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The Search for EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE with Prof. Avi Loeb · The Smart Cookies podcast

• Zaza: Professor Avi Loeb is a former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He's also the head of the Galileo Project, the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts. Professor Loeb is the author of the best-selling Extraterrestrial, the first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth, and the most recent Interstellar. The search for extraterrestrial life and our future in the stars. Professor Loeb, welcome to Eurotrash. It's an absolute honor. Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me, it's a great pleasure. Zaza: You probably already know what I'm going to ask you first. On July 26th, we witnessed an American congressional hearing like no other. David Grush, a decorated Air Force intelligence officer, stated that he absolutely believes that the U.S. government is in possession of multiple extraterrestrial UAPs or unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs. Not only that, but apparently the US, as well as many other world governments, has a secret retrieval program, snatching up aircraft that have supposedly crashed on Earth. Furthermore, although he admitted he hasn't seen the alleged alien aircraft himself, he said that non-human biologics were found at these crash sites. Basically, he is convinced that the US is in possession of alien aircraft as well as alien pilots. What do you make of these claims? Avi Loeb: he didn't have access to the evidence, he heard it from 40 eyewitnesses. The good news is that he was asked by congresspeople to provide the contact information of the people he spoke with, who he claims were involved in this program. So within the coming months, these congresspeople will try to go down this path and figure out if the story is fabricated or real. And if we don't hear anything within a year, we will know it's fabricated. It's all about evidence, because people can say anything. And of course we know from the women's world cup in soccer that in many instances that were controversial, the referee relied on video cameras. That's the evidence collected by instruments. The referee did not go around and ask the players what they think or the audience what they think. The idea is that you need to seek evidence collected by instruments not the eyewitness testimonies so I am Intrigued by this testimony but not convinced because we haven't had access to the evidence and as a scientist you know my fundamental question is whether the evidence will come from politicians in Washington DC or from scientists like myself. I just went on an expedition to the Pacific Ocean a couple of months ago Zaza: We're going Avi Loeb: to Zaza: to talk Avi Loeb: collect, Zaza: about that later. Oh yes. Avi Loeb: and we will talk about that, but it's quite possible that we will learn something new from the evidence that we collected in that expedition. And we are anticipating releasing the scientific paper very soon. Zaza: Alright, if we come to David Grush for a second longer, naturally, like you said, a lot of criticism followed because there was no evidence. Quite a few people likened the claims to an episode of the X-Files. The pushback I found most interesting was basically the simplest one. For example, even if we concede that aliens are in fact visiting us, why would they man their aircraft, excuse me, even we already have drones that we use for really dangerous stuff. Also, Why with all this sophisticated technology are they crashing on Earth so often? Avi Loeb: Well, it depends how many such objects exist. Of course, if there are thousands of them and one of them crashes, it's not a bad record. And it also depends on the circumstances. It's possible that they crashed because the US military fired at those crats. I mean, we don't know what exactly happened and if it's real. And the question is, is it real? And is there material evidence for it? The only scenario that I can imagine is if the US government had that in possession of such things, because it's the only organization that monitors the entire sky for national security purposes. fraction of the sky and focus on very distant sources. So if a bird flies overhead they ignore it. But the US government has a day job which is to protect the nation and as a result they notice unusual things. So it's possible that over decades they had some very unusual objects that they identified and if you know, they collected the materials. The government is not a scientific organization, so the first thing they would like to know is whether it belongs to adversaries, other nations, but then when they realize maybe it's not, they could have delegated the figuring out what this is to corporations, and the relationship between corporations and government are similar to the relationship between a psychiatrist and a patient. A psychiatrist will never solve the problem of a patient because then they will not get paid. So in the same way, corporations would prefer to keep it unresolved for decades to get paid. And the only way to get around that is to share these materials with scientists. And I should emphasize anything coming from interstellar space started the journey millions of years ago or billions of years ago before humans existed. So it doesn't really care about how we split the land on this rock that we call earth. And it's not a matter of national security. It should be knowledge that is shared by all humans. And that's the way science operates. And also if you engage scientists, you have a chance of, you know, benefiting from the best minds in