TED Talks Daily - My search for proof aliens exist | Avi Loeb

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Why have we not yet found proof of alien life? According to astrophysicist Avi Loeb, we simply haven't dedicated the proper resources. Diving into unidentified phenomena such as the Oumuamua asteroid, he explores his scientific search for extraterrestrial technology, envisioning a future where a higher interstellar intelligence helps us improve life here on Earth.

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Figuring out what lies outside the solar system is astrophysicist Avi Loeb's passion and profession. Today, he reminds us that new scientific knowledge takes exploring. It doesn't just fall into our laps. His case for finding more evidence of what's

happening in our universe. After the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy. Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era,

and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. I want to tell you about a podcast I love called Search Engine, hosted by PJ Vogt. Each week, he and his team answer these perfect questions, the kind of questions that when you ask them at a dinner party completely derail conversation. Questions about business, tech, and society, like is everyone pretending to understand inflation? Why don't we have flying cars yet? And what does it feel like to believe in God? If you find this world bewildering but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, check out Search Engine with PJ Vogt, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, our TED Talk of the day. When I look up at the sky at night, I see a hundred billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy. They look like lights in cabins of a giant spaceship, the Milky Way, sailing through space. And I wonder if there are other passengers in those cabins. There are a hundred billion of them, comparable to the number of people who ever lived on Earth. It would be arrogant to think otherwise, that we are alone, that we are unique and special, especially if you read the news every day. We are not the pinnacle of creation.

There is room for improvement. I'm just a curious farm boy, and I wonder about the world around me. And I hate to behave like the adults in the room, because they often pretend to know more than we actually know. And that bothered me since I was a young kid. And so I decided to become a scientist and answer the questions based on evidence, not based on prejudice,

not based on the politics of getting the largest number of likes on social media. I don't have a footprint on social media. I enjoy nature. Whatever it brings to our doorstep is welcome. So let's just look around. And for 70 years, we've been searching for radio signals. This is equivalent to staying at home and waiting for a phone call that may never come, because nobody cares that we are lonely. It may also be that others are addicted to digital screens and they live in a virtual reality,

as we are at this point in time. A much better approach is to check if there is any object in our backyard that may have arrived from a neighbor's yard, like a tennis ball that may tell us that the neighbor plays tennis. And we haven't really checked until the last decade. The first object to have been reported by astronomers that came from outside the solar system looked really weird.

It was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii. When it passed close to Earth, it was the size of a football field. It looked really weird because, as it was tumbling every eight hours, the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of 10, which meant that it has a very extreme shape, most likely flat, like a pancake. And moreover, it exhibited a push away from the sun by some mysterious force,

because there was no evaporation, no cometary tail around it, no dust, no gas. So the question was, what is pushing it? And I suggested that maybe it's the reflection of sunlight. But for that, the object had to be very thin, like a sail. And that meant that it was not produced naturally. Maybe it's a surface layer.

Maybe it's space trash, like a plastic bag tumbling in the wind. And so we go back 70 years to a question that Enrico Fermi, the physicist, asked at Los Alamos, where is everybody? Well, this is a question that single people often ask. But if you stay at home, you will not find anyone. You have to go to dating sites. At the very least, you need to look through your windows for other people. And he didn't seek the evidence. He was just asking the question. Keep

repeating it. And if we don't look for evidence, we will not find anything. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a way to maintain our ignorance. And science is better than politics. We can find the evidence if we allocate the funds for it. The Tesla Roadster car that was put as a dummy payload on the Falcon Heavy launch of 2018, it's now moving in an elliptical orbit around the sun, and perhaps in 20 million years, it will collide with Earth. And if it will do so unexpectedly, some of my colleagues would argue this is a rock of a type that we've never seen before. We cannot see it with our best telescopes because it's too small.

It doesn't reflect enough sunlight. Oumuamua was the size of a football field, big enough for us to see. And so the next Copernican revolution would be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. Not only that we are not at the physical center of the universe, but actually, you know, we arrive to the play relatively late. We are not at the center of stage. The play is not about us. We should be modest. We keep thinking that it's about us, but it's not.

And we better find other actors that will tell us what the play is about. And people often say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they are not seeking the evidence. Actually, extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. Elon Musk argued recently, I don't see any aliens, but new scientific knowledge does not fall into our lap.

We had to invest $10 billion in the Large Hadron Collider in order to find the Higgs boson. We had to invest $10 billion in the Webb Telescope in order to find the Higgs boson. We had to invest $10 billion in the Webb telescope in order to find the first generation of galaxies. This is the way science is done. You need to put the effort in order to find something new. And only over the past decade, we discovered objects that came from outside the solar system. The first one was actually a decade ago.

It was a meteor, an object half a meter in size that collided with Earth and burned up in the atmosphere. It was spotted by U.S. government satellites. The fireball that it generated released a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. And it was moving too fast to be bound to the sun's gravity. And so we concluded, it's interstellar. It came from outside the solar system.

Could it be a Voyager-like meteor? Imagine our own spacecraft colliding with a planet like Earth in the future. It would appear as a meteor of unusual material strength and unusual speed, which are exactly the properties of this meteor from 2014. And then Oumuamua was discovered in 2017. And finally, a comet appeared, also from interstellar space, was moving too fast. And so my colleagues argued, well, this one looks familiar.

