Modern Wisdom - #678 - Avi Loeb - Will Humanity Ever Become An Interstellar Civilisation?

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

Avi Loeb is a theoretical physicist specialising in astrophysics and cosmology, Professor of Science at Harvard University and an author. Humanity travelling to different planets is a huge undertaking. Yet we're already looking further afield. If we are to survive out into the far future, we need to travel to different solar systems and this presents a ton of unique challenges, today we get to find out about the biggest ones. Expect to learn how Avi discovered and collected the first ever material from a different solar system that landed here on earth earlier this year, whether we will ever send generations of humans on a space craft to a different stars, how Avi is planning to propel a craft up toward the speed of light within the next decade, the dangers lurking beyond the edge of our solar system and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Arvi Loeb. He's a theoretical physicist specialising in astrophysics and cosmology, a professor of science at Harvard University and an author. Humanity travelling to different planets is a huge undertaking, yet we're already looking further afield. If we aren't to survive out into the far future, we need to travel to different solar systems, and this presents a ton of unique challenges. Today, we get to find out about the biggest ones. Expect to learn how Arvi discovered and collected the first ever material from a different solar system that landed here on Earth earlier this year, whether we will ever send generations

of humans on a spacecraft to different stars, how Arvi is planning to propel a craft up to the speed of light within the next decade, the dangers lurking beyond the edge of our solar system, and much more. This Monday, Sarasafari joins me on Modern Wisdom for a very fun episode, and then the Monday after that, and the Monday after that for probably a month, or maybe even a couple of months, we've got a big cinema episode every single week. Consider it a little September treat for you, it'll keep you going. This episode is brought to you by my protein.

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making the highest quality nuts available to you. Also, you can get a 20% discount, site-wide, plus a free box with your first purchase if you go to houseofmacadamias.com slash modern wisdom and use the code mw20, a checkout that's houseofmacadamias.com slash modern wisdom and MW20, a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Arvi Loeb. What do you think is the chance that our universe was created by aliens in a lab? It's a possibility. We don't understand how the Big Bank came to exist. And it's really troubling that there was a beginning in time. And in a way, it shows the shortcoming of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which has singularities. And the big bang is one of them. It's a time singularity. If we go back in time, there was a point in time when the space and time had the very

extreme conditions and we can't go beyond that point. Clearly, the reason for that is that there is no quantum mechanical theory of gravity that is predictive and you know for the past few decades there were attempts to put these two theories together of general relativity and quantum mechanics and I must say that despite the claims made by string theories they don't make any predictions about the big bang they don't even make predictions about what happens inside a black pole. So as far as I'm concerned, if you're a plumber and I ask you, can you fix my toilet and you say, no, that's too difficult. And I ask you, okay, so can you fix my faucet and you say, no, that's also too difficult. And then you tell me, but actually in the metaverse, I'm a real plumber. That doesn't buy much for me. I would say you're not a real plumber. So claiming that you're working on the unification of quantum

mechanism gravity and you have some partial success doesn't count if you can't solve the main problems that face us. And one of them is how the big Bang started. And I can imagine an advanced technological civilization that has these two theories unified because they had more than a century of physics to work on. And if so, they might engineer their knowledge into creating a baby universe in the lab. And of course, our universe could have been the result of a lab experiment. And in that case, it's just like humans, you know,

that babies grow up to become adults and they have their own babies and so forth. So you can have a universe inside of which, the, you know, it gives rise to technological civilizations that give birth to new baby universes and it goes forever this way. So that's one possibility and I consider it as possible. I suppose this would nicely fold

in the fine-tuning argument as well. Why is the cosmological constant just so, so delicately balanced along with gravity, along with the strong and weak, et cetera, et cetera? Well, I think it stems from the fact that a very advanced technological civilization is a good approximation to God. And of course, some people believe that God created the universe and I'm just saying it could have been a technological civilization that unified quantum mechanics and gravity. And then the fine tuning is also argued, oh, well, there was a design here that some numbers worked out so that we exist.

And these numbers were designed by some divine entity. Well, you know, here I say again, whatever we see around us, including life, could have been created by an advanced technological civilization. And the only way to find out, I mean, the difference from religion is that I'm talking about something that can be tested experimentally. If we find evidence for such a civilization, we will know their capabilities. I mean, at some point, once we visit their home, we can see what they are up to. Or we might see gadgets that are so advanced that, you know, we won't be able to understand them. But and they would be considered as miracles,

just the way Moses, in the Old Testament, the Bible Moses saw the burning bush. And that was a miracle that convinced Moses that God exists. Well, if I was around Moses at the time, I would use infrared cameras that we are using right now in the Galileo project, the'm leading. And I could advise more Moses about the surface temperature of the burning bush, the amount of energy emitted per

time. And I could assess very clearly whether the burning bush is a natural phenomena or some creation of a superhuman entity so that he would have more or less all from this phenomenon and perhaps decide whether he believes in God or not. But what I'm saying is, if a cave dweller came to New York City right now, the cave dweller would be at all and would think that everything around must be a miracle. And that's what Moses felt. You've talked there about a number of super advanced civilizations. Talk to me about the different ways to classify civilizations and their respective usefulness. Right, so Kardashian astronomer, he classified civilizations based on the amount of energy that they are harvesting.

