Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The SCIENCE of ALIENS: Garry Nolan & Avi Loeb (#275)

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Garry Nolan is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research is in microbiology, immunology, bio-computation, and analysis of UFO artifacts, materials, and he is actively investigating reports of UFO encounters. Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard, the director of the Galileo Project, and the author of Extraterrestrial. In 1993 he moved to Harvard University where he was tenured three years later. He is now the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science and former chair of the department. EPISODE LINKS: WOW DNA SIGNAL http://bit.ly/3EBASJr Avi's Website: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/ Latest essays: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Opinion.html Garry's Twitter: https://twitter.com/GarryPNolan Nolan Lab's Website: https://web.stanford.edu/group/nolan/ Connect with me: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast-  Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

everybody and welcome to another exciting episode of the Into the Impossible podcast featuring yours truly professor brian keening the associate director of the arthur c clark center for human imagination at u.c san diego where i'm also the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics and this is a real treat this is a uh an interview that many people have been asking for for a long time both to have uh gary nolan on but to have ovi low back on as well and put them together, together, two great tastes, like peanut butter and chocolate. And I'm just delighted that they were able to come on, and you'll enjoy this two-hour-plus interview where we talk about everything, including taking audience questions from you,

including some very controversial questions about alien artifacts, about the DNA and biology of aliens, and about how you out there in the audience can get involved with the projects like the Galileo project that Avi Loeb is working on, even if you don't happen to have a spare billion dollars or two lying around. And Gary was really fascinating to talk to, and we even spoke about a part two someday. So for now, I want you to sit back and enjoy, and just a reminder, you can always, always ask questions of my audience on my YouTube channel where I do the live streams. And that's Dr. Brian Keating. And you can also ping me at Twitter or Instagram. where I'm also Dr. Brian Keating and ask questions of the audience.

I usually post a couple hours or maybe even a day before the audience gets to ask those questions live. And one last favor, if you'll subscribe to my mailing list, you'll hear you'll win some of this very genuine space schmutz, an interstellar meteorite perhaps, which you'll have your chance to win if you join my mailing list, bryankeating.com slash list. And then finally, you can also do a huge favor and That'll be so thankful for in the season of Thanksgiving, today's Thanksgiving Day in America. And that is to leave a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, rather,

like Marco H. Krastit, great podcast with a thoughtful host and variety of interesting guests at D-Di-Dive deep into thought-provoking subject matters. That's what I'm going for. That's the vibe, inspiration for curiosity. Truly, it is my goal. So for now, if you would leave a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, even Audible, I've got 11 reviews on Audible, over 300 on Spotify, and over 500 just in the U.S. on Apple. And I really want to get to a thousand. And then I'll quit.

And then I'll reach it. No, I won't quit. I'm going to keep going having more and more interviews. But your response and your feedback give me the fuel to keep the fire ignited. So for now, sit back. Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with two distinguished professors. and maybe me counts, counting as a third. Gary Nolan, Stanford University, Avilab of Harvard. Enjoy.

The Eastern Seaborne, K.Bring, Massachusetts, Harvard, and we have a new friend joining us today, also young and distinguished, and that's Professor Gary Nolan. So we've got three professors here on this pre- Thanksgiving day that is my favorite holiday, and I couldn't be more grateful than to share it with such a wonderful set of guests. Thank you guys for joining me. Gary, how are you today up north? Great, thank you. And up north, yes, yes, up in the frigid north of Apollo Alto. And Avi is jealous of that frigidity, I'm sure. Avi, how are you, sir?

I'm doing great, but most of the universe is much colder than the earth. So I feel sympathy to the rest of the universe. Oh, that is great. Well, for those of you who are new to this channel, we have conversations with the greatest luminaries in science, technology, engineering, and math. We have luminaries ranging from 14 Nobel Prize winners, four billionaires, and that includes Avi and Gary. So those are two new billionaires. We've had guests on from all over the spectrum of culture.

And today we're having a very special pre- Thanksgiving episode, which is to discuss and have a gentleman's debate about the impact, the import, the knowledge and the future of unexplained aerial phenomena. And this is an area that these two gentlemen have made a contribution. I want to thank you guys in particular because a lot of what we do when we are expressing an interest in this subject gets met with derision, with maybe attempts to humiliate, to discredit folks that are interested. I find that repugnant. But the fact is you guys are some of the most distinguished intellects on this planet. We're very lucky to have you in this community, but you're also incredibly open-minded. So I don't expect you to reply to that.

I do have a reply. I just wanted to mention that in politics you see it very often that there is polarization where you have the extremes on both ends fueling each other because one side says nonsense and then the other side uses it as fuel to say also nonsense. And then you end up in a situation that doesn't make much sense. the middle ground of common sense is not populated, not in politics these days, and I would say not in academia, and also on this question of unidentified objects,

because what I realized is, first of all, you know, as an astronomer, I was driven into it by data that implied an object that looks really unusual, and that happened to be the first object from outside the solar system that we identified, called the Muamua, and since then we find two others before it, meteors with my student, we can talk about it. Yeah. But the point is, this looked unusual. They didn't look familiar.

So I said, okay, let's study them. And of course, the subject was ridiculed by mainstream astronomers. And then they tried to explain those things in terms of rocks that we had never seen before, objects that we had never. So to me, I mean, it didn't sound like they are trying to use familiar objects to explain them, but they appealed to unfamiliar objects that still keep them sort of relaxed that they are natural and so forth. So they dismissed any possible association with other technological civilizations, even though we ourselves launched five probes to interstellar space and, you know, why not imagine that others did it as well, billions of years before us? And then on the other hand, you have those believers who would interpret anything unusual in the sky in

in terms of being extraterrestrial. And the reason I say that is, you know, when Ukrainian astronomers reported about some dark objects and didn't have good distance estimates for those, and I suggested that maybe they got the distance wrong, and as a result, these would be just artillery shells, those believers jumped at me and said, you know, it must be extraterrestrial because there could be new physics.

And I say, well, for new physics, you really need a very high bar. You know, like we work really hard. You need exquisite data to convince you that you are missing something in the known physics. And you can't just jump into a conclusion about new physics because, you know, you see something that you didn't really measure well. Okay, if it's sloppy data, that cannot be justification for new physics. You need to have exquisite data to argue for new. So you see this polarization of two sides, and one uses the other to justify their extreme positions. So the scientists say, we don't want to be to share the same.

same bed with those people that don't believe in the scientific method. And those that don't, you know, those believers, on the other hand, say, look at the scientists, they don't pay attention to this. So my point is, populating the middle ground that makes common sense and following the scientific method is unpopular. Okay. And that is really surprising to me. I thought it's only the realm of politics, but over the past year, I learned that it's the realm of science as well in some areas. Yeah, we've talked before about new physics, but today we're going to talk about new biology. That's courtesy of our new guest on the show, which is a real treat. Gary Nolan, you're perhaps, you know, along with Avi, my most frequently requested guest on this subject.

And I just want to introduce you to my audience. Most of the Nobel laureates I've had on are physicists, although I have had on a Stanford professor, Weido Inbenz, who's a colleague on campus, and I have Jay Batacharya, not a Nobel Prize. prize winner yet, but he's coming on next to talk about his experiences with a Galileo-like affair that we'll talk about when he's on. But Gary's an immunologist, an academic, an inventor, business executive helps to lead or works with six different companies. He holds the Ratchford and Caroletta, a Harris professor, endowed chair, and the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Usually, Gary and Avi knows this. I usually ask you to

to start off by describing your latest book. But you told me you prefer papers. And I want to just get a quick tease of this upcoming paper if you're allowed to talk about it just to set the stage in your bona fides for my physics-minded audience. Oh, well, let me first riff off of something that Avi was just saying about this divide.

And I think a lot of it begins with something that I've always focused on. on, especially in my lab meetings, is finding the point which is off the line and paying attention to it and not ignoring it. Because you can continue to walk that line and continue to basically do conventional science, but it's when you see the point off the line

and you try to explain it, either as being an error or as something that is indicative of either new biology or new physics or new observations, et cetera. And I think, I mean, I've been having this conversation with a fair number of people lately about, you know, what is a standard of proof? And, you know, the standard of proof really differs depending upon who you are. You know, science has a standard of proof that says, you know, I can reproduce it. I can hand the data to you. You know, it's not an anecdote.

I mean, I have my own anecdotes of things that I've observed that, you know, in standard science. might be thought of as preliminary data. It's preliminary data. It's sufficient for me to get sufficiently interested, but it is not something that I could hand to somebody else and say, here is proof of a new object or a new physics or what have you. So I think one of the things that it's important for both, I think what Obie is doing, what I'm doing, is to teach the lay public what these different kinds of proof structures are that enable one to be thought of as, say, a believer or to be thought of as a scientist. Now, a believer isn't a negative thing. I mean, religions are believers, but if you want to take the realm of religion and belief

and hand it over to science, that's where this disparity happens. So I'm happy to occupy that middle ground where Avi is basically arguing we should be as scientists and argue to the people on my, let's say, far science extreme and say, you know what, you guys are acting more like priests than you are like scientists. So why don't you come a little bit closer to this line? And then you say the people on the far other side, you're acting more like, you know, you're not, you're acting more like priests. And if you want to talk to the scientist, you need to come to the middle. And so let's find a way to create languages which allow the two sides to talk to each other. That said, I'm not, you know, this is not the UN.

I'm completely willing to ignore both sides, just do the work, create the data, publish a paper, get it peer reviewed, and say, there it is. Now, you try to argue with the data that I've just presented you. And if you can't come up with a different conclusion that justifies the data and at least the speculations I'm coming up with, then get out of here. Yeah. So, Brian, if I may just, yeah, go ahead. ahead, Abby. Two short points. One, there is a common thread between spirituality and the

frontiers of science. In both cases, you are exploring the unknown, and we should be humble in the sense of not assuming we know the answer in advance. A lot of scientists do their job in order to demonstrate that they're smart. It's all about themselves. You know, they will do mathematical gymnastics, even if the real universe didn't show that there are more than three spatial dimensions. They will just show that they are smart for 50 years by doing manipulations in extra dimensions, even though we have no clue for that. Now, I say, okay, five years, 10 years reasonable, 50 years is starting to be excessive. And the point is it's not about us, not demo, you know, showing off. It's about learning about nature. And unless you get some dialogue

with nature, getting some evidence for what you're doing, you're doing math, mathematics, okay? And you are trying to show off, but you're not explaining nature. So that's the first thing. First thing is we need humility to learn from nature by experiments to get the feedback and respect the data. Whatever it is, if it looks unusual, we should not brag that we know everything in advance, that we are experts, that we can explain everything by past knowledge. We should be open-minded to new knowledge. The second point that is really important is that science is about the signal to noise ratio. Yes. Okay.

