← Planet Tyrus
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. What? It is Tyrus here. And welcome to planet Tyrus. And yes, I said my name twice. But. And that's not a theory, that's a fact. And speaking of theories and facts, I'm very excited. It's going to be very scientific. Out of this World podcast today. I'm very excited with my guest. He's world renowned Avi Loeb. He's an Israel American theatrical, theoretical. Why? I don't know why. I think it's because I got my two teeth knocked out and I ain't got my two new ones yet. Certain words are killing me lately, so bear with me. But theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, who became one of the most talked about voices in modern astronomy. He was born in Israel, he had a crazy life. He was actually a super athlete. And, and he chose academia over sports. What was that about? But, you know, and he continues, and he's this amazing professor of science and we're going to talk about all things extraterrestrial tonight. Outer space, the way the universe works, the Milky Way. It's really. You're going to learn some things I'm very excited about. So without further ado and me messing up with the. Thus, enjoy today's podcast because this is one of my favorites. Well, it should be. Even though it hasn't happened yet, but I have a feeling it's be going to to be very, very enlightening. So let's do this. Let's talk about how excited I am that you are here today. And there's a lot of things I want to talk about. I want to talk about the meteorite or is the spaceship that has an amazing name. But you are a fascinating man and your origin story is awesome. And we have, we have some things in common in terms of life choices. And right before we started, you started talking about you were a very good athlete and you had an opportunity. Was it out of a thousand athletes you were ranked one of the top ones?
- [02:05]
B
Yes, that's true. I mean, I was born on a farm, very much connected to nature. I was good in sports. And you know, looking back, I'm not sure I made the right choice because it's not a pleasant experience to be in academia, I must tell you.
- [02:20]
A
Yeah, no school works hard.
- [02:22]
B
Well, the thing is, it's supposed to be heaven. You know, it's just like supposed to be, you know, when you get tenure in academia, supposed to have freedom of thought, you're supposed to innovate, take risks, think about whatever you want. But it's very different in the Sense that there is a lot of peer pressure and a lot of scrutiny if you try to deviate from the beaten path. And you know, sometimes I long back to my childhood when I was surrounded by nature. It's much more rewarding. You know, I jog every morning at sunrise, three miles and surrounded by ducks, wild turkeys, rabbits, you know, and it's, it's so much nicer to be now. Nature is not always nice to you, of course, you know, if you go into space, it's really hard, a harsh environment. You can't live on the surface of Mars. And despite what Elon Musk keeps arguing, you know, we will need to build the infrastructure underground in order to survive there, you know, in some self sustained basis. But nevertheless, I love nature because, you know, it's very rich. It's not ego motivated always, you know, like humans are. So anyway, but in terms of my choices early on I could go into sports and I this, I chose academia. You know, perhaps I would have been happier if I were an athlete. I also had to choose whether to go into the Delta Force when I was serving in the military. It's obligatory in Israel where I grew up. And since I excelled during my military training, I parachuted three times. I was in the paratroopers training and back then in the first few months we slept only seven hours a week. You know, I remember those days that sort of prepared me for life. So, you know, nothing can break me right now. And, and also when, you know, I remember a statement saying that sometimes a soldier has to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can pass through. And I feel, you know, if I'm in pain, it's all for the benefit of the next generation. I really hope that the next generation of scientists will have a better future than the past, you know, than my generation had. There are certainly a lot of puzzles, mysteries that we failed to resolve. So I'm always optimistic by the way, because I think life is a self fulfilling prophecy. And yeah, so I made choices not to be in the Delta Force, not to become an athlete. That's where I am right now. So that's why I can answer some questions about the universe, if you have any.
- [05:01]
A
Oh, I have a lot. And it's funny because I was just like, I don't do the three mile jog, I work out. But the one thing I do love to do is I love to go out and relax and sit in the sun, a little sun on my face and I will just stare off in a direction and it comes Alive. And being in Florida, there's so many creatures and lizards and birds and stuff.
- [05:25]
B
Oh, that's beautiful.
- [05:26]
A
And I'm a big outdoorsman and I love.
- [05:29]
B
But, but here is the bad news. The sun will not last forever.
- [05:32]
A
No, and neither will I.
- [05:33]
B
But I, I once went to a dentist, a dentist appointment, and the receptionist said to me, you know, so many things change in our life now. And I said, well, the sun will also die one day. And she said, is that possible? Is that true? Because it's against my religion, she said. And I said, yes, I can. I can assure you that in 7.6 billion years the sun will not be around anymore. And moreover, it will expand and engulf potentially the Earth and the moon as well. And so the moon would crash onto the Earth very quickly because of the friction on the envelope of the sun. So you know, the moon came out of the Earth as a result of an impact. In the early days of the Earth there was a Mars sized object that collided with Earth and created the Moon. But now, you know, at the end of the solar system, the sun will engulf both the Earth and the moon. The moon will crash back, will come back home, so to speak. And we will fall into the core of the sun. So there will be no, nothing left. And any, all the monuments that we put on Earth will just go away. And by the way, nobody would mourn the fact that we died. The disappearance of the human civilization on Earth would, you know, I assume that barely nobody knows that we exist because our technologies were developed only over 100 years. There aren't many stars out to 100 light years out of the entire population of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So nobody knows about us. If we disappear, nobody would have a funeral for us. And so we should have a perspective, you know, and the perspective is in order to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy, you know, over billions of years, we must leave the Earth and venture into space. You know, that's the thing. We, you know, we will not gain much recognition by conquering a piece of land in Ukraine right after fighting, you know, killing half a million people over, over a period of a few years just to gain that those few inches, you know, that would not leave us any appreciation on the cost.
