B (4:54)

Wow.

A (4:55)

We also see it in the brightness of the object that is periodically changing over a period of about 7.1 hours. And we can infer the rotation axis just from the average of the wobbling. And, and we find that the rotation axis is within 10 to 20 degrees aligned with the direction to the Sun.

B (5:18)

Wow.

A (5:19)

At large. So once again there is this geometric coincidence that 3 Atlas has a very low probability of having its rotation axis in the direction of the Sun. If it was perfectly aligned with the direction of the sun at large distances, it would mean that it has a permanent day side, a permanent night side as it approaches the Sun. And then when it recedes, the two rods, the two poles of the rotation axis, reverse and you get the pole that was previously in the night side becoming the day side and so forth. But just this alignment is really puzzling because at large distances from the sun, the object didn't really know about the sun. So why would the rotation axis be so aligned? Why would it be in the plane of the planets around the sun? You know, the plane of the Milky way galaxy is 60 degrees away from that plane. There are all these anomalies. There is much more nickel with very little iron. So that's why I said, let's consider the possibility that it is a black swan event, an event that has a very low probability but could have big implications for humanity. And therefore we should consider it seriously that it might be technologically designed. At least its properties were designed.

B (6:34)

Right. And you've been studying this for many years now. And you said earlier you've never seen anything like this, right?

A (6:40)

Yeah, I mean, there are only three interstellar objects that were identified by astronomers from telescopes, and this is the third one. So there cannot be an expert on those interstellar objects because we had only two before this one. Just think about it as a blind date with objects that come from outside the solar system. You know, if you go on a blind date with two people and then you have a third one and, and the first and the third look really strange to you, obviously you should not make any judgment about their nature, you know, because you don't have a big enough sample to decide what is normal.

B (7:17)

Right.

A (7:18)

You know, and of course, there are people who marry the first blind date, you know, like they decided it's sufficiently exceptional for them to get attached to that person, even though it's the first one that they ever sampled. But. So we can't really tell how unusual because we have only a sample of three. But. But there are anomalies that we cannot explain. And to me, it raises the possibility that there could be, you know, a subpopulation, a fraction of those objects that might be technological in origin. And, you know, there aren't as many of them, but they target the inner solar system for a reason.

B (7:52)

Right. What were the leading theories for the other two objects? Were they similar theories as this one or different?

A (7:59)

No. So the first one was discovered in 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii called the Pan Stars, and it was given the name Omua, which means a scout in the Hawaiian language. And that first one was anomalous in other ways, very different from 3 Atlas. There was no gas or dust around it, and therefore it was not a comet of the type that we are Familiar with definitely not a comet. And moreover, the brightness of the object changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours. So it meant that the object has a very extreme shape, so that the surface area of the object was changing by a factor of tennis. It was tumbling. Just think about a piece of paper that is very thin tumbling in the wind. And. And the. The shape of the object was most likely flat based on the variation of reflected sunlight. And so the fact that, you know, it was tumbling and had this extreme shape was unusual. But moreover, it exhibited an excess push away from the sun by some mysterious force. And it couldn't be the rocket effect from cometary evaporation. Usually you do see jets in comets, you know, that give it a boost just like a rocket. But there was no gas or dust around that we detected. And so the question was, who, what is pushing it? And I said, well, maybe it's just sunlight pushing it. And for that, the object had to be very thin, like a membrane. And I suggested, therefore, it must be technological in origin. It can be a surface layer that was torn apart from a technological object or a broken piece of some megastructure like a Gyson sphere. We don't know what it is. We didn't get enough data on it. But in fact, the push away from the sun declined inversely with distance squared. So that's what you expect from solar radiation pushing on a thin object. And just three years later, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another object that was definitely pushed by reflecting sunlight.

B (10:10)

Wow.

A (10:10)

And then they realized a few months later that it's made of stainless steel. They took a spectrum of this object, realized it's stainless steel, and then they said, oh yeah, this one is actually a rocket booster that was launched by NASA in 1966. We know about it as part of a lunar lander mission.

B (10:29)

Okay.

A (10:30)

And so here is an example of a technological object that displayed the same quality as Omuamua. And it was. We know that it's technological because we produced it. The question is, who produced Omuahua? And then the second object that was discovered was in 2019, the second interstellar object. And that one was definitely a comet, similar to comments that we've seen before from the solar system.

B (10:57)

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A (11:56)

So altogether we have three. The first one was anomalous in in different ways than the third one, three Atlas. So I'm just open minded to the possibility that, you know, one of these two might, might be technological.

