Julian Dorey Podcast - #358 - Astrophysicist on 3i Atlas, NASA Moon Mission & Intelligent Life | David Kipping

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) MOOD: Discover your perfect mood and get 20% off your first order at http://mood.com and use code JULIAN at check out! PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Dr. David Kipping is a British astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University, where he leads the Cool Worlds Lab. DAVID's LINKS: X: https://x.com/david_kipping Cool Worlds Lab Website: https://www.coolworldslab.com/ Cool Worlds Lab YT: https://www.youtube.com/coolworldslab Cool Worlds Lab GitHub: https://github.com/CoolWorlds/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 – Intro 1:28 – People Are Freaking Out About 3I/ATLAS… 13:00 – What is a Comet’s Tail? 28:32 – Our Galaxy Could Be INSANELY Old 37:35 – What Happens When Black Holes Collide? 48:19 – The Multi-Everettian View 59:42 – If Humans Lived 500 Years 01:04:15 – Statistics, Aliens & Nickel/Iron Ratios 01:16:22 – Is There Life on Jupiter? 01:25:59 – Mars vs Moon, Weathering & Politics 01:36:09 – Moon Caverns & Far-Side Telescopes 01:50:16 – 3I/ATLAS Is Not a Trojan Horse 02:04:07 – Debunking the 10 Anomalies & WOW! Signal 02:17:47 – Trappist-1 Planets & Cool Worlds 02:30:05 – What Multiple Moons Mean 02:39:16 – The Multiverse & Inflation 02:51:14 – Hawking, Wormholes & Infinite Particles 02:56:07 – Athena Memo, Science Funding 03:01:12 – David's Book CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 358 - David Kipping Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Because the universe is stretching and expanding, there's a few anomalies in particular, especially 3A Atlas, there's a case that this could be an alien spacecraft that's passing through the solar system. The other thing that's weird about the subject moves really fast. You shouldn't expect to see that one every million years or so, and yet we've caught it within the span of like three or four years of looking for these things. And so Abby's making the point that if this really is that big, it basically means it can't be natural. NASA's budget is about $25 billion a year. But of course, only a fraction of that goes to building telescopes.

Some people are freaking out right now. in the science community we'll get into it but there's something about black holes that are like a cheat code to reality itself there's these holes that punch through space and time i'd be quite tempted to throw myself into a black hole just to like see i've heard wilder ideas sort of that way yeah like say i was falling back you're watching from the spaceship until they literally the end of the universe itself he'd be stuck there and there are some credible reasons to believe in a multiverse as well and the first one hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review they're both a huge

Q-Too Chelp, thank you. Is this three-eye Atlas going to kill us? What's going on? It could do. No. I'm not too worried. I'm not too worried. Some people are.

Some people are freaking out right now. Who's freaking out about it? Like in the science community? You know what? It's amazing. It's kind of become like this viral thing. It's actually not so much the scientific community. Scientists are definitely interesting.

in that as well. But this one's really broken through in terms of pop culture, right? You've got celebrities tweeting about Kim Kardashian. It's like tweeting about three helllessly the day. So you've got, you know, people are getting all over the world are getting really engaged about it. And it's kind of a double-edged sword. You know, it's great because when people are talking about science, as a scientist, I'm always excited about that. But we'll get into it. But there's a lot of confusing, conflating information about it as well. And so some people are panicking that their lives are going to and other people, maybe the scientists are more like, you guys maybe don't need to stress out too

much. So there's a lot. There's a lot to say about this object. All right. Well, let's unpack it because I know, like, Professor Avi Loeb has been going on some podcasts. I believe you just did Joe Rogan again to talk about this. And I haven't had a chance to listen to that and like what the overall take is. I've seen the cliff notes of it. Like, oh, could it be something from another planet of another species or something? That's a little beyond me. But for people out there, who don't know anything about this and just want a basic understanding minus like a kim Kardashian tweet what what are we referring to when we talk about three-eye atlas yeah so three i means third interstellar object so we've detected three of them so far the first one was

omuamua which is hawaiian for messenger from afar and that was i think 2017 2018 and then the second one by the way ohma more was the one that actually also had a bit of alien jazz about it because you might remember maybe you can pull it up there was some beautiful artist impressions of it being cigar shaped and people were kind of freaking out about that like why the hell does it look that way yeah this guy over here so the top left for instance you can kind of see and this was in 2017 they discovered this i think it was 2017 i mean don't yeah don't quote me exactly on that but yeah around 2017 a few years ago and um the the the shape i mean that's not a real photo that is inferred so we can't actually image it that beautifully we can't

just see the light bouncing off it and reflecting and so we can see the light going up and down up and down and you can kind of figure out what kind of shape it is so could either be a pancake actually or this we're not sure which one it is but either way it's it's pretty weird now what is the process to discovering something like that like how did they come upon this what did they use so the way we look for asteroids and comets in the solar system it's kind of hard because they move very quickly compared to planets right planets are just dawdling around across the sky so if you take an image, you're going to easily snap it. But these objects, they're moving so fast and they're pretty small. Obviously, this thing is only like a kilometer across or something.

Oh, yeah. I mean, compared to Jupiter, that's very, very small, right? So it doesn't, there's hardly any light coming off there. If you look into the blackness of space and you've got a kilometer-sized rock that's, you know, a couple of AU away from you, that's hardly anything. So these things are, you know, they're hard to detect. And so they move fast across the sky, And so you have to kind of see these trails. So you see, okay, here's my photo, and you'll notice that there's one dot that's basically going do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d across the sky.

Okay, and you're like, that's not a planet. Plants don't move that fast. It must be something else. You try and track it, and then you can figure out an orbit. And so for these interstellal objects, there's three of them now that have been found. Oma-Muh was the first, and there was two-eye Borisov,

which was very comet-like. O-Mu-Mu was a bit weird. It looks more like an asteroid than a comet. Can you explain the difference for people out there? So a comet normally means it's icy. It's like a ball of, imagine like getting, you know, going skiing, picking up some snow, making a slosh ball out of it, chucking in some dirt from the pavement, and just mushing it together.

That's kind of what a comet. It's just a dirty snowball. And so when the comets get close to the sun, all that snow boils off and you get these beautiful tails and plumes coming off them. So they're really wonderful to see when you can catch them through a telescope. Whereas a rock doesn't do that. A rock just basically stays a rock. Maybe it will break up.

but usually, you know, stays together. And then the third object three-eye Atlas is almost certainly comet-like as well. So we've had two comets, the last two, two and three are comets, and the first one was a rock. Okay. And, you know, it was a little bit surprising when we first found them because it was predicted that they should be out there. So these are things which used to be around another star. So another solar system, light years away, was giving birth to planets. And during that chaotic process of giving birth to planets, there's lots of material kicking around.

And some of that material can do a close passage of its Jupiter-like planets and get kind of ejected out like a particle accelerator, basically, just get going to swing out of the solar system altogether. And so there's presumably billions of rocks just wandering between the stars. And now and again, they will, by happenstance, happen to come close to our solar system and pass through, which is pretty wild. And when you predict how often that should happen, we didn't think we'd get anything for like for 10 years. We were like, maybe once every 10 years we should get one of these things. And so in the last few years, we've had three. That's partly because we've starting to get the telescopes that are more sensitive. But even with those more sensitive telescopes, we still didn't expect to get quite as many as we've seen.

How can you even – this goes a little beyond my pay grade here. How can you even accurately or somewhat accurately predict how many you might see when you're talking about small objects, relatively speaking, compared to planets, as you say, that are coming from other solar systems that are light years away from us. It's a lot of guesswork, to be honest. I mean, you take, a lot of our guessing is based off the solar system when it comes to this. We look at how many rocks we know are kicking around the solar system. You look at the asteroid belt.

You look at, there's another asteroid belt further out called the Kuiper belt that's beyond Pluto. And so you look at, you know, how much stuff do we have in our solar system? And then you sort of simulate the motion of the planets and you ask, how often would you expect something to get kicked out so you kind of run this calculation and yeah you end up with a number and the number we're seeing is significantly higher than what we'd expect um which is interesting but i mean maybe the solar system is there's many things about a solar system that's kind of weird right we or you know we know that i'm my main job is looking for exoplanets planets outside the solar system and we know for sure the solar system is not a typical solar

system there's many things about it which are this one yeah yeah so our home we know is odd so why in the same sense why should it be that all the junk in our backyard would be typical of junk in other people's backyards given the solar system has some new weird things about it already so in that sense it's not completely crazy but yeah there's a few anomalies in particular well about all more more as well but especially 3-a-atlas that avi lobe has been saying on podcast and his blog he's been saying like here's a list of i think he's got 10 anomalies now i was going through it this morning like looking at all the anomalies he's got yeah and so on these 10 anomalies he's saying you know each of these things is sufficiently, well, maybe not in isolation, is strange, but when

you take the whole list of them, he thinks there's a case that this could be an alien spacecraft that's passing through the solar system. How far away is it approximately right now? Where is it at the moment? It's basically behind the sun right now. Okay. Yeah. So that's kind of unfortunate.

Is this the correct list? Yeah, this is one of my colleagues debunking of the list, actually, which is kind of fun. So if you... Well, science on science crime. Yeah, so he lists, if you scroll down, he actually lists the 10 anomalies here. So if you keep going down a little bit. Yeah, so here's that list, that list there. All right, so should I read some of these?

Yeah, go ahead. All right, let's start with number one. It's retrograde trajectory is aligned to within five degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the sun with a likelihood of 0.2%. Dr. Kipping, let's put that in English. Let's translate that one. Yeah. So all the planets in the solar system basically orbit more or less in a disk in a plane. So it's like a pizza pie, right?

There's not stuff that's completely wonky coming out of the pizza pie. It's all in a flat pizza pie. And so if you have a random asteroid or comet come from outside the solar system, you wouldn't really expect it to happen to come in at the same angle as the plane of the planets themselves. That's called the ecliptic, the ecliptic planes, that is the plane of the solar system planets. So that's a bit odd because as far as we can tell, each star is just completely randomly oriented in space. There's no particular preference in space. So that's a bit odd. However, I mean, my debunking of this a little bit would be, I'm not sure how much Avi's looked at this.

I'd like to talk to him about it. But the surveys that we're doing to look for comets and asteroids, the survey was called Atlas. That's why the subject's called Three Atlas. So the telescope survey was called Atlas. And they preferentially look in that plane. Because that's where most of the comets in our solar system live. So we tend to give much more attention to that region than we do the North and South Poles, if you like, of the solar system.

So the fact we detect an interstellar object in that direction is, in my book, very plausibly, just a product of the fact we look there more often. So there's a selection bias, we'd say, like a winner's bias towards looking towards that region. So, yeah, for me. And also the likelihood isn't super crazy. I know it sounds maybe to some people like that's a super low probability,

but by scientific standards, there's millions and millions of 1% 0.1% anomalies. So to me, this isn't, you know, that if that was the only thing, you definitely wouldn't be like, oh, it has to be aliens. Right, right. Like, of course something could randomly come at that angle. It's not like that has to be an alien spaceship to do that. Natural stuff will also do that sometimes. But that's why he's got nine more.

That's what's got no. So we can keep going. All right. Let's go. All right, so I'm rooting for the aliens, I'm just saying. During July and August 2025, it displayed a sunward jet anti-tail that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective unlike familiar comets. Yeah, so I actually did have to see a little bit of research in this one.

Because I have to say, you know, to be clear, comets is not my, got my notes. Oh, look at this. I've come with receipts. What's that? Like a two-by-four? Different kind of two-by-four. This was all I had in my hotel room. So I was like, this is going to have to do for the notes today.

This guy a fucking notebook. So, yeah, so the thing with this one is, there is precedent. So to say, to have, I mean, normally comets do have a tail. We all know that if you ever seen a picture of a comet, you normally have this beautiful, long tails come up with it, like Haley's Common or something. For these beautiful long tails. So this has got a, when we first started taking photos of it, it had a tail going in the opposite direction, right? So which is kind of weird. And so, yeah, that was what Avi's pointing out.

he's pointing out. So he causes the anti-tail because it's like going, he's pointing the wrong way. So what this, what is this tail? Maybe it's worth sort of highlighting scientifically. So the tail, remember, this is a ball of ice. So as the, as the object is closer and closer towards the sun, it warms up, and that caused some of this ice to boil off. And that makes water vapor and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. All these gases come off. And that, that forms what we call a coma. So it's like a little atmosphere around the snowball as it warms up. And then just because the sun, produces a wind. It's kind of like blasting it. It, you know, like putting a hair dryer in your long hair, it would blast it backwards, right? So that's why you get the tail.

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on over to mood.com, link in our description below, find the functional gummy that matches exactly what you're looking for, and let mood help you discover your perfect mood. And once again, don't forget to use promo code Julian at checkout to save 20% off your first order. So the reason why there's an antitale is kind of curious, but it's not unprecedented. There are two other objects, at least I could find. C-2014 was a comet that has an anti-tail, and there was another one called Kowutuk that has in 1970s. So we've seen this before. It's not completely crazy, seven-antytale. And it's possibly a product of the fact that if you're really far away from the sun, and actually when we've been taking these images, it is really far from the sun. It's

beyond the orbit of Mars when we've been imaging this thing. And normally we don't look at comets until they're really close to the Earth. So it's obviously closer to the sun than we are. Yeah, yeah. So no, no, it's beyond Mars. So when we were first on Mars as the next planet further out in the solar system. So it's a little bit beyond Mars, so further out, and we were imaging it really intensely because everyone was fascinated by this object, and we saw it has this kind of antitail, but we don't normally image comets that far out. It's kind of unusual to take photos of them that far out.

It's just because this one's a pop star that everyone's kind of fascinated by it. Kim Cornetian. Yeah, exactly. So the solar wind at that distance is way less. So it's like putting your hair dryer down from, you know, mode three to mode half, right? So there's hardly any breeze hitting your face anymore. So the fact is, all this stuff evaporates off, but there's not much to push it anymore. And so it's not surprising that on the side facing the sun, there'd be more stuff because

that's the side that's boiling, right? That's the side that's getting baked by the radiation of the sun. So therefore, there would be more stuff there, and that kind of looks like the antitale. So it looks like it. It might not necessarily... Well, it kind of is, but it's just, it makes sense because that's the side that you're baking in the sun. So, of course, there'd be more stuff on that side.

than the opposite side. And it's only when you turn the hair dryer up, the solar wind up, that you start getting the beautiful tail at the back end. So I think we can explain that. I don't think you need to say, it's also kind of weird to say that's aliens, because why would an alien spaceship do that?

There's no, like, I don't understand why an alien would produce these kind of weird antitails. That's kind of strange. Right, because we don't have, you were showing me the imagery of, I forget what it was called, but the first one that they found in 2017, which you said could be like a pancake

or a cigar, but that's a, that's a generated image from what we think it might look like versus what we have actually seen because it was impossible to photograph. So we're dealing with the same problem here to where we're looking at what we think it might look like with 3i Atlas versus what it actually is. It's even kind of, well, we can image this thing, but it's hidden because, yeah, so it has these, the two properties of a comet are that it has a coma, which is this atmosphere of crap coming off it, and then it has the tail, or an anti-tail in this case. It also has a tail now as well, so it has both of those things.

So the actual, I mean, the comet itself, what we call the nucleus, the actual snowball, that's buried so deep inside these extra layers of stuff coming off it that we can't see it. So we have these nice photos, the Hubble space telescopes looked at it, James Webb's space telescopes looked at it, there's photos, there's many amateur photos of this object that have been taken. Amateur photos as well. Yeah, if you have a 14-inch telescope at home, it's fairly big, but you can buy those online. You could take some really nice images of this thing right now. Well, it's more once it pops out behind the sun a bit easier.

So we've imaged it, but yeah, all of these blobs you can see like on the top right, for instance, on the Wikipedia page there. I think that's taken by professional was that one, I think, from Ezo, European Southern Observatory. Yeah, is that enough to be able to tell? like this is where it's definitely beyond my pay grade like when you just see like kind of the blob and you can't get like a full texture to it or anything like can you guys be like okay this is how we can identify comet versus rock and etc well if it was a rock it wouldn't have any that I mean you can see the tail was pretty clear and it's it's just gigantic it's this huge cloud of gas that's coming off it and you can even tell what that gas is made out of so if you

if you take that light and you pass it it's like white light but you can pass it it white light contains all the colors of the rainbow so you can pass it through a prism and it splits it up and then if you look at that light you'll see there are some colors that are missing and the colors that are missing are indicative of particular molecules which absorb those colors so you ask how we it's called spectroscopy and that's how we can yeah it's on the pink floyd album yeah so this is how you can figure out what uh what stuff it's made out of so we know that this object is made of water it's made of carbon dioxide or the gases coming off at water carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide and those

are like what all comets do so it looks everything about it looks very very comet-like in that sense so i would say yeah maybe we can move on to other anomalies but i i don't think the you know the this one is particularly slam dunk all right number three its nucleus is about a million times more massive than how do you say it again umuma oh muamua uh one omumuua yeah and a thousand times more massive than two I Borasov while moving faster than both altogether with a likelihood of less than 0.1%. Yeah, so the challenge here is the mass estimate itself. That's what I see in this blog by my great colleague, Jason Wright.

People should really check out this blog if you're super interested. Yeah, just Google. Jason Wright, Wright with a W-W-R-I-G-H-T. He's a professor at Penn State. he's been providing the counterweight to Abbey in popular discourse on this. So I'm glad to see this, have some debate on this. Yeah. And he's pointing out that, you know, this calculation is really difficult.

Like to weigh a comet is non-trivial, right? So the only way normally in astronomy we can weigh how heavy something is is by gravity. That's what gravity does. Gravity is all about mass. So if you want to measure how heavy is Mars, let's say, you use the moons of Mars. The moons of Mars, Phobos and Demos go around and you see how far away are they from Mars and what is that orbital period. We do this calculation in my class for the students and for undergrads.

So I won't put you through the pain of that. I remember that one from physics actually. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you use Kepler's laws and when you use Newton's version of Kepler's law of gravity, you can basically figure out the mass. So if there was something in orbit of this comet that you could also monitor, then you could get the mass of it.

