Science Friday - Orange Bat, Greenland Bacteria, COVID Anniversary, Alien Argument. Jan 22, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Orange Is The New Black—For Bats For a newly-described bat from West Africa, dubbed Myotis nimbaensis (mouse-eared bat from the Nimba Mountains), scientists are reaching for a different part of the color wheel. While Myotis does have some black on its body, the overwhelming majority of the bat’s fur is bright orange.   A team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and Bat Conservation International stumbled on the new species while surveying populations of another endangered bat in the Nimba Mountains. It lives in abandoned mine tunnels in the northern part of the mountain range. As those aging tunnels are beginning to collapse, the researchers are working to build new bat-tunnels to help preserve the threatened species.   Winifred Frick, chief scientist of Bat Conservation International, joins SciFri director Charles Bergquist to discuss the new species, and what’s being done to help protect it. Greenland’s Microbial Melt-Down The Greenland ice sheet covers nearly 700,000 square miles—three times the size of Texas. The ice sheet is estimated to have lost nearly 4 trillion tons of ice in the past three decades. A team of researchers recently investigated how the bacteria in the sediments on the ice sheet could be contributing to the melting of the ice. Their results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.  Producer Alexa Lim talks to glaciology Asa Rennermalm about how the mix of bacteria and sediments can darken the ice, impacting how the ice sheet melts. Life Of A Coronavirus Scientist During A Pandemic Unfortunately, we’ve arrived at a grim pandemic milestone: One full year of a global health crisis. The first COVID-19 cases were reported in December 2019 by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.  Last spring, we talked with three coronavirus researchers—Matthew Frieman, Andrea Pruijssers, and Lisa Gralinski—who discussed what the pandemic was like for them, including working in a BSL3 biosafety lab, and how their lives, and research, had been impacted. Ira checks back in with one of them, Matthew Frieman, to reflect on his experience in the last year, and what he expects for the coming year.  Searching For Extraterrestrial Life Like ‘Sherlock Holmes’ Back in October 2017, our solar system received a strange visitor, unlike any seen before. Scientists couldn’t decide if it was an asteroid, a comet, or an ice chunk. To this day, it’s simply classified as an “interstellar object,” dubbed ‘Oumuamua.’ For his part, Harvard astrophysicist Ari Loeb is pretty sure what it is. It’s so hard to classify, he reasons, because it’s a byproduct of intelligent life outside our solar system. But how it found its way here is anyone’s guess. In his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Loeb wants you to take the possibility of aliens seriously. He joins Ira to talk about his theory, how an early love of philosophy shaped his views as an astrophysicist, and why searching for extraterrestrial life is a little like being Sherlock Holmes.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If I ask someone to draw a bat, they'll probably sketch what an oval body, two largest pointy ears, angular wings, and the color most likely black, maybe dark gray or brown. But a newly described bat from West Africa has scientists reaching for a different color. Cyphraise Charles Berkwist has more. Its name is Myotus Nimbabensis, meaning mouse-eared bat from the Nimbabom. mountains, the mountain range in West Africa where it lives. And its color? It has some black, but what really stands out is its fluffy, bright orange fur. Think of the hockey mascot gritty with wings. The bat was recently described by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History

and Bat Conservation International. And one of them joins me today, Dr. Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, and an associate research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Welcome back to Science Friday, Dr. Frick. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. I'm going to encourage everyone to go to our website to see pictures of this at ScienceFriiday.com slash orange bat. But for the radio world, describe this bat for us. Well, it's just spectacular looking. It's bright orange fur and its wings when you open them up are black with a contrasting orange along the finger bones and the wings. And it has a few freckles on its face and fairly large ears.

And it fits about in the size of, in the palm of your hand. It's about 15 to 17 grams. So sort of average size for a bat. The pictures are really striking. And as they say, no filter. It really, those are accurate. It looks like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And there's no filter on any of those photos. We're scientists, not artists. The animals do the art for us. So tell me how your team came across this bat. Well, we were part of a collaborative team working on bat conservation in the Nimbab Mountains,

which is an isolated mountain range in West Africa on the border of Guinea, Liberia, and Cote d'Bois. And the Nibah Mountains are an incredible place for biodiversity, because it's one of these African sky islands where you have a steep mountain range that erupts from a lowland habitat. And so you have a lot of different species, that are endemic that only occur there in the Nimbab Mountains. And they're known as a hotspot for bat biodiversity. There's over 50 different species of bats that have been found in the Nimbab Mountains, and to put that into context, that's more species that occur in the U.S. and Canada combined.