B (12:12)

That makes sense. Yeah. Three is not that many at all. I feel like if, if aliens were out there, there'd be way more, right?

A (12:18)

Yeah. Well, maybe not everywhere, but they might have a purpose in the inner solar system. You know, there might be a reason why maybe even they are parked in the outer solar system. We can't see them. You know, we cannot see an object smaller than the size of a football field within the Earth sun separation. With our biggest telescope we can. You know, we are looking obviously for objects under the lamppost. You know, just like looking for the keys under the lamp post is the sun. And when you put an object too far from the lamppost, you can't see it. And so, you know, even if there was an object as big as Starship, our biggest rocket, you know, we wouldn't be able to see it at the distance larger than the Earth sun separation. And so I can imagine, you know, the solar system extends out to a hundred thousand times the Earth's separation. That's the edge of the Oort cloud. And so just parking something at a thousand times the Earth sun separation, you know, even if you park the biggest constructions that we've made in space, you know, our biggest telescopes will never be able to see those things. And so there could be things parked in the solar system and every now and then they send a probe. We just don't know. I mean, that could be the answer to Enrico fermi's question from 1950. He asked, where is everybody? Well, they might not be very far, you know, and he didn't build the telescope to search for them. That's a mistake that a lot of lonely people make. You know, my wife, before she met me, she said, there is nobody out there for me. You know, it's really difficult for me to find a partner. And if you give up on the search, if you say there is nobody out there, you will never find a partner. You know, so. So the mistake that Fermi made was that he didn't build the telescope. He didn't really search for. He just said, I don't see anyone having lunch. Any extraterrestrials sitting next to me at lunch in los Alamos in 1950. Therefore, they. Where is everybody?

B (14:15)

You think they'll invent better technology, whether it's a telescope or something more advanced in the future where we could see farther out?

A (14:23)

Oh, yeah. So right now, the best survey telescope we have is called the Rubin Observatory in Chile. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Just started operations half a year ago, and it has a camera with 3.2 billion pixels.

B (14:43)

Wow.

A (14:44)

So a thousand times more pixels than your cell phone camera camera that you're looking through. So it's an amazing instrument. The camera is roughly half the height of a person. It's quite amazing. And it will survey the southern sky every four days. So it could alert us to interstellar objects bigger than a football field every few months. We should potentially find something like that. However, it's only limited to the southern sky, and we need a copy of it in the northern sky. So that. That would require an investment of a billion dollars to have a second one. And I think it will be worthwhile so that we cover the entire sky, and that will be sort of an alert system to big objects bigger than a football field that come from interstellar space. But then if. If we find clear evidence that any one of them is a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor, you know, it's artificial, not natural iceberg or rock. It will change everything, because then we will feel potential threat from alien technologies. And that would mean that we might decide to allocate a significant fraction of the military budgets worldwide to defend the Earth, defend our planet from a completely new type of threat. You know, in the past, we imagined that rocks may collide with Earth because a giant rock the size of Manhattan island killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. So we do have a planetary defense office at NASA that is engaged with identifying all the rocks bigger than a football field that may collide with Earth. Okay. Just to prevent the catastrophe across the metropolitan region. But we've never prepared for a technological object in space that is threatening The Earth. And that is much more complicated because it could have an intent, it could maneuver. We can't really forecast its path. So the minute we find evidence for alien technology, I think it will change our priorities. And if we decide to invest a trillion dollars a year in a fraction of the military budgets in space exploration, we can build an array of interceptors in space that will come close to every interstellar object, get us a close up photograph so we can tell its nature. And perhaps even we will have some kind of a solution of how to defend the Earth against those threats if they exist. So that will change dramatically the funding for space exploration by a factor of almost a thousand or, wow, 100. But for that, we need to find evidence. And the strange thing is that someone, just a couple of weeks ago submitted, his name is John Greenwald, submitted a request, a FOIA request, Freedom of Information act request to the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency is asking them if they have any documents, any records that mention three atlas. And the reply was, we cannot confirm nor deny the existence of such records.

B (18:14)

Interesting.

A (18:15)

And to me it illustrates the fact that they must have some records, because if they had nothing, they would say, we have nothing. And the question is, why would the CIA consider three atlas? Well, if they want to entertain the possibility that it might be a black swan event, you know, they want to have an analysis of all the data available to figure it out. And they don't want the public to know about it, just in order not to create any panic unnecessarily. So that makes a lot of sense. And I suggested back in July that actually we should establish a scale, a classification scale of interstellar objects where 0 means a natural object, 10 means possible technological threat. And we should just rank on this scale, which is called the lobe scale. We should rank every interstellar object in the future.

