situation where very commonly the scientific community converges behind an accepted notion. For example, that the dark matter, most of the matter in the universe, which we don't know

the nature of, maybe weakly interacting massive particles. That was the dominant view for decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in experiments trying to find that particle. Without success, right now there are only upper limits, constraints, but nobody blames those experimentalists for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to rule out suggestions. Because that's part of the scientific learning experience. You know, sometimes go in directions that turn out not to lead anywhere. And so the point is that even if the scientific community believes that something is natural

and not extraordinarily speculative, it turns out to be wrong. So I think that we should remove the word extraordinarily from the equation. And just look at evidence. You find mainstream people that worked for decades now. These are people working on string theory, extra dimensions, the multiverse, super symmetry, ideas that are mainstream for which awards were given, for which people got their ego boosted, for which people feel very proud of themselves and discuss it at length, even though there is no experimental evidence. So why doesn't that, you know, why does that attract the attention of the mainstream,

even though it's extraordinary? Having an extra dimension is really extraordinary. There is no evidence for it. Nevertheless, communities of thousands of physicists work on it. So to argue that the search for extraterrestrial technologies is speculative, and therefore it shouldn't be discussed. There should be a taboo about discussing it, whereas to discuss exo dimension is completely legitimate. That to me is a distortion of the spirit of science because we know that we exist. There is evidence for that.

And therefore, we should look for others out there. And how dare the scientists not work on a subject that is of so much interest to the public when the public funds science? So there is, you know, in this equation, there is a lot of arrogance of the scientific community saying, we don't want to deal with a question that the public cares about, even though we have the technology to address it. We want to do intellectual gymnastics demonstrating to each other that we are smart, working in extra dimensions,

working on anti-de-seater space in which we can solve some complicated equations for which, you know, there is no connection to reality between that and the space that we live in, which is decider, not anti-de-seater. We give each other awards

for working on anti-de-seater space, and we are extremely proud of the accomplishments that we reach mathematically in that space, give accolades and say how great the situation is because a thousand people are working on this. Instead of connecting it to the real world, instead of connecting it to the real people. Who cares what anti-de-seater space properties are

in the general process? public, nobody. And why is this part of the mainstream when the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not? To me, the current scientific culture has a big problem. It's geared towards improving your self-image towards building an echo chamber around you that would make your voice louder and maintain a bigger image of yourself so that you can get awards, get into important societies and get more likes on Twitter. But that's completely orthogonal to the actual purpose of science, which is a dialogue with nature, having experiments educate us, correct our notions.

Quantum mechanics would never be thought of if there were no experiments. In fact, Einstein resisted quantum mechanics, the standard. You know, he had a problem with that. But we would never think about quantum mechanics without the experimental feedback. So experiments help us improve our imagination and just tossing it aside and saying, I don't need experiments. You know, I can think about anti-de-situ space and come up with the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. To me, first, it's arrogant. Second, it's the wrong approach.

We're heading the wrong, you know, we took the wrong turn in the highway. And, you know, that's a strategic decision because you are guiding. Heard of young scientists in directions that do not lead anywhere. So you and I were last together in 2014, cruising down some highway in Moscow, going to a conference commemorating the 100th birthday of Yaakov Zeldovich, who was sort of a grand advisor of mine. And, you know, we're going down the highway. And it was just a few months after the Bicep Two affair that I describe in my book, losing the Nobel Prize.

And before we get to the topic of, you know, this sort of, you know, way that the public perceived science, the way that there's sort of this, you know, military industrial complex, or I call it the media industrial complex, where you everything has to be this huge discovery because we're all terrified that the public's going to realize that, you know, basically we would do what we do for free. I mean, you talk about your childhood in such, you know, in such very simple terms, but very lovingly, tenderly describing what it was like to grow up in. in Israel, as you did, a very simple way of life and almost pleasant, almost longingly, melancholy for that simple time. And now we live in, like, everything has to be this huge smash hit that could someday garner a Nobel Prize. I was told by my chair at the time, whose father was Dmitri Bassov, his father was Nikolai Bassov, who won the Nobel Prize for Co-invention of the laser. He was like, we hired you because we thought you had a good chance of winning the Nobel Prize. And, you know, and how about that? We came very close, and, of course, we'll get a into that. But I do want to take one step back. I do think that theorists in general have sort of

an advantage, a built-in asymmetry in that it's easy to create theories. It's very hard to test theories. So you and I are both Jewish. We both know the famous catechism of Judaism is the shma, which is basically means here, oh, Israel, but we won't get into theology very much unless you want to. But there's a line in there and it says, do not follow after your eyes or after your heart after which you stray. And actually in Hebrew, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it really means like prostitute yourself, that people will basically subjugate their morality, their love of their spouse for money or for power or for whatever.

And I think that's sort of a sign that the Bible is warning us about confirmation bias, and that we tend to fall in love with our ideas and feel that science is a zero-sum game, that if string theory, if there are extraterrestrials, if Omuramura is extraterrestrial, then it's going to take away attention, dollars, research funding from five-dimensional ADS-CFT. Now, my other friends, are your friends, Elisa Randall, who's been on the show and of Kormon Woffa, they'll say, no, no, no, this is not just interesting math. We actually make predictions. And I asked him, well, I didn't know that string theory may's testable predictions that we can confront with the experiment.

And he said, yes, the string theory has predicted that the mass of the electron has to be somewhere between 10 to the minus 23, you know, plank masses and 10 to the minus one plank masses. And I said, you know, there you go. And I said, well, the string theory predict that my weight is below, you know, 10 to the 13th kilograms. I mean, that's true. I mean, the question should be reversed. Can they put some skin in the game? Can they say, make a prediction that can be proven wrong? And, you know, that's an interesting question because Qumran Vafa himself gave a colloquium in which he said, you know, string theory landscape implies something about cosmic inflation. And I wrote to him afterwards. I said, great. So if we, from the microwave background, anisotropis, discover that inflation occurred differently than the kind of description you gave, would that rule out string theory? He said, no, it would rule out the connection that I drew between string theory and...

Or a particular model. And string theory will always be right. And I said, okay, well, then it's not a prediction. How can you say that something is a prediction if you can't rule it out? So you see, the point is they are not putting skin in the game. And it reminds me of theology. But let me give you an example where theology, actually three examples where theology can put some skin in the game. Okay, one example.

My book inspired a student in the English department to pursue a PhD related to the search for extraterrestrial life. Just a few months ago. And she invited me to the thesis exam. And in the thesis exam, one of the professors asked her, do you know why Giordano Bruno was burnt on the stake? And she said, well, you know, he was an obnoxious person. people didn't like him, which is true.

It is, yeah. But the professor said, no. Actually, it's because he argued that other stars are like the sun, and they could have a planet around them like the Earth, which could potentially host life. And the church found it offensive because if that life sinned, then Christ should have visited those other planets, and you need multiple duplicates of Christ, which is unacceptable.