What does it mean? There are all the time noisy fluctuations, things that happen by chance that do not signify anything unusual. It's just rare phenomena that happen now and then. Okay. And what people fail to understand, like in a war zone, if you go to Ukraine, you increase the level of noise. Okay. That's why I was reluctant to consider Ukraine because there are lots of things flying in the sky, many of which we don't know because the U.S. government wants it to be. be classified or the Europeans wanted to be classified or the Russians wanted to be but there are things flying in the sky all the time this increases the level of noise in the sense that we don't know what they are okay and there would be spy satellites all kinds of things you have to realize that given that the noise level is high the chance of you seeing something that you don't understand is higher okay so it's all about how significant is the signal that you detect relative to things that happen by chance in the environment that you're looking at. And that's something that the public fails to follow because they say,

we will go to the war zone because maybe they will be there, but then you have to understand that burden of proof is actually higher. It's higher. If you are in a noisy environment, you have to work harder to demonstrate that there is something unusual going on. And you know that very well from the cosmic microwave background, from studies of the universe. I mean, we looked for fluctuations in the cosmic micro background relic from the Big Bang for many decades until the signal to noise ratio per pixel was above one. At that point, it was detected. And before that, it was not.

So it's really all about not just the signal, but how unusual is the signal relative to some random occurrences in the environment that you're looking at. Yeah, I think that's often missed out. And one of the things that I most frequently hear about is that there's, you know, kind of a conflation of the notion that these are legitimate phenomena to study, but also that they could be representative of much more plausible, I mean, effectively much more plausible explanations. They could be, you know, hallucinations or mass delusions. They could be military siops. there could so do you guys think that a lot of the kind of dereliction or the or the denigration of this

subject gary i'm interested in particular to get to get your take on it because you've been incredibly courageous and it's almost like when you talk about it you're immediately assumed that you must cleave to one camp or the other so i want to ask you in keeping with the obvi said do you did you come into this field i mean this is not your field you're an eminent world-renowned scientist Did you come into this field with any preconceived notions that there were phenomena? And then so there's been a great sacrifice that you and Avi to some extent have undertaken. So explain what was your motivation? How did you, what's your origin story in this, Gary?

Well, I mean, I have two origin stories, if you will. I mean, I've been open about this. I mean, I saw an object when I was young as a paper boy. And it went right over my head. it was unmistakable, you know, that it was not supposed to be there. But I was, what, I think it was 11 or 12 years old. I don't really remember. But I didn't know what it was, but I remembered it years later so that when the whole subject of what UFOs or whatnot might be, I could look back on that and say, well, you know,

insofar as what everybody else is claiming this to be, that was a UFO. Oh, it was clearly, to me, it looked like technology. It had lights. It was making no noise. It was 30 feet over my head. And it was, you know, 5.30-ish in the morning. But, you know, as I explained this to Avi at one point, it's an anecdote. And so it is not sufficient for me to use that as proof of anything except to myself.

To me, it currently motivates me to continue to look into this because at some level I want to prove not only to myself that I wasn't seeing something, but I want to prove to others that it's worth it. But I got brought into it by basically a visit by government agencies and an aerospace corporation asking me to help them understand how pilots and intelligence personnel or how they had been harmed. And they, you know, they came to me because my lab had developed or been involved in developing one of the world's most advanced blood analysis instruments. And they said, okay, well, in part of a larger medical workup on these individuals, they said, would you please help us look at the blood of these individuals to look for signs of inflammatory disorders? and they showed me data. And that data was sufficient for me to get more and more interested in this. And then I got shown additional and more data. And frankly, it was, just like I was saying before, it was data off the line.

And that didn't just, I'm just drawn to that kind of stuff. I mean, it is one of those kinds of unsolvable problems that just was begging for an answer. And I suppose the reason why I continue to get more involved is because people told me not to get involved. Other scientists, oh, you shouldn't be doing this. It'll ruin your career. And I just, I had an inner welling, I guess, of anger about it. Why would you even say that? It seems that you're closing your mind to some fascinating possibilities.

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While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. right right i think that's the you know kind of the the the you know to whatever extent there is a conspiracy and i'm not a conspiracy minded person i don't think you guys are either but there is a desire not to think about these things i mean obvi mentioned religion earlier um you know one of the reasons that i there's a conspiracy there's a conspiracy by scientists to tell you to not think about it which isn't like it's being driven by anybody behind the scenes right it's like this it's like this uh

I don't know. It's like they're afraid of being painted with a brush of your belief, even though I'm not asking them to believe in it. But what do you say to somebody, Avi, who says, look, you guys are, I mean, they're going to bring out this card. You guys are three chaired white male professors. You are the peak of privilege, blah, blah, blah. How can you legitimately say, Avi, that there's a conspiracy against you. You're one of the most peak performers the planet has ever known. I mean, how do you answer those kind of critiques. Well, there is no conspiracy.

I don't believe in those, but I wanted to mention that two-thirds of all Americans believe that there is extraterrestrial life. And that's more than the number, you know, the nearly 50% that believe God exists. Okay, so and then there was a poll recently by Elizabeth Stanway in the UK. She polled the of all the 350 astronomers and 94% of them. 94% of them admitted that they were fascinated with science fiction, and then 60-something percent of them suggested that they chose astronomy as a result of reading science fiction and thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence.

So I say to myself, well, it must resonate very deeply with those astronomers and with the general public. The only question is why professional they put this makeup of pretending they don't care about it, they don't want to fund it, and they want to assume that the universe is a zeroth assumption, that the universe is dead, lifeless, which is pretty much what cosmologists do all the time.

And, you know, I do believe that unidentified aerial phenomena are a mixed bag. I think many of them are probably used for espionage, but by other nations. I think that some of them, are just weather balloons or, you know, drones or U.S. government developing some equipment that others are not aware of. Or, you know, it could be some, you know, natural phenomena like birds or thunderstorms or whatever, or meteors. But it's sufficient to have one object which originated from an extraterrestrial origin for this to change the future of humanity.

because imagine us finding a gadget. And, you know, the chance that the gadget was produced by a civilization, which is exactly at the same technological phases we are, is minute because we developed our science and technology over one century. Quantum mechanics was discovered 100 years ago. And all of our gadgets are based on that understanding of quantum mechanics, just 100 years. My point is that's one part in a hundred million of the age of the universe. So most like, and most stars formed five billion years before the sun. So most likely, there are much more advanced than we are,

whoever produced this gadget, and we can learn a lot. It, you know, and one thing we need not to worry about, that's something that Stephen Hawking argued that, you know, we should be really careful, they might harm us. I don't think so. I think there's so much superior to us. It's just like a biker, you know, driving down the sidewalk. and what the colony of ants does in the crack of the pavement is completely irrelevant.

I mean, they can decide about the protocol, how to engage with a biker, but that doesn't really matter. So I think we are dealing with something far beyond us, which in a way, you know, is similar to religions that believe in something much more powerful. So that's why I said that spirituality and the frontiers of science may have something in common. Well, let me, you know, since you've heard my spiel a little bit of, Avi, but maybe Gary hasn't. You know, I of the three of us might be, you know, I mean, I think we're all skeptical. I think that's the job of a scientist to be skeptical, but also approach things with an open mind.

And maybe the latter is not as common as the former should be. And the default reaction of a scientist, you know, should be essentially, as Isaac Asimov said, you know, that's odd, not like eureka. I have found it. But I've said to you, Avi, I've said, you know, the, well, first of all, the appeal to popularity, right? So I was in Europe recently at Galileo's house. I mean, this is amazing. I was at Galileo's prison house in Florence in Archetri. And I was there and I was thinking with the prison bars on there that he was imprisoned for saying something essentially that was true.

And that didn't go against the prevailing religious doctrine of the day. In other words, the person who came up with the idea that the earth was the center of the universe wasn't, you know, Jesus Christ. It was Aristotle and Ptolemy. Now, you guys know better than the average person. Those were pagans, right? So why did the Catholic Church, Avi, did you know this, that the Catholic Church, you know, made Aristotle effectively baptized him 1,400 years after his birth, so that the, so that the sun could not be the center of the universe?

I don't know. I mean, you can understand it from a political point of view, because if people, if you flatter the egos of people, they adapt your doctrine. So in order to attract more believers, what you would argue is that we are central to the universe. We are central actors. God is really focused on us. And then people will believe you. If you say, oh, we are just side actors.

You know, there are much more important things happening in the universe. And we are just, we happen to be here by chance. And then people say, well, you are just depressing. You know, like this doctrine is not appealing to me. I want to be at the center. Like all the alpha males want to be at the center. And guess what? if you were to tell Putin that by conquering a piece of land, he would look like an ant

hugging a single grain of sand on the landscape of a huge beach. You know, he would be really upset, but that's the truth. You know, the universe is huge. We are insignificant. We just came at the end. If you come at the end to a play and you are not at the center of the stage, guess what? The play is not about you. But people don't like that message.

They want to be central and important. They want God to look over their shoulder and read. respond to everything they do. And as a result, if the church adapts this doctrine that we are central to the universe, they get more believers. So I think it was serving a very good political purpose. Well, that brings me to a question for Gary. So that one of my friends here in San Diego wanted me to ask you, why should we expect along the lines of what Avi said, the centrality, this notion of cosmic ego and significance, why would we expect or should we expect that aliens would even have DNA or have any kind of chemical composition like we are.

Is that something that we would ab initio expect? In other words, is DNA the fundamental operating system of life in the universe? Or would we, are we being too, what do you say, anthropocentric by assuming that if there are life forms, that they must be, quote, unquote, like us? Well, I think you can take that question in two directions. I mean, one, there's plenty of evidence that the raw materials for DNA are everywhere. That's pretty clear. There's two interesting papers that I'm aware of about sort of the panspermia notion.

One of them is it's sort of applying Moore's law to DNA regulatory complexity and the regulatory programs that you can infer from everything from, you know, viruses through bacteria, yeast, up until us. And the premise is that you can essentially show that there is a Moore's law of genetic complexity that would, you can draw across the timeline of life on Earth. The problem with the timeline and the Moore's complexity is that it goes, it goes back and points to a time about 8 billion years ago when life likely exists or started in terms of if it were a linear line. So there's two solutions to that. It either happened 8 billion years ago well before our solar system was around and got here on meteorites or other basically modalities.

Or it rapidly ascended and the complexity basically happened in maybe 100 million years and then achieved linearity. So that's one fascinating aspect. And it's an interesting published paper. People can go to argue about the math if they want. I'm not going to get into that. You know the authors of that, Gary, so I can put it in the text? I'll go find it for you. I haven't got it on my computer here.

I'll put it later. It's a Moore's Law argument about it. It's fascinating. And the other is the so-called, it's called the wow signal in the genetic code. And it was by a couple of scientists from, I think it was Azerbaijan, mathematicians, looking at the genetic code structure and essentially laying out, again, a mathematical argument that the DNA code, the genetic code for determining a triplet of bases into proteins was designed. Right. And so they said that basically that's the wow signal that we're all looking for. Now, again, I mean, the problem, I mean, it's a fascinating argument and the map looks good,

but the problem is it falls prey to the attack that you can't apply simple, linear mathematical approaches to evolution. It's the same thing that, you know, the selfish gene of Richard Dawkins, his beautiful book, basically lays out that, you know, just because the eye didn't Abinicio evolve out of nothing, it doesn't mean that there's a God involved. But the wow signal, it's a beautiful, it really is a beautiful paper. It's a think piece. I posted it in the, and it's overlaid your face right now. I see it there.

No, no, it's great. And, you know, I just, again, I don't think it's proof of anything. Kazakhstan, not Azerbaijan. I apologize to both nations. Don't start any wars in that part of the world, please, Gary. Yeah. So I think that those are two papers that underpin the sort of scientific notion that this panspermia effect can be at least analyzed by traditional approaches, mathematics, at the least.