B (19:15)

I like that. Yeah. There's a lot of mystery with three I atlas. And I know with NASA, they wouldn't release the photos, right?

A (19:21)

Well, there was the government shutdown, which was the reason that they said they cannot process the photographs. And then they had a press conference where the images they showed were very fuzzy. So I didn't really understand why they would hold such a press conference. A month later, the Hubble Space Telescope got much better images. So they should have had the press conference with the Hubble images. But anyway, NASA is obviously a bureaucratic organization. The press conference was held by officials. It was not held by the scientists who analyzed the data. That's where I would expect content to come out.

B (19:59)

Right. Well, If NASA or the military won't fund the telescope, maybe you could give Elon Musk a call.

A (20:07)

Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental question is whether Elon Musk is the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang. And he might want to know the answer for that, because if the answer is yes, he will get a big boost to his ego. My personal assessment is that, you know, there are hundred billion stars like the sun, most of them formed billions of years before the sun, just in the Milky Way galaxy, you know.

B (20:36)

Yeah.

A (20:37)

And so my guess is that we are not at the top of the food chain, that there are things better than us, and that's an opportunity for us to learn. And so it makes a lot of sense to invest in the search. You know, unlike Enrico Fermi, who just asked the question, we can actually search for partners. And when you do, when you go on blind dates, the best advice that someone could give you is to aim high, not to aim low. You should look for a partner that is better than you.

B (21:11)

Agreed.

A (21:12)

And at this time, you know, the astronomy community is focused on searching for microbes. And I argue, you know, this is lower than us. I want to find something better than us. Right. So I would like us to invest billions of dollars, you know, in parallel to searching for microbes, also in the search for a higher level of intelligence, technological civilizations out there in. If we are searching for primitive life, let's search for technological civilizations at the same time with the same level of investment, because the signatures of technological civilizations might be easier to detect because, you know, they create products that are different from nature. And if we find any of these products in our backyard, we would know that they exist. And finding microbes is very challenging from a distance.

B (22:05)

Right?

A (22:05)

Yeah.

B (22:06)

They've been trying to do it on Mars for, for like decades, right?

A (22:09)

Yeah. That's an object that is close to us that we can visit and look for the signal. Well, Mars is a dead planet right now because it has a desert and very little atmosphere there and no liquid water on the surface. But the idea of the mainstream of astronomy right now is to search for molecules like oxygen or methane in the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets in the habitable zone around the other stars. The problem is not only that it's very challenging to find those fingerprints, Becker fingerprints that are very faint and difficult to detect, but also that once we find them, it will not be obvious that the same molecules cannot be produced by geological processes. This will be debated. It will not be a clear cut situation. Whereas if we find an object, an interstellar object with buttons on it. It's clear that it's technological. Yeah, if we, we have an image of it. So let's invest similar amounts of money in both searches and let nature decide what is easier to find, you know, rather than us saying, well, it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something as sophisticated as we are. You know, I think that is a mistake and I hope that Elon Musk will find it exciting enough to, to support it. If he's interested, I'll be delighted to discuss it with.

B (23:37)

Yeah, I agree. I mean, we came from somewhere, right? We still don't know what happened there.

A (23:41)

Yeah, well, if you believe in the most conventional scientific scenario, you know, we came out of a soup of chemicals on the primitive, on the early Earth evolution.

B (23:53)

Right.

A (23:53)

And so that means, you know, imagine being a chef, where you make, create food. Obviously if you start from similar ingredients, you have a chance of ending up with the same product if you just follow the same path. And so if there are 10 billion earth sun analogs in the Milky Way galaxy alone, which is the current estimate, you know, the chance is high that conditions were similar to those on Earth and at least a large number of them, you know, and therefore things like we have here on Earth came about elsewhere. And it's unlikely that we are really the pinnacles of creation, you know, and if you just read the news every day, it's clear that we are not that intelligent. Look at how many mistakes we make. We invest a lot in, you know, in, in fighting each other and wasting resources rather than working together.

B (24:54)

Yeah, agreed. How much attention do you pay towards UFOs and UAPs? Do you take any of that serious?

A (25:01)

Oh yeah. So in fact, I'm leading the Galileo project and, and we started the project after the Director of National Intelligence submitted three reports to the US Congress discussing objects in the sky that they cannot figure out. And you know, that's a rare admission of a government official that they're not doing their job because for national security purposes, you know, there is a trillion dollars allocated to the defense budget in 2026. And if those officials admit that they can't figure out some objects in the sky, they are not doing their job. And so that's a serious matter, you know, that has to be dealt with. And of course there is a possibility that these are not human made objects, or not all of them are human made objects. And I was intrigued by that. So the Galileo project is building observatories by now. We constructed three observatories, one In Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, and a third one in Nevada, in fact, where you are, Las Vegas.