And so they burn the guy. So I said, great. I said to this professor, great, so you are offering now an experimental test of this theology because suppose we find intelligent life on a planet, we visit that place, we see that these creatures sin, and we ask them, did you witness Christ? And if they say no, then we rule out experimentally, that theology. So that's an example for ruling out a theology. It's an expensive experiment.

It's an expensive experiment. You know, Martin Buber is quoted by Elie Wiesel as saying, you know, the Christians argue that the Messiah arrive and will come back again. the Jews say that the Messiah will only arrive in the future. He said, why argue both sides agree that the Messiah will arrive in the future? When the Messiah arrives, we can ask him or her. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV.

Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is out. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.

Were you here before and resolved the conflict? It's a very simple experimental test of one theology or the other. A third example. Abraham, you know, when he heard a voice that told him to sacrifice his son, you know, that's a story from the Bible. Yeah. Right. So suppose Abraham had a cell phone with a voice memo on it up, you know, if he had that up, he would just press the button and record the voice, right?

and make everyone on earth a believer. Unfortunately, these apps were not available at the time of Abraham. But it's another test of theology. But even for theology, you have tests. So if string theory cannot come up with such a test, cannot put some skin in the game, then what are we talking about? I think we're talking about, you know, kind of this dominant paradigm. And just like, I think that people have, you know,

I am a practicing Jew. I call myself a devout agnostic because like Freeman Dyson, who plays a big role in the book as well, Freeman regarded the question of God's existence as definitely a puzzle, but perhaps a mystery. In other words, maybe it could be solved like a Rubik's Cube. And I told this to Come Run because his book is called puzzles to unravel the universe. And I said, you know, Comron, do you ever play with a Rubik's Cube? And he said, sure. And I said, yeah, I can get five sides of the Rubik's Cube all the right color.

but I never get that six. Can you help me out? And he didn't get it. He didn't get it. But anyway, he's a wonderful person. I really enjoy talking to him and that he did go on the record. But the fact is, he felt his need to really subsume this. But getting back to the proving of God, I just want to take a side note. Even the thing that I like about, so I was a Roman Catholic altar boy in the Catholic church that I described in my book. I was an atheist. Now I'm a practicing, practicing agnostic, but the point is I've had a lot of exposure to different religions. And I found in my book, I actually had it as a test as well, because as you know, the fifth commandment is Kivud Avvaeim. So honor thy mother and thy father. It's very important. It's the first religion

that put women on equal status in that level that you couldn't just honor your father. You had to honor your mother as well. So I said about kind of this quest in my book, basically if you could if you could prove that inflation took place, that might lead credence to the inflationary narrative, but that might be rejected by people, right? You might say, well, like Paul Steinhart, our mutual colleague and friend, he might say, well, inflation predicts an infinite number of different. So even if you did provide evidence, scientists might not accept it. And so, too, I said, well, one thing I could do is honor my mother and my father and see,

unique among all ten commandments, there's actually a reward promised for Kiva. Do you remember what it is? No. What is it? So the reward is that your days on earth, your days will be lengthened. So it's the only mitzvah that promises a reward besides shooing away the mother bird from her nest. We won't get into that. But there's two commandments.

So I said, hmm, that's pretty interesting. It could be falsified. You could falsify the Torah if you honor your mother and father and then you die at a young age. We're not going to get into that. But my question is, looking at evidence, scientists will dismiss things, you know, as Arthur C. Clark, the namesake of this podcast in the center I co-direct. He said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. You know that your colleagues will say,

Ah, Avi, you know, you're just, you just got, you should stick to your lane. You know, you're an eminent cosmologist. Just stick to that. Why do you have to get into extraterrestrial? We haven't even spoken about it. So let's get there. I want to talk about the book. Why don't you just stick to your lane?

Why do you care about some piece of schmuts floating through the galaxy? Well, actually, my lane is now the search for life because I have an 870-page textbook. coming out in June by Harvard University Press with my former postdoc Manasvi Lingam that describes how the search for both primitive and intelligent life should be conducted scientifically. So here is a lane, it's actually a highway and it's the wave of the future.

You know, I think that would become one of the major frontiers. You know, my experience from the past, I worked in areas that were not really shared by many colleagues and then they become, they became mainstream. Examples include the study of the first stars, the first galaxies, on which I have a textbook, Gravitational Wave Astrophysics, imaging black holes. You know, all of these I worked on when the community was very small of people interested in,

and then they became fads, and I don't really pay attention to the response that people. Now, with respect to objects like Omuamua that we will talk about, my point is simple. I want to us to monitor the sky, for example, with the Vera Rubian Observatory that will come online within three years and look for objects that are as peculiar as this one. And basically, once we find one heading our way, send a CubeSat that we'll take a close-up photograph of it, so there will be no doubt that it's unusual. I don't want us to suffer from lack of evidence. I want to collect as much evidence as possible. And we can do it with a existing technology. But if you're ahead of time have a prejudice, if you say that when you go to the beach and look at the beach, all the time you will see just seashells that were naturally produced and you will never see anything else, then obviously you will never find a plastic bottle. I mean,

if you walk down the beach, sometimes you find a plastic bottle that is not officially made. And my point is that by examining all the objects that enter into the solar system, we might find a message in a bottle. So it's a different way of studying or searching for extraterrestrial technologies, different from looking for a radio signal. And why shouldn't we do that? You know, all the people that tried to explain or mua mua by natural processes had to invent something that we have never seen before. Like a dust bunny, you know, there was, there were several papers on that. Dust bunny pushed by sunlight or a hydrogen iceberg, you know, things that we've never seen before. So I say, okay, if it's something that we have never seen before, why not consider a technological origin? You know, like what is the problem in discussing it as a possibility? Just like weakly interacting massive particles are one possibility for the dark matter.

Axions are another. We collect evidence, try to figure out. What's the problem? There is nothing bad about it. It's part of science and the public is interested. How dare the scientists shy away from it. Avi, do you remember you certainly do, probably in the 80s, the so-called Valentine's Day event that Blas Cabrera and colleagues at Stanford University

claim to detect the magnetic monopole that existed in the universe? As I was reading your book, I felt you don't go far enough because I know if I had access to an accent Russian billionaire instead of just a local New York billionaire who funds most of my research. I would say to him, look, you're a great to send, you know, tens of thousands of small spacecraft as you are doing with the star shot and the star and the and the chip chips. But this thing might be the only one. And it might be the only one I get to in my lifetime and your lifetime, Omuamua. So first, let me ask you, Avi, if you had his billions,

you know, or, you know, we're going to get to Bitcoin later. But, but, but, uh, but if you had his billions, or you could even convince him, why not just go after, that's the only thing that you know, are you willing to bet, you know, your stake, your scientific reputation and say, let's not go to Proxima Centurie B, that might be nice, but, but this thing is definitely signature. No other, I mean, not no other, and you wouldn't say that. You say 91% something like that. Why not go there?