But without that, it's really difficult. It doesn't, it's not heavy enough to disturb the orbit of the comet bit of the Earth, right? It's this tiny snowball. It's not going to move the Earth. It does have enough gravity to do that. It's not going to move the Sun. It's not going to move any planet. So it doesn't really have any influence on the solar system gravitationally. So then how are you supposed to get the mass? So the way Avi's been trying to do it is to look at how much mass is it basically losing. So you can see all this gas coming off it and you can try and figure out what how much weight that would have given the amount of light it's absorbing basically,

these rainbow effects, these spectroscopy effects. And then, And then from that you can kind of try and back engineer what the mass therefore of the object must be. But it's a really tricky calculation. It requires a lot of detailed physics of thinking about the sublimation rate and the carbonyl interchange between these different molecules on the surface. So it's a really challenging calculation. And I was really just in the back of the envelope thing. So it's probably ballpark not a million miles away, but it's not how planetary scientists do this calculation. So, Abby's not a planetary scientist, he's an astrophysicist, same as me.

And so neither of us are really experts on that calculation. And you talk to the planetary scientist people, and they're just like rolling their eyes at this calculation. They're saying that's not the way we do it. It's completely wrong to do that calculation that way. And really, they just don't believe this mass, this. They know it's losing mass, but they just don't believe the mass calculation here is correct at all. So I think there's some debate here about the fact, right? So the fact, he's claiming this as a fact.

It's a million times more massive than old more moor. And they're saying, hold on. we don't know that for sure like it's maybe it is but we haven't established that and some people are seeing it's way way less than that it is crazy how the smallest differences though and weight and what you know the size is something what that can mean and how it orbits and then how it could affect like a planet like when people talk about like the end of the earth you could have a comment that's you know i'm going to make up numbers but instead of you know 1500 light years away it's 1400 light years away and that's the difference between we live and we die yeah you know

So when you get into these calculations, if he's going outside of his bounds on something like that, I guess that's 0.3 right there, number three of the list of 10, like, you know, that can make all the difference in the world if he's, like, slightly wrong about that, totally. And the reason why he's, like, pulling on this string, he doesn't explain it in that bullet point. But if you do this kind of calculation of, we talk about this calculation, what do you expect to be out there? normally even if you you know scale up to correct for the fact we've seen more than we have you'd still expect that to be more small stuff than big stuff it's the same reason like you know if you kind of you know take a biscuit and you crumple up there's going to be more tiny crumbs than big chunks left over and it's the same with rocks smashing into each other in solar system so there's going to be tons and tons of small stuff hardly any big stuff and so abby's making the point that if this really is that big it's too big like there's just shouldn't you shouldn't expect

to see that every like one every million years or so you'd get something that that big pasture of solar system and yet we've caught it within the span of like three or four years of looking for these things so it would be so freakishly large that it would it basically means it can't be natural don't they also have estimates on how old this is or like how far it goes back or am i think it's somewhere else yeah kind of by proxy so yeah so this object is uh super old most likely but it is a a statistical argument so the fact is move the other thing that's weird about this object moves really fast so it's way fast and near the two It's moving around 60 kilometers per second when it first entered the solar system,

which is way, way, fast than any of the planets or stuff we have in the... Typically, it's like 20 to 30 kilometers per second. So this is like a factor of two or three faster than typical stuff in the solar system. And we think that speed very roughly of these objects should correlate to their age. And the reason being that the older something is, the more time it's had to pass by other stars. So the galaxy is moving, right? The stars are jumbling around, moving from place to place. And this rock could have encountered not just one star, but two or three or four.

Could have had many encounters, maybe not as close as it's had to the sun. But each encounter gives it like a little speed boost, like a gravity assist, basically. That's what we do for the spacecraft in the solar system, these slingshots around the planets to get more speed. So this thing could have picked up speed through its journey through the galaxy. And you'd think, therefore, its speed means it's old because it's moving so fast. So it's definitely a hand-wavy statistical argument. You can't say, oh, it's exactly 8 billion years old, but it probably is about that old.

So that means the solar system is 4.5 billion years old. It's older. The galaxy is about 13 billion years old. The whole universe is about 14. So it's, yeah, it's over half the age of the universe in age, most likely. How do we know the age of the galaxy approximately? Yeah, that's a great question. We know the age of stars.

aging the galaxy itself is directly is not really possible but you can age all the stars that you have in the galaxy and then since a galaxy really is just a bucket of stars by proxy that you can kind of use that to say how what the galaxy itself must be but it's also a little bit of an ill-formed question to even ask how old a galaxy is because it's constantly changing so our galaxy is not the same galaxy that it was five billion years ago or six billion years ago it has been eating other galaxies, and it continues to do so. There's two small satellite galaxies around, it's called the Magellic Clouds, which we're probably going to engulf at some point. There's the Andromeda galaxy, which is the nearest major galaxy,

and that's on a collision course with us. So in, I think it's about five billion years or so, these two galaxies will hit. And what happens when they hit? Yeah, so you might wonder, like, our stars can smash into each other, and, you know, it's just going to go crazy. but the galaxy is extremely diffuse. So the typical distance between stars is just vast.

So the probability of any two stars actually colliding is really small. There's actually a calculation again that undergraduates often do to sort of convince them of this because you might think, no, no, surely something that's going to smash if you have two galaxies come. But they basically just pass through each other. But the gravity tugs them back. So they kind of like go through each other and then each time they oscillate back and forth, back and forth, and eventually they just kind of become one new galaxy. And we call that Milkdromeda.

Ah. Milky Way Andromeda. So we predict there will be a milk dromeda one day. That'll feel like an earthquake here? I don't think we'd even know. I mean, the sky would look spectacular. Because you'd literally see another freaking galaxy in the sky being shredded to pieces. But we wouldn't feel anything.

Oh, that's interesting. And we wouldn't be here anyway. I mean, this is five billion years in the future. Oh, we're gone by that. Yeah. I mean, the sun won't last that long, to be honest. But anyone who is around then, it would be pretty awesome to witness. So, yeah, ageing galaxies is hard, but we do know that our galaxy is probably very mature,

not too far off. You know, the seed of what became the Milky Way, the proto Milky Way, is of order about the age of the universe, almost, yeah. And that, because it's interesting that you said, I believe it was like the galaxies approximately, we estimate 13 billion years old. And then the universe itself is like 14 billion. Yeah. which you know a billion years is a lot but when you look like the percentage like you're talking about

something that's you know over 90% the age yeah of the universe itself that's pretty crazy because we don't even know how many galaxies there are out there yeah i mean we don't even know how big the universe is right the universe could be infinite as far as we can tell we can see we can see a certain distance and we're just not sure maybe just goes on and on and on forever so we can count how many we can see um in our local volume it's really limited by the speed of light right so if the universe is 13.8 billion years old, you can only see something in principle that's 13.8 billion light years away. We can actually see a little bit further than that because space itself stretches. So because of that stretching of space, we can actually see out to about 45 billion light years

away. But that light that light that we are seeing, this is what the James of Space telescope is all about, is seeing light from literally the very first stars and galaxies that were being born in the universe. And those objects are, you know, it doesn't matter. You could build a telescope that's a million times more powerful or larger than James Webb and you can't see back past that point because that's limited by the speed of light itself so it just could go on and on on so the James Webb telescope is fucking wild to me what that can see the fact that human beings invented something like that that can see I mean the images are insane yeah that you look at I mean as an astronomer that's when when they came up with that you got to be thinking

yourself holy shit right it was such a it was such a gamble in so many senses as well. Like if it didn't work out, it really could have been very difficult for NASA to recover from it and for astrophysics to recover. The telescope is very complicated, right? It's, I think it has over 200 parts that have to unfold when it went into orbit.

And it's not orbiting the Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope orbits the Earth. So that's why astronauts have gone up there, I think, four times and fixed the damn thing. Every time something goes wrong, we can get up there, we can fix it, We can replace a part, we can upgrade it, we can refuel it, do all that stuff. This thing is so far away.

It's about four times further away than the moon is. So no human has ever gone that far into space before. And I think people have concerns about whether a human being can even survive that journey and go out and come back. So there's no intention or plan or even there's nothing on board the spacecraft itself that even allows a human being to service it. There's no like panel you can open for astronauts to handily fix something. It's not designed to do that. So just set it and forget it basically. Yeah.

So you have to make sure you don't screw. anything up right because if if any one of these 200 moving parts when it unfolds goes wrong it's it's stuck um so yeah maybe you could google like james web unfolding or jdv unfolding yeah yeah i just looked through the imagery it captures sometimes yeah and you can see like it was it was packed up like in that middle right panel you can see like it were go down one the second row and on the right this one yeah so you kind of see this kind of sequence of images where the way it launched was like it was on the left that it was kind of like folded right up. Yeah, it came out like Tars a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was designed to be like stuffed

into the Ares rocket which launched it. But it wants to get into this full and folded size. So it had to do all these complicated maneuvers, all these actuators had to push it open. And, you know, if any one of those steps went wrong, we just wouldn't have a telescope. and it was almost $10 billion. So this is why it's such a big risk for NASA, right? Because if it took NASA about, NASA's budget is about $25 billion a year in total. I think it's been cut now under the new administration, but it's normally about $25 billion a year. But of course, only a fraction of that goes to building telescopes, like a tiny fraction.

So the budget for telescope building each year is probably of order of like a couple hundred million dollars or something. So if you're going to build a $10 billion telescope, that means it's going to take you 20 years. of like committing all of your resources. To just this one. Yeah. And so astronomers like me and many astronomers were kind of pissed with James Webb a little bit because we wanted, we had other ideas.

We were like, hey, I'd want to build this telescope. Well, let's try this thing. And they were like, no, sorry, we've got no money for that. Everything's going to James Webb. And it was like that for like 20 years. So it was kind of annoying. So what if this thing doesn't work out? I mean, it's amazing, but it kind of like tied out hands.

It's putting all of your eggs in one basket. Right. Right. And if that basket breaks, you're in deep shit. Now, what were like some other ideas of other types of telescopes you would have wanted to develop that were different than Hubble, obviously, I assume? Yeah, there's lots of ideas of, like, doing smaller telescopes, looking in different wavelengths. So there was a recent call for, like, big ideas for new telescopes, and there was three or four ideas that were proposed. One was to actually take photos of planets called the Habital Worlds Observatory.

So that would be fantastic, because James Webb, it can take photos of planets. but only really big planets and planets which are like basically forming so when a planet is first forming it's really bright it's very hot it's like a lava world almost and so there's all this heat coming off it and so james web can detect those but if it was the earth around the sun and it's a mature system like we are it can't see those that's impossible so you need you need one of these more sophisticated telescopes specially designed to do that so that was one idea another one was to look in totally different wavelengths of light like x-rays so build an x-ray super telescope we've had small X-ray telescopes and they've been amazing but if you build a big X-ray telescope

you can see stuff like black holes merging you can see the center of galaxies you can see these active galactic nuclei where all this stuff's flying into black holes you can see quasars so X-rays let you see like the most extreme stuff happening in the universe like all like the high energy extreme need-for-speed type stuff that's like that's where when the universe is on steroids that's when you want to go to X-rays you see all this wild stuff why can that do it versus versus like the James Webb Telescope can't do that kind of thing. It's to do with the wavelength of light that it looks at.

So we see in visible light, so it goes from about 400 nanometers to about 700, 800 nanometers. That's a very narrow range. If you could see further into the red than we can, then you'd see the infrared. And that's what James Webb looks at. That's a longer wavelength of light. And so Einstein taught us and quantum mechanics shows us that, there's a very strong connection between the wavelength of light and the energy of the photon itself. So it's basically proportional. So the longer the wavelength, the less energy that

photon is carrying. And so that means that the source that created that photon was a low energy event, right? So it was a warm planet. It was the surface of a star. Comparatively, we can see those kind of low energy environments. Whereas if you go towards the left and you go towards shorter wavelengths you go towards the ultraviolet that's what obviously gives you a sun tan if you go even more extreme you get into x-rays that's obviously so energetic it passes mostly through your body those rays and so those photons carry a huge amount of energy and so the only way to make such an energetic photon is that it has to be like two stars collided or um but yeah like something's falling into a black hole that's why you're saying when black holes collide they can see that

yeah you get all this wild high energy astrophysics happening so x-rays are a probe to that most extreme end of the universe. So it depends what your interests are. I mean, those folks had a really good case, but obviously they can't do anything to with planets. Nothing to do with life or aliens or anything like that. That's just to do with understanding the universe better. Whereas James Webb actually wasn't really interested in planets either.

It's gold. The reason why it went to the infrared is because it wanted to look at the very first galaxies forming the universe. So a galaxy normally produces light in the visible, like we see, that's why we can see stars. But because the universe is stretching and expanding, if an object is really, really far away, billions of billions of light years,

that light gets stretched out by the expansion of space itself. And so that light that used to be blue light becomes red light and then infrared light. And so the only telescope that could see the first stars in the universe would necessarily have to be an infrared telescope. So that's why James Webb was built. That was really its goal, was to see the very first stuff happening.

What happens, I'm a little fixated. on the black hole thing because one of the amazing things about the movie Interstellar is that when we later actually got a look at a black that came out in 2014 when we got to look at a black hole in 2019 five years later it looked frighteningly similar to what christopher nolan had created which is just kind of crazy how that worked out but like when you say two black holes are like going to collide together what does that even mean like what does that look like so they're also stars evolve as they get older, they change, and the sun will not evolve into a black hole. It's not big enough to fall into a black hole, but the biggest stars well. And a lot of stars are in binary

star systems. Wait, the sun's not big enough to fall into a black hole? To become a black hole. It went fall into itself. I was going to say, I saw Matthew McConaughey fall into a black hole. Yeah, so yeah, so you could push the sun into a black hole, but if you leave the sun alone, it will not become a black hole. It's like, I'm bigger than the sun. Good impression I worked on that one So we don't think that's going to happen to the sun But some of the biggest stars will do that

And lots of the big stars actually live in pairs They kind of, you know Our sun's pretty lonely But a lot of stars are binary or even trinery So they mess around They're not monogamous That's right You're polyamorous or whatever

They have their swing of parties out there That's right And as they evolve and get older they can these stars eventually slowly kind of spiral in towards each other and there's various ways that can happen there's lots of people studying exactly different mechanisms that can happen but generally there's you know we expect this to happen so as they get closer and closer and closer these binaries will merge eventually and when that happens we get these like ripples through space time so it's it's not really light there is there is some light effect as well but primarily the main effect you see or here is a ripple in space time itself and so

That's what these gravitational wave detectors, like LIGO, have been so successful at. So we've detected something like a few hundred merging black holes by hearing them merge together. And what's really wild, we have a new factor. We can hear it. I mean, it is basically a sound wave propagating through space time. You just hear like, black hole just got sucked up. Yeah. If we, yeah, I mean, it is actually technically possible because it shifts space.

it bends space and that's what a sound wave kind of does it compresses air so it causes a compression wave so it is possible um that you could if you were near one of these events you could actually hear it with your own ears which is really that's crazy even in the vacuum of space they say in space you can't hear anything but if you're near emerging black hole certain configurations you would actually be able to hear those frequencies i think my colleague jan 11 told me that and i was like that is that is wild oh my god so that's yeah it is literally a like hearing the universe these effects so it's a completely different way i mean for 400 years of astronomy we've just been using light x-rays photons it's all light whereas um this is like radically

different this is this is like ripples that you're feeling in space itself so that's that's been pretty mind-boggling and uh we're what's really crazy is that if we keep doing this if we build even bigger versions of these detectors um these telescopes these i mean they're kind of like a telescope gravitational wave detectors, they can be in principle so sensitive that we could detect every black hole merging in the entire universe. There wouldn't be a single black hole merger that we would not be able to detect. In the whole universe when we don't even know the size of it? What I mean is the visible the universe that light has time to reach us. Obviously if light doesn't have if this, I mean because gravitational waves also travel at the speed of light. So they travel the same speed of the speed light does.

So obviously, if it's beyond what we call the particle horizon, it's beyond the observable universe. Obviously, nothing can travel fast in the speed light, so we're not going to see it or hear it. But anything within the observable universe, there could be a black hole merging right at the very boundary. And we could, in principle, build detectors with the next generation of observatories that would be able to catch every single damn one of the things. What's the relation of time there, though? And here's what I mean by that. you know a hundred years passes here on earth but if something exists fucking 12 million light years away or something is the same this is getting to kind of interstellar plot too is the same amount of time one second there like if if if we're detecting something with black holes like you were just talking about that's happening way over here and it takes 200 years to develop here on earth is it really just taking a totally different form of time longer or shorter to actually develop out there and how do we know that yeah it means where you put your clock So we've got one clock here on the earth, but where's this other clock you're putting?

Exactly. Is it? Because you say like put it in the system, but if you put it, the closer and closer you put it to the horizon of the black hole, the slower that clock will tick. And eventually, as it's on the event horizon itself, it will stop ticking. So if you watch someone fall into the black hole, like I say, I was falling backwards into black hole and you were watching from the spaceship above going, have a good time, watching Matthew McConnell fall down.

He would actually seem to slow more and more and more as he got closer and closer. And from his perspective, that's not happening. In his perspective, he just falls straight through. But from our perspective, watching him fall, he would seem to slow down more and more and more. And he'd also get redder and redder and redder because the wavelengths of light now have to, it's kind of like a gravitational, well, it is literally a gravitational well. It's like a hill. And so the light now has to climb out of that hill.