So we were there working to assess the species that live in these old abandoned mine tunnels that were dug in the 1970s and 1980s. And there's a critically endangered bat called Lamott's Roundleaf Bat that lives in the tunnels. So we were trapping bats exiting these underground old abandoned mines. And this bat that we had never seen before flew into our harp trap. And, you know, like we were just talking about it, it's bright orange. It looks really different from anything else. And we knew right away that it was something really special and something that was very different. So you were just sort of surveying the tunnels and stumbled on it.

It wasn't that somebody in the area said, hey, you've got to check out the orange ones that we know live over here. That's right. Yeah. So we were there looking to see what species of bats were using the tunnels to assess their habitat and work on bat conservation. And we had no idea that these mountains were also this really special home to this new species that no scientist had captured before. Does the orange color mean anything? Or is it just we live in a world that has both golden retrievers and black labs and this bat just happens to be orange? Yeah.

So it's interesting. you know, the myotus, which is the genus that it's in, is actually one of the most species-diverse genera in bats. There's about 120 different myotus species around the world, although on continental Africa, there's actually relatively few myotus. There's only about 11 species of myotus, and some of them have this really bright orange fur. Why is a good question? You know, we have a species, the eastern red bat here in North America that also has a bright orange fur, and that species likes to roost in trees. And so we often think, well, it's probably has to do with sort of camouflage, but meiotis and imbaensis roosts in caves and mines. So they're roosting in subterranean features.

So it doesn't seem like the orange pellage would be related to camouflage for roosting in trees and these species. So I don't know why they're orange. Good question. So sometimes in nature, you know, bright colors means I'm poisonous, don't eat me. There's no sign of anything like that here, a warning of some kind to a potential predator. No, I don't think so. No. Okay. So these bats eat insects? Yep. They're insectivorous. We really don't know anything about their diet. The Nimbab Mountains, they're a steep mountain range.

And at the top of the mountain, there's this sort of a grassland savanna type habitat. there's these valleys with a moist woodland that kind of drapes the steep hills. And it's right at the interface, that eco-tone between the savanna habitat and this moist forest habitat. And so likely that's where they're foraging. Bats tend to like sort of edge habitats because it's a good place to sort of find insects. But there's still lots to learn about this bat and what it likes to eat and more about its ecology.

How widespread is this species? If you went to say the next ridge over, would you expect to find them there too? As far as we know, they may only exist here in the Nimbab Mountains. This is a mountain range. It's 40 kilometers long. The Lomats Roundleaf bat is only known to occur in that one mountain range. And so it's possible that it is also endemic to the Nimbab Mountains. We have been doing some acoustic monitoring where we put out sensors that record the echolocation calls of the bat.

So we were able to record the call. and we know that they're occurring in a number of the different abandoned mining tunnels, but just how widespread it is throughout the NIMBA Mountains, it's notable that other bat researchers had done extensive bat surveys in the southern part of the mountain range and never encountered it. So it may be restricted not just to the Nimbab Mountains, but to this northern high elevation habitat within the Nimbabh Mountains. So tell me more about what's going on in the area.

Are there threats to this bat? Yeah, so we are working with the local mining company to actually design and build new tunnels that can be put in places that will be protected and offer a long-lasting habitat for these mats. The tunnels that they're in are collapsing. In fact, so we have visited there in 2018 and then again in 2019 and in between those two field visits, One of the tunnels that had a pretty large population of Ginnian horseshoe bats had collapsed. So it's really important to be working on protecting the habitat. Part of the Nimbab Mountains is a world heritage site and then be thinking about safe, roosting habitats for these species that really depend on them.

These are living in human-made tunnels that didn't exist before the 1970s. Where did they come from? Where did they live before that? Well, there are some natural rock features in the Nimbab Mountains that they probably were using. And there are also caves lower down. But the caves that are in the lowland habitat and in the lower part of the Nimbab Mountains are under a lot of pressure from deforestation and a lot of human pressure. It's a highly disturbed degraded habitat. Pretty much all of the lowland habitat has been degraded or destroyed. And so these high elevation areas and these old mining tunnels, even though they're human-made structures, they really do represent sort of the safest and most protected areas for some of these rare bats. They're up in an area that the habitat's relatively protected and they just provide a really nice safe habitat.