B (26:06)

On the sphere, right?

A (26:09)

On the sphere, yeah. And near. Also within 10 km of the sphere, not just in one location. We have three units. But the whole point is we are looking at the sky, trying to figure out if we can identify all the objects there as being human made. And if we see any object outside the performance envelope of human made technologies, then obviously we will write a scientific paper about it. If we don't see such an object and everything looks as if it's human made, so be it, you know, and then I wouldn't feel that my time is wasted because the Pentagon can take advantage of the software we develop, the instruments we use in order, you know, for national security purposes. They can figure out they can monitor the sky better.

B (26:57)

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A (28:02)

Yes. So we are using AI or machine learning to train models on familiar objects and we are asking the AI to check if there is anything any outlier.

B (28:14)

Wow.

A (28:16)

Now it's not an easy process because even a single object like an airplane can be looked at from different directions and it really depends on how the sun, the direction of the sun relative to the camera. And of course we are also looking at night at infrared radiation emitted by all warm objects. But if we have a large enough training data set, then eventually our hope is that we will automate the process and find all the anomalous objects. And as of now, we are planning to look at the few million objects in the coming year.

B (28:54)

Wow.

A (28:55)

So it will be a big sample.

B (28:56)

There's that many objects in there? A few million.

A (28:59)

A few million in a year? Yes.

B (29:01)

Wow. Yeah. Because all the planes and the satellites, right?

A (29:04)

Yeah, exactly. Most of them are, I would say, 99%. More than 99% are definitely human made.

B (29:11)

Wow. What are the odds, you think we find some sort of alien technology in our lifetime?

A (29:16)

Well, it really depends if it's out there. So if it's not out there, you know, like when you go on dates and you hope to find a path, the partner may not be out there. Your, your, you might be out of luck, and then it doesn't matter how much work you do, you won't find a partner. So, so it's really, I mean, and the other thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't really matter what idea is popular on social media. What the mainstream of the scientific community thinks is likely, because the question of whether we have a neighbor or not is already settled. You know, either we have a neighbor nearby or not.

B (29:55)

Right.

A (29:56)

And it's up to us to, to check, you know, and if we decide that we know the answer in advance, if we decide that the probability for that is very small, that we have a neighbor, you know, we can maintain our ignorance forever. There is no guarantee that we will see the light. And it's really up to us to search. Now I'm saying that, you know, the mainstream of science is investing in searching for things like microbes, investing in searching for most of the matter in the universe. We don't know what it is. It's 84% of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we've never found. We call it dark matter. And we are investing billions of dollars in searching for dark matter. For about 50 years now, we haven't found it. What? So searching for things that, you know, we don't know if they exist is part of film frontier science. And we already spent billions of dollars on, on such. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, there were two experiments that were searching for a ghost particle, which is called sterile neutrino. And the two experiments cost $90 million. Obviously it took a decade for the people working on those experiments to bring them to fruition. And at the end of the day, they ended up not finding the particle okay. Even though they had good reasons to expect that it might be there based on anomalies in other experiments, it was not found. So. So very often, you know, you find in the mainstream an investment of large amounts of money, a lot of research, a lot of time dedicated in a direction that proves to be, you know, dead end. There was a search for a new symmetry of nature called supersymmetry by the Large hadron collider at CERN. And that large hadron collider cost $10 billion or so. It was also searching for dark matter. Haven't found supersymmetry, nor dark matter. And it's part of doing science. And of course, all I'm saying is that on a question that is so important for the public, where the public fund science, the question of whether we are alone, is there intelligent life out there, how can the scientific community ignore that question and say it's too speculative and let's invest just in the search for microbes? That is unclear to me.

B (32:24)

Yeah, that's always been your frustration with the scientific community, right?

A (32:29)

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a matter of common sense to say, let's at least invest as much time and money as we did in the search for specific types of dark matter. Let's search for intelligence for 50 years, invest billions of dollars. If we don't find anything, we'll be at the same place as the dark matter searches are right now. So it's not an unusual request. And I think it makes a lot of sense given the interest of the public. We can search, for example, for city lights on the night side of exoplanets. We can search for industrial pollution in the atmospheres, not just for microbes. And we haven't done that. Of course, what we did do, I mean, there is a community that was searching for radio signals, but that if you think about radio communication, it's just an old technology that we are slowly abandoning. And the communication in the future might be handled with lasers. Right now we have fiber optics used on Earth for communication. So it's not at all clear that a century from now or thousand years from now, or a million years or a billion years, you know, this technology will be actually being used. So. So why are we putting all our eggs in one basket, you know, searching for radio signals? It's also like waiting for a phone call. You might wait forever. Nobody would call you. And it's a very different approach to search for a package in your mailbox, you know, or. Or some tennis ball thrown by a neighbor in your Backyard. You know, looking for physical objects is a completely different approach because you don't need the sender to be active or to be alive. You can still find those objects.