- [07:40]
A
So the Grays aren't going to say, hey, turn your chapter books to Earth when there's civil war. We were shocked to watch it. Well, Earth is very anti life. We've had five mass extinctions on this planet. Every so often the Earth Just kind of shakes and let's restart. And again, what you were talking about earlier, none of us are talking about the tremendous territory that the last T. Rex had, you know, like, how many. How many acres he owned before the.
- [08:09]
B
You know, one thing I wonder is whether these were resets. Suppose we were in an experiment of some extraterrestrial scientists that want to see what happens if, you know, call it an interstellar gardener that puts some seeds for intelligent life. Interstellar gardener wants to see what. What would happen. And then it was disappointed by the outcome when the dinosaurs roamed around, you know, so then it arranged for a big impact that will reset the Earth. We don't know if we were visited in the past, if everything we see around us, because there was nobody to record history. Documented human history is only 8,000 years old. It's really very, very short, you know.
- [08:50]
A
On cosmic scales, don't you think, without there being a written book categorizing when we had a presence. I just. For 70,000 years, people much like myself would be sitting in a forest somewhere with a rock and a stick, and nobody in the group said, hey, you know, if we put this together, we could chop stuff down. We had them both, we used them both, but nobody. And then all of a sudden, something happens. And not only do we make weapons, we have an iPhone. And if you think about the time when we first started the record of us using tools and stuff, all this stuff is a relatively short period of time. And you look at the temples, you look at some of the hieroglyphics, you have in places where the idea that they would have contact with each other is unimaginable. So I believe there was a visit. I personally think there was a visit. It's just they found out real quick. Human beings eat other things, rape other things, and destroy things. And I think they packed their bag and left. And we. Whatever they left behind, we then built our technology from. That's my little weird theory, you know.
- [10:07]
B
That'S another answer to Fermi's paradox. Enrico fermi asked in 1950 when sitting at lunch in Los Alamos, he asked, where is everybody? Well, you know, when you ask this question, sometimes you should recognize that the answer is that you're not that attractive. That's why you don't have a partner.
- [10:23]
A
Yes.
- [10:24]
B
And, you know, and back then, you know, when we were all. When you say that we had a stick and a stone, I bet you that not only most members of the human species did not recognize the potential, but also, whenever someone recognized, they ridiculed that someone and said, you know, you should do what we do. You shouldn't try to propose something new. And if they were to find a cell phone, let's say a cave dweller were to find a cell phone, the cave dweller would argue it must be a rock of a type that I've never seen before. And only if the cave dweller has a kid interested in exploring this unusual rock, this shiny rock that is a cell phone, pressing buttons on it, only then the kid would recognize that it's something else. So it's really all about thinking like a kid and having a beginner's mind. And I see science as the privilege of maintaining a beginner's mind. And my colleagues do not. They always want to, you know, gain recognition by pretending to be experts. And I argue that the foundation of science is the humility to learn. It's not the arrogance of expertise. And what you see all the time is the arrogance of expertise, where people tell you what the answer should be without asking too many questions. Cause they don't want to risk their reputation.
- [11:43]
A
Well, it's not even. The expertise is gone. The arrogance is. I mean, you have scientists. We went through a period of time where a scientist would lose his career if he said, there are only two genders. In my lifetime, I watch the scientists be, what is a woman? Well, there's a lot of what? No. A scientist would be like, just break out some chromosomes, bro. Here it is. What else do you need like this? We know, and we even saw it. Unfortunately, the one place science was supposed to be safe was the universities. That was the place where great discoveries would happen and challenges and ideas and theories. And all of that kind of became feeling.
- [12:28]
B
Yeah. No, it's not just that. I met with the current president of Harvard University when he was a provost. I know him very well. Alan Garber. And that was a couple of years ago when there were lots of turmoil because of the kind of culture that you just described. And I told him, look, the biggest mistake in the leadership of Harvard University was to incorporate a political agenda or a political narrative or some ideological views into scholarship. That's the worst you can do, because just think about the political system. We have roughly 50, 50 split within our society between the two big parties. And if you were to just side with one party, you are alienating half of the country. Like, these kids came from homes that do not agree with the narrative, a specific narrative. And so that was a big mistake. It's alienating the young kids. It makes free expression forbidden and it also suppresses scholarship, because in scholarship you want to explore ideas that are out of the beaten path. You want to be able to speak freely, to innovate. So it was all bad. And obviously it's not just at Harvard, it was throughout academia. And the question is whether we are now on the path towards a better future. And I really hope so. But it takes a long time to repair such a system because many of the, I mean, it didn't just happen at random. There are lots of senior people that made decisions and choices and they appointed other people that agree with them. And so you create a culture that is pretty much uniform and it's difficult to repair it unless you wait a generation until young people with multiple opinions enter the system.
- [14:22]
A
Yeah, because we went from theories to absolutism, you know, and it was shocking at times to see where it was coming from. But as you know, and you. One of the things I like about you, and maybe I'm quoting you here, but you said insisting that the, insisting the greatest risk in science isn't being wrong, it's not daring to ask, which goes completely against of, I already know. Right. I'm a scientist, so therefore I already know. Once you already know, you're not a scientist anymore. By definition.
- [14:57]
B
Exactly. Now, you know, in the corporate world, in, for example, in big companies like Google or Meta or others, it's well appreciated that you need to take risks because some of those risks end up being big wins commercially. And you know, these are entities that are focused on making a revenue. And you would think that in academia it would be even easier.
- [15:26]
A
Yes.