Why not go farther? Explain what's so weird about its shape. A lot of things look like, you know, and I think there was a disservice as always happens in this field. I'm going to call it your field now that you're writing the definitive textbook, soon to be definitive textbook. But now it's in your field. So your field suffers from, you know, the saga, as Adam Frank calls it, prosthetic foreheads, you know, the like aliens in Star Trek. But now you know or you believe you know, this object is likely to have come from a technologically advanced civilization. Why not go after it?

chase it down, and not wait for another one to happen to come by when Vera Rubin's online. Maybe this is the Valentine's Day event for extraterrestrial intelligence. Just a quick interruption in this fascinating conversation with the incomparable Avi Lobe of Harvard University. And as they ask you to please do me the very small favor, astronomically speaking, of course, of leaving a small constellation. An asterism, as we astronomers call it, of stars in a rating for the Into the Impossible podcast, on iTunes or wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast, please subscribe and share it with your friends. That's really the only way that I get more and more guests like today's guest, Avi Loeb.

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And it will really illuminate for you the hottest topics in science and in ways that you can not only learn more and get resources from the community. You can win, give away, sign books, meteorites, and so forth. But you can also get resources to educate people in your life as well, whether it be, children or friends, etc. So anyway, please leave a rating. Stars are more or the better, but even one star and a critical review will be helpful to me. I read each and every one of them.

And then, yes, please do subscribe to my newsletter, Brian Keating.com. Now, back to today's episode with the really unparalleled Avi Loeb. I hope you're enjoying this conversation of someone who's really completely unafraid, unashamed, and will speak his mind whenever he darn will choose. So I had a great time in this podcast. I hope you enjoy the rest of it. Signing off until the very end of the episode, Brian Keating. Well, the problem with chasing it.

First of all, we detected it only when it was receding away from us. Faster than any rockets can chase it. It's just like seeing a guest for dinner and then realizing the guest is strange by the time he or she lives through the front door into the dark street. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I did that when I came over for Pesak dinner. I'm so sorry. So the thing is that we want to catch it when it's approaching us.

And we discovered it in October 2017. If we were to discover it in July when it was approaching Earth, we could have sent a CubeSat with a camera that would take a photograph. I was actually visiting Mount Haleakala in Maui in Hawaii because we were on vacation with my family and I gave a seminar at the observatory. And if we were, if we knew about the object back then, then I was. I would advocate taking a photograph. But we didn't know.

And so we cannot really chase it for another reason right now, even if we had a fast spacecraft. And that is because it dims, it gets fainter as inversely with the distance to the fourth power. Because the fraction of light intercepting it falls off as one over a distance squared and then another factor of one over distance squared for us to see the flux, the reflected flux. So altogether, it's now a million times fainter than it was when it was near us. And you need a big telescope on board of a spacecraft to find exactly where it is, and that is not practical. So I think we should aim to look for other objects that are peculiar.

Now, there was another interstellar visitor since then called Borisov. And it's called after a Russian amateur astronomer Ganadi Borisov that found. it and it looked just like a comet. It had a cometary tale, unlike Umu-O-O-Mu-A that didn't have a cometary tale. So people came to me and said, oh, look, Borisov looks just like a comet that we have seen before. Doesn't it convince you that Omu-a-Mua is natural? And I said, look, when I went on the first date with my wife, she looked special to me. And the fact that I met a lot of women afterwards didn't change my opinion about her. So why should I change my opinion about umu more just because we saw a comet right and so the point is that we should be

exploring other objects that they are weird uh and they find them before they pass us and they try to now there was another peculiar object i should mention found in september 2020 just a few months ago and that object was given the name 2020 s o by the minor planet center, you know, an astronomical organization that gives names to objects. Harvard, right? Harvard runs it. Yes, exactly. And they gave it the name of 2020 SO. And then astronomers noticed that it moves in an orbit that is not very different from the orbit of the Earth. So it's bound to the sun. And they went back in time to see where it came from and found that it actually came from the Earth in 1966. And then they looked at the history books and realized, oh, yeah,

there was this lunar surveyor mission, lunar lander, that they failed, but there was the rocket booster that was kicked into space, and that is probably the rocket booster. Now, that object, before it was recognized that it's that rocket booster. The Osama's figure that, in fact, it has an extra push because of the reflection of sunlight. So it's not just the force of gravity that dictates its orbit, but there is an extra push which is similar to umuamua and so my point is this is a hollow object very thin it had exert there was an extra push from reflection of sunlight that we could recognize and we can tell the difference between that and a rock we can tell that it's artificial and in this case we know that it was made by us but in the case of umuamua doesn't look like a rock and was potentially made by

another civilization. When you think about the civilization that might have created it, do you think that they targeted the Earth? Because I think that would alter my priors, right? If you were trying to send something to, you know, Proxima Centauri B, I mean, you make the case of how large a technical challenge it is. And I don't think you can just say, you know, well, their technology is so much more advanced if they can create something that can travel these vast distances.

But I think, you know, it changes the way I would think. about it and I wonder how you think about it if it was targeting the earth do you think that there's reason to suspect because you don't really come down one way or another in the book but i don't i don't think it was targeting the earth and the reason is simple i think that we are common you know if you open the morning newspaper you realize we are not very smart we're not very you know we make a lot of mistakes all the time speak for yourself ovi speak for yourself no my point is also you know if you imagine us coming from the soup of chemicals that were on earth early on and you look at recipe books you know you can start from the same ingredients and

get very different cakes right and what's the chance that this soup of chemicals made the best cake that you can imagine it's it's probably very small and you know if you cook the same chemicals on other planets slightly differently you might get much better cake so i would argue that we are you know sort of an average kind of outcome and that there are much smarter beings out there and And, you know, when you walk on the sidewalk and there are ants under your feet, you don't pay attention to every ant. It's not very significant. So I don't think we deserve, let's put it this way, we don't deserve the attention. I don't think they would spy on us because, first of all, you know, we are so common and so uninteresting and so foolish, if you look at human history, that we would not attract a lot of attention.

So I would assume that, you know, we are not worthy of their, and also if there is a very advanced civilization that, let's say, is a billion year's old, technological, you know, they probably created a cocoon, a habitat where they have everything they need. And they would close themselves off just, I call it social distancing on a cosmic scale. You know, if you have everything you need, you don't want invaders, you don't want, we want to reduce the risk, you close yourself. You don't look after others. And, you know, in that case, you might say, oh, we will never find about them. But that's not true because they have to throw their trash. You know, they produce some trash. And we can be just like those investigative journalists that search the trash of celebrities in Hollywood to find out about their private lives. You know, we can find us that trash. Another thing you talk about a lot in the book is being humble. Obviously, that's a biblical virtue as well. I wonder, though, what would it really mean? And I can't resist because, you know, I know you are a scholar of many things, not just science, but also you think deeply about philosophy.