B (34:18)

That makes sense. You said earlier 84 of the universe is dark matter, but they can't find it. How did they know that 84% is, is dark matter?

A (34:28)

Right? Among the met, there is also dark energy on top of that. So I was saying, out of all the matter in the universe, only 16% is ordinary matter that we are made of.

B (34:38)

Got it.

A (34:39)

So the thing about ordinary matter is that we can see it, right? It interacts with light. And this substance that is called dark matter, just to express our ignorance, is dark in the sense that it doesn't interact with light. And how do we know that it exists? It's because the amount of mass associated with big objects like galaxies or clusters of galaxies, is much bigger than we can see in stars or in gas. The ordinary matter that we are used to. And moreover, we can follow the history of the universe. And based on that history, which we measured to exquisite precision using the cosmic microwave background, we can tell that there is a substance that was not coupled to the cosmic radiation. This relic radiation from the hot Big Bang, that the universe started hot and dense and then it expanded. So we see the radiation left over from that hot dense phase. It's called the cosmic microwave background or cosmic radiation background. That radiation background was coupled to ordinary matter early on when the universe was dense. And we would not exist if there was only ordinary matter in the universe, because the ordinary matter was coupled to the radiation. The radiation was smoothing all in homogeneities in the ordinary matter. So there was no. The ordinary matter was smooth, just like the radiation was. However, the dark matter was more clumped as a result of some physics in the early universe that there were some inomogeneities created in it, but it wasn't coupled to the radiation, so there was no smoothing force acting on it. And so the reason that the Milky Way galaxy exists is because the dark matter maintained memory of the initial inhomogeneities. And so it collapsed. So these region that was denser than average in the universe, mostly full of dark matter, ended up collapsing upon itself because of its high density and making a galaxy like the Milky Way. And the ordinary matter just fell into that gravitational potential. Well, of the, of the dark matter, if there was no dark matter, if all the matter was coupled to the radiation, there would be no inomogeneities that could see the formation of the Milky Way galaxy. We would not exist. The Milky Way galaxy would not form. Stars like the sun would not condense out of the gas of the Milky Way galaxy. So we will not exist. So we owe our existence to dark matter because it maintained memory of the clumpiness that was induced early on in the universe. And as a result of that clumpiness, objects started forming in the universe, including the Milky Way galaxy, inside of which the sun formed, next to which the Earth formed. And so we exist on the surface of a tiny rock that was left over from the formation of the Sun. And the sun formed out of the gas in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy. But the Milky Way galaxy as a whole would never come to fruition unless there was dark matter seeding its growth and collapse.

B (37:54)

Wow, that's crazy. That is crazy.

A (37:56)

And by the way, a lot of astronomers are not aware of that. So what I'm telling you is really a process that is underappreciated. So, in fact, we owe our cosmic roots to dark matter. Without dark matter, we wouldn't exist.

B (38:13)

It's like yin and yang. You need both dark and light. Right.

A (38:17)

But we don't know what it is, by the way, we don't know who to thank. If you want to send a thank you note. We just don't know where to send. I mean, we are searching for the substance in laboratory experiments, you know, for any traces of this matter that we can find other than through the force of gravity, but we haven't yet found it.

B (38:39)

What about dark holes? How are those made, do you think, for black holes?

A (38:44)

We see them in a way. You know, we already have some images of black holes. And the first one was obtained at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University that I served as the founding director of back in 2016. That's when we founded it. And then in 2019, there was the first image of a black hole in a giant galaxy called the M87. That the black hole there is about 6 billion times the mass of the Sun.

B (39:17)

Wow.