And as it climbs out the hill, it's like it's losing potential. energy. And so it shifts. It's called a gravitational red shift. It shifts from, let's say, it was blue light coming off his helmet. It shifts towards the red by that same effect we talk about with the expanding universe. So he would look redder and redder and redder and fainter and fainter and fainter. And eventually he would almost go invisible, be far redder than our eyes can see and completely freeze on the surface. So you would never actually witness him past the event horizon until literally the end of the universe itself, he'd be stuck there from our perspective. from our but it's it's not what happened but from his i mean we don't really know what happened inside

the event horizon from his perspective that's where physics kind of breaks a lot of it was crazy though that like you you're telling me i could physically like take a clock that's moving and when i that clock itself when i'm getting close to this hole it slows down to like a stop yeah yeah it sounds like a DMT trip right it doesn't even sound real like the clock knows like oh he's near a black hole stop ticking yeah there are so many questions about yeah i mean we know we know pretty well what we'd expect to happen from our perspective and the the mystery i always think about is what does yeah matthew mcanaughey experience like what what does he see from his perspective and you know if i was given the choice like you know let's say you're like you've lived your life you're 75 80 years old

and you're like okay i've only got a year or two left to go um i'd be quite tempted to throw myself into a black hole given the option just to like see because it's like a one-way trip you can never tell anyone what you see once you go through that event horizon there's no way you can ever send information back out so you're what what you know is for you and for you alone and you would be the only human being the the only individual who would ever actually know what happens inside a black hole now what if what if our bodies here are just containers of the soul which you know some religion's posit yeah and when you die physically your spirit it actually it turns out we figured out after death passes through something like a black hole

to some other side or some other dimension or something like that perhaps you might and i'm totally like riffing right here but perhaps maybe you would experience something similar to what the actual like oh i'm 75 i got a year or two left let me just fucking send it and fall into a black hole i've heard wilder ideas for what happens in the afterlife i put it that way yeah i mean it's they're kind of the Like, there's something about black holes that are like a cheat code to reality itself. They are, they are a break in the rules of the universe itself where, you know, there's these holes that punch through space and time. And all of our questions about, you know, one of the grand goals of physics is to try to unify quantum physics, which is a theory of the very small

with general relativity, the theory of the very large. And at black holes, those two worlds meet. And it's pretty much the only object we know of where both of those physical effects manifest in meaningful ways. So there's this paradox with black holes called the information paradox, which is like what happens to stuff that falls in? Quantum theory says that you can't delete information. So it's sort of paraphrasing it a little bit, but essentially it's like every process is reversible. You could like take an egg and you could smash it into a million pieces and crack it on the table. But in principle, we could if we wanted to like put everything back to. together and make the egg again. You could undo it. Every process should be time reversible in

quantum physics. But with a black hole, it's not time reversible. When something that falls through that event horizon, like we said, that's it. It can't come back out. So there's another way of saying that is that you've lost information. The universe has like erased, it's deleted information that the universe once had, unless it was a textbook with, you know, a biography in it or something. All those words, all that information is gone forever. And quantum physics just can't handle that. And so a lot of physicists are thinking really hard. This is why it's a paradox. It doesn't make any sense. There must be a way for that information to somehow get back out. And one of the ideas that seems connected is Stephen Hawking had this

brilliant inside of something called Hawking Radiation. We now called, he didn't call it that. We call it a hooking radio. You're a bit of a jerk if you call something after yourself. Right. I need this. Kipping radiation. But yeah, he got called this afterwards. But he basically showed through you know some quantum arguments that you should expect black holes to evaporate over time to evaporate yeah they don't last forever either so um and the the kind of the the cartoon way to understand this is to imagine that a pair of particles pops up into existence which happens all the time even in this room right now in empty space there's constant virtual pairs of particles popping up an antimatter and matter pop up and immediately annihilate each other so fast that we don't

even really have time to see it and quantum physics says that happens all the time it's in and it's very well understood and observable um so this should happen on on the event horizon of a black hole so you've got this boundary everything on this side falls in everything on the other side can escape in principle and a pair of particles could form right on that threshold one of the guys falls in and the other guy has the opportunity to potentially escape and if it escapes it is basically removing energy from the black hole because that was that any that pair of particles was like a was like a loan. It's like borrowing money from the bank. And so somehow now that that dollar that you loaned has escaped. And so the black hole has to lose that dollar. It has to decrease in its

mass to accommodate for that. So this walking radiation effect causes black holes just very, very, very, very slowly lose mass and evaporate. Which is interesting then from the perspective of what happens if you fell in. If time really does get massively distorted, you could in principle observe this speed-up effect of seeing your own black hole that you're inside evaporate whilst you're in it and disappear. Is there also a, maybe I'm totally misinterpreting this with the example you just gave, but is there also like a Schrodinger's cat type idea there where there's two possibilities of what happens to the same person meaning they fall in or they escape?

Well, not exactly in this analogy, but you could imagine experiments like that. Okay. You could certainly imagine having some, you'd have to have some kind of random 50-50 quantum coin that's like okay 50% of the time this rocket's going to blast you into the black hole and 50% of time you're going to stay inside this inside the ship and then yeah then you could have these quantum super positions set up where you're both inside the black hole and i've never that's a really wild idea actually i've never heard of the schrodinger cat thought of with black holes but i could imagine having some fun thinking about the consequences of that i don't know i'm bringing the loop back to like when I was talking

with Michi Okaku a couple years ago he would he was blowing my mind with dimensions and I'm wondering if there's like some sort of relation there because he's like we could sit in this room and turn the transistor this way and a dinosaur's there or if we could turn it this way and it's you and me and I'm like fuck so that means

there's like trillions gazillions billions of possibilities that happens so maybe if you look at a black hole you would also have those all those possibilities with the same person and now it gets into like what is that or black holes the key to time travel it gets really weird it gets way beyond me yeah i mean the there's a lot of um disagreement about how to even interpret what quantum mechanics is really telling us um with these kind of experiments like schrodinger's cat so

it's a recap shreding as cat is that you have a cat in a box and um it's a closed box that no one can see uh inside of um and there's some like poison or something inside and there's a a random particle that's going to decay, and there's a 50-50 chance it will decay in, let's say, the next hour. And if it decays, it will trigger this poison to release and kill the cat. And if it doesn't decay, the cat's alive. So in quantum mechanics, we would say that particle that causes the decay, until we observe it, it truly isn't a superposition of both decayed and not decade. And you can't, it doesn't collapse into one particular case until you actually, you know, start observing it. And so therefore, by extension, shouldn't the cat also be both dead and alive?

And so that's really mind-boggling to think about. And then you might say what happens when someone opens the box. And now he, you know, the lab guy can see it and he's like, okay, the cat's alive. But then you could also say, well, the room that he's in, there's now two versions of that room one where he opened it and saw the cat and one where he didn't and so then this kind of like bubble of reality kind of expands across the universe and so uh caught you know causally it just goes out and out and out and so uh there is a view that the entire i mean shan carroll often holds this view the whole universe itself is in a giant superposition of all of these different states um and this kind of lends itself a little bit towards a view called the multi

multi-world multiverse everettian view there was a physicist called hugh everett that put this worldview forward the many worlds hypothesis and it's kind of like sliding doors that movie where like if you miss the train and don't miss train both of those things actually do happen and all of these realities are playing out side by side so there's a essentially you know almost an infinite number of you and me having this conversation uh in just kind of different quantum realities that we can't interfere with in any way just one in one three hour conversation think about all the possibilities of like the first sentence you say this word instead of that that word and then in the next iteration it's like well the second sentence is not you know

there's just the number of possibilities just rapidly blooms so the weirdest thing i've ever heard about this um it kind of creates a philosophical problem called the quantum suicide experiment quantum suicide yeah maybe a better name for it is quantum immortality i think some i like suicide it's good yeah suicide sometimes people get a bit upset about it but uh the idea is um imagine you took like a revolver and you're you're definitely pretty pathological to this i do not not recommend anyone try this exporter. Don't do this at home. There's a good chance this is wrong.

But if you follow the quantum physics forward and you believe in this Everettian view of the universe, if you tried to shoot yourself with a gun in the head, then there is a chance that that gun will not malfunction or something, something will go wrong with that. Do not try this at home. Yeah. Do not try that at home. Or stand in front of, you know, you can sign the road and a truck's about to hit you or something. There's a small chance that truck will get a pop tire and miss you you know like in kind of final destination type universes right there's like all these like weird things that can happen where you actually miraculously survive this this situation so there's

millions and millions of views and 99.99% of them get killed in this experiment but there's a tiny tiny fraction of them that miraculously survive and the idea is like what is conscious experience conscious experience is a continuous flow of um of reality from moment to moment and so So you can never observe being dead. You can't be one of those dead things because there's nothing to observe. And quantum observation is all about someone there to observe it. So you can only observe yourself as one of these live individuals. So the idea is that you could take this revolver and do this like three or four times in a row.

And you would survive. And if you did that, you could prove to yourself that this theory was correct. because the probability was so tiny, it would just be miraculous. But in the vast, the reason why we don't know of anyone who's ever done this is because the vast majority of these universes, you would die. Right. So if, you know, if your friend said, I'm going to try this experiment, he's just going to kill himself.

That's what's in our reality. But in his, maybe, in his conscious version of reality, he wouldn't see that. And he would continue to experience life. So he just keeps going. And then you can apply this also to aging. So, I mean, if you die by, you know, getting cancer or you just die because your heart stops when you get old or something.

Again, there's a small chance that heart keeps beating another beat. And so you have this quantum immortality possibility where it's impossible for you to die. But you can get sick and you can get injured. And so you can become this really decrepit, bedridden, tortured experience where it is... And it's impossible to die? You can't die in this quantum immortality. So if I blew my brains out, I still would live. the gun wouldn't go off yeah oh oh it just wouldn't even go off or you would you know or you would

like blast a piece of your skull off but somehow you'd still be conscious or survive the experiment if i got to run off a cliff i just float uh where you'd slip before you got there or something you know like something would always stop you from from doing these things yeah or like a you know i don't know like an eagle would nudge you into the cliff face or something like every time something weird would happen that seems incredibly unlikely but you know like in deadpool is that character lucky who just keeps like getting away with all these crazy things so the quantum immortality it was coming by max ted mark and a lot of people say like this is so crazy it kind of proves it's so ridiculous it kind of proves there must be something wrong with this view of

quantum mechanics it can't be right because it just seems stupid that everyone could like keep surviving forever but um the everettian view is actually the most popular view i'd say or one of the the most popular interpretations of quantum mechanics there is. When did he come up with it? I think it was like the 1950s or 60s. So he actually believed, yeah, rumor is ever, ever believed he would never die. Yeah. Like die according to our laws of dying or? In his reality, he would never die. So obviously we would observe him die because we

live in a different dimension in a sense to him, but in his dimension, he would continue to live forever. But it's not, it's not a pleasant thing, right? To be, it sounds great at first, but it's like a deal with the devil because then like you don't really want to live forever decrepit and unable to do anything. Yeah, that's a strange thing thinking about life. I was talking about like the concept of heaven was someone the other day and why I actually think, oh, something like reincarnation could really make sense because it sounds awesome to go somewhere in the sky for all of eternity after a quick trip here, you know, you do a good job and then you get there and you can fucking eat chocolate and never get fat. You're on a 4040, no problem.

you're all around people you love, you drink, you get drunk, and you're never hung over. Like, it sounds amazing, but it's all good. Yeah. And then you don't have, there's no, like, maybe you're just totally enlightened at that point, but there's no, like, struggle. There's nothing to make the good stand out from the bad. So the idea of doing that infinitely is crazy. Similarly, the concept of, like, living life and knowing I'm never going to die

would take away the whole kind of meaning and purpose of, like, the clock of life here, and what you're supposed to try to accomplish while you have whatever time you have. So in some ways, it goes against our, you know, little pea-brained ideas in humanity to even understand or be able to appreciate something like that, like not dying because it takes away from the whole meaning of us living in the first place. Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge Tolkien nerd, so J.R. Tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings. And the elves don't die in that world, right?

they just live forever and it's pretty it's pretty strange to like compare the the way the characters behave in their stories um the the elves are just sad like all the time because they they just want the world to be the same and they hate things changing like when the seasons come and the world you know the evolution of the mountains and see rivers change humans emerge all this kind of they hate all that they just want things to be like just keep it the way i'm used to it and um eventually becomes like a really kind of tragic existence to have this prolonged life and eventually yeah they do kind of go to like a heaven essentially in in the story which is valid but um the human the humans have much more impetus about them they're like hey i've only got 100 years i need to get this

shit going like i'm not just going to sit around messing around i do wonder though because you know there's people like um uh what's his name brian johnson thank you who's trying to extend his life significantly you see him take a mushroom trip the other day really yeah he's trying to live a little bit. Okay. I'm glad to see him pushing the boat out a little bit on that. So yeah, that's good for him. I do think it's interesting, like what would happen if we live, maybe not forever, but 500 years? How would human perspective change about things like climate change? You know, a lot of folks are like, I don't give a shit about climate change because it's not going to happen for another like 200 years before the world screwed over. So why should

I give a shit about it? If we live for 500 years, that's now like poisoning your back garden in your, you know, in your relatively short-term time scale, right? It's like, why would you invest in your retirement fund? It's because, yeah, sure, it's a few decades away, but you know you're going to live it. You're going to experience being retired one day, so you want to put some money in your 401k because that's going to happen. So in the same sense, like, if you live for 500 years, I wonder if, as a society, we might mature a lot and think, you know, I think we're so short-term focused as a society. A longer-term view might actually be really beneficial. yeah but you're also talking about like a middle ground there too it's not like we're going to be a mortal for fucking you know a million years or something but oh if you lived 500 years you'd think a little bit more about the timeline in front of you and i agree because it's like especially in america we think about tomorrow yeah or like today you look at other cultures around the world some of them you know they think 300 years out or something like that obviously it's more rare these days but it's like when you're talking about something with the climate and like the health of the planet and like the health of the planet and

just in general and like our place in this universe like that is a human issue it's everyone around should care but then you have all these borders and stories basically of countries that are all different and have different opinions and different cultures and different people so you can't get everyone to agree on something it's like do you think we can have something maybe it's not that but is there even a would it take something like people knowing that fucking aliens exist or something for human beings to suddenly have a moment where we come together and go oh wow we should all care about that because that affects all of us equally you know yeah i'm i was talking about this when i was on joe's podcast as well because there's like a double-edged nature to humanity right

that we're we're competitive and tribal with each other and that's to a fault in a way right because sometimes being so um tribal and and wanting the other team to lose is not net good for humanity right wanting to destroy your enemy uh especially if it's like in um you know, sports or something or often get like so worked up about wanting to crush the crush your opponent. But and that's very human that we feel that way. But if we act that way in society, you're just making other people's experience worse and those people could want to do great things. So it's net bad for humanity, I would say. But being competitive also drives us to be better, right? So if you're if you're competing in the Olympics

against some super fast swimmer, you're going to train extra hard to try and get to the top of your game. So yeah, I do kind of wonder with alien civilizations, if they're not, if they don't have that tribalism that we have, that competitiveness, maybe they never become technological because they're just not driven to sort of that the peaks of what's possible. And if they are competitive and tribal, maybe their fate is to ultimately destroy themselves because that seems like a distinct possibility at least for humanity that we could end up in some kind of giant World War III or something one day. So it might be like a double-edged sword that the only way to become advanced is the same

way which ultimately limits your lifetime. All right, real quick, I've got to go to the bathroom. We're going to come back to number four and start going through the three-eye Atlas list. I didn't forget people. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So we've been, I like the side tangents off this list because obviously we're explaining three-eye Atlas and everything, but I got a lot of questions about the universe.

all of you out there, I'm sure. But we left off at number four right here. We just done number three going through a couple of the other ones that have been observed. But number four on the 10 anomalies that Avi Loeb had is that the arrival of three eye Atlas was fine tuned to bring it within tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus, and Jupiter and be observable from Earth at a perihelion with a likelihood of 0.005%. So let's go to those hotel notes. right there. Yeah. What have we got going on? Yeah. So this one actually is really easy to debunk because one of my strengths is statistics. I love statistics. I teach that at Columbia. And this is a statistical argument so we can get into that. Yeah, so the comet is making a pretty close approach

to these three planets, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. But those are not the only planets in the solar system. So if you do it, if you do the calculation differently, you said, okay, what about how close it's getting to Mercury, the Earth, and Saturn instead? You get basically 50% probability times by 50% times by 50%. So you get one in eight. So it just becomes like a, you know, not a big deal at all. This is the situation. So it really is subject to which planets you pick.

So let me give you an example. You could apply this to human beings. Okay. So what is the probability I'm an alien, right? So you could look at weird things I'm doing and say, that's a bit anomalous. David does this weird thing. That's a bit anomalous. So I'm going to show off a little bit, but my best lift, so I think I'm going to see the day,

my best lift at the moment is two plates for about five reps. And apparently... Pretty good. All right. Yeah, there you go. Apparently, only about half a percent of the world's population can do that. Yeah. Okay, so maybe I'm a super strong alien that's just like hiding in human skin.

You're in the wrong room to be saying that. You're scaring me. Right. So I know this, you're probably even more extreme, you guys. He's like going to be the fucking men and black guy coming. Could happen. You never know. And then let's say, there's a half a percent probability then that I'm alien by that definition.

And now what is it? I also have a weird accent, right? I talk with a British accent. Only about 1% of human beings speak with a British accent. Makes you sound smarter. Yeah. So maybe I'm an alien who like couldn't figure out how to talk proper American. And this is like the best I can do to, like, pull it off.

Do you have an American accent? No, no. You can't do it. I can't do it. I have a shitty British accent, so if that makes you feel better. There we go. I'm not going to, I'm not going to do accents. But if you multiply those two probabilities together, 1% being British, times by half percent

of being able to lift two plates, then you'd get the same probability here, 0.005%. So it's just, all you should do is just take a couple of things about yourself, like your blood type and like maybe some genetic condition you have or some, you know, some ailment that you have, multiply those two probabilities together and you can like trivially get down to this percentage. So if you take the object and just look at its history and say, there must be something about it that's a little bit odd, it's really easy to back engineer like these crazy low probabilities. And again, like if you just take three of the planets, you could get a much more mundane number than this. So this is just what we were called P-hacking in statistics.

P-hacking. So this is a P-value technically. It's not actually a likelihood value in statistics, which is a P-value. P-value is when you ask like how surprising something is. So it's a measure of surprisingness. And if you like a very, if you like engineer these numbers very carefully, it's called hacking, P-hacking. And it's banned in most journals in science to do this.

You're not allowed to do it because it's been shown over and over again, especially in nutrition and health. There are so many studies that do P-hacking. pee hacking to say like, hey, if you eat three tomatoes a day, you know, you'll get, you know, get rid of all your cholesterol or something. Oh, yeah. Jesus Christ. And there's tons of pe hacking going on in those days. So this is like not, it's just not legitimately even allowed in most scientific journals anymore. So I think this one's pretty easy to kick out. I see stuff every day where it's like, new study says, and it's like ridiculous thing and ridiculous thing.

And it's like, oh, I guess everyone should just do that now and you're fucking healed. It's crazy. But if that number, so it's 0.005, if that number had said, point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero five you might be like okay it depends on how you do it because I could just keep adding things onto the you know look at lift 225 British blood type um I don't know the fact that I'm right footed you just keep adding like more and more stuff my my eye prescriptions 3.25 so you just keep adding stuff on and you would end up with ridiculous probabilities it just it just depends on how how much you engineer it so

P value alone isn't meaningful. If you really want it to do something surprising, it's got to do something unnatural. It's not unnatural for an object to pass near to a planet. That's not a natural. If it came to a stop, if it just went, and just stopped in space, went backwards. That's not natural. Then we'd be like, hold on, that is freaking weird. That has to be a ship. I would agree with Abby then. That has to be a ship. It is not doing any of that stuff. Everything is doing is what asteroids and comets do. Number five, its gas plume contains much more nickel than iron, as found in industrial produced nickel alloys, and a nickel-to-cyonide ratio that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets, including to Iborosov with a likelihood below 1%.

