Dr. Avi Loeb (2:21)

Active probiotics and help support gut health. While you go about your day, your.

Mayim Bialik (2:25)

Gut is where it all begins. So start with Activia.

Dr. Avi Loeb (2:28)

Enjoying Activia twice a day for two.

Mayim Bialik (2:30)

Weeks is part of a balanced diet. And healthy lifestyle can help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

Jonathan Cohen (2:37)

And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

Mayim Bialik (2:38)

And welcome to our breakdown. We are in a special location. We happen to be away somewhere where it's 105 degrees. So we are inside in air conditioning. Today we're gonna be talking about the fabric of our very existence as we couch it in the possibility of life on other planets. Life that has possibly existed for millions or billions of years before we do. Basically we're going to be talking about how insignificant we are and how incredibly significant the research is in astrophysics that is examining life on other planets and the possibility of us even living on other planets. We're going to be talking today to Dr. Avi Loeb. And Dr. Loeb is the Frank Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He's a best selling author. His latest book is Interstellar the Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars. He's a former member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology at the White House, a former chair on the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He's a guy who has testified in front of Congress asking for them to release unidentified information that we know the government has regarding things that only people like Dr. Avi Loeb can actually analyze and determine if they come from other planets and what that means for our humanity.

Jonathan Cohen (4:03)

He also talks about three One Atlas, which many scientists believe is a comet, but he believes may be alien spacecraft. And it is coming very close with the Target date of October 29th.

Mayim Bialik (4:19)

We're so excited to get to talk to astrophysicist and really expert on imagining things about extraterrestrial life and our interstellar existence better than anyone else. Dr. Avila, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down.

Dr. Avi Loeb (4:35)

Thanks for having me.

Mayim Bialik (4:36)

This is kind of an awkward question, but I'm going to ask it.

Dr. Avi Loeb (4:41)

Why?

Mayim Bialik (4:41)

And how do you feel so comfortable speaking so informally about the existence of aliens?

Dr. Avi Loeb (4:48)

Oh, why? Because I don't believe that we are special. You know, I was invited to give a talk at the town, the birth town of Copernicus to run a couple of years ago. The Polish government asked me and I decided to speak about the, the next Copernican revolution. He informed us that maybe we are not at the center of, of of the solar system or the universe based on the data that he looked at. And the next Copernican revolution would be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. Now why do I think that's very likely? Because you look out and you see a lot of stars like the sun. You see 100 billion of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And we estimate that at least a few percent of them have a planet like the Earth. Roughly at the same separation. So that means that there are billions of Earth sun analogs out there. So it's like looking at the street. You live in a house, and you see a lot of houses just like yours. Now, many of my colleagues would say, okay, we see a lot of houses, but how do you know that they have residents or that they ever had residents? And I say that is the most natural assumption. You know, when my daughters were young, they thought that they are the only ones in the world. You know, like the world centers on them simply because, you know, it's just like the AI systems that have a training data set. So my daughters had a very limited training data set, which is our home, and all the attention was on them. Obviously, they thought that they are the center of the universe. That's what humanity did as well, until Copernicus and Galileo Galilei argued otherwise. So at some point, my daughters looked through the window and saw other houses, but they never imagined that there are infants just like them over there until the first day in the kindergarten. And then they were shocked that not only there are others like them, but also they are not the smartest. And I think we haven't matured yet as a civilization. And I think the more. The more natural thing to assume is, no, we are not special. There were things like us billions of years ago. You know, the sun formed in the last one third of cosmic history, and most stars formed billions of years before the sun. And there was plenty of time for those other civilizations to exceed our capabilities. In fact, you know, there were a hundred billion people on Earth so far. And you should ask, where is everybody? Well, the answer is most of them are dead. There are only 8 billion alive right now. And the same must be true for civilizations that existed. Most of them are dead. But what I'm trying to find is, you know, if they left behind any relics. I'm doing sort of space archaeology. And, you know, my search is similar to thinking that, you know, you have a backyard, and very often you see rocks in the backyard, and some of the rocks come from the street. But every now and then you might find a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. And I'm saying that's a very different approach than waiting for a phone call from a neighbor, which is pretty much what the SETI community, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, did over the past 75 years or so. They were just trying to wait for a radio signal. That's the idea of contact. And, you know, that is very different than checking your mailbox for any package that may have arrived in the mail.

Mayim Bialik (8:24)

I think one of the things that really astounded me in your book was, you know, the comparison that you made was if you were to take someone from, you know, I sort of think in major epochs of history, I think of like, you know, the several thousand years we know about before Jesus's time, right then, right around zero, you know, and then, you know, I think of like a slew of progress, innovation, you know, I think of the Renaissance, I think of the Enlightenment, I think of the industrial revolution, you know, I think of all these things that have, you know, happened. And what you said is if you were to present an iPhone, you know, to someone living in biblical times, let's.

Dr. Avi Loeb (9:07)

Say a cave dweller, for example, right?

Mayim Bialik (9:10)

Or even a cave dweller, it's almost like there wasn't the capacity for cognition, you know, to be able to form, right, a story around what is this?