So right now we are using up a small fraction of the energy from the sun that is intercepted by Earth. And you can imagine, like Freeman Dyson did, the surrounding the star with some mega structure that would harvest all the energy coming out of the star. That's the next step and Kardashian even imagined harvesting all the energy from all the stars within our Milky Way galaxy. And that would be, and of course one can even think farther than that using all the energy that the universe, the observable universe creates. That is a rather difficult engineering-wise, and also I don't think it's the right scale. It's not just size that matters. Let's put it that way in terms of energy. It's really what you do with it and how you change your environment.

you do with it and how you change your environment. So obviously animals they adapt to their environment and whatever it is. And as humans we started changing the environment. Climate change, we created the atomic bomb, as illustrated in the recent film, Open Imer. That was a major event because previously, nuclear energy was visible to us in stars, but was never used. And once we started using it, of course, it changed history, changed politics, changed society. And so the fact that we are able to change nature as of now

is quite remarkable. And we're making substitutes to biological entities, like humans, the human brain. Instead, we have the artificial intelligence that could potentially surpass our abilities, mental abilities, intellectual abilities. But one can eventually imagine us changing environments on a bigger scale. And obviously, the largest scale would be to create a baby universe in the laboratory.

So I think that it's a much more appropriate to evaluate the abilities of or to gauge the technological abilities of a civilization by the way that it changes everything around it ending up with creating new universes. What do you make of the last few years and specifically the last few months of alien rumors? What do you make of the last few years and specifically the last few months of alien rumors? What do you think is going on? Well, I should take responsibility for part of the discussion here because about a couple of years ago I created the Galileo project along with a colleague of mine, Frank Lauke, and that was a result of my previous book, Extra Therrestrial, where I discussed the first reported

Interstellar object, Omua-Mua, that was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii, and this word means scout in the Hawaiian language. At first, everyone thought it's a rock from another star but then it had anomalies. It didn't look like familiar rocks and it was flat in its shape, had an extreme shape and moreover was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any commentary of operation that could give it the rocket effect. So altogether, it looked weird and I suggested maybe it's push by reflecting sunlight. And actually three years later, there was an object discovered by the same telescope in Hawaii that was pushed by reflecting sunlight. It ended up being a rocket booster that was launched by NASA in 1966,

given the name 2020SO. And so, as a result of my book, a lot of people came to the porch of my home, including some multi-billionaires, and they provided me with funds to establish the Galileo project. And month after the Director of National Intelligence talked about unidentified anomalous phenomena, objects in the sky that the government doesn't understand. And I actually met Averyl Haines, that Director of National Intelligence

and about half a year later at the Washington National Cathedral. And when we were in the green room, I said, you delivered this report. And you have a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Chicago. What do you make of these objects that are not identified? And she said, I don't know. And I believe her, I think the government is simply puzzled, doesn't know. And I'm here to help them figure it out with the Galileo project. We have a functioning

observatory at Harvard University, and we are planning to make copies of it and place them in different locations. And we are basically observing the Sky 247 using infrared optical radio and audio sensors, and then analyzing the data with machine learning, artificial intelligence to differentiate between birds, natural objects, or balloons, drones, airplanes, human-made objects, and we are just checking if there's anything else. But as part of the Galileo project, we also have other branches. One is to find more objects like Oumuamua that passed away from Earth and never came very close. And also to look for interstellar meteors. These

are objects that came from outside the solar system and collide with Earth. And I discovered collide with Earth. And I discovered the first such object from 2014, together with my student, Amir Siraj, and the government confirmed this discovery. And I led an expedition about a month and a half ago, going to the Pacific Ocean, to the site of this meteor. And we did find some materials that we are analyzing now and we can talk more about it. So that's my approach using the scientific method to answer a question that I'm curious about, that the public is curious about and that the government is curious about. So I think it's really inappropriate for scientists to shy away from it, to ridicule the subject,

because science should serve humanity, and not just by building nuclear bombs or nuclear reactors, but also by figuring out whether we have a neighbor. That's a fundamental question that will change our future. And we can use the tools of science to address this question, not by waiting for a phone call, the way we did for 70 years, waiting for a radio signal

to be transmitted in our direction. That's what the sety was all about. And surprisingly, the sety people are not open minded. I mean, they're really upset that this line of research of looking for objects is being taken, that I'm promoting it. I'm not sure why. I came from a culture of cosmology where, for example, the nature of most of the matter in the universe is not known. It's called dark matter. 83% of the matter in the universe was never seen in the solar system. And so in that culture, if you suggest a possible explanation to this puzzling data about

matter that we don't know its nature, then people like and encourage that because then you can have experiments that test that hypothesis. It's part of doing science. However, people that worked in the context of SETI for many years looking for radio signals are upset that there is another method which is looking for objects in our backyard to check if there is a tennis ball

that the neighbor may have been throwing out direction. And I don't understand that. I also don't understand those people who worked on stones in the sky for decades. So there are experts on meteorites that are made of stone or iron at the very best iron meteorites. They basically argue that anything in the sky must be stone. And what I say to that is that this represents the stone age of science. You can't learn something new if you think that everything

in the sky must be stone. It got to a point where the US government reports data and they confirm it in a letter to NASA about this meteor that I described from 2014. And they checked the data and they wrote an official letter to NASA saying, yes, indeed, as Avilov Beharius, this is a Finntestella origin at the 99.99%. And yet, a year later, astronomers argue, no, the government data is wrong by a factor of three, because otherwise, we can't fit the data with a stone. And I say, you will never learn about something new this way. We know

that, for example, there is matter in the universe that is not stones. It's called dark matter. We haven't seen it. Why not be open-minded? Obviously, they feel threatened by notions that, you know, something else might be out there. Why, why stone? We have, there are many, many different elements. We know that in the heart of every star that all of these are created. I don't understand what it threatens for the current scientific establishment if it wasn't stone. Why have they hitched themselves to this particular stone-shaped wagon? Well, it's very simple because if you say that the government data is wrong by a factor of three, that this object was moving three times slower than claimed. And by the way,