Doesn't it convince you that the others are natural in origin? Rocks of a type that we've never seen before? And I say, if I go down the street and I see a weird person, and after that I see a normal person, it doesn't make the weird person normal. Now, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, delivered three reports to the U.S. Congress talking about unidentified anomalous phenomena. The good news is the sky is not classified. We don't need to wait for the U.S.

government to tell us what lies outside the solar system. Their day job is national security. My day job is figuring out what lies beyond the solar system. And the sky is not classified. We can answer the question ourselves. So I'm leading the Galileo project. We built an observatory at Harvard University that monitors the sky 24-7, looking for objects that are not familiar. Not birds, balloons, drones, airplanes, satellites.

So far, we monitored half a million objects, haven't found anything unusual yet, but we keep looking. We are using machine learning software to figure out what we are looking at. And now, back to the episode. But the most exciting endeavor that I was involved in is an expedition to the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea NASA confirming at the 99.999% that this object indeed originated from outside the solar system based on its high speed. It was moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. It exploded in the lower atmosphere, about 90 kilometers away from Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. And that meant that the object had material strength tougher

than even iron meteorites. And so I led an expedition in June 2023 on the ship that was fittingly called Silver Star. And we used a sled with magnets on both sides to search for droplets left over from the explosion of this meteor and saw Netflix. They are preparing a documentary about this research. And the director asked me, Avi, it looks like you are running because I was jogging at sunrise, as I often do on land, for a few miles. And he said, are you running away from something or towards something? And I said, both. I'm running away

from some of my colleagues who have strong opinions without seeking evidence, and I'm running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space. Now, we used this sled and collected magnetic particles from the ocean floor about a mile deep, and then I brought them to my colleagues at Harvard University. They looked like metallic spheres, very distinct from the background of sand in which they were collected. And my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson, is a world-renowned geochemist. He used the electron microprobe, a mass spectrometer in his laboratory.

And he's a summer intern, Sophie Bergstrom, who found most of our molten droplets. And so I called her the Sferal Hunter. And most of our spherals were actually of a type familiar from the solar system, but about 10% of them looked unusual. And they had a chemical composition very different from solar system materials. They had abundances of elements like beryllium, lanthanum, uranium that are up to a factor of a thousand more than found in solar system materials. They were not from the Earth, not from the Moon,

not from Mars, not from asteroids. And so now the question arises, was this a rock from another star? And of course, one possibility is that there was a natural process that produced it. For example, most stars are dwarf stars, 10% of the mass of the sun, and they are 100 times denser than the sun. And so if you bring a planet like the Earth close to them, they spaghettify the planet, make a stream of rocks

that could be ejected at a speed similar to that of this meteor. But it's also possible that this object was of artificial origin, in which case, if we look for bigger pieces of the object, we might find a gadget with buttons on it. And I asked students in my class, if we find such a gadget, should we press a button? Now, some of my critics argued, maybe it's coal ash. So we looked at 55 elements from the periodic table and found that the abundances of elements are very different from coal ash, so it's not coal ash. Others argued, maybe it was not a meteor, maybe it was a truck.

Well, the data came from U.S. government satellites. We actually based our search region on the Department of Defense coordinates, and we went 26 times back and forth searching that region. So the next expedition, hopefully within the year, will search for bigger pieces of the object, maybe even the core of the object, because that could have a huge impact on humanity. We all know the biblical story about Moses, who looked at the bush that was burning without being consumed, with religious awe,

and that gave Moses the sense that there is a superhuman entity, God, out there. Now, Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1882, argued, God is dead. And that gave rise to the modern period of science and technology where humans have this hubris. They lack modesty. Nobody is smarter than us. We are at the top of the food chain. Maybe AI will do a little better. But AI is not just a digital mirror. It reflects our faults. It's nothing better than us. It's not a digital species. It's just us. And if we find a partner out there, of course, that will give a new meaning to our

existence. And it's a whole different ballgame. Something from another star has nothing to do with us, and we better be ready for that, not look at the mirror and imagine something like it, as science fiction stories do. Now, the good news is next year, the Rubin Observatory in Chile will survey the southern sky every four days with a camera that is the size of a person, 3.2 billion pixels, a thousand times more than your cell phone camera. And so if we find more objects like Oumuamua, it might give us a sense of modesty.

We might bring back this sense of awe that Moses had, except in this time, it will be based on something that was delivered from interstellar space, from a neighbor. And that is quite promising, actually, because it may change our priorities. Instead of spending $4 trillion a year on military budgets, killing each other for territories on this rock, the tiny rock left over from the formation of the sun, we might realize that there is a smarter kid on the block,

and that kid may provide a better role model than our politicians. And if we allocate $4 trillion a year to space exploration, we could send a CubeSat towards every star in the Milky Way galaxy, hundreds of billions of them, within one century. And it gets better than that, because if we find a superhuman intelligence out there, we might learn new physics. The first question I would ask is, what happened before the Big Bang?

And they might have quantum gravity engineers that are capable of creating a baby universe in the laboratory. And this job of creating a new universe can be perfected. And that would help us, actually, given that there is a lot of room for improvement in the world that we inhabit. Thank you. Thank you, Avi.

Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make

the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Avi Loeb speaking at TED 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner, Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessy. I'm Elise Hugh.

I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? Today, TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED games.