But then the other is, you know, I think you go back and probably Avey knows this as even better, the so-called notion of Boltzman brains, right? Are you aware of this, Brian? Yes. Yes. We spoke with John Carroll about that. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating that, you know, you can perhaps have organized plasma or organized objects in 3D space. And if they could be, if they could self-contain themselves, there's no reason that they cannot be conscious.

Right. It's not life as we understand it, but you could still imagine it as conscious or consciousness. And, you know, if such existed, it's been a. around since the beginning of what we would call time. That's right. Yeah, if I may add that, Brian, what traditionally humans called God in religious texts, in philosophical texts, you know, there is a lot of philosophy around it, could simply be attributed to an advanced scientific civilization, because we are getting to the point where we will

develop life in our laboratories. And again, it's 100 years after modern science started. So you can imagine that a civilization that had a million years of scientific work might know how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, even though for 50 years string theories were not really able to come up with predictions, maybe a more advanced civilization was able to figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity and engineer that knowledge. Okay, so once you understand it, you can engineer it and create, perhaps a baby universe in the laboratory. And so my point is that here is a path.

It's often thought that religion and science are somewhat contradictory, but that's if you stick to traditional notions. But it could well be that, you know, when you advance to a high enough level of intelligence, you realize that what we called God is actually a manifestation and of a much higher level of intelligence or scientific development. And that's where I think that we can bring

philosophy, religion, and science together. It's not necessarily contradictory. But for that, we need to be open-minded. We need to allow, when we attend the class of intelligence civilizations, allow for a smarter student in the class, not just say we are the smartest, there is nobody else in the room, but rather say,

Let's check, okay? Because that was the biggest shock my daughter said when I brought them on the first day to kindergarten. They realized there is a smarter kid around. You know, like that is a shock. And a lot of people prefer not to look and say, we are the only ones in class. And we are so smart that nobody else exists out there. And I say, well, you know, you behave just like those people who put Galileo in house or else, because they didn't want to learn about something new.

Let's go back to the pan-spermia. By the way, I can't resist that on my channel I like to give away stuff. And one of the things I give away are meteorites. Here are some meteorites. And Gary brought it up, of course. And I can't resist. So you can actually win your own meteorite if you go to my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list.

And you'll be entered to win a drawing of a real genuine meteorite that crashed into Argentina. About 5,000 years ago was discovered in the 1500s. and was used for tools and other sorts of implements. And it's really fun. And I'll send that to you. I may even send one lucky winner some uranus soap because you need to keep uranus clean, as we all know. But actually, my point is a serious one. So, panspermia works both ways, right?

So I want to ask both of you guys, maybe starting with Gary, pansepermia should work the opposite way. In other words, life on Earth should have disseminated throughout our sources. solar system. And over the billions of years, you were absolutely right. The origin of life, you know better than me, we believe started about four billion years ago. In other words, it's just a few hundred million years after this meteorite was created in the same proto-solar system, right? The fact is we don't observe any evidence for life in our solar system. I'm not saying it's dispositive. As I think Carl Sagan said, you know, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.

and, you know, there's my favorite finger puppet of Carl Sagan. I've got all sorts of props. I'm a prop cosmic, prop cosmic. But I want to ask you, Gary, to what extent can we use in a Bayesian framework the lack of observation of any trace of any existence of life on a meteorite on another planet as some constraint on the Fissundity argument that life should be ubiquitous once it gets started? So I don't think that the Bayesian framework operates here for two. reasons. One, we haven't done the real test, first of all. I mean, so we sent, I mean, actually the department that I got my PhD in here at Stanford, the Dentist Department, they actually built the experiments that were done on Mars and the Viking Landers. And, you know, there was, there's actually

been a lot of post hoc analysis of that original data that said, you know what, this actually probably was evidence of life. But strangely, and I don't understand this. I'm not saying that it's a conspiracy or anything, they keep sending back microscopes that look at rocks, but they don't send back a growth media or anything to try to see if something, if they were to drop a piece, some dirt from Martian soil in it, if any critters grow, bacteria or what have you. So, you know, so first of all, the experiment has been done so you can't populate the priors in the Bayesian inference there. Second, well, Venus, at least, from the, you know, view point of the kind of life that we would be looking for is not a nice place to be if you're

life. But, you know, I mean, I think we're all looking at the under ice oceans around the larger planets here. And I would bet any amount of money that we're going to find something under there. I mean, all the necessary requirements for the kind of life that we think of are going to be there. water, heat, and probably things like hydrogen sulfide or other redox-related chemicals that would be sufficient for growing, let's say, even primitive life will be there.

I'm 100% sure, but that's where it is going to be. Here is an interesting anecdote. Let me just mention that. You know, if there was a news media back two and a half billion years ago, they would say some good news and some bad news about life in the solar system. Because what happened was that Mars lost its atmosphere around that time. And it used to have liquid water on the surface. It's pretty obvious based on all the data we have from the Perseverance Rover most recently.

So there were clearly lakes and eventually for some mysterious reason, Mars lost its atmosphere. I mean, it has a much lower gravity than the Earth, but there was some event that caused it to lose its atmosphere and as a result, all liquid water on its surface or life form. So we might find evidence that life existed on early Mars because it was not very different from Earth, early Earth. Now, around the same time, two and a half billion years, that's a complete, it could be a complete coincidence or maybe not.

But the oxygen level in the atmosphere, of Earth rose abruptly. We don't know why. I mean, we know what produced the oxygen cyanobacteria, but we don't know why there was this sudden rise in the oxygen level, and that, of course, enabled all the chemistry that allowed complex life forms like ourselves to exist, okay?

Without that, we wouldn't exist. There wasn't much oxygen in the first half of the life of the Earth. And both events occurred at the same time. at the same time there was bad news on Mars, good news on Earth for intelligent life or complex life, and maybe they were related. I don't know. But when we look at other planets,

one thing to keep in mind is, you know, that we have a 50% chance to conclude that life exists if there is oxygen, because there was microbial life on Earth for half of its life without much oxygen in the atmosphere. And the second is that within a billion years from now, the sun will boil off, all the oceans on Earth.

Okay, so even Earth will lose its atmosphere and the water on its surface. And that's one billion years from now. So that's like 20% left. You know, we don't have much time left anyway. And all of the tricks we are doing about global climate change and so forth, you know, it wouldn't change much when the sun will heat up the surface of the Earth. Good thing we have 10 years. Most stars like...

You see nothing we have 10 years? That's right. But one thing to keep in mind, most stars like the surface. sun formed five billion years before the sun. So they already went through that. Now, we didn't hear the cries for help from those civilizations that were on these habitable planets like the earth and said, wow, we're losing our, you know, atmosphere, we're losing our oceans, we're losing everything. And we, and they cried for help. There must have been sort of an immediate exodus. They must have sent lots of spacecraft. In fact, most of the interstellar objects, most of the interstellar

objects. Most of the interstellar crafts may have been launched at this last phase when the civilizations that were highly evolved, technologically realized, we're about to die. Okay, so they sent everything as much as they can. And so most of the things we find in the interstellar medium may be relics from that desperation, but we couldn't hear them because we were not around. And, you know, these radio signals passed by the earth when microbes were around. We were not there to hear them. And we will go through that in a billion years if we are if we will survive all the other catastrophes but my point is that's something to keep in mind when we look for set these signal radio signals you know they cannot come from a star that evolved into the red giant phase you know like most of the sunlike stars went

through that and therefore just forget about it well i guess you know that my point in bringing this up is that, you know, you either have two different conjectures. One is that the day after we discover unequivocal evidence for the existence of life outside of the earth, that will transform everything. And I sometimes feel like that stands in direct contradistinction to the fact pattern that we've already seen. And that's the following. In 1996, late 1996, early 1997, President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the discovery of meteorites, not unlike this, in Antarctica, where I've been twice, and I've spent about a month of my life there. And it's a barren place. It's a frozen dead continent, just like the ice planet Hawth.

I love the people there, but I wouldn't want to live there, right? Now, that was never falsified. In fact, in order to get a NASA press conference on the White House lawn, it had to be peer reviewed right avi uh and and that peer review process took place and it's never been anti peer review it's never been retracted formally and my question to you guys is what was what was the results i i am i'm so they discovered these meteorites uh from the allen lands hill meteorite fall that was actually discovered and it was believed to either contain microbial life oh yes okay this one right and that was and you can see it in the movie contact there's a scene where

President Clinton is talking and Jody Foster's on and and that's really real. It's not cheesy. He actually did that and they used the actual NASA press conference. So my point is that we already, in the general public has already been through this. They don't know what's been retracted. I mean, I meet people all the time that don't know my Bicep 2 paper was, you know, the conclusions were retracted. And Avi knows that story very well because he was there. But I want to ask you guys a question, Gary, if the general public, you know, really hasn't gotten up in arms about this discovery, which in their minds is still valid, it's still a actual scientific discovery.

What makes us think that if you come up with proof or Avi comes up with some discovery that anything will be different 20 years from now? Well, you know, I said this before. I think if it doesn't affect kitchen table issues or doesn't challenge somebody's religion or their status in the world, they probably will just ignore it.

until it, I think, eaks out and leaks out into the general scientific framework so that it becomes, as of many things, and now is an accepted fact. And two years ago, it wasn't. So, I mean, I'm perfectly fine with the public not agreeing with the conclusions or any conclusions in any point in time. I'm only interested in convincing a sufficient cadre of scientists that something is worth studying so that continued research can be done on it. I mean, you know, I often say I was raised Catholic but brought up Jewish by two fantastic scientist mentors when I was a graduate student here at Stanford Leonard and Leonard Herzenberg.

And Lee Horsenberg, the wife, was always with a, when I asked a certain question, says, Gary, you're asking a question that is yes or no. And you can, that's sort of a Las Vegas question. You can be spending so much of your time on a no and you've wasted, you know, as many months or years of your life as possible. Sometimes it's easy enough to just switch the mode of the question around so that it's a Zen outcome. so that no matter what the answer is, it's interesting. And so I think that this is one of those kinds of questions, this whole subject matter. It doesn't matter what the answer is. If it's no, it's maybe disappointing, but that's still interesting because that means life on Earth is unique.

But if it's yes, if it's yes that there is life even in our own solar system doesn't prove there are UFOs or U.S. But it is at least a step in the direction of saying, well, it could have been. I'm convinced that no matter what we find on Mars or under the oceans of Titan or what have you, is going to be related to us, whether it started there and came here or vice versa, I don't really necessarily care. But there are actually genetic ways to get at that problem. By the way, yeah, Brian, I should emphasize, to me, science is about learning. I mean, it's a learning experience about reality.

So nature is educating us and we better pay attention. It's a dialogue with nature. It's not a monologue. And very often we get into a monologue, which is a very bad attitude when you date with a partner, right? You need to listen to the other side. And that's why experiments are so important. Now, the point is, why is it beneficial to us to listen

and figure out what reality is? is because it allows us to adapt to it. If we have the wrong ideas, if we live in the metaverse and put goggles on our head and believe that we look like Brad Pitt all day long and that we are very attractive next to celebrities, you know, we may feel good about ourselves, but it will not be the reality that we all share.