Dr. Avi Loeb (9:21)

The cave dweller would say, it's a rock of a type that I've never seen before. And that's what my colleagues are saying about interstellar objects. They say, like Oumuamua or now Three Eye Atlas is an object of a type that I've never seen before. We can talk more about it. But my hope is if the cave dweller says that there would be a kid of the cave dweller that would look at the rock and realize that they can press a button and something else will happen. And so that is the kid that will bring progress to humanity. And that's why I think that science is really a great privilege to maintain your childhood curiosity. And my advice to young people is never behave as the adults in the room. You know, I was traumatized at the dinner table as a kid when I would ask a difficult question and the adults in the room would give me an answer that didn't make sense and they pretended to know more than they actually know. And becoming a scientist is really the privilege of asking questions, you know, as science is. As I said today at CNN in the morning, I said, you know, science, we shouldn't censor any question. Any question is legitimate. Within science, people think, oh, how dare you speak about this possibility? And I say, no. Within science, you can ask any question you want. You can brainstorm whatever comes to your mind. The scientific method is all about getting data to answer the question. That's very different from politics, where you just need to convince other people to do something. That's very different from the discussions on, on social media, where you have to get Likes, it's not about that. It's not about humans agreeing with you. It's about what describes the physical reality. And by getting enough data about reality, eventually we'll figure it out just like a detective story. And, you know, that's a lot of fun. That's fun. You know, science should not be boring. And really the biggest problem with the way science is deliberated right now is that scientists have a press conference where they lecture to the public on what the public should understand. And they don't take any debates, they just tell the, you know, the other side, the reporters, what they should know. But science is work in progress. It's always. There are always doubts, there are always uncertainties. And that's actually the fun part. And if science was portrayed as work in progress and you know, the scientists would not try to show off that they are smarter than the people they talk with, then science would be much more credible because a lot of the credibility went away, for example, during COVID 19. And when politics is introduced into science, that's pretty bad.

Mayim Bialik (12:10)

One of the things you talked about is the difference in capability that we might observe between us and a species, let's say, that has millions of years of a head start on us. Billions of years of a head start on us. We spoke to Robin Hansen and I was like, this is nuts. I can't even wrap my head around it. But what I was explaining to my teenager was that we are, we are closer to the possibility of technological understanding and AI than let's say cave people were to an iPhone. However, there's still going to be this gap. So when you talk about a civilization that might have this kind of head start, I, because my brain can only do what it can, I'm thinking, oh, they must have had like a Jesus figure. And then they had, you know, an enlightenment and they had paintings, and then they had skyscrapers, and then they had terrorism. Like, I'm picturing our existence a million years ago. But that's not necessarily what would have happened because it's got its entire own time course, like a whole bunch of other. Like I'm trying to literally wrap my head around what that's like.

Dr. Avi Loeb (13:26)

So first of all, advice on a blind date, don't express your opinion at first. Just observe. And so, you know, when we deal with aliens, it's a blind date of astronomical proportions. And we should be open minded to things we have never imagined, that not even Hollywood scripts have imagined. Because just like artificial intelligence, they were trained on data, on Earth, all of the imaginations that we can find in the literature, in movies and so forth. They are based on experiences on Earth. And when you have a visitor from another star, all bets are off. Okay. Now, of course, in the small scale, you can imagine the way that the Iranian air defense responded to the B2 bombers. They couldn't do much about it. So if they come to us and they have the technology that is a little bit above, then we won't be able to cope with it. But definitely, when you see airplanes, you know what you're dealing with here. It could be something that we cannot comprehend. So they could have the advantage of the amount of time that they develop science and technology, of course. But there is another difference that could be quite more important, and that is the size of the brain or the capability, how many neural connections our brain has versus their brain has. Because, you know, it's possible that we are just limited by our brain. And the brain developed to the maximum size possible within the human body. That consumes about 20 watts, by the way. If you compare it to AI systems that consume gigawatts, it's quite amazing what biology did. And I think we, at some point we will have to visit the question, can you make AI with biology? You know, like using chemical reactions rather than silicon chips, which are very different. They are not flesh and blood. But our brain uses just 15% of, up to 15% of the, you know, of, of the power that the human body provides. And, and, and that's what limited it. It can't grow bigger because that's the maximum power the body can give it, the metabolic power. So it's possible that they have, you know, a different nutrition, a different digestion system so that their brains are bigger. And if their brains are bigger, we just wouldn't understand them. It's just like we are the dumb kid in the, in the class.

Mayim Bialik (15:50)

They may not even be humanoid.

Dr. Avi Loeb (15:53)

No, exactly. They might be something completely crazy. So I'm saying let's not imagine anything before the blind date. Let's just keep our eyes open and then deal with it when we see it.

Mayim Bialik (16:05)

The only reason you're allowed to say that it could be crazy is because you work for Harvard and you're wearing a tie.

Dr. Avi Loeb (16:13)

Fundamentally, I'm not a Harvard person. I'm not a Harvard groomed person. I grew up on a farm. I just happened to get a tenured appointment at Harvard. I'm not sure yet why, but it happened 32 years ago that I arrived at Harvard. But the way I think is just like anyone else, I'm just curious. And science gives me the privilege of pursuing it. I mean anyone you see, what you just said is the kind of the way that herders keep the herd in a tight configuration. You are being told by the adults in the room not to misbehave. Okay? You are being told not to imagine things. You are being told to stay within the beaten path. And I'm telling you, no, no. That's just the narrative you heard from people who do not have imagination. And in fact, that slows down progress. That slows down innovation. I want you to feel like a kid, you know, and imagine anything you want.

Mayim Bialik (17:13)

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Dr. Avi Loeb (17:41)

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Jonathan Cohen (18:37)

Learn more@WhatsApp.com why don't we go into the discussing the objects? Because that is almost more tangible, right? Like, I like the analogy of the ball being thrown into the yard. If a tennis ball is in your yard and you don't know where it came from, maybe you don't even know what a tennis ball is. You're going to be like, okay, what is this? It's a, it's a tangible object. And there's been an enormous amount of conversation, especially with the congressional hearings, of all these people claiming there are all these objects that everyone has and every government has objects. And what we can't show you But I promise you, I've seen them.