the world, rather than keeping it hidden and having it at the privy of some administrators, bureaucrats, or engineers that do not have all the tools to figure it out. Zaza: Generally speaking, what do you think of UAP sightings? Which, Avi Loeb: I think. Zaza: if any, seem credible to you? Avi Loeb: Well, I Zaza: Is that a fair question at all? Avi Loeb: haven't seen convincing evidence beyond the reasonable doubt so far, but it's possible that the reason for that is the most convincing evidence is classified because it was collected by classified sensors that the US government has access to, because there are people within government talking about very unusual objects, but I haven't seen data that confirms that. And of course, if pilots... tell me that they saw, and I spoke with Ryan Graves and others, and they say that they had seen unusual things. That is not sufficient for a scientist because I want to see the data from instruments that I have full control over, that are calibrated. And also I wanted to get such data from a systematic survey of the sky. And that's what we are doing in the Galileo project that I'm leading. The main difference between anecdotal reports happen to be at the right place at the right time compared to a systematic study of the sky is that in a systematic study of the sky you monitor the sky all the time and you figure out what is the noise what kind of birds or balloons or airplanes or drones you happen to see quite frequently and that constitutes the background and then on top of that if you see something unusual you know how to calibrate it but if you happen to see something unusual by chance You don't know whether it's background or whether it's real. You can't calibrate the statistics of how frequently it happens and how rare it is. And the worst is actually to go to places where there is a lot of background. And some people argue, you know, the war in Ukraine is a good place to be in. Who knows, maybe there are UAP there and some, there were some reports by astronomers about it. I don't think that's a good idea because that's a place where you have lots of things flying in the sky. And you had. you will have a hard time distinguishing between a drone and something unusual. And simply because you're not aware of all the, you know, the classified drones and perhaps even satellites that are being used for espionage over there. So it's much better to go to the Sahara desert when there is nothing or Alaska or the South Pole, you know, these are sites where there is not much activity and the noise level is smaller. So any signal there would be intriguing. Zaza: What about these videos that were released by the Pentagon, for example? Avi Loeb: They were not convincing. I mean, they showed some motions that perhaps look unusual, but in fact, there is the new office in government, the old domain anomaly resolution office under the Pentagon that started looking into hundreds of cases where military personnel reported things. And the claim by the director of that office, Eero, Sean Kirkpatrick, is that only a few percent of the reports are indeed anomalous, that in fact they can figure out that, you know, maybe 97% of them are drones, balloons, have mundane explanations. So it shows you that it must be a mixed bag, and in fact the strongest correlations you find between reports about UAP is with population density, basically telling you that the more eyes are looking at the sky the higher the likelihood of a report Zaza: interesting. Avi Loeb: would be. And it's probably because there are balloons everywhere, there are drones everywhere. So the more people look at the sky, the more reports you get. But it doesn't mean that there are so many unusual objects, it's just that it's difficult to figure them out with relatively, you know, a low level instrument. Zaza: more I listen to you the more you seem skeptical but not outright dismissive of these claims. Avi Loeb: No, Zaza: For Avi Loeb: I Zaza: example, Avi Loeb: mean, Zaza: David Grush or site UFO sightings. Avi Loeb: I should tell you that I'm, as of now, I'm leading the only scientific project, which is trying to figure out what UAP are. And that means that I'm intrigued by these reports and I try to figure it out. I know that the government cares about it. I know that the public is very interested. So it's, I think, the duty of scientists to help and figure out what these things are and get to the bottom of them. And so that's what we are doing with the Galileo project. We have an operating observatory at Harvard University and it's collecting data 24 seven in the infrared optical radio and audio. We use machine learning software to figure out whether we are looking at the bird, at the drone, at an airplane, balloon or something else. So I'm taking it seriously in the sense that I want to figure it out and. Hopefully within the coming years, the Galileo project will shed some light on the nature of these objects. You know, and as a scientist, even if one in a thousand or one in 10,000 objects appears to be unexplained, not from this earth, that would be a great triumph because we will discover that we are not alone. OK, for the government, the motivation is completely different. They want to protect the nation. And so they want to know what most of the objects are, whether they are Chinese. Russian or anything else. And human-made objects are obviously their focus. So in a way I see the work of a scientist as complementary to the work of government. Anything that was made in China is very boring as far as I'm concerned. Zaza: Staying with X-Files and men in dark suits and sunglasses for a final time. You are one of the most well-known scientists