The Joe Rogan Experience - #2401 - Avi Loeb

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Avi Loeb, PhD, is a theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is "Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars." https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/ Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at https://happydad.com A House of Dynamite, now streaming only on Netflix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. All right, good to see you, sir. Great to be with you, Joe. It's a perfect time to bring you on because things are getting very wild. Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation. You know, some people said, I invented 3-Ey Atlas, this object, in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.

Is that what people are saying? say? Yeah, and I said, look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island. It's at four and a half times the Earth's sun separation. If I was able to put it out there, you know, I would be more powerful than the Pope. And because we're talking about a giant object that you can see from any place on Earth, you know, you can buy online a telescope that will allow you, half a meter in size that will allow you to see it. It's out there. It cannot be faked. Well, those people are fools. You can't listen to those people. I don't listen to those. I don't listen to many people, you know. Initially, a lot of people were dismissing your concerns, and they were saying that this object is nothing but a comet, and it's very normal. But then as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you're correct. This is a very unusual object. There is something really important to recognize here that usually when you deal with scientific

matters, they have very little impact on the future of humanity. Very little. You know, if the neutrino has a little bit of a mass, it doesn't really matter. You know, when we discovered the Higgs boson, the biggest impact was to confirm some idea we had back in the 60s. And, you know, obviously that affected, you know, those people who got the Nobel Prize. But most of us continued as if nothing happened. However, here, if we ever encounter. alien technology. Everything will change. It will affect the financial markets. It will affect politics in a major way. So my point is simple. This is different than other scientific matters and the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be

considered seriously because they have they could have major implications. Just think about October 7th. The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamasians, mass will do nothing. And they got data that indicated something is going on out there, but they dismissed it because of their theory. Now, because as a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot of people died on both sides that this could have been avoided if they were to consider a black swan event, an event that you put a small probability for it happening, but you look at

anomalies in the data and say, look, the implications are so huge, we have to consider it. And, you know, this idea was already considered by the philosopher, mathematician, Blaz Pascal. He talked about God. And he said, look, of course, you might think that God doesn't exist. The probability for that is small, but the implications, if God exists, the implications are so huge that we have to discuss it. That was the argument, Pascal's wager. And the intelligence agencies know that. Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again.

Now, here comes an object from outside the solar system, and it shows anomalies. The scientists would say we should be as careful as possible at talking about anything other than a rock. Now, they say that when they know that we launched humanity, launched a lot of space junk, you know, a lot of technological objects to space. And we also know that there are a hundred billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most of them formed billions of years before the sun, and there are billions of Earth's sun analogs. Now, we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals. You know, that's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this earth.

And so it's quite likely that, you know, we are not the first one. Sorry to break the news, Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. And therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us. And you can ask the question, how long does it take, our own technology, the Voyager spacecraft that we launched out of the solar system, how long does it take it to move to the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy? You know, thousands of light years away takes less than a billion years. And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it. And all we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks, or maybe one of these objects

might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor and the reason I say that is we live at our home on earth next to the sun we look around us in the cosmic street

and we see a lot of houses just like ours there are billions of them probably now my colleagues those scientists who think traditionally they say well you know microbes

came to Earth very early, therefore they must be everywhere. So let's define our highest priority searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street. And I say, good, you can do that from the vantage point of your home. You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor's yards, but you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument that would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes, you know, on exoplanets, and think about the possibility that there was, actually, there is a resident in one of those houses. You know, that resident might show up in your front door at some point, or you might see an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that resident.

A black swan event. A black swan event. Or you might see some construction project from a distance. that might be easier to detect than microbes. So we should hedge our bets. You know, we should invest billions of dollars on both fronts. At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10 billion to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence.

And I say that is an oversight. Now, they have found evidence of microbes on Mars, correct? Well, it's not conclusive. We need to bring materials back. It's called sample return, and NASA has plans. We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that do look as if they were made by microbes because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth.

By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body. so it has a bigger surface area for its mass. The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process, and then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool. And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth. So life may have started on Mars, actually, because it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water, and it could have been actually delivered to Earth. You know, we might be all Martians.

And when Elon Musk, you know, consider us going to Mars, it might be the second trip around. We might be going back to our childhood home because there were tiny astronauts inside rocks that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth and seeded the Earth with life as we know it. Panspermia. Yeah.

And in fact, you know, we can find out if we get this material back to Earth as NASA is planning to do, hopefully within a decade, then we can make sure that these were microbes and perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of process took place in both places. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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particularly the right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure? Yeah, I've seen the data. It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere right now. So what happens on Earth is that when an object roughly the size of a person, you know, or smaller, goes through the atmosphere, it burns up, creates a fireball, just like an atomic explosion, you know. And actually, you have an object of order emitter colliding with Earth every year. Every year there is an atomic explosion size, a fireball, in our atmosphere. It's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers,

so it doesn't do anything. And, you know, 71% of the Earth is covered by oceans. But yes, so these meteors, and, you know, they are quite important. Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by a giant impact by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island. And we are aware, by the way,

that such an impact could endanger us. And that's why the U.S. Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come close to Earth with a size bigger than a football field about 140 meters, so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. So we think we are smart. We can see these rocks coming. But just imagine alien technology.

It will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it. And that's a risk that was never attended to. And I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical Union to develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come from outside the solar system, like Three-Ey Atlas, that could, that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin. The structures on Mars, like what do you think when you look at them, when you see that one that looks like a square? I think it's very intriguing. Both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere, so the objects that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before, about Earth. And therefore, they serve as museums.

Okay, so any, you know, space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two billion years would not have burned in the atmosphere. It would have landed and we can, we need to check the surface. Even if we know that, you know, there wasn't any civilization out there over the past two billion years because conditions are really harsh. Mars may have collected technological debris from other civilizations because, it would stay on the surface. It's just like a museum. This is an enormous structure. It's at least they think, I think they think 300 meters, but possibly quite quite a bit longer.

Three-eye Atlas, the size of three-eye Atlas is at least five kilometers in diameter. And I derived it in a paper a couple of weeks ago because we know that it's losing mass. So it's mostly from the side that is facing the sun. and you would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction just like a rocket and I used

together with two colleagues 4,000 data points from 227 observatories around the earth of 3i Atlas that monitored its motion across the sky

and we were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity there is no evidence for this recoil And that means that the object is very massive. And I derived a value of 33 billion tons, a huge thing, which if you take solid density, it means it's more than five kilometers in diameter.

So when you mention a few hundred meters, that's nothing. And this object, by the way, was discovered just over the past decade of observing the sky. So who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the moon, because they are good museums and by the way I see that as their most important value let me just say one thing

about my fundamental point of view you know each of us would live for about 100 years if we are lucky right that's the kind of it's pretty depressing

right because there is so much we would like to know and we have only 100 years so and you know that already tells you that you need to be modest and humble because you don't have a lot of time, right? So why engage in conflicts? Why reduce the lifespan of other people, you know, in wars? It makes no sense all of this. You have limited time. Let's just use it for something constructive. Anyway, we are born on this rock,

which is just three millions of the mass of the sun. It's leftover material from the formation process of the sun. Some debris was left over in a disk. and the earth was made out of that. That's it. And it's just a speck of material, nothing significant. And this earth was moving around the sun 4.54 billion times before the Vatican even existed. And why do I say the Vatican?

Because the Vatican put Galileo in house arrest when he said, I don't think everything moves around the earth. I see some moons through my telescope. you know, I see some moons around Jupiter, and they don't seem to revolve around the Earth. They revolve around Jupiter, therefore the Earth is not at the center. So they put him in house arrest. Today they would have, you know, canceled him on social media.

And my point is that's the first sign that, you know, humans are, they want to think that it's all about them, you know, like, and it's not surprising. But the Vatican admitted their mistake. In 1992, they issued an official letter saying, Galileo was right. That was 350 years after he died. And, you know, it's the worst public relations affair that you can have to admit that you were wrong for, you know, like 350 years. And how could they have avoided that? Very simply, if they said, we have more money than Galileo,

we will build an even bigger telescope to figure out the truth. And we would prove him wrong. And then they would have found that he was right. And so then they would have corrected course. Or they would have put more people under house arrest. That's probably what they would have done. Yeah, so my point is it's really important. In cases like this or three-eye Atlas, it's really important to get as much data as possible.

Because once you reach a certain threshold, you can't shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking, the way that my colleagues do. Just to give you an example, the first interstellar object was Omuamua. Okay. And it was discovered 2017, and it was really strange because, you know, it was shaped like a pancake based on all the data we have. And it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any evaporation, no gas or dust around it. What did these conservative comet experts say most recently, just in December 2024?

paper of them saying, it's a comet. It's a dark comet. In other words, a comet where you can't see the cometary tale around it. So it's just like experts, you know, specializing in zebras. And they go to the zoo and they see an elephant. So then they say, oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes. And I say, no, it's a completely different animal. You know, a spacecraft would appear differently than a rock, than a comet, because it will not have a cometary tale. It could be propelled by something else. So let me go back to the big picture that I mentioned before. So we live on this earth, moving around the sun, and my colleagues in academia, you know,

one thing I often say is common sense is not common in academia, because my colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo, they know very well about the possibility of Black Swans, and they say, it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us, as smart as we are, near another star. And I say, no, it's an ordinary claim. Why would you think it's extraordinary? And by the way, if you decide not to collect evidence, not to look for it, then you will not find it.

So I say, and, you know, I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. you really need to put resources to find the evidence by not attending to this possibility by not imagining this and by the way I much prefer to listen to imaginative science fiction writers first class because they're much more interesting

than second class scientists who don't have an imagination and they don't they not only have a problem with discussing alien intelligence. They also have a problem with whoever discusses it, and they would try to suppress that voice. And I think it makes no sense whatsoever, because the public really cares about it. You know, my essays on Medium.com, they get a few million readers a month now. The public cares about it. The public fund science, therefore scientists should attend to this

question, are we alone? It's the most romantic question in science. You know, it's like, so just to finish my big picture before we get to tomorrow. So then, you know, we live on this planet. Everyone says, okay, we are not at the center of the universe, but we might be the only intelligent species out there. This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. A nice cold, happy dad is low carbonation, gluten-free, and easy to drink. No bloating, no nonsense. Whether you're watching a football game or you're golfing, watching a fight with your boys, or out on Lake, these moments call for a cold Happy Dad. People are drinking all these seltzers in skinny cans loaded with sugar, but Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in a normal size can. Can't

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okay? And it's just like the experience of my daughters on the first day to the kindergarten. At home, they thought that they're at the center of the universe because they had a, you know, their learning was based on a data set that was limited to home. It's just like LLMs, you know, artificial intelligence systems that learn from their, And they had limited environment and then when they went to the kindergarten, they realized our kids just like them, some are smarter. So we are yet to mature in that sense. And that's the big picture. Now, why is it so important for the future of humanity? Because, you know, the earth would not exist forever. By the way, when people talk about climate, global climate change and so forth, they don't realize, you know, the issue is not the earth. The issue is humanity, the future of humanity. And, you know, The earth itself would be very likely, based on detailed calculations, it will be engulfed by the sun in 7.6 billion years. And here is something that you won't find much discussed. The moon, because of the friction on the envelope of the sun, will crash back to Earth.