Dr. Avi Loeb (19:13)

So let me tell you an anecdote on that exact issue. On the 1st of May, 2025 this year, I gave a briefing in Congress. The day before that, I was invited to visit the old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon. And that is the organization that was established after the Director of National Intelligence submitted the three reports to the US Congress admitting that they're not doing their job. The defense budget is almost a trillion dollars for 2026, and they're supposed to figure out what flies in our sky. And yet the Director of National Intelligence was admitting that they cannot figure out the nature of some objects. To me, that's a very rare admission because it basically says we're getting a lot of money to do the job and we don't do it. Okay, so it's a serious matter of national security. If these are manufactured by adversarial nations, we need to figure it out. That's what I said in Congress. I said, look, if you want to figure it out, I'm happy to collect a bunch of scientists that will help you do that. It's not a matter of the kind of sensors you are using. It's. It's just like in any other scientific matter. It's the quality of the people that analyze the data. I said, if you want to invest a billion dollars in getting something like the Manhattan Project, I'm all for it and we can figure it out. But the reason I bring this up is a day after visiting. So I was at the old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and this is the organization that was supposed to look into those cases, into the reports of objects that, that cannot be identified. And, you know, I asked them, did you find anything? You know, you've been at it for two years now. And they said, no, we pretty much have access to all the information. And whenever there was data available, it looked like human made. Nothing unusual, nothing extraterrestrial, except for a few FBI reports. That's what they said. But then in the, in Congress, a, after I gave my briefing, next to me was sitting Eric Davis. He said he worked for the government decades ago. And the government has at its possession about a dozen or more than a dozen spacecraft that were retrieved from crash sites and with pilots. And there are four types of, of aliens that were recovered.

Mayim Bialik (21:43)

This person said that there are, there's debris, including pilots like the people who were in the unidentified.

Dr. Avi Loeb (21:55)

And four types of those biological creatures that were recovered.

Mayim Bialik (21:59)

Four types of them, yes.

Dr. Avi Loeb (22:02)

Now, what I thought about is, well, first thing I thought, who should I believe? Should I believe the old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon the day before that said there is nothing, or should I believe Eric Davis that says, I was in government and I know, I know that this exists somewhere. And I, you know, I asked my wife, who should I believe? You know, you know, I'm a scientist. I respond to data. And, you know, I didn't see any evidence. If I were to see something the government has, of course I would be glad to help them figure it out. But without seeing it, I cannot just believe stories. People tell stories all the time, you know, and when there is a car accident, you hear different reports and each of them is different, you know, like different people see different things. And it's just. I cannot tell if it's a real story or not. And also, I can imagine a situation where, you know, there is a, indeed, retrieval and reverse engineering program within government, but that's for equipment that was found in crash sites of, you know, of debris from adversarial nations, you know, so we want to figure them out. And of course, there might be pilots there, human pilots that belong to different nations of different types. And so the story might be twisted in a way so that those nations will not know what our intelligence agencies know. So that is a possibility. And then Eric Davis hears secondhand that there are these things, and he thinks it's aliens, but it's not really it. So I just don't know what to make of it. But here is my. Here is my solution. My solution is I don't believe stories. I don't believe people. You know, I adapt the approach of FIFA, the soccer world organization. When there is a disputed goal, FIFA doesn't go to the goalkeeper or goes to the audience and asks, was there a goal or not? They use cameras. They record the event with instruments that have no personality. And then they decide, was there a goal or not? And I want to approach it this. I don't care about the past. I just want to collect data that will tell me the answer, you know, from instrument.

Mayim Bialik (24:13)

Okay, I'm going to go with your criteria for data collection. There are two things in particular. Two. I don't know what to call them. Crafts, objects. The first is. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. Is it Omamua?

Dr. Avi Loeb (24:33)

Okay, now we're dealing with something else. So previously I was talking about unidentified anomalous phenomena that are inside the Earth's atmosphere. Now what you are talking about is something that astronomers discovered with telescopes. These are objects flying through the inner solar system, but they are not colliding with Earth. They're not coming into Earth's atmosphere. They're just passing by at a speed that indicates that they are not bound by gravity to the sun. These are called interstellar objects, and they were found only over the past eight years, okay, with telescopes. And as you say, the first one was named Oumuamua because it was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii and it means a scout in the Hawaiian language. And the second one was called Borisov after the amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov that discovered it. Ended up being a comet, nothing unusual comet similar to what we know in the solar system. Oumuamua was really peculiar because it changed its brightness by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours. And that variation of reflected sunlight implied, based on very detailed analysis, that it's disk like it's flat in its shape. Very unusual. And then it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any evaporation. There was no cometary tail. There was no gas or dust around it. And I just suggested maybe it's a very thin object that is pushed by reflecting sunlight, you know. And the same telescope in Hawaii three years later, after 2017, in 2020, he discovered an object called the 2020, so that was definitely pushed by sunlight. Ended up being a rocket booster from a 1966 launch by NASA. And the question is, who produced Oumuamua? But then the third one was discovered on July 1, 2025. And since then, I wrote four papers about it. For some reason, my name became viral. I don't have any footprint on social media, but I'm told that every second there is a tweet about it.

Mayim Bialik (26:41)

Where did we come from? Meaning how did we get here?