And in fact, you wanted to be a philosopher, as I learned from the book. And maybe theology isn't so far off. I look at the case of the – and I mentioned this in my book as well. I wrote a book about the detrimental effects that the Nobel Prize has on science, scientists, and the public's perception of science, that we elevate people to the status of gods. We know their names to the extent that we know any scientist names. It's Stephen Hawking, Mealdigress Tyson, Bill Nye, and, you know, probably Avi Loeb. But that's about it, right?

And then a kid sees that and says, I'm not Avi Loeb. I'm not Einstein. and, you know, I said that to Jim Gates, who wrote a book about Einstein, and he's like, Einstein wasn't Einstein in the beginning. And here's someone I look up to you like that. Now, in the case of the Nobel Prize, people aspire to it, and it makes funding decisions. It makes decisions for entire fields, for departments, as I already mentioned. And so I wrote this book. I saw the impact that it has on my field of astronomy and physics in general. And it was pretty negative. And then I saw Duncan Halden came to UCSD to give a colloquium,

because he was a professor here when he did the work that later garnered him the Nobel Prize in 2016 for the prediction of topological matter with strange properties. He brought his actual Nobel Prize. He left it with me. This is some gelt from Hanukkah left over. But he brought it. And everybody was there. And everybody wanted to like, they didn't care about him.

They wanted to touch the Nobel Prize. They wanted to feel the Nobel Prize. They took selfies. I took a selfie with it, Avi. I come down like, I hate it. the Nobel president. No, I took a selfie. And I realized, you know, we're not so different from the Israelites who, after they supposedly witnessed the splitting of the sea and, and God's miracles tenfold over, destroying their enemy and liberating them in redemption, they worship a golden

calf 40 days later, right? So how far are we from this? In other words, how much do you think that people would really change how they live their daily life if they discovered, I mean, we already know, and I think you talk about this in the book. If you look at a chimpanzee and you assay their DNA, it's about 99.something, you know, percent identical to human beings. But nobody walks around and says, you know, I'm just like an ape. You know, I'm a hairless ape. I should have some humility.

Why do you expect it would be different if we discover a muamua is alien technology? Well, two things I wanted to mention. First of all, I completely agree with you that science should be driven by curiosity. It's about the dialogue with nature, getting an answer from nature, you know, through experiments and that will educate us, improve our imagination. Nobody would have thought of quantum mechanics out of the blue. And the second is that being an astronomer teaches you modesty because you realize that, you know, there are 10 to the 20 planets like the Earth in the observable volume of the universe. even if you conquer a big piece of land on earth like emperors or kings did, you know, it's just like an ant, you know, wrapping its legs around a single grain of sand on the landscape of a huge beach. It's not very impressive. There is no way for us to be impressive. Even if we demonstrate our superiority relative to another person, you know, that's ridiculous. This ambition of showing off, getting awards. Like, what are we talking about? Are these really awards? I mean, that's nothing compared to understanding reality, figuring out what the university. It's not about

us. Doing science is about nature, you know, trying to figure out nature. Let's do that. Let's focus on the real thing rather than focus on ourselves, because if we focus on ourselves, then we do intellectual gymnastics. You know, if you go to the Olympics, what do you see? You see people running 100 meters. Is there any significance to the length, the distance of 100 meters? No. We could have defined it to be 50 meters. We could have defined it to be 20. Just like the anti-decitrant space, you know, it's something that we decide about,

and then we test the ability of people to do it the best, you know. And it bears no cosmic significance. It's about us, testing us. So you can, of course, give jobs to people based on how well they do under these defined circumstances, but it says nothing about nature. If you want to understand nature, you need to go out, collect data about nature,

and figure out whether your ideas are right or wrong. You need to put some skin in the game. You need to allow yourself to be wrong. If you don't allow yourself, like, for example, Alan Goose, speaking about inflation, you know, like, so I asked him at a public discussion. I said, is inflation falsifiable? Can you prove inflation wrong based on an experimental fact?

And he said, it's a silly question. I said, what do you mean it's a silly question? Any theory in physics is supposed to be testable, right? And he said, well, it will all be, it's just like a part, it will always be right. Irrespective what the experiment is, I can design, find a model that would accommodate it. So I have a problem with that,

because then you're not learning anything new. If you can tailor your theory to fit any fact, then it's not really, really you're not really learning anything because anything so anyway but coming back to your point you know let me let me make my you know so so the universe tells us that we should be modest okay and we should accept that and not value prizes so much I think the biggest thing for us to think about is something that you can find in the Bible which is in the story of Noak's arc you know noah was worried about the great flood destroying life on earth and so he decided to

build an arc and the dimensions of the arc are specified by the way they are very similar to the dimensions of oh mu and yeah i noted that i noted that he wanted to put animals on the ark like that so that life would be preserved during the great flood that's the storyline yeah we should think along the same lines because currently all our eggs are in one basket here on earth And if some catastrophe happens, like for example, we don't take good care of our climate or an asteroid impacts us or, you know, in a billion years, the sun will boil off all the oceans on Earth. Then we will lose everything that is precious to us. And how do we build a NOAAX arc that will present? You know, if you look at the printing press that was invented by Gutenberg, the big innovation was previously there were very few copies.

of the Bible. And therefore, each of them was extremely precious because it was handwritten. But once the printing press came along, lots of copies were produced, and then if one of them gets damaged, no worries. So the same, you know, if we were to establish copies of life on earth elsewhere, then we would face less risk if something bad happens here. And how can we do that? We don't need to build a huge spacecraft that can accommodate elephants, whales, birds, and so

all we need to do is take a CubeSat that has a very advanced computer system in it, put a 3D printer, and learn how to produce synthetic life with the 3D printer out of the raw materials that it finds on another planet. So we just need to feed the computer with the information about the DNA of those animals that we want to reproduce. It goes there, uses the raw materials, and makes life the way we want it. And once we make those, just like the printing press, once we make copies, then we would be less worried about what happens here. Yeah, hopefully we won't.

That's the biggest thing for us as a civilization to think about. Yeah, I mean, hopefully though, you know, when I plant the tomatoes in my garden, I don't, I throw away the seed package. I hope there'll be some use for the originators of the DNA that create this interstellar Noah's arc. I do want to touch just on one thing you said before we kind of wind down with some of the standard, I ask all my guests who honor me with their presence as you are today. And that's, that's with regard, again, to this confirmation bias that scientists seem to have, but don't admit that they have. And my theory is that scientists are, even if they're atheists, and 90% of the National Academy or a National Academy member, they are either non-believers in God or

they don't actively profess any sort of religion. Maybe they don't deny it. But the number of agnostics is very small as well. Anyway, something like 90% don't actively. affirm the existence of God. And yet, you hear statements from people like Gooth, like Linday, like other people, and Lawrence Krauss, Max Tagmark, who's been on the show, and they'll say all sorts of things that, you know, if the multiverse is true and we have no reason according to, so the syllogism is, you know, Linday says that it's almost impossible not to have the multiverse if you have inflation. Goet users told me basically says it's impossible to avoid inflation. Therefore, where there is a multiverse, according to most people.