A (39:18)

The what we can see is the silhouette of the black hole, because light coming from behind it is basically swallowed by the black hole. So you end up seeing a shadow on the background of the brightness from the gas surrounding it. And so that image was obtained. We know black holes exist. We find giant black holes like this one at the centers of galaxies. These are called supermassive black holes. And then we find another type of black holes that are a result of the collapse of massive stars, stars that are more than 10 times the mass of the Sun. They end up their life. And then gravity is so strong that their core collapses to a black hole. We see the process of that collapse, because sometimes you end up the material that that falls into the black hole creates jets. And if the jet happens to be aligned with the direction that we observe this, this collapse, we would see it as a flash of gamma rays. These are called gamma ray bursts. So there are sort of the, the signatures of a birth of a black hole that we see out of the collapse of a massive star. So we do see the birth, the births of black holes out of the collapse of massive stars. And we know, for example, in the Milky Way galaxy, there are about 10 million such black holes, stellar mass black holes. We also see them in gravitational waves. When you have two such black holes in a pair and they are close enough together so that they create ripples of space time that we can detect from a distance, you know, according to Einstein's gravity, You know, when you have a single object, it curves space time. But when you have two objects moving around, they create ripples. These are called gravitational waves.

B (41:10)

Right?

A (41:10)

And that get outwards is as if you move a stick on the surface of a pond and it creates those rights, those waves are getting out. So in the same way, we could potentially detect the gravitational waves from a emerging pair of black holes. We did detect that in 2015, you know, and that was exactly a century after Einstein came up with his theory of gravity. And Einstein would have been delighted to see, he thought at some point that gravitational waves do not exist. But now we detected them. And the Nobel Prize was given for that detection of two black holes coming together, stellar mass black holes coming together. And they were detected not by light, but by gravitational waves.

B (41:55)

Wow.

A (41:55)

Completely new method in astronomy. And there is another probe. I mean, this was done by laser interferometers on Earth. One, you know, the discovery was done by the LIGO experiment that was funded by the National Science foundation in the US but we are planning also an interferometer in space and that would be sensitive to the coalescence of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. So when two galaxies come together, the two black holes spiral together and eventually create gravitational waves at much lower frequencies than stellar mass black holes because they're much bigger. And so we can detect those. Hopefully within a decade, we'll detect those. This is an experiment called LISA planned for about a decade from now. And hopefully we learn much more about mergers of supermassive black holes as well. By the way, the Milky Way galaxy is about to merge with the Nearest neighbor, a sister galaxy called Andromeda, we can see it in the sky. And the Andromeda galaxy, when it collides with the Milky Way, both of them have a black hole at their centers and they will come together and, and create such a pair of supermassive.

B (43:12)

Whoa, what's that going. Is that going to impact Earth at all? When those merge together, there might be

A (43:19)

a burst of radiation that could potentially affect the Earth. Yes. And I actually wrote a paper about it a decade ago trying to figure out. It turns out that if a star with a habitable planet like the Earth is. Is too close, goes to such the center of a galaxy where you will have such a merger, that planet can. Can be sterilized.

B (43:42)

Wow.

A (43:44)

By the burst of radiation. We see such bursts of radiation all the way to the edge of the universe. These are called quasars. We see a point source of light when a supermassive black hole is being fed with a lot of gas. And, and one way to feed it is if you have another black hole emerging towards it that feeds it with gas.

B (44:05)

I did not know there was space radiation. I always thought it was from nuclear weapons. You know,

A (44:10)

well, that's what, that's the risk that we pose to ourselves. You know, it's sort of like a self inflicted wound. We can shoot ourselves in the foot if we use nuclear weapons. But you know, we could also be impacted, but by our cosmic environment. And the dinosaurs obviously realized that after a giant rock. Yeah. There could be exploding stars that could affect the Earth. I also wrote a paper last year about the fact that the solar system was presumably a few million years ago, was passing through a very dense cloud of gas. And that cloud of gas compressed the solar wind. You know, the solar wind is flowing out of the Sun. There is an outflow, and it meets the ambient medium, the interstellar medium, at a distance that is about 100 times the Earth's sun separation. That's where Voyager is. So Voyager just crossed that boundary recently. And however, if we are to cross through a very dense cloud of gas, that region where the solar wind is confined by the ambient medium is, Will shrink to a scale smaller than the orbit of the Earth around the sun. And then we will not be protected as much as we are right now from energetic particles. So a few million years ago, we calculated there could have been a situation where we passed through a dense cloud of gas and that compressed the solar wind and we lost protection on Earth. Another interesting paper that I just published a few months ago had to do with the A star that is seen passing by. And we show that this particular star may have passed very close, I mean, within a thousand times the Earth's separation. And in that case, it could have sent comets or that that collided with Earth at a much higher rate than usual. So that could explain why a few million years ago there was a change in the climate on Earth. By the way, that's around the time when humans appeared on Earth.

B (46:20)

Wow.