I should say, this is the same government agency, the US Space Command, that is monitoring the sky, not for meteors. They are monitoring it for ballistic missiles. And if they would make a mistake by a factor of free, they could tell the US president that there is a missile heading towards Mexico, where it's actually headed towards Washington DC. I just think it's completely irresponsible of astronomers to argue that the main agency that is funded as much as NASA or more actually the US Space Command can make a mistake by a factor of three after they wrote a letter to NASA saying this is of interstellar origin. And moreover the data originated from satellites whereas the astronomers

say oh it probably came from a radar but it was publicly shared that it came from a satellite. So you know it's actually quite insulting to say that to a government agency that went beyond their day job to confirm the identity of a meteor just for the benefit of pure science. And another way to look at it is I went there to their site in the Pacific Ocean, and amazingly I found molten droplets from this object concentrated along the meteor path

that they talked about, the government talked about. So I sleep better at night because I know that if there are ballistic missiles ever launched towards the US, they would figure it out. Whereas my colleagues would argue, no, they can get it wrong all the time. So then what happens to these tens of billions of dollars per year that are going in their direction,

like they are completely fooling themselves. If the astronomers know that this object must be stone. So the point is the argument is that it's a factor of three slower. Therefore, it was actually not from outside the solar system. And only then can the data be fitted with a model for a stone because these are the most common rocks that come from the sky. There are asteroids that belong to the solar system and they are the most common things. I still don't understand why they're so bothered about it being stone. Why? Well, that's 95% of the rocks that fall from the sky are made of stone. A 5% are made of iron.

They are called iron meteorites. So they say we have a model that fits a lot of data on these rocks. We can fit the government data if the government was wrong by a factor of 3 in its speed. Then we can fit it with a stone meteorite. That's what they say. And I say, well, actually, I respect the government data. I respect data. Okay?

I'm not trying to be arrogant and say, oh, the data must be wrong if my model doesn't fit it. I say I respect the data because they checked it. And because I respect the data, this object could not have been a rock. Now, think about Voyager, And because I respect the data, this object could not have been a rock. Now think about Voyager, colliding with an exoplanet, billions of years from now, we launched five probes to interstellar space over the past five decades, and one of them is Voyager,

and it could collide with another planet. And then it would appear as a meteor if the planet looks like the Earth. And it has an atmosphere and oceans and so forth. And obviously there you would have those astronomers saying, oh no, no, the measurement was wrong, it's actually a rock. But whoever respects the data would say, no, it must be tougher than the rocks because it survived. And it was moving faster. By the way, this meteor moved faster, the 95% of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun relative to the local frame of the Milky Way galaxy. And moreover, it must have been tougher than all

the rocks that were cataloged by NASA over the past decade, 272 of them. And that's the way that Voyager would appear. That's why I thought it's a possibility. And they say, no, it's not a possibility. I say, okay, well, you write this paper now after I came back from the site and I have the spheros in my hands. You tell me there's stones, but I actually check their composition on the ship at the time that this paper was published and an approved publication, by the way, it's not just the writers, the authors, it's actually whoever reviewed it, wanted it to appear at the time that I'm coming back. And when I'm coming back, I'm coming with materials from this object and I check them on the ship using an X-ray fluorescence analyzer and I find that they're mostly made of iron.

So obviously not a stone and then there are other elements in the composition that I cannot mention because we are now writing the paper on these findings. What I'm saying is there are some scientists who declare that they are representing science when they're actually violating the way science is done, which is follow the evidence. So when the evidence doesn't fit, what they expect, they would argue the data must be wrong. But then I respect the data, go there, collect materials from the path of the meteor, bring back the materials already knowing that.

It's mostly iron, and they publish a paper exactly at the same time saying no, it's stone. And what can I say? I have respect for the US government for figuring it out because now I sleep better at night and I'm not so worried about ballistic missiles, but these astronomers must be really worried. Serious ruckians. Serious drama going on in the astronomy world. Okay, so you go to this site, you find these spherials, these tiny little balls, you get to bring them back, you say that they have got a very high-eye in content, along with some other stuff that we can't talk about.

How do you know that these little tiny little balls are interstellar objects? How do you know that they're not just something that's been naturally created to rest really here on Earth? Well, that's what the paper will address, but I can tell you how in principle it can be shown. Before that, I just wanted to mention, after the sixth day of the expedition, we found mostly, I mean, we had a sled with magnets on it that collected mostly volcanic ash. I wrote 43 diary reports that were read by millions all over the world and were translated to Spanish.

People were inspired to see how science is done. So the public appreciates that. And then on the sixth day, I basically said, where are the spirals? Because I expected molten droplets to come off the surface of the object when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball that it created as it moved through air. And there were a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy released into 500 kilogram. So obviously, there should have been some molten droplets. And I wrote an essay saying, where are they? We haven't

found them yet and just to demonstrate to you that when I don't find something I expect I say that. I'm straightforward, I don't manipulate people. In the case of Umua Moa, we didn't have enough data to reach firm conclusions, but I said, maybe it's of artificial origin, it's a possibility we should live on the table. That was the entire debate whether we should live it on the table or not. Here, I decide to take matters to my hand and go and collect the material so I can figure it out. And when the geologist of the team came a day later after I wrote this essay, came down the stairs from the analysis room and said, Avi, I was the chief scientist of the mission. He said, Avi, we found the sphero.