And then Lenny Suskin has been on the show also thinks because string theory provides evidence in some sense for the existence of a spectrum of different habitable or it. But they should put some skin in the game. They should say if this is found experimentally, if you go with the Simon's Observatory and you find something, okay?

Can you rule out any of their models? No. No, I've had this conversation. The answer is no, then, I mean, how can they argue that they make predictions or that this is a scientific, you know, this is not part of our scientific? Well, here's a counterargument. I talked to Martin Rees this past Monday, and he said, you know, imagine that you were trying to prove that the Earth is the center of the universe. So you take Michelson Morley and you look at the Michelson Morley effect and that shows you that the Earth is stationary with respect to the ether wind. Okay, so that was his example.

My example is... No, but that's one experiment. We have a lot of other... So you might be misled by one experiment, and there are many examples for that where one experiment gave the wrong impression, and then there were other experiments that falsified the interpretation of that experiment.

Fine, so we can be wrong along the way. That is legitimate. I mean, you can have a worldview that is completely distorted, that is supported by one experiment, okay? But then you continue to test it. It continues to put some skin in the game, And you check it again and again.

So that's why I feel like, I mean, again, with all respect and covered to you, I have to say that I don't feel like you really believe that Omar Amura is real. Because if I knew that what you just said, you said two things today. You said that it wasn't targeted at us. That means it was random by definition. It wasn't intentionally sent to us in likelihood. That means that the chance of it happening again could be extremely small. I mean, it's not vanishing. But at least if I know there's a string theory habitable universe and it's,

in the constellation, Akela, and I can look there and I'll see it. It'll be hard. It'll cost me a lot of money. I would do anything to see that. So why don't we go after and chase it with a star chip? No, no. My point is, if it was not targeting us, the conclusion is different. The conclusion is that there is a population of objects because with pan stars,

we surveyed the sky for a certain duration, a certain length of time, let's say a few years, let's say, and a certain volume that we were sensitive to in terms of. objects of this size reflecting sunlight from that if you assume that it's a member of a population of random objects that we don't live at a special time when pancels was able to detect just the one object that is in our entire neighborhood uh if you assume the copernican principle which says you know things are sort of the typical uh you know that they're typical at the time that you observe them then it means there are many more okay and it means that lssts on the vera rubin observatory will find once per month such an object because it's much more sensitive. So actually I draw the opposite

conclusion in the sense that it's a very testable hypothesis in the sense that there should be many of those if it was not targeting us. If it was targeting us, there may be very few indeed. Yeah. Because then it came on purpose, but then you ask yourself, what's the chance that we happen to live at the time when one such object comes close? So you violate the Copernican principle, but again in terms of time. Anyway, so altogether, I think the conclusion is let's collect more evidence. And I wouldn't say that I, no, I actually do think that, you know, we should base our assertions on evidence rather than prejudice.

And the only way to avoid it is by us saying we know the answer in advance. Well, yeah, I mean, I remember hearing it, you know, when it first came out and you first started to alert the world to this possibility. that was startling. I mean, you know that it is, and it's an audacious claim. And I remember you saying things like, we have to gather more evidence. And I was like, well, how are you going to do that if it's... With LSS, we can monitor the sky. But sorry, Avi, just to put one pin in that. I mean, if you got a letter from some force, God, I'll call it God, this is the only one. What would you do? In other words, that's the ultimate

skin in the game, in my opinion, is you believe in it so much. Your skin is fully on the skin of this of this object no no but that violates okay that violates the copernican principle so i believe in the copernican principle yeah the copernican principle has two aspects to it one that we don't live at a special time okay so even if these objects are rare you know still there is a certain frequency by which such objects pass near earth because it's very unlikely that if they pass once per million years or once per billion years that we would live exactly at the time you know you would look at the sky with past us exactly at the time when it comes close to earth. That's very unlikely. And therefore, I don't accept that notion that we will never see anything else like it in the future.

Would you give a... Yeah. Would you give a limit? Like, when would you, when would you give, at some point, you might say, I believe this one is extraterrestrial. We haven't seen any in X number of years. Let's go after a muamua. But what would that be? In other words, when were you say that your hypothesis, what would it take to falsify your hypothesis, Avi? So when LSS looks at the sky in three years. After a year or two of not finding anything like Omoa, then I would say maybe it's special. But before that, I would not say that.

Now, you also brought up the issue of God and the science, and I wanted to mention the fact that, you know, Einstein accepted the concept of God advocated by Spinoza because Spinoza associates God with names, nature. And to me, the most startling fact about the universe is the laws of physics that we uncover by experiments here on Earth appear to apply all the way to the edge of the universe, you know, the cosmic microbe background and so forth. And that's remarkable, you know, because, you know, when you establish laws in society, you see lots of people violating them, but how come

the universe as a whole is so organized? And, you know, that order to me is fascinating. Yeah, I asked people like Sean Carroll once. And I'll ask you, I can't resist. I said, what do you think the odds of the multiverse being true are? So what do you say? I say I don't want to discuss this question because I cannot test it. You know, we can waste our life just talking about things like how many angels can sit on a pin. And people did waste their life doing that.

You know, we have a limited time here on earth. Why not ask questions that we can answer? Right. And then I asked him, just for completeness, I asked him, what do you think the... He said about 50% odds that the multiverse is true. And then he said, and I said, well, what are your odds estimation for the existence of God? And he said, less than 1%. So I found that interesting.

But the point is, anyone can say anything. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing, right. It's completely... So there is a lot of noise in the system if you just have no evidence to support any of these statements. And my point is, let's reduce the noise. Let's just talk about signal, right? So the signal comes from nature itself.

Let's look at the evidence and try to understand what it means. Otherwise, we can sit here forever and talk about possibilities that are not realized, like until the sit of space, for example. Exactly. Talk to your neighbors across Harvard Yard there about that. Before we turn to the final questions, I just, you know, again, cannot resist the temptation to discuss almost anything with you. But yeah, the notion of kind of publicity and science. So recently I was asked to comment on this discovery of phosphine in the clouds of Venus.

And, you know, it was a major press conference. There are leaks about it. It reminded me very much of Bicep 2. And actually, I had on Sarah Seeger on my podcast. And she talked about the events of that discovery and follow-up that's ongoing. But I basically made the case that, you know, I think press conferences turn science, into spectacles. And I don't really feel like

they have a great place in science. In fact, you know, even like supposed gold standard of science is peer review journals. I mean, those have only been around for about a hundred years. It used to be a bunch of white guys got together in the Royal Society.

They did an experiment. Something blew up. Or they cut open a frog. And that was it. And then finally nature came along. But, you know, as they say, just because it's published in nature doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.