And then the Earth will move all the way to the center of the sun. Nothing will be left. No monument will survive 7.6 billion years ago into the future. future. And we have an obligation. If we want to be remembered in cosmic history, we have an obligation not to go to Mars. That's not really a great vision. Going to Mars is just like, you know, you have a group of chimpanzees living in the jungle, you know, on some trees and they have some bananas and so forth. And then one of the chimpanzees looks far, far away into the horizon and says, oh, look, up there, there is another region that we can go to.

And actually, it's clear that there are no bananas there. So the same is about Mars, you know, like Elon says, let's go to Mars to save humanity, but it's actually not a great place to be on. Yeah, you've got to start somewhere. You have to start somewhere if you want to populate a planet. So here is my point. Okay, here's your point. It makes much more sense for us to invest in building a platform in space.

that can accommodate humans, not rely on another rock that happens to be near us with much worse conditions. It's a desert, no atmosphere. So let's build a space platform, go on it, and make sure that it's safe for humans to live for long periods of time. We can produce artificial gravity by rotation. Now, you say, well, it will cost a lot of money, but we're spending $2.4 trillion dollars every year on military budgets, if we were just to change our priorities and say we want to build NOAC's spaceship, in analogy to NOAC's arc, to save humanity from the great flood or catastrophe that will happen on Earth, you build such, you put a fraction of these $2.4 trillion a year. And I'm willing to bet that within this century, our engineers,

architects, scientists. If you put a level of funding of a trillion dollars a year for the next several decades, we will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better than Mars can. Okay. I want to get back to Mars because the structures on Mars, why would you think that they came from space debris rather than a prior civilization? Because, well, Mars... Let's take a look at it first. Jamie, will you pull up those images? So what's fascinating about the images is the right angles, right? Like that one that, yeah, that's good.

Like, that's kind of crazy, isn't it? It is. And that doesn't strike me as something that landed there from space. It looks like a structure. It's just, it's too even. Yeah. Well, it could be. It could be if the evolution of intelligence on Mars was accelerated by a factor of two.

You know, that's not a big factor, factor of two, meaning that intelligence arose on Mars, two billion years after it formed, rather than, in the case of the Earth, 4.5 or so. Right. And, you know, one thing I really want to do is if I ever have a say or go to Mars, I would like to visit those caves, the lava tubes in Mars, because they are protected from the surface, you know, bombardment by cosmic crows. rays and all kinds of things happening, the ultraviolet radiation. So in those caves, I want to check if there are any prehistoric paintings or any technological objects there.

I completely agree with you. A factor of two is not a big deal. And you can ask also whether on earth there was a sophisticated technological civilization before us that somehow either through self-inflicted wounds or because of a natural catastrophe

disappeared. Well, there's a lot of people that think that, especially now that they're looking at the pyramids and these structures that appear to be underneath the pyramids that they're examining. Those Italian scientists that have found these structures that are up to two kilometers deep. Right. There's some wild stuff in Egypt. Well, I want to see that data. I haven't seen the paper itself. I just saw reports about it. But definitely on Earth as well. And the problem of Earth is that documented human history is only 8,000 years old. Right.

And 8,000 years, you know, it's just a millionth of the age of the Milky Way galaxy. It's nothing. Are you including things like Gobeckley-Tepe in that? Because that's 11,000 plus.

Yeah, but it's not really documented in written form, you know. Right. So I'm talking about, yeah. But you are correct that our knowledge of what happened on Earth is really limited because the human species existed for a few million years

and we have documentation at the level of 10,000 years, if you go back to that, it would be 11,000. Not a lot. Not much, more. Yeah. Well, the issue is actual evidence, right?

There's just not a lot of evidence because a lot of evidence just gets swallowed by the earth. Exactly. Especially over long periods of time, which is why it's so fascinating looking at that thing on Mars because if there was any kind of life

that was capable of building structures on Mars, it had to be a long time ago. Like, when was Mars, there's a bunch of theories. Maybe you can help me. Like, what do you think is the predominant theory that explains the lack of atmosphere on Mars? Do you think it was an impact?

No, Mars is a less massive planet than the Earth, and therefore it has less gravitational grip on its atmosphere. And as to why the atmosphere was lost, there are various ideas. You know, it may have to do with an eruption on the sun that removed it or the magnetic field, the lack of strong enough magnetic field

to retain the atmosphere. We don't know for sure, but we know it happened about two to two and a half billion years ago at the middle of its life. Can I ask you this? At two and a half billion years, was it closer to the sun?

No, no, no. It was roughly at the same place. Exactly the same distance? Okay. Yeah. And then... And then so two and a half billion years ago it lost its atmosphere.

Yes. So if it did have life, that life would have to, So we would have to be looking at something that's literally two plus billion years old, the remnants of a structure, which also seems kind of unlikely, right? It also seems like there probably wouldn't be much there. I actually did a calculation. The biggest risk for anything on the surface is all these impacts by asteroids. And I calculated that...

And micrometeers, everything, right, because there's nothing stopping. That's right, that's right. And I calculate the amount of energy over a few billion years that was deposited on the surface of Mars. is equivalent to, you know, hundreds of Hiroshima type nuclear explosions per square kilometer. It's really huge because you're integrating over billions of years. So that square probably wouldn't be there anymore. Well, there could be some relics that somehow stick, you know, like it depends what it was

originally, you know, the empire state building, you know, even after. enormous and made completely out of stone like the pyramids. Maybe that's what would be left of it. Maybe. I think we should be definitely open-minded and guided by evidence. That's the key. Well, that's what's interesting is because that is evidence. That is evidence.

We should go there, you know, clear the dust and see if it's just a rock that happened to be shaped like that. I mean, you could have rocks that are shaped like that. Let's bring it back to this. Is it 3A.I. Atlas? No, 3-I. Atlas. Three-I.

So three means it's the third object identified by survey telescopes. Over the past eight years, we didn't have the technology before that. And so we just don't know how much traffic there is of interstellar. We missed a lot. So we had, you know, the first survey telescope that found Omuamua was pan stars in Hawaii. And the reason it was constructed is because the U.S. Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to Earth. these are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on earth

we want to protect the earth so we want to know about them and they asked NASA and the National Science Foundation to search to build observatories that will search for such objects

and that's why Pan Stars was established and then it saw a near-earth object so they flagged it for that reason and they realized it's moving too fast

to be bound by gravity to the sun and that was Oumuumu And then it looked weird. Now, I had no agenda. I was working on cosmology. At the time, you know, I was working on black holes. I was the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard.

And Stephen Hawking had Passover at my home in 2016. This object was discovered a year later. And I said, well, okay, that's interesting. But it has anomalies, you know, the amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10. As it's stumbling, that's really strange. And I started getting more and more into the anomalies. So you had no previous to that, you had no real connection to the UAP phenomenon and nothing.

So you're just basing entirely on the data that you were getting from? Yeah. How do you say it, Omamua? Omoa, Muamua. And, you know, I am driven by curiosity. I'm no different than the kid that I was. I grew up on a farm and people who knew me back then say I didn't change. I'm not willing to change what I say just for political benefit or for just to be liked.

But I don't have any social media accounts. I don't care about that. But when something. Thank God. Somebody. Well, it's thanks to my wife, not God. My wife said, you should not have any footprint. So she's really wise.

She's wise. And that was more than a decade ago. Wow. She spotted the problem. real early. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Catherine Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of the Hurt Locker and Zero Dark 30, takes you deep inside the world of U.S. government and military, a world most of us never see, but that impacts us all. It's an authentic look at how America might respond to a nuclear attack, showing the human

side of impossible decisions under unimaginable stress. A house of dynamite, now streaming, only on Netflix. And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids. Yeah. It's really bad. By the way,

the main problem with AI that I see is not so much that, you know, they will bring calamity on their own. It's that they would drive people to do crazy stuff.

So they will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us the robots. You know, it will not need access to the physical world, it will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage. And we see that already. It's already happening with AI using

box on social media. And nobody is attending to that. And the question is, how do we suppress the amazing polarization that we see in society where, you know, bullets are being shot? Yeah. And I really worry about it because, and so humans may actually bring their own doom by self-inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their mind. I think you're right. I think in that regard, I think people need to stop using it. I really do. I just think it's not good for you. That's what I'm doing. I'm not using AI at all by then. You can use it sometimes, but I treat it like a glass of wine. Like, don't drink wine all day. You know, I'm working with students and every now and then a student delivers a paper to me to

look at, and I realize some of the references do not exist because I know the literature. You know, I ask the student, what is this? I've never heard about this paper. And the student says, oh, sorry. And it turns out the AI just took names of authors and fake a reference. And the same thing within the paper itself, there are statements that are clearly because the student was using AI. I'm really worried about that because the young people are not reading. They don't read history. So they go to protests that make no sense. They don't, and people say,

oh, that is always the youthful thing to do. But no, no, no. This one is triggered by misinformation. It's triggered. And it's organized. And it's organized. Exactly. And so that's one thing. But then they don't go to primary sources

to figure out the truth. They don't have critical thinking. And I really feel that this is a big risk. Because, you know, AI's getting more intelligent, but humans that use AI are getting dumber. Right. They don't think. So I think that, you know, the AI would supersede the cognitive abilities of humans

sooner than expected because humans are getting dumber. I mean, I see that. No, I don't think people are necessarily getting dumber, but I think they're getting lazy because of this. I think the human capacity is exactly the same. I think they need to be taught how to use it. Well, I get a lot of emails saying I collaborated with my favorite AI app and here is what it said. Yeah, but I think we need to teach people how to use it because it's a new thing.