But they're collapsing. And so that's why it's really important for us to be working with the mining company to actually design and put in new tunnels that aren't 40 years. old and starting to collapse. So these would be new tunnels that are just for the bats. They're not mining tunnels. They're bat tunnels. That's correct. Yes. Cool. How do you work to protect something that you don't really know that much about yet? I mean, how do you decide the right style of tunnel to build for these things or the right conditions that they're going to be most favorable? Yeah. I mean, that is a challenge. So we actually, because these tunnels are really fragile, we're actually not allowed to go in them either. So we actually went back and a year later and we brought a little

mini robot that we would send down into the tunnels that could measure the temperature and humidity and some of the structural complexity of the tunnels so that we have as much information as possible as we think about designing new tunnels. And, you know, we have to use our best judgment. And, you know, we know a lot about just generally the kinds of features and conditions that bats use that are subterranean roosting. And, you know, these tunnels are used by a number of different species. So even though we don't know that much yet about myodus nimbabinsis, the fact that we captured it where other bats are using these tunnels, we're using all of that information to try to make

our most informed gas. What would you most want to learn about this specific bat beyond saying, oh, wow, cool. What do you want to know? I would love to be able to follow one of these on its nightly forging. And just from a pure curiosity standpoint of knowing, you know, when it leaves this tunnel, how does it spend its night? You know, where does it go? What does it forge?

What does it eat? From a conservation perspective, you know, there's real value in knowing how big an area these bats need. What are the primary habitats that it's foraging in? what are its primary prey species, and then how dependent is it on different kinds of features for roosting, right? When we think about conservation, we got to be thinking about all the food, shelter, and water, the things that bats need and making sure that bats have those key components and that they're protected in a landscape that allows for them to persist. What's it like to add a completely new mammal into the books? I mean, that seems like it must be a thrill.

It's a dream. Like, it's just, it's really indescribable. Having the privilege of the opportunity to get to travel to a place like the Nimbab Mountains and work alongside folks like our colleague, Dr. Eric Baku-Fills from Cameroon and be able to participate in work that is trying to protect bats in such a spectacular part of the world, it really is a dream come true and very humbling as well of just, you know, I see it as a privilege and an opportunity and something I never thought I would get to do. And certainly, yeah, stumbling across a species never described before is just, it's just fantastic.

Well, congratulations. And thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. Well, my pleasure. Thank you so much. Dr. Winifred Frick is chief scientist at Bat Conservation International and an associate research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And you can see pictures of this bat on our website at Science Friday.com slash orange bat. For Science Friday, I'm Charles Bergquist. After the break, a look at the Greenland Ice Sheet and how bacteria might be speeding up rapid melt there.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. The Greenland ice sheet covers nearly 700,000 square miles. That's a lot of ice, about three times the size of Texas. And the ice sheet is shrinking rapidly. Some estimates put the amount of ice loss at nearly 4 trillion tons in the past three decades. One factor playing a part in this melting? The bacteria living in the sediments on the ice sheet.

Producer Alexa Lim has more. Most people probably haven't had a chance to venture out to Greenland or an ice sheet. I imagine a pristine, white, frozen field and crystal clear streams. But in reality, some parts of the Greenland ice sheet kind of like dirty. They're covered in dark sediments that are teeming with bacteria. A team of scientists wanted to figure out how these sediments in bacteria might affect the water and ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Their results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. My next guest is one of the authors on that study.

Olsa Renormelm is an associate professor of geography at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I know you've studied the rivers of the Greenland ice sheet. Can you kind of describe what the floodplains and those rivers look like in the areas that you work? Most of it is covered by snow, but there at the edge where you have most of the melting occurring, you have these like streams and rivers flowing on the ice. It's really beautiful and surreal landscape.

It's basically everything is just ice and water and ice, but there's also dark sediment on top of the ice. It kind of reminds you of floodplains in a normal river where you have sort of a more flat, low-lying area. In parts of these rivers, we measured about a quarter is covered by this very thin layer of sediment that is like overlaying the ice. And did you notice that there was more sediment clumping in these rivers?