who is actively searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Has anyone from a secret agency ever contacted you and would you tell me if they had? Avi Loeb: I would tell you what you Zaza: If Avi Loeb: see Zaza: you can't Avi Loeb: is what Zaza: say Avi Loeb: you Zaza: it Avi Loeb: get. Zaza: out loud, professor, please just not twice. Avi Loeb: Yeah, I was never approached, maybe because I'm just following the scientific method where, you know, I'm not seeking any classified data. I'm not trying to convince government to do one thing or another. I mean, they have their day job and we are not in position to tell them to declassify data. I'm just... trying to pursue my work as a scientist because the sky is not classified, it's only the instruments that look at the sky that are classified, and also the oceans are not classified, so I'm just doing scientific work in the open, completely transparently, without hiding anything, and I'm doing it the way science does it. Now, of course, most of my colleagues, they focus on very distant objects, on questions about the universe at large. let's look at our backyard and see if there is any unusual object there. And then it's just like going to your backyard near your home and checking everything to see if there, there is any tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. That's a reasonable proposition as far as I'm concerned, because we sent five probes to interstellar space, Voyager one, Voyager two, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. And that's just over half a century. And you can imagine other civilizations that existed for billions of years before us, because most of the stars formed billions of years before the Sun, and we know that a significant fraction of them have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same separation. And with chemical propulsion, the kind of rockets that we send, you can traverse the Milky Way galaxy in half a billion years. So they could have arrived here to our doorstep or sent something that would arrive here, and obviously if they arrived to our doorstep before we will arrive to... their doorstep, they're more advanced than we are, or at least they preceded us. So we can learn from them. So I see it as an opportunity to learn. And that's why I'm interested, has nothing to do with me trying to, uh, gain any knowledge that is of national security importance, and that's why perhaps the government doesn't really care about it. Zaza: Professor, does AI kind of throw a wrench into the works when it comes to making contact with other beings from outer space, at least as we have classically imagined it? We are only scratching the surface with these large language models now. But assuming we follow this rapid trajectory and that other technological civilizations kind of do the same as they progress, wouldn't it be more likely that whatever we might encounter out there would probably be some sort of AI? instead of a biological Avi Loeb: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Zaza: mecha Avi Loeb: And this Zaza: system. Avi Loeb: is, yeah, I completely agree. Artificial intelligence could be shaping our future and in fact we will start sending it to space. And in fact, if you see of what we have done so far, NASA sent to Mars the Perseverance Rover and the Ingenuity helicopter, and they are directed by engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab. I call that the helicopter parenting, because the engineers are parenting, you know, literally speaking, a helicopter there, but they also in the sense that, you know, they are telling those devices what to do. So these are robots that are operated by people, but then a much more appropriate approach, if you go interstellar is to send the systems that operate by themselves. They don't wait for guidance from the senders because even for at the speed of light, you know, it takes thousands of years to for light signal to traverse the Milky Way galaxy. So it doesn't make any sense for a probe to wait for guidance. We can only use that method close to us. Mars is sufficiently close for that. So the way I see the future in space is shaped by artificial intelligence astronauts. I call them AI astronauts. And actually I discussed them very extensively in my new book that is about to appear next week. That's the one, Zaza: Right. Avi Loeb: Interstellar. Zaza: Yep. Avi Loeb: And I talk about the fact that as you say that indeed other civilizations may have evolved far beyond where we are and we might have a hard time figuring them out. and maybe we will use our own AI systems to figure their AI systems because they will have some kinship but more generally, you know, uh an advanced technological civilization may appear to us As making miracles things we can't really understand and that's the realm of religion in the past You know, we were attributing such things to god doing things that That are superhuman that are way beyond what we can do And therefore I argue that a very advanced scientific civilization is a good approximation to God. Just imagine, for example, in the Old Testament, Moses was witnessing the burning bush. And that was a bush that was burning and never consumed. And this miracle... Convinced Moses to believe in God But if I were next to him with the infrared sensors of the Galileo project I could have advised Moses about the temperature of the bush the amount of energy emitted per unit time And I could have done a calculation to tell Moses look this is not natural for a bush to last so long More quantitatively using instruments and obviously it would have increased the sense of all that Moses had so what I'm saying is that know, if