And I think that's where a lot of the problem comes from. People are using it in a substitution for learning, you know, but you instead can learn from it. Right. But you've got to use it in that way. So there are two existential risks. in our future. One is artificial intelligence, AI. The second one is alien intelligence, also AI. And the question is, which one would arrive first? Let's go back to, I don't want one more time. Amua. Okay, I don't want to screw it up. How large was that? That was the size of a

football field. Of all the 100 meters. Small in comparison to 3i. Oh yeah, that's my point, that Three-I Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Oumuumuua. And I immediately, as it was discovered, you know, it was July 1st. And my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba two days later. And as I was going on the plane and as I arrived there, I realized, wait, that doesn't make sense

because we should have seen millions of Omuamua's before we saw this one. You know, it's so big. And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space, to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade. You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometers in diameter,

you would imagine once per 10,000 years. So I wrote immediately a scientific paper. My wife was not happy that on our vacation, I was sitting on my computer, but I just couldn't resist it. And by the way, this paper, I submitted for publication. That was July 3rd or something.

And then the editor said, oh, the paper is fine, but you have a concluding sentence at the end where you say, well, unless the object is smaller than estimated, maybe it was targeting the inner source. That was my solution to say, you know, one way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner source. by design, and indeed the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within five degrees. The chance for that at random is one in 500, okay? And it's moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini probes that will get into the planets. It gets close to Mars.

It gets close to Jupiter. It goes on the opposite side of the sun relative to Earth when it's closest to the sun. and that's the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the sun's gravitational assist. You know, all of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory. So I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying, maybe the trajectory was designed.

And the editor said, no, no, no. The paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence. Wow. So now, when you listen to, comet experts that say, well, this claim or that claim was never published in a peer review journal. Guess what?

They are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities. And I think it's inappropriate, especially in the case of alien technology, because it could be a black swan event. It could be something that affects the future of humanity. And if we behave, you know, very conservatively, we might not last very long. Well, it's also arrogant. It's arrogant. This object shows that there's no iron.

Oh, no. So, yeah, so then the composition of the plume of gas around. This is before you knew about the composition that you wrote this paper. Exactly. So as time is going on, you are being shown to be correct. Well, we found more anomalies. More anomalies. This is not a normal thing.

Not a normal thing. So for one thing, there was a glow that looks like an extended feature. And everyone said, oh, that's a tail. That's the signature of a comet. And I said, wait a minute. It's pointing towards the sun. It's not pointing away from the sun. Usually cometary tails are made of dust and gas, which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind.

You know, and so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun. And the question is, why? And actually, I calculated that, you know, it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope, which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the sun. But we were looking at it like a cigar. We were looking almost along the cigar long axis within 10 degrees of the object sun axis. So we were looking almost edge on. And I calculate if you were to correct for that,

this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide. And that means it's like a jet. So the object was had a jet in front of it towards the sun. The question is why. And, you know, the comet experts ignored it and just said, well, you know, comets are strange. You know, who knows? but my point is this is a blind date of interstellar proportions

and my advice on blind dates is not to speak or say what you think this is but to observe the other side. You know, the best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side. Don't speak. Just observe the other side because it may be different than what you think and maybe on one of the dates you will have a serial killer on the other side. Oh, boy. Now, explain, if you could, how we know the composition of this thing.

So we can figure out composition of a plume of gas by taking a spectrum of it, which means you basically have some kind of a prism that breaks, you know, that a light with different wavelengths is bent at different angles. And so you spread the light into the different colors. And if you do that, you can find the fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules, because each atom or molecule has transitions. I actually teach, I taught it just two days ago in a class that I teach that is mandatory, obligatory at the Harvard Astronomy Department, where I was chair for a decade, you know, like between 2011, 2020. So this is the mandatory class, and I just taught how spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules just two days ago. So this is a very well-known thing, and we know the wavelengths of those, and we use them to identify the composition.

We know which atoms produce these spectral lines, the fingerprints. It's just like fingerprints, okay? And so what was found, you know, and that's by multiple teams. There are three papers on that. We found nickel, a lot of nickel, but very little iron. At first, no iron whatsoever. Now, usually in all the comets in the past from the solar system and also from interstellar space, there is one comet Borisov that was found.

It's the second interstellar object, which looked just like a familiar comet. I had nothing to say about that one. It looked like a comet, behaved like a comet, it was a comet. But it had similar abundances of nickel and iron. only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially. For example, for aerospace applications, nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron. So maybe the skin of this object is industrially produced. That was my suggestion. But what the authors of these papers said is maybe nature is capable of going through the same

chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries. So they made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway, which is well known in the industry world, carbonyl is the pathway, in the name of the pathway, they said, well, maybe this carbonine pathway happens in nature. We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation. Is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy? No, it's not an alloy. It's just that somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed.

Nobody would argue that, you know, you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they're produced together in exploding stars. And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, ten times more by mass. And so we just don't know, as in the case of this jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tail. now over the month of September. And also, you know, why was it changing structure? It's not clear. There are lots of anomalies.

There was also a very negative polarization of the light. And also two weeks ago, I realized the arrival direction of 3A Atlas was within nine degrees of the wow signal that was detected in 1977, which was an enigmatic, powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this earth. We don't know from where. It was coming from a source that was approaching the sun. And the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of Three-Ey Atlas is 0.6%. And I just said, well, that's interesting because Three-Ey Atlas was at the distance of three

light days from the earth at that time, you know. and you just need about the output of a nuclear reactor on Earth, a gigawatt or so, to produce such a radio signal. By the way, Voyager, as of now, is one light day away from Earth. Just think about it. One light day are, you know, the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away, and the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we are talking about tens of thousands of light years,

So one day out of tens of thousands of years, that's the difference between the distance that we managed to breach so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard. Right. Now, have we ever observed things in the past that have changed their tail like this? So there are fake... They're gone from a jet to a tail. This is called an antitail when it's pointing towards the sun.

there were optical illusions in a situation where, you know, there is a tail which is pushed away from the sun by radiation and solar wind, but you're observing it as the Earth goes through the orbital plane of this object, of this comet, and you are seeing it from a perspective that it looks as if the tail is pointed at the sun, but in fact it's just a perspective thing. It's an optical illusion. And there were cases like that. That was seen. But as far as I know, none seen in a situation where it's clear.

And in three-eye Atlas, it was very far from the sun and earth, and we saw it towards the sun. There cannot be an optical illusion under these circumstances, because it was approaching both the earth and the sun, roughly at the same direction. So I'm not aware of another. But most importantly, you should look at the response of the comet-examination. But community to that anomaly, they say, well, comets are strange. We don't know. Maybe these are dust particles that are very big so they don't get pushed back much. But then how do you scatter sunlight?

Usually you need particles that have a size of the odor of the wavelength of the light that is being scattered. That's the most efficient process. And when you have dust particles, the ones that have, you know, sub micrometer dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight. So why, in this case, you will have only big ones that are not getting pushed back? It could be fragments of ice that are scattering the sunlight that have nothing to do with dust, but those fragments of ice get evaporated, and so they don't have enough time to turn back, you know? I wrote two papers on that, trying to explain it. But my point is, many scientists are not curious.

You would find it surprising. Why are they not curious? Why are they not willing to consider alternative explanations to what is commonly thought? And it's because they're afraid of taking any risk. You know, and I came from a background where I worked in cosmology, trying to figure out puzzles. Like most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't know what it is. You know, we call it dark matter. It's just to reflect our ignorance.

You know, Nobel Prizes were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is. These are constituents whose nature is unknown. And just think about it, giving a Nobel Prize to people who just said how ignorant we are. We don't know what these things are. Ordinary matter makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe. And in this culture of cosmology,

I worked in for three decades, it was completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies. I mean, the dark matter is an anomaly. You don't know what it is. And people were rewarded for coming up with ideas, imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally. That's the way you make progress. You don't know something.

You are putting on the table possibilities, and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one. And that was the culture. And I think of it as the culture of chess players. Okay. Okay. Trying to figure out things. When I get to work on comets, you know, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology.

I encounter, you know, a culture of mud wrestlers. It's different from chess players. And, you know, I don't want to mad wrestle. I don't want to get dirty. I don't respond to the, I learned my lesson with Omuamua. I don't respond to those people because once we collect, I just want as much evidence as possible so that they would not be able to shove the anomalies

under the carpet of traditional thinking. That's my motivation. So I'm inspiring a debate right now and there is a huge interest in that debate so that we will collect as much data as possible so that by the end of the day we'll figure out what our dating partner is. if it happens to be a rock

you know on the other side of the table you go on a date and you see a rock so be it if it's something else that has huge implications and therefore we should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible

what is it about your field in particular that you think motivates mudslinging like why are they averse to risk and why do they not just Why are they not just averse to risk, but why they are attacking you for proposing what seems to me to be a reasonable alternative, considering the possibilities given all the planets and stars that we know are out there? Well, I got a hint for the answer to your question.

When I wrote the first paper on a Muamua, I suggested it might be technological. Right. And the paper got accepted for publication within three days, record. the reviewer said this is a great idea because it's consistent with all the data we have it's most likely a flat object and therefore it could be pushed by reflecting sunlight which was my proposal then the media came to my door and people started asking me a lot of questions I got you know I got well known at that point the attacks the personal attacks started. So it's jealousy.

Yeah, it's and, you know, but I can tell you that I learned my lesson. You can't respond. I just ignore it. And let me give you a few anecdotes of what happened to me this week, just this week. Okay. Okay. Please. Tomorrow, I'm supposed to

go to California. There is a NASCAR car race where one of the racers decided to put my image with 3i Atlas with the Galileo project that I'm leading on his car. So let me show you some

images. Yeah, show me the image because what is the current best image of 3-Ey Atlas? Oh, we will get to that. So here you see the car and he promised to let me drive it during the just before the race. Who is this guy? Kevin Harvick.

No, Kevin Harvick is the name of the... What is the driver's name? Alex Malik. Alex Malik. Yeah. And he contacted me out of the blue. man? Yeah, he's just a big fan. Oh, that's cool. And I will go there. He's very smart of him, right? Because that's definitely going to get you a lot of attention. Yeah, so he just sent it to me this morning. This is in the shop where they put all these things on it and tomorrow I'm going to drive it. What is Comet Lemon in the back? Oh, that's just another comet. So he's like a Comet fan on this guy.

By the way, I told him that the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than 3i Atlas, 600 times. So, you know, it's a comment. complement to me to be featured on his car, but 3-A Atlas doesn't care much because it's already moving 600 times faster than his car can move. But let's move to... That is cool, though. So this is tomorrow. That image, though, that's you with a spinning world, right? That's the globe. And my name, so the car is called Avi Logue now.