- [15:26]
B
But it's not the case at all. Because people become conservative in their opinions. They don't want others to deviate from their echo chambers that they created over decades because it's all tied up to their self esteem, to their ego. And they want the future to just confirm what they already said for many decades. And that is opposite to innovation, you know. And for me, it's all about innovation. You know, I had a lot of file cabinets in my office that I got rid of two months ago when one of the most accomplished sculptors in the US called Greg Wyatt, he has sculptures in Arlington Cemetery, in New York City, everywhere, you know, and he donated two sculptures of Galileo Galilei and 51 watercolors to my office. And I said, I have room for that. I just gotten rid of everything documented about the past. All these five cabinets that had the forms in them and so forth. I didn't care less about it. I told my administrator, get Rid of all of that. I'm all about the future now. My office is a mini museum celebrating art and science together.
- [16:37]
A
I probably need to do that in my office. Although I'm not getting rid of important files. I got way too much. I live in my. Unfortunately, I live in Florida and I work in New York, so it kind of gets. The laundry kind of piles up a little bit every once in a while. But I like, I like to shift gears a little bit because you have a lot of titles. You are, I would say, an esteemed man ever. Ever. Ones1, you're a theoretical physicist and astrophysicist. You, you're one of the most talked about voices in modern astronomy. When you think about all your accomplishments, all of those take tremendous amounts of hard work and a little bit of failure and success and rolling your sleeves up. Do you think it's when you look back at your career and how you got there, when you look at how people are coming up now, I think it's safe to say that you lived your life in terms of you. Every experience you went through, you were physically going through it. My thing is I see now that people watch more life experiences than they're actually doing it. So they spend all the time in front of the TV or the iPad or the phone. So they're not going through life the way that the generation before them came up, where it was trial and error, mistake, missed meal cramps, failures, you know what, what is my next plan? Choices, and ultimately patience. Nothing happens overnight. You think that's the reason why it's such a big disconnect, is that they just wanted this, they don't want to do the work. And it's not necessarily that they're bad people, it's just that they were are being engineered that way from the time they're born to watch instead of actually live life.
- [18:22]
B
Yeah. So there are two parts to the answer. One has to do with the people who create content online, you know, right now, which is these people are very different than they used to be because anyone can create content. You don't need to show any hard work to create the content. But. And in the context of science, you have commentators, you know, a new brand of commentators that did not publish a single scientific paper over the past decade or two. And they criticize real scientists like myself just in order to get clicks. Yes, in order to get likes. And I don't like that. It's sort of like playing, you know, football and then having people on the bench that criticize you when they are not in the field, you know, and the main difference is that they cannot score a goal. So I don't like that. And some of them get a lot of views, you know, and just because they appeal to a broad audience, but they just talk about America.
- [19:19]
A
Americans, unfortunately, the world unfortunately loves train wrecks and these, these trolls, these train wrecks. And it's so, it's so I never see anyone of success punched down. I've never made a post and have somebody going, hey, just so you know, that was dumb. I don't know how you're on t. It's never by anyone who is successful, so.
- [19:42]
B
Right. Yeah. So I, I should tell you, thanks to my wife, I don't have any footprint on social media. She told me not to do it and I, I don't.
- [19:50]
A
Brilliant.
- [19:51]
B
Yeah. But the second thing has to do with the customers, you know, people who read those things. And, and here I have a problem with the young generation because they're used to just very, you know, quick reads through tweets and other.
- [20:06]
A
They read, they read the, the title and then they're.
- [20:09]
B
Yeah, it's as if they are CEOs and they need the executive summary. That's it. Yeah, but the problem is if you don't go to primary sources, you lose track of the substance. You don't know about the history of the world. So you think you can protest without knowing what really happened.
- [20:25]
A
Yeah, we see that a lot.
- [20:26]
B
I can give you a simple anecdote that will illustrate that. I asked the question in my class, of the undergraduate students in my class. I said, if a spacecraft were to land right here and you were invited to enter for a one way trip, would you do it? And I, of course, would do it just for the experience. But they said, well, we will do it under one condition. That we can share the experience of our Instagram with our friends. And I said, why would you need to share the experience? After all, it's a one way trip. Yeah, you will never see your friends, but that's the way they think. It's all about bragging to other people or pretending.
- [21:09]
A
Yeah, peacocking is what I call it.
- [21:12]
B
They don't live life for the sake of the experience. And I say, I don't really care what other people know. I just want the experience. I just want to feel as if I, you know, life is worth living when you actually have all these hurdles that you fight through. You go through the experience. That's true for everything. And if you don't do that, if you live in the virtual world, you don't live your life. It's. It's sort of like being completely detached from. From the reality and from the struggles that it brings. And, you know, without it, what's the point of living? Like you live in your virtual world and nobody knows about it.
- [21:47]
A
Well, you're becoming a leading expert on nonsense.
- [21:50]
B
Yes.
- [21:51]
A
So that's. And that's what it is. And you can't argue with them because I'm a very factual guy, and maybe that's a character flaw. But when I try to have a conversation or a debate with somebody, I try to stick to the facts. And I always get hit back with emotions like, well, your voice is loud right now. You're intimidating, or you're being aggressive. I'm like, I'm just stating the obvious that I disagree with you that there's not 15 genders. Sorry, my bad. But you see that.
- [22:26]
B
And by the way, there is nothing, there is no better illustration to that than science, because in science, it's supposed to be about facts. But then you see people arguing about, indeed, as you say, their emotions. And so I, you know, we can talk about 3. I Atlas the third interstellar object and the response of other scientists to the anomalies that it exhibited. And the same is true about the first interstellar object, Oumuamua, that was discovered in 2017. And in both cases, you know, there are things we don't understand. Instead of admitting it, what you find are NASA officials, experts telling you what you're supposed to think. And they don't resolve the anomalies. They don't feel obligated for that. And it's only in order to satisfy the notion that what we see was already known before, and we are the experts telling you what it is instead of using it as an opportunity to learn.
