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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.
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UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, oh my
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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 3i Atlas, this object,
in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.
Is that what people are saying?
Yeah, and I said, look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island.
It's at four and a half times the Earth-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.
Well, this is a very unusual object.
Well, I have—
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 Hamas 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 for 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,
Blaise 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 100 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 billions of 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, you know, 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 that is an oversight.
Now, they have found evidence of microbes on Mars, correct?
Well, it's not conclusive.
Not evidence?
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, considers 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.
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.
Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars,
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 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 3-I 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
It 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 a
bit longer.
Yeah, but that's not enormous, because 3-I Atlas, the size of 3-I 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, and 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, 3-I 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 surveying
the sky,
you know, so who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the
Moon, because
there are good museums, you know?
And by the way, I see that as their most important value.
Let me just say one thing about my fundamental point of view.
Okay.
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.
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?
Right.
Why engage in conflicts?
Why reduce the lifespan of other people, you know, in wars?
It makes no sense, all of this.
Right.
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 disc 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, 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.
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, so my point is, it's really important in cases like this or 3i 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.
So, just to give you an example, the first interstellar object was Oumuamua,
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, just in December, 2024, there was a 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 tail 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 tail, 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.
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,
you know, 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 funds 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 more.
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.
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So, again, we need the next Copernican Revolution, the next Galilean Revolution
to realize that
there is a smarter kid on the block, 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 their
learning was based
on a data set that was limited to home.
It's just like LLMs, you know, the artificial intelligence systems that learn
from their data
sets and they had limited environment.
And then when they went to the kindergarten, they realized their 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 is not, would not exist forever.
And 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, uh, into the future.
Um, and we have an obligation if we want to be remembered on cosmic in cosmic
history, you
know, we have an obligation not to go to Mars.
That's not really a great vision.
You know, going to Mars is just like, you know, you have a group of chimpanzees
living in the
jungle, you know, in, 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, that we can go to.
And, and it 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 got to start somewhere.
You have to start somewhere.
No.
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 are spending $2.4
trillion every year
on military budgets.
If we were just to change our priorities and say, we want to build Knox
spaceship in analogy
to Knox arc to save humanity from the great flood or catastrophe that will
happen on earth.
You build such, you put a fraction of this $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 deck, several
decades, we
will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better
than Mars can.
Yeah.
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.
It 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.
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.
A factor of two...
Right.
...meaning that intelligence arose on Mars...
Right.
...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 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, you know, 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, is just a millionth of the age of the Milky Way
galaxy.
It's nothing.
Are you including things like Gobekli Tepe in that?
Because that's 11,000 plus.
Well, 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?
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 could 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?
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 a 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?
Yeah.
At two and a half billion years, was it closer to the Sun?
No, no, no.
It was roughly the same place.
Exactly the same distance?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
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.
Yes.
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...
And micrometeors, everything, right?
Because there's nothing.
Stop it.
That's right.
That's right.
And I calculated 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.
Right.
And 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, if the Empire State Building, you know, even after...
If it was 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 3AI Atlas?
No, 3AI Atlas.
3AI Atlas.
So 3 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 Oumuamua was PanStars
in Hawaii.
And the reason it was constructed is because the US 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, you know, to
build observatories
that will search for such objects.
And that's why PanStars 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 Oumuamua.
And then it looks, 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.
And 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 tumbling.
That's really strange.
And I started getting more and more into the anomalies.
And I know you had no previous to that.
You had no real connection to the UAP phenomenon.
No, zero, zero.
So you're just basing entirely on the data that you were getting from.
Yeah.
And you know, I am driven by curiosity.
I'm no different than the kid that I was.
You know, 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.
And 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.
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takes you deep inside the world of U.S. government and military.
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And now with AI, we're talking about social media and steroids.
Yeah.
It's really bad.
By the way, the main problem with social 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.
Right.
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.
Exactly.
With AI using bots 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 minds.
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 just think.
I'm not using AI at all.
You can use it sometimes, but I treat it like a glass of wine.
Like, don't drink wine all day.
It's not good for you.
You know, I'm working with students.
And every now and then, a student delivers a paper to me to look at.
And I realized some of the references do not exist because I know the
literature.
You know, that I asked 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 faked a reference.
Yeah, faked things.
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.
Right.
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 useful 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 is 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,
that 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 risk 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 know, one more time.
Oumuamua.
Okay, I don't want to screw it up.
How large was that?
That was the size of a football field.
So small in comparison to 3i Atlas.
Oh yeah.
That's my point that 3i Atlas is a million times more massive,
at least a million times more massive than Oumuamua.