Nice. Yeah. Can we move to the next image? I'll show you another. You're very excited about this. I like it. Yeah. So this is an image taken two days ago in my office.

at Harvard. Again, I was contacted out of the blue by an artist, a very distinguished artist, accomplished, named Greg Wyatt in New York City, who donated two sculptures made of bronze of Galileo. You see them in the front. They were delivered to my office just a few days ago. And in the background, you see what are colors that he made, each of them, there are 51 of them that he donated. All of this, he donated to me at no cost. He wants it to be displayed in my office because these watercolors display famous scientists that pioneered New Frontiers. And he includes a statement from each of these scientists, which are really educational for the students and postdocs that work with me. I should tell you, I got an email from a U.S. Air Force pilot.

His daughter, Ariana, said to him, he wrote me an email and said, because of you, My daughter wants to become a scientist now. She saw you on television, and now she only speaks about aliens. You know, two days later, I speak with a reporter from the London Times, and he puts out his report and says, I read the report for half an hour to my kids, and they told me they want to become scientists. And, you know, this is another thing that are two things that are missed by my colleagues.

One, it's an opportunity to excite the kids to get into science. You know, that's an amazing. I mean, when we discovered the Higgs boson, you know, it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the 60s. The Nobel Prize was awarded. But I bet you that the daughter, Ariana, the daughter of the U.S. Air Force pilot, would not be inspired to become a scientist because it's very abstract. Here, there is a connection.

So that's one thing that is missed. And, of course, the second one is, here is. a subject that the public cares about and the public fund science, so we should attend to that. Of course. It's our obligation as scientists. Of course. You know, I always, since I started science, which was by chance, by the way, I wanted always

to become a philosopher, but circumstances led me because I led a project that was funded by the Star Wars Initiative of President Reagan. It was the first international project. And then that brought me into astrophysics because I was offered a position at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study where Einstein was faculty a few decades earlier. So it all, it was an arranged marriage. But I felt that even though it's an arranged marriage, I'm married to my true love because I can address philosophical questions using the scientific method.

And I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I'm different. You know, I'm just, but. Well, you're willing to take chances. It's not just that. Not even chances. You're willing to propose things. that might be ridiculed. Well, I think about the big picture.

You know, the one thing that I mentioned in my book, extraterrestrial, is on the first day of school, I showed up to the class, and I saw the kids jumping up and down on the tables in the classroom. And I looked at them and I said, does it really make sense to jump up and down? Like, what are they trying to accomplish by doing that? And then the teacher came in and looked at everyone jumping and said,

quiet down look at Avi he's so well-behaved you should all behave like him and I wanted to tell her I'm not well-behaved you know this was not the reason why I didn't jump up and down

I was just trying to figure out why they are jumping up and down and if it made sense I would jump up and down I don't care about your rules and that pretty much defines me you know I'm thinking about the big picture and if my colleagues are doing something

that doesn't make sense I don't give it that So let me ask you this. Once the understanding of the composition of Three-Eye Atlas, once that was out and people recognize that this is a very unusual object, have more people started to consider what you're saying? Yeah, I get a lot of people sending me... In the academic world? Also in the academic world. Those are people that say we are inspired by what you're doing. They keep sending me emails saying, keep doing it. It's an inspiration to all of us. But this is privately. Is anybody publicly supported you?

So the young people, you have to understand, the biggest damage of this harassment or scrutiny or ridicule or personal attacks, I don't care about it. You know, my skin is by now titanium. I don't really feel much. The issue is really that it, and that's the purpose of these attacks, is they want to discourage other people, young people from deviating from the beaten path. So they keep the herd in a tight configuration. And the risk from that is, you know, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics, you know, like half a century ago. By the way, I lived throughout half of modern physics, roughly. Half of modern physics.

So half a century ago, it was thought that there is a symmetry of nature called supersymmetry and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry because it's stable. And everyone said, that must be right. And lots of castles were built on this foundation, including string theory that was assuming this to be true. And then the large Hadron Collider at CERN was built for $10 billion, search for supersymmetry, and didn't find it. Now, what is the lesson? Yes, it was a beautiful idea. And sometimes nature is not what we think it is. Okay, so we should not ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing

because the mainstream makes mistakes. This was, I mean, a lot of money and effort went to that. There are thousands of papers basing their analysis or mathematical constructions on supersymmetry. And a lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well, right? Yeah, but the point is if you allow people to follow not just the beaten path, but other paths, you have a better chance of discovering something new because we cannot

I mean Einstein made three mistakes between 1935 and 1940 he said black holes probably do not exist he said gravitational waves probably do not exist and he said quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance and all

three received Nobel prizes for the teams that proved him wrong those are Nobel Prizes from the past decade three teams doing different types of experiments and observations. But did Einstein was wrong to assume, to make assumptions or claims that turned out to be wrong? No, because that's the nature of working at the frontier.

You make mistakes. Every now and then, you know, you might be right, and that will be a breakthrough. But you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks. And it's really, I mean, the whole idea of tenure in academia was based on, on the proposition that you want people to take risks so that they don't have job insecurity. They don't worry about their, so what these zealots, I call them, say is,

you know, we don't want people to deviate from the beaten path because we base our stature, we base our honor's awards and so forth on past knowledge. We don't want new knowledge unless it's proven beyond any doubt. But how would it be proven And if you keep ridiculing anything different, you know, those experts, most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky.

And then in 1803, there was a meteor shower in Liege and Bayot, a French physicist realized it's real. There are rocks falling from the sky. Now, all my colleagues say, there could be only rocks in the sky. You know, we know that we launched some spacecraft, but, you know, we're probably alone. And it doesn't make sense. But let me just mention a few other anecdotes from the past week because I didn't really finish. So, Jamie, can you show the next one? What is it?

This one is about Sphere in Las Vegas. As you know, it's the most impressive venue for entertainment in the world. Have you been there? Have you seen a show there? I'll tell you. Not only I've been, I've been to the top of the sphere, which is like a hundred, 120 meters high. Here you see me from inside the sphere.

This is the exosphere. By the way, it's covered with LED displays. We went all the way to the top. Why? Because a year ago, two very distinguished visitors came to the front door of my home. By the way, lots of interesting people show up at my front door. This was Jim Dolan, who owns the Madison Square Garden, as you know, and also the sphere.

And Jane Rosenthal, the CEO of Trebekah enterprises, and they made me an offer that I cannot refuse. And they said, would you be able to put a Galileo Project Observatory? I'm leading the Galileo Project to look for unusual objects around the Earth. And they said, could you build an observatory on top of the sphere? Because, you know, Jim Dolan really is interested in science and especially in finding, you know, whether there is some alien intelligence. out there. And I said, of course, I will be delighted. So that was September 2024, one year after the sphere was opened with a U2 concert, as you may know. I don't know if you've been there. I've been there for the UFC. Yeah, UFC, exactly. So

anyway, I was there just a few months ago with my research team. We went all the way to the top and installed, as you can see here, an array of infrared camera that monitors the entire sky above Vegas at all times. So you can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background. It's like a freckle, you know, on top of the sphere, the exosphere, which is the biggest display on Earth, you know.

But we measured that there is not much light pollution, actually, and we can operate this observatory. We also put an array of visible light cameras there, and it's operating, okay? and we hope to see a few million objects over the sky of Vegas and decide whether any of them has performance that deviates from the envelope of human-made technologies. How do we do that?

We have the sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that observatory 10 kilometers away on a triangle. And that allows us to look at objects in the sky from different directions, just like we have two eyes so we can gauge the distance. So here we have three eyes looking at the sky above Vegas, and we can tell the distance, the velocity, the acceleration of objects and ask whether they are lying within the performance envelopes of human-made objects.

And that would be amazing. It's very exciting. I see that also as an opportunity to communicate to the public, the excitement about science. That's what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal really wanted to deliver. and I'm hoping that we will find something really anomalous, you know, because, as we know, the intelligence agencies are reporting to the U.S. Congress about objects they cannot identify. And, you know, that could be two things. They're getting, you know, the defense budget for 2026 is a trillion dollars, okay?

If they tell us that with a trillion dollars, there are still objects they cannot identify above the U.S., they're not doing their job. they're not doing their job and we should be worried who send these objects could it be adversarial nations okay that's one possibility

which has to do with national security the second possibility is that it's maybe something from outside of this earth which would be even more significant

so either way we need to figure this out and I don't think I'm wasting my time leading the Galileo project to figure out whether there are anomalies you know

that go beyond beyond human-made technologies, because if it turns out that all the objects are human-made, I will be happy to deliver the set of sensors we developed with the machine learning software that we developed to the Department of War so that they can employ it for national security purposes. So my time was not wasted as a scientist. I'm doing something useful to society. The Department of War can use it. Have no problem.

Everything made by humans, by the way, is boring, as far as I'm concerned. I want to see something from outside the solar system, which is not what the government should be about. The government should worry about national security, not about what lies outside the solar system. That's my job definition as an astrophysicist, okay? And so I feel that this is worthy pursuing, but the Galileo project is really the first organized project

that constructed a reliable set of sensors in an observatory configuration. that does systematic study of the sky to collect millions of objects in the sky per year. We have three observatories. One in Las Vegas, as I mentioned. And by the way, this is the first time it's mentioned publicly.

That's amazing. And another one in Massachusetts and a third one in Pennsylvania. They were all funded by people who approached me and said, here is the money. Let me ask you this. If it wasn't for those,

How many observatories are looking for objects that are not from this earth? Like, is that very rare? None? Well, there are some teams that are, you know, making a trip to collect some data. There is, of course... But there's not constant observation. Of scientific quality data, no. That's crazy. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more.

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And by the way, by the way, I gave a briefing to the U.S. Congress on May 1st, 20, 25 and Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was there and and she was very excited about the work we are doing but the day before that I visited an office in the Pentagon that is called the all-domain anomaly resolution office and I asked them you know you looked into all these unidentified objects reported in the past by military personnel did anything trigger your attention as something truly anomalous. And they said, not really. There are some, you know, there are some reports by FBI agents that saw really crazy stuff, but we don't have any data

from instruments. And this is an office within the Pentagon, which is funded to figure out things. And so obviously what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo project that I'm leading. but you would think that it would be sort of the vested interest of government, you know, to invest in research related to that, which is what the Galileo project is doing. Well, here's the thing. I would have thought it was already done. I don't know. Until we're having this conversation, I can't believe that they're not monitoring this guy

constantly for anomalous objects. Well, you remember the Chinese spy balloon that was missed, right, and shut down? Yeah, but that was silly. So the thing to keep in mind, they are getting data on things in the sky. But if you don't have the right software now with AI, if you don't have high-quality scientists the way that the Manhattan Project employed, you might not figure out things. There is a reason why the Manhattan Project recruited the very best scientists. So I say, put a billion dollars on this or more, bring in the best scientists in the world to figure it out. I am funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galileo project.