- [23:26]
A
Now things have changed. When I was, when I was growing up, if there was any talk of UFOs or aliens or asteroids or spaceships, there was something wrong with you. You were a little off, or you lived in Alabama, you know, and you were abducted by somebody. And we've seen it over the years change. But I thought there would be a bigger reaction from civilization that, you know, perfect example, one of my favorite TV shows is Skinwalker Ranch. And they do a lot of work trying to study the orbs and the frequencies, and maybe it's a wormhole of some sort of these little orb things and shift change and all this stuff. And they're doing it into terms from a scientific perspective. They never come out and say, well, we know it's an alien and we know it's this. They say it's a phenomenon. And as they try to get more data and more stuff, is it, is it because there's no quick like we. Until we have like a FaceTime from an alien talking to us, will people actually be more fascinated about it or take. Because I think it's fascinating. Because when you talk about. I just feel like it's, it's an ignorant thing to think that there's not other life out there, other forms of, because of intelligence. And I, I always say I should not be able to say this better, but. Umama.
- [24:49]
B
Oumuamua.
- [24:50]
A
Oumuamua. Okay, now I can only say it aggressively. Oumuamua. And you talk about interstellar visitors and you have an open dialogue about the possibility because as a scientist you're supposed to ask those questions, correct?
- [25:06]
B
Yes. But one thing to keep in mind is, you know, astronomy is focused on very distant sources of light, usually or sources of signals. And the question is whether there is anything close to Earth. And you know, for me, the turning point was three reports that were delivered by the Director of National Intelligence. You know, the US Government has to monitor the sky for national security purposes. It's a serious matter. You don't want drones, you don't want espionage. So they monitor the sky. Now when they admit in three reports to the US Congress that they're not doing their job, you should take it seriously. Because how often is a government official telling you that, that they get a trillion dollars in the 2026 defense budget and yet they can't figure out what is in the sky above the U.S. you know, like that's a serious matter. So I take it seriously. And that's exactly the reason that I established and became head of the Galileo project where we are building observatories. Three of them so far, one in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, and a third one in Nevada where we monitor the sky 24 7. In the coming year, we should have a few million objects that we monitor. And we're trying to figure out if there are any outliers that are not human made. You know, any, any unusual objects. And of course the government may have data. Now my hope is, you know, even if we end up realizing that everything we see is human made, suppose we end up with that conclusion, it would still be useful. I would give the knowledge, the know how, how to make those detectors and how to analyze data with machine learning artificial intelligence to the Pentagon. They can use it for national security purposes, for defense and it wouldn't be a lost effort. But if we do find anything unusual, obviously it would be the biggest discovery of science ever. And so I decided to look into it. And to me it sounds very reasonable that either you help national security or you do state of the art science. But this opinion is not being shared with other most people in academia, even those that are targeting technological signatures of existential civilization. In fact, that community that is called SETI is the most hostile to the kind of research I'm doing. They don't want to look at objects near Earth, they don't allow any discussion on those objects. In their conferences they made a decision not to discuss it. And moreover, they're hostile to considering the technological origin of interstellar objects. Just to give you an example, this week they came out with a press release where they said, we looked for five hours for any radio transmission from Three Eye Atlas, this the latest interstellar object that was found. We didn't see any radio transmission in the frequency band between 1 and 12 gigahertz that that cell phones operate in. Therefore it's not a technological object. Now just think about this statement. You looked at for 5 hours, 5 hours, 16,000 year journey of this object within the solar system, all the way out to the Oort cloud. So you expect the transmission to happen for 16,000 years all the time. So that when you look at the window of five hours you will definitely detect. You expect it to be in the direction of Earth. You expect the object to communicate with the sender when it takes 30,000 years for the signal to move at the speed of light across the Milky Way galaxy one way. Why would this object communicate with the sender? You know, it can never get any real time guidance or anything. So it's all used in order to argue this is not technological. They looked at a short window of time just to be able to say this is not. And their mindset is all about saying things are not detected because for 65 years they were waiting for radio signals, didn't find it. But I say that's an approach that you know is just like waiting for a phone call at home. Nobody may call you when you're waiting.
- [29:13]
A
Well, not to mention you might not have the number their technology, radio might be something their babies play with.
- [29:20]
B
Exactly.
- [29:21]
A
Like you have no idea. Or here's a plan, here's a funny thing, they don't want to talk to you.
- [29:27]
B
Yeah, but I'm just illustrating.
- [29:30]
A
No, yeah, I'm just saying, I'm not a scientist. I don't claim to Be one. But as a human being, this makes sense to me.
- [29:35]
B
This is the community responsible for collecting technological. Yeah, that's a little scary community. They did not allocate several months of their time to explore this possibility. That would mean that it's a priority for them. If they were to say we invested a lot of time, a lot of. Instead they looked for five hours and said nothing. Like, it's as if they wanted to just dismiss that possibility.
- [29:58]
A
Or maybe it's more important about getting funding than it is and finding solutions.
- [30:05]
B
It's like letting the cat take care of the milk. I mean, this community that is supposed to represent the search for technological signatures is just locked on the search for radio signals and that's it. My point is that finding a package in our mailbox or in our backyard is more likely because you don't need the sender to be alive. When you explore your, you know, your back, there may be a tennis ball thrown by a neighbor in your backyard that took billions of years to arrive here. And by the way, most stars are billions of years older than the sun. We are late to the party. And if you imagine the Voyager spacecraft that we launched in the 70s, it will take it less than a billion years to cross the Milky Way galaxy. So there was plenty of time Even for the 1970s technologies to make it across the Milky Way over the past billion years. And they were ahead of us for billions of years. So, you know, the point is we should be open minded. This is not a crazy idea. This is a very reasonable idea. My conclusion is common sense is not common in academia.