And the same if you take recreational drugs. You may feel high and very good, but it's not the reality. Now, the scientific inquiry allows us to figure out what reality is. And sometimes it contradicts our, you know, prior beliefs like quantum mechanics, you know, was in conflict with the traditional thinking. And Einstein had a problem with that, but he was wrong. Okay. So the point of the matter is that by understanding why you are wrong, you can then realize how to cope with the new sense of reality. So for example, if you know that the earth moves around the sun, when you design a space mission, you take that into account.

If you believe very decisively that the sun moves around the earth, you will never get to your destination by launching a rocket, okay, because you have the wrong idea. So reality is whatever it is, and we better adapt to it. And the only way to do that is by, you know, collecting data, not human beings are not scientific sensors. They are not scientific tools. We learn that over history.

That's why we are using instruments. And that's what science is based on. So collecting quantitative data, understand extending your instruments and then learning something new about reality will benefit us, no matter what we find? Absolutely. And I wonder, Gary, what do you attribute? And I think, you know, just with all lack of false sincerity to mix a lot of things, I think

you in particular have been in part crucial in the destigmatization of this phenomena and to the fact now that it's being studied by none other than NASA. What do you attribute the recent upsurge, the kind of, you know, the three of us are old enough maybe to remember Nancy Kerrigan, why me, you know, why now? Why is this becoming in the forefront of our collective, you know, frontal lobe? Why is it, I'm not the Avi lobe? Why is it, why is it now coming to the forefront such that what was previously derided and you have suffered a lot of slings and arrows personally, Gary? Why is it now coming, you know, sort of kosher to investigate this so much so that NASA itself is investigating it. What do you attribute that to?

Well, I think it's a conversation across the multiple fields of, let's say, human professional arenas. I mean, one, it's the sciences. You know, it was, for me, actually, very exciting when Avi got on board because I felt like, okay, well, here's another person, another serious scientist that I can point to and say, say, I'm not the only, I'm not the only one. But I second, you I think it was really the efforts of people in the intelligence services. I mean, we all know of Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon and then the pilots who came forward. And not because I think that they were addressing some sort of conspiracy, they were actually being scientists.

They were saying, look, there's data off the curve here that needs to be understood. We don't know what it is. And I think them going public and going, I mean, everything, Even though the New York Times article changed things back in 2017, I think those pilots being on 60 minutes, it was that kind of personal, frankly, anecdote that was given and conveyed by credible individuals that changed things because you heard people speaking in their own terms. I mean, I can speak to another scientist in my own terms within my own language of science, and they will believe me because of that. So there was something essentially very human about what these individuals did, where they took more bricks and arrows than I ever did. And so I think that it was, it's that kind of back and forth, there's a, there's a ricochet effect occurring where I don't think we can expect that ricochet. to be sufficient to propel it, I think we need to continue to work on it.

And frankly, I need to be able to provide the kind of proof that I think another scientist would agree with me is irrefutable. And I've had, I think that's kind of what it's about. Last year I had on Jim Semivin, you know, former CIA, operative, executive maybe, along with Tom DeLong, with my good friend Kurt Jiamengal, who may be listening, his YouTube channel theories of everything. everyone should subscribe to. That conversation, and actually, thank you, Kurt, for putting me in touch with Gary. I have to give Hakarathatov, right, Avi? When I talk about these subjects with Tom DeLong,

he mentioned a problem that he has, but he's not a scientist, so he could get away with it. And that was that he claimed to have alien technology, an artifact from a downed craft, and he claims that it's 100% genuine. However, the means by which he acquired it cannot be either divulge or reproduced. In other words, there's a chain of custody problem that Avi and I don't suffer from, right? If Avi and I look at a at a muon, their mons are like commodities. They're fungible. One mule, you've seen one muon, you've seen them all. They're interchangeable. But alien craft aren't. And so therefore, it's very important the provenance, so to speak. And I guess I'm wondering, you know, from your excursions, what do you make of the claims of, say, a Tom DeLong or

Jacques Valet, who I know you've worked with? Well, if he's talking about the so-called magnesium bismuth metamaterial, you know, I have pieces of that. And I don't think that there is sufficient evidence at this point to claim that is clearly, you know, from an extraterrestrial vehicle. That said, I don't think that sufficient analysis has been done on it. It does have slightly altered magnesium ratios. I've looked at that myself, but they're not so far off that they can't be construed as some other sort of reason for in the making of it.

So unless he's talking about something else, I don't know and nor have I seen it, the evidence. And so I put it into the anecdote category. And I like Tom. I mean, I'm a, you know, he's a friend. But I haven't seen anything else. Now, I have been given pieces of material that do have chains of evidence. This is the so-called Ubutuba event where we did do a very detailed analysis using secondary iron mass spec of the isotope ratios of two pieces. And we did it in the same instrument at the same time under the same vacuum conditions.

One piece was perfectly conventional magnesium ratios. the other were way off. I mean, so far off as to be, the only thing that I could imagine is it was manufactured. Now, that doesn't prove it's a UAP. That doesn't prove it was alien. It just says to me, somebody back in the 70s spent a lot of money

to change the isotope ratios and then blew it up over a beach in Brazil. And so the only question it raises to me is, who would do that and why would they do it? I mean, because we don't use isotopes for anything other than either medical reasons or blowing stuff up. So if I may add there, Brian. So given the landscape that I described before of scientists being skeptical and then believers being very proactive and so forth, given that you would ask yourself, okay, who would be the first to notice something unusual?

It's obviously the government who has the day job of worrying about national security because they have to monitor the sky at all times and protect military personnel. So they keep patrolling or looking from above from satellites on Earth. And if there is anything unusual, they would be the first to notice it because the astronomers build telescopes that focus on a small region of the sky, look at very distant sources, and if something flies above their telescope, they dismiss it. And even if they see an object from interstellar space that looks unusual, they would say, oh, it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before.

So you can see the ad. By the way, an anecdote, a colleague of mine wrote a review paper in annual reviews of astronomy and astrophysics about Omuamua, the first reported interstellar object. And he said, I just finished writing it a review about the comet Omuamua. And I said, what do you mean the comet, Omuamua? We all know that there was no cometary tail detected. And in fact, the Spitzer Space Telescope looked very deeply, couldn't see any traces of carbon-based molecules.

So he said, well, I have a theory that in fact, this object had a cometary tail when we didn't look at it and didn't have a cometary tale when we looked at it. So I said, that's just like going to the zoo and looking at an elephant and saying the elephant is a zebra. just that the stripes show up when you don't look at the elephant. And just think about it. Mainstream astronomer writing the authoritative review on an object that looked unusual and calls it something that is inappropriate like a comet. Why would he do that? First, he has the backing of

people that say, oh, it's natural, forget about it. Second, he wants to have the cozy, warm feeling of something familiar. Okay? So when you call it to a comet, you feel, okay, we can move on. Now, my point is, this is not supposed to be the way science is done. We are all supposed to be kids wondering about the world, without pretensions, without pretending that we are experts, that we know everything, and without bullying any opinion that might be different than ours. That is the way science should be done. And here I see a problem, because when young scholars see this behavior, they hesitate to innovate, and then science, is not progressing at the same rate as it should.

It should be blue sky research. We should encourage young people to be creative, to deviate from dogmas. And, you know, it's just very depressing to me to see this behavior. And he's young, by the way. So he wants to show as if he size up because he's looking for a job. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. fit for your ambition for citizens back but this should not be the climate that well yeah i agree i've

often said you know there was a guy in the in the 1850s who had these uh incredible ideas that there was an ether and they at the space of the vacuum was actually not a vacuum there were little gears and whirlpools and vortices and thank god for james clerk maxwell that twitter didn't exist back then because he would have been ridiculed and humiliated and we would have thrown the electromagnetic laws that are associated with his name, 160 years later, out with the bathwater. But I think you're wrong, Avi, because I think scientists are like children. I mean, we don't play well with others. We're very jealous.

We like attention. And we don't like to share our toys, right? So I want to ask Gary, when we see things like this, and Avi, please, you too. And I just want to remind everybody, we're talking about Avi Loeb, Gary Nolan, some of the most eminent scientists who happen to have turned at great personal risk. And I want to say this with respect. I don't have the courage that you guys do. I kind of do this because I believe that we as scientists have a moral obligation

to share the data, to share the discoveries in a way that are tax-paying public who pay our freaking salary. I don't care. You guys are at private institutions. I'm at a public institution. But you guys are supported by the public at a very deep level as well. I just want to put that out there. I feel it's my moral obligation to share.

But I don't have the courage to go out on a limb to go on Tucker Carlson like Gary to go on the various outlets that you've gone on. on as well, Avi, because I am worried. I'm worried about the, obviously there's career risk, et cetera, but there's also kind of an intellectual capture that occurs. When you believe something to be true, that no one else maybe agrees with you, or very few of your colleagues agree with you, it's a very lonely place. And I'm just saying, in all honesty, not many scientists have that courage.

Not many people have that courage. Courage is the rarest of all human emotions, in my opinion. So I just want to express that. But I do want to say along the lines of data, I've heard people say, and when Avi was on with Eric Weinstein, we heard things like the data is ours. It belongs to the public. I don't know if I necessarily disagree that the data belongs to the public. But don't we have an obligation as scientists, Gary, to interpret the data very complex. Someone who's watching this channel may be a layperson, very bright, brilliant, I mean, the smartest audience in the universe watches this channel.

But do they have the tools to assess at the level that you do? do because of your access, because of the privilege that you have to be a scientist, can an average layperson really understand what it is that maybe you might be claiming? Or is it your job to explain it in a way that they could? Does it belong to that, basically? Again, this is kind of literally a riff on what Avi just said. I don't think of, frankly, what we're doing as courageous. I'm just doing what I thought science was teaching me to do. Right. And that's really what Avi was saying, that if science is about following rules that somebody else wrote on stone tablets, then science is done, right?

And so I've spent my whole career doing things that people told me shouldn't or couldn't be done. Like when I was doing starting companies back in the early 90s or mid-90s, I was told you're going to destroy your career, you shouldn't do it. Now everybody does it, right? And people who used to come to me and tell them I'm ruining my, career come and ask me how to start a company. So that's fine. So I don't consider it, I don't consider it courageous. I'm just doing what I think we're supposed to be doing. You know, that's the, that's the first part. But I'm sorry, what was the second part of your

question? That, you know, when we see data, for example, I'll hear it's, you know, the Huffles field is data, right? It belongs to the public. NASA made the Hubble deep field, James Webb telescope. But it's a pretty picture at one level, right? Avi. It doesn't really have spectroscopic image. So what level do you have to have as a responsibility, Avi, to distill it in a way that the general taxpaying audience who pays our salaries at some level should understand? Yeah. So that's the rationale for the Galileo project, where we say we don't need to wait for the government to declassified data. We'll just collect data that we will open to the public so that everyone can see it. And we're funded by donations and therefore we owe nothing. I mean, there is no level of secrecy.

The other thing I wanted to mention very often, funding is not done from the private sector, but from committees that allocate federal funds to researchers. And these committees argue we shouldn't take risks because otherwise we will waste taxpayers' money. Well, guess what? If you were to ask the taxpayers, what do they care about more? The nature of dark matter being, let's say, the lightest supersymmetric particle, or whether we are alone in our class of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. They would say the latter.

And if you don't want to waste taxpayers' money, you should put it all in the direction the taxpayers want it to be spent. And that poll was never made. So instead, what you have is the mainstream deciding on its own what they believe is risky. And as a result, they suppress innovation in other than the world. And I say, you know, this subject is different. It's not just that I'm deviating from the beaten path in trying to pursue it. It's the path that the public cares about the most and that will have a huge impact on the future of humanity.