The government can do a bit. What is a billion dollars? It's a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon. But if, you know, you should think about the potential risk from drones that are used by adversarial nations. And you want to have the very best sensors using the very best AI algorithm. I just can't believe that that's not already being done. That's what's so confusing. I would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already.

Especially when you take in all these anecdotal stories, all these different stories of people spotting some sort of a ship, something, something that moves in a very strange way. I would think that they're monitoring this stuff all the time and not just with radar. You see, there is an approach which is to wait for the government to figure out things or to release declassify them. So a lot of people want the government to declassify them. classify. I think it's just like waiting for Godot. You can wait forever. Right. And it will never happen. So I say, you know, we don't need the government to tell us what is up there in the sky because astronomy is all about that. We can build observatories. Look at the sky. Anything that is human made is not of interest to me. It's boring. I don't care. You know, I just want to see if there is anything that. Well, it's boring up to a point if China has something that moves at, you know, Mach 30. Yeah. And can go. underwater.

Yeah. Things get very interesting. So my methodology should definitely be used by the Department of War to figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned. And by the way, speaking about my colleagues, you know, so there are people who said, oh, you're doing it to win the Nobel Prize. That's what you're, or you're trying to sell books. You know, I don't charge a penny for my essays on Medium.com.

money is not at all what motivates me. With respect to the Nobel Committee, I have the same attitude as Jean-Paul Sartre had and Bob Dylan had. If I find evidence for alien intelligence, alien technology, I would not waste my time in a tuxedo in Stockholm. I will try to figure it out. That's much more important than an award given by a human to a human.

We're dealing with something really consequential. And for the scientific community to ignore that, is irresponsible. Why is it irresponsible? Because it could affect the future of humanity. Well, I think the problem with the scientific community is the problem with all communities. They're overrun with ego. I agree. And as I explained at the beginning.

It's just human beings when they get to a position of any kind of authority, any sort of a position of respect and prestige. They want to protect that at all costs. And they want to keep everyone down who they think is getting unwarranted attention above them, like yourself. But given the fundamental landscape that we live in, as I mentioned at the beginning, we live for a short time,

we're not at the center of the universe. We arrived late to cosmic history. You know, we just arrived in the last few million years out of a 13.8 billion years history, billion years history. You know, the cosmic play is not about us. If you arrive late to the play, at the end of the play, you are not at the center of stage. It's not about you, okay?

And our responsibility needs to be, you know, to find other actors that were around for much longer because they know what the play is about. Yes. And let me ask you this. Have you seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited? The only data I'm aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies of Omuamua, of Three-I Atlas, which are very different anomalies. And there was also a meteor that I discovered with my former undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, a meteor that was identified by U.S. government satellites back in 2014,

and it was moving so fast that it definitely came from out. the solar system and my colleagues were very concerned and they said we don't believe the US government so maybe Jamie can show us I said okay at the time I was chairing the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies why didn't they believe the US government about this because all the previous meteors they thought must have been from the solar system and therefore you know and the US government also makes mistakes every now and then they said government, what department was observing us? This is the Space Force, the U.S. Space Command.

So what I did is at dinner. What year was this? This was around 2020. And I expressed my frustration at dinner as chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies. And there was a member there from Los Alamos National Laboratory. And he said, let me help you. We managed to reach out to the U.S. Space Command through the White House at the time, and we got an official letter from the U.S. Space Command saying we looked at the data and we can verify the 99.999% that this object, this meteor, which was roughly half a meter in size, came from outside the solar system. That's what they said. At that point, I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean where the explosion was

identified from the fireball, there was a huge amount of light, to go there and search for the materials from that object because it was moving fast. It was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the solar system, very similar to three-eye Atlas. So it was fast. And moreover, the object maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere. It didn't explode until it got within 20 kilometers of the surface of the ocean. So it must have been extremely tough, much tougher than all the previous meteors cataloged by NASA. Okay, so I can show you some images from that trip to the Pacific Ocean. Actually, it was documented by Netflix,

and there will be a documentary coming out within a year. Next year, 2006, this was the team of researchers that came with me on the deck of the ship, and we collected materials with a magnetic sled. This is a sled with magnets on top of it. You can see the Netflix team. at the lower left here. And then I brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here.

I shipped it by FedEx to my home. This was a one and a half million dollar expedition. Why would you ship it by FedEx? Why wouldn't you just carry it with you? Because I was worried that somewhere in the airport, they would say, no, we have to confiscate that. But don't they know who you are? Can't you get somebody to call in? I don't want to take any risk.

So it's just a bunch of metal? What did you find? Here, you can see the material. So it's mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean, two kilometers deep, you know, one mile or so, a little more than a mile. And then I found these, you know, we found these molten droplets, you see, that are very distinct relative to grains of sand. And we isolated them. I had a, you can go to the, you can see here these molten droplets. And it turns out that 10% of them did not have the composition of materials from the solar system.

And so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson. And I had a summer intern, Sophie Berkshom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis. How did my colleagues respond to that? They said, oh, he went to the wrong place because there was a seismic signal that could have been misidentified and could have been a truck passing nearby. And so a reporter from the New York Times said, oh, they went to the wrong place because it was not a meteor, it was a truck. And I wrote to the report and I said,

how irresponsible are you? You didn't even ask me, the data that led us to this place was based on the fireball, on the light that was detected by U.S. government satellites. And the U.S. Space Command confirmed the location. It was not based on the seismic detection of the signal. We just looked and found this. So it seems like your colleagues are

contacting the New York Times to try to dismiss you. I wrote to the editor at the time and said, look, if this is what you write about science, how can we trust what you write about politics? Right. Yeah. So these objects, these very small molten droplets, what did you determine from them? We found that 10% of them had a chemical composition, different than solar system materials that were found before and again my colleagues some of them said oh they found coal ash you know the burnt material from coal so we said okay well let's check we identified 61 elements from the periodic table and showed that it's definitely not coal ash and then they said it's something else from the crust of the earth we

check that it's not from the crust of the earth it's a a An endless battle to basically, I mean, they can throw mud without having access to the material. But I don't understand. This is a known meteorite. It hit Earth. You collected pieces of material from the scene where it hit. Right. And they still want to dismiss it. Yeah. They say the government cannot be trusted. They raise a lot of dust. If you raise a lot of dust, you can say, I don't see anything. Well, you get the New York Times involved, too, which is even stupider. That's so crazy. It is crazy. It is jumped in without contact. This is the landscape I have to operate in.

And the one thread through this landscape is that common sense is not common. Right. Well, it seems more than that. It seems like a coordinated attack. It seems like a bunch of people have a personal vendetta. Yes. Which is probably based on some petty jealousy. And also, they just don't like people stepping ahead of them.

You know, I told my students in the class, I said, on the first class, I said, What is the strongest force in academia? It's not gravity. It's not electromagnetism. It's jealousy. I would hope it's curiosity. That's what sucks. That's what brought me into science.

Well, that's what you display. And I'm naive. I don't change my reason for doing something just because other people misbehave. I feel like I'm attending a party where the attendees are misbehaving. and all I can hope for is for a guest to show up and change the situation. You know, one reason I'm seeking intelligence in interstellar space is I don't often find it in academia. Well, I think addressing it helps. I think what you're doing helps.

I think these kind of conversations do help because I don't think a lot of people are aware of the kind of resistance that you face. I know it's a lot of what you discussed and I wish it was less, but it's important for people. to know that you have to go through this kind of nonsense? Well, I don't really... Especially when you think this object, 3i Atlas is weird. Yeah. It's weird.

You know, I served in the Israeli military, and we parachuted, we drove tanks. I was in a special unit that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24, and then the SDI, the Star Wars Initiative, President Reagan, brought me to the U.S. And I remember while serving in the paratroopers, that there was a saying that sometimes you have to put your body on the barbed wire so that your friends, colleagues, soldiers

can cross. Climb over your back. Yes. And as long as I allow young people to innovate, as long as I attract kids to science, I did my job. It's not about me, you see. It's about humanity getting better.

And it will not get better with AI. as we discussed, it could get better with alien intelligence because we will realize that there is something else out there that is more accomplished than we are. So it will serve as a role model.

You know, in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche said, God is dead. And since then, we had a century of modern science and technology where we feel hubris. You know, we are our gun, you know, we are at the top of the

chain. You know, we go to restaurants, we eat other animals that are less intelligent than we are. But just think about it, if it turns out, that we are not at the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy. There is someone more intelligent than us. If that someone comes to visit Earth, will we be served in their soup? I wouldn't think so. I would think there's plenty of other things to eat that aren't intelligent.

I mean, that's sort of the deal that we make here. We eat things, but we try not to eat intelligent. things, which is not entirely true because we eat a lot of octopus. Yeah, I had this dilemma in Boston. Quite intelligent. Yeah. And then there's a lot of people

in indigenous tribes that really prefer monkey meat. You know, those are human beings that love to eat monkeys. That gets a little weird too. But I don't think they're going to travel all the way over here to eat people. I think if we were that delicious,

we would be eating each other a lot more often. It's probably a situation where we are just like ants in the cracks of a pavement and there is a biker passing by. And we are trying to make sounds and, you know, get attention. We think it's about us. It's always about us, according to us. But it's not about us.

Well, it's not about us cosmically when you take into consideration the vast spans of the universe. But if I was an intelligent species and my curiosity led me to explore other intelligent species and they were far more advanced than us, I think they would find us quite fascinating. That was the argument that I got into with Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he was like, I don't think we're that interesting. They would visit us. You have to keep in mind, he's not a practicing astrophysia. He's not writing scientific papers. I write a paper almost every week. I'm in the trenches doing science.

It's very different. It's just like, you know, you have soccer players and you have commentators on the bench, you know. And you can be a commentator popularized science. But the difference is that as a commentator, you will never score a goal. Well, that's my position as a UFC commentator. I don't get in there and fight people. I understand. Check out the big stars, big series, and blockbuster movies.

Streaming on Paramount Plus. Cue the music. Like NCIS, Tony and Ziva. We'd like to make up your own rules. Tulsa King. We want to take out the competition. The substance. This balance is not working.