we do encounter an advanced technological civilization, it might be a way of merging religion and science in the sense that something real, you know, that we can measure with our instruments may inspire all the way that the miracles in religious texts were described. Zaza: I was listening to an interview of yours recently and you made an interesting argument that I've never heard before. I thought it was fascinating, although it did hurt my ego a little bit. Avi Loeb: Hahaha Zaza: I'm not gonna lie. You said that there might be many advanced alien civilizations out there, but we're just so average that no one is paying attention to us. Ouch. Could you break that down a little bit? Avi Loeb: Yeah, I mean, you can look at your family members, you know, in my family, I had the young daughters, when they were very young, they stayed at home and they develop a perspective about life in which they are at the center of the world. That was their thinking. And that's because we paid a lot of attention to the girls and there was nobody else to compete with them for our attention. But As soon as they went to the kindergarten, they realized, oh, there are kids that might be smarter than we are. That was a shock and that hurt their ego. But it's something that all of us are going through in life. Once we realize there is a bigger environment out there where we are not that important. So only when you focus on your immediate environment, you can believe that you are really, you know, exceptional and unique and special and important. And once you broaden the scope. of your vision, you realize, no, you're just, you know, just one drop in the ocean, so to speak. And, you know, we tend to think of ourselves as very, I mean, look at Putin, for example, I'm sure he has a lot of self confidence, right? And where does he get it from? Because he's focusing just on Russia and Ukraine and these, this region. So, but if you look at it from a distance, that you know, from a, for example, a spacecraft that went to the moon. You can't even tell where the border between Russia and Ukraine is. It looks like there is this blue marble of the Earth, and it's completely, it appears completely unimportant as to who conquers this tiny piece of land that you barely see from a distance. And in the big scheme of things, the moon is really very close to us. You know, it's like one part in a quadrillion, or even less than that, of the size of the universe. You know, that's... completely negligible if you think about it. It's just like the ratio between the head of a pin, the size of the head of a pin, and the most distant planet in the solar system. So there is so much real estate out there in the universe that everything happening on this rock that we were born on appears completely meaningless and not so important. The only way for you to think that we are important is if you just focus on our immediate environment. So my point is if someone comes from thousands of light years away And visits us it's probably not because That you know, whoever sent that something Thought about us Because we existed as humans we existed only for a few million years Okay, and to travel through the milky way galaxy takes half a billion years with the chemical rockets that we sent So we were not around our planet was dominated by microbes when the journey started. And why would anyone target a planet controlled by microbes? There must be a different reasons. It's not because eventually it will develop humans because that was not guaranteed by any means. And for a long time, there were relatively dumb animals on this planet, on this rock. Probably that's the most common situation that you find if you visit. And also within a billion years. the sun will boil off all the oceans on earth, so life as we know it will not exist. There is just a short window of time where life might be interesting if you think of humans as interesting. So it's clearly not about us. And the bigger way I think about it is we arrived recently to the cosmic stage only over the past few million years as the human species, which is one part in 10,000 of the age of the universe. And moreover, we are not at the center of stage. We know that since Copernicus and Galileo I mean before that we thought that we are at the center. No, we are not So, um, if you are not at the center of stage and you arrive to a play at the end of the play The play is not about you I mean, i'm just using common sense if the play was about us. We would be there from the beginning And we would be at the center of stage just like aristotle argued or the church that you know wanted We would be just at the center, everything would move around us, that would be the natural way. No, we are not, and we came only at the end. So, you know, we better seek other actors that have been around for longer and ask them what the play is about. It's just common sense, it's just a sense of modesty that, you know, we must acquire if we look at the big picture. Zaza: Speaking of timeframes, David Kipping, he's another astrophysicist who's researching exoplanets, I believe, that might support life. He said that it's extremely unlikely we will ever really engage with anyone else. He makes this assumption that at least in the vastness of space-time, civilizations rise and fall, like you said, in a blink of an eye, right? Avi Loeb: Right. Zaza: So we would have to be incredibly synchronized with someone Avi Loeb: Oh, no, Zaza: else, which is almost Avi Loeb: that, Zaza: impossible. Avi Loeb: no, that that's only if you're waiting for a phone call. So Zaza: Or like, Avi Loeb: if. Zaza: I don't know, Encounters of the Third Kind or ET Avi Loeb: No, Zaza: or Avi Loeb: no, Zaza: anything. Avi Loeb: no. So, you know, if you are looking at your mailbox for any packages that arrived in the mail, there is no requirement that the sender is still alive. OK, so there could be, you know, space trash in the spirit of Eurotrash. There could be some objects, gadgets that are not functional anymore. That will happen to our own probes. Once they exit to interstellar space, they will be trash. And those are, you know, accumulating over time because they can't escape. Chemical rockets cannot escape from the gravitational pull of the Milky Way galaxy. They move 10 times too slow. And then they will just accumulate in interstellar space over billions of years, just like plastics accumulate in the ocean. And the amount of them keeps growing over time. And you could have another type of gadgets that, you know, is still functional. And... may survive for long periods of time but the senders could be dead so you don't need the senders to be around it's just that you know there are things that you find that belong to the senders just think about them archaeology you know we find relics of cultures that do not exist anymore the mayans you know where most of them were wiped out a long time ago but we can still find the ruins of the mayans and appreciate the kind of culture they had. So in the same spirit we can learn about intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations just by finding the relics they left behind in space and the easiest is to find them near us not to go very far because space is vast. Zaza: That's a bit of a downer, Professor Loeb. Like, instead of Avi Loeb: I'm going to go ahead and turn it off. Zaza: the idea of chilling and hanging out with ET, we're just gonna stumble across some alien diapers floating in space. Avi Loeb: Yeah, I agree with you. It's somewhat disappointing, but on the other hand, you know, think about if you were to stay at home and you know, you don't even check your backyard, you don't look through the window, then obviously it's natural to say, well, I don't have anyone out there that, you know, I can share my thoughts with. I'm alone. you know, that's what a single person says, but then of course what you tell that person is to find a partner, you need to go to dating sites, you need to look through the windows, you need to search for any objects that arrive from the streets so that you know what's out there, and we haven't done that until recently. Only over the past decade we found some interstellar objects, that's why I'm engaged in the search, you know, and many of my colleagues, including Keating, you know, they just talk and talk and talk and talk. They just have opinions all the time, publish opinions, talk with each other, express their view about whether I should go to the Pacific Ocean or not, because the chances are small, say that the government data is probably wrong because it doesn't agree with models about stones. You know, this is just talk and talk and talk. The point is, it's not about talking. I mean, we've done talking since the days of Enrico Fermi, who said, where is everybody? Very pretentious, you know, to say, sit in Los Alamos for lunch. and ask, where is everybody? Like, what do you expect them to come with you to lunch at the time that you're having lunch in Los Alamos 1950? You know, that's exactly what you want them to do. Why would they do that? First, you are not that important. Second, space is vast. Time is very long, measured in billions of years. What's the chance that they would be exactly there, exactly at that time for you to witness it. It's very small. So it's a very pretentious statement to say, I don't see anything. Well to find something you have to seek it like if you were to say the same thing about dark matter Just think about it. Most of the matter in the universe is not known It's of a substance that we don't know its nature And so we've been searching actively we spend billions of dollars to look for it But nevertheless just imagine the same attitude. Okay saying You know, I look around I don't see the dark matter Maybe there is no dark matter. Where is the dark matter? Why don't I see it? Well, that's the whole point that you have to search for it to find it. You know, things that are obvious, like birds, like stones, like rocks, you know, these are things we know about, but then there are other things. Not then the universe is not made just of birds and stones, things that you see very often. It's not okay. And you have to search for those things that are more difficult for you to observe. And that includes objects that are smaller than a football field. within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. You know, we can't see with our best telescopes objects that are smaller than a football field through the reflection of sunlight. We can't see that. So there could be millions. In fact, there are millions of objects like the meteor from 2014 that I went to search for. There are millions of them within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, but we can't see them because they are too faint for our telescopes. So just saying, where are these objects? Well, you have to develop a giant telescope to see them if you want to see them. But you can't just say, I don't see them with my naked eye, because your naked eyes unable to see that thing. So the only way to find such meteors as of now is by the fireball that they create when they collide with earth. And that happens once per decade. So this object from 2014 that I went to study, you know, represents a population of objects. There are millions of them within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Every decade, one of