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 Oumuamua
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, you know, on our vacation, I was sitting on my
computer,
but I just couldn't resist it.
Right.
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.
And 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 and 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, when you listen to comment experts that say, well, this claim
or that claim
was never published in a peer reviewed 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's could be a black swan event.
It could be something that affects the future of humanity.
And we, if we behave, you know, very conservatively, we might not last very
long.
Well, it's also arrogant.
It's, it's arrogant.
Yeah.
This object is how it shows that there's no iron.
Oh, no.
And it.
So, yeah.
So then the composition of the plume of gas.
So this is, this is before you knew about the composition.
That's right.
You wrote this paper.
Exactly.
And so as time is going on, you are being shown to be correct.
Well, we find more, 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.
Right.
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 calculated if you were to correct for that, this would be a feature that
is 10 times longer
than it is wide, you know, 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, you know, 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 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, you know,
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.
You know, we know which atoms produce these spectral lines, the fingerprints.
It's just like fingerprints.
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.
The 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.
And 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, the name of the pathway.
They said, well, maybe this carbonyl pathway happens in nature.
We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.
Hmm.
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.
Right.
And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 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 is 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 3A Atlas is 0.6%.
And I just said, well, that's interesting because 3A 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 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 from a jet to a tail.
This is called an anti-tail 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 are 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 3i 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 expert
community to that
anomaly.
They say, well, comets are strange.
We don't know.
Maybe it's 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 order 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 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, you know, I worked in for three decades.
It was, you know, 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.
Mud wrestlers.
It's different from chess players.
Right.
Um, and you know, I don't want to mud wrestle.
I don't want to get dirty.
I don't respond to the, I learned my lesson with Oumuamua.
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.
Right.
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.
Right.
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, 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 Oumuamua, I suggested it might be technological
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, I got well known at that point, the attacks, the personal
attacks started.
So it's a jealousy.
Yeah.
It's just, um, and you know, but I can tell you that I learned my lesson.
You can't respond.
I just ignore it.
Yeah.
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 3i 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, that's the name of the,
What is the driver's name?
Alex Malik.
Alex Malik.
Yeah.
And he contacted me out of the blue.
So he's just a big fan?
Yeah.
He's just a big fan.
Oh, that's cool.
And I will go there.
It's pretty 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 just put it.
Oh, so he's like a Comet fan, 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 compliment to me to be featured on his car, but 3i Atlas
doesn't care
much because it's already moving 600 times faster than his car can move, you
know.
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.
Yeah.
And my name, so the car is called Avi Loeb now.
Nice.
Yeah.
Congratulations.
Can we move to the next image?
I'll show you another-
Okay, I'm 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 watercolors 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 US 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 there 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 US 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 funds 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 it's—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—does it really make sense to jump up
and down?
Like, what are they trying to accomplish by doing that?
Like—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
a damn.
So let me ask you this.
Yeah.
Once the understanding of the composition of 3i 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.
You know, they keep sending me emails saying, keep doing it.
It's an inspiration to all of us.
But this is privately.
Privately.
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
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 dollars,
searched 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.
Right.
Because we cannot—I mean, Einstein made, you know, 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, you know, doing different types of experiments and observations.
And—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 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
honors, 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 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 Liège and Bayeaux, 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 the most impressive venue for entertainment in the world.
Have you been there?
Have you seen a show there?
I'll tell you.
I not only have been, I've been to the top of the sphere, which is like 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 Tribeca 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 cameras 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 a performance that deviates from the envelope of human
made technologies.
How do we do that?
We, we have the sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that, that,
that observatory, uh, 10 kilometers away on a triangle.
And, uh, uh, 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, um, I'm hoping, uh, that we will find something really anomalous, you know,
because as we know, the, uh, uh, 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 sent 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 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.
Of course.
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.
So 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.
None?
Well, there are some teams that are, you know, doing it, making a trip to
collect some data.
There is, of course.
But there's not constant observations of scientific quality data.
No.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
That's what I'm saying.
That's crazy.
And by the way, by the way, I gave a briefing to the U.S. Congress on May 1st,
2025.
Even Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was there and she was very excited about
the work we're 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 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.
Of course.
I just can't believe that that's not already being done.
So confusing.
Well, I would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated
monitoring of the skies already.
Well, that's 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.
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, 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.
It's, things get very interesting.
So my, my methodology can definitely, should definitely be used by the
Department of War
to figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned.
But, and by the way, um, speaking about my colleagues, you know, so, so there
are people who said,
uh, oh, you're doing it to, to, to, to, to, to win the Nobel prize.