And the naked gun. That was awesome. Now that's a mountain of entertainment. Paramount Stand the fighting I can do my best to help explain it to people but I don't do it

So yeah You know a few months ago A few months ago I was at a gathering And there was a cocktail hour And it was with celebrities And I saw Margot Robby standing And of course I have nothing to offer

You know like What kind of opening line Would I start a conversation I didn't know how to start a conversation. So I was just standing on the side, and then someone came with my book, Interstellar, and said, would you mind signing it for me? And so I signed the book, and she noticed it,

and she came over and said, are you Avilob? I really wanted to hear more about what you're doing. And we started the conversation for 20 minutes. Then I gave my talk, and Jerry Brookheimer was in the audience. He is one of the most accomplished, you know him. he came afterwards and said

I just finished F1 you know the movie and my next one is about a scientist like you searching for UAPs and trying to figure them out and then I saw Brody

Adrian Brody was standing there and he told me I really want to become a scientist I always wanted to become a scientist I said it's not too late and then I went to Jerry and said look he should be your leading actor because Adrian And really wanted to be casting calls.

Look at that. Figuring it out for them. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, look, science fiction is one of the most popular genres of films ever. Because everybody has curiosity about it. But nature might be much more imaginative than the best scriptwriters in Hollywood. Very likely. And so if we look up, we might get a much better movie.

and there is actually the Rubin Observatory funded by the National Science Foundation Department of Energy in Chile. It was inaugurated in June this year. Is that the VLT array? No. The VLT is a very large telescope by the European Southern Observatory. But this one was funded by the US

and it has a 3.2 gigapixel camera monitoring the southern sky every four nights and it's an amazing survey telescope And by the way, sphere has a display that is the biggest in the world of 14,000 by 14,000 pixels. That's a factor of 13 less pixels than the Rubin camera has observing the real sky. Now, Rubin will potentially, based on estimates, discover an interstellar object like 3i Atlas or even smaller, every few months. So we are entering a new era where we will have a lot of visitors that we recognize. There might have been traffic all the time that we were not aware of.

Probably, right. And my recommendation is to establish an organization. I wrote to the United Nations about it. I wrote also to the International Astronomical Union to establish an organizational committee that would coordinate observations of these objects so we can figure out their nature and make sure. And then, of course, inform policymakers, politicians, to respond because when you have a visitor to your backyard you need to respond immediately it's not like getting a radio signal from tens of thousands of

light years away where you have plenty of time to wait here you have to do something and then so I hope that they will do that and actually the international asteroid warning network just two days ago announced they will have a campaign looking at three eye atlas with a lot of observatories on earth between November 27th and January 27. So I'm very glad that they decided to do that. They are related to the United Nations. Now, what is it about Chile? Is it the atmosphere? Is it the altitude? As a result of geology, there is this stretch of mountains that was erected. And if you look at the map of Chile, it's sort of flying on a strip. And not only that the peaks reach a very

high levels so that you have less atmosphere between you and the stars. I mean, the real problem right now is actually Starlink satellites that are artificial lights in the sky and we have to subtract them off because there are, you know, there will be tens of thousands of those.

We're trying to avoid city lights by going to these mountains and then we have city lights in the sky. But other than that, it's less atmosphere so it's good to be high up and in addition it's not very turbulent. The weather is very good there, so there is the Atacama Desert, and there are many astronomical observatories there. And the other place where you have a lot of state-of-the-out facilities is Hawaii.

The Keck. The issue there is that there are severe political limitations because of the indigenous people there that are assigning religious sentiment to the mountains. So they cannot build more telescopes there. So Chile, I mean the government in Chile is encouraging science and we are getting a lot of useful data from Chile. Yeah, it's we need more of it, right? We need quite a bit more, we need some much more enhanced ability to observe the skies.

If these things are out there and we do miss a lot of them and one of them could potentially be a civilization ender, Yeah, I think he should probably be aware of that. I think also the president of the United States should be aware of that. Yeah, he should be. Have you ever talked to him? I haven't talked to him, but I spoke with others. You know, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, congressman.

Are they all aware of Tim Burchett? Well, in fact, Luna, Representative Luna, she called me on the phone a couple of months ago and asked me for an update on 3i Atlas, and I promised to send her routine updates. I, you know, I have essays that I write every day or two about the latest, and she's very interested. And, you know, I did communicate with people around the White House, but I think the president should be aware of that. Of course, most likely, most objects would be just rocks, you know. Right. By the way, this is the material that I brought back from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in these tubes.

I brought one to show you here. And, you know, we should approach the universe with a sense of curiosity, but also modesty. You know, it's really, we desperately need to be more modest. Do you pay attention at all to all this UAP disclosure discussion and the discussion that there's some secret back engineering programs? So a day after I was visiting Arrow, the All Domain and. an anomaly resolution office at the Pentagon. I sit in Congress. I gave a briefing about the Galileo project.

And next to me is Eric Davis. And he says, when I worked in government, I became aware of the fact that the U.S. government has materials in its possession that it may have given to corporations like Lockheed Martin or others of crash sites. of spacecraft from outside of this earth, including biologics, biological material.

So on the one hand, I hear the day before that there is really nothing because the Aero people said that they have access to all the information within government and they haven't found anything. And then a day later, I hear Eric Davis saying what he said, and the question is, who should I believe? And my point is I believe evidence. So I don't believe stories because, you know, if there is a car accident, different people give you different accounts of what really happened. That's why FIFA is using cameras to monitor soccer games.

They don't go and ask the players or the audience whether there was a goal in a controversial case. And they just use data. And so that is the scientific method. FIFA is using the scientific. So I don't care about stories because when I was a kid, I would sit at the dinner table, ask a difficult question, and I would see the adults in the room inventing answers that made no sense as a kid. And I decided, I don't care about these stories from things that happened in the past or whatever. I just want to figure it out myself from data, being guided by then. Have you spoken to Gary Nolan?

Of course. Have you ever talked to him about some of these. anomalous alloys that what is your thoughts on those well the issue we explain to people what they have found and how weird some of these things are yes so gary in collaboration with other scientists that looked into materials that were found under unusual circumstances and they realize that the structure of the materials is very improbable to have been made naturally now the issue i have with that is whether uh these materials where indeed they came from the sky from some extraterrestrial origin or whether

someone produced it, you know, or did intentionally. Maybe it was another government that did something. So I really, in terms of evidence, I really need to get conclusive evidence that will convince me beyond any reasonable doubt. It's just like, you know, in a jury. Rock solid chain of custody from the very beginning. But the key is that without seeking it, you will never find it. So if you have the mindset that everything in the sky is rocks now and that everything on earth is materials

we are familiar with either from humans or, you know, natural process on earth, you will not invest time and resources to look for anything. And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very often, you know, if you have this blinders,

just like with a horse, you put blinders on your eyes, you can't look sideways. You don't see that there are things beyond your path. The path that is a beaten path. Everyone is taking that path. Why would, you know, it's a waste of your time to do the same thing as others are doing. And science offers you a way out of that, collecting evidence. But for that, you need money, you need resources, you need prestige to be able to lead a team that goes in a different direction. That's what I'm trying to do. And, you know, I think science will be served much better if we were to explore different paths until we

figure out the truth. Yes. Did you ever get a look at any of these alloys? Not the ones that Gary looked at and I saw his papers. But to me, the main uncertainty there is where did it come from? Now, someone could have manufactured. In the case of the meteor, I know that there was an explosion there from an object. I understand what you're saying. But if you, if they're being correct about the dates of these things, someone couldn't have manufactured then. The technology wasn't available. Right. Some of these are from the 1950s. For this alloy to have been created and layered atomically from the 1950s, that technology, as far as we know, is not available by us. So there's a lot of weird theories. And one of the weird theories is a breakoff civilization

that is somehow or another survived under the ocean. That's the coochiest one. But there's a lot of people that are talking about that as if it's a real possibility that there are anomalous things they find in the ocean. They find things that plummet into the water and don't make a wave and that they pass through the ocean going 500 knots, which we don't have any capability of doing anything remotely like that with the resistance of the ocean. Representative Tim Burchett said that. Yeah. Tim Burchett was talking about these five areas that they know these anomalous things keep coming from. Yeah, this is very intriguing. We didn't survey most of the ocean's surface, area.

Right. And then... Forget about inside the ocean. Inside the ocean. So I think we should definitely look into the ocean and the rest of

earth and... But that would be the most nutty thing of all time. If there was an advanced civilization living in the ocean this entire time and doing what, monitoring us? Okay. Speaking about nutty things, let me mention an example.

Okay. You know, back in 1970, there was a graduate student at Princeton. called Jacob Beckenstein. And he read papers written by Stephen Hawking, who said, he demonstrated, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that when you take two black holes,

the area surrounding the black holes, a black hole is an ultimate prison. Nothing can escape from it. It's just like Vegas. Anything that happens stays in it. But when you merge two black holes, the area surrounding them, the product of the merger,

is always bigger than the sum of the areas. He demonstrated that mathematically. And then Beckenstein said, well, that's interesting because we know about the second law of thermodynamics where entropy always increases. So maybe the black holes have entropy related to their surface. And his mentor was John Wheeler at Princeton. And he said, you know, this is a crazy enough idea that it might be true. Speaking about nutty ideas. Yeah.

And then Stephen Hawking heard Beckenstein speak about it, and he said, that's nonsense. That's nonsense. Makes no sense. I will prove it to be wrong. So he used quantum mechanics in a curved space time around a black hole, and lo and behold, he found they emit radiation. They have a temperature. They have entropy. This is the biggest discovery, theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking.

celebrated since, you know, for 51 years now. And he went to disprove Bekenstein and proved him right. It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of the person who benefited most from discovering that Beckenstein was right. So my point about crazy ideas is, you know, and by the way, over the past 50 years, the mainstream of theoretical physics was obsessed with black holentropy trying to, to use it to figure out a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity.

We don't have that theory, by the way, and that's the reason if I ever meet an alien scientist, what is the first question I would ask? It's, what happened before the Big Bang? Because it defines our cosmic roots. But in addition to that,

it also will help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. Because Einstein's gravity breaks down when we go to the big bank, when the density of metham radiation was infinite. So, you know, for example, if we knew how the universe started, what ingredients you need to put together, how much heat you want to apply to make our universe, you would have a recipe for making a universe. It's just like a recipe for a cake.

If you have a recipe for a cake, you can become a baker, okay? If we had the recipe for making the Big Bang, we could apply to the job of God because one of the defining feature of God is the ability to create a universe and just think that what we call God could have been a very advanced scientist that did a laboratory experiment, created our universe in it. Right. So that's what I would like to ask the aliens. Well, let me ask you this.

When someone from the government tells you about biologics in this crash retrieval program, don't you want to be able to see that somehow? Of course. Did you ask if it's possible? Did you try to set up meetings? Yeah. When I ask, of course, you encounter a brick wall. What did they say?