Dr. Avi Loeb (26:47)

That's an excellent question. Because humans arrived on Earth just a few million years ago. And that's one part in a thousand or so of the Earth's history. And when people say, you know, we need to save the Earth, the Earth went through catastrophes, many of them before we came to exist. The Earth would survive us. We shouldn't worry about the Earth. It's about saving humanity that we should worry. And moreover, you know, the only catastrophe that the Earth would get eliminated through is when the sun, in 7.6 billion years, will expand at the end of its life and will engulf the Earth. At that point, the Moon, as a result of the friction on the sun's envelope, the moon will collide back, come back to Earth. The moon came from Earth, but it will come back to Earth and then the Earth will sink all the way to the center of the sun. So that's the only reason the Earth will disappear at some point in the future. But coming back to the question, where did we come from? That's an interesting question. Of course, the standard scientific version is that we came from perhaps chimpanzees or, you know, in Africa, and. But somehow we managed to develop intelligence far beyond any other species on Earth. And the question is, you know, there is a fundamental question whether that was a result of a visit by some interstellar gardener that decided to introduce intelligence into this planet. And we just don't know because it's not documented. Humans documented history over the past 8,000 years or so. And, you know, one reason I'm seeking intelligence in interstellar space is because I don't often find it in academia.

Mayim Bialik (28:41)

I've been under the assumption that the process of evolution, the way I was taught as an undergraduate in graduate school, was accurate. Am I supposed to entertain the possibility that there was an interstellar visit from a being that inserted intelligence into our evolutionary DNA?

Dr. Avi Loeb (29:00)

It's possible. And let me bring another possibility. You know, we think that 66 million years ago, there was a giant rock the size of Manhattan island that killed the non avian dinosaurs. What if that was not a rock, but some giant thing that collided with Earth to reset the biological life on Earth? Or, you know, there are all kinds of events. If you go back hundreds of millions of years, and we just don't know, it was never documented. We don't know what happened. We know that the common ancestor of life, it's called gluca, the last universal common ancestor, right? Now, it was dated by DNA to have appeared 4.2 billion years ago. You know, that was the earth, formed around 4.5 billion years ago. And within 300 million years, life started with this common ancestor. And we don't know where it came from. It could have come from Mars because Mars cooled before the Earth. It's a smaller body. It had more surface area for its mass than the Earth, and therefore it could have cooled earlier and life could have started on Mars. We know it had lakes, rivers, oceans of water, just like Earth. And, you know, we know that the two planets exchanged rocks. And if life started, if Luca was first on Mars and delivered to Earth with a rock, this is called panspermia, that's the delivery of life in rocks, then what Elon Musk is trying to do right now is return to our childhood home. In fact, There were astronauts, tiny astronauts, microbes in the cores of these early rocks that were the first to make the trip from Mars to Earth. And it's possible that LUCA that started life on Earth came from Mars. We don't know because we haven't found yet evidence for life on Mars. And when we find it, we can see if it looks just like ours.

Mayim Bialik (31:03)

I mean, it's kind of funny because if we hadn't read your credentials, we might say this sounds crazy. Meaning it never occurred to me. I mean, first of all, I think it's adorable that we consider microbes that might be traveling in rocks tiny astronauts. I just think that's cute. But I think the sort of notion of, well, we could have been visited by aliens from Mars is something that many of us would not usually speak of, you know, or assume is spoken about in legitimate academic circles. And it is.

Dr. Avi Loeb (31:43)

No, there are scientific papers talking about it. It's just that we don't have the data to support it as of now. If we find life on Mars, we can check if it's identical to life on Earth. And that would suggest that the two planets shared life among them. But I can give you advice, very simple advice. If you ever encounter an alien, don't shake their hand. And the reason is simple, because life on Earth, all forms of life on Earth has a particular helicity. The DNA molecules and RNA molecules, they all are oriented. Their structure is such that it's sort of, you know, it has handedness. And you could have imagined mirror life where the handedness was the opposite. But all life on Earth has the same handedness. This, the molecules are organized, their structure is, you know, clockwise, let's say, and not counterclockwise. And we brought 120 grams of material from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth and studied it over the past year. And it turns out that on this asteroid, the amino acids had both chiralities, both orientations, with equal probability, 50% each. And somehow this symmetry was broken when life started on Earth. Now, the reason I say don't shake the hand of an alien is because our bodies are not protected against, you know, bacteria or other living organisms that have the opposite handedness. And in that sense, if you get a disease from a bacteria that has the opposite handedness, the body cannot cope with that because it's used to all forms of life that have the same handedness. And so it could be catastrophic, health wise. That's why I'm saying going to Mars is dangerous. Because if, for example, life developed there with an opposite handedness, then you might get sick and you won't survive that. And that's something that Elon Musk doesn't talk about. He doesn't talk about all the health hazards. You know, that the fact that there is no, obviously no atmosphere, you're not protected against cosmic rays that can damage your body, you know, destroy your brain within a matter of a few years if you're not shielded, you know, it doesn't talk about the temperature variations between day and night that are hundreds of degrees. We will have to go into caves if we ever go to Mars. Sort of ironic because our prehistory was in caves to protect ourselves from the weather. When we go to Mars, we'll have to go down into those caves. If I ever go to Mars, I would like to check if there are any wall paintings on the caves, you know, because that would mean that someone was there before us. ABC Wednesday Shifting Gears is back. It has arisen. Tim Allen and Kat Dennings return in.

Jonathan Cohen (34:38)

Television'S number one new comedy what what?