them collides with Earth. Only then you can see it. And the first one that was seen was in 2014. So, you know, it's not as if Enrico Fermi had a telescope searching for such objects and said, I'm searching, but I don't find anything. No, he didn't even look. He just asked, where is everybody? And everyone keeps talking and talking and talking about this question since then. And then people say, Well, we've been searching a lot. We haven't seen anything. Well, you haven't okay You haven't searched because such an object a meter size object collides with earth From interstellar space only once per decade and the u.s Government had satellites that could detect it only over the past decade So one was found in 2014 the first one ever recognized first one in history So you can't just say You know, I have an opinion because that is not substantiated by evidence. What you need to say is let's seek the evidence. Let's do the best we can. And I said that, you know, just two months ago, going to the Pacific Ocean, Zaza: Right. Avi Loeb: even that was an issue to some of these people. They Zaza: Yeah, Avi Loeb: came to me and said, why would you do that? Zaza: we're going to come to that in just a second. But just nevertheless, so whatever package we might receive from outer space, whether it's alien garbage or meaning of the life in the universe, it will probably come from a civilization that is long gone. Right. Avi Loeb: Probably, I agree, Zaza: OK. Avi Loeb: yeah. Zaza: OK, that's a bit sad. OK. All right. Avi Loeb: Well, Zaza: I can't help myself. I'm sorry. Avi Loeb: you know, the reason for that is simple, it's because it takes a long time to travel according to known physics. Of course, you can always say, oh, maybe they have a warp drive, maybe all kinds of fantasies, these we don't know exist. And also, you know, we don't know if it's possible from fundamental physics to do such things, you know. irrespective of the engineering. So as of now, if I limit my imagination to what we know in physics, you know, it takes thousands of years to move at the speed of light across the Milky Way. It takes half a billion years to use chemical rockets across the Milky Way. Therefore, on such long time scales, civilizations may come and go, may not survive for very long. And indeed, Zaza: So, Avi Loeb: the centers are Zaza: right, Avi Loeb: not likely to exist. Zaza: yeah. So that thing they do in the movies, in sci-fi movies when they just go into a black hole and then they come out on the other end of the universe, Avi Loeb: Yeah, Zaza: that doesn't work. Avi Loeb: that's why I don't like these movies. And Zaza: Okay. Avi Loeb: I'm not really a fan of science fiction because it very Zaza: Interesting. Avi Loeb: often doesn't make sense. Zaza: Alright, professor, I still clearly remember logging into my computer in the beginning of July, only to be greeted by a whole host of news articles with pretty incredible titles. They spoke of a Harvard professor who believes he's found fragments of alien technology in the sea. Professor, what exactly have you found in the waters Avi Loeb: Right, Zaza: of Papua New Guinea? Avi Loeb: so first I want to clarify, I never said that. These were journalists who tried to get clickbaits Zaza: Of course. Avi Loeb: and if you look at the actual articles or if you ever listen to a podcast or a video interview that I had, you can see what I actually said because I always say the same things. You know, so it's just impossible that the reporter heard something else than I say everywhere else because I always say the same things. You can see consistently that they say the same things in different podcasts, different interviews. And the point is we went after the relics, the fragments of the first recognized interstellar meteor, which is an object at least half a meter in size that collided with earth on January 8th, 2014. Almost a decade ago, the fireball released a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. and was visible to US government satellites. So they saw the satellite, saw this fireball, and they recorded it because they are monitoring Earth for national security threats. That's the main purpose. But if they see a meteor, they record it and then they give it to NASA and NASA catalogs it. So NASA has a catalog of 273 of these. And back in 2019, about five years after this object was discovered, I realized. that NASA has this catalog. I didn't know about it until then. And I was intrigued because it was a couple of years, actually less, a year and a half after Oumuamua was discovered. So, I was very interested in Zaza: Just Avi Loeb: interstellar. Zaza: to clarify, Oumuamua is the cigarette-shaped object that came very close, right? And that you Avi Loeb: Yeah, Zaza: published a paper on Avi Loeb: right. Zaza: just for our listeners. Avi Loeb: It was not Zaza: Quickly. Avi Loeb: really cigar, I mean, an artist depicted it as a cigar, but in fact it was most likely disc-like, flat, based on the reflection of sunlight, and then in projection, when you look at it on the sky, then a flat object does appear like a cigar, if you look at it side This was the first reported interstellar object, even though the meteor was the actual first one that humanity discovered. But only in 2019, I asked my undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, to check this catalog and see if the fastest moving objects could be of interstellar origin because they are not bound to the sun. And indeed we found this object from 2014 and reported about it in a paper. And then the US government, in particular the US Space Command under the Department of Defense, confirmed it in a letter to NASA that said that at the 