So by calling it thinking outside the box, we are missing the point. The box is in the wrong place. I'm thinking straight based on common sense. And one day, my hope is the box will be placed when I'm exactly at the center. of that box, okay? But it takes time. And that happened to me multiple times in my career, where I just did what common sense makes, because after all, I'm a farm boy. You know, I was born on a farm. I don't feel that I'm, that I belong to any elite, even though I was chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years. You know, I feel like the common person, I think straight,

I think with my common sense, I try to reflect what the public cares about. And my point is that, you know, that's the way that science should be done, that we should be just, you know, pursuing what people care about. Instead, what you find in academia is a lot of acrobatics of people trying to show off that they are smart. And sometimes they're going dark alleys that nobody cares about, like worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, you know, the equivalent of that would be to say, let's work for 50 years about the notion of exodemations without evidence, without evidence for supersymmetry, you invested a lot of billions of dollars in the large Hadron Collider. We didn't find it.

My point is it's not a bad thing to do those things, but at the same time, you shouldn't ridicule a study of something that the public cares about, that will have huge impact, and that so far was not funded federally at all. And why would we even doubt that thing? You know, why would we, if we are doing, we are sending interstellar props, why wouldn't we search for others that were sent in our direction? In my view, it's a completely natural thing to do. And the community is like 180 degrees away from where it should be. So it's the box that is in the wrong place. You know, I'm not thinking outside the box. I'm thinking what I, you know, is falling common sense.

The box is out of the common sense. That's what I would argue. I want to ask you, you know, I want to throw a bit of a stink bomb, at NASA, if I may. Yeah, go for it. This UAP committee that they're doing. The task force, several of those so-called scientists, and I'm going to call you a so-called scientist until you prove otherwise, whoever I'm deriding here, have come out before they've even said anything and done many of the things, before they've even done the analysis, and have done many of the things that Avi has been discussing.

They've pre-boxed their conclusions and protected themselves against others being who might say something negative about them because of being even on the committee. How so? How so, Gary? Well, you know, I think, I can't remember the name of the woman, but she basically came out and said something along the lines

of who we don't think that any of this stuff is UAPs and we're pretty sure. Not that's right. You mean, not the Drake, probably, the daughter of Frank Drake? Yeah, I mean, she made a statement. And then there was another person, a BU, or maybe it's, he just came out this morning. He was just recently put on the committee. He said something similar, whereas like, what a sad, sad scientist you are that you feel that you have to say something like that,

before you even look at the data. I'm just disappointed. I would take people like that off the committee, and I'll do something, say something else that I think is a little, why is it only astronauts and astrophysicists who are on this committee? Why? Where are the other kinds of scientists? There's many other kinds of scientists.

I'm sorry, Gary. There actually is. There's Paula Bontepi. She's a biological oceanographer. There's industry people from, from the home. sociological oceanographer. Oh, there's a Islamic Institute of Policy Studies. I agree. David Grinspoon

is a planetary scientist. I actually There's a concentration of a type of scientist that I think has a predilection to not think outside of the box or in the right box

because they're more afraid of what their colleagues might think than others. I question the constituency of the individuals who are on that committee. But but but accepting that let's ask the meta question Gary is this a good thing is that is it in principle I mean we shouldn't prejudge their conclusions just as as as you are. I'm happy I'm delighted if they prove me wrong. Okay Gabby by the way I met with the committee and had a very good conversation with them. The one thing that surprises me is not what Gary just mentioned what surprises me is that a year ago there was a committee appointed by the

SETI community and decided not to have discussions on UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena in any of the conferences related to SETI. Now you ask yourself, SETI is supposed to be the closest ally to the study of objects that are unusual. Okay. Why would they reject any discussion and dismiss it up front, not allowing any discussion in their conferences? And the only way I can understand that, is they want to distance themselves from those studies because they want to show the rest of the community that in fact they are in the middle. They are actually mediators,

and they are more sane than another group in their mind, and as a result, they deserve funding. And I find that apologetic tone to be completely inappropriate. We should search for radio signals. Fine, we didn't find any in 70 years, just like waiting for a phone call, but we should also search our mailbox for any packages that arrived. And that's a completely different method.

And I don't see a contradiction. And I don't see why one is supposed to be considered as less valuable or less worth pursuing, especially when the government comes out and sees things they don't understand. So let's just figure it out. And why should the SETI community be the one to resist studies of UAP? So I find that really strange. I must tell you, because it shows how the dynamics of academia is controlled by societal forces, not biological thinking.

Do you think that they are under constraints? Let's say they discover something potentially transformative or definitive proof that aliens don't exist, whatever that means. Okay. Are they under constraints? Because they are not going to, I've spoken with David Spurgel, who happens to be a personal friend of mine.

And he's not going to come on the podcast. I mean, he said he'd come on the podcast, but he has this thing called the U.S. Congress to testify in front of first. Okay. So that'll come down the line. Shelly writes, my upstairs neighbor, UC San Diego. So they are sworn to do a good job and come out these results. Now, on one hand, we have talked about, you know, the fallibility or the implicit bias that we have as human beings to confirm or refute hypotheses that agree or disagree with our preconceived notions.

Now, I've heard a lot of say, and there is a substantial amount of aviation and space, you know, related people that are on this, including people from the FAA. I have heard a lot of things from pilots over the past couple of years. And I happen to be a pilot with instrument ratings and all sorts of goodies that fly little tiny planes around Southern California. Not far from, by the way, where some of these tic tacks and stuff were observed. But I want to get your impression, first of all, Avi and then Gary. For the claims of Commander David Fravor, you know, you can't comment on their braver. I mean, they're far braver and they've done things that I'll never do. and I never criticized them personally.

But we're very skeptical of eyewitness evidence in a courtroom. Why are we so willing to believe in the pro-UFO, UAP, as alien craft? Why is it so readily accepted that the testimony of an eyewitness who is mostly trained to look at his instruments and flying as instruments or her instruments? Why do we take that with outsized credulity? Avi first and then Gary, I'd like to get your impression of...

I don't think it should be regarded as scientific evidence. Now, let me first comment on why I think you see the behavior of members of the committee or others in SETI and so forth. There was a congressman who expressed anti-gay statements publicly when he was in Congress. Okay. And once he retired a couple of years ago, he confessed that he is gay. Okay? And what does it show you about human psychology? That very often people are really intrigued by something and they pretend to be something else.

okay so because of what they see around them and i think a lot of that is happening in the context of uap those that are object to it the most are the ones that are actually very intrigued by them and by the way in religion very often if you want to convert someone to a religion those you know you target those that object the most because they care about it and then you realize you can convince them so anyway just putting that aside with respect to frayver and all these testimonies, you know, they are intriguing, they're fascinating. And of course, we want to believe that there is something else out there because it's fascinating. It's intriguing that it will change everything. But from a scientific point of view, I'll tell you, I'll give you two scenarios that could

explain what the Nimitz report was about. One is there was a swarm of objects. Okay, so they saw an object at one point and then a short time later it was behind them. Now, they say it moved so fast, you know, that nothing can do that, but in fact, it was two different objects that came in and out of view, and it was not the same object. So unless you have scientific evidence, you're dealing with, you can read the serial number of the object and tell that it's the same object.

It may not be the same object. It could also not be a physical object, like if you have a laser pointed at the, you know, and creating a blob of hot gas that appears in your infrared images and appears in your radio images, it may not be a real object. So we don't know. Maybe there was some new equipment.

The government was testing and not telling those who saw it. The point is that this is intriguing enough for me or the Galileo project to build a suite of instruments that we will employ and bring to those locations and, you know, monitor the sky, take a video of the sky in the infrared, the optical, the radio, and try to figure it out if it comes back again. And we will, of course, let everyone know. It will not be eyewitnesses. So the point of the matter is this is good enough to trigger scientific inquiry.

It's not good enough as scientific evidence. I agree. I mean, I call it, like I said before, is preliminary data. I could be working at my bench or when I used to work at the bench, and I can see something in the data that to me is pretty clear evidence, but I know that there is a standard of proof that's required to hand to others. And so, you know, if we could get all of the necessary data from the fraylor and the other individuals, maybe that could be, you know, constituted as actual proof.

But, you know, so I think in a nod to the true skeptics, I don't mean the pseudosceptics and the pathological skeptics, it's like, yeah, we haven't done our job yet. Or the job isn't, we don't have the necessary access to do the job. So I think what the Galileo project is doing and is exactly what needs to be done is just, you know, let's take it into our own hands and do it. And if the government wants to participate and have us help, that's a great thing. I mean, one other thing that I think is kind of exciting, though, about this notion of, let's say, preliminary evidence or whatever, if some civilization has made it past the inflection point of self-immolation that we are, you know, seem to be on the precipice of ourselves, I see that as a positive thing.

I look at these suppositive events that people see and these objects, even if they're not real, as a horizon to which we can aspire, right? If something can do this, or if we force our minds to think, well, can we do something like that? That to me is a fantastic way to excite the younger generation to. to come up with new ideas and new technologies, even if everything that is going on around UAPs ends up to be a complete and utter illusion. Well, we're gonna take questions from the audience,

so I've seen a couple thousand comments go by, but I'm gonna start the process now of actually looking through them by taking my host prerogative. And just a reminder, we're talking with Professor Avi Loeb of a small institution in K. Cambridge, I love it when I meet somebody from Harvard, Avi, and they say, I go to school near Boston, you know, I got a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Oh, really? You go to the Cambridge Institute of Virology. I'll be... I will define the institution as having smarter undergrads than many faculty I know everywhere. Wow. Well, that is in contradistinction to William F. Buckley Jr., who said I'd rather have, might me, my government be comprised of the first 50 names in the Boston phone book than the

the faculty of Harvard University. But I did once meet somebody who said, I go to the best university in the world. And I said, oh yeah, which one? She said, I'll give you a clue. It starts with an H and ends with a D. And I said, Harvard? She said, Howard, are you crazy?

So that's shout out to some of my young colleagues. Gary Nolan joining us from Stanford University. Avi has some book news that I want to share. And first of all, I put links to both the gentleman's web pages down in the description. I put a link to the paper that Gary referred to about the wow signal and DNA. But in particular, Avi's got a series of articles in addition to his smash hit book called Extraterrestrial, for which he was on the show a year ago or two years ago now.

I can't believe it, Avi. It's going to be two years in January. And he's promised he'll come back for his new book. Say a little bit about your new book, Avi. Yeah, it's called Interstellar, and it will be about the implications to humanity of everything we discussed. So stay tuned for that. I should say that, you know, over the past, since my previous book appeared, I was on about 1,800 podcasts and interviews for TV and newspapers and so forth.

But the biggest satisfaction came about a week ago. I attended a summit in Palm Desert, and a woman came to me originally from Iran. And she said, can I have a selfie with you? And I said, sure, she knew about me. and she took a selfie and then she said the following morning, she said, I posted it on Instagram, and there are hundreds of Iranian women scientists that wrote back to me and said that they are following your work.