- [31:13]
A
And that's my, apparently my trademark is common sense. And I don't really feel like it's a skill. You know, it's not like I went to school of the, I went to the college of common sense. I, I graduated because I did the work.
- [31:26]
B
Yeah, I'm telling you about, I mean, I was more naive than you and now when I see things around me, it's not the way I imagined it. Okay, so I'm talking from the inside telling you that things need to be changed in the culture of academia. And I very much hope that the next generation will have a better experience that in fact they will be open minded. They will search for the question that the public cares most about. There is a huge interest. You know, over the past few months, I wrote about 3i Atlas on medium.com the link is avi-loeb avi-loeb.medium.com I put an essay every day or two updating about the status, what we know about 3 Atlas. I wrote two papers just today and we can talk about it about 3. And my point is I have 5 million views every month for essays that take 6 minutes to read each. And it's not a tweet. And getting millions of people interested in science is not a trivial matter. If you were to discover a particle, I don't think that you will have 5 million readers every, every month, you know.
- [32:35]
A
No, because it's. Well, the biggest thing is I think a lot of it has to do and by design is that it has been. It's so hard to figure out what is true and, or what is fact and what is feelings. We used to have it in this and I think we need to go back to it. Even when a guy comes on TV to talk to you, it needs to be at the bottom, editorial, you know, like there's a difference between a newsman talking and a scientist talking than a talking head or TV personality.
- [33:05]
B
Exactly.
- [33:06]
A
And they've blurred those lines. So then you could have someone like me. Let's just say I've decided I'm just trying to make a quick buck. I get a science white lab coat and I started telling everyone that I know for a fact that there are no aliens and that we're the aliens, you know, And I just, I just spit that and I. Anytime a scientist, a man like yourself, with incredible accolades challenges me, I'll be like, well, you're racist. And then you're like, wait, I came to talk about the possibilities. Because here's the thing, you want to ask questions. That is the whole point of science is to question things and to find bits and pieces. And then you have a hypothesis and then something will happen that we like we all knew that all mammals give live birth. That was true. Then lo and behold, somebody in Australia found a damn duck billed platypus. And now everything has changed. Like, oh, that's just a one. That's a freak.
- [34:00]
B
Then there is, there is a lot of resistance to innovation, a ton of it. And you know, we can stay ignorant, that's no problem, you know. You know, the Vatican argued that the sun moves around the earth, you know, for a long time. And by the way, the earth was moving around the sun 4.6 billion times before the Vatican even existed. So what people say to each other is completely irrelevant. You know, the question is, do we have a neighbor? And that's a serious matter. You can sit at the dinner table and tell your family that we don't have any neighbors. You have all these houses that are similar to our house, but they don't have any residence. They may have microbes. And by the way, this is the mainstream view within astronomy. Microbes are everywhere. Intelligence is unlikely. We might be the only ones. And if you tell your family members there are no residents in those houses, you know, they will accept it, but they will stay ignorant. On the other hand, if you tell your family members, look, check out the backyard. Do we have any tennis ball thrown by a neighbor? Do we see any construction project in a neighbor's yard that may indicate that there is a resident? Did anyone knock on the door recently? You know, if you ask those questions, you might find that you have a neighbor. And that's a much better way to recognize the reality that you live in. You can stay ignorant forever. That's not a problem. Nobody cares in the universe at large if we are ignorant. But if you want to adapt to the reality that you live in, it's important to know whether you have a neighbor, because the neighbor may show up at your front door. And it's, you know, from the national perspective, it's a question of, of security or safety of the people. You know, we protect the people against adversarial nations. We. But we protect against, let's say, an impact by an asteroid, because we know that dinosaurs were killed 66 million years ago by a huge rock the size of Manhattan Island. So we want to figure out if there is any rock approaching. But for some reason, the notion that there might be alien technology, a technological gadget that is visiting the inner solar system that could be a potential threat was not discussed. So in July, I proposed a scale that is now called the lobe scale, where 0 is a natural interstellar object, an object that came into the solar system and is of natural origin. Like an iceberg.
- [36:20]
A
Iceberg, a comet, something like that.
- [36:22]
B
Yeah, exactly. And a 10 is some technological object that could be a potential threat to humanity. And I suggested that we catalog, we give a rank to every new interstellar object because it could be a black swan event that we give a low probability to being a threat, but yet it has a huge impact on humanity. And, you know, the intelligence agencies, after September 11 decided to update their practices. They consider low probability events just because of the big impact. And these Black Swan events, you know, are remembered from the Trojan horse story. You know, the. The residents of Troy dismissed the possibility that the Trojan Horse would be a risk to them. So we need to consider that. And scientists are not used to it. Scientists say, oh, at the 95% confidence. I think it's an iceberg. So they are done. That's it.
- [37:19]
A
And then the Titanic happens. Yeah. You know what's funny is, okay, for a perfect example, I go back to the nature thing. Octopuses, Right. One of my favorite animals. And it was, I think it was maybe, maybe last year where there started to come out some scientific papers that led to believe that octopuses, common, their ancestor, might have came on a meteor that crashed into the ocean and that octopuses are actually. Their species is extraterrestrial. Right. And the only thing they haven't figured out quite yet is how to increase their lifespan. But when you hear that, it's just so dismissed. And I was so fascinated by it. And I was like, and you too. And then you continue to. When you just open your mind to search.
- [38:07]
B
Right.
- [38:08]
A
And then in Antarctica, they discovered that little life form that only he has to eat, like once every thousand years. He can live in extreme. He can live in outer space, he can live in fire ice. And he continues, which means life can find a way in any environment. Therefore, we're seeing the little results of that here. It's not too hard to think that the same little dude that's sitting under an iceberg in Antarctica is not crawling around in a different place.