I immediately rushed up and looked at the microscope and it was obvious. You could see this spherical marble that looked very distinct from the background, less than a millimeter in size. And I basically hugged the person next to me who found it first. And I said, don't understand how happy it makes me. I'm so happy it was something we, it know, it was very challenging to find millimeter size particles across the region that is 10 kilometers in size where the ocean depth is two kilometers. And finding it with a sled that is just a meter in width that has magnets on it is a remarkable achievement. Now to your question. So then I knew immediately we will find more because

I'm familiar with what happens in the kitchen. I wash dishes every day. That was the agreement with my wife. That's my duty at home. And when I see an aunt, I get alarmed because I realize there must be many more ants out there. So when I saw the first feral, I said, now we will find a lot. So when I saw the first feral, I said, now intern and she aspires to become a science journalist, but at some point she said that her name is Sophie Bergstrom. She said that if I can be of help, let me know. And I arranged for her tweezers and microscopes, so she can go over the materials once again. And because the ship was rocky and we just didn't have enough time

to go carefully. And so she went over the materials and found 650 of them. So now we have more than 700 spirals. And that's amazing. And then we could do statistics. So to answer your question, first thing is we looked at the distribution of spirals relative to the expected path of the meteor and there is a clear enhancement along the path of the meteor relative to the background. Okay, so that's point number one. Point number two, we can now take those spirals, each of them is a milligram roughly, and analyze them using a mass spectrometer to try to figure out their composition. And that includes two aspects.

One is elements from the periodic table. We can ask, is the abundance of elements similar to solar system materials? And just to remind you, the solar system formed out of a cloud of gas that was enriched by an exploding star nearby, a supernova, and it gave it roughly the same abundance of heavy elements. And so, you know, the solar system when it was made was roughly of the same composition. And in fact, there are some elements that have very precise values in their

abundances. And what we can do is check whether the spirals have the same abundances along the meteor path. And then of course, when we deviate from the meteor path, go far away, they should have the solar system abundances. And that's something we can check. And we are already checking. We already have some data. I cannot speak about it. And then the second thing we can do and we already did is check isotopes, radioactive isotopes. These are elements that have a finite life span. And you can think of them as time bombs. They exist for a period of time and they have a half life. And you can use them as clocks.

They decay into daughter products. And you can compare the abundance of these parent isotopes to the daughter products and figure out the age of the material. Again, we can compare it to the age of the solar system. So there is a very simple and straightforward way of telling a part, any material you find, relative to the solar system. And of course, until now, all the rocks that fell from the sky were from the solar system, because this is the first identified interstellar meteor. It's the first one where we knew that it's interstellar came from outside the solar

system because of its high speed. It was moved, you know, we translated the speed near the earth to the speed that it had far away and it was moving at 60 kilometers per second outside of the solar system. It was faster than nearby stars, 95% of them outside the solar system. So it was really fast. And if it were to collide with Earth head-on as the Earth moves around the Sun, it would have had a relative speed of 90 kilometers per second. However, it came from behind the Earth, so it had only 45 kilometers per second. So anyway, when such an object passes through earth, through the atmosphere of earth, it loses some elements,

and that is called fractionation. And just by examining the spheres, you can also distinguish between materials that came from earth itself, geological activity, and materials that came through the air at a high speed because evaporation removes some of those, and some of the elements. And so what I'm saying is that there are signatures of both a meteor passing through the atmosphere and moreover a signature of materials associated with that meteor that came from outside the solar system because if it came from far away

it was exposed to a different supernova, a different exploding star and different abundances of elements. Presumably this means that it could just be a normal meteor from outside of the solar system. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's alien artifact that it's Voyager Pro, but from some other star system. Okay, so here we get to the second question. The second question is, is it technological in origin?

How can we address that? Well, imagine Voyager entering the Earth's atmosphere at 45 kilometers per second and appearing as a meteor. Just given its path, it could happen in a few billion years that it will collide with an Earth-like planet. And then imagine the surface of this Voyager Meteor melted as a result of the friction with the air and creating spirals. Obviously, their composition, let's say of stainless steel, would appear different than a rock. And imagine melting the surface of a computer screen or melting semiconductors. Obviously you'll have some rare elements that appear at much higher

abundance than you find in nature. So there are ways of telling something technological because you can see some pattern of elements that you wouldn't find under natural setting in nature. So that's the second question that we want to address. And of course, that would be a dramatic realization, if true. But even if we just find it to be a rock from another planet, far away, near another star, very far away, very different from Earth, that is a historic discovery because it's the first time that humans put their hands on the materials from a large object that came from outside

the solar system. We will have confirmation from two directions. One is the speed of the object, which some of my colleagues dismiss and say the government measured it wrong, but completely independently, if we see that the composition of the materials is not solar system material. Then, you know, that's obviously an independent piece of evidence telling us that it came from far away, it's in the stellar which happens to be the title of my book in the stellar. So let's see what happens. So that's us detecting using experimental design in order to be able to search for out there and also detect samples of materials that are from different star systems.

Let's get onto us, us as humanity. If it's the case that we are on a very long but still ticking down clock to where the ultimate global warming is going to occur when the sun expands, right? Global warming is happening regardless of how vehement you disagree with the levels of sea temperature because over a long enough time the sun's going to engulf us all. That means that we need to get off planet eventually. In your opinion, what are some of the most promising ways that we could travel across interstellar distances? What have you sort of thought about when it comes to this?

Right, so first, I should say that irrespective of what we do about our own industrial pollution and global warming that we trigger by our technologies, there will be an inevitable global warming that will basically boil off the oceans. And that will happen in about a billion years because the sun is getting brighter. And the calculations of the evolution of the sun imply that there would be boiling of the ocean as a result of the interplay between the Earth's atmosphere and the ground.

atmosphere and the ground. So we don't have more than 20% of the lifespan of Earth to continue life as we know it. And it's, you know, most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. And therefore stars like the sun with planets like the Earth already went through that. A lot of them, billions of those. And we probably didn't hear the cries for help from those civilizations who decided to stay on the planet. It was the biggest item in the news reports. Not so much the global warming they make as a result of the technologies, if they happen to overcome that.