All right, let's take that out of Japanese. Yeah, so it's when you do this spectroscopy of these objects, we talked about the different molecules you can detect coming off it. So we know there's water coming off it, which is obviously very typical of comet. There's also tons of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Again, totally normal for a comet to do that kind of stuff. And then another kind of trace, you know, there's trace metals which come off as well. So there's iron and nickel and other things. And the ratio of nickel to iron is super high. So that's kind of odd. It's producing tons of nickel and hardly any iron at all. So that was the anomaly that Abby's talking about. And that is genuinely

quite weird. We haven't really seen any comet. There's no known comet asteroid which produces this extreme ratio that's been observed for this object. However, we did, again, we observed it at kind of a weird time. It's pretty rare that we observe comets this far out in the solar system. It's just because this is like the celebrity object. We've been giving it so much attention. So it's possible there's actually a ton of objects we've just not been doing this for that it does this. The other interesting thing is if you look at the papers of these detections, they've been monitoring it all the way from an AU, by the way, is a unit of distance. That's the distance from the Earth to the sun, one AU. We've been monitoring this comet from about three AU into

about two AU and measuring how much Nicolet's got all the way along that journey. And what we're seeing is that it started out really extreme and it's getting more and more normal as it gets closer and closer in. And the prediction is actually as it gets closer to the sun, it would be indistinguishable from other comets, the ratio. So again, this kind of speaks to the fact we caught the sky so early that it looks weird to us, but that's maybe just because we don't normally observe things at this part of the journey. And as it's gone closer and closer to the sun, it actually looks indistinguishable in terms of its nickel emission. So it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty hard to like really know how anomalous this truly is because it's, the very nature of

observations on it are kind of anomalous, how much attention it's got is anomalous. So the deeper you dig, you know, you get all this extreme finely grained detail, but it's, It's not obvious whether these things are true for other comets or not. And the other thing is, this is obviously the third interstellar objects. So there's only three. There's really into two of the objects to compare to, if you're being really honest about it. So to say it's got an extreme nickel compared to solar system objects, but it's not a solar system object. So why are we even like really comparing to that anyway?

We know that exoplanets are freaking weird compared to the Earth's, the solar system planets. So why would we expect comets from other star systems to look the same? as comets we have here is no reason why that should be so by the way you had said this earlier but it was just coming up in the context of what you were explaining there when you talk about three eye atlas entering our solar system so it's within the same galaxy but it's coming from a different solar system which is effectively coming from a different star system so something another equivalent of the sun somewhere else how does that happen does it just float in or is there something that needs to happen for it to be able to leave another solar system and come to ours i'm thinking like

You know, are there gravitational pools working against it? What's the science there? Yeah, I mean, we know there are ways of ejecting stuff out the solar system even. The solar system most likely probably had a fifth gas giant when it was really young. So there's Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, or Uranus, Neptune, really, in that order. But there was probably another ice giant, so another Neptune-urinus-type object in the solar system. And the reason why we think that is because if you simulate the planets and let them, you know, orbit around super fast, you speed up the simulation, very often Neptune gets kicked out the solar

system altogether through gravitation tractions with Saturn and Jupiter especially. So the way to solve that problem, because obviously Neptune's here, is to add another gas giant, and then that guy gets kicked out and that saves Neptune and Uranus. So we think even the solar system, we probably ejected not just tiny, rocks but entire planets at the freaking solar system so there are literally rogue worlds drifting between the stars you know which might even have moons and even maybe there's in life on those things it's pretty wild to think about so there's definitely ways that can happen another good example is triton around neptune so triton is a moon which goes backwards around neptune which is kind of weird yeah

why does it go backwards well for a long time people like that doesn't make any sense like if it's forming should form has the planet forms it should spin in the same way the planet spins no this makes any sense. But then this brilliant astrophysicist Craig Agnall came up with a mechanism to explain this. And you basically have two like a binary object. So you have Triton and it has another body next to it. And these two objects just orbit around each other like a binary. And we know of loads of binaries like this in the asteroid belt. So there's this binary that swings closer and closer towards Neptune. And then what's happening is at the moment of close approach, Triton is on the inside and it's moving at almost the same speed as Neptune.

So they're kind of like, it's like two cars down the highway that are moving at 70 miles now and 71 miles an hour. You can kind of look through each other's windows and see each other and it looks kind of slow. And so that means that Neptune can gravitationally capture the moon and grab onto it. Whereas the other object is going the other directions, that's like the car going the opposite highway direction. That's going 70 miles of the other direction. That's doing like 140. So that thing just gets slingshot super fast and gets kicked out of the

the solar system altogether. So this mechanism we think explains how you can form some of the moons, including Triton. So there are probably these binaries which also kicked. So maybe 3A Atlas, maybe Omoor, used to be in a pair, and they got too close to another planet and one of them became a moon and the other guy got... Oh, they split? Chooked out. Yeah.

Right. We don't know for sure, but that's one easy way of doing it. When you talk about, I believe you said it was Neptune when we run these simulations, could be kicked out of the solar system. system, how long, like, let's say we notice one day, oh, they're getting kicked out, and you can see it's like point in no return, how long does that simulation take for it to actually leave the solar system? Are we talking days, years, hundreds of years?

Oh, millions of millions of years. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, these speeds are very slow. So, I mean, it's going a similar speed to Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and it will take Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, I think, something like 100,000 years or so to reach like the nearest star. So yeah, these are very slow speeds, but the galaxy is very old. So there's like plenty of time for these things to make their way. And then within another thing I was just thinking about, within our solar system, obviously like, you know, there's planets that we're trying to figure out if at some point we could reach, but they're so far away.

You know, are there definitive cases to be able to say that not necessarily aliens or something like that, but there's some life on Jupiter, for example, and how do we know that? it depends what you mean by on jupiter because jupiter doesn't have a surface so so like what's the on mean it would probably have to be like hanging out in the clouds just like floating around and people have speculated about that scientists have speculated about that i think car saigan actually thought about that quite a bit and was you know wondering there could be life in the clouds it's been suggested for venus that's true so a few years back there was a detection of a molecule called phosphine in the atmosphere of venus and on earth phosphine is pretty much only made through life through these, it happens on like bays and shorelines.

There's this bacteria. I think it gives that truffle smell. Actually, no, that's DMS. It's like, yeah. So anyway, it's a molecule which is made by bacteria. And it was found in the atmosphere of Venus. And it turns out, even though Venus is like a hellhole, the surface is like 700, 800 Kelvin, so extremely hot.

It's like another than on the surface. So there's definitely no way you'd expect life to be on the surface. But as you go up and up and up, there is a certain layer where the pressure is similar to this room and the temperature is similar to this room. So it's possible there could be bacteria, which are just wafting along in the clouds. It's a little bit challenging how they stay up there. Like you need, you know, do they propel themselves somehow or is there wafts that just sort of keep them afloat for their entire life cycle?

I mean, it's a little bit speculative. But in principle, the conditions are right and phosphine was detected. So people got excited about that. So I think people are, you know, scientists are open-minded about that possibility. it's not it wouldn't be your first bet though right because um there's moons like europa and inceladus which have like liquid water underneath their surface and the plumes and organic molecules yeah so we know obviously on the earth oceans are full of life so if you've got a giant ocean underneath these moons it seems like that would be a more obvious place to find life

since we know for sure that's a place where life can survive rather than saying hey the first place we should look is the clouds of neptune because you require like two two or three or three miracles for that to work out. Whereas you only require the same thing to have happened on Earth to have happened in these moons. So I think when we, you know, sometimes the public get frustrated with scientists like saying, why do you guys only care about, you know, Earth-like planets? And it's not that we're narrow-minded.

We don't think about life in strange places, like on the surface of neutron stars, even people have speculated. Even the galaxy could be a living being. Scientists have speculated about that. The entire galaxy could be an organism. A living being. Yeah. That is like the last scene in men in black.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So scientists have very wild imaginations, trust me, about what is possible. That's good. But it just wouldn't be, if you're going to prioritize, hey, here's, you know, $10 billion NASA's got to look for life, you have to, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, most of your money into your Bitcoin or something. I don't know what you're probably going to, like, put, you know, some of the money in, like, the high-risk stuff, but not all of it. And then most of your money, probably lower risk investments. It'd be kind of radical to stick all in, like, the highest risk thing possible. You're trying to stick it to what you could relate to. Like a human being, like you said, couldn't live in like a cloud-like atmosphere. They got to live on something that has somewhat similar resources in a way.

So that's where you're going to look. It makes sense. Yeah. And it's similar for stars. It's similar for planets. So, yeah, we've got to look at least, you know, the chances are good to look at places where we know for short life was successful yeah i don't hear nearly as much talk from like Elon and other people these days about the whole colonization of mars for years that was like the thing

he would lead with always talk about it where are we with that how realistic is that over the next 300 years i mean dude's got a trillion dollars now that's what i'm saying it's like put you're telling me about the telescope costing like 10 billion or something i'm like buddy come Yeah, he could easily do that now, right? He's got enough money to do that. I mean, there's a technological challenge, which obviously he's trying to solve with Starship. Starship has had like a bunch of launches.

I'm not sure how many they're at now, maybe like half a dozen or dozen or so. Each one, they seem to making progress, but it's been a difficult nut to crack, I think, for SpaceX, as to get that to be a fully reusable vehicle, as they imagine it to be. And even if they get that, obviously, to go to Mars requires all these.

extra steps like refueling in space and how would that work as i think so i think the plan is to have um like a tanker version of starship that just launches and it's just full of fuel that thing orbits around the earth and then you have um another starship comes up which is like the crude version and then they dock in space and it it dumps all over the fuel to the other guy and then once it's in space once it's an orbit of the earth it's a little bit less energy now to go to mars so it's easier to go so you can't do it in one shot i think it's true like starship um with a crew and all the infrastructure it needs, it can't do it in one shot, you have to have a refueling. So that's, I don't think there's any plans for Starship to test that in the near future as far

as I'm aware. So there's still like a lot of stuff they have to prove. But, I mean, I'm in favor of it. I think it would be great. I really would love to see humans working on Mars in my lifetime. I don't want to do it, but I'd love to see somebody do it. It'd be nice to die on Mars, right? You go there?

That's where it ends. I don't know. It's like, would you want to die in Antarctica? Because Antarctica is a lot nicer than Mars. How so? Well, Antarctica is about, I mean, it's about roughly the same temperature as Mars. It's not a different temperature. But it has atmosphere.

There's hardly any atmosphere in Mars. It's a very, very small atmosphere. So, you know, if you took your helmet off, you definitely suffocate pretty quickly. There's no oxygen to breathe. And then on top of that, there's water. There's tons and tons of water in Antarctica. You just melt the ice and you've got water. There's hardly any water in Mars.

It's really difficult to come by. There's a little bit in the polar caps. but it's a much more challenging place to survive than Antarctica. So I think that's a good point of comparison. And humans do live in Antarctica, but not all year round. It's like they'll stay there for like six months. It's like astronauts on the International Space Station. Like, yeah, you'll do a stint.

Yeah, don't sign me up. No one wants to live their life in Antarctica. What kind of life is that? Unless they have pyramids on the ground. I've heard, you know. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe there's pyramids on Mars. Who knows?

It'd be cool to dig up Mars and see what's going under the surface as well. That's a good idea. Space 2001 Space Odyssey, that's in the moon. They find the monuments, right? So there could be, I mean, I'm actually a big proponent of that. I think one of the, I'd like us to do that. I think we should build structures underneath the surface of Mars and the moon for future aliens to find.

Ooh, a little reverse, reverse engineering here. Yeah, my, my pitch is that this is the most likely way that we'll have communication with another civilization, a non-human civilization. But the pitch is that it'll be after we're gone and dead. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not two-way communication. It's one way. It's the same way that, yeah, the pyramids are a form of communication, right? There's hieroglyphics being on the surface and you can decode it and they are a, they're a monument to their brilliance, right, to these pharaohs. And so it is a message, which has been sent through time. And we can't reply to that message, but we can learn a lot from that

message. So if we're going to have two-way communication with aliens, it requires them to be contemporaneous with us, right? They have to be, A, nearby, because of the finite speed of light, and B, they have to also happen to have emerged at about the same time that we emerged and not be so far behind us that they can't use radio, but not so far ahead of us that don't give a shit about us. So there's a lot of, like, coincidences you require to have two-way communication. So maybe that'll work out. I'd prefer that. But it might be that one, day we come to the realization that's just not going to happen like we've surveyed the nearby plants there's no one there um the only option we have is to leave a message to leave a time capsule

for someone to discover one day couldn't that be destroyable though too like we always look at new york and this could all be just completely gone and no recollection that any of this existed right so if you're building some whether it's a pyramid whatever it may be some sort of monument and your ideas i think you said to build it underground or something like that what's to stop you know a core event in the event that the planet fucking explodes from destroying all that on the way to rebuilding itself as a new planet no you're exactly right and that's why i said mars and the moon especially are not the earth the earth is a terrible place to do this this is one of the advantages of going to these other planets the earth has weathering right so yeah if you calculate how long new york city would last for if

we went away, it's a border of a few million years. And then there would be a trace of it left at that point. And you see that with like Chernobyl, right? There's, you know, if you look at Chernobyl after that nuclear accident, there's already nature is like taking over. Maybe you can grab some photos of that to show it. But you can see all these like trees and wildlife just kind of engrouching back into that city.

So yeah, I don't think there'd be any trace of humanity, whatever we try to do after, say, 100 million years. Yeah, it's like I am legend. basically yeah exactly it all just kind of goes away so the moon though is completely different because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere it doesn't have rain doesn't have wind um doesn't have any geology there's no earthquakes there's like very tiny lunar quakes there but there's no volcanoes there's no there's nothing to like destroy anything you leave there and so it's often said that neil armstrong's footprints will last there for millions of years and that's just a footprint in sand

your footprint will yeah just the imprint of his boot will last for millions of years how long were the Apollo landers last on the moon. We don't even know. We're trying to calculate that my team right now, actually, with a science project on that. But it will probably, it will plausibly last until the sun engulfs the moon. The sun will one day get so big it engulfs the earth and that happened about five billion years. So probably that stuff will be there long, long after we're gone. And an alien, you know, we might stumble across the moon. Because the thing is with the earth, the earth is like a beacon for other aliens. Let's say there's an alien at the other side of the galaxy right now. 100,000 light years away from us.

But they could build their own James Webb, maybe a super James Webb, and they would be able to see the Earth and they'd say, look, we can tell this planet has oxygen, we can tell this plant's got oceans, it's got land, it's got, even probably tell it's got people on it eventually. But even because of the light time travel effect, they'd be able to, you know, they'd be looking back basically 100,000 years ago, so maybe they wouldn't see civilization, but they'd still see that we have a rich biosphere. So they would know, here's the galactic map. This guy right here, the Earth, the solar system, there's something.

special about this guy there's life on it there's like stuff happening on this planet and not just simple life oxygen is a sign of complex life so they would know this is a unique interesting planet i mean this is like a good reason for alien tourism if you an alien tourist the earth i think would stand out as like this is one of the best places to go in the whole in the whole universe why is oxygen in particular viewed that way for complex life yeah so oxygen is a product of photosynthesis that's the only way it's made on the earth at least so this is it took the development of cyanobacteria and plant life to to lead to this so that only happened about two and a half billion years ago and before that for the previous two

billion years we just had simple microbial life that was basically living off chemical gradients and that's like much easier to do from a like internal machinery perspective of life to develop photos synthesis was a pretty big deal for life and it took a significant advancement once you've got oxygen in the atmosphere it was possible to have much more metabolism inside cells so you start to see the development of eukaryate cells which is really what we are we are eukaryotes and that allows for much more efficient energy production once you've got oxygen so once you've got the energy you can do more stuff you can you can then animal start develop and multicellular life starts to develop about a billion years ago so all of that you know

is likely we think conditional upon having an oxygen rich atmosphere so that that's That's a good sign that was something interesting going on here. So I think an alien, 100,000 light years away, would look at the Earth 100,000 years ago. They'd be like, something's going on here, let's send a ship. And it's going to take that ship probably, unless someone has a warp drive or something.

It's probably a damn long time to get over here. We're probably long gone by the time it gets over here. But they would maybe be able to detect something we leave behind. Or maybe this happened three billion years ago. Maybe three billion years ago that I looked at the Earth. And sure, there was no oxygen back then, but they could still see probably there was life on the earth, they would detect life and be like, hey, maybe in a few billion years some smart creature might develop on that planet. We're not going to be

here in three billion years. We're probably going to be dead by then. But let's send something over for those guys. That's the best way for us to communicate. So there might be a time capsule, a beacon, which is really the, you know, obviously the plot of 2001 Space Odyssey, hidden in our solar system. And the best place to put it would not be the earth, but would be underneath the surface of the moon because you'd be protected from micrometeorites there's no weathering there's no volcanism so that would be the perfect place and there are caves on the moon these are lava tubes so when the moon first formed um there was the there was a little bit of volcanism when it was first forming and it left these caverns as lava flowed underneath the surface so there's these like cathedral-sized

tubes underneath the surface of the of the moon which if we seal those off by the way that's a perfect place for a moon base because then you could have atmosphere in these tubes maybe we have maybe we maybe someone's done that maybe that's what must gonna be doing i don't know i'd love to see a moon base do that and yeah that's like a super trivial place to put something because you literally just drive down the hole and dump something there you don't even have to dig around and we haven't explored those things at all so yeah uh to me that's very exciting like that if i was thinking logically in our current day and age, what is the best bet for me to, if I want to maximize a probability of detection of something for us, something that could be found by an alien species, that's what I would do.