PhD students that are working with Sasha Leibman, he's always been interested in sediment, and he wanted to know, like, how much sediment is transported in these rivers. And so we went up to Greenland and we measured how much water is flowing and we took samples of the sediment. And then when we came back to Rutgers, Sasha took his samples and he analyzed like the size of these sediment particles. And he came up with something super fascinating. It turns out like the sediment grain size he measured was too small to be deposited in the channels. It shouldn't be any sediment in those channels at all. So we basically found more sediment in those channel floodplains than we would expect. So then in your study, you came up with an idea for the causes of all these sediments, and it was

bacteria. Exactly. I know. I mean, I don't know about you, but certainly I didn't think there were any significant biology on the surface of the ice sheet. But people have discovered algae on the ice sheet. There is terms like biological darkening of the ice sheet. The fact that biological activity on the ice sheet, like bacteria, algae, can cause the ice sheet surface to become darker, which means it will absorb more of the solar radiation coming in. That means if you have more solar radiation being absorbed, instead of reflecting back, to space. You can have more melting, more water flowing onto the oceans, and risk of more sea level

rise. So we remember all of that research and we're like, hey, wait a minute. Could it be that it's actually bacteria, algae and stuff like that, that is making the sediment larger than the mineral grains? Because what we measured, which is just the size of the minerals. But then we realized these bacteria can actually clump it together. So it becomes these larger granules. And those granules fall apart when you go to the, like taken to the lab in New Jersey. The transport from Greenland to New Jersey, they don't survive that. You have the bacteria that's clumping up these sediments and like kind of maybe clogging up the rivers

or just finding their ways in there more. So then how does all that add up to impact the melting of the ice sheet? Because the particles are larger. are less likely to move away, be flushed away by the water. It stays there and it makes the channels appear darker, right? And that means it's absorb more solar radiation, melts more. Yeah. So what other ways can bacteria affect the ice?

Another term for is called cryoconite. Cryoconate, okay. Sounds maybe a little bit like a science fiction movie. It's just a mix of dust and mineral particles, organic matter, and it's clumped together. When I go on the part of the ice sheet that's melting every summer, which is called the ablation zone, it's widespread. Like it's on the surface.

It's so dark compared to the ice that it melts down, right? You get sort of a hole that melts down. So what you see all over is not this like clean ice surface. No, it's like a perforated surface with these cryokinite holes. everywhere. So it's chryokinite that is just melted down into the ice, roughly like a feet or so. And there's the dynamics to that too. That's certainly influenced by weather conditions. They tend to form if you have strong solar radiation. And then if you have windy overcast day, they will sort of erode out. So there is a connection between the chryoconite on the surface and the streams. So that

it comes from the surface to the streams. There's another layer that's added on top of all this, which is climate change. How does climate change play a role in all of this? Because it's changing so fast in Greenland, and Greenland's really been warming a lot over the last decades. The Arctic as a whole is warming at least twice the rate as global places. And because organic matter, like bacteria, organic matter, is going to be sensitive to the environmental conditions around them.

You could imagine that there could be increased biological activity or depending on what kind of changes you have with respect to cloud cover and solar radiation and so on. It's hard to say exactly how it would change, but it probably would change. Future is unknown. But it's going to change. We know. That's the one known. That's the known, yeah.

That's all the time we have. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Also Renormom is an associate professor of geography at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. For Science Friday, I'm Alexa Lynn. As we enter the second year of the COVID pandemic, our first conversation on this program about the coronavirus

happened this week one year ago. And during those early days, we checked in with coronavirus researchers in three different labs, scientists who had been studying coronaviruses for years. We wanted to know what the pandemic was like for them, working in a biosafety lab and how their lives and research had been impacted. Here are interviews we recorded eight months ago in May 2020. I mean, it really started December 30th when this first announcement of this pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan.

At that point, it was more kind of an excitement because we didn't realize how bad it would be. And then by late January, I think it was clear to us that there was a big problem. We first got this virus SARS-CoV-2, the first week of February. So February, March, April, May, it's been almost four months of basically nonstop, really, really hard work. But it's really a marathon. But if you start a marathon, sprinting, you don't last. So I don't know how I'm still alive, but I am. Afternoon evening is my BL3 lab time.

Lately I'm leaving there between like 9 to 930 usually, sending the occasional message to my husband promising like, yeah, I'll be home before bedtime. And he writes back, yeah, we'll see. I've spent most of my day in the lab. It's really important, obviously, to be careful to not bring that out of the facility. But now it's everywhere. You can pick it up in a grocery store, on the playground. You can get it anywhere. So now I feel most safe within the BSL-3, because it's the only place where I'm truly protected against it.