It was the fact that they just sit at a fixed distance from their star and the furnace is getting hotter. So you have to move out, but you can't if you are stuck to the planet. And perhaps they had some major exodus in spacecraft, living the planet, that we are not aware of. There must have been a lot of tragedies. That's what I'm trying to say over a cosmic history. We just tend to think about stars and say, look, these stars evolve in this way, in that way, based on the physics we know, but we are missing the human perspective of just

imagine the star evolving in the way that we expect it to. How many tragedies of other cultures, other technological civilizations happened in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And now there are these completely desert-like surfaces of planets that used to have life as we know it. And it's really tragic. A lot was lost over cosmic history. Now, if you ask me, what would the future hold? So actually, frankly, I'm very proud of our technological kids, which at this time are the artificial intelligence systems that we are developing.

And they are growing in their capabilities exponentially. So it's possible that by the end of this decade, they would surpass by a large margin the human brain. And I'm proud of that. I don't see that as a threat because it's not obvious to me that biological creatures like ourselves are any different than the primitive single cell organisms that were on earth to start with and they were replaced by more advanced entities. So perhaps we are just one phase in the evolution and ultimately it will be all about artificial intelligence and self-replicating probes that are not biological.

We of course learn from nature, we are trying to replicate the human brain, we are trying to make 3D printers that will produce 3 dimensional objects. We haven't yet produced a self-replicating car, even a car that can repair itself like the human body, that you put a bandaid on it after an accident and it will repair itself. We don't have that and it will take us a little while. But then, ultimately, you know, we will get to the point where artificial intelligence carries the torch of intelligence, at least here on earth. And I believe that it should do so or so in space, because when you send a probe to interstellar distances,

it would take millions to billions of years for it to reach any destination. And that means thousands of light years away and any such probe cannot wait for guidance from the senders. It will take thousands of years for a one-way communication signal. So they need to have their brain if you want them to function when they reach their destination. Obviously artificial intelligence is a better path forward than biological brains because

they're very vulnerable. Biology is very vulnerable to cosmic rays. You can't survive in space for more than a few years exposed to cosmic rays, even if you were a space suit. And that's one problem in going to Mars that doesn't have an atmosphere. We need to go into caves, into lava tubes to be protected from cosmic rays. But moreover, human lifespan is very limited and this would be millions billions of years. So it's much better to send technological gadgets, potentially, that would self-replicate. And that's the way I see it. Now they will carry whatever tasks we provide them with. Maybe we can ask them to replicate what we care about here. So instead of sending what we have here, by biology the way we have it, we can

perhaps have them seed biology over at great distances by using their own materials on a planet that appears to be habitable or create whatever we feel like out there. And to me, that's the best path forward, sending the type of equipment that can carry the intellectual DNA, whatever we care about elsewhere and reproduce it wherever we want it, if we want to replicate it so that we have many copies of it. Now, of course, in the Solar System, we might bring people to the moon, to the to Mars and then it would be interesting to establish colonies there but this is not really going very far from the Sun and it would not solve the long-term issue of longevity. So I do believe in technology leading the way.

And of course, if we find that someone else did it already, that would inspire us, that would give us a glimpse at our technological future. That's why I was actually, I'm jogging every morning at sunrise and I did so also on the ship that was fittingly called Silver Star. And I had a filming crew with me. And, you know, there were 50 filmmakers and producers

and directors that contacted me. They wanted to be on the ship. And I selected one. But the director of that filming crew, that he decided to film me one morning on the deck of the ship when I was jogging. And he said to me, are you running away from something or towards something?

And I told him, I'm running away from some of my colleagues who have very strong opinions without seeking evidence and I'm running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space. Yes, so what you're suggesting is running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space? Yes. So what you're suggesting is it seems like you think it would be unlikely for a human or a generation ship of a series of humans to go from Earth to some other star system, like let's say Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, etc. You think it's much more likely, much more feasible to go artificial intelligence, put it on a ship, maybe have a desktop encoder for bioengineering or something like that, it's got the code,

it gets there, it then deploys the code. I think I understand how you could see that as a solution. I don't think that that's going to satisfy most people's feeling or their desire for human civilization to continue. It will not satisfy most people's desires, but just think about a dandelion flower. Okay, what does a dandelion do? It's sense of seeds that are carried by the wind, and they carry the DNA of the dandelion flower and establish new flowers.

Now you might say, oh, that's not satisfactory, because as a dandelion flower, I really want to be out there in other places. But no, that's not what nature cares about is longevity of information content. And in the case of the dandelion flower, it's not the identity of the single dandelion. Actually for humans as well, you know, all of us die, right? So we have kids that carry our DNA. We gave up on us living forever or some people didn't give up, but we don't have an option. Okay, let's put it that way. And what I'm saying is, if you think about it more

broadly, it's not so much about yourself as an individual. It's about maintaining longevity of the what you care about and the dandelion flowers, at least from the point of view of biology, cares about having more dandelion flowers like it, preserving the beauty of the dandelion flower. And therefore, it doesn't have any umbilical cord connecting it to the seeds. You might say, if it wanted, it could have been connected to the seeds. No, but that doesn't work very well because then you need a long wire that goes all the way to where the seed lands on the floor. And only then the dandelion will learn something about what the whereabouts of the seeds. But in the way that nature does it, it just sends the seeds with the wind and they do their

job. And so there is some trust in the system. So in the same way that you send a spacecraft with AI somewhere and you don't communicate with it because it takes a long time. It's very cumbersome for you to communicate with it You just trust it. It will do the job. And that's the way nature works Do you think that we will ever physically visit another galaxy? whether that be an AI

robots whether that be a spacecraft that has the seeds of our Noah's Ark, spacecraft, Noah's Ark. Obviously, I'm aware that we're talking about, oh my God, we found something from outside of the solar system and I'm saying, why don't we take it one step further and get outside of the galaxy? But what do you think? Is that something that's realistic? Could we get the Milky Way to elsewhere? Here is a fact of life that we need to accept that the universe is not just expanding, its expansion is accelerating. And that means that any distant galaxy

beyond the local group of galaxies, the ones surrounding the Milky Way, any galaxy farther away than a few million light years is running away from us at an ever increasing speed. And once the universe will age by a factor of 10, all these galaxies will recede away from us faster than the speed of light. So even if you build the fastest spacecraft that moves at the speed of light, you won't be able to catch up with them.