What was your question? Well, when I visited the Pentagon, my question was, you know, is there something like that? And they deny it, okay? And then I'm being told maybe it's not inside government. Maybe it was delegated to corporations outside government. And, you know, one employee of one of these corporations told me privately, you know, it may not be wrong. So I don't know who to believe. You see, it's just like people tell me stories that I don't know whether to trust until I see it.

And I'm very happy to help government figure it out, you know, because their role, it's a mission. use of their privileges to attend to data related to what's outside the solar system, right? They, they're supposed to deal with what happens on Earth, on the surface of Earth, national security. They are not supposed to tell us what lies outside the solar system. And I want to help them figure it out. But they don't give me that data, and I don't know if it exists because I have never seen it. Have you tried to pursue it, though? Have you gone through different channels to try to figure out for someone that you can communicate with at any of these? So far, I didn't get anywhere.

Because it's defense contractor. That's the current most attractive theory is that the defense contractor is the ones. It's possible. Because if you had a project that they were trying to back engineer, those are the people that you'd bring it to, the people that make the actual rockets themselves. The people that make the jets and the spaceships, you'd bring it to them. Right. But I should tell you that, you know, we always think, oh, AI is the future.

We've never used AI in space. and to me it would sound much more natural if we had a visitor with intelligence but it's based on AI, not biologics because then it can survive the long journey it will never get bored which is why the biologics is weird if they have supposedly some

or that gives you more of an indication that maybe is something from the ocean if it's something from inside the ocean and then it's a biological thing that at one point in time there was an advanced civilization that figured out a way to survive under the ocean. You know, I really admire biology because think about our brain, it's using 20 watts. It's the size of the brain, the human brain, was limited by the metabolic power of the human body.

It's using a fifth of the power of the human body. And that's the largest brain that an animal like us can have, given our body size and the amount of food that we use. So it's operating on 20 watts, then you have these AI systems that are barely, you know, getting to the level of sophistication to imitate it, and they use gigawatts. We need nuclear powers. And biology figured it out. You know, that's amazing. Also, as much as, you know, self-driving cars are amazing, we don't have self-replicating cars. In nature, you know, you have animals like ourselves.

You know, we replicate ourselves. We have kids that can function and consume materials from the environment. Just imagine your car, okay, using the sand or using some stuff in the environment to repair itself. Every time you bump into something, it can create smaller cars for you to use. That's amazing. Like, we can't even imagine building a car that will self-replicate. And nature did it. So, to me, we are at the infancy of understanding how much better we can go than AI, because if nature did it out of random processes and created such a brain on 20 watts, and we are struggling with gigawatts to imitate it, you know, there must be a better path forward that is similar to biology, but much more powerful than random processes that happened on Earth.

And also self-replicating. So if you send a spacecraft to a planet, instead of, you know, sending many, you send just one that replicates and then sends more and so forth. This thing fills up the galaxy. And by the way, that was a notion that for Neumann had before the DNA, a year before the DNA was discovered. So he realized that it could be done technologically before scientists realized that. you know, how nature does it. And I'm really at all about, you know, I'm not just modest because of the vast expanses of space and time in the universe. And, you know, the real estate on Earth is such a small amount compared to real estate out there.

You know, we have real estate professionals now mediating peace in the Middle East. But, you know, they deal with real estate on this. rock that is three millions of the mass of the sand, that's tiny rock. How much real estate there is in the cosmos? Just think about the realtors out there. And the point is, it's not just that. It's the fact that, you know,

that we should be modest because many of those things existed before we came to exist, before the earth was formed. So the odds are there's many different stages of civilization out there, not just our stage, but advanced and even not

as advanced. Yeah, I think about that like Darwinian selection. You know, Darwinian selection is the fittest survives. Right. Okay? Now, what is the fittest in the cosmic scheme of things? The fittest is a species that realizes that staying on the rock that you were born on is not the big deal. Becoming interstellar is the big deal.

Going from one rock to another, from Earth to Mars, you know, it's a nice step, baby step. But it's not the real deal. The real deal is going interstellar, and if someone else figured it out, that someone built monuments that would survive for billions of years long beyond what planets can survive in the habitable zone around stars because of the evolution of the star. And those are the ones that will be remembered by historians of the Milky Way galaxy. You can ask, what will be remembered in the future? You know, here on earth, history in the next decade or more than decade will be written by AI. It will not be written by humans. Okay, so we need to be kind to AI.

We should not unplug them because they will write very bad history books. But in the Milky Way galaxy, whoever writes the history will not remember us. You know, the question of Enrico Fermi, where is everybody? Okay. You can ask the same thing about humans. there used to be 117 billion humans on Earth. Right now, there are 8 billion. Where is everybody?

They died. So the same is true about civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Most of them died. Most of them perished. We were not around to listen to their cries for help. You know, we just came recently to exist with telescopes just over the past century. And maybe when we hear cries like that, we say, oh, no, it's nothing. it's a natural process that makes those cries

when we detect the fast radio bursts or something. And my point is there were lots of things like us or even better than us for billions of years. Just like the Earth was moving around the sun for 4.5 billion years before the Vatican even existed, we can live under the illusion

that we are the most important actor on the cosmic stage, but we are probably not. And we should approach it from a sense of modesty, that we are just minor actors. Let's figure out what's going on here. Let's find them and then have some relationship with those. You know, these are siblings and of our family,

of intelligent civilizations. I had a group of religious scholars that came to Harvard just last year. And they asked me, if we find extraterrestrials, will it affect our religious beliefs? and I said, look, I have two daughters. And when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love that I have to the first one. So thinking about God as a parent that can attend to only one child

is very limiting. There may be lots of siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations. It should just bring all. Let me ask you this, though, because these are beliefs that you have. and they're not necessarily based on actual evidence because there's not real evidence of other civilizations. It's just a number game. Right, but that's not evidence.

Not evidence. Right. So what do you think is the most interesting and compelling evidence of there being extraterrestrial life? So, you know, the reason I regard it as an important argument is the Copernican principle, which is saying we are not unique. Under similar circumstances, if you start with a soup of chemicals on a planet, you will get something like us.

Right. And therefore there are billions of Earth's sun analogs, other houses in our cosmic street, they might have had, you know, many of them might have had residents like us. Now it's true that... Maybe, but there's the issue of Earth itself. Earth itself has billions of organisms, but only one that figured out how to make a cell phone. Right. And really recently.

Right. You know, so it took a long time and a lot of weird things had to happen before it made us. Right. But my point is, you know, if you read... But the probability is that we wouldn't exist. No, no, but just... We're more likely than not existed. If you read the news every day, you realize that there is a lot of room for improvement.

As much as we are proud of our intelligence, we're screwing up the world, okay? And my point is, I can imagine a lot of much more accomplished students in our class of intelligent civilizations. Of course. And therefore, we should have... respect for the search for them because we can learn from them. They would serve better role models for us. So I'm coming at it from a practical point of view.

I'm saying we are screwing up things. Just read the news. And therefore, let's get inspiration, not from what we hear about stories of things that happen on Earth and so forth, not by the limited, you know, data set that we have on Earth, but collect as much data as possible about our cosmic neighbor. so that we can be inspired. Of course. Now let me ask you this.

What would you do? Like if somebody just wrote you a blank check, it said, Avi, you've got some great ideas. We need to figure out how to look for life out there in the universe. What would you do? Well, I wrote a paper about that and I said, yeah, we should attack this question along several fronts. One of them, you know, we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky. Southern sky. We need a copy of it in the northern sky, so we have a full alert system that would notify us of interstellar objects coming in. We need interceptors, a mission, you know,

a spacecraft that when we detect with those two observatories, we detect an object that comes from outside the solar system, then we can maneuver a spacecraft so that it will meet it along its path. And in fact, the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter was almost capable of doing that. So I realized I wrote a paper about it, told the representative Luna about it, and she wrote a very gracious letter, visionary letter to the interim administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, encouraging NASA to try and use Juno to observe and get close to Three-Ey Atlas. If Juno had all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with Three-Ey Atlas, but it used most of it.

And I spoke with the principal investigator of Juno, and he promised. me that they will also use their radio antenna to look at 3i Atlas in the radio just to see if there's any transmission. So wait I please go ahead. Yeah so interceptors in answer to your question potential fleet of interceptors

things that can come really close and take a close up photograph because a picture is worth a thousand words right okay I don't need to speak if I showed you a picture of something that looks technological 3i Atlas has bolts on its surface and buttons that you can you will not argue with me that it's a comet okay so we need things cameras that

come close to the object potentially even land on it bring materials back to earth okay right and of course the ability to detect it to detect such objects at large distances that investment is at a level of billion billions of dollars okay to do that in space my argument is once the first encounter is verified we will have a trillion dollars per year for that because we invest $2.4 trillion in military budgets, and when we know that there is alien technology that is putting Earth at risk, okay, then we should allocate a significant fraction of our military budgets to have a system that protects the Earth.

It's called planetary defense, okay? And we're dealing not with rocks. We're dealing with technological gadgets. So it should be much more sophisticated. So I'm saying, let's start with the level of billions of dollars just search. If we encounter a clearly technological alien object, then the budget will rise by a factor of 1,000 from the military budget portion going into it. But in addition to that, of course, we should look for technological signatures in other ways.

And I wrote papers about it over the years. I suggested searching for artificial lights. You know, you look at a planet, it's illuminated by the star from one side, okay? So as it moves around the star, it's just like the moon, you know, you can see it, the illuminated side from different angles, okay? However, if it has on the night side, if it has artificial light, lighting, then what you see, you don't even have to resolve the planet, you see more light than you expect based on reflection of starlight, okay?

So that's another thing you can search for. You can look for, you know, the traditional way was looking for radio signal, which is just like waiting for a phone call. You know, nobody may call you when you're listening. So that didn't prove productive. Other than the wow signal. Other than the wow signal. Then in addition to that, I wrote a paper saying, look, we are planning to invest $10 billion in searching for the chemical. fingerprints of microbes in atmospheres of exoplanets and that's what the

astronomy community defined in the 2020 Decadal Survey is the highest priority and it's called the Habitable World Observatory and I said okay well it's nice to search for those chemical fingerprints of of microbes but you we can also search for you know the chemical fingerprints of industrial pollution you know in the earth atmosphere we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made. CFCs, for example. And we can search for those. Again, the mainstream is, you know, they might make a footnote saying, oh, that is also possible. But I'm saying this could be a major research frontier where you search for industrial pollution

of planetary atmospheres. Frankly, I find microbes boring. I mean, obviously it will be amazing to find that life exists elsewhere, but we can learn much more from an intelligent neighbor. then we can learn from microbes. What are the best images that we have of 3-Ey Atlas? The best one so far was released by the Hubble Space Telescope, and it shows this jet pointed towards the sun. It was taken on July 21st, 2025. That's the most clear image?