Dr. Avi Loeb (34:41)

With a star studded premiere including Jenna.

Jonathan Cohen (34:44)

Elfman, Nancy Travis and hey buddy.

Dr. Avi Loeb (34:47)

A big home improvement reunion. Welcome. Oh boy, that guy's a tool. Shifting Gears season Premier Wednesday, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. It's pro savings days at Lowe's. Get up to 35% off select major appliances and save. In addition additional $1,000 when you buy four select LG major appliances plus get a free Dewalt 20 volt max 5amp hour battery when you buy a select Dewalt 20 volt max tool. Get the job done for less at Lowes. We help you Save valid through 926. Selection varies by location while supplies last.

Jonathan Cohen (35:27)

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Mayim Bialik (35:32)

Tonight turn down the noise of the day and focus on the rest with agz, the nightly drink for winding down and resting up. New from AG1. AGZ supports your body's natural sleep cycle with clinically studied key herbs, adaptogens and minerals in amounts supported by research. And no melatonin helping you wake feeling rested, wind down, rest up with Agz. Learn more@drinkagz.com it's towards the end of your book. The possibility that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization provides humanity both of the possibilities that we have sort of a secular explanation and also a potentially one that's consistent with a religious notion you talk about. Our universe has a flat geometry with zero net energy and an advanced civilization could have developed some technology to create Sort of a baby universe you call it. Is it possible? I mean, I know there's a lot of presuppositions, you know, that we'd have to sort of also be comfortable with. But what is the possibility and how does that work that we may have been created by another species that has long preexisted ours?

Dr. Avi Loeb (36:51)

Well, it's a very simple idea. By the way. I'm simple minded, despite of what you might think. I was born on a farm in Israel, and I only say what I understand. Okay? And so it's a very simple idea. There is nothing fancy about it. Basically, as of now, you know, we have two pillars of modern physics. One is called quantum mechanics, and that's responsible for all the electronic instruments that you're using that we are communicating through. We understand how to make those as a result of understanding quantum mechanics. Okay. And that deals with elementary particles primarily. Then there is the theory of gravity that Albert Einstein came up with 10010 years ago. It's called the general theory of relativity, where gravity is not a force, it's actually the curvature of space and time. Okay. The problem is unifying these two pillars, bringing them together to a single theory that includes both in a consistent way. And Albert Einstein dedicated the last part of his life to this mission and couldn't do it. And there are people that dedicated the last 50 years of theoretical physics to this mission in the context of mostly string theory. And they don't make any predictions. But I'm saying, I mean, their theory is not unique. It's not complete enough to make any forecasts about experimental data. So, but anyway, I'm saying, suppose you have a higher level of intelligence. You know, maybe it's a problem of the human brain. Maybe it's a problem of lack of data. We don't have enough data. But imagine a civilization that had more than one century of science and technology since they discovered quantum mechanics. So they had plenty of time, maybe thousands of years, millions of years, maybe even billions of years. And they have developed a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. It's called quantum gravity. What does it mean? Okay, so according to Einstein's theory of gravity, if we go back in time, we end up in the Big Bang. We see the universe is expanding, and you just reverse the movie backwards and you get a denser and hotter state of everything until you reach an infinite density. And at that point, Einstein's theory breaks down. It cannot handle an extremely high curvature of space time. And of course, it's because it doesn't have Quantum mechanics, Because quantum mechanics is important at very high densities of matter, quantum effects start to play a role. And so suppose we had the theory of quantum gravity. Then we would be able to, to figure out to replace the singularity of the Big Bang that exists in Einstein's gravity with an actual scenario for how the universe started. What was there before the Big Bang? Okay, that's it. So we could go beyond the Big Bang back in time and figure out what were the initial conditions that led to the Big Bang. What was there before the Big Bang? Now, if you think about it, it's just like a recipe for a cake, because if you have the ingredients and you know how to put them together and how much heat to apply to them at any given time, you can make a cake, bake a cake. And if we had a theory of quantum gravity, we would know how to make a baby universe. You just put the ingredients at the right order with enough heat, and you end up with a universe. Now, of course, if you go back to the Old Testament, in the first chapter of the Bible, it says that God did just that. God created the universe. What I'm saying is, once we have a theory of quantum gravity, anyone that has it can apply for the job of God. Why? Because in principle, you have a recipe for that cake. Okay? Now, the question of whether you can make the cake or not depends on what oven you have. If you don't have the oven to bake the cake, you can't make it. And that means in the context of the universe, you need to create a very high density of matter and radiation and somehow create the conditions that led to the Big Bang. Maybe we can't do it engineering wise, but we will have the recipe. If anyone is asking for job applications, we would be able to apply. We would say, because the requirement would be, if you want to apply for the job of God, you should be able to create a universe. And if we have the recipe, we know how to do it. So my point is as follows. If there are civilizations that developed to the level of being able to have that recipe and maybe even realize it in the laboratory, they can create a baby universe. Then you can have universes continuing as babies inside, you know, just like humans, that, you know, the babies become adults and give birth to new babies, okay? So within our universe, there would be aliens that would be able to create baby universes. And inside those baby universes, you know, presumably, if the conditions are right, you will have scientists that will eventually figure out how to make additional baby universes. So that's sort of a way to resolve the Big Bang singularity and imagine that this sequence continued forever.