And if you ask me, there is only one galaxy outside the Milky Way that we have a chance of getting to, I mean, we could aim to get to more, but that would require proportionate speeds that are getting close to the speed of light. But the one that we have a good chance of getting to is the one that will collide with the Milky Way and merge with it. That's a cheating. I knew you were going to give that answer and that's cheating. We can't wait for Andromeda to come to us. That's not the same thing that I meant. So I actually did a calculation and asked them, suppose you move at a higher speed than chemical rockets, how far can we go? Okay?

And if you have a spacecraft that moves 10 times faster, you can go within the so-called Virgo cluster of galaxies, that's within a distance of tens of millions of light years. We can do that. But you need the propulsion scheme that is 10 to 100 times faster. 100 times would bias that. Otherwise, it's just the universe expansion is too rapid. So I can imagine us getting to other galaxies

as long as we can make our propulsion, let's say a hundred times faster than all the space raven that we launch so far. And of course there is a benefit to that because then we can all settle in a bigger environment like the center of the Virgo cluster includes the galaxy M87 which is a giant elliptical galaxy, and there are many more stars there than the Milky Way has by a factor of about a hundred. So we will just have a bigger party over there as the rest of the universe recedes away from us, more resources. And actually I had a correspondence with Freeman Dyson about a decade ago on this subject,

because what I pointed out is that as the universe is accelerating, you know, we will be left in a lonely place. And he said, why don't we contact all these other civilizations out there far away and arrange a project of cosmic engineering where all of us will come together by moving our stars with us. And I said, that's too much work. I mean, we can do much better by just simply going to a cluster of galaxies, like the Virgo cluster, and finding hundreds or maybe thousands of times

more stars in our environment. And instead of us moving stars, we can just go to where the stars are, which are clusters of cluster of galaxies nearby. Okay, so this is kind of the same as cosmic fertile ground, so to speak. Yeah, so I know that you mentioned about how galaxies are moving apart, they're going to move apart at ever increasing speeds. Is the Virgo cluster, even though they are distinct individual galaxies, are they sufficiently gravity bound that that's going to stick together? That's not going to blow apart. The Virgo cluster will stick together, but if we don't go there, it's going to go away

too. What we need is to go there. Then we'll have the company of, let's say say a thousand times more stars than the Milky Way has So you might imagine a situation where we are not the first to recognize that in fact other Civilizations decided to do that and then you have a flow of these spacecraft towards The center of the Virgo cluster right now because everyone recognizes that they want to be there. The race to the fertile ground. Well, I would call it the cosmic party where you can celebrate until you exote until the lights go down.

And the lights will go down if you ask me when would that happen? That would happen when the smallest stars will burn up their fuel, which will happen when the universe will age by another factor for almost a thousand. So in 10 trillion years, that's when the tiniest stars will go away. And those are the most common stars. So we are fortunate. The nearest star to the sun is actually a dwarf star, Proxima Centauri. And it would live for trillions of years.

You know, the sun will die at an age of 1% of that. So it's 100 times, it will have 100 times longer lifespan. And obviously if you want to Get the light from a nuclear furnace like this like a star then we want to come close to a dwarf star like Proxima centaurion and amazingly it has a planet in the habitable zone But then you might ask why are we close to a star that is not typically if most of the stars are dwarfs Why do we reside next to the Sun and there might be a reason for that because these furnaces the dwarf stars, you know, they're much Fainter because they have less fuel, but and they burn it more slowly than the stars like the Sun

So in order to keep yourself warm, you need to get closer to them. In the case of Proxima Centauri, you need to get 20 times closer. That's where the habitable zone is. And then when you are so close to a star, you are vulnerable to the irupcions on the star of the flares. And those can remove the atmosphere of habitable planets. So it's possible that the best place is being close to a star like the sun, but obviously in the future the sun will not

stay around and we would create our own nuclear energy. We can use a nuclear reactor to provide all of our energy needs. Well, my favorite theory, one of my favorite theories about far-fling future civilizations is the idea that we would wait until you get really close to heat death of the universe because it's then very, very cold, which means that if you want to run computer systems, they can burn off all of their heat as a byproduct of that, they can be kept cool,

they can run more efficiently. You're now doing simulations within simulations, within simulations of you and all of your ancestors, and it's this blissed out, completely perfect world that you want to exist in, or whatever artificially recreated consciousness, you can do that much more easily when the universe is much cooler. So yes, you can do that much more easily when the universe is much

cooler. So yes, you have an energy problem because you no longer have as much energy that you have access to, but I've seen a number of theories that talk about almost going into hibernation, super advanced civilizations, going into hibernation, capturing energy or finding a way to create their own energy for as long as they need to, and then switching off, or going into standby mode, waiting for the universe to get down to a requisite cool temperature and then switch back on again. I mean, this is similar to some people as they get all, they go on a diet that keeps

them more healthier so they can live longer. But of course, the best way to prolong the longevity of your DNA is to have a lot of kids that will have more kids, that will have more kids, rather than you. And so here I come back to the idea that if we, you know, by that time, it's quite likely that whoever is around will figure out how to make baby universes. And by creating baby universes can basically put whatever you want in those babies in

terms of their qualities such that you will know that life will continue in them. Have you thought about how long the average civilization that doesn't become into Stella would exist for. Obviously, that depends a lot on how intelligent they are, because if you look at what we do, we spend $2 trillion every year on military budgets. We are thinking about how to kill other people or how to protect ourselves from being killed.