Like 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.
You know, I have the same attitude as, um, Jean Paul Sartre had and, and Bob
Dylan had.
Uh, if, 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.
Yeah.
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, any sort of a position of respect and prestige,
they want to protect that at all costs.
And they, 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
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 Oumuamua,
of 3i Atlas, which are very different anomalies.
Right.
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 outside the solar system.
And my colleagues were very concerned and they said,
we don't believe the U.S. 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 U.S. government about this?
Because all the previous meteors they thought must have been from the solar
system and therefore,
you know, and the U.S. government also makes mistakes every now and then, they
said.
So the U.S. government, what department was observing this?
This is the Space Force, the U.S. Space Command.
So what I did is at dinner, as I was...
What year was this?
This was around 2020.
Okay.
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 3-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, 2026.
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?
No, 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 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 Bergstrom, 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 could have,
it was not a meteor.
It was a truck."
And I wrote to the reporter 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 checked that.
It's not from the crust of the earth.
It's an endless battle to basically, I mean, they can throw mud without having
access to the material.
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 that the New York Times jumped in without contact.
But 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.
You know, and I'm naive.
You know, I don't change my reason for doing something just because other
people misbehave.
You know, 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.
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 at the top of the food 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.
Octopus is 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.
No, 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.
Right.
They would visit us.
You have to keep in mind he's not a practicing astrophysicist.
He's not writing scientific papers.
I write a paper almost every week.
Right.
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 of 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 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, uh, I saw Margot Robbie standing.
And, um, of course I have nothing to offer.
You know, like what kind of opening line would I start a conversation with?
I, I, 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
Avi Loeb?
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 Bruckheimer 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, yeah, the movie.
And then my next one is about a scientist like you searching for UAPs and
trying to figure them out.
Oh.
And then I saw, uh, Brody, Adrian Brody was standing there and he told me, I
really want to become a scientist.
You know, 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 really wanted to be casting calls.
Look at that.
Figuring it out for them.
Interesting.
Um, yeah.
I mean, look, science fiction is one of the most popular genres of films ever
because everybody
has curiosity about it.
But, but nature might be much more imaginative than the best script writers in
Hollywood.
Very likely.
And so if we look up, we might get a much better movie.
And there is actually a Rubin, 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 U.S.
And it, 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, you
know, 14,000 by 14,000
pixels, okay?
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 didn't, we're 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, how 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 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 3i Atlas with a lot of observatories on
Earth
between November 27th and January 27th.
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?
Yeah, 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 lying on a strip.
And not only that the peaks reach a very high level so that you have less
atmosphere
between you and the stars.
I mean, the real problem right now is actually starling 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.
Right.
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 art facilities is
Hawaii.
The Keck.
The issue, yeah, 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, we 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 Ana Paulina Luna, Congressman Tim Bochette.
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.
Um, and she's very interested.
Uh, and, uh, I, you know, I, I, in the, I did communicate with people around
the White House.
But, uh, I think the president should be aware of that.
Of course, most likely most objects would be, uh, just rocks, you know, right.
By the way, this is the material that, uh, I brought back from the bottom of
the Pacific Ocean
in these tubes.
Oh, got some.
I brought one to show you here.
Um, and, you know, um, 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, uh, UAP disclosure?
Yeah.
Discussion and the discussion that there's some secret back engineering
programs.
Yeah.
So, so a day after I was visiting, uh, Arrow, the all domain anomaly resolution
office at
the Pentagon, I sit, uh, in Congress, I gave a briefing about the Galileo
project.
And next to me is, uh, Eric Davis.
And he says, I'm, uh, when I was worked in government, I became aware of, uh,
uh, the fact
that the U S government has materials in its possession, uh, that it may have
given to corporations
like Lockheed Martin or others, um, of, uh, uh, crash sites, uh, of a
spacecraft from outside
of this earth and including biologics, uh, uh, biological material.
So on the one hand, I hear the day before that there is really nothing because
the Arrow 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, uh, Eric Davis saying what he said.
And the question is, who should I believe?
And my point is I believe evidence.
So I want, I don't believe stories because you know, the, if there is a car
accident,
uh, different people give you different accounts of what really happened.
That's why FIFA is using using cameras to monitor soccer games.
They don't go and ask the players or the audience, whether there was a goal in,
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.
Right.
And I decided I don't care what the, you know, 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 them.
Have you spoken to Gary Nolan?
Of course.
Have you ever talked to him about some of these anomalous alloys?
What is your thoughts on those?
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 realized that the structure of the materials is very improbable to
have been made naturally.