And we had things published. And of course, we had everything. What do you make of that? You were chair then, and you helped to set up the press conference at Harvard that we announced it in front of Nobel laureates in the audience and to a chorus of both. I found it interesting because on that same day, there are people like Lawrence Krause saying, this proves there's no God because there is a multiverse. And then there was people from the Discovery Institute, which is a Christian apologist organization. And they were saying this proves there's a God because he's fine-tuned the universe. So anyway, what do you make of this relatively recent?

phenomena, which was first invoked in my mind, you know, in the 90s, well, certainly in 80s, but then, you know, most prominently when Clinton announced in the Clinton administration that we had found evidence for Martian meteorites in the Allenland Hills meteorite of, you know, so it's extraterrestrial. Then there was extremophile life found in Mono Lake here in California and other things. Anyway, it seems to have a lot to do with press conferences and extraterrestrial life. I think it's a symptom of the way that the system operates. by which the idea is not to expose anything to the public

until the group of scientists that collects the evidence is confident that it can come out. The truth is, you know, that the king is naked, right? That in fact, the process of science is by trial and error, and there are many, you know, times when we are mistaken. And so we should not elevate an announcement to the level of certainty and then make a press conference,

we should show how science works. And what I mean is, for example, in the context of Bicep, if the group were to announce its results, and then other people would criticize it, and then there would be some additional data coming in, let's say for Planck and so forth, and we would sort it out.

That's the process by which science works, and there is nothing wrong about it. Again, one of the motivations was that, there could be a Nobel Prize attached to such a discovery. And you need to come up, you know, in a public way, in a well-organized way, so that others cannot scoop you. And, you know, so all of these motivations are unnatural to the process of science. And my point is that science is done by iterations.

We should not portray an image to the public where we never make mistakes. You know, some scientists told me, you know, that's really bad. If something turns out to be wrong, because then the public will not believe when we tell the public there is global warming. They would not believe us because here is, you know, an example where scientists are wrong. Well, the truth is this king was naked for a long time. You know, the fact that you say the king is dressed doesn't make it because if you look at the history of physics, there were many instances where people made statements that turned out to be wrong, including Albert Einstein, including famous people. And so the point is

that science is all about, you know, a learning experience. We are trying to, figure out what nature is and sometimes we make the wrong inferences and the only way to correct that is by getting more data rather than closing ourselves in a room figuring out something and then once there is consensus in the room coming out with a big announcement so that we can get a big price you know that's not the natural way of behaving I agree not for way of behaving is always making things as tentative statements based on the data we have that's the best conclusion we can reach and let others criticize it. And you know, with umuamua, that's exactly the approach I'm taking. You know, I'm, you know, I was in the military at a young age and there was this saying that, you know,

one soldier sometimes has to put the body on the barbed wire so that others can go across it in a battle. And as far as I'm concerned, you know, I'm willing to put my body on the barbed wire and get the critics to attack me just so that younger people in the future will benefit and be able to speak freely. Great, Avi. That's a really beautifully expressed sentiment. I just want to say for your consideration, you shouldn't rule out using high-resolution micro-rate background experiments to look for these objects as well. Simon's Observatory, one of our plans is to look for planet nine and transient phenomena. And so don't be so visual spectrum-centric as I know you have a great you'll have experienced from the radio down very low megahertz level college radio stations

all the way up to the very high frequency optical light gamma ray ultraviolet. Anyway, I want to conclude with the three questions I ask all of my guests. And I think, you know, there's no one I'd rather ask this about than you right now. And so we'll start with one that is, you know, we're getting awfully religious today, but I can't help it. It's something I think about all the time. maybe just one second. Before I go there,

I think one of the things I'm helping to do into the Impossible podcast and with my own research is construct what Galileo's most, maybe it's his third or fourth book that people really know about

called the asser, El Sagittori, and it means the asser, someone who tests something, like if you want to see if this is gold, you don't need gold to test if it's gold.

You take a piece of stone called a touchstone and you rub it on there and it makes a mark. The stone has no value, but it allows you to see the wealth of value that may be there or may be lying to you. So I've started this kicking around this idea of a fellowship

for all of those theorists across the quad from you that are at the Institute for Advanced Study. And I've had all these people on. They're all friends about Juan Maldesana, having Nima Akami Hamleta on soon. I love these guys. John Prescott will be on next week. Your late friend, Stephen Hawking's colleague, Leonard Milano, I was on.

But I always think about, you know, this question, why are there so many theories of everything? Why are there so few experiments of everything? And I said, well, there actually are a lot of experiments, but nobody's looking at the data that already exists. So if you hadn't happened to look through the PanStar's data or, you know, if somebody hadn't thought to look through, you know, the data when pulsars were discovered,

in other words, data is abundant and cheap. It's like software. But, you know, how many, I know Facebook came out of Harvard, right? But very few cell phones have come out of Harvard. In other words, it's easier to produce software and theory in my analogy than hardware and testable assays. So I'm trying to cultivate this notion that people should look at data that already exists rather than coming up with a new theory of everything that has some beautiful properties of it. I agree.

And I have an essay, beware that is titled, Beware of Theories of Everything in a Scientific American. I highly recommend. Yeah, we're going to have a link to it in the nuts. And I advocate exactly your point. Okay. final questions. These all relate some way to these theories of creativity and imagination, which nobody exemplifies better than you. So the first one

has to do with what is known in Hebrew as a Zava'a, an ethical will. So Alfred Nobel, when he created the Nobel Prize, he said he had no kids, he had no wife, and he said, I want these to go to people who have caused the greatest benefit to humanity via their invention or discovery in physics, chemistry, etc. And of course, it dates back to the Bible, and Jacob blesses his sons, as they did in last week's Torah portion for those that are playing along at home.

But the notion and the book of Deuteronomy is basically Moses' last will in Testament. And the question is, for you, what would you put in your ideological will, in your ethical will, not your material will, but what would you put in your ethical will to benefit the millions of people that count you as not their biological father? Avi in that sense, but their ideological inspiration. Yeah, I was asked this question, actually, by the Harvard Gazette, the Pravda at Harvard University. And what is the one thing you would like to change about the world? And my answer was, I would like my colleagues to behave more like kids, to be driven by their curiosity, not to worry about making mistakes.

We talked about all of these. and to be guided by what nature educates us. And it's not about our egos. It's not about us getting honors, rewards, prizes, likes on Twitter. It's not about all of that. It's about figuring out how things work in the world. And by the way, I should say, sometimes religion is viewed as an antithesis to science, like, but it's not the case because if you were to figure out how the world works, you can appreciate it more.

It's just like looking at the watch and figuring out how it works. You know, if you just look at the outside of a watch, you know, it doesn't look as impressive. And so I, you know, if you want to be at all as to what reality is, the best way to do it is to pursue science because that gives you the highest resolution image of. the thing that you care about right and so to me science is really the way forward that's the way to change our preconception unfortunately what happens right now is because that you know of some circumstances in the history of particle physics were you know the superconducting super collider project was cancelled back in the 1980s there was a long hiatus a long period of time where

theoretical physics did not receive new data and that led a new culture in where data is not needed you don't want that you know you can work on things that are not falsifiable it's a post data a post data environment like deconstructivism you know post modern and it's even justified by philosophers you know in some books that are written and I find that dangerous to be spirit of modesty of learning from the data what the world is rather than believing, you know, that we can come up. The only way we can come up with what reality is is, you know, if we live in a simulation, as some people suggest. You know, to me it's like being on drugs. Let's put it this way. You can imagine that you have a billion dollars or that you have even 200 billion dollars.