That was the truth when we were in the jungle and had to survive in zero-sum games. It's not true anymore. We could have worked together instead of conquering small pieces of land and being proud of that, we are talking about the surface of this rock that we happen to be born on. Why is that so valuable? Why do we need to feel superior relative to other people just for superficial reasons, like the color of their skin or the ethnic origin? And this is completely ridiculous if you think about it from a perspective of intelligence, yet we spend $2 trillion a year on that.

Now imagine if we were to find a sign of a cosmic neighbor, and we will tell ourselves, wait a minute, that makes no sense. Look at this other civilization, they live much longer, look at the technologies they develop. Why aren't we? Having a different set of priorities and and then we will remember the words of the song by John Lennon who said the imagine all the people living in peace and we would say, oh, yeah, that's a good idea

Let's live in peace and let's use then we will have it a surplus to three dollars a year. What can we do with it? We can use it for space exploration. And I did the calculation, I did the math, and with that budget, we can send a probe to every star in the Milky Way galaxy by the end of this century. Billions of probes, by the end of this century, sending them.

Of course, it will take them time to get there You know maybe billions of years, but we can just do that now imagine Another civilization who reached this conclusion. They have their own John Lennon. They got their own inspiration They are more intelligent than we are. They are not wasting resources on fighting each other and conquering a small piece of land On this rock that they were born on. Okay, they instead they say let's work together rather than kill each other. Let's not feel super relative to each other. Let's thrive towards a better future. So prosperity is recognized as a priority rather than a zero sum games. And imagine them sending props everywhere, and then these props make their way.

And by the way, the speed of those props that we send so far is at least 10 times smaller than the speed needed to escape from the gravitational pull of the Milky Way galaxy. So if other sent props like that, they would keep accumulating in the Milky Way galaxy over cosmic time and over billions of years. Just like plastics in the ocean, and many of those will not be functional anymore. Just imagine Voyager, billionaires for now, it will not be working, it will just be trash. Just like plastics in the ocean is trash, but it keeps accumulating. And the same would happen with all these probes. That's what I'm talking about. Let's check out

back yard and see if there is a tennis ball thrown by a neighbor. Right. We have the difficulties that are faced in going into stellar pale and insignificance in the different difficulties going into galactic. Oh, yeah. But it's not to me. Can you just one thing that I was really interested by, no matter what the spacecraft is, let's say that it was seeded with a tabletop bioengineering,

3D printer that can recreate human babies in a test tube or something. Can you just talk me through the journey, pick any star that you want. Pick any star that you think looks like a nice piece of real estate within the Milky Way galaxy. Can you just explain what the major hurdles upon that interstellar journey would consist of?

I know we've got the art cloud, we've got different things that we need to get through. What are the main hurdles that we need to get past? Right, so first I should say that even biology, we should not dismiss it altogether. We've got different things that we need to get through. What are the main hurdles that we need to get past? Right. So first I should say that even biology, we should not dismiss it altogether, because just recently there were some worms found in the Siberian paramafrost, and they were frozen.

And after they were rejuvenated in the laboratory, they came to life 46,000 years after they became frozen 46,000 years. So one can imagine engineering biology perhaps to survive interstellar travel that that is something for the future So we don't yet know if it's possible, but it may be But then in terms of the timetable, so let's imagine the kind of spacecraft we are launching right now because that's what we are doing. I mean, I of course am leading a very ambitious initiative

called Starshow to launch a spacecraft at the fifth of the speed of light to the nearest star. It will take 20 years, but we are not there yet, the technology is very challenging. So let's imagine chemical rockets of the type that we used. And so a chemical rocket, just like Voyager, one Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and new horizons that are making their way out of the solar system. So these were launched over the past

50 years. Okay, so they are still deep inside the solar system. The solar system, by the or cloud, is 100,000 times larger than the earth sun separation. Okay, so these spacecraft will exit, we'll get to the outskirts of the solar system, the edge of the or cloud, which is by the way halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, they will get there within about 10,000, 20,000 years depending on which spacecraft you are talking about. So we're talking tens of thousands of years. Okay, they will not be functional. We may be gone by then.

That's another lesson that you can look for packages in your mailbox while the sender is dead. That's the advantage of that compared to the method of city to look for a phone call, to search for someone sending you a radio signal. It needs to be active. So here, you know, we might be dead by the time our packages leave the solar system, at least the ones that we send so far. And if we send something much faster in the future, it will overtake those very slow ships that sail through space. Okay, so after 10,000 years, we leave the solar system, we start making our way into into this is truly interstellar space at that point because we cross

the midpoint separating us from the nearest star. And then to get to the nearest star, we take some more tens of thousands of years because we cross the midpoint. So we're talking tens of maybe 50,000 years to reach the nearest star. And that is roughly the time that he lapsed since the first humans left Africa. Okay, just think about it. If we were to send a spacecraft

when the first humans left Africa, it would get to the nearest star just now. And then if we continue to avoid through space, how long will it take us to go to the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy? That will take us half a billion years. So it sounds long, but it actually is not so long because the time difference between the formation of most stars and The formation of the Sun is billions of years most stars from billions of years before the Sun So there was enough time even for chemical rockets to make their way to adore step But that's and and at that speed we can't really exit the solar system as you can tell because

the edge of the solar system is the solar system, as you can tell, because the edge of the solar system is another factor of 10 farther away and that would make the travel time equal to the age of the universe. Not the edge of the solar system, the edge of the galaxy, I mean. Sorry, then, yeah, the time to cross the age of the Milky Way galaxy would be longer than the age of the universe. Yes, okay. Because it's 10 times bigger than the Milky Way disc that I was alluding to before, going to a star on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy. So there is the entire hell of dark matter of the Milky Way which is 10 times bigger or even more 20 times bigger than the extent of the disk of stars that are

near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So actually, if you think of galaxies, there is the luminous part, which is sort of like a light bulb in the middle, but then there is this big structure that is invisible to us of dark matter that is 20 times bigger. What is your proposed propulsion mechanism to get to the nearest closest star at one fifth the speed of light? Oh, that is using a light sail, basically a very thin membrane. That's the concept of the Starshot project. If this membrane weighs about a gram, if it has the size of a person, roughly, and it's being pushed by a very powerful laser,

a 100 gigawatt laser, for a few minutes, it would reach a fifth of the speed of light. And you can put in this light cell, you can put in this light cell, you can put some electronic infrastructure that could record, for example, take a photograph when it comes close to the planet near Proxima Centauri and also transmit the signal to us. That is not so much of a challenge.