Because I'm in my bubble. I got my own airflow, my hepa filter. So it's kind of a place where I prefer to be right now. It's remarkably watching this virus move around the world when it's the virus, that you work on. It's really weird. And we had to have conversations about, like, if someone in our lab does become infected, how do we demonstrate that it wasn't from the lab? In a way, our lab is lucky because we were a coronavirus pathogenesis lab beforehand. I already had to take my temperature every single day. I already had to be concerned about upper and lower respiratory symptoms. So

anyone who's trying to rapidly adapt, those people I feel really bad for. You know, people ask, why don't we have a drug or an antibody for this thing yet? And the reason is because only one lab has really been funded to do crime research in a large scale in the past 10 years. All of this is stuff that we've been trying to get people to pay attention to for a while. I think the funny part of this story for me is that as of the end of last year, I didn't have enough money for the lab to continue through 2020. That has changed. And we are now well funded and we'll be keeping this going for the rest of my career, I hope. People have been incredibly supportive. It was really, bizarre when I got, you know, my first couple of messages coming in through Facebook or something,

you know, thanks for what you're doing. Like, I'm not in the military. This is something I've never thought of. We have another drug that is now entering phase two clinical trials that has just been picked up by Merck. I tested that on SARS-CoV-2 and sent those data on. And it's just, it's me by petting, making a graph, sending it off, and then seeing it in a newspaper. I mean, it's kind of like a dream for a research and be able to work at this level with this type of importance. That was from conversations back in May with Matthew Freeman, Lisa Gurillinsky, and Andrea Prousers. And now eight months later, Dr. Freeman is here to join us to talk about reflections about that experience and give us an update. He's an associate professor in

microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Welcome back. Thank you for having me again. Listening to those clips of yourself eight months ago, what's the difference between where you were then and compared to today? Well, I thought I was very tired at that moment eight months ago. I didn't realize how much more tired I could possibly get. But I think that what it reflects is that this, obviously, we all are going through this

remarkable pandemic over the last year. At the time, eight months ago, we knew that this was going to spread. this was going to be a very big deal around the world. I don't think anyone could predict the numbers of cases that we are seeing right now. It's still in the midst of it. Like you say, the virus you work on is now out in the real world and there are still record numbers of cases and deaths.

How does it feel for you to be a coronavirus researcher right now? I think it feels for all of us that we have a very important role in this, especially all of the labs that have worked on coronaviruses previously. The driving force in my lab over the last year has been working with companies and developing therapeutics that they've developed or we're working with them on and get them into the people in the community as fast as possible. And so we have a remarkable role to play because of our expertise in this field. It certainly is exhausting and tiring.

I'm really a basic science scientist at heart. I never thought I would do anything that would affect any human really directly from the lab. So to be able to play a part in this is really quite rewarding and really drives the research. I'm Ira Flato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. The speed that scientists have had to work has been astonishing, right? I mean, in the clip, one of the researchers described approaching the work like a marathon. rather than the sprint. Do you agree that this is a marathon?

How do you create a balance between the two? There is absolutely no balance, unfortunately. At the beginning of this week, certainly we were all calling it it's a marathon at sprint pace. And that hasn't slowed down. Our lab and everyone else's lab in this field that are working on this virus are working at amazing pace to try to understand the virus better, develop therapeutics,

get clinical trials run, and then out into the population so we can get approvals. It just hasn't slowed down. I don't know when it will, but in our lab, it certainly is not. How are you viewing the second year of the pandemic? I think I look at it two ways. I'm quite optimistic about all of the vaccine that has been really rapidly developed through all of these companies. We're working with Novavax on their vaccine directly. Seeing that out in trials and the two vaccines that have EUA approval already in a year, that is incredible. remarkable. I know we keep saying that, and I don't think the general public really realizes what a scientific endeavor it has been to really develop these fast and safely. The other aspect

of it, though, is the cases are not slowing down. And so the scary thing and the kind of, I guess, sad thing to me, really, is that we're not protecting ourselves the way we know how to protect, of social distancing, wearing masks. And so seeing the case numbers increase is really disheartening to watch this move, not just in the United States, but around the world. People not doing the things that we know can protect them and getting really just tired of it, which I totally understand. But the case numbers are certainly not slowing down. And it really saddens me that we aren't getting better at this yet. You talk about being saddened by this. Do you take your work home with you? I mean, does it affect you when you leave the lap?