Now, the issue I have with that is whether these materials were 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.
A 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 these 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 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 break-off civilization that has somehow or
another survived
under the ocean.
That's the kookiest 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 Burchette said that.
Yes.
Yeah.
And Tim Burchette 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 surface area.
Right.
And then...
Forget about inside the ocean itself.
Inside the ocean.
Yeah.
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.
Uh...
You know, back in 1970, there was a graduate student at Princeton called Jacob
Bekenstein.
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 in it 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 Bekenstein 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.
And then Stephen Hawking heard Bekenstein 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 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
Bekenstein 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 hole entropy,
trying 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, you know, 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 Bang,
when the density of matter and 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 features 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
and 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, you know.
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?
Right.
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, these are, 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, it's a misuse 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 like gone through different
channels to try to figure
out if there's someone that you communicate with at any of these various
contract? Because it's
defense contractors. So that, that's the, the current most attractive theory is
that the defense
contractors, 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. It's weird if they have supposedly some, or that
gives you more of an
indication that maybe is something from the, in the ocean. If it's something
from inside the ocean,
maybe, and then it's a biological thing that, you know, at one point in time,
there was an advanced
civilization that figured out a way to survive under the ocean. You know, I, 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 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, 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, 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.
Right.
And then, and also self-replicating. You know, so if you send a spacecraft to a
planet, instead of,
you know, uh, sending many, you send just one that replicates and then sends
more and so forth,
and this thing fills up the galaxy. Makes use of the materials on the planet,
makes its own production.
By the way, yeah, that was a notion that von 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 a real
estate,
uh, uh, uh, professionals now, uh, uh, mediating peace in the middle East. Uh,
but, uh, you know,
they deal with real estate on this rock that is three millions of, of, of the
mass of the sun,
just tiny rock, how much real estate there is in the cosmos. Just think about
the realtors out there.
And, uh, and the point is, it's not just that it's the fact that
you know, that, um, we should be modest because
many of those things existed before we came to exist,
before the earth was formed. Right.
So, 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, I think about that,
like a 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 before 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, 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,
they will write very bad history books. Uh, but in the Milky Way galaxy,
whoever writes the history
will not remember us. Uh, you know, the, 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
centuries. So, and maybe when we hear cries like that, we say, ah, no, it's
nothing. It's a, it's a natural
process that makes those cries when we detect the fast radio bursts or
something. Um, and the, my point
is there were lots of things like us or even better than us for billions of
years. You know, 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, you know, a sense of
modesty that,
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. Uh, you know, these are siblings
and of our family of
intelligent civilizations. I had a group of, um, religious scholars that came
to Harvard
just, uh, 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, you, 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. Yeah. Okay. But that's not
evidence. Not evidence.
Right. So what do you think is the most interesting and compelling evidence of
there being extra extra
terrestrial 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. Right.
You, you, 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 sun analogs, other houses in our cosmic street, they might've
had, you know,
many of them might've had residents like us. Now it's true. 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, but the probability is that we wouldn't exist. No, no, but just more
likely just 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 intelligence 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. Um, and therefore let's get inspiration, not from what we hear about
stories that have things that
happen on earth and so forth, not by the limited, you know, data set that we
are, we have on earth, but
collect as much data as possible about our cosmic neighborhood 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
and 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, that's, uh, uh, I wrote a paper about that and I said,
um, yeah, we, we should,
uh, uh, we should attack this question along several fronts. One of them, you
know, we have the Rubin
Observatory in Chile that it's monitoring the 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 and 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 that wrote a paper about it, told the
representative Luna about
it. And she wrote a very gracious letter, visionary letter to, um, the interim
administrator of NASA,
Sean Duffy, encouraging NASA to try and use Juno to observe and get close to 3i
Atlas. If Juno had
all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with 3i
Atlas, but it used most of it.
And then 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, yeah, so interceptors, you, you, in answer to your question, um, potential
fleet of interceptors,
things that can come really close and take a closeup 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 press.
You will not argue with
me that it's a comment. Okay. So we need things, cameras that come close to the
object, potentially
even land on it, bring materials back to earth. Okay. Um, and of course the
ability to detect it,
to detect such objects at large distances, that investment is at the 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, um, we're dealing not with rocks. We're
dealing with
technological gadgets. So it's much, it should be much more sophisticated. So I'm
saying,
let's start with the level of billions of dollars. Just search. Uh, if we
encounter a clearly
technological alien object, then the budget will rise by a factor of a thousand
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 the 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. Uh, you can look
for, uh, 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. Um, so that didn't prove, uh,
productive for six
other than the wow signal, other than the wow signal. Um, then, uh, in addition
to that, um, I wrote,
I wrote a paper saying, look, we are, um, planning to invest $10 billion, uh,
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. Not,
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 than we can learn from
microbes.