And I thought to myself, wow, that's quite remarkable because I'm originally from Israel, and I'd never imagined there would be hundreds of Iranian women following my work. And I basically recorded a video snippet with her in which I supported the women of Iran in their fight right, now in the protest. So what I would like to say is this subject resonates with a lot of people around the world. A lot of people are excited about it. We are going to do the expedition to Papua

New Guinea. There is a lot going on. Every day I get surprising things happening. And within a year or two, I bet you that we will have a conversation. The landscape will change. It's not up to federal institutions to authorize progress. It's not up to the dogma of academia to tell us what reality is like. We will just figure it out like kids. And then, you know, I don't really, by the way, I keep thinking about Galileo that knew the truth about the earth and the sun and was put in house arrest. Like, who cares whether the public knows about it, whether people don't like it? You know, that's completely irrelevant. If you know what reality is like, one way or the other, the news will break out, okay?

Because that's the reality. You can hide the virus. You can avoid people knowing about it. But the virus, if it's there, people will get sick. You know, so the reality is whatever it is, irrespect of what humans try to do to hide it. And I like to look at the pimples of reality. I don't want any makeup. You see, the people around me try to put makeup on reality so it looks better so that we are the only

intelligent, you know, civilization out there, we feel better about ourselves this way. I want to realize if there is a smarter kid, we want to learn from the smartest kid in our class. That's what we should aim at, because it will give us inspiration. So we want to find who is smarter, you know, out there. One reason I search for intelligence in spaces because I don't often find it when I opened the newspaper. Ryan, Gar, Avi, I can't resist you quoting your top, your top, cop aphorism from last appearance when you're on with Eric Weinstein. I'll put a link to it. What did you say about the sky and being classified, Avi? Well, the sky is not classified, and that's why we should look at it, you know.

And I think we should think of ourselves as students of nature. Let nature educate us rather than having a monologue in which we say what nature is supposed to be. And part of nature, you know, I grew up on a farm, and to me, nature is the entire universe, okay? So we are focused most of the time on the two-dimensional surface of this rock that we were born on, the earth. But it's just a tiny rock in a huge space. And just, you know, let's be more modest and look up. That's all I'm asking. Let's look up.

Let's check our mailbox. Like, why are we so close-minded? You know, like that is really, and Fermi asked 70 years ago, where is everybody? That's so self-centered, like to stay at home and say, I don't see my neighbors, you know, like, what is going on here? Well, you didn't look through the windows. You didn't use a telescope back in 1950. So how can you claim where is everybody?

Well, hopefully we'll get a lot of good packages in the mail this Black Friday with books by obvious in them. So first question from the audience for Gary comes from one of my listeners who's asking, are you related to Christopher A? and then in all seriousness, Red Panda Koala asks, any updates on the Havana syndrome? And have you noticed any patterns in experiences held by people that you've encountered? So, Havana syndrome upgraded. I mean, I mean, I, I mean, the Havana syndrome relationship work for me basically was, you know, when we had 100 individuals that were, you know, that something.

of the medical data was taken to me. You know, we had back around 2014, 2015, already figured out that there were, well, we called it at the time interference syndrome. We didn't know that it was basically some sort of, it was related to the issues going on at the U.S. Embassy in Havana. Those cases that I was involved with Havana have been hands. hand it over to the U.S. government. I would say, and it's a good thing. They're not my problem anymore. You know, science is about classification,

and once we could classify them as some kind of, frankly, attack on our diplomatic corps or individuals, those individuals were then taken out of my hands. I mean, not in a negative sense. Just I could hand them over because they were class, they were, I could classify them as something other than, let's say, UAP. on the table, and I think is really this is what the individual is asking about, are the individuals

who were harmed in some way or had damage, who claimed some kind of UAP interaction? Again, it's, for me, the story of the UAP intervention is less interesting to me than is the damage that happened to them and how they came about to be damaged and what was the, let's say, the technology that caused the damage. And so I've said this before, I try to stay away from the anecdotal aspect of the story because I can't verify that, but I can look at the same x-ray or the same medical analysis of an individual and I can reproduce that analysis. And so that's where I'm focused. And I'm sorry if that's not the kind of answer that Mr. Koala wants, but that's really as far as I'm willing to go. The other thing I've said is, I will not do science

by press release. Yes. I will wait until the science is vetted by other individuals. I mean, I got in big trouble doing science by press release with that so-called otacama thing and that, you know, the gentleman Stephen Greer. who I had speculated along the way that I thought that some of the DNA results looked odd, and maybe it was an alien or something. But what I found is that if you speculate to the public who don't know what the limits of speculation mean, they sometimes take what you're saying as a conclusion. And when I basically published the paper showing that this unfortunate mummy was, in fact,

a young girl likely born prematurely and had multiple mutations in genes that were basically in bone development genes. And I had literally the world's expert on bone development genes, Ralph Lachman from here at Stanford, three other Stanford professors who were specialists in South American genetics and all the rest, validate, verify the results, 13 or 14 postdocs, graduate students, Roche Science, Roche Diagnostics on the paper, et cetera, et cetera. And I published it, it didn't matter. All they could basically say was I somehow had convinced a cadre of 15 or so people to fabricate the data because I got a grant from the DOD for doing ovarian cancer,

and that was my payoff. I mean, that is literally, it's, that's what I had to go through. And I realized, okay, you really do, the ethics of how science is done really do work. You have to stick to the rules. And the rules are be very careful what you speculate because the people who don't understand the rules will run with it. I mean, we see this in the newspapers and social media every day. So that's why I won't go any further. So I'm sorry, red, koala, panda.

That's okay. Avi, for you. This comes from Professor Brian Keating. If you had unlimited budget, let's just say unlimited budget, what would you be doing? What could you be doing? Gary, I'm going to ask you the same question. What would you do with effectively unlimited budget? I'm tweaking this.

By the way I tweeted to Elon Musk yesterday about this very question. Go ahead, Alvy. Yeah, I should note that this is not a hypothetical question. No, I know. I know if it is. Okay. So because I'm, you know, I get to meet a number of people that are quite excited. And many of them come to the porch of my home to discuss it with me.

So, you know, as I said, the two-thirds of Americans really care about and believe in extraterrestrial life. And you might assume that many of the multibillionaires that became wealthy recently are drawn out of that population. So many of them care about it. What would they do? So I would follow studies along three tracks, which is pretty much what the Gallo Project is doing, just much more forcefully. So one track is right now I have money to perhaps duplicate the system of instruments that we have maybe a few times and put it in three locations. Okay. But if I get tens of millions or more than that, I could have hundreds of those systems. And that is really the

minimum needed to study the problem thoroughly and get enough statistics. on all the unidentified aerial phenomena that appeared in reports. So what I need is a factor of 10 in funding or more than that. And the more, the better in the sense that we know how to make those instruments. In fact, this week is very sort of historic for the Galileo project, because for the first time we're getting data from all the instruments and bringing them to the computer systems that we have and starting to analyze with artificial intelligence algorithms.

So we are, in the coming weeks, we will basically make sure that everything works. And then within a month or so, we can start planning where to put additional copies of that suite of instruments. And what I'm limited by is the funding. So if I get enough funding, let's say tens of millions to 100 million, that would allow me to get to the bottom of this question, what are unidentified aerial phenomena. I can promise that. And we can demonstrate that we know what we are doing with the current system. We just need more copies of it.

So that's one track. The second one is going after the fragments of interstellar meteors. So we are going to Papua New Guinea to scoop the ocean floor. That's one interstellar meteor from 2014, the first interstellar object in the solar system, tougher than iron, tougher than all the other space rocks known. And therefore it's possibly of some artificial alloy composition. So we want to find out by collecting the fragments. And we are fully funded for that.

that's a one and a half million, but there is another interstellar meteor that we identify, and we would like to go after that as well. So that's at the level of a few million dollars we can go after interstellar meteors, okay? So we have the tens of millions or 100 million for the UAP and at the level of millions for the expeditions. Then the big ticket item is really space missions. So objects that do not collide with Earth, like Omoa Muwa was, we could come close to them and take a close-up photograph. And such a mission is actually a billion dollars in cost. So we are thinking about proposing to space agencies like NASA or others.

But at first we are designing the mission, the parameters of such a mission. And we will have a dating app, the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile that will start operations next year. And it serves as a dating app because we will see more objects like Omoa Mua, and we will swipe to the left for most of them. but some of them would look intriguing, and we would like to approach them as they come towards us and perhaps take a close-up photograph. And that's the most expensive. So if I had unlimited budget, I will have those space missions that meet unusual interstellar objects, just like Omoa-Mua, and take a close-up photograph, maybe even land on them

so that they can tell whether it's a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg, a dust bunny, in which case you will pass through it. These are the suggestions by the main thing. Advertising billboard, right. Yeah. Or they have some screws and bolts and we can land. And I would love to press a button if it's safe. Well, actually, so Joe is asking a question.

Joe Westcott is asking, he'd love to help out. He's got a lot of money because he donated $20 to the super chat. So I'm expecting he's also a billionaire. So now I've had on five billionaires on the podcast. How can an ordinary STEM professional participate in the Galileo project? Okay, so we have two, on the Galileo website, there are two items. One is how to contribute, if someone wants to contribute funds, how to support us. And the second is volunteering to be part of the research team, and there is a different tab for that.

And you just fill a form, and we will look at your credentials and make a decision. Or you can contact me, you can just email me. Okay. And yeah, we'll have links. We have links to your website on the comments section down below. Gary, if you had unlimited funds, say Phil Knight decides to make another $400 million donation to that fair university to let the winds of freedom blow on this research. What would you do with unlimited budget? It's really kind of a surreptitious question, actually. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay.

Well, you know, as some people know, I've been interested in these claimed materials that have been either left behind or dropped from these UAPs. I mean, there's an interesting pattern where an object is seen and it drops something, often a molten metal. In fact, I published a peer-reviewed paper on exactly this, and on a well-credentialed event.

We didn't find anything unusual, but in terms of the constituency, because it was a molten metal, but how does a molten metal end up in the middle of a field where everybody saw a glowing blinking object, you know, just a few hours before. So, you know, in that vein and, say, looking at things that, for instance, Tom DeLange says that he has or that others might have, there is, there are a range of scientific instruments which could be brought to bear as well as a couple that need to be built, including something called an atomic imaging scope that if you have something, how do you prove that it wasn't made here? Well, you need to know that it was made of things, for instance, that humans don't normally

make. That's hard to say because we can pretty much put any set of elements in a vat, mix them together and they'll be there, but it's how they're put together. And if it isn't an obvious technology, nuts and bolts, as obviously just alluded to, then I'm, I'm, I'm just alluded to, then how do you understand or how do you prove that it is from elsewhere? But secondly, let's say that you do have something which is verifiably not human. And it is millions of years ahead of us in some manner or developed by a technology or a civilization farther ahead. The next point of just claiming beyond what it is, that it is from somewhere else is what does it do and how does it do it? And so, you know, if we're going to learn lessons from our betters, let's say,

what better way to do it than to understand the material that it's made of? And so as it turns out, I have seen data supposedly from inside of the government on some of these supposed materials. And I was left wanting for the kind of analysis that was done. It just was insufficient. And so there needs to be sort of a standard. standardized pipeline of how the data should be, how materials should be processed so that you can compare apples to apples, oranges to oranges. So at the end of the day, you get a report which can be read by the scientific community to say one way or the other.