Sure. I don't think I'm depressed at home. I, I don't, I don't think I'm depressed at home. I certainly am working more now in the last 12 months than I have ever before. You know, staying up late. I miss some kid bedtimes and dinners. But I have an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old and a wife who is also a physician scientist at Johns Hopkins. So, you know, all of this impacts all of our lives, whether it's somebody working in a lab or it's a single mom at home trying to, you know, put her kid through virtual school while they work a job. everyone is finding their way through this. And I think that we all have a role to play,

whether it's in the lab or otherwise. What do you want us to know about your work and COVID researchers in general? What I want everyone to know is that, again, everyone plays a role in this, that we can work as hard as we can in the lab to develop vaccines and antibodies and drugs. But if everyone out there is not helping themselves

by distancing, wearing masks, doing the real things that we know are interventions that are non-pharmaceutical interventions that really reduce the risk of being infected, that is where everyone can play a role of this. I also want everyone to know that the vaccines that are rolling out now have gone through trials very rapidly, and I know there's some concern in the community that, no, that's not normal and maybe they aren't safe. That certainly is not a fact in any of the things that we have seen, both published and unpublished, where all of the rigors of normal scientific research and clinical trials are still there in these experiments and in these, in phase one, two, and three

trials. So I want everyone to understand that these vaccines are safe and that the therapeutics are safe. And combining those therapeutics with protecting herself by, you know, following all of the normal public health measures are really how we can get ourselves through this. Thank you very much, Matthew, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much for having me, and good luck and stay safe. Yeah, we'll check in with you along the way. Is that okay? Absolutely. Thank you. Matthew Freeman is an associate professor in microbiology and immunology,

University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. We have to take a break, and when we come back, a conversation with astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb, who believes evidence for intelligent life has visited our solar system. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Some scientists find my hypothesis unfashionable, outside of mainstream science, even dangerously ill-conceived. But the most egregious error we can make, I believe, is not to take this possibility seriously enough. That's a quote from Avi Loeb's new book, the hypothesis that

he wants you to take seriously. What is it? Well, let's return to October 26. when our solar system received a strange visitor, unlike any scene before. Scientists couldn't pin it down. Was it an asteroid or a comet or a chunk of ice or what? To this day, it's simply classified as an interstellar object dubbed Umuamua. But Loeb is pretty sure of what it is. It's hard to classify he reasons because it's a byproduct of intelligent life outside our solar system. How it found its way here is, well, we don't know. This is the central argument of his new book, Extraterrestrial, first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. And here he is joining us to talk about it, Dr. Avi Loeb, astronomy professor at Harvard

University, director of the school's Institute for Theory and Computation, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative. Welcome, Dr. Lope, to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Now, I mentioned in my intro there that Amulmoor was a strange object which has made it hard to classify Tell us about this object. What made it so unusual? Yeah, the experience is similar to walking on the beach and seeing most of the time natural seashells and rocks. But every now and then you stumble across a plastic bottle that indicates that it was artificially made that there is a civilization out there. And that's the sense that one gets from looking at the evidence we have on Oumuumuwa. It showed a lot of anomalies.

The first of which was that its brightness. by reflecting sunlight changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling over eight hours. And if you imagine a piece of paper that is razor thin, tumbling in the wind, the area that is projected in front of us is not expected to change by such a large factor, even for a razor thin object. So that implies that Umuamua has an extreme geometry, extreme shape. It is at least 10 times longer than it is wide. And then trying to fit the light curve imply that it's most likely flat.

It's a flat object rather than cigar shape, as was depicted in some cartoons. And then even more mysteriously, it exhibited an extra push away from the sun beyond the force of gravity that the sun exerts on it. And usually that is provided by the rocket effect on comets when ice on their surface gets evaporated. as it gets heated by sunlight. But the only problem with that is there was no cometary tail. The Spitzer Space Telescope searched very deeply for carbon-based molecules, dust around this object, and found nothing. So there was no cometary evaporation of the object,

and yet it exhibited this push in order to provide this push about a tenth of the object, 10% of the mass of this object had to evaporate and we haven't seen anything. And so the question arose as to what gives it this extra push. And the only thing that I could think of is reflection of sunlight. And in fact, in September 2020, there was another object that showed a similar push away from the sun without any cometary tale. It was given the name 2020 SO by the astronomy community. And then astronomers figured out that in 1966, this object came from the earth.