What are the best images that we have of three-eye 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, one of my,
no, that's from the ground, Gemini South. That's more recent. That's at the end
of August.
So it's blue in my, one of my slides, you can see of 3A Atlas, 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 a
hundred 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, 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,
any cometary tail here. Right.
Uh, and in fact, we're looking at it just like a cigar along the long axis. So
it should be 10 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 Atlas came within 30 million kilometers of
Mars. And it was taken by the
high rise camera on board the mass reconnaissance orbiter, which is operated by
NASA. You, 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, can I get the
data? I'm a scientist.
You know, I, you can do the press release afterwards. I would like to see it.
Right.
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, uh, you know, when it comes closest to this 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. Uh, they should have shared it with scientists. They
haven't done so.
And why? But why? Because my guess is that taking the time, the communication
office of NASA,
you know, 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, uh, 3-I, excuse me, are considered NASA-wide news because the federal
government is in shutdown.
Communications of NASA news has been suspended. And 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 talk, call Sean, say, Hey, what are you doing? I should
try that. Yeah. Why don't
you do that? Okay. Because, you know, um, this is important because this would
be 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 3-I 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, uh, 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 tail the way
you see around comets.
Never ever, you know, and, uh, I want- And that's because of the composition of
it?
I don't know. Right. Because if it was covered with water, if it was just ice,
you would see this enormous tail, correct? And dust. Dust. Yeah. Right.
So what, um, the Webb telescope told us, uh, 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, CO2, and 9% is CO, carbon monoxide,
which is really
dangerous to humans. Um, and then 4% is water. 4% 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, uh, error bars. You know, the, the data was not of
good quality.
There was a lot of noise. And I said, that's not a clear detection. Another one
was basing,
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 very, just 4% by mass water. So I was attacked when I
said, it's probably not
real that the, 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 in 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, of visible light, you know, these,
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 slowed down. So that then you end up with, uh, um, you
know, a tail going
away from the sun. And that's what you see in comments. There was no evidence
for that during July and
August. Now in September, it seemed to have reversed from being an anti tail to
a tail. I want to see the
image, but still a tail that's very small compared to other comments that we've
observed. 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 a
visit 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, uh, 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, um,
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, uh, at least the hundreds, uh, 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. Right. Very similar.
That's the point.
The point is that there's so few that have come from, from that are interstellar.
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, uh, association or, but, but, uh, 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. One thing we
see.
Do you think they would be able to get it if they had this Mars footage?
They would get an image of it.
It depends how big the object is.
One way to get the object, uh, uh, you know, structure is, uh, as it spins
around and three
Atlas does have a rotation period of 16 hours. And as it spins around, if it's
like a cigar shaped,
let's say, and then, uh, the area that reflects the sunlight changes over time.
So you see variability
and we haven't seen that much. There is very little variability. So it's not,
um, the object is not
very different than, than, uh, a sphere, um, uh, with slight variations, uh, as
you see the, uh,
you know, the, the, the rotation of the object.
So it, it's similarly shaped to something that you would 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, you
know,
has some sort of like geometric structure to it. Right. Well, um, rendezvous
with Rama, you know,
is a book that was written by Arthur C. Clarke. And, um, uh, in it, the, 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. Uh, Arthur C. Clarke was an
amazing, uh, visionary
science fiction writer and, you know, 2001, a space odyssey is an amazing film
that he made with Stanley
Kubrick. Uh, 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, um, you know, sensors put, uh, 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, uh, actually in the film, uh, 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, that's something that makes sense. And, you know, there is this dark
forest hypothesis,
one solution to Enrico. So Enrico Fermi back in 1950 had lunch together with
Edward Teller and other
people associated with the 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 both,
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, uh, 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 and 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, and we have
those blind dates.
Uh, maybe it's just with rocks, maybe not. Uh, and we should just be open-minded
when we address those
blind dates. I think we can end it with that. That'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, uh, mention that, you know, there are all
kinds of technologies
that I can imagine that we don't even have. 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. Uh, in fact, I'm working on a paper
now with a group of
collaborators, applied physics on this. And, uh, you could also potentially
imagine time machines with
negative masses. So there are lots of things we don't know. Let's, let's be
modest. The future has
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, in our private life, finding a
partner can change your
future for the better. Finding an alien partner. Yes. All right. Thank you, Avi.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate you being here. Thank you very much. Bye everybody.