- [38:40]
B
You are exactly correct. And by the way, Elon Musk is very proud of the idea, the vision of going to Mars, bringing humans to Mars, as if Mars is a lifeless planet, never had life. But the reality is that Mars is a smaller body than Earth, so it cooled before Earth. It had more surface for its mass, so it lost the heat, that initial heat. It was hot, and then it cooled before Earth and it had liquid water on the surface. We have clear evidence for that. There were rivers, lakes, oceans there. And so life could have started on Mars before it started on Earth. And that was in the first few hundred million years when, you know, both Mars and Earth were bombarded with rocks. And we know that. Rocks that arrived at Earth from Mars. We know that. And we also have an example of a rock that was analyzed in 1980 that was not heated by more to more than 40 degrees Celsius. And if there was any life carried in it, this is a rock from Mars. Even though it was ejected from the surface of Mars and then landed on Earth. And it was never heated beyond the temperature that would destroy, you know, primitive life, like a bacteria.
- [39:52]
A
Right. Because that's all it takes.
- [39:54]
B
Yeah. So the point is, we might all be Martians. It might well be that life started on Mars and then arrived at Earth. And in that case, you know, these microbes that they migrated in a rock to Earth and started life on Earth, you know, they were the first astronauts.
- [40:12]
A
Yes.
- [40:12]
B
Not Elon Musk going there. It's actually those microbes that predated him by four billion, four and a half.
- [40:19]
A
So it's almost like a homecoming.
- [40:21]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [40:22]
A
And you'll see. And you see why we left.
- [40:24]
B
Exactly. So your idea makes a lot of sense. The interesting question is whether life was seeded by rocks from Mars or maybe from another star or another place, and we just don't know. And by the way, those interstellar objects that are now being found, you know, they are an excellent place for us to, you know, land on and extract some materials, Check what are the building blocks of life on material that came from another star, because it will tell us how likely it is to have the scenario that you just pointed out where, where life could have arrived from another star to Earth. We. We can calculate what's the chance of such a rock colliding with Earth.
- [41:03]
A
Maybe that's the theory of how it starts, right? Planets all over the galaxy. One ends, bits and pieces, land somewhere else it begins.
- [41:12]
B
It could also, because we're just a.
- [41:14]
A
Blip, we're a blink of the eye of the universe, and we're extremely arrogant.
- [41:19]
B
Here is the point that is often not appreciated. We initially started with thinking that we are the center of the universe. We turned out not to be. Now, if you ask scientists, they would tell you we're probably at the top of the food chain. There is nothing better than us. I argue that when you go dating, you know, you look for a partner that is better than you. Yes, you know, you aim high, you don't aim low. But the mainstream of astronomy right now wants to find evidence for microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets by looking for their chemical fingerprints. And this is just like saying, I aim for the lowest, you know, I. On the other hand, my opinion is that we should aim for some advanced civilization that is far better than us because it could serve as a role model. We can learn about new technologies, new science, and it might be easier to detect those more advanced beings than to find evidence for microbes, simply because the technological signatures will be clear and transparent and not debated. And so I very much believe that we should invest billions of dollars in both searches because we should hedge our bets. You know, and if we don't search, obviously, we will not find anything.
- [42:36]
A
Now, a few weeks back, I had a gentleman on the show who he was. He was in charge of UFOs and the phenomenon, right. And reports of seeing objects in the sky. And when I asked him about life, he was very apprehensive to talk about it because I'm like, I'm assuming someone's flying these ships, these orbs or whatever. And he was very like, well, I just deal with the phenomenon of the report of what it is. And then there was one of the questions I asked, because you hear a lot of theories, and I'm a big fan that we were of looking at just through. I'm a history. When I look at Egyptians and I look at the Mayan temples and the new temples we're finding and discovering all over the country. And I'm like, all over the world. And I see those things. And I think my hypothesis is that we were visited. Some people even go further and say there was a mixing, that the aliens came and they bred with human beings. And there's actually two different kinds of humans on this planet. There's ones that have the DNA, the alien DNA, and there's ones who don't. So when they were doing that, I was like, well, that's a pretty easy thing to figure out. You just do a couple of blood tests, and you, you know, you could literally do. Not in blood, do a swab, and when you do the DNA chains, there would be a common difference between the two. So you don't. We don't find that at least. Or if it is, it's not reported.
- [44:03]
B
As long as the previous. The other type survived, you know, it's possible that they did not survive. So we are. We all belong to the same branch of the tree. But, yeah, you're. You know, it's. It's completely possible that we're missing something really big about our past. And there are a lot of things in biology that involve big transitions, you know, like. And so the question is, was that just random evolution, of course, guided by survival of the fittest, or was it intervened by an external gardener, you know?
- [44:39]
A
Yes.
- [44:39]
B
And there are very reputable biologists that I spoke with who are in the opinion that perhaps there are some signatures in the DNA for extraterrestrial intervention. So I wouldn't dismiss that. Although most, you know, the dogma. Most scientists would argue, no, it was all a matter of random circumstances on Earth that gave birth to that. But if you argue that indeed there were these random circumstances out of a soup of chemicals that led to human intelligence and then now to artificial intelligence, you have to admit that the same circumstances can be arranged on right now 10 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And there are about a trillion galaxies in the observable volume of the universe. So we suddenly are not at the top of the food chain, you know, because most of these stars form before us. So they had time to go well beyond our abilities. Right now we just had a century of modern science and technology and they may have had a million years, a billion years. So if you adapt the notion that it happened at random on Earth and you arrange for similar circumstances on 10 billion planets just in the Milky Way galaxy, I would argue it's completely reasonable to expect things like us to have existed for billions of years. And you know, we are not at the center of the intellectual environment as well. We are not at the top of the food chain. I'm willing to bet that, you know, if, if we are visited at any point, it will be by a species that is superior to us. And the only hope that I have is, you know, we tend to serve in restaurants animals that we regard as less intelligent than we are. Including octopus.