And according to the history books, indeed there was a rocket booster that was kicked into space from a mission called the Lunar Lander Surveyor 2. And so that was this object, hollow, very thin, and so it could have been pushed by sunlight. And here we have an example of an artificial object that we could, in fact, that is artificial from the extra push, and we know that it's artificial because we produced it. The question is, who produced Tomoomua? Wow. And, you know, I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's famous quote, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Will we ever get extraordinary evidence on this one?

Do we need it? I don't think this statement makes much sense because the word extraordinary is really dependent on the eyes of the beholder. For some people, dark matter is extraordinary. For others, it must be there. For some people, extra dimensions are extraordinary. For the mainstream of theoretical physics, even though we have no evidence for it, it's not extraordinary. So my point is we should be guided by evidence.

And if the evidence shows anomalies, we should try to explain them, just like Sherlock Holmes tried to explain a crime scene. We should put all the possibilities on the table and then rule them out based on the evidence. But we should not have a prejudice. You know, the Mayans, the Mayan culture collected a lot of data on planets, the motion of planets in the sky, where they are, because they believe that you can forecast the outcome of a war based on where these planets are on the sky. They had the wrong idea. They collected a lot of data and it was completely useless.

because they haven't really used it to derive, for example, Newton's law of gravity. So my point is, if we have a prejudice, if we have a prior idea about what the data means, we think that everything we see on the sky is rocks. We behave just like a caveman that is faced with a cell phone. And the caveman would say, oh, the cell phone is just a shiny rock. And yet we have a seti, the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, which means we must believe it's out there or else we wouldn't be searching for it. So why are we so surprised when we get some evidence for it?

Well, the problem is that the discussion of the search for technological signatures in space is at the periphery of astronomy right now. There is a taboo on interpreting anomalies in that way, and very little funding is allocated for such a search. And moreover, young people are discouraged from entering this field. So it's as if you were stepping on the grass and saying, look, the grass doesn't grow. Obviously, we don't have a lot of evidence because this possibility is not entertained by the mainstream. And I find that to be inappropriate because we now know from the Kepler satellite data

that a substantial fraction, about half of all the sun-like stars, have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same distance from the star, implying that all these planets could have liquid water on the surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. So if you arrange for similar circumstances, the most conservative mainstream approach would be to say, you get the same outcome. If you repeat the experiment, you get the same outcome.

So why would we feel that we are special, unique, and that there is nothing out there? The mainstream approach would be to say, oh, there should be billions of other places where technologies may develop, just like we find them on Earth. Let's go and search. We should be open-minded. Instead, I get a pushback on the suggestion that these technological civilizations may have left relics in space, space junk, the way we do.

You know, we launched Voyager 1, Voyager 2, No Horizons, that will exit the solar system. why wouldn't we imagine other civilizations sending messages in a bottle? And all we need to do is check our neighborhood for this space trash, so to speak. I'm also wondering, and you mentioned this in your book, why you're very well-known and respected scientists, why you have taken upon yourself to believe in this, and it has something to do with your upbringing, with your early interest in philosophy, if I understand it correctly from your book. Please tell us about that. Yes, I'm not the typical astronomer because I was mostly interested in philosophy at the young age.

I grew up on a farm and I used to collect eggs every afternoon and drive a tractor to the hills and read philosophy books because they address the most fundamental questions we have. But then circumstances brought me into astrophysics and I ended up at Harvard, the chair of the department. And I then realized that I'm actually married to my true love because astrophysics allows us to address philosophical questions with scientific tools. We can ask, where did we come from? How did the universe start? How did life start?

These are questions that are all addressed in the first chapter of the Old Testament, the Bible, meaning that they were of interest to humanity for millennia. And now we can answer these questions. using science. And we should not be worried about, you know, considering the possibility that life is elsewhere. Because to me, it reminds of what happened in the Middle Ages.

You know, there were people arguing that the human body should not be dissected because it may have some magical power, there may be a soul inside of it. So imagine our health benefits from the modern medicine not being realized because scientists would say, we should shy away from dissecting the human body because there are all these nonsensical statements being made by the public. This is the same thing that the scientists are saying about science fiction. They say, oh, there is this literature that is not scientifically substantiated.