If I build a radio beacon, that's a crappy suggestion, because that's only going to last 100 years and it'll break at best, right? It's not going to last that long. So you need something that can not require an active power system that can somehow be an information-rich beacon in an obvious place that an alien might look yeah it's like i was here yeah we're gone but i was here yeah now they're talking maybe i hope i saw this right i forget who it was but one of the guys not at nassah but in the government talking about space exploration was talking about last week like going back to the moon and how they're planning that and whatever when you talked to like all the people who don't believe they went we went to the moon i do to be clear i think like Kardashian doesn't by

Oh, she doesn't. Yeah, yeah. She's on that train now. That's what I read that she's now a moon truther, I think they called themselves. She went all in. Good. Yeah. Well, the one thing, like when they'll bring it up that is quite interesting is the fact that

we went in 69 with people and we haven't gone since. What is the logic? Because I would think, like, the rock that orbits in our system right there, we would want to know everything about that even if we're not going to colonize it or something. Like, there's resources. We can definitely get out of exploring that. of being there all the time obviously we take pictures of it and scans and everything so we know stuff but like why why haven't we gone back yeah i think this is more politics and economics than science right

so there's lots we can learn about the moon scientifically but you don't necessarily have to have have humans there to learn that and we keep sending rovers and satellites there we've been doing that ever since the apollo era so we've certainly been sending stuff there just not human beings but why politically don't we do it um i think the you know obviously the the space race is a a big part of it that's why we went it wasn't yeah the reason we probably put boots on the moon wasn't for a scientific experiment in it that's what neil that's not what neil armstrong was actually there do so we did it motherfucker he was there he was there for prestige yeah it was to show off that hey we we can do this shit and you can't we can do it before you it was it was flexing

and once we'd flexed and we'd done that a few times what was the point of staying there i mean it would already we'd already established with a top dog at that point there was the soviets had given up on their moon probe. They never put a man on the moon the entire time. By the time we'd put like 13 astronauts, I think, water in the moon. So there was, there's nothing more to prove. And it costs an absolute bomb to do it, right? It's so expensive to fly to the moon with very, very little, well, there's no economic return, really, of flying to the moon. You bring back some moon rocks and you can throw those on eBay. It's not really paying the bills. So it's just it is, you know, a desert, right? So it's very difficult. If we discovered, you know,

here's a counter universe in this multidimensional universe stuff. I always love to think about this. Imagine if the moon was just a little bit bigger than it was. It's about 1.25% the mass of the earth, I believe. So 1% the mass. Now, because it's so low mass, it doesn't have enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. That's why it's a vacuum, basically, when you walk on the surface. But if it was, say, 10% the mass of the Earth, which is about this mass of Mars, it would be big enough to hold onto an atmosphere. And so it is quite, and then it's in the capital zone, right? Now it's a world which has an atmosphere, which is the right distance from the star to have life. And the Earth has water, delivered likely from comets, we believe,

that comets smash into the Earth and delivered all the water. The moon would have got that same delivery system, would have had that same Amazon Prime delivery of all that water line on the surface. And so everything would have been there for it to have had life. And so Neil Armstrong, you imagine this alternate history, Neil Armstrong sets foot and he doesn't need national suit. He's setting foot in shorts and a T-shirt and he's still on a beach. And imagine how different the next 60 years of history would have been. Oh, of course.

Had the moon had been a habitable world that we could just basically move into right away. Like real estate the size of Africa, the landmass. about the same of Africa. So it would have totally transformed society. So if that happened, I'm sure we would have been going back to the moon constantly. But if it's just a dusty desert of moon dust with very little economic value for us, it just comes down to money.

There's any point doing it. It also feels like when you look over the last five, six decades, I'll just speak for this country more than anything, but you could probably say this in different places around the world. the interest for a while there waned in space it wasn't the same like back then it was like oh my god we can go to space which is that's how it should be in my opinion i fucking love space but you know if there's if there's one really positive thing about elin getting so involved with this and in his adult life is that as you've seen him become the celebrity over the last

10 20 years him talking about it all the time has people thinking about it a lot more people interested in again which would make sense now with even something like the moon that lacks the resources for you to want to spend the money to even go there. But it's like if you have more interest and you have more economics from the private side pouring into the space, well, fuck it. You can go to the moon too. It is fascinating, though, when you consider you could have a planet like Mars that may be

down the line you could actually put humans on and they could live there as opposed to what you said about the moon. Like that's what makes that a little bit more, I don't know, sexy to go look at. But the moon tunnels you were saying, like those caverns. that they have. You said that was from, there was some sort of volcanic event. Yeah. When the moon first formed, it was just a big ball of lava. It's slowly cooled down. There was still some active volcanism for a while. But yeah, the, you know, there's, when you look at the moon, you see there's these light patches and dark patches, maybe a picture.

Just, yeah, photo of the moon. Yeah. So all those dark patches are lava flows. They're called Maria. So those were ancient lava flows that happened, you know, like four billion years ago. And there was, they covered up these cratered regions. There was probably when the moon first formed, like tons and tons of rocks just smashing into it, like every day. And that's why there's so many craters on the moon. The Earth, of course, would have the same thing, but it's all weathered away by now. But the moon doesn't have that weathering process, so that's why it's covered in craters.

But the dart patches are where lava came up from the surface and smothered up over those craters filled it in. And so, yeah, that's a direct evidence that we have that the moon did once have lava flows. And then from sounding experiments and mapping from these satellites, we can see there's evidence for these lava tubes that are underneath the surface. So they're totally unexplored. What they really look like, we don't really know, but I think it would be super exciting to go there. I think what's really wild about the moon is that it's like a bit like simulation theory kind of stuff, but it is wild that we have the moon and Mars. It's almost like, if you're just like,

If you were playing a game in space race game or something, you would want to have an object that was close enough that you could do it with 1960s technology. But if the moon wasn't there, we probably would never have bothered developing as much rocketry as we had. The moon is only a three-day ride with 1960s tech, and you can land and you can do it in 1960s tech. That's kind of crazy. But now to go to the next step, to go to Mars, is much, much harder.

But still, it's a rocky plan. Imagine if it was another Jupiter or another Venus. We can't learn on Venus. Venus will crush you immediately, the moment we step onto the surface. Mars is like an ideal next stepping stone. If you would like to design a game to try and like nudge the player through a tutorial mode of like, you know, learn how to do this and then you can do the next thing and then you can go to the stars, you would put the moon here and you would put Mars there. And you wouldn't make it too easy. You'd make it challenging enough that maybe like having the moon be truly habitable would just be too easy.

So you wouldn't really like push yourself hard enough. So yeah, I do kind of think is wild because the moon is weird. It's we have the biggest moon in a relative size sense. I have any planet in the solar system. It's a, you know, it's it's a quarter of the size of the earth. Could we like send? I mean, you talk about these unexplored basically like tunnels in a way. Is there a way for us to put a satellite up there that gets into the atmosphere of the moon?

then you know you run some little drones down into those areas and take video yeah or am i thinking that far too simply yeah i think um maybe you can google like moon lava tube um robot and people have um thought about putting like these snake snake robots that can so i'm saying like let's do it let's go fund this like crowdfunded or something yeah i'm in maybe you can't find but yeah i've seen i've seen these cool visualizations of different robots that we could put down. It is a tricky. Obviously, you can't put a rover down there because it's a pretty steep descent to get into them.

Oh, China's doing it. Oh, now we got it. Yeah. Different countries obviously have different ideas about exactly how to explore these caves. But someone's going to do it. And, yeah, maybe they used to be the XPRIZE, was it Google X Prize? Which was like, you know, we'll give you, what was it? it like $10 million or something for the first person to land on the moon and take a photo.

And someone won that prize. Someone landed on the moon, took a photo and beamed it back to the earth. And they won this X prize of maybe it was a hundred million dollars. It was a ton of money. Oh, wow. But yeah, maybe we could like get, I don't know, Elon or someone else to say he's got a ton of money lying around to say, look, I will give the first person to send photos from the inside of one of these labitubes a billion dollars. And that will spur like a huge bunch of these teams to try and get the investments to develop it. What is the cooperation like these days among countries, be it NASA and some of the other space programs of other countries because we're dealing with something that doesn't have a border.

I'm just using the moon as an example right now. I'll forget Mars even. But like it's uncharted territory. Someone doesn't have to get permission from someone else to go there because no one has like legislative authority over it. So how do we even organize and what is the organization, I should say, of like trying to figure out some of these space missions. these days between countries. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I mean, there is a lot of collaboration, but I'm not sure it's going in the right direction at the moment.

So you look at James Webb and it was launched by the Europeans, for instance. So the Americans built it, the Europeans launched it. You look at, and then a lot of that, some of, you know, a lot of telescopes, there is some parts of it are built in Europe or Japan and they're shipped over and we put it all together. We assemble it, maybe in the US and launch it. And there's lots of, you know, Japanese missions. which share data with us.

There's, again, lots of European collaboration. I think China and Russia, maybe there's less, certainly way less scientific collaboration because there's more obviously politically of a tense situation there with those nations. But historically, that wasn't always true. I mean, the International Space Station has had plenty of cosmonauts on board as well as astronauts, and they don't fight. They get them well. That's good.

Everyone gets on. No cops up there. There's no one punching each other as far as we know. the international space station between these nations so uh but i mean astronauts are picked to be like that's part of their training is to be like you're gonna you're not gonna pick someone who's an asshole who's gonna fly over be a jerk in the space station right you want someone who's pretty easy to get along with to be up there um i mean that's a not picking matt damon and interstellar basically yeah right he's a bit of a jerk yeah yeah you know what someone with like a really

annoying habit to be like up there i really like making this sound You don't want that guy with you for the whole time. So much can go wrong. What was the thing, maybe this is like one of those things pop in my head. I can't remember if I read it or if it was a joke, but like China was trying to develop something on the dark side of the moon. Am I totally making that up? No, there's a bunch of, well, yeah, I think China's interested.

So China has this giant radio telescope called Fast. We used to have one called Arecibo. Okay. But it got destroyed during one of the recent storms. So it's just in pieces now, unfortunately. It's in Puerto Rico and the NSF National Science Foundation supported it, but they didn't have enough money to basically fund it and rebuild it. So we lost it, it used to be the biggest in the world,

and then China overtook us and built their own one. But radio telescopes are basically just giant dishes. They can be huge, like hundreds of, I think the fastest is like 500 meters or something across, absolutely gigantic. And the reason why you can build them so big is because they don't have to be very smooth. So unlike James Webb or an optical mirror, it's a piece of glass that's incredibly smooth. It has to be smoothed down to like nanometer scale. So it requires lots and lots of polishing, costs of bomb to make those things.

And any slight piece of dust or anything is going to ruin it. But a radio telescope, it can basically be made out of concrete and that's smooth enough to like you can just pour concrete out. And it turns out some of the craters on the moon, are almost the right shape, right? So they kind of look the right shape as a big dish. And so you probably, with a little bit of modification to those things, could use them as natural radio telescopes. And if you put it on the far side of the moon,

it would be really advantageous because, you know, one of the problems that alien hunters have, one of the ways we try to look for aliens is to listen to their radio signals. But we are just talking too much ourselves, right? There's all these like 4G, 5G towers going up everywhere. There's, you know, people have got microwaves that they open and send out signals. There's radio channels all over the place, TV channels. So there's just way too much noise to like really clearly hear.

So that's one of the big challenges of doing this work. But on the far side of the moon, there's nothing. It's just dead quiet. So it would be like the perfect place to like really listen in and dial in to radio signals from alien civilizations. And also for astrophysics as well. Can we pull that up, Joe, China, dark side of moon, just to see what, because it just gets so interesting, like you were saying politically when you're talking about, like, superpowers trying to do this.

And now America's like, well, we want the dark side of the moon, too. Well, there is no dark side of the moon, but it's far side. Far side. I'm so used to Pink Floyd. Yeah, that's a common misconception. So China has successfully completed the Chang Six mission, which returned the first ever samples from the far side of the moon to Earth in June 2024. The mission involved a robotic lander and rover that collected about two kilograms of rocks and soil from the South Pole-Aitken Basin and delivered them to Inner Mongolia, China.

The samples are now being analyzed by scientists to learn more about the moon's history and the differences between its near and far sides. Yeah, they grab some rocks off the far side and brought them over. Yeah, the reason the Apollo astronauts didn't go to the far side is because the same reason I just mentioned, you'd lose radio contact with the Earth. So if something went wrong and they're out there, it's just those two guys by themselves, they're screwed. So all the astronaut missions we ever launched have always been on the near side so it's easy to be in constant communication with them. And you said the moon's approximately 1% of the mass of the Earth? It's about 1% the mass, but about almost 25% the size.

Right. So you're talking about a big space right there. Yeah, it's huge. The landmass is, I think about the size of Africa, roughly, it's sort of the landmass you've got to work with. So, you know, if you're a real estate developer, there's a lot of stuff to... They got one of those in the White House right now. Yeah. We'll see if he gets them any ideas.

All right, Joe, let's get back to our list. We're like halfway through it. I like how this is going, just weaving in and out of this thing, coming back to 3i. Go about side quests. That's it. I love side quests. I'm from Jersey. It's what we do.

All right, number six, talking about 3i Atlas. This is a part of the 10. ideas Avi Loeb have that makes this different. He says, its gas plume contains only 4% water by mass, a primary constituent of familiar comets. Yeah, so it's producing water, but maybe not as much water as you'd expect for a comet. But the fact that it produces water at all

is exactly what comets do. So, I mean, this is, I mean, what Avi's been sort of suggesting in a big more zoom-out perspective from all of these points is that this is like, you know, maybe a Trojan horse. Right. So maybe this is, it's like dressed up to look like a comet, but it's actually an alien vehicle that's trying to trick us. And I think you can't really have it both ways, right? Either it's an alien spaceship that's just clearly detectable or it's or it's a, it's pretending to be a comet. But this isn't either of those things, right? Because if it's dressing up to look like a comet, it's not doing a very good job. Because otherwise it wouldn't have any anomalies. Everything about it would look like a comet.

So the fact any of these things are anomalies means it doesn't really match up with the Trojan horse hypothesis at all. Because surely aliens, if they're sending spaceships here, would be smart enough to not have 10 things, which all give it away as being obviously alien. So, yeah, what's the gain there? So I just don't understand, like, even the premise of, like, picking up these individual things. But I think this particular point, it's just like, yeah, it's producing water, maybe not quite as much. which is a typical comet, but that's exactly what comets do. They produce water. That's the other problem, though, if it were like invading or something like that, that's

not, you would think, and everything's a hypothetical because it's really impossible to think the way another advanced, perhaps far more advanced civilization would think and how they even think. But you would think that it wouldn't be dressed up in any way. We wouldn't even know it's there. You would have to, I don't assume is a strong word, But when my mind starts to think about this stuff and you're talking about potentially a civilization that has figured out how to basically like bend time, move at the speed of light, do all these crazy things.

If they figured that out, they've probably figured out like invisibility or other things like that to the point that when people talk about like seeing UFOs or something like that in our atmosphere, I mean, I don't know, maybe. It's like I've always thought that like they're simulating that.

Like, let's show them one. Just to see all that idiot will react. in the desert and tell everyone about it. So if you were making a one kilometer long or whatever it is, like, you know, Trojan horse to come here, it wouldn't be the kind of thing that I would want, like, I don't know, trying to think like them

Avi Loeb to see and go on Joe Rogan and talk about like, hey, they're coming. It's right there. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's like, you know, the drag queen that can't put makeup on properly. Like, it's like, surely, surely they can figure out a little of you. Like, why is this such a challenge?

Like, yeah, that's what I didn't get at all about this. So, yeah, I'm happy to entertain the idea that could be alien spaceships in our soul system. I think it's a really interesting idea. I think we should be looking for them. Yes. Whenever Abby said that, I'm like, yeah, I'm with you, brother. Like, let's, we should have programs to look for that stuff. That's cool.

But this object is, everything about it is like not, is not that convincing. But, you know, Avi keeps saying, oh, I'm just saying it's a possibility. Like, you know, I'm just saying we should consider this as a possibility. But, I mean, that's kind of a slippery slate because then you could just say, well, what about this? I'm just saying this could be alien, you know. We should everything. Press it. You can say about anything.

Should you do it? Yeah, it is. There you go. Right. It's supposed to be alien. So if you just say, well, I'm just saying it could be alien, like, where do you stop? I mean, everything about this looks pretty comet-like. There's plenty of other stuff that you could chuck around.

the word alien on so um certainly by scientific standards i guess it's a cool and attractive idea and it's jazzy and people are drawn to it but it this is far off the scientific standards of evidence that we would want to to have for a genuine alien detection you have to think about what the effect is of popularization and how you do it right because hey aliens are very interesting i'm fascinated by it i look at the size of the known universe and i'm like it seems impossible that there's not some sort of intelligent civilization out there wherever that is but then when you're getting to like the evidence of oh have they been here are they here or what are they that's where it gets weird because people you know i don't like to shoot everything down but people make a lot of claims

and then you have the government getting involved which you know let's call it what it is they got a job to do that invites in disinformation on purpose for sure and people start to run with these narratives that because there's then that and you're making fucking 40 million leaps when you do that so when you start talking about things in space that seem to have i mean we're through like six or seven of these seem to have some rather viable scientific explanations to point to something different i think you run the risk of actually setting the seriousness of that conversation back if you just start labeling something alien it's a lot of fun but you know i i've enjoyed over the past year talking more with physicists and stuff not the obelope is not a physicist to be clear like he is but i'm saying like i've

enjoyed talking with, you know, you science guys, if you will, because you look at things based on what is the scientific evidence of what I can see. Rather than like, oh, and, you know, in 1964, we saw one in Socorro. It's more like, here's how it could happen or here's what it is or here's what we're looking at. And that, I think the conversation needs to be more there and then not fall into kind of the trap of like just immediately running to, I see it. So I want to believe it. Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want us to leave three Atlas, because it's going to leave the solar system. It is. Yeah, it's on its way out. And we're going to get many more of these things, right? This is just the third. And we've just built a new telescope called Verirut. It's

going to just had a ton of these things. So we're going to get like hundreds of these objects in the next like probably decade or so. So this is going to become like normal of having like tons of these objects. And I think people will just stop, you know, getting so worked up after it's like number 72 of these things, right? You just, not going to be quite as engaged. And I hope we don't leave it thinking that, oh, the only interest scientists having these objects is alien or not alien. Because this object is a relic from another star system. We would love one day, if we could, to send astronauts to a nearby star, land on the ground, just like the Chinese did in the back side of the moon, pick up a rock

and bring it home and be like, let's look at this rock. This rock is from a freaking another solar system. Let's look at it. Let's dissect. Let's see what's going on. all that their geology is different their chemistry is different everything's crazy there these objects are that if we could intercept them we could get a ship one of our own rockets could launch and catch up with these objects we could land on it maybe not a human land on it yeah we could land on these things we could scoop up a rock and just like we did for the moon and we could bring back to the earth and we could look at them you could wait was this the one that was going 60 kilometers a second and we could land on that we could catch it with it yeah with what uh yeah the best

The best way, I mean, Avi was actually suggesting the Juno spacecraft could maybe do it. Juno doesn't have enough fuel, but if it had a bit more fuel, it wouldn't have been able to catch up with it. Juno is around Jupiter. But actually some of the Mars, if you were launching from Mars, it would be actually pretty easy to catch up with it. If Elon Musk was a few years ahead and we had stuff on Mars already, we could have easily caught up with it. Yeah, this one's pretty fast, but Omo and Borisov could have easily landed on as well if we'd had stuff in space ready to go. So the question is like, you need to have a rocket just hanging out in the solar system, just waiting. to turn on its afterburner, basically, and then like,

okay, there it is, let's go, let's go get it. But we could do it, and then that would be, this is what's so cool about these objects, this would be material that we would have in the laboratory from another star system. There could be simple life buried inside this thing. I'm not, I mean, let's forget, like, the advanced alien thing, there could be microbes buried inside the core of this little crust, right?