Mayim Bialik (42:29)

You know, I, I studied neuroscience as an undergrad and I studied neuroscience and I got my Ph.D. and you know, I was busy learning about molecular and cellular neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. And you know, the most out there thing I studied was like consciousness and religion. You know, are there substrates in the brain for that? I, I don't know when I miss the portion of history when we went from there's no aliens to of course there's aliens. But something happened that I think a lot of people missed.

Dr. Avi Loeb (43:06)

Yeah. You know, when I started astrophysics, it was thought that maybe the solar system is unique and that other stars may not have planets. That was entertained by astronomers. And you know, there was an astronomer named Otto Struve that back, back in 1952 suggested, let's check if there are Jupiter mass planets next to stars because they are so big. Jupiter is big and when it passes in front of the star, we will see a, a reduction in the flux of the star or it will tug and move the star back and forth that we can detect. And, and people ignored it. And then in 1995, the first hot Jupiter, Jupiter close to a star was discovered next to a sun like star. And the Nobel Prize was awarded for that. And just as a footnote, the paper that discovered that did not cite Otto Struve just to show you not only people ignored his suggestion for more than 40 years, but when it was actually realized, he didn't get the credit in the paper that won the Nobel Prize. That's the way science happens very often people forget. But to answer your question, since the discovery of that planet, we are seeing planets everywhere. And so the fact that there are so many Earth sun analogs out there implies that it's not so rare to imagine circumstances similar to ours. That changes the psychology. But most of the astrobiologists, those that are interested in life out there, you know, in the mainstream of astronomy, they say, oh, you know, microbes formed really early on Earth immediately, and therefore we should search for microbes. They are probably much more abundant. The existence of intelligence is an extraordinary claim and the mistake they are made. So they are willing to, as the highest priority right now in mainstream astronomy, it is to build the next space telescope that would search for microbes through the chemical fingerprints that they live in in the atmospheres of planets far away. And that is a very subtle signature. And that's why it would cost more than $10 billion to build a telescope that would detect it. But even if we detect oxygen, methane, you know, water vapor, it would not demonstrate that there is life because you can make these molecules also by geological processes. My point is it may be easier to detect intelligent life because if we see a gadget flying by and we can tell that it's not a rock, that will be beyond any doubt. And that will show us that not only life exists, but intelligent life exists. And intelligence can build self replicating probes that will be easier to detect. It might target us at the center of the solar system, so the chance of it visiting us might be higher than some random rock or something else. So my point is we should do both. We should hedge our bets. And so the discussion, in my view, didn't go that far enough. You're saying it went too much beyond what you expected. But I'm saying not far enough because I think we should hedge our bets and invest billions of dollars in the search for microbes and the search for intelligence. And frankly, I find microbes boring. I think we can learn much more by finding a smarter kid on the block. And the one thing I'm hoping for is suppose we see a technological object from an alien civilization flying near Earth. I think it will unite people. I think it will bring a sense, you know, to me it sounds like the messianic age where peace may come to Earth because we will start looking up and realize that we are all in the same boat, we are part of the same team. There is someone else out there. There is nothing better to unify people than that sentiment. And so my view of the messianic age is actually that the Messiah quote unquote, will come from another star.

Mayim Bialik (47:18)

I think there's a few things that could happen. You know, one of the best ways to unite with someone is to have a common enemy. And that would be one, you know, one possibility. Like, we're busy killing each other and fighting, but there's something that would like to kill us much more than we would like to kill each other. And you know what I instantly think of again? Like, we can only put our framework right on what's happening. And I, I'll be honest, like, I was the kid who at the dinner table, like, oh, you tell me to eat this, that I don't want to, I will eat it. You tell me, finish it, I will finish it. Like, I will be the most obedient person at the dinner table. So my brain doesn't really, like, go in all of these places, but I'm trying. So the first thing That I think of is, you know, one of the most exciting things. When anthropologists would talk about, you know, the possibility of, like, Homo sapiens sapiens living at the same time as Neanderthalensis. Right. Imagine you have two. Or pick any other, you know, iterations of humans. Right. The notion that we could have had, you know, a far more intelligent, let's say, species ruling over, you know, a less, I don't know, competent, you know, there was all these jokes about all the poor, you know, Neanderthals that, you know, were being oppressed by Homo sapiens sapiens. It is one theory that we are essentially already being watched or observed by a more intelligent life form. I don't even know what to call it. And when we had Robin Hansen on, he was absolutely certain that the only reason that we haven't had, you know, kind of reasonable interception from aliens or extraterrestrials is that they're waiting for us to do something so they can harvest us.

Jonathan Cohen (49:03)

He believes that they're sitting at the edge of our solar system watching us to make sure that we don't become interplanetary, because he believes that would be an existential threat.

Dr. Avi Loeb (49:16)