A (46:21)

So we published in Nature a paper showing that this passing star could have triggered basically the enhanced rate of, of comets raining down on Earth and changing the climate on Earth. We don't tend to think that we are affected by our environment. This is true by on short timescales. But every now and then there is some catastrophic event that could be triggered by our cosmic neighborhood. By the way, the sun itself, about 150 years ago had an eruption that if it happened today, there would be a loss of electronic technological equipment, including all the satellites around, at the level of probably a trillion dollars or so. Back then, you know, in the 19th century, there wasn't much technology that could be destroyed by a huge solar flare. It's called the Carrington Event. And so it could happen anytime. We are not protecting our infrastructure against that, against giant solar flares like the Carrington Event. Such a thing should happen once every few hundred years, you know, and it could happen anytime. We just. We. Once it happens, of course, then we will start protecting our technologies against it. But our technologies are less than a century old. You know, modern science and technology, I mean, quantum mechanics was discovered just a century ago. So during that short period of time, we didn't have any giant catastrophe on Earth. There was not a solar eruption that could devastate our technological infrastructure. There was no impact by a big asteroid. So we tend to think nothing bad can happen from the sky, but that's an illusion. If we wait a few centuries, definitely there would be a huge solar eruption. I actually wrote two papers about it. But nobody pays attention until it happens. You know, that that's a human nature, that until something happens, we are not alert to it. And so I believe there would be much more funding to defend the Earth against such things once they have.

B (48:45)

Yeah. What causes those solar eruptions? Is it similar to a volcano eruption?

A (48:50)

No. So the sun is just a hot ball of gas, you know, that is being fueled by. It's basically a nuclear reactor, a fusion reactor that we are trying desperately to produce on Earth. But the sun basically is a condensation of gas and very hot. That got very hot at the center, it just came together by gravity, and. And at the center, the temperature reached about 13.5 million degrees.

B (49:20)

Wow.

A (49:22)

High enough to burn hydrogen. And so it's basically a nuclear fusion reactor that is held together by gravity, and it gets its power from the nuclear reactions. Eventually, it will consume all of its fuel, and at that point, you know, it will die. The nuclear reactor will stop working, and then the core of the sun will condense into a metallic ball roughly the size of the Earth. So about 60% of the mass of the sun will end up condensing into a very cold object that is the size of the Earth. These objects are called white dwarfs. And. But we see a lot of them in the graveyard of sun, like stars in the Milky Way galaxy. You know, just like if you go to a graveyard, you realize that you will die one day, right? Because you see all these monuments for dead people. And the same is true, you know, for the Milky Way galaxy. We see all these relics of dead suns that these are white dwarfs. That's what will happen to the Sun. But until then, it burns its nuclear fuel, and then the sun is powered by this nuclear fuel, and it has also magnetic fields. And the magnetic fields come out of the sun, and every now and then, two of them cross each other. Because the sun is rotating, there is turbulence. So when two magnetic fields cross each other, what happens is a process called reconnection. They basically cut through each other. They carry hot gas, and they inject a lot of energy into the particles of the gas, and you end up with a flare, a solar flare, or an eruption.

B (51:04)

Got it.

A (51:05)

And depending on how much energy is stored in the magnetic field, loops that break up as a result of this process, you end up with a solar flare or solar eruption of different proportions. And it could, you know, the amount of energy released, obviously, most of the time is relatively small. You don't get much of an impact on Earth. I mean, there are these plumes of hot gas coming out of the sun that many times they're missing the Earth. They're going in a direction that they don't intercept the Earth. And. But every now and then, there is a big eruption that sends a plume of hot gas that would collide with Earth and cause a lot of damage to our technologies. And that's what we. And the more energy is stored in this plume, the more rare it is. So we just have to wait a few centuries before one giant eruption will affect the Earth.

B (52:02)

Interesting. So the sun has a lifespan. What about Earth? Do you think this planet has a Lifespan. And there's all this talk.

A (52:09)

Well, so when the sun, well, first of all, the sun will brighten up in a billion years to a level that will boil off all the oceans, all the liquid water on the surface of Earth through the greenhouse effect. So there wouldn't be much left, you know, liquid water on Earth, it will become like a desert. And all life forms will disappear from the surface of the Earth. But within 7.6 billion, by the way, 1 billion years is about 20% of the lifespan of Earth. So we just have 20% left, you know, before life will not be possible. But in 7.6 billion years, the sun will die basically, and will expand. The envelope of the sun will expand and engulf the Earth and it will also engulf the moon. But, and so the Moon, because of its friction on the envelope of the sun, it will eventually crash on Earth.

B (53:02)

Wow.