So that would be mind-boggling. We'd have potentially, there could be DNA traces on this thing. So that's what gets me excited. Wait, when you say DNA traces, meaning like a trace from an actual advance civilization? Well, not necessarily events. Okay. Forget the event, just something living. Just something living.

Yeah. I mean, we know that happens like the, if you go to Antarctica, I'm talking about Antarctica earlier, that's the best place to find rocks from Mars. So Mars gets hit with meteors and it knocks rocks off Mars and those rocks fly up into space and some of them hit the earth. And they hit all over the earth, but Antarctica, they're really easy to see because it's all white. So if there's a black rock there, it's like super obvious. So people skidoo around and they find these black rocks, they bring them back and we can reconstruct which, you know, where they came from. And a good fraction of them do come from Mars. And we, you know, can study them.

And that's how we've learned so much about what Mars is like without even visiting it. It's just by aliens, they come to us. We don't have to go to them. And these objects are like that. We don't have, this kind of solves in so many ways the interstellar, travel problem, we don't have to go to these other planets. It'd be great if we could, but this is like a shortcut. The universe is giving us a cheat code to see what these other planets are like without actually having to go there. So that to me is like by far like the coolest thing about these

objects. Whether it's an alien spaceship or not is obviously a super sensational hypothesis. But even if that's not true, we shouldn't think, oh, who gives a shit about these objects? Of course. They're still like amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, you put the term on it like alien. And then when it's not, people are like, oh, it goes from 100 to zero. But this is an unbelievable, like you said, potential relic from somewhere else. But so you said they're simulating that it will leave the solar system. Do we have a length of time that that'll take for that to happen? So it's behind the sun right now. It's just coming. It's just poking back out. And then it will make its closest approach to the Earth in mid-December. Okay. But it's really far out from the Earth. It's not going to hit us. No way.

It's really, really far out. And then it will, I think it passes next to Jupiter in sort of the spring. And then after that, you know, it just keeps on going out to the solar system. Yeah. So we can observe it for about the next year or so. We can keep observing it. Which means as it does that, that'll also kind of take away the whole alien invasion argument because they missed.

Yeah, it would just fly off. And, yeah, I mean, Avies, I think, said maybe it will release a bunch of mini probes on Christmas day because that's close to the closest approach to the. earth and then there's mini probes but i'm like i'd give that very low probability yeah i mean it'll be wild if it was true but i could say that about anything i mean i could say uh you know maybe the nearest star will suddenly shoot a laser at us tomorrow on christmas day like yeah sure i can say that but i don't have any reason to believe that's going to happen yeah no i i agree it's also though when you're talking about something this size like we know the story the dinosaurs and it hit the earth and

everything and it wasn't like a huge area it was like a few kilometers or something like that but it was enough to on impact destroy like climates and fuck up the whole thing you know if something like this whether it was three eye atlas or some other mass rock comet was coming towards the earth these days do we have the technology to be able to destroy something like that before it gets here um nukes really it's probably our best bet so yeah you wouldn't actually probably blow up the asteroid, or the comet, you would actually probably detonate your nuke off to the side of it. So if you detonate, if you blow up the actual thing like they do in Armagedda and you just, of course, you get a bunch of like crap that then is still on the same trajectory. What you

really want to do is fly your nuke maybe a couple of kilometers off to the side, detonate it, and then that blast wave nudges it off into a different path. So it remains largely intact, but it just gets deflected into a different position. So that would be your last ditch thing. So if you didn't have much time, that would be what you would do. If you had more time, if you had, you know, maybe years to work with, maybe you could, you know, some comets we can trace them and we can see, oh, it's going to come by in 50 years and have a close approach to us. You can't do that for interstellar asteroids, but for comets in our own backyard,

you can do that. So for those, it's even easier. All you need to do is, you know, you could actually just paint one side of a rock, dark or silver, and that'll do it. So if you have an asteroid and you paint one side of it white, you just photo, you split the paint bonnet. one side white the sun's radiation nudges the white side more than the dark side and so it would actually nudge it enough that you could deflect it from the earth just with paint no kidding yeah

just from the deflection of the earth of the sun's radiation we got that technology yeah we got that technology yeah so that would be even easier um the danger the biggest threat of these interstellar asteroids is that they are moving very fast and um we were kind of lucky with three atlas in a sense it is pretty big and it's easy to find but it doesn't have to be that big if it was a hundred meters across that's still a city killer it's still you know potentially enough to knock out New York City if it hit us and that that would be harder for us to see and in fact it's moving so fast doesn't give you a lot of time so you might only detect it like two weeks prior to impact and then you're kind of in trouble like then it's hard to like get shit together in time to to do

something well that's where you're throwing all the money at the problem yeah you know that's we're coming together and doing something yeah yeah maybe that's the way we unify yeah yeah right comets coming here we go all right so we're at number seven on this list now it shows extreme it being three eye atlas shows extreme negative polarization unprecedented for all known comments including two i boris off with a likelihood below one percent yeah i think this is it's also weird um it is it's another oddity but again it's it's hard to compare to like compare yeah compared to two other objects sure yeah you're not comparing to hundreds or something Yeah, so I would just sort of hold my breath on that one and wait.

Let's revisit that in 10 years and I bet it'll be totally normal. Okay. I guess amongst the hundreds we find. All right. Number eight, it arrived from a direction coincident with the radio, quote, wow signal, unquote, to within nine degrees with a likelihood of 0.6%. I don't know what that means. Okay.

So there was a radio signal was set in the 1970s called the wow signal that a lot of people think is the most convincing evidence of an alien transmission we've ever received. It was detected by the big ear telescope in Ohio state. And it's still anomalous. There's no, yeah, people, it was just like literally when we had like, you know, ticker tape printouts and you just see this like, beep, this like one part of the sky suddenly get loud in the radio. I've actually written papers about that signal before, trying to figure out exactly what it is.

It's a mystery. It remains a mystery. It's never repeated. and that's kind of curious. I've been advocating that we should observe it more intensely because a lot of people, a lot of strong has said, hey, the fact hasn't repeated means it's not aliens, but we haven't actually looked at that carefully.

So I've been advocating that we need to have more serious effort to survey that guy. And so this, if you look at whereabouts in the sky that comes from, a three atlas is coming nine degrees off. But nine degrees is a lot. I mean, it's actually not in space close at all. I mean, if you stretch that out, these kind of distances,

you're talking like tens of thousands of light years separated so this is this just isn't it's too far to be like a meaningful if it was like exactly where it was within like 0.1 degrees or something then i'd be like okay i always got a point but nine degrees is just is yeah we're thinking about it in near-term effects if i do this right here right but if i do 45 by by huge cosmic distances and you're talking about things which are so far apart from each not even close yeah okay all right number nine near Parahelian, it brightened faster than any known comet and was bluer than the sun. Maybe we can pull up an image of this again, Dief, so people can observe that. Yeah.

It's a, yeah, I think to this one, it's just, it is, it brightened really fast compared to any known comet. True. But it is moving faster than any known comet. Right, I was going to say, this is not the speed? Yeah, it's maybe not a surprise it's doing that. Okay. And that's that wired image right there, is that? that looks like an artist's impression yeah yeah i don't think i don't think this is necessarily

a single image it's just a collection of observations put together they piece that yeah okay let's go to number 10 wherever that is all right so three eye outlets exhibits non-gravitational acceleration which requires massive evaporation of at least 13 percent of its mass but preliminary post-perahelion images do not show the evidence for it so far. Yeah, I mean, again, this is exactly what comets do. They lose a ton of mass when they get close to the sun. It's a ball of ice and snow as it gets close to a freaking star is going to boil off a lot of that snow and ice.

So the fact it's losing a load of mass is exactly what a comet should do. So, yeah, I don't really get this one as an anomaly. It's just it's exactly what it should do. I think all of these anomalies, by the way, are like changing. So when the when the first, Abby was first writing about this, I think there was only like four or five anomalies and it's kind of like the list has grown. And that's a little bit precarious as well because you're kind of like, oh, it didn't something else. I'm going to add this on and add this on. But all the stuff that it does that's normal you don't add on. So,

you know, it's again, this kind of like peahacking mentality of just like selectively choosing things to kind of engineer the narrative to be to be as strange as you want it to be. So I think that's a little bit precarious. And some of the things, I mean, when it was, some of the initial anomalies that Abby was writing about was the fact that it doesn't have a coma. So when it was first detected, we couldn't see any coma or tail off it at all. But that was when it was really far out and, you know, really far out in the solar system. And then it started to develop a coma. And so as soon as it had a coma and a tail, that seemed, a lot of us, a lot of astronomers were like, oh, that's going to, Abby's going to give up on this now because it's doing the

thing that a comet does, which is have a coma and a tail. He's going to forget about that. But Then instead he said, and he wrote this on his blog, that actually I think this is a spaceship that's producing a shield. It's like flying off particles to try and protect it from space dust. And it just happens to like look very similar to what a comet would do. So again, it's kind of like you're changing the stories you go along. Like just if it's a ship and it's not producing anything, then just stick with that hypothesis and that hypothesis is now out.

Like once you've got observations which undermine your hypothesis, it's very, rejected. But you can't keep editing the hypothesis on the fly to fit the data in real time, because then it's not, that's not science. That's just, that's just story weaving, right? So this is the big, aliens is like such a flexible hypothesis. Aliens can explain anything. So literally anything that happens in the universe, in this room, the reason why your mom doesn't call you tomorrow, or the reason why you dropped your coffee down the stairs. You could always just say, Oh, aliens did that. And I can't prove you wrong, but it doesn't make it a good hypothesis, just because it can, it's too

malleable and too flexible. I think you really need to see something pretty extraordinary. So, yeah, like I said, if it stopped, if it shined a laser beam at us or something, I sent a radio emission at us, like, you know, hey, we're here. Like, here's a television signal, beamed your way or something. I'd be down with it. But this, everything on this list is, like, very much what comets do. Maybe it's a slightly unusual thing, like extreme example of what a comet would do, but it's definitely very comet like everything it's doing.

We know approximately how old it is. We know where it's coming from. We know the path that's been taking and therefore the projected path that's going to take past that. And it hasn't, like you gave an example early on the conversation like, well, if it suddenly went up or down or all around, okay, you might think like something's maneuvering that. But it hasn't, there's no evidence to show it's done any of that. Right. And I can't disprove a negative. No one can. So I can't prove to anyone here who's listening who really believes this is an alien spaceship. I can't prove to it's not an alien spaceship. Because you can't. You can never prove that something that something is not alien. I can't prove that anything in this room is not made by an alien. Right. It's impossible to do that. So if you want to have that as a personal hypothesis, you can. But unless it does something that nature just absolutely cannot do and it breaks our understanding of nature, then that's the only time that I think that the scientific community. Right. are going to get behind it. And look, I think what we all want,

do you really want to have like a personal hypothesis that is just, I think this thing is alien? Or I think we all want to convince our peers. We want to convince our friends that what we saw was real, you know, that this was a real alien ship that you encountered. And the only way to get buy-in is to provide really compelling evidence that even the, you want the evidence to be so good, that even the skeptics are like, I can't fault you, man.

Like, you're right. Like, there's no, you know, it's like Michael Jordan was so good that even the people that hated Michael Dole, I'm like, damn, he's the best. Like, there's no way around that. And that's what we want in science. We want it to be like so clear and crisp that even the skeptics have to shut up.

And that's how all of science works. It's not particular to aliens. If you're going to claim you've got like a new theory of gravity or you think you've discovered a new exoplanet, it has to be that everyone who comes at that data is going to arrive at the same conclusion no matter what different assumptions that's making. So this is, and I think aliens is like,

has got an even bigger responsibility to sort of, you know, take this more carefully because we're so invested in it. 100%. And it's like you can't get too excited about it. And what it seems like from what you're telling me today is that, you know, in for this particular argument, a lot of the scientific community seems to be on the other side of Bobby Loeb and saying like, this is probably what we're looking at. It's probably not an alien spaceship because the evidence like this is, a lot of this is too chancery. I'm making up a word there, but it's not, it's not like intense, like, down to 0.40 million zeros one evidence or anything like that. Everything's on the, is either

completely exactly what a comet should do, like have a tail on a comet and produce those gases, or it's comet like, but like an extreme comet. But yeah, if it was a Trojan horse, like, why would it, why wouldn't, why wouldn't they do a better job if that's true? So I just, I think the alien hypothesis is, is in deep trouble with this object. But, I do admire Avi for pushing, because this is, I mean, it's easy to say this and get ridiculed, right? And I think Abby has been ridiculed for that. And I don't ridicule Avi for pushing the alien hypothesis because I do think we need, it's easy to get stuck in groupthink and get too conservative and just like ridicule anyone

who tries to do something different and push the envelope. So even though I disagree with Avi that I don't think this is alien, I'm not going to like throw shit on him and say he's an idiot for saying this i think it's um he's he's you know pursuing his scientific ideas and i disagree with it in a respectful way um but i'm not gonna like personally attack him as saying like he's he's a do-first for like coming up with this idea that's how it should be this is what science is supposed to be we've lost sight of this in the modern era and it's not just science it's fucking every part of culture it's like you throw mud on each other to get more clicks and therefore every everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot and that doesn't

get anyone anywhere. I've always said, you know, the greatest lie we ever perpetuated on humanity was that science and religion were competing. They're both seeking the answer to the same thing. And then that's just been downstream to everything else, be it politics, culture, whatever it may be. We are always thinking that, you know, the other idea can't exist for us to exist or whatever, and that's not how it is. You're constantly trying to find things that one day are going to disprove every single thing that, like a brilliant guy like Albert, I came up with. That's the whole point, you know?

Yeah, I agree. It's kind of something to business, like if you're an entrepreneur and you start a company, your first company might fail and the second might fail, but maybe if you keep getting chances, you'll eventually figure out how it works and break through. And America's great because, you know, it has really good, like, loan forgiveness and, like, it lets people keep trying, whereas if you start business in France and it fails, like, you're not allowed to get a loan for like 50 years. They don't want you to ever try again.

Yeah. And I do kind of worry, maybe Abby is wrong about this. maybe avie's wrong about this but hey maybe he'll be right about another signal maybe not a comet but something else in the future and i'm worried that a lot of scientists will just not pay attention to him because they're like you've burnt your reputation dude with this one i'm not i'm not going to listen to anything you say ever again and that's that's also very close-minded like we have do it's like icarus right you're gonna you have to fly close to the sun to take to really advance and maybe in this case in my opinion i think the wings are melting off and he's falling but we should

keep giving the dude a chance to like with evidence to push the envelope yeah yeah yeah if you bring evidence it should be evaluated yeah and if the evidence is good then you take it far to look if it's things that maybe can be refuted in good scientific mathematical ways then you go okay this isn't the one pal yeah you know it shouldn't be that hard but when did you like did you grow up wanted to be an astrophysicist were you just fascinated with space as a little kid uh i was always fascinating space yeah i remember i remember loving planets and the universe when i was a kid i loved sci-fi loved star trek grew up next generation was my bag yeah and star wars all that kind of stuff um and then yeah i thought i was going to be a physicist when i was about sort of 12 13 i was getting

really interested in physics and i had a great high school teacher mr fox and he gave me a load of physics books on the site you should check this out and i was reading i was like oh wow this is crazy. Like there's neutrinos passing through my brain right now. It's like all there's particles everywhere. It kind of was like an enlightenment. Like when you realize the world is so much more complicated than you think. So I studied physics at college. And then when I was at college, I started to come back to space because I got the impression for right or maybe it's pretty wrong. I think it is partially wrong. But to make progress in physics was getting really hard that you needed like billions and billions of

dollars to have these huge teams with thousands of people and you were just going to be one very small cog in that machine whereas in astronomy there's a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and there's only eight billion people on earth so each of us can have a hundred stars to ourselves more than that right just you can have just a hundred stars that you yourself could study your whole life and everyone else can have their own hundred stars we could all move there and have this is my hundred star system that I live on and each of those would have about ten planets and you know you could have a thousand planets to yourself right so that's that's just how ridiculous the scale of the universe is and i realized we are never going to like get bored of this

we're never going to run out of stuff to discover because we only know of a percent of a percent of a percent of what's out there and in physics it kind of i'm sure there's a vast amount we don't know about as well but it felt to me like all the rapid progress and discovery was happening in in the universe yeah so you start to take that journey through school itself and then you get into that and eventually like and you've mentioned this term several times today i think you started to explain it once but you developed a specialty in identifying exoplanets and observing them yeah so for people out there that just want to understand what that is as a recap what is an exoplanet yeah it's just a planet that orbits another star that's what it means so exo means outside so extra solar is the full name but we just

you're shortened into exoplanets. So we know of about 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets, I believe at the time of writing, which is obviously a lot. We've only discovered those in the last 20 years. 5,000 to 6,000. About 6,000 confirmed planets now, yeah. And the discovery started about 20, 25 years ago, and there's been a rapid explosion in discovery over that time. And, yeah, I was in college when the first ones were being discovered. And to me, a young person this is like this is like the gold rush in san francisco right everyone you know as a young person you're like this is where the shit's happening i want to get over there and pick up

some gold for myself and i've discovered myself like probably a dozen planets or something and like i don't even count them but yeah i've just found very few parts myself in my career we just kind of wild to think about you know how do you find one so the way there's a few different ways the way i normally use is called the transit method which is to look for eclipses basically so these These planets are so far away, you know, thousands of light years away sometimes, that you can't possibly take a photo of them. They're just, at that distance, the star on the planet are just a blob of life. You can't possibly see them.

But if the orbital inclination is correct, it will sometimes eclipse in front of the star. The same reason why we had like the, you know, when the moon eclipsed the sun, because that solar eclipse, maybe you saw those two great American eclipses we had fairly recently in the US, which is awesome to see. Stare right at it. Yeah, yeah. Well, you want the glasses, but yeah, be careful with that. So, yeah, I really enjoyed watching those.

And it's the same thing. You can also see transistors Venus. Venus sometimes goes in front of the sun. And you can catch that. You probably need a telescope with good pair of and oculus to catch those, but those are fun to watch. And so in the same sense, some of these exoplanes will serendipitously pass in front of their star. And as they do, the star gets dimmer, right? Because some of the lights being blocked out.