- [46:23]
A
I, yeah, I won't eat one. I'm emotionally too attached to them.
- [46:28]
B
Exactly. I refuse to take that. I saw it in the menu actually last week. So just imagine those advanced.
- [46:37]
A
How awkward that would be at the advance octopus. Like yes, we sent our cousins down.
- [46:41]
B
It will appear in their menu. That's the question. Do you think if someone. I don't think. I think they so much under. Appreciate us that they will not come even close.
- [46:50]
A
Yeah, I think they might have came and said, hey look, they're not ready yet. These guys are. Yeah, there's some wild stuff going on on Earth. We're just going to put Earth on the. Just the flyby. Do not land. Do not land. That's why I think we get the little orbs that go through and it's like a. Like wow, man. Yeah, they're still fighting each other over their skin color. Yeah, they're not ready yet, you know, and I think I would tend more to believe that. Do you think? Okay, so let's get a hot take from you. With the interstellar objects that are coming. There's been the makeup of. Is that it might have a tremendous amount of a high metal in the thing and which they're saying makes it. One theory is that it makes it to where it is a artificial intelligence. Maybe it's a ship of some sort. Opposed to. That's one argument. Another thing is. Well, because I hear scientists go it's a miss. I heard one guy Come out and I can't remember his name. Who said, no, it's the same as anything else. It's just maybe it has more. But that, to me, wasn't a very good answer. Instead of, like, the possibilities are fascinating, that'd been a good answer.
- [48:03]
B
Some scientists say, you know, it walks like a comet, it talks like a comet, It's a comet just like a duck. And what they mean by that is that we see a plume of gas and dust around it that was evaporated as a result of the illumination by sunlight. And I argue you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. You know, this may be an outer layer that was accumulated over time throughout the journey. It may not represent what's inside. And we should focus on the anomalies. There are several anomalies of this object. The most unusual one that have no explanation whatsoever is the geometric ones, meaning the object came within 5 degrees of the ecliptic plane of the planets orbiting the sun. And the chance for that happening at random is 1 in 500. So why would the third object, and not the hundredth object, come aligned in its trajectory within the plane of the planets? Obviously, you know, a technological object would like to spend a lot of time near the planets, and that could be the reason. Moreover, this object has a jet that is pointed at the sun. It's an anti tail. Usually what you see in comets is a tail, and that is a plume of dust and gas that are pushed away from the sun. The gas is pushed by the solar wind, and the dust is pushed by the solar radiation. We've never seen an anti tail. It's as if you find an animal in your backyard and everyone says it must be a street cat. And you say, well, but the tail is coming from its forehead.
- [49:35]
A
So basically this thing has headlights.
- [49:38]
B
Yeah, exactly, but, well, headlights when it was approaching the sun. Now it's receding from the sun, so it's always illuminating. The jet is pointing at the sun. And it's possible to, you know, with the purpose of protecting the technological gadget by blocking sunlight, blocking solar wind from hitting it. But in addition, you know, the rotation of the object, the rotation axis, the, the object spins and its rotation axis is pointing at the sun to within 10 or to 20 degrees. Why would it do that? If it comes from a large distance, it doesn't know about the sun. Why would the rotation axis be aligned? And there are also other facts about it. It will come to Jupiter on March 16, 2026, at the distance where Jupiter's gravity dominates over The Sun's gravity. It could be, again, a coincidence, but it may also be because of the intent to deposit some devices, satellites around Jupiter. And amazingly, I mean, this morning I just posted a new paper that says that on January 22, the Earth would be exactly between three ayatlas and the Sun. And again, it's a very unusual coincidence. When I say exactly, I mean to within 0.669 degrees, a very small probability.
- [51:08]
A
And so this stuff is starting to look more calculated than random.
- [51:13]
B
Yeah. But it also is a great gift for us because it allows us to learn much more about this object. When you look at it from the direction of the sun, it's being illuminated face on, and moreover, it becomes brighter, and so you can study it much better. So the fact that it moves in the plane of the planets allowed a lot of instruments that we have in the solar system system to look at it. Usually, objects arrive at a large angle. You know, the, the Milky Way galaxy is also a disk, but it's inclined by 60 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane of the planets around the sun, 60 degrees. So you expect most objects to come at. At large angles relative to the solar system, but this one comes in the ecliptic plane of the solar system. Why? And so I'm saying it's a gift because we can study it much more, and let's just be curious and learn as much as we can about it. You know, a week ago, there was a response from the CIA to a FOIA Freedom of Information act request for any records related to 3i Atlas. And the response was, we cannot deny nor confirm the existence of such records. And to me, it indicates that if they had no records whatsoever, they would say no records.
- [52:30]
A
No records. Yeah.
- [52:31]
B
But instead they hide it. And presumably because they listened to me, that they were probably considering a black swan event, they wanted to know everything possible about it, just to figure it out. And they had discussions about it, but they don't want the public to know about it because they want to create panic. So that's completely reasonable what they're doing, but it just shows you that reasonable government officials are doing the right thing. It's just that the scientific community is completely locked on a particular interpretation.
- [53:01]
A
Well, unless it's going to be interesting. And would you consider coming back on that date, the podcast, to update us on what's going on? Yeah. Can we get that written? Yeah, because that would be amazing. Now, I want to talk a little bit about your book, Interstellar. First of all, you can get it everywhere. I can Pick it up on Amazon, where all books are sold. So I'm getting my copy now.
- [53:23]
B
Right.
- [53:25]
A
When I hear the title Interstellar, I'm assuming it basically breaks down a lot of what we're talking about today.