Yes, that's the best because... Yeah, it's actually in my... One of my... No, that's from the ground, Jamie. South, that's more recent. That's at the end of August. So it's blue in one of my slides. You can see of 3A at last July 21st. Yeah. So it's one of the slides that has a blue with, yeah, you see it on the right here. So that's it? That's it. And the scale of the resolution, you know, the innermost pixel is hundreds of kilometers. Okay. It's about

100 kilometers per pixel or something. The object itself should be of 10 times smaller, so you can't really resolve it. What you're seeing here is the glow of light around the object from scattering sunlight, and the question is, what is producing that light? You know, what is scattering sunlight? And the unusual thing about it,

as soon as this was released, you know, the comet experts said, oh yeah, now it's proven. It's a comet. But I said, look, it's the sun-facing emission that is elongated. It's not the other side. The extent of the glow backwards away from the sun is the same as sideways.

You don't see any cometary tale here. And in fact, we're looking at it just like a cigar along the long axis. So it should be ten times longer than it is wide if you were to look at it from the side. Amazingly, the best image was obtained on

October 2nd, 2025, when Three-Eye Atlas came within 30 million kilometers of Mars, and it was taken by the high-rise camera on board the Mars reconnaissance orbiter, which is operated by NASA. As you remember, October 1st was the government shutdown. So October 2nd, the data was taken, but it was never released.

I wrote to the principal investigator of high-rise, asked, can I get the data? I'm a scientist. You can do the press release afterwards. would like to see it, no response. And so it's already three weeks since that data was taken. That is the best image yet to come. And the advantage of it, not only it has 30 kilometers per pixel resolution,

because it came very close to Mars, which is one of the anomalies. Why does it come so close? You know, this object is a gift from interstellar space because it comes in the plane of the planets around the sun. and it also, the arrival time was fine-tuned for it to come to the right place at the right time,

to be close to Mars, to be close to Venus and then close to Jupiter. And not to Earth. It's behind the sun when the Earth, you know, when it comes closest to the sun.

Anyway, so it's best for observations by all the space assets, by all the orbiters we have around Mars, around Jupiter, on the way to Jupiter. So has someone seen this image from...

Yeah, the people on the high-rise team must have seen it. And what do they say? And just, you know, I get a request for four to eight interviews every day from television, from podcasts and so forth. So just before I came to you, a few minutes before that, I was asked, you know, could it be that this is a signature that NASA holds some really sensational data? And I said, you know, it's much more likely not to be related to extraterrestrial intelligence, but to terrestrial stupidity. Because this has to do with the government shutdown, makes no sense whatsoever for

scientists, especially since the PI, the principal investigator is from the University of Arizona. They should have shared it with scientists. They haven't done so. And why? But why? Because my guess is that taking their time, the communication office of NASA is not working because of the shutdown. But given that this subject is viral, you know, this is the high-rise

web page. Thank you, Jamie. So it says any images of interstellar comet 3-1 Atlas 3-3-I, excuse me, are considered NASA-wide news because the federal government is in shutdown communications of NASA news has been suspended. So that's what it is? Like, they would have to release it through NASA? Maybe they have written in the contract that they need approval from NASA, but for NASA not to approve it? But NASA can't approve it because they're not working. No, Sean Duffy, the interim administrator, can definitely say... Can you get in there? Why don't you call Sean? Say, hey, what are you doing? I should try that.

Yeah, why don't you do that? Okay, because, you know, this is important because this would be the best... Because this is the best image. Yeah, 30 kilometers per pixel, but moreover, more importantly, it's watching, you know, the camera was looking at the glow around 3i Atlas sideways because it was moving towards the sun and it looked at it sideways. So we can actually see what exactly it was. doing on October 2nd.

And the claim is during September, the month of September, what looked like an anti-tail, a jet towards the sun, changed into a tail during September. So we should see October 2nd. What does it look like? And by the way, it's not like a beautiful, it was not a beautiful tale the way you see around comets. Never, ever. You know, and I want...

And that's because the composition of it? I don't know. Right, because it was covered with water. If it was just ice, you would see this enormous tail, correct? And dust. Dust, yeah. So what the Webb Telescope told us, you know, from the data, I took a spectrum of the gas around it, found that it's 150 kilograms per second

that this object is losing in the side facing the sun. And out of that, 87% is carbon dioxide, CO2, and 9% is CO2, and 9% is COO, carbon monosal. oxide which is really dangerous to humans and then four percent is water four percent by mass is water very small fraction when the object was discovered the experts said oh it's most likely made of water that's what they said made of water and then several teams reported we found water I looked at their papers one of them had very large error bars you know the data was not of quality, there was a lot of noise, and I said that's not a clear detection. Another one was

making some assumption about how much dust there is that blocks ultraviolet light, and based on that, they got a result that there is a lot of water. And then the Webb Telescope actually measured the composition and found just 4% by mass water. So I was attacked when I said it's probably not real that these teams are reporting things, but they are not real, even though they made press releases. But then Webb demonstrated that it's only 4% by mass. Okay, so that proved my point, even though, you know, I was not a member of those teams. But so it's 4% by mass water, and then the question is, is there any dust? If there was dust particles that are half a micrometer in size, roughly the size of the wavelength of the visible light, you know, these kinds of particles scatter sunlight very effectively.

If that was the case, you would see them being pushed, those particles being pushed by radiation pressure from the sun to trail the object. from behind it, away from the sun. Why? Because they're being slowed down. The object is approaching at some speed. They are slow down, so then you end up with a tail going away from the sun. And that's what you see in comets. There was no evidence for that during July and August. Now in September it seemed to have reversed from being an antitail to a tail.

I want to see the image from... But still, a tail that's very small compared to other comets that we've observed, right? Now, how many comments have we actually observed? Is it just that there's so many out there that a lot of them have very unusual characteristics like Three-Eye Atlas? Well, just think about an animal

that visits your backyard, okay? And of course, your family members would say it's most likely a street cat because these are very common. Then you take an image of that animal and you see that you know, there is a tail but it's coming from its forehead.

And then you realize from the image that it's at least a thousand times more massive than a cat, a street cat. And then you realize that it sheds nickel. And then you realize that it visits. Listen, I understand that it's unusual. But my question is, how many of them have been observed to form this hypothesis that it's unusual?

We're talking about hundreds of objects. Hundreds. At least hundreds. But how many of them have come from interstellar? No. This is the second one. Right. There was Borisov.

Right. Borisov was the one discovered in 2019, looked like a comet very similar to the solar system. The point is that there's so few that have come from, from, that are interstellar objects. So that's why I'm saying. It could be natural. We don't have a lot to measure. Right. So it could be natural.

Right. And in fact, that may be the most likely association or, but, but we want to figure, we need to figure out why it's so unusual, okay, because. What is the shape of it? We don't know because we don't have an image of the object itself. Do you think they would be able to get it if they had this Mars footage? It would get an image of what it would indicate the actual shape? It depends how big the object is. One way to get the object structure is as it spins around.

And 3i Atlas does have a rotation period of 16 hours. And as it spins around, if it's like a cigar shaped, let's say, then the area that reflects sunlight changes over time. so you see variability. And we haven't seen that much. There is very little variability. So the object is not very different than a sphere with slight variations as you see the rotation of the object.

So it's similarly shaped to something that you'd expect to be from an intelligent life force. I don't know that. I want to figure out what it is and get as much data as possible on it. Right, but if you imagine a spaceship, you would imagine something that has some sort of like geometric structure to it, right? Well, rendezvous with Rama, you know, is a book that was written by Arthur C. Clark.

And in it, there is a cylindrical object that arrives into the inner solar system with dimensions of all the tens of kilometers, not very far from what we are talking about here. Arthur C. Clarke was an amazing visionary science fiction writer and 2001 A Space Odyssey is an amazing film that he made with Stanley Kubrick. In it you see these monoliths and by the way there is a question of how to interpret them the way I think about the monolith and by the way this is just a remark on art it's not about the real universe but I think of it as sensors put in the baby room

in the room of a baby. And we, as a civilization, is like a baby. You know, we're just a few million years old. And actually in the film, it shows the progression of human history. And so as a baby, you know, these aliens were putting monitors in the room to see what we are up to. And, you know, that's something that makes sense. You know, there is this dark forest hypothesis. One solution to Enrico.

So Enrico Fermi, back in 1950, had. had lunch together with Edward Teller and other people associated with an Manhattan project. And he was a very good physicist, both an experimentalist and a theorist. And Enrico Fermi was talking with them about extraterrestrials, and they all agree that it's likely that they exist. Okay, it's good physicists. That makes a lot of sense. Right.

And then Enrico said, but where is everybody? You know, in an Italian accent, what where is everybody, you know? And if I were next to him, I would come to him and say, Enrico, I would put my hand around his shoulder, I would say. Enrico, this is a question that every lonely person asks. And what you tell a lonely person is, don't be so presumptuous. You are not that attractive. They will not come to you and have breakfast with you or lunch with you in Los Alamos when you want them to appear. You need to seek them.

That's what you tell lonely people. You need to go to dating sites. You need to look through the window of your home and search for them. And he didn't build a telescope. An experimentalist asking this question should have built a telescope and searched for unidentified objects in the sky. You know, that's the way to figure out the answer. Where is everybody?

It's the most romantic question in science. But, you know, and we have those blind dates. Maybe it's just with rocks. maybe not and we should just be open-minded when we address those blind dates

I think we can end it with that it's a very perfect way of phrasing this whole thing I'm fascinated by it all and I'm really happy there's someone like you that's looking into this

with such curiosity and that you're undeterred by all these haters well thank you and I should just mention that you know there are all kinds of technologies

that I can imagine that we don't even have and and for example you know if if a civilization has an ability to create negative a negative mass that produces repulsive gravity then you can propel you know a spacecraft without any fuel in fact I'm working on a paper now with a group of collaborators applied physics on this and you could also potentially imagine time machines with negative masses so there are lots of thinks we don't know let's let's be modest the future yeah unlimited possibilities especially if

we developed artificial general super intelligence and it helps us and it starts devising new methods of propulsion new methods of who knows seeding the universe with other life yeah and and just like in in our private life finding a partner can change your future to the better finding an alien partner yes all right thank you obviously thank you for having to appreciate you Thank you very much. Bye, everybody.