So that's what we look for. We just look for these, like, stars that are winking at us, basically. Just getting like a little bit dimmer and then they get back to normal. And we notice that every 10 days, that happens. And so if it happens every 10 days, that means the planet is on an orbital period of 10 days around its start. So that's its year. And you can identify that that's a planet versus, you know, some sort of like loose piece in space or something like that strictly because of the size. Yeah, well, you know it's an orbiting object if it repeats.

The size of it basically tells, yes, a lot of the objects we detect are typically like, you know, between the size of Neptune and Jupiter. So that's not debris, obviously, if it's the size of Neptune, that's a pretty big object. Yeah, if you make the planet twice as big, it blocks out four times the amount of light. So that means big planets are really easy to find, but small plants are really hard to find. And the smallest plants we can currently detect are about the size of the moon at best, but typically the Earth. So we can find Earth-sized planets. There's a really beautiful star system called Trappis 1. Trappis 1?

Yeah, that I recommend everyone, Google at some point. it has it's the most famous exoplanet system at this point has seven planets they're all earth size three of them in the habitual zone of the star in the hat meaning like you could actually land on them and you're not frying to death or freezing it does well the habitat here just means that um the temperature is similar to the earth basically wow yeah so they have the right distance for life this is it trappist one yeah and this is most astronomers favorite exoplanet system uh the seven it's a really dim star. The star is about eight times less massive than the sun. And so it's a really diminutive star. It's very red because it's so cool. And so the planet's actually packed in really close in.

I think all seven planets are closer in than Mercury is around the sun, all seven of them. So, you know, like they're kind of the same sort of distance that the moon is from us. So if there's an alien civilization here, they could like hot from planet to planet, like no problem. Be super easy. If I even like if there was life on one, one of these planets it would almost certainly just spread out between the planets by rocks just being knocked off from between them how far away is this approximately about 30 light years which is actually pretty close that's actually really close by astronomy standards yeah so this is a very nearby favorite object james web is uh is spending a lot of time looking at this thing and planet

e right in the middle there that is we think the most earthlight planet of the bunch in terms of it's like the perfect distance really and so there's a huge amount of attention to try and figure out, does that have an atmosphere? And does that atmosphere maybe have oxygen? Does it have, you know, there's molecules that we have in our planet? But we can't tell that yet with the tools we have. Like, it's still too far. So far, what we can tell is that planet B and C do not have atmospheres.

That's something that James Webb has told us. So in the last year, we've discovered that. The inner two planets are so close to the star that the atmosphere must have been removed somehow. It's probably like been stripped off from the stellar activity. Wow. so almost like burned away yeah so the question is uh what's d like and d there's some ambiguity we need a bit more data and e we're collecting that data right now so have we even been able to tell like oh there there's water there or still no no we don't even know if there's an atmosphere there

at this point yeah now now how do you collect that data then like you say we're collecting that data now yeah so what are they doing it's mostly it's a lot of transit work actually so that same technique of how we detect the planet. Imagine you do that same observation. You see the dip in light of starlight. Now, you repeat that observation. Let's say we're imagining the Earth transit the sun, and we do it in the blue wavelengths of light, and we do it in the red wavelengths of light. Now, what color is the sky? Wanted me, it's blue. Yeah, it's blue sky. And that's because our atmosphere, I was waiting for a trick question there. Like, to me, that's just blue.

you go a plus we're going we get uh we have a blue sky because um the molecule is in our atmosphere scatter blue light um so if we didn't have an atmosphere um obviously that wouldn't happen the sky just look black you wouldn't have any of that so if an alien was watching the earth trans at the sun and they did it in the blue wavelength the you can kind of think of the atmosphere as being like a peak like it would block out all the blue light so all the blue light wouldn't be able to travel through the atmosphere it gets stopped by our atmosphere And that then bounces around, that's what makes it look blue. So, therefore, the planet is effectively a bit bigger because it's the rock plus the atmosphere. So that's its size. Whereas in the red wavelengths of light, when you can see a sunset, the red light just goes straight through, no problem. So red just travels straight through the atmosphere

and it will come out the other end, no problem. So the red light, the atmosphere is not there, essentially. It's just the rock by itself. So you would see a bigger planet in blue wavelengths and a smaller planet in red wavelengths. And you can break that down into more fine colors. You know, you could look at individual wavelengths of light. And carbon dioxide, for example,

absorbs at exactly 4.6 microns, I think it is. And it makes the plant look huge. So you're looking at all these wavelengths, like 4.0, 4.1, 4.2. It's just the same size, same size, same size. And then you go to 4.6 and suddenly the plant looks bigger. And you're like, holy shit, like it's got carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because that's the thing that absorbs that wavelength. So that's how we can tell.

Like, we see the plants get bigger, basically, at the wavelengths of light where certain molecules absorb. Whoa. Yeah, it's pretty clever. And it all comes back. We can smell. We can smell the atmosphere. We can smell it. That's what we're doing, right?

Wait, that? Now you're losing me. Not literally, but we are kind of figuring out the chemical composition. It's like a sniffoscope. You're seeing the light breakdown. You can figure out the chemicals. It is essentially. you know, it's using the sense of smell.

Maybe it's not a good analogy, but that's the way I think about it. Yeah, you got to watch it because I'll start believing you when you start telling me, like, yeah, we can smell that show. I think in Futurama, like, he actually builds a sniffer scope in the show. He's doing things from his nostrils and got a giant scope. Well, they say art imitates life. Life imitates art, so you never know. So when you, you have this whole cool world's program over Columbia that you've been doing, you also have an amazing YouTube channel where you bring it to the public.

as well. But, like, what's your process? Like, do you walk in there and say, all right, let's find an exoplanet today? Or is it more, way more targeted than that? And, like, trying to look at the exoplanets you already know that then allows you to find other exoplanets some way through that. Yeah, I mean, different groups have different goals and aspirations. And it really comes down to the individual leaders of these teams. For me, I'm not that interested in just discovering more planets. I'm kind of done with that a little bit. Like, okay, we've got six thousand. We got six thousand on the damn things. Like, we don't need any more. like we've seen a bunch of planets at this point so for me i always want to do something new

like has to be something that's never been done before that's pushing the envelope so for me one of my big challenges has been to look for exo moons so moons around those planets that's no we have no confirmed xo means whatsoever zero zero i found two candidates uh using the hubbos space telescope and the kepler space telescope so we have two candidate objects um and we are trying to get more data from james web to try and find even more and confirm the ones that we have so what makes them candidates because we just have one dip so you know i talked about earlier like with these dips of light you want to see like repeated dips right and then you're like okay that's real but if there's a one-off like you never know like it could just be something weird

with it maybe there's someone uh shook the telescope that day or something went wrong something electronic defect or something so you just want to make sure that it's real um and xx means it would be pretty cool to find they could be habitable in their own right like pandora and avatars like that right you got all these blue aliens running around on the moon Um, so they could be like a huge fraction of alien, maybe like most aliens live on moons and they look at the earth and like, there's no point looking there because that's not a moon, right? They just think that plants are like boring places to look at. Um, our own moon actually is probably super influential for the earth being habitable. Some people say if you took away the

moon, we wouldn't be here. Um, it stabilizes our access. So if you took away the moon, the axial tilts about 23 degrees, but it would wander, it would drift. And so you'd be sometimes where the north pole was just pointing straight at the sun and so the south pole just totally the southern hemisphere just totally freeze out yeah wouldn't we also have like massive tide problems and stuff too without the moon well you'd have less tides without the moon you'd have fewer tides so but actually tides are thought to be good thing for life as well um one of the theories of the origins of life is like rock pools basically so if you go to a beach and you see a rock pool the chemicals get kind of concentrated in these little pools and when the

moon first formed it was way closer it would have been like about 30 40 times larger in the sky it was really close and it would have raised it would have made tides that was so big the entire continent would have been covered that's what i'm saying and like bruce almighty when it's like yeah it would have been like this and then it's like flooding the whole fucking earth the whole planet would have been flooded basically and that would happen every day and so that well it's maybe maybe not good for building your house but actually kind of good for getting things going for life because you can have loads of these rock pools covering an entire continent. Let's not try that.

I don't want to try that. But fortunately, we don't have the ability to try that anyway. So that could be useful. And then, you know, the third reason is we want to one day actually take a photo of another Earth. I talked about this telescope before the Habital World's Observatory that we'd love to build if we could with NASA. We're doing some of the early calculations now about what that would look like. Maybe you can Google pale blue dot for me. Pale blue dot.

Yeah. This is a famous photo of the Earth, actually. So you're talking directly with NASA about that. Well, not me. I mean, I'm one of many astronomers, yeah. It's not like, Hey, NASA, David Kippen here, start building it. Oh, okay, yes, sir. We'll get out right away. Keep doing podcasts. We'll get you there. So, yeah, if you look at like maybe the BBC image, it's kind of a cool one. So that is a photo of the Earth taken by, I think it was one of the Voyager spacecrafts that took this image.

And Carl Sagan asked the, asked the vehicle to turn around. and take a photo of the Earth. So this is taken from, I think, where Neptune is, from the distance of Neptune. Oh, wow. Far. Really far out. And obviously the Earth is just like basically a single pixel of just this smudgy blue thing.

And that's kind of the image we're probably going to get one day of an exoplanet as we build these telescopes. So we'll hopefully get an image like that of another X, you know, an Earth-like planet far from its star. But where's the moon in that image? You can't see it. It's just smushed in that. It's too small. Yeah.

And so one of the reasons we want to look for these moons is because, we need to know if that moon's in there or not because it makes a big difference to all this chemistry stuff I was talking about. So one of the possible signatures of life is oxygen that we talked about. But oxygen can also be made without life. Water makes oxygen actually quite easily because it is made of oxygen. So if you just split hydrogen up and oxygen, you get oxygen in the atmosphere so that can happen. It's called photolysis. So people say oxygen is not enough. You need both oxygen plus something else. And methane is usually the other. molecule that people talk about um now titan is a moon of satan that has tons of methane so if the earth

didn't have life it might still form oxygen through this photolysis a small amount and if it had a titan-like moon it would have methane and you'd see oh it's got oxygen it's got methane boom we're done it's got life but actually it could be a lifeless world so if you didn't know the moon was there the moon could trick you into thinking you detected life when there isn't really life so if we ever want to understand these images properly we have to know if there's a moon there or not so that's one of the other big reasons i think this is really cool to try and figure out the moon population in the universe what's like the effect though when plants have multiple moons like we have one here yeah but like if you ran i'm making something up if you were jubta has tons yeah but if you even ran into

an exoplanes somewhere else so not just within our solar system like you know and you see one with four what effect is that having on life or is that there even a way to could it be multiple possibilities depends what the moons are doing um what their orbits look like yeah so the the moons of jupiter since there's there's four big moons of jupiter so they're the galilean moons um and they do really wild stuff between them so ios like super volcanic and the reason is it's because it's like a rock stuck between a hard place it's got these three moons on the outside which are kind of tugging it out and it's got jupiter on the inside which is tugging it in so it's just being like pulled each way and it kind of discused

distorts and stretches the rock and that actually causes all this volcanism on the surface of the moon it also these moons don't stay in the same place they move so our own moon is moving away from us about one inch per year um so you know in principle you could lose moons eventually uh if billions of years yes i said the moon used to be a lot closer and that's the speed it's moving out but i feel like we could make that up somehow with tech like yank it back a little bit moves 10 inches you know it's a lot of mass it's big it's a lot of mass yeah we'll figure a lot of energy to do that It doesn't really affect us in any. Actually, the cool thing is we did, well, it's not cool,

but we'd eventually lose solar eclipses. As you know, the moon is like the basically the perfect size to block out the sun. As it gets further away, it will get smaller in a projected sense. And so eventually you won't get solar eclipses anymore. It's kind of weird. There's like one of those simulation things. It's kind of weird that we even have a moon

which happens to be exactly the same size as the sun in terms of the angle of sky. Almost like they lined it up perfect. I know. And not only the same size, but yeah, they're in the same plane to allow for those ecloses. This is why the Earth would be like the alien tourist hotspot, in my opinion, right? There's probably very few planets in the universe where you could see a perfect solar eclipse. We are probably, and they would surely know that. They would surely be able to look at the, you know, if they could, an alien had this image of us,

they'd be able to figure out the moon, be able to figure out the planet, get the geometry, be like, holy shit, these guys get solar eclipses. this is why this is why the Fermi paradox is actually to me such a strange thing like there's I'm sure an alien would look at the earth and be like damn that is

there's stuff going on there so you're not one of these people it's like ah they'd be like that's not interesting at all you think the opposite oh no no I think I mean from everything we know I mean about exoplanets is that the solsticism is not normal

even having a Jupiter-sized planet is weird only 10% of stars have a Jupiter-sized planet we've got two of the dumb things. But we also only know, and I say only, just looking at it in the full context of like the universe, we only know of 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets and X number, whatever it is of solar systems. And yet, you know, the universe, the known universe, you said that exists within what we can tell by light could just be one little marble ball from that men in black, you know, last scene where it's a marble inside of a marble inside of a marble and someone playing with

it and hypothetically, that could mean that there are quadrillion, trillion, billion, gazillion, you know, planets like this that exist out on the plains. So maybe if you're an advanced civilization that, I don't know, has figured out some way to be able to see into other parts of the universe at any given time, you might have a gazillion types of Earth to choose from, even if based on what we know right now, which seems to be a lot, is like, wow, we can't find anything like Earth. Yeah, I mean, if you, you can't, if you imagine aliens being basically able to do magic, you know, they're so sophisticated, they can do stuff we can't possibly contemplate, then all bets are off, right? It's really hard for us to speculate about either

their interests, their activities, the way they think about the universe, how special or rare or anything is. For those guys, like, all bets are off. So I don't even worry about that too much to frankly i mean another this is arthur c clark or arts c clark said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic there's another sci-fi artist a sci-fi writer called car schroeder who is a modern guy and he took a twist on that and he said any sufficiently advanced aliens is indistinguishable from nature from nature yeah so let's take um the galaxy we see the galaxy and we just assume it's natural um we think we end we can kind of come up with the story of how it was made makes sense to us but it is possible that that's just an alien made that right we don't know that

there's no we can't prove the the Milky Way is not an industrial project that's right of another civilization that's just so far beyond us we think it's natural because we can't even contemplate the possibility of someone that advanced being able to do those things maybe all stars are engineered products right we think a star is a natural thing who knows if that's true or not so all of our astrophysics is kind of based on the assumption of that I mean all of science is based on the assumption of naturalism that's kind of a fundamental tenet to science is that the universe is natural and it's our job to try to come up with a natural explanation for why everything happens a mechanistic and that's worked really well for us through that naturalistic view of the

universe we can predict how a semiconductor will act if you give it a charge and that allows you to have an iPhone and that allows you to build computers and have airplanes and all of society and technology is basically built on this assumption but when you try and extrapolate that to the the whole universe like it is hard like we we have to kind of operate in that assumption but it's unproven it's unfounded um so i am open-minded to that possibility but it doesn't really have much utility to a scientist because what am i supposed to do with that like it's fun to philosophically play with but it's it's probably not a useful starting point for trying to like make predictions because who knows what what these creatures would do yeah and and i've heard some of the

scientists obviously argue on on with with the Fermi paradox where it's like it'd be on interesting it's just you don't even you can't even conceive how an advanced civilization regardless of how advanced they are would even think or what their you know utopian worldview whatever that is could be so it is weird to think about but there are to your point so many perfect things that line up in our in our little area of the universe that you have to want to want to do that you have to want to like what did create that if it is more along what was the name of that scientist again who came up with the nature and distinguishal from oh that's what as car schroeder so schroeder so if it's along schroeder's lines and potentially nature was created by some form of man

so you know some form of alien somewhere else okay or you know you can get to the question of like there has to be a creator on top of something like this because everything's so perfect and so aligned not just in our area but everything we're looking to solve in the universe is based on math and light and you know the senses coming together in weird ways what what's your opinion on that do yeah you kind of about where it all comes from yeah this is kind of into an idea of like fine tuning as well a little bit so yeah you can it's not just the conditions of our planet but even the conditions of the universe yeah seem well well constructed for life um the you know if you make a good example is the mass of the proton the neutron the mass of the the

neutron is a little bit heavier than the proton, but only by about 0.14%, I think it is. And that's suspiciously close. If it was 0.3% or higher, basically, you wouldn't be able to have atoms. The atomic nuclear would be unstable. They would immediately decay. And if it was either way around and protons were heavier, then protons would decay into neutrons. So, and then you wouldn't be able to have any atoms that way either. So there's like this very narrow corridor of basically between 0.2%.

that those have to be balanced with him and it's perfect and it's not just that those two numbers there's like a bunch of numbers like that in the universe that seem really finely tuned so there's two way there's a few different ways of answering that but the you know two very common ways are yeah you say you have to invoke a creator or something or say it's you know simulated universe or a god or something created this and that's why it seems that way um the other hypothesis is that you could say there's a multiverse there's there's countless numbers of universes out there there, and most of them have arbitrary values of these numbers, and we don't live in any of those because, like, of course we don't.

There's no one in there. There's no atoms in those universes. What do you mean arbitrary values of those numbers? So let's make the mass of electron three times heavier than it is an universe. And it works in another multiverse. Well, you could just choose those numbers to be whatever you want, right? Especially, I mean, if you believe buying into string theory, string theory comes up with, you know, 10 to the 80 different universes that are possible.