I just want to produce the data in a way that is credible and then let the conclusions flow from the data. But I have, you know, the amounts of money to create some of those, to put together a suite of such instruments is in the tens of millions of dollars to do this. And to do the, make the instrument that I want to make, you know, I actually turns out I have the funding for it now. But you're talking a lot of money as well. I mean, producing data is one thing. analyzing the data is wholly another. Right. And so you basically need to basically bring in the kinds of experts.

PhD and otherwise to do it. I can't do it anymore. I don't have the time. Yeah, and I mean, looking at infinite budgets, I mean, the government can actually print their own money. So in a certain sense, they have infinite budget. Are you impressed with the budget they've dedicated to date to this UAP task force, Avi or Gary? I'm satisfied that they're putting the money to it. And so to the extent that they actually do something with it and don't come out with some, you know, I hope that they put a report out for,

commentary before they finalize that report. I think, I mean, that I think would lend a lot of credibility to it. So we'll see. I'm withholding judgment. And I would love to say six months from now when they're done with it, I'm sorry to the committee for insulting them. Okay. Next up, Avi, this is for you. You can obviously comment on whether or not you think the sufficiency of the federal government NASA budget is adequate. Do you just comment on that quickly? Avi? Well, we don't know what it will be. Right now, it's a study that was funded at 100K, and it's supposed to recommend within a year by June 2023 how much money NASA should allocate to the study of UAP. So this is not really a study of the nature of an identified object.

It's more about whether NASA should invest in such a research, and therefore the funds will be be allocated if they are recommended only probably two years from now if you think about it realistically and my hope is that the landscape of research on this subject will change in the meantime because the Galileo project for example will collect data and so I you know I believe we should not wait for others to approve the research if there are sufficiently wealthy individuals that are excited about this question we can do it ourselves we don't need to We don't need to wait for anyone. You know, it's just like the play of Samuel Beckett, waiting for Godot.

You can wait forever, either for the government to declassify data or to fund things that you wanted to fund, and then you realize that you're actually, some of your colleagues are blocking it because they want the same funding for something else. However, if the funding comes from the private sector, and most of my funding came from the private sector over the past decade, and I established a new center at Harvard unrelated to this subject, on black holes, for example. And all of the funding comes from foundations or private donations. And my point is, in that case, you can explore new territories, and you can pretty much decide about what seems exciting, what is exciting to the public. And I think that's a much better path for innovation,

simply because of the reasons we discussed before, that there is a lot of inertia for experts to claim that they already know everything, and they deserve more prices in addition to the ones they already deserve. Therefore, new knowledge should not be gathered because it would threaten their status. So comes in another question. This is from a fellow farmer, Avi, Simon Farmer, who asked the following question. What criteria do you have established to determine if you spot something? whether or not its design is terrestrial human-made or not?

Oh, it's very simple. Basically, the two categories of objects that we are familiar with, these are human-made objects or natural objects. We all know about airplanes, drones, satellites, weather balloons, you know, rockets. These are human-made. And we also know about birds, insects, you know, and meteors that are rocky. And so the first task is to basically see if everything we find in the sky belongs to one of these two.

And if we see an object behaving in ways that are not explainable as human-made technology, because we don't have that capacity, you know, we pretty much know the limitations of existing. I mean, either from espionage or from what we develop, I mean, all of, you know, countries around the world are not the head and shoulder above the U.S. So we pretty much know our limits. And if we see something behaving technologically far, you know, better than what we can produce, then we know that, you know, it's not us. And at the same time, if we verify that it's not biological, it's not natural, then we know that it's not from this earth. Okay, so that's really, now we still don't know what it is. So my point is it will take a long time through the learning experience of figuring out what it's seeking,

what kind of information is it trying to get, how should we respond to it? And we don't have a protocol for that. There is no organization that represents Earth because we never imagine that we'll have a visitor in our backyard or that we will find a package in our mailbox. you know, if you find a package in your mailbox that is not sent by your family members in the home, you know, like just put there by your kids or something, if it came from far away, you know, you have to decide what to do with it because you don't know what's inside. And one way to figure it out maybe is to try and learn about it.

What is it trying to do? What could be the content of this package? And that will be a learning experience. we can use artificial intelligence for that because it might be equipped with AI itself. So our AI systems will have kinship to their AI systems more than to us. And that's the way I see the future, by the way.

I'm very proud of our technological kids, AI systems. I don't necessarily think about sending humans to space. I think about sending technological gadgets that are equipped with AI. So I think it will be a learning curve. for us to figure out what it is. But at first, the first step is just to find something that is not familiar. A follow-up question from Anton Schhe asks,

are you going to open source the either AI or the machine learning research data? Is that going to be open source? And he says, Kaggle is a good platform. Yeah. So, okay. So we are currently developing it and we are also starting to collect data. Eventually, the data will be public. and the tools that we use will be public so people can check us and also do their own work.

That's the way science is done. And we plan to follow that until we verify that things work to our satisfaction. Before that, it's premature. We don't want to cry wolf for no good reason. So we want to actually verify that what we're getting is reliable. We calibrate our instruments. We will test our algorithms. And we have already eight papers that we submitted to the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation,

where we describe the instrumentation that we are currently already testing. So we will be open as open as possible. That will be a breath of fresh air into this subject, because people are used to secrecy. I mean, it's clear why the government has classification, because they collect the data by sensors that are classified. They don't want adversaries to be aware of the capabilities of. the US so it's not so much the data it's the sensors and if we developed our own sensors that

are open you know off the shelf then we have nothing to hide next question comes from my friend delon levy who asks gary does the does or did the government or some other earth-based institution have a live alien and what if anything did they learn about these internal composition of such creatures. If such, and I'm not deriding it, and I've, you know, I've seen fascinating, you know, a fascinating movie, moment of contact from James Fox about some of these kinds of events. I don't know. I've not seen anything. And so, sadly, it's, it's anecdote. But I think there's a, there's a different kind of question that is being asked here is how do you deal with the hundreds or thousands of individuals and often children, their testimonies.

How do you deal with the testimonies of individuals as, let's say, Bayesian priors? How do we deal with that kind of information? And is it sufficient to get others interested? Again, there's different audiences. It's not sufficient for a scientist as proof, but maybe it's, efficient for politicians that is worth, you know, at the very least, I mean, John Mack from Harvard actually went through exactly this, is whether what these people are seeing or not is interesting or real, it does tell you something interesting about the human mind.

I would like to mention an anecdote that I was asked by the Boston Magazine when they made a profile about me a year ago, about what will happen if, you know, a spacecraft landed in our backyard. And my wife said, if they land back then, she said if they ever land and want to pick you up, just make sure that you leave the car keys with me and ask them not to ruin the loan when they take off. Now, actually, I was asked this question again

at a public forum just a month ago. And so when I came home, I asked my wife again, I asked her, did you change your opinion? And she said to me that, well, this time, I will tell you, make sure you turn off the lights and I will join you because she's a little bit disappointed with what's going on around the world now. So, you know, there might be an opportunity for us to stay together, even if I go on board. I wonder what the frequent fire mile situation. Would you get, you know, alien premiere gold or magnesium. You get magnesium status. I tell you what my worry is. When I go to Europe, I see the same movie again and again. But if you go to Alpha Centauri, you'll have to see it million.

of times. That would be very boring. Well, unless, unless it goes faster than Light Offey. That's true. That's true. We could all be using the El Cubier drive or some derivative. Yeah, Gary, Mumfi, which is one of the names I chose from one of my kids, actually, sends us a Norwegian donation asking you, Gary, do you have an update on the sphere you got from Colthart? I don't... Coldheart. Well, yeah, this is another...

situation where, you know, somebody had some anomalous, I won't go into the details of it here, but they have an anomalous material. And it's the same thing I've said to others is, yes, I have the material. No, I have not yet done the analysis, because I'm not going to do the analysis until I have all of the right instruments lined up. So that when I do it, it's not just, just not a runoff data point. It's a one-off data point is useless. It's correlated to nothing. Yes.

And so, you know, as I said, it's expensive. People don't understand how expensive it is. Yeah. Okay, so I run it. I'll get iron and maybe some chromium or whatever. That doesn't prove anything to anybody. Yeah. And so, you know, I just, and even if I did, if it were something worth, you know,

announcing. I won't do it in a press release. I'll publish a paper, probably in a really boring place, and let the world deal with it from there, because one data point in isolation is nothing to me. Let me ask you this question that came up in the context of a friend of mine who was received. I won't say too much about it, not to be purposely mysterious, but just because I don't know if it's... Anyway, he wanted to use some campus resources, you know, x-ray, fluorescent spectroscopy, et cetera, et cetera, to look at some ancient artifacts found in a shipwreck. And this was, you know, something that we could look at with tools that we have here. And he was even willing to pay for it.

But the question came up, you know, can you use, you know, campus resources or even government? Do you think, you know, you might face if you did get, you know, as part of your reluctance to kind of, I mean, obviously you want to avoid being on People magazine, although I was just in people magazine recently, not for World Sexiest Man. Don't get your hopes up. But instead, guys, it was for a comment I made about the sun. But anyway, Gary, do you worry? Speaking about that, I don't know if I mentioned to you, but one day someone pointed out to me a tweet of a husband who said his wife got, she said she has a crash on a scientist named Avila, but who she thinks is sexier than Anthony Fauci. And I mentioned it immediately to my wife. And her response was,

Fauci is a low bar. You guys know that you should be on the Borsch circuit. I know. Well, that's our, yeah, we, Avi and Brian, we do go on tour. But Gary, would you face opposition for using, you know, do you have to be totally privately funded? No, not at all. First of all, I mean, I would, I won't use NIH funds to do things for, you know, that aren't validated. But I have an endowed chair. Yeah. That, you know, it basically generates a few hundred thousand dollars a year that I can use for anything. I happen to be on very good terms with the family that originally donated, the money that generates those endowed funds for me every year. They're perfectly fine with me doing it. And Stanford is perfectly fine with me doing it. Because,

at the higher levels, at least here, they understand that inquiry like this is, is laudable. And if they ever dare to try to stop me, I would find ways to embarrass them. Ominous, that's good to know. And I don't want to get on your bad side, Gary. And if you are related to Christopher Nolan, that could even be more impressive. Okay, we're going to ask some existential questions of Gary. I've asked these to Avi, but actually, it's time for an update, Avi. It was two years ago you were on the first time on this podcast.

So I'll take a couple more questions from the audience. There's still time in the closing minutes. Just a reminder, you're talking to Professor's Avi Loeb, good friend of the show, four-time guest, five-time now, on The Into the Impossible podcast. I have links to his previous episodes, along with all the content I've had. I've had on skeptics, Gary, you should know I've had on Michael Shermer, I've had on Mick West. These are people, I don't know if you want to comment on them,

but they are decidedly not on the UFO as alien technology front. Well, you know that Michael Shermer is also a member of the Galeo Project, and I brought people from both sides because I think evidence will eventually, so it's sort of like a lithmus test. If everyone is united in the interpretation of the data, I know that we are not missing something. So I said that to, so Michael said that at some point, You know, if you find evidence that is conclusive, I will be glad to write an article about it in my magazine, Skeptic.

And I told him, you know, that's not enough. I want you to change the name of the magazine from skeptic to believer. To believer. Wow. Now you could play the Pope. Avi. We can really mix up some Catholic and Judaism. Okay.