There are these reports on unidentified flying objects. Therefore, we should shy away from discussing this subject. That makes no sense to me. And moreover, if the public is interested and the public is funding science, We, scientists, have an obligation to address this question with scientific tools now that we have the technologies. We have telescopes. And science is not an occupation of the elite. It's supposed to address the interests of the public.

You know, you also say that you fear that the scientists and lay people are not ready to answer the more difficult question. You know, is there intelligent life out there? They're just not ready for it. Right. And this unreadiness dates back centuries ago. There is a student in the English department at Harvard that decided, because of my book, she decided that the theme of my book is exciting and therefore she wants to pursue a PhD thesis on that theme. And she invited me to the first PhD exam that she had. And one of the examiners asked her, do you know why Jordan? Dono Bruno was burnt at the stake. And she said, well, you know, he was an obnoxious guy. He irritated a lot of people and they burned him. Which is true, but the professor corrected her and said,

no, it was because he argued that other stars might be just like the sun and they might have a planet just like the earth around them. And there may be life on those planets. And that was offensive to the church because if there is life in other places and that life sinned, then you need copies of Christ to visit those places to save the life there from their sins. And that was unacceptable. So they burned the guy. Now, in retrospect, given the Kepler data that we have, we know that he was right. that, well, first of all, we know that there are many stars like the sun in the Milky Way

and that they have many planets like the Earth, and therefore there is a possibility of life around these planets. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking with Dr. Avi Loeb, astronomy professor at Harvard University, director of the school's Institute for Theory and Computation, author of Extraterrestrial, the first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. Let me go to my first. next question. Towards the end of your book, you propose a new branch of astronomy called space archaeology. What would these scientists look for, in your opinion? Right. So if you look at us, which is the best guess we can have for other civilizations, you know, I'm not particularly

optimistic because we are making a lot of mistakes. We are fighting each other. We engage in destructive measures against each other rather than cooperating, which would be the most intelligent thing to do. And as a result, we might not live very long. We might produce technologies that will destroy us. And if that's the case for other civilizations, they might be short-lived. Once they develop technology, they might live for several centuries, and that's it. And that doesn't mean that we cannot find evidence for them. It just means that most of them are dead when you look out. And that opens a whole new window to to space archaeology because here on Earth,

we had cultures that disappeared, like the Mayan culture, but we can still learn about them by looking at the relics they left behind. And so the same thing can apply to space. We can search planets for industrial pollution that was left behind civilizations that destroyed the climate on their planet. We can search for megastructures they left behind,

the swarm of satellites they left behind, and of course, all kinds of probes that they sent out of their planetary system that we may find as space trash. It seems to me that you're putting yourself in a sort of unusual position. You're a very accomplished astrophysicist. You're willing to fight for this theory that the object is extraterrestrial and not only extraterrestrial but made from intelligent life, even if your colleagues find this idea unfathomable.

Why are you willing to do this? to die on this hill, so to speak? Well, there are two aspects to it. First, I served in the military at age 18 in Israel. And one of the sayings was that sometimes a soldier needs to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can pass forward. And then, you know, in order for younger people

to be able to discuss this subject openly, I feel an obligation to insist. And the second is that I don't regard this as a speculation that we are not alone. In fact, I don't think that we are the smartest kid on the block or the sharpest cookie in the jar. And the only way to find out for us to mature is to find evidence for others. And it seems completely reasonable to me to put it in the mainstream of astronomy. I just use common sense. I don't understand why my colleagues would disagree with that.

because, you know, for example, when we search for most of the matter in the universe, the dark matter, you know, we are searching in directions that didn't prove to be successful. And that's much more speculative than what I'm proposing. And I very much hope that things will turn around because I did work in the past on frontiers that were not recognized at the time when I started them. And by now they are very popular and part of the mainstream. And so this sense of pushback is not new to me. If we don't know what 95% of the universe is made out of, what do we know about anything?

I completely agree. I think our knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance, you know. And despite what many scientists try to claim that, you know, we know so much, I think we know very little. Well, if you're like Sherlock Holmes and you believe when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth, you're going to like this new book written by Dr. Obviya. Lowe. Thank you, Dr. Lowe for tech and have to be with us today. Thanks for having me. Dr. Ravi Lube, astronomy professor at Harvard University, director of the school's Institute for Theory and Computation, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and author of a really interesting new book, Extraterrestrial, The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, please subscribe to

our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can also say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Please send some feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover to. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.