And each of them have different rules of physics, different constants. And all of them are real solutions to string theory. So it's possible there are many, many different universes out there with different values. And those would never have creatures in them. They would never have life in them. And so maybe some of them do. Maybe there's some weird combinations of things that we hadn't anticipated where you actually do get aliens. But we shouldn't be surprised to live in a universe where things seem.

finely tuned because it would be impossible for us to live in a universe where that was not so yeah so it's kind of like a chicken and egg type situation a catch 22 like you start to stuff eat your own tail in this logic um but it is fascinating and lots of cosmologists are deeply interested in this in this problem and it seems and there are some credible reasons to believe in a multiverse as well that could maybe give us some credence what are what are what are some of besides what you were just going through right there what are what are some of the most credible reasons you're seeing right now because i i've had brian keating sitting here who was a couple times who was working on a project for 15 years to basically prove that the universe if they were able to

prove it was inflationary which would the way he explained it scientifically you would know better me basically would say that means yes we have a multiverse turned out he was looking at universal dust and not what they were looking for so they couldn't prove that but like what kinds of things could point to us having the different transistor radios yeah i mean i would say the same thing more or less as what brian you know would have told you that um the theory of inflation is the theory it's kind of almost the theory of the big bang it's like what happened in the earliest stages of the universe how do we get this extreme rapid expansion phase of the universe and we believe um we believe if you don't have inflation you can't really explain so many things about about the light that we see from all

directions in the universe this is called the CMB the cosmic microwave background so we see light from all directions it's the leftover radiation from this earliest period the big bang itself essentially and what you notice is that it's the same temperature in all directions and there are some correlations embedded within those um that are very weak but are detectable and they imply that somehow um one region of space on this side of the universe and one region of space over that outside the universe, we're in contact with each other. And when you look at the rate of expansion of the universe, that shouldn't happen. They should never have been in contact with each other. There's no way for light to have possibly have had time given the age of the universe to have gone

from here to here, even if you reverse the clock. So the solution to that is inflation. Inflation says, look, I have a way of explaining that. There was a period where the universe was expanding fast than speed alike, super fast, and then everything can kind of come back into causal contact. You could also try other things like changing the speed of light. You could say maybe the speed light was faster in the early universe than it is today. And that would be a way of making these things have contact with each other as well. But that comes with lots of other problems. And generally, it's not as favored as inflation.

So inflation has a few different predictions. And one of them that Brian was looking for was these gravitational waves that would be left over from the Big Bang as well. So we definitely have quite a bit of evidence for inflation at this point. And if you, it's not, there's many different theories of inflation. There's not just one. But in almost all of them, you end up with a multiverse. So a multiverse is just very difficult to avoid in inflationary theories.

And it asks an interesting philosophical question as to whether this is science or not, to be honest. Because by definition, a universe outside of our universe can't ever be testable, right? And science is all about evidence, testing. I want to hear. In our universe. Right. Yeah.

No one in our universe could ever detect the presence of another universe. but because the universe is supposed to be everything right so yeah you can't possibly leave your universe as far as we know and so the question is then is another is the concept of another universe even truly science anymore like what are we talking interesting i've never heard that argument okay i mean it makes sense what you're saying yeah but i don't know i'm getting a little philip k dick now if we start talking about this but you've i'm sure you're familiar with at least some of his work and stuff he's he's a legend from the sci-fi space but in I'm thinking of like the one example, the man in the high castle, which they later made a TV show as well, the way that they were bending time, their time traveling was they were traveling between dimensions, which would mean someone from this dimension, if you were ever able to figure out how to do this, was going into another dimension to observe and test things in that dimension.

In that case, if you are coming from the dimension we're in to go in and you're actually, we're able to figure out a way to go in, tap into the dimension. the other dimension to study something does that then constitute science because we're coming from the place where science exists yeah if you could interact if you could traverse or interact with them then i think you could do experiments and test and prove it's important to be clear there's many different definitions of multiverse so we already talked about one earlier on the show with um this whoever stuff of like that's like a multiverse right the many world's hypothesis there's in a in a quantum sense, there's another universe right here in this room that's almost like slightly offset from us. It's decohered from us. And therefore we can't interact with it, but it is literally

in the same space and time as us. This multiverse is different. This is like saying if you travel on a spaceship just forever and ever and ever, you just keep going, keep going. You'll eventually reach regions of space where the laws of physics could be different. And that's still in a sense part of the infinite universe, but in another sense, it's a completely different pocket universe or to its own. And then inflation says you can't, there's another type of multiverse beyond that. You can't even leave this bubble. You could just travel forever. There's infinite space inside each bubble, but there's also an infinite number of bubbles. So this is where it gets really trippy. There's an infinite number of universes, each with infinite amount of space within each of them.

So that really is like the marbles from Men in Black. And those, you know, that some of them will be identical to us, which is really wild, because there's infinity is involved. there'll be an infinite number of all of us having this conversation. It's like a small butterfly effect across each transistor motion. Yeah, so ones will be some, maybe you're wearing a red t-shirt and some of them. Yeah, that's the only difference, but in other ones, it would just be almost identical. And so this is where science starts to get a bit philosophical, a bit metaphysical, and there are legitimate questions. Some cosmologists and physicists like strongly feel like this is just

pseudoscience. This is not legitimate. But inflation is definitely not pseudoscience. It explains a ton of observations. It's real. It's credible. It makes predictions that were confirmed. Real predictions that have been confirmed. Like Super Horizon scales in the CNB, for instance. So there's a ton of stuff it's predicted. Super Verizon scales in the survey? Yeah, that's these kind of like these points being in contact with each other that shouldn't be able to be in contact with each other. So you should, when they looked at the power spectrum of the CNB. So that's sort of asking like, yeah, does this, does the temperature of this have any correlation to the temperature of this part over here? They inflation predicted if it was right

and it was actually predicted to explain different problems. It was invoked to explain why we don't have magnetic monopoles. That's a different story. So that was why it was invented. And then one of the predictions of the theory was that you should find once we get the technology to assess this, that parts of the universe that are so far apart from each other that shouldn't be in contact with each other will appear to have been in contact with each other and that was then confirmed later on so that was a real prediction of the theory um and an inevitable consequence more less an inevitable consequence of inflation is this multiverse so what do you do when you have a theory where much of it is scientific and credible but of all of the predictions it makes it happens

to make one extra one which is totally intestable but is perhaps the most philosophical intriguing one of them. Untestable in what we know now, but eventually, possibly testable. Yes. I mean, this is where you get to kind of, yeah, invoke magic, invoke miracles. Yeah, I try to avoid invoking miracles because, you know, that's part of science is, let's think about what is, you know, the bounds of what is known. But it's a pretty slippery slope, in my opinion, to invoke miracles and magic, because then just

sort of everything goes. And then there isn't any science left at that point. Like, you just say, yeah, you may as well be. literally in a Tolkien world of Lord the Rings at that point. Yes. Yes. And I think about this one a lot just because it's, it is so theoretical and it's so trippy and it can tie together a whole bunch of ideas. Like you mentioned simulation theory and all that. But it's like, what if you die in this dimension and you're spawned into another dimension from that, but it's only a year before you died or 10 years before you died in another

one or 30 years before you died or you're in a different set of circumstances. You were married to some girl on this one, you're married to a different girl on that one. It gets so weird. And I can imagine in the scientific community, when you have now taken like thread on a thread on a thread on a thread, they're like, wait, wait, slow down, stop. Because if one thread's wrong, the whole house of cards, like, we're here and it doesn't make, you're at Terrence Howard. Like, you know, you just went way far beyond where it was actually like provable or feasible.

Yeah. It's, it's always hard as scientists because you're walking this fine edge between pushing the boundaries of knowledge and being open-minded to wild and speculative ideas but at the same time like the whole point of science is to have stuff which you can prove and show is absolutely right and doesn't mean the other things are wrong that it's not exclusionary in that sense sometimes it excludes things but mostly we just want to know what is right and how the world works to have rules that we can use in our lives right to use and to build stuff yes and to explore the universe yeah i think like the way we label things also can rule out like, I don't know, almost create attitudes on how we view

things. We were talking about it with labeling, you know, three-eye Atlas as potentially alien, get some scientists to be like, shut the fuck up. But like, even when you say a word like alien and think about what that is, in our head, we think, all right, green man and space suit coming here and UFO. But then, you know, what is the actual definition? Does it have to do with place, space and time. Meaning, I've always looked at the movie Interstellar and I look at Matthew McConaughey and he leaves this earth at a given time at, you know, age 40 something. I think he's gone for two years total. He comes back 85, 90 years later. He is only aged two years and the place he comes back to, which actually technically was an earth, but let's assume it was

literally Earth he came to. The people who were there are some of the same people he left. but they're in a completely different part of life and is a completely different reality than the lived time that he left and came back to. So I look at Matthew McConaughey and I go, that's an alien. You know what I mean? He's from a different period, a different time. So to the planet he's on, he's an alien. So when people start generalizing and saying like it has to be something from light years away,

that's like a person or, you know, a green man or whatever, it's like, well, who's to say that there's not something that's been figured out in humanity to say, oh, there could be, you know some sort of future human or past human element that has figured out how to bend time like is that crazy to think about or am i also way too far in that theoretical then yeah i think certainly being a cultural alien is 100% right like that's true like you can definitely be you travel to japan you feel like an alien like you're just walking around you just it's so different and i'm sure they feel the same way when they first come over here um but the the time travel thing's interesting So, yeah, I think forward to time travel is obviously trivially possible, and that's what Matthew McConae does.

He travels forwards through time, 90 years. To go backwards, that doesn't happen in that movie. And that's because Kip Thorne was one of the science directors behind that film. And he knows his stuff. And that should not, that caused a lot of problems to physics, if that's possible. So a good example, actually, is wormholes. People often talk about wormholes as a possible. way of going backwards through time. Even if you would create two wormholes right here,

like one wormhole, but two mouths, you could always put one mouth on a spaceship, travel super fast, close to the speed of light, then come back, and you'd offset them in time. So now you have a time travel machine. Okay, sounds good. But there's a problem here. So now you can have a particle, and this is something Stephen Hawking imagined, and you can have a random particle like a virtual particle even that it pops up and it travels through um the one of the tunnels like say a and comes out in the past into b and then it over overtakes itself so now at this point in space between these two mouths i have a duplicate a clone to matthew mcconhays and then those two now go through the mouth and now there's four and now there's eight and now that's 16 and it just

keeps going and because this in you know this is there's an infinite number of loops that can happen you would end up with infinite amounts of energy in between the two even though there's only one particle that one particle has now turned into an infinite amount of energy in between the two wormholes and an infinite amount of energy well doesn't have to be infinite but a large amount of energy will destabilize the wormhole so the idea is that stephen hawking said this it's kind of like putting a microphone to a loudspeaker you get like a feedback that sound The same thing happens with the two wormholes with these virtual particles. You get a feedback of this particle.

And so that loud sound becomes an infinite amount of gravity, basically, that rips apart the two wormholes. So the moment you build a time machine, in this case, these two wormholes, it immediately destroys itself. The very second you activate it, it destroys itself. And so Stephen Hawking suggested he gave the example there of the two wormholes. but he suggested this was a general rule that whenever you build any time machine the moment you turn it on one of these effects will be ruinous

the universe just won't allow it to happen because if it did it would kind of break the universe and it's true like if the universe was a simulation you wouldn't want time travel to be allowed in that simulation because it would be if you're running the simulation real time now you have to have a time machine in your real world to be able to

to account for the fact people are doing time loops in your simulation. And maybe that's not forbidden in their universe either. It would also allow for infinite amounts of memory for the same reason, right? Because now you could have two mathematics, four mathematics of cameras. So now you have to have an infinite amount of memory on the computer to handle the infinite versions of events that can happen. So it would very quickly destroy the computation, the memory, and even maybe the logic of their own universe that they operate in.

So there's good reasons why if you were designing a universe, you would not want that to happen. And then, of course, you can have paradoxes like Grandfather. the paradox we commit kill your you grandad or something they just have no logical solution so like how is the simulation supposed to proceed past that point yeah that was all that was a that was a point michi okaku made with like hypothetical time travel and stuff he's like if you went back to april 14th 1865 to try to stop john wilkes booth you're not stopping it in this multiverse you're creating a new reality that's a separate verse we don't know that we don't know it but

what you're saying that exactly right that's one resolution the problem with that is now yeah now you have to create another whole universe so now every time someone uses a time machine it creates another universe right and what's that because that's not an everettian multiverse that's not an inflationary multiverse that's not a infinite space is not it's a different as another type of multiverse that you've just invented to explain this to accommodate a time machine so um there's yeah you have to have a lot of miracles work again it's like how many miracles you need before breakfast to accept something being true. So I think for my money, yeah,

I think time machines run into so many problems, reverse time machines that are probably not possible. Forward time machines, no problem. But going back, changing things in the past, I think it's probably prohibited, unfortunately. Yeah, time travel is one of those ones I would talk about all day. We would stay on that a long time because there's so many possibilities there.

We could go back to the start of this podcast. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We'll go back, you can do it all over again. But one other thing I did want to talk to you, about before you got out of here is this leaked memo that just happened with NASA for Project Athena. Have you seen this? No. Okay, Dief, can we pull this up? So the broad strokes are, I think a guy who's, his name's Jared Isaac, man. He's like, oh yeah, he's the, he's going to be the, hopefully the next NASA to you know. Yeah, the head of NASA. Yeah. So this memo leaks where

he's talking about how essentially, and I'm really broad brushing it here, there's, going to create a more like incentivized the private industry to come in and basically work more hand in hand and get budget that way, meaning like some of the private people like Ilam us who have a trillion are going to have a trillion dollars could start contributing more without the government necessarily like creating a way bigger NASA. So you've mentioned today, this is why I bring it up, like that you have obviously had discussions with NASA and like it's something you care about and you've been around it like what needs to change there i'm not saying this is a solution but like what is the future here with the relationship between nasa which is a government

entity and like the private people like the elons and the bezos and the space x is obviously owned by elan who are trying to run their own missions to get to frontiers in space yeah there's lot of overlapping interests and reasons for collaboration, optimism there, I think. Yeah. NASA, I mean, a lot of people think NASA builds rockets, but it doesn't. I mean, it's always contracted out people like Lockheed Martin to build its rockets and other companies. So it's not like it's contracting out SpaceX is some novel thing. It's always done that. NASA is, is the contractor. They, they solicit the contracts and find the best vendor to deliver these services. So, If the private industry can pull down those costs for whatever service it is, then I'm 100% in favor of that.

I think the only anomaly here is this question of science, science funding. If you're doing fundamental science, like the origins of the universe, something like that, and you want a private investor to do that, you say, oh, it's okay, the private industry will solve the problem of the origin of the universe. They're not going to do that. there's like there's no economic incentive there's no possible investment you could imagine in a human lifetime that would give a positive return on your investment that it's it had to have to be philanthropy that's the only reason you would do it um maybe if we lived for thousands and thousands of years to come back to the you know extended lifetime maybe then we'd give a shit because then we'd be like oh in thousands of years we'll be traveling the universe so then we actually need to know this

shit but and that's the whole point of science science is multigenerational it's not all about answers that are going to solve problems. When all the discoveries of like Maxwell's equations and quantum physics were being discovered in the 1920s, no one had any idea would be using that to build iPhones one day. That's like radical. So it's very difficult in a human lifetime to predict how investments in fundamental science are going to reap rewards.

But they always do. They always like leave to profound shifts in society and technology. as we increase our knowledge and development. So I'm a little bit worried about that. Like if we said, if NASA said or the government said, we're just going to let private industry do all the science, there was do a lot of science. There's still lots of science,

which is applicable in our everyday lives, like maybe healthcare stuff or vaccinations and drugs. You can imagine getting plenty of funding because that affects people in a day-to-day sense. But looking for exoplanets or, you know, trying to study another galaxy far away, that's just going to fall off the wayside. Like, that's not going to be funded by anyone.

And I think, I was having this conversation with a colleague the other day. Like, why do we do science, like, fundamentally? I don't think is that different from why we do art. Why do you play musical instrument? Why do you watch interstellar? Why do people make movies? Some of it's to make money, but some of it's just the human condition of wanting to engage in these activities because they enrich our lives.

They'd be kind of a sad state of affairs if you just lived in a closed box room, you woke up, you ate food, you took a shit, and then you went to sleep and you woke up next day and you rinse, wash, and everything about your life was just about pure survival economic benefit. That was it. You know, picking up a guitar and playing that in the middle of that day, would enrich your life so much more. Drawing a painting, contemplating the size of the universe. These are things we do not because they're beneficial to our survival, so often they are as well.

But fundamentally, I believe the reason why we do these things is because it's part of what makes us as being human beings. We're just animals if we're not doing that. We may as well just live like a rat. There's not anything else to our existence. So, yeah, I think if we, it's sometimes hard for private industry is so short term. They care about the quarterly stock revenue and, you know, the returns on the capital investments or this kind of stuff. It's difficult for me to imagine how private. industry would invest in fundamental science that's why government is the best place for it um i'm

thinking that there's got to be some beautiful balance to strike there you know i i agree with you if you just pushed it all onto the private side you know you're they're going to be tactically focused on the stuff that makes money right away and not in the discovery of it as well but that also means government's got to take it seriously to be able to fund discovery of of these things and not just you know obviously there's always a fucking war to fight somewhere so So they're putting money towards that. But where do you make sure you keep that excitement you had for space that we had five, six decades ago that we lost there for a while?

Now we're starting to get it back. How do we keep that going? How do we keep the next generations trying to find like, I love that point you make right there, like the art in space and the interest of it. And I do think a big part of it is having communicators like you go out onto the mics, talk to people, talk through these things that are happening. I think that's a huge help because somewhere a 15-year-old kids listen to this right now, he's never fucking thought about it before.

He's like, wow, that's really cool. I'm going to go look at this. And that's the power of the internet, you know? Yeah. Astronomy is a little bit like a gateway drug to science. Right? You get into astronomy and you realize like, holy shit, science is pretty freaking cool. And maybe you end up being an engineer or start your own, you know, tech company or something.

But sometimes the initial spark is just the wonder of something really fundamental. and deep, and it leads to manifest other economic benefits down the road. But, yeah, I think even without that, I'd still say, let's do it because it's the same reason why I like playing my guitar and reading books. It's like there's something about being human that's about, that has to be curiosity-driven and wonder. And I think life's pretty empty if you don't have those things. Agreed.

What have you been doing on this sabbatical for the last half of the year? I'm trying to write a book, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm working on a book. it's questioning our place in the universe. Yeah, it's thinking about the case for alien life in the universe, the scale of the universe, historical examples of possible evidences like a Kethrae Atlas will probably appear in there, and mistakes we've made in those journeys in the

past and lessons to be learned and perhaps even the case that the Earth might be more special than we realize. When's this book coming out? As soon as I write it, I guess. Oh, so how far into it are you? Have you written any of it? I've written about a third of it. So I've got a ways to go. Okay. I feel like there's a few podcasts in there.

Yeah. For sure. Right. Down the road. So you've been doing, you've been all over in the UK, like doing this and design it. That's nice. Yeah. And doing science as well, of course, and making the cool words videos and the podcast, all that kind of stuff.

So, yeah, anyone wants to find me, head to cool worlds. Yeah, we're going to have your cool worlds link there. We'll also have any other social media link as well. So let me know on that. obviously your channel's great you've done some amazing podcasts in the past with a bunch of different people including joe rogan and lex friedman so it was great to have you in here and thanks to mark agnon for hooking this up yeah this is awesome so much all right enjoy the rest of your sabbatical and i will see you again soon sir yeah all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought

get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge help and if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X. Those links are in my description below.