You are wealthier than Elon Musk. Okay. You can imagine that. Fine. You can sit in your room and enjoy the idea. But if you go to the ATM machine and check your balance, that will give you a reality check and will educate you that you cannot have that dream and you cannot have that wonderful idea that is so appealing and that you can play with and have all kinds of ideas of what to do with the money and so.

Because there is a reality check. And that to me, you know, is an important lesson because we can be bankrupt in terms of our ideas if we never test them against an ATM machine, which is experimental data. Yeah, very good. I always think about the meaning of the word science is knowledge and the meaning of, you know, Torah or whatever is wisdom as teacher is something very different. And that wisdom requires humility and knowledge doesn't, right? you can have Wikipedia has a lot of knowledge. I'm working with some friends on a project. I'm calling, you know, artificial Galileo or AI Galileo I.

About, you know, basically taking all of his written words, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not a million words that he's written, putting it into, you know, GPT3 and churning out and see what you get. And maybe he can be a better teacher of, you know, Galilean relativity than even Brian Keating. It's hard to believe. Okay. Next statement is relates to something I think you'll get a kick out of.

I had on the show, so this is The Into the Impossible podcast, Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Curiosity is our key byproduct here. And I had on Carl Sagan's widow, as I mentioned, her name is Androion. And I asked her this question, I'm going to ask it to you. I said, in the movie 2001, a space odyssey, there's a scene in the opening moments, which is based on Arthur C. Clark's book, where these apes come upon this monolith in the savannah of Africa. and they start hitting it, and they start bashing it. And there's nothing they can do with it. They try to do all sorts of things.

They can't get any extract anything from this object. Then later it appears like on a surface of the moon. And it seems to be like a time capsule, a billion year long time capsule, put by an ancient technologically advanced civilization. And I asked Andrew, and I'm going to ask you, too, what would you put on a billion year long lasting time capsule? But she said to me, I already did that. I said, what did?

And she said on the Voyager one spacecraft, Carl Sagan, you know, encrypted this record that with her brainwaves. And when she had just fallen in love with Carl, it was quite poignant. And also sounds of earth and birds and apes or whatever and music from around the world. It was actually the first example of what's called ethnomusicography or world music. Anyway, don't ask you, Avi, what would you put on an omoa of your own to travel and ply our galaxy for the next billion? years. What piece of wisdom or time capsule content would you put on it, in it, around it? Well, I would make NOAAX spaceship. I would put a very advanced computer with AI and a 3D printer. And hopefully, by the time we launch it, we would understand how to create synthetic life in

the laboratory. There are several people trying to do that, including a colleague of mine, Jack Shostak here, a Nobel laureate at Harvard. So I would be a good. do that and then whoever finds it can use that machine to create life as we have on earth. And that's much more informative than, you know, a golden record. Who cares who the Beatles were, you know, like, I don't think, okay, let's put it this. I don't think that we are so accomplished, that we are worthy. I mean, it will be actually humiliating if they look at us and laugh. You know, they would say, what are these primitive creatures doing?

But if you can have the information of how to recreate what we have here and launch it into space, that would be great. Now, I should say that, you know, you might ask, is there any possibility that we will find if there was a civilization before us technological, let's say a billion years ago, would we find any evidence? The answer is no, because there is geological activity on Earth. And anything that was here more than 100 million years ago was telemarked. turned around and mixed in so if there were computer terminals on earth they were churned up and they are now deep in the in the interior of the earth we can't really tell uh so if you want to live a something like a stature that they would indicate that we were there you want to put it on on a surface that doesn't have geological activity and you know the moon is an example yeah

i mean the only thing that happens on the moon is that there are impacts yeah that they you know they go 10 meters deep but not much more than that but other than that I mean the moon is a museum it collects all the things that fall on it and by the way there is a plan to go back to the moon as far as I'm concerned the most exciting thing we can do is just go around and see if there is any evidence for some technological debris that collided with the moon yeah a year ago exactly we had an event here with Paul Davies who I know you know and Jim Benford and they had it was called is ET lurking in our own celestial neighborhood.

And they talk not only about the surface of the moon as this ideal, you know, kind of desiccated environment in which anything could survive for very long periods of time, but also these Trojan asteroid, these asteroids that are tiny little balls of, you know, kind of rubble piles, but some are solid. And you could put something there if you wanted to observe and lurk, perhaps. But, yes, it's very, so it's very good that we, I'm just afraid we're going to put it on, like, you know, this little disc, you know, little USB drive. and they're going to get to be like, all right, and they'll say, thanks, but we already discovered string theory.

Thanks very much. By the way, I should tell you that the reaction of my colleagues to Umoomua being a rock, you know, that to me reminds me of what a caveman would have said if you were to present the caveman with a cell phone because he would, seeing rocks all of his life, he would say, well, it's a shiny rock. And, you know, it's the same reaction that, yeah, astronomers. It reminds me of the, there's an old joke of, you know, these people are doing excavations in the, in the Middle East somewhere, and they go to, they go to some country, or maybe it's Asia. They dig under, they find, like, copper wire. It looks like copper wire. And they say, oh, this is evidence that we had underground, you know, cables carrying power and Ethernet or whatever. And then some Israeli guy says, big deal, look over here. And the archaeologists say, there's nothing there. And they say, yeah, obviously they had, they had Wi-Fi. communication. They didn't need a wire. Okay. Just one thing I wanted to make. Yeah. Umuamua,

there was a seminar at Harvard that I attended along with a sort of mainstream conservative astronomer that, you know, worked on rocks in the solar system all his life. And as we were walking out of the seminar, the guy was saying to me, and I will not mention the name. He was saying, I wish it never existed. It's so weird. I wish it never existed. Now, to me, me, you know, that would, I cannot hear that thing because how can a scientist say about observed facts? I wish they never exist. I mean, obviously they come in conflict with what he had thought about all the objects in space, but you never say that. You say, great, there is an anomaly. Let's figure out what it is, you know. You know, cosmologists would have been thrilled to find

something that never existed indicates what the nature of the dark matter is. You know, like, that would be fantastic if we see evidence for an anomaly that indicates that. So scientists should be grateful for any evidence coming their way, even if it is surprising. And unfortunately, a lot of colleagues are just looking for evidence that confirms what they already knew. That's right. And they lose that child. I would say, I agree with you, Avi. You know, scientists are like children. I've got blessed to have children. And, you know, they're curious. They smile. They play. They're also. very selfish. They don't like to share their toys. They don't like to share credit. You know, so it's like scientists, we have to balance the good aspects. I asked, obviously, you know, I ask all my

guests these questions. I asked Barry Barish the same question. And he said, curiosity is what I'd like to transmit to future generations because we get such a negative notion of curiosity. What's this famous saying? Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity is dangerous. It's mendacious. It's perhaps, you know, volatile. You have to be where, no, scientists. And it reminded me, and I told him, and this is a podcast that I recommend you go on by the name James Altutcher, far more. I was invited to it. You should do it.