Yeah, so that is actually the dark forest hypothesis as a solution to Fermi's paradox. So Enrico fermi, in around 1950, had lunch in Los Alamos talking with the other physicists about extraterrestrials. And. And he asked, where is everybody? And, by the way, this is a question that every lonely person asks. And what you tell a lonely person is, don't be so presumptuous. You're not that attractive. You should go to dating sites and find others. It's not as if they will come to you. And Enrico Fermi didn't build a telescope. You know, he didn't really search. Now, the dark forest solution to Enrico Fermi's paradox worries everybody, is that they are out there. You know, there are many of them out there, but for survival, they decide not to make a sound. You know, they're silent. That's why we can't detect them. And they are listening to us because they want to protect themselves. And if they notice that we develop as a young technological civilization, they might see us as a threat and visit us. And that could be the source of a visit, you know, of. Of a technological object. And I brought it up in a paper this month in the context of 3I Atlas. This is the third interstellar object discovered on July 1, 2025. And what was special about it? First of all, the brightness was so large that if you were to assume it's a solid object, it had to have a diameter of 20 km. That's bigger than Manhattan island, twice as big as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and it's just extremely rare. Okay, so I calculated well, first of all, there should have been hundreds of thousands of Oumuamua sized object that was just the size of a football field, 100 meters or so. And there are many more small objects than big than big rocks. But more importantly, the interstellar space can deliver a rock of 20 km at best once per 10,000 years. If you take all the rocky material, pack it into 20 kilometer rocks once per 10,000 years, you can get one to cross the inner solar system at the speed of 3i atlas. So and we saw it after one decade of surveying the sky. So that was unusual. And then more dramatically, the trajectory of this object is that exactly aligned with the plane in which the planets orbit the sun to within 5 degrees. And you know, that coincidence is 1 in 500. Okay, for it to lie exactly in the plane, it means that along its path it can come very close to several planets. In fact, it comes very close to Mars, Venus and Jupiter. And it wouldn't be able to do that if it came at an angle. And moreover, it arrives closest to the sun when the Earth is on the opposite side of the sun. So we won't be able to observe it. And that's the best point to make a maneuver using the Sun's gravity. And moreover, it came from a direction in the sky that is full of stars. It's the direction of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And so I was the co author of a paper that said his Three Eye Atlas alien technology. And of course, you know, if it is alien technology, you, you can't do the calculation of the mass in rocks in interstellar space because this object is targeting the inner solar system. And you know it will pass closest to The sun on October 29, 2025. I got a text message the other day from someone who said that he is trading options on the volatility of the market with an expiration date of October 29th in order to make money. And I immediately thought, I don't know if there will be meaning to money if this object turns out to be technological after October 29th. If you want to take a vacation, take it before that date, because who knows what will happen now. It could be a mothership that releases mini probes that come to Earth. The Galileo project that I'm leading is looking for unidentified anomalous phenomena. And we have now three observatories. And we will check if after October there is more activity. You know, that would be interesting to check. But as of now, you know, people, astronomers, what you will hear is the sort of the party claim that this is a comet. Now a comet, by the way, just like zebra is identified by its stripes. Right? That's what I mean. How do you tell the difference between a horse and a zebra? It's the stripe. Okay, so how do you tell a comet from a rock that doesn't have any eyes? You tell it by the cometary tail. Okay? That's what distinguishes a comet. And in this case, just yesterday there was the first analysis of the image from the Hubble Space Telescope of this object. And guess what? There is no tail. But more importantly, there is glow in front of the object instead of behind it.

Mayim Bialik (54:36)

It's got headlights. It's got headlights. You're not celebrating Halloween this year. That's the take home message.

Jonathan Cohen (54:46)

Just as an English to English translation. If I'm summarizing, there is a large rock that most scientists think is a comet that is bigger than the size of Manhattan hurtling towards space or hurling through space potentially towards the Earth that you believe may be alien technology. Potentially a mothership that does not have any of the signs of a comet, but has headlights potentially or a glow in front of it. And it's scheduled to arrive potentially on Earth on October 29th. Is that accurate?

Dr. Avi Loeb (55:22)

Not to Earth, but to get closest to the sun along its path.

Mayim Bialik (55:26)

But Avi, it's gonna appear when we can't see it, which would be the best time for it to make a sneaky maneuver.

Dr. Avi Loeb (55:33)

Yes, exactly. I mean you can argue like my colleagues do and say, you know, the trajectory, you know, it's just a random trajectory that happens to be fine tuned and so perfectly aligned with all these planets. And you know, it's a coincidence that it happened to come closest to the sun when we can't see it. And it's a coincidence that it passes near all these other planets. By the way, even if you take this trajectory and just arrange for a random arrival time, you get 1 in 20,000 chance of it coming as close as it does to Jupiter, Mars and Venus. It just fine tuned in the sense that it also comes closest to, to those planets. Those planets are moving around the sun, you know, in a circle, each of them. And they get to the point where three eye Atlas is just when it arrives there. Like how can that happen?

Mayim Bialik (56:22)

Maybe you're crazy, maybe they're just going to say Avi's crazy, but is this sort of the way we have to think? Meaning if you're going to open up the possibility that there's extraterrestrial life, it's got a million or billion years of head start on us. You have to open your mind to the possibility of what if? And so every time you see something that we can't yet explain or we can't yet measure, we get to open our minds and say, what if? What are the possibilities? What's the clinical, scientific, quantifiable way to examine it rather than just dismiss it.

Dr. Avi Loeb (56:59)

Yeah. Or assume that it's the same as we have seen before, because that's the usual approach of scientists, of anyone. And my point is that, in fact, I suggested establishing a new scale between 0 and 10, which is now called the lobe scale, because I suggested it a month ago. And there was actually a paper yesterday that I co authored about it. And the idea is a zero would be an object that definitely shows a cometary tail or looks like an asteroid, has all the characteristics that we are familiar with of a rock or an icy rock. That's zero and 10 would be an object that is definitely technological because it maneuvers or has some artificial lights or has some unusual shape or transmits signals, something or has, you know, releases much more heat than you expect from the solar illumination. It has some engine that gives it additional heat. All of these signatures would raise a flag. And if it looks like it's technological, then there needs to be an organization that is international, because the aliens do not care how we split territories on this rock that we were born on. You know, there is much more real estate out beyond Earth, and they would be completely amazed that we are worried.