- [53:31]
B
Yeah, but it goes beyond that because I think the biggest impact of finding a role model from interstellar space is that we will have new aspirations for space. Okay. So it needs to go beyond going to the moon or Mars. We need to aspire to have a space platform that can accommodate people, that will carry us. And I make the analogy with Noak's ark. Nok, because of the flood, decided to build this ark and put animals in it to save them. And we should do the same because we are not confident the Earth would survive. And there are all kinds of risks and we want to.
- [54:15]
A
Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. You basically have a lab in the thing in case the world ends. Break glass and we can restart over. Yeah, that's.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah. So we want a space platform that accommodates humans and I call it Nox Spaceship. And of course, we might discover at some point that another civilization did that, but we definitely want it for ourselves. And that will be expensive. But if we decide that it's something like the Manhattan Project, if we decide that there are alien civilizations that did it already, you know, then we could allocate a trillion dollars a year. You know, we spend $2.4 trillion every year on military budgets worldwide. It's just a question of priorities. Do you want to spend this money on killing other people or protecting us from others, killing us? Or do we want as a whole, you know, the humanity as a whole to invest this money in going to space, in branching out and being, you know, better than our ancestors here on Earth that were just engaged in zero sum games. I always say the universe is an infinite sum game. You have so much opportunities out there. There is much more real estate than you have on Earth. And we should think big. We should look up instead of looking down. And my hope is that an interstellar visitor would change our mindset and will.
- [55:36]
A
Convince us to do it or help us reset. You might have to sit down, you know, the president, talk about Space Force or get, get Elon on this and be like, hey, bro, you know, you're looking for a tax write off, we got a good one for you, you know, and especially think about it, your genetic code. Or, you know, we could, I guess people would be. But you would freeze information or species and stuff. So it would be a great. We took our best scientists and athletes and stuff like that. And we took all their. And I'm sure that's going to be racist and horrible or whatever the hell, but I'm just saying. And we put all our information up there and it's just there in case of.
- [56:16]
B
By the way, it doesn't need to be racist in America.
- [56:20]
A
Anything you disagree with is racist. I'm telling you right now. There will be someone who'll be like, listen, we only had room for bison. We weren't able to get bovine DNA up there. Somebody will say it's racist because everybody knows that, you know, we rather have hamburgers, but they're because white people like cows, you know, we can't have it.
- [56:44]
B
Or, you know, by the way, if you look at the. The Golden Record, I mean, with Voyager, we sent out a message in a bottle, okay, that. That was a representation of what our culture is about. So there were, you know, there was music, there was. There were some equations. I believe there was an image of a man and a woman, by the way, just two.
- [57:05]
A
Only two genders made it. Wow, man. Imagine that.
- [57:08]
B
Now on Voyager, this, Gordon, with the hope that, you know, if an extraterrestrial finds this, they will know a little bit about us. I don't think that's a great idea because first of all, I'm not so proud of the music of the 60s, you know.
- [57:21]
A
Yeah. Actually, you know what? The 60s and 70s, if you actually listen to the lyrics, not great. A lot of underage dating, a lot of. A lot of stuff. You're like, what. Why did you.
- [57:33]
B
My point, what we just discussed, you know, sending human DNA, for example, so that they can reconstruct what we are about, or sending real humans, you know, in a Nox spaceship. That would give a better. A better record of who we are. And perhaps, you know, that would be the only thing remembered from us billions of years from now in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy.
- [57:58]
A
That, I mean, I could listen to this for absolute ever. I've learned so much, and I cannot wait to get my hands on that book. And it's on Prime. I looked it up, so I'll get it to my office tomorrow morning. So my weekend reading material. So the next time we meet, I'm going to have some. Some real questions. But this has been a tremendous man. I've learned so much today, and I really like the fact that we're able to give a platform because this is what we need to be talking about. About. There's so much intrigue and adventure and it just, you Know, science is about facts and stuff, but there is a great love and a feeling of euphoria when you're learning new things and discovering things. And it being wrong about something is not bad.
- [58:43]
B
No, it's not learning.
- [58:44]
A
Oh, I have new information. This, this idea that you're a know it all is. Is the best thing or the favorite thing about an ignorant person is they know it all and they can't learn.
- [58:55]
B
I think, you know, I could have made a choice to become an athlete and you could have made a choice to go to academia. And then we will be in reverse.
- [59:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, my thing was zoology. I was going to. I had an opportunity to go to a special school in Santa Barbara for zoology. I was, I had a tremendous background and. But at the same time I was playing football and it was like one or the other. And I chose. I chose football over labs, but, you know, but I never lost the passion, the passion for wanting to understand and learn things. I think the universe is fascinating and it's always a mirror to what's going on here.
- [59:31]
B
Well, we are similar in many ways.
- [59:34]
A
Which is crazy because we are. We have very different paths.
- [59:38]
B
Right?
- [59:39]
A
You jog three miles a day. I like to lift small villages in the morning. So it's like it all. It's very different, but it's awesome. And this is what happens when different people from different walks of life get a chance to sit down and talk about something cool. And if you can take anything from this other than that and you find out people of different faiths, different cultures, different backgrounds, good conversation is good conversation and we should all get back to it. Thank you so much for today. And again, we got him. March Is it 22nd?
- [60:13]
B
March 16th.
- [60:14]
A
March 16th. So, yeah, we're gonna get that locked in. We're gonna hold you to because I want to know what's going on and I'm gonna up my game. I'm now fascinated with this interstellar object.
- [60:25]
B
I will put it already on my calendar.
- [60:27]
A
It's done.
- [60:28]
B
Looking forward to it.
- [60:29]
A
Thank you.
- [60:29]
B
It's a great pleasure speaking with you.
- [60:30]
A
Yes, sir. You have a wonderful day.