It's far better than this podcast. It's already planned. Okay, great. So James and I did a TED talk together, and he, I mean, he did one, and I did one the same day. And in his TED talk, he brought up some data, and he said that children smile or laugh 300 plus times per day. and guess how many times per day an adult laughs something like six

and I felt like that's kind of what happens with people in terms of curiosity in the I have a kid he's young and he just keeps asking like can you push it in a black hole what happens if you push a black hole into the center of a galaxy

could you do galactic engineering I'm just like even I can't answer these questions so I refer them to my colleagues in string theory you know that's the making of a real physicist so it's wonderful to hear that But your child has the potential.

Send him to Harvard after you. I will, but he's got his heart set on UCSD, the Harvard of the West Coast. Okay, well, I have to speak with him. Okay, you will. Yeah, when we get together next, maybe we'll get together in Beijing next time. Last question I ask, oh, by the way, your colleague, guess what your colleague across the Harvard yard said he would put on a come run Vafa. What he would put on his monolith to last four billionaires would be the equations of string theory. So I found that very, very interesting and kind of curious.

But I love coming. If you want to demonstrate our herd mentality, that would be fine. Last question. Now we're going to go backwards in time. We went forwards in time a billionaires. We went forwards in time with your ethical Zavaha. Now I'm going to ask you the last question. Sir Arthur C. Clark had these famous three laws.

The first one is, and I think you mentioned this, any advanced technology, sufficiently advanced technology, is indistinguishable from magic. That's number one. Obviously, if Umuamu is true, they actually did create some beings created basically as magical device. Number two is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I feel like, you know, we have this notion of listen to scientists and like scientists, we don't agree.

If you ever find a scientist, right, Avi, if you find a scientist and that person says, you have to listen to me, you must obey me. I think you and I have a rebellious spirit, but even the common scientists would say, go to hell. You know, I don't have to obey you. It should be the way to decide things in science is based on evidence and data. If there are conflicting interpretations, you just want to collect more data. That's the way to make progress. So the last question is his third law says the only way of discovering the limits of the possible

is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of this podcast, The Into the Impossible podcast, as part of the R3C Clark Center for Human Imagination. Avi, last question. If you could tell a 20-year-old Avi, just getting started in your career, something seems impossible to you now, young Avi,

but have courage, get through it, and in retrospect, it'll be the best thing that ever happened to you. What advice would you give to a younger version of yourself? Yeah. So the biggest mistake I made was that, you know, I always have a stream of ideas that come up naturally, bubble up whenever I hear about the results and what is being done, practiced in a field. And initially, initially, I was bringing up those ideas to the attention of the experts

and listening to what they say. And if they said it's not worth pursuing, I wouldn't pursue them. But then I realized that some of these ideas are picked up by other people once they hear me saying them and follow, they followed those. ideas and they led to the most interesting insights in those areas and after it happened to me multiple times you know 15 years ago I said the hell with it you know I I just wouldn't listen to what people say the experts very often dismiss things that go beyond what they thought and if you bring up a new notion a new

idea they would dismiss it irrespective whether it merits attention or not just because it's different you know it's just like kids in a kindergarten whenever they see something different, they bully that something, that kid, because he or she are different. That's a sufficient reason to bully someone. And it's true also of Twitter, right? So anyway, so I learned this lesson after a while and I lost some important opportunities to innovate. You know, other people got credit for things that I told them. But then at some point, I said, the hell with it. I, you know, I would not pay attention to. what other people say and just pursue what seems right to me.

And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, you know, but that's the whole purpose of tenure to allow you to go in directions that you find appropriate. You know, and somehow a university, the system, the academic system gives, put some confidence in you and says, we allow you to explore things that, you know, in directions that you might be wrong, but take some risk.

And the strange thing is if you look at the private sector, commercial sector, you know, companies like Google, starting with Bell Labs, they took Chris. They had physicists, think about blue sky research, come up with ideas that were not conventional at the time, and had a lot of Nobel Prizes actually given to, you know, people in Bell Labs. And now the academic community, I find, is more conservative than the business world. How is that possible? You know, the whole purpose of tenure is to allow people to, to be innovative and going directions that others do not necessarily accept.

Whereas in the private sector, it's all about making a profit. You find a person like Elon Musk advocating for some technologies that were not popular at all at the time, and he's now the wealthiest person on earth. And he did it because he realized that if you take risks, there is a chance of you making a huge profit, okay? So how come the academic community is not recognizing that? It must mean that we are losing a lot of opportunities to innovate, to find new things.

Gravitational wave astrophysics was almost demolished because the astronomy community did not support it. Fortunately, there were some administrators in NSF that decided to support it. But I remember as a postdoc, I heard a lot of bad stuff about the gravitational way. And the same about search for exoplanets. There are lots of examples. And I'm just worried that there were many good ideas in science that were lost because of this. And I'm trying to help to bring us to a better place in terms of the health of our mission, a scientist, you know, being honest, straightforward, making mistakes. Don't worry about your image, worry more about nature.

You know, that's my message. That's a magnificent message. Yeah, Max Tagmark was on last week, and he said, you know, imagine if Twitter existed back in 1610 when Galileo announced the discovery of satellites around the planet Jupiter. and they would have said, you know, fact check, experts in the Catholic Church have disputed this claim. I should tell you that I have no footprint on social media. I know, I know. And that explains your productivity. Your H index is inversely proportional to the time you spend on Twitter.

Right. I mean, if you look at, you know, again, on the beach, you know, you see the sand that you find on the beach are seashells that were ground. it up by rubbing against each other and they all you know all these grains of sand look this look the same they look similar you don't want scientists to rub against each other and break up into pieces that are indistinguishable that's very bad for innovation yeah absolutely well avi i can't thank you enough for going into the impossible with me i want to wish you all the best of success wherever the book may take you and uh since you don't follow are not a big presence on social media i will do my best to promote you inside and outside of all these video venues.

And otherwise, I will let you know when this comes out. Anyway, for now, I wish you Shabat Shalom, because you must not work seven days a week. That's the only thing I would implore you not to do. You're so productive. You get so much done. But we all need a day of rest. I command my graduates. The only thing I bring religion into the public sphere, I say, I command you, you may not work

at least one day a week. I don't care what day a week it is. You need to rest. You need to recuperate. but I know you're going into a very busy period for you. I wish you stamina. I wish you resiliency, but I know you already have it. So I wish you all the best, Avi.

Thank you for coming with us on the show going Into the Impossible. Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube. on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to, imagination.ucsd.edu.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination

at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Brian Keating, co-director. Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volko.