The big challenge is generating this photon engine, the radiation that associated with the laser such that you have a beam of light focused on the sail and pushing it. The sail itself can be made of materials that we already know, and that it could be sufficiently tough. The main challenge is getting it to maintain a stable ride on the light beam with a very powerful laser and then communicating whatever it finds near the planet

around Proxima Centaurion. I should say that it takes a few minutes to get it to a fifth of the speed of light, then it continues the travel like a bullet towards the destination. That will take 20 years at the fifth of the speed of light. So it's two minutes of very fast acceleration and then a coasting over 20 years before it gets to the destination. That's crazy. You need a lot of patience. That's all I'm saying. Well, you need a little bit of patience. You need a lot more accuracy. I think that's the main, that's the main thing.

Yeah, so one other thing that I was thinking about, it seems to me, it's probably disheartening to hear that, you know, there isn't going to be a human, or it seems unlikely in your estimation that a human will go to some other system, that it's likely to be seeded by whatever, whatever. Well, I would not really doubt, by the way, if you go through the numbers, if we develop this technology of light sales and you get to the extreme of using all the energy intercepted by Earth from sunlight, you know, and you use all that energy to create a very powerful radio beam that is pushing a giant sail this time. It could propel humans at an acceleration of 1G for

about a year. And if you accelerate it at 1G for one year, you can reach the speed of light. And that is possible in principle and we would not feel any different than being on Earth because gravity gives us an acceleration of 1G on the surface of Earth. So if you bought a spacecraft that is accelerating at 1G, it would feel just like being on the surface of Earth. And the only issue is how to build the infrastructure necessary to use all the power coming from the Sun on Earth towards creating a giant radio beam that pushes on a light sail but in principle I did the calculation it's possible. Is there not a second problem which is how do you slow down? Oh for that you need a similar beam on the other end but if you just get to the speed

by the way if you board such a ship and you continue accelerating at 1G for 20 years. You can cross the entire universe while the universe is aging. But because of time dilation, according to Einstein's special theory of relativity, you can do it in your lifetime. So the only problem there is that you need a huge amount of power to keep accelerating for 20 years at 1G. But why is it so? you could go quicker than the speed of light. You cannot, well, according to what we know in physics, we cannot go faster than light, but you don't need to, you just need to go very close to the speed of light and then time is ticking more slowly in your spacecraft than it is elsewhere. So the universe, you know, will age by billions of years while you are aging just by a decade.

And because you are getting so close to the speed of light, of course, there are lots of practical problems, how to get enough power to propel you at 1G for such a long period of time. Also, when you're moving so fast, any particle of dust or any material that you collide with will generate a huge explosion on your ship. Yeah, very good. I saw a visual representation, a computer simulation of what it would be like to approach the speed of light from the front deck of a ship, and all manner of weird stuff starts happening. The way that light moves past you and doesn't, it's very, very bizarre.

By the way, that is the best way to maintain longevity when the universe ages by billions of years. You are just aging by decades. Just move fast, move fast. Yeah, just move fast. And of course, then if you have a similar system elsewhere, you can slow down. The problem is you need someone else to build it. So, otherwise, you will just move at that speed for a very long time. Of course, this is science.

We are not, I mean, there are practical problems, but it's all allowed by the laws of physics. I don't like science fiction because it violates the laws of physics, the storyline very often. Avi Loeb, ladies and gentlemen, Avi, I really appreciate your work and very excited to see what you come up with on this new paper, what you can reveal to the world once you've finally got your work done and got it passed everything. And I'm interested to see what other groups of people and colleagues you can piss off as you continue to do your research. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of this stuff that you're talking about and publishing and all the rest?

Yeah, I just wanted to comment on what you said, the food note, that, you know, we know that we are not at the center of the universe. And we also know that humans came to exist only over the past few million years. So if you come to a play, a cosmic play in this case, you are not at the center of the stage. And you're coming at the end of the play. The play is not about you. And the best way to find out what it's about is to look for other actors and ask them. So that's what I'm trying to do. In terms of my writings, I have essays on medium.com.

You can just type avi-lowbot-medium.com where you can find updates about my research. Also, I have a website at Harvard University that you can go to, the professional website, where you can see some links to papers and videos and interviews and other things. And I have no footprint whatsoever on social media because you know I just realized that if you want an airplane to fly faster you reduce the friction with air. You reduce its cross-sectional area. So I reduce my friction to the best of my ability

with other people who may criticize me, who may want to slow me down. I simply don't have any footprint on social media. Another metaphor that I should mention in this context, there is the metaphor of the crow and the eagle. So the crow is the only bird that can sit on the eagle's back and pick the eagle's neck. And there are photographs of the crow's on the backs of the eagles. But the eagles do not waste any energy or effort pushing the crow's away.

the cross away. What they do is rise to greater heights where the oxygen level is low and the cross just drop off their back. To me, the greatest height is to do my science in the best possible way by collecting evidence, material evidence, and studying it and reaching my conclusions based on what the evidence shows. And once I get to those heights, all the crows that are currently pecking at my neck will drop off. What a mic drop. Avy, I really appreciate it. Thank you, mate. Oh yeah, I'm fed.