Mayim Bialik (58:23)

They're like hippies. They don't believe in borders.

Dr. Avi Loeb (58:26)

No, I mean, what we decide here on Earth is very local. You know, we are obsessed with it. All our politics. Geopolitics is all about territories, you know, and they would think, who cares? You know, this is a tiny rock out of billions of them out there. But so they would not distinguish us based on the nation that we belong to. So therefore, it will be a problem of the. Of humanity as a whole. And this organization needs to be international. So my recommendation is that there should be an organization because, you know, we are worried about existential threats from artificial intelligence. There is a lot of talk about it from climate change. There is a lot of talk about it from an asteroid impact. There is modest talk about that. But I'm saying another type of threat would be alien tech. Okay? And there should be an organization that decides what to do. Why? Because when we imagine in the context of contact, you know, the film or the book, if we imagine detecting a radio signal from a star that is thousands of light years away, you know, there is no urgency. There is plenty of time, because it would take them a lot of time to reach us. Even if we respond, we have time to respond. There is no immediate threat. But if you have a visitor in your backyard, you immediately need to decide what to do about it. And that depends on the intent and the capabilities of the visitor and the characteristic, the specific characteristics of the visitor. And each visitor deserves special attention. So my point is this organization, when, you know, in the next decade, the Rubin Observatory will discover an interstellar object every few months. We're entering a new phase. Now in the past, in the last eight years, we discovered only three. Okay, so now every three months there will be a new one. And we need to develop a strategy of how to deal with things that are high on this low scale of risk, that are above 5. Let's say we need to develop a response to that, especially if it's close to 10. We need to decide how to deal with that. And we haven't thought about that. There is no such organization and nobody discusses it.

Mayim Bialik (60:35)

You predict that within a generation we will be able to conceive of. And that can mean a lot of different things. A small craft or a miniature satellite containing an advanced computer system with AI that stores the complete DNA information of all species existing on Earth as of 2022. This is likened to a modern day Noah's Ark. You're talking about an artificial intelligence fueled DNA catalog of all species existing on Earth as of 2022. What would we do with this artificial intelligence, Noah's Ark of DNA?

Dr. Avi Loeb (61:20)

Well, that's different because for that you need someone to visit us and go there, you know, and I'm not sure they have any motivation to search for it. But, you know, we spend our life replicating our DNA by having babies. You know, I don't know. You know, I have two daughters. And that's one approach to maintaining longevity. Another one is to write a book.

Mayim Bialik (61:46)

Either have sex and make babies or write a book. Those are the choices.

Dr. Avi Loeb (61:50)

All of these are calculations for the short term. Because, you know, in 7.6 billion years, the sun will. In fact, in 1 billion years, the sun will boil off all oceans on Earth. We need to go somewhere else. We need to go to space. And the question is how to Maintain the longevity of what we care about. And first of all, you might want to record everything we care about. Now, Noah, in the biblical story built an ark, okay, and put animals in it. I'm saying, forget about the animals. It's so much work to pack them into a spacecraft, and then would they survive? You need to feed them and so forth. So let's have just the information of life on Earth encoded and sent out so that if someone finds it, they can recreate. And, you know, that someone could be a human that survived because, you know, when Earth had a catastrophe, that human was wealthy enough to build a spacecraft and escape. So. But at least they will have the ability to reproduce what was demolished here on Earth somewhere else. You know, but it could also be some. Some other intelligent beings out there. You know, if I ever met aliens, I would ask them two questions. The first one would be, what was there before the Big Bang? And that question relates to what we discussed before, because then we would have a recipe to make a universe. And the second question would be, where do you hold your social events? You know, where is the hub that I can meet others and socialize? Because, you know, if you think about Darwin's theory of the fittest surviving, if you apply to interstellar space, you know, you're dealing not with millions of years of evolution on Earth, but you're dealing with catastrophes on many other planets where, you know, there was a population of intelligent beings like us and their star erupted and killed them all. And there were tragedies that we are not aware of because we were not around to hear their cries for help, you know, But I'm sure there is a lot to cosmic history where a lot of tragedies of very intelligent beings, more intelligent than we are, that perished because of some catastrophe. A star exploded next to them, something bad happened, a big asteroid, they didn't notice something, and eventually the fittest survived Somehow, you know, a small minority of those civilizations managed to escape the hazardous environment that they were born in and live for. So I'm saying if we have that ambition of survival, it might make sense for us to go interstellar.

Mayim Bialik (64:46)

We're going to hit pause here. This is a fantastic conversation we've been having with Dr. Avi Lo. But we've got so much more that we want to cover in part two.

Jonathan Cohen (64:56)

Including the AI revolution and how he thinks it may extend life, how science does not contradict religion, and we get deep into black hole theory.

Mayim Bialik (65:07)

That's the only way you can get into black hole theory is to get deep.

Jonathan Cohen (65:10)

We almost don't come out. But don't worry, we do manage to come out. We talk about the polarization currently happening in academia, what's preventing new discoveries from happening, and what Avi wants us to remember about the future of humanity.

Mayim Bialik (65:25)

So please make sure you tune in for part two of our conversation with Avi Loeb and make sure you're following us on substack. Tons of great content there. We'll see you in part two. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

Dr. Avi Loeb (65:36)

It's Maya Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two on fiction and now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.

Mayim Bialik (65:53)

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Dr. Avi Loeb (65:57)

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Mayim Bialik (66:00)

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Dr. Avi Loeb (66:02)

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Mayim Bialik (66:03)

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Dr. Avi Loeb (66:22)

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