A (53:03)

The Moon came from Earth, but as a result of a collision with a Mars size object. But now it will come back to us after the sun engulfs both the Earth reunited. Yeah. And then the, the combination of the two will sink to the center of the dying sun.

B (53:20)

Wow.

A (53:21)

And will become part of the white dwarf that will be there. So, you know, there will be nothing left of us, nothing left of what we care about on Earth in the long term, 7.6 billion years from now. And therefore all of the ambitions that we have about leaving some monuments that will be remembered in the future, they will disappear. The only monuments that will stay around are anything we send to space, that especially to interstellar space. And that's the only way for us to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy. And so if another civilization realize that that's what they will do, they will embark on an interstellar trip or send probes or instruments that will carry their legacy to industrial space. And so I think we should search for such objects because it will encourage us, it will give us a tip, it will encourage us to imitate them, it will give us a role model of how we can do better. And you know, it's an extension of the Darwinian principle of the fittest survives. You know, if you think about long term, the fittest means that you leave your home planet and you survive in space for on a space platform.

B (54:42)

Star Trek.

A (54:46)

Well, Star Trek is limited to the imagination of Hollywood script writers. I, I can imagine things, you know, I, I, in fact, I think nature is probably far more imaginative than we are. So I look forward to finding such objects because my belief is that they would be Something we've never imagined.

B (55:04)

Right. I can't wait till that happens. Hopefully we get to see it one day. I think by billions of years. We'll probably be multi planetary by then. Right.

A (55:12)

Well, so the only planet that we can go to is obviously Mars, but it doesn't have much of an atmosphere and it's impossible to survive on the surface of Mars for more than a few years. You know, the human body would be bombarded by energetic particles, cosmic rays. So we have to go underground. And it's not, you know, it's just another rock that has much worse conditions than on Earth. So why would you leave your, your home planet and go to a planet that is much worse in terms of habitability?

B (55:47)

Right.

A (55:48)

You know, my recommendation is to invest maybe a trillion dollars in a project to build a, a space platform that can accommodate humans. So we design it in a way that would give all the nutrients, all the, provide the habitat, provide the artificial gravity and all the conditions that we are used to on Earth and put it in space because you know, we went from the jungles of Africa to high rises in cities and that was a big leap because you know, we had to search for food in the jungle. And it was a zero sum game. If someone gets that food, the others will not. And now you can order the food and it will come to your doorstep. That was a huge transition and we just made it in, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. And going from high rises in cities to space to me sounds like less of a leap. And we just need to focus our ambitions on that transition. And then instead of making humanity multi planet species, making it a space engaging species, and if we build our own habitats that we can make sure that it provides what we need. We can equip it with nuclear energy and with artificial intelligence, we can create sort of a heaven that, and frankly, I would love to go on a journey away from Earth. You know, I'm, when I read the news every day, I'm very frustrated with.

B (57:38)

Yeah, I don't blame you, I don't blame you. Hope to see you in space one day.

A (57:42)

Well, I asked the students in my class one time, I said if there was a spacecraft landing at Harvard Square and, and they would invite you for a one way trip, would you go on it? And I was surprised that the young students, you know, Gen X or even younger said we will do that, but under one condition, that we can share the experience through Instagram or yeah. With our friends. And I found that to be quite ridiculous frankly, because you will never see your friends. You know, like, once you go on a trip, what's the point about sharing experiences? Just enjoy it. You know, that's. That's the only reason I would do it. Just for the fun of experiencing something new.

B (58:33)

Yeah. Yeah. The younger kids have to document everything. They got to show off where they're traveling, where they're vacationing, what they're eating for dinner, you know?

A (58:41)

Yeah. But you're basically wasting your life sharing it with other people. Just enjoy it for yourself.

B (58:47)

Yeah, I agree. Well, Avi, it's been a pleasure. How can people watching this find you, support you, and keep up with you?

A (58:54)

So I have essays on medium.com the link is avid avi-loeb.medium.com where I provide updates about 3i Atlas or anything else that I'm working on. And I have two books at a popular level that I published in recent years. One is extraterrestrial, the other one is interstellar. And there is a third one. They just finished their writing and should come out in 2026 about the expedition that they led to the Pacific Ocean. There will also be a Netflix documentary about that and that was in search for materials from an interstellar meteor. So stay tuned for the Netflix documentary.

B (59:37)

Awesome. Can't wait. We'll link it all below. Thanks for coming on.

A (59:41)

Thanks for having me.

B (59:42)

Thanks for watching all the way to the end, guys. Please hit like and subscribe. It helps us grow the show and helps us get bigger guests. Thank you so much.