So just a reminder, we're talking Avi Loeb of Harvard and Gary Nolan of Stanford University. and I'm Brian Keating, your humble host of The Into the Impossible podcast, where you've had dozens of conversations on this most fascinating subject, and we have another one coming up with Jacques Belay, another introductory to me by none of than Kurt Jai Mungle, who's lurking in the chat room, and has been so kind to introduce me to Gary, and I want to thank him for that.

So Jacques will come on. I'm trying to get Eric Weinstein on with Jacques, so let me know, give a thumbs up if you'd like to see that pairing before the end of the year. Okay. And Gary, maybe we'll have you and Eric Weinstein. That would be fun. I know he's interested to talk to you. Eric's a friend.

Yeah, that would be great. And he's also, you know, been paling around with people like Lou Elizondo lately, so I want to get an update for him. Okay. And just a quick reminder, if you do want some interstellar meteorites, you can sign up for my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list. And you may win some extraterrestrial, maybe interstellar. I don't know. I can't be sure.

But maybe- We're all interstellar. What's that? We're all interstellar. That's right. Okay. So, Gary, you have not been on this podcast, but I love to ask the deepest questions of life because, A, scientist, you know what they say about scientists?

How do you know a scientist is outgoing, Gary? Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. But we have this trope that we're, you know, we're these unhuman, inhuman, and droidal, you know, kind of thinking robots. and sometimes we deserve it, right? We're on some kind of a spectrum. I'm so far on the spectrum. I'm off the spectrum.

But I do like to humanize my guess, and I'm not implying that you're not human in any way. But I ask these questions, and you haven't really seen them, I don't think. But they really kind of relate to the most important things of life, the kind of meaning questions of life. And I want to start with something that I asked Avi about when he was back on the show.

And it's something in Hebrew called a Zava-a. It's an ethical will, not a material will. And it has to do with what you want to leave the planet with in terms of your wisdom, your learning, your knowledge, not your material goods, which, you know, I don't know where those will go, but what wisdom would you most want to communicate to all of humanity and your ideological errors once you spring forth this mortal coil as the barns? Hmm. Well, I mean, these are in some ways trite, but give more than you take and you know less than you think you do and listen more to others that the observations will teach you more than anything you think you understand.

I mean, that's to me what I was always brought up as give more than you take. and frankly, if you can, take nothing. Beautiful. And leave no trace, right? No backpacking. Avi, did you want to comment? Yeah, so I actually met with a class of undergrad at Harvard a couple of weeks ago, and my advice to them was drawn from the metaphor of walking on the beach.

You often see some seashells that maintain unique colors. and structure. And these are the youngest, those that were swept ashore very recently, but those that over time were rubbing against each other as a result of being dragged by ocean waves, they eventually lose their unique colors and break up into indistinguishable grains of sand.

So my message to the young people is don't rub against each other on social, media too often because then you will lose your unique colors and I want people to maintain it. And, you know, when I was a young kid, I grew up on a farm and that taught me that the independent thought is most important in life because very often humans are swayed by wishful thinking. That's very common. And if you want to find your truth, you should not seek it in others. You should look for it yourself and keep your unique colors.

Don't surrender to how many likes you have on Twitter. And besides, Twitter may go away. Well, yeah, if Elon keeps up with his pace of innovation, although I'm trying to get him to spend the tenth of what he bought Twitter for on some transformation of physics projects. Something's happened to your sound. Uh-oh, what about now? Can you hear me now?

Yeah, there it goes. Okay, good. So the next question has to do with, and by speaking of Twitter, you can follow Gary at Gary P. Nolan on Twitter. And Avi is too, his time is too precious. So he's not on Twitter, but the Galileo Project has a Twitter account. It is Galileo Project 1 on Twitter. And hopefully it will have a blue check mark if they can come up with the eight bucks from one of Avi's billionaire buddies. Okay. Next question for you guys. The namesake of this podcast dates to the man, whose center we have at UCSD, the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, and I am the associate director of that fine august institution. And of course, we opened the audio podcast, which you can subscribe to as well, with Sir Arthur's actual reading of the following statement, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I want to ask you, if you had access, Gary, to a monolith, an object of great permanence that could last not just 120 years, like billions of years into the future. What would you put on it or in it to be speak

of the magical technology that human beings have been able to construct in our short few hundred thousand years as a species of homo sapiens? What most majestic magical thing in your field, maybe you created or somebody else created, would you put on a monolith to give a little swagger to humanity? I was going to say a Rubik's cube, but, um, uh, I was, Let's see. Well, I think one of the most amazing devices that we've created, well, I mean, many, but I think any, the lens, right? Because it's a, you know, the glass lens, it's a, you know, it's emblematic of looking deeper, right?

It's kind of, I mean, beyond the wheel, it's probably one of the first devices. we ever created that allowed us to look beyond ourselves. And that to me is perhaps the best. That's great. It's interesting that Gary is thinking in my direction because lenses are often used in astronomy. But my preference would be to put artificial intelligence so that especially a system that can evolve

and learn, machine learning, because then it will be dynamic. and whoever finds it will interact with it and learn much more if we store enough information. In fact, I was advocating in a recent paper putting a reboot system on the moon. That will be if something catastrophic happens on Earth, we want to keep all the precious information out there. And so I bought a laptop over the summer and together with it I had a backup system, a small tiny disk-like system that keeps all the information. So the same thing we can keep on the moon

and basically communicate to it by a laser and transmit all the DNA information about all life forms on Earth so that it's stored there and all human creations, all the music, all the books and so forth. So that's sort of a monolith because it keeps all the information, but I will add to that an AI system that is able to use that. like, you know, what you use when you Google something, you know, that's an AI system. And so that would be fun to interact with.

Yeah. No, I agree. I just, I put a CD-ROM, you know, when I did this. And unfortunately, you know, the Microsoft paper clip could not decipher the CD. Anyway, I'm just joking, guys. Okay, last two questions for you, distinguished gentlemen, actually have to do with another quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, which is the following. He said when a distinguished, but. But elderly scientists, I'm not calling you guys elderly, okay, come off of it.

When a distinguished, but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. But when they state something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. Gary, I want to ask you with all humble respect and admiration, what have you changed your mind about? What have you been wrong about? Well, I don't know that I'm right or wrong about it, but I'm more of the opinion that the universe is somehow designed or made for life.

You know, maybe that's just my lack of appreciation of the possibilities, but I am more of the opinion that the universe is somehow constructed to enable life. Now, it could just be that that's the way it is, but it's easy enough to also imagine that some large, entity, you know, in a universe beyond us, you know, and we're encapsulated within that, you know, created conditions such that we are here. I just find it fascinating that the way that all of the objects that operate down at the fundamental units of nature can come together in a way that allow for life. I mean, I'm in a greater level of awe about it, if anything, and if awe

equals a religious sort of consideration, then that's kind of where I am. Let me connect to that. So when I started astrophysics, that was 35 years ago, there was this notion that the early universe is simple simply because we don't have data on it. Many people said that, oh, cosmology is simple, you know, just because we haven't gathered enough data, and once we collect the data, we will find that it's as complex. as the universe nowadays. You know, the universe now has, you know, in addition to life, it has stars, it has galaxies, very complex structures.

Now, as we got more data about the early universe, now we have a lot of data, it's still simple. Now, this explains the era of time, okay, because the universe started simple and you can ask why. And, you know, some people advocate for cosmic inflation that they created initial conditions that are quite unique and simple, you know, the universe was, was pretty much uniform except for small fluctuations.

Some of us are not sure that cosmic inflation took place and maybe some other process did it. The bottom line is the universe started simple and became complex. And then, you know, if you think about our life, it also goes that way. We start simple, you know, as babies, and then we get more complex as adults. But here is the catch. Complexity doesn't continue forever, okay? because eventually we die and we become really simple once again.

So if you look at old people, in a way, they are as vulnerable as babies, and they eventually become simple because they end up dead. And so the same will happen to our universe. Now it's sort of at the peak of its complexity. Maybe it will continue for a little while, but eventually we will be surrounded by vacuum because the expansion is accelerating, and there will be only our galaxy is surrounded by nothing, because all the other galaxies will exit from our horizon.

And that's a simpler state, okay? And eventually all the stars will die. That's a simpler state than we have now, and life will not exist. So my point is we are used to complexity increasing with the error of time. There will be a point where simplicity will increase with the error of time.

So it's not always true that error of time is in the direction of increasing complexity, and that's all because of gravity, you know, that drives everything in ways that we do not expect from thermodynamics. Yeah. Well, guys, this has been fascinating and delightful. Speaking of inflation, I wish you both much inflation of your wasteline. Although, Avi, you're wasting away. I used a picture, you know, of Avi from like a year or two ago.

And I had to take it down because you've lost considerable number of kilos, which I will be conserving those kilos. because you and I are in a exchange where I gain the weight. I have not been so kind in the picture. Since the pandemic started every day, for three years, actually, I've been jogging at sunrise. And I must tell you, it makes me younger. I feel really great about it. And it increases the density of thoughts per unit mass in my body.

How about you, Gary? Do you have a quick one, two second daily routine, something important to you or weekly routine? that's important to you? Weekly routine. Well, I work in my garden. I have a greenhouse. I collect carnivorous plants

because what mad scientist shouldn't collect carnivorous plants as well as being interested in UAPs. I've been interested in that sort of stuff. You tweet about that, yeah. Well, gentlemen, it's been a distinct honor for me and I know from my audience and I hope we can have many more conversations like this

as new evidence, new data arises. And as you guys continue, You also in your storied careers, Avi, you've had a paper out recently about disconfirming inflation. I want to have you back on for that, as well as for your new book, Interstellar, which I put up the monograph, the cover of it on the screen, a couple of maybe an hour ago now. Gary, I want to have you back on, talk about all sorts of exciting projects you're involved with, get your opinions on hot topics like CRISPR, gene editing, artificial life in the lab and other things. So hopefully you'll do me another honor come back on someday. Yep, happy to. Thanks so much.

For now, everybody. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. And reminder we'll have on Jacques Valet hopefully soon, maybe with or without Eric Weinstein. And we'll hopefully have Gary and Avian many, many times to come. So please do subscribe. And if you do want to win a chunk of interstellar space schmutz, I'm shaking it here. These are actual meteorites, four billion years old, at least found in Argentina about 500 years ago. You can enter to win your chance at briankeeden.com slash list.

and I'll send some to you guys, maybe a carnivorous plant, and then for one lucky winter, I will send you some Uranus soap to keep Uranus clean. Everybody, enjoy Thanksgiving if you're in America. If you're in Canada, I hope you enjoyed it last month like Kurt, my friend, my good friend, Kurt Jemong, I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season coming up, and stay tuned to the Into the Impossible Podcast. Bye, everybody.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from legend well that's a wrap i hope you enjoyed that thrilling episode of the into the impossible podcast with abie lobe and gary nolan let me know in a and a comment on youtube or where you can see the three of us chatting uh whether or not you'd like to see a part two whether or not you'd like to see some new faces like jacques valet with maybe eric stein or gary nolan with eric winstein or ovi lobe with jac valet and all sorts of other things the other thing i'm thinking about is tom long getting him back on let me know leave a rating leave a review subscribe to the podcast apple iTunes podcast Apple podcast rather and Spotify you can leave ratings and really appreciate it

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving and a happy end of 2022 and looking forward to many many awesome interviews to come in 2023 Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars catch the Jones brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamavaitheter.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Must be 21 to enter.