99.999% confidence, it is of interstellar origin. They wrote this letter because our paper was not accepted for publication because my colleagues were arguing they don't believe the US Space Command data. So the US Space Command went out of their... way, you know, they have a day job, they get more funding than NASA to alert the US president about any national security risks from the sky and it's not their day job to care about meteors, but nevertheless they did it for the sake of science and they wrote this letter to NASA. So then at that point my paper was accepted for publication and I started planning for an expedition to retrieve anything left because we knew where the fireball was located, to within about 10 kilometers. That's the error box of the Department of Defense. So in a way the Department of Defense came to my defense in terms of the origin of this object being in the Stella, and they also released the fireball light curve and that allowed us to infer that the material strength of this object was tougher. than all 272 space rocks that were catalogued by NASA, all the others. So it was tougher than even iron meteorites because we know that the object exploded only when the stress was extremely high in the lower atmosphere of the earth. So it was able to maintain its integrity much more than any other space rocks in the NASA catalog. So that was quite intriguing for me because If the object is moving fast, and in fact, we calculated that it was moving at 60 km per second outside the solar system, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun, relative to the local standard of rest. And that implied that it could have benefited from artificial propulsion, and maybe it was made of some artificial alloy that is tougher than even iron meteorites that make up 5% of the rocks. And then just... Think about Voyager colliding with the planet like the Earth. In the future, it will appear as a meteor of unusual strength and also moving faster than usual because of its propulsion. So we decided to go to the Pacific Ocean. I recruited 28 people, the best in the world for an ocean expedition. We got funded as soon as within a few months after I announced this. Charles Hoskinson contacted me and said, you have the money. And then we went there between June 14th to 28th this year and 2023 and found them, amazingly found the droplets, the molten droplets from the surface of the object at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. That's. Zaza: Molten droplets from the surface of the object. How big are they? Avi Loeb: So they are less than a millimeter in size between Zaza: Wow, how do you find that on the bottom Avi Loeb: a millimeter Zaza: of the sea? Avi Loeb: Yeah So that was a big challenge to start with that's the kind of sizes we expected when the surface of the object was Exposed to the immense heat from the fireball That's what you get when meteors enter through the atmosphere and so We are talking about a depth of about two kilometers for the bottom of the ocean. And these droplets rained down on the ocean and settled at the bottom of the ocean. So we had, first of all, to identify the location. So we narrowed it down using seismometer data that measured the sonic boom from the explosion. And from the time delay, we could tell how far the explosion was from the seismometer. So we narrowed it to a path that was roughly 10 kilometers long, but one kilometer wide. And then we went there and the idea was to build the magnetic sled, basically a sled of 200 kilograms, roughly a meter in width that we dragged on the ocean floor. It was connected with a cable to the ship and it had magnets on both sides. And the hope was that The object included the iron because it was tough and Therefore we can find magnetic particles from the surface But we also had plan B if the object was not magnetic We had a sluicing device that we also built to look for it Just like you search for gold then you search by the density of the particles so anyway, then after six days well in the first day we couldn't get the a sled on the bottom of the ocean because the cable would lift it. It was kiting above the ocean surface, bottom, and then we figured that we have to go with a current in the ocean to keep it on at the bottom and the engineers just figured it out. It was a matter of art how they realized the technique and once they got it on the ground we started collecting materials. Mostly it was volcanic ash. black powder. And after the sixth day, I mean, I wrote an essay, I basically wrote 44 diary reports from the expedition on a daily basis. And all of them appeared in medium.com. You can find it there. And millions of people around the world, they read them and they were translated to Spanish. And then On the sixth day I wrote in my diary report, I said, where are the spherules? I honestly asked this question just to show you that I'm not pretending to find things that I don't have. And I'm just saying out loud what, where we are. And gladly a day after we started the filtering out the black powder, the tiny volcanic ash particles to look for bigger particles and then Then we put them under a microscope and lo and behold, we found the first spherule. It was a spherical sort of marble, metallic marble that was very distinct from the background sand. And I realized at that point, I was thrilled. I hugged the person who found it because I knew that once, you know, when I see an ant in the kitchen, there must be many more ants out there. And sure enough, within a few hours, we found more spirals, altogether 50 of them on the ship that was fittingly called Silver Star. And then we brought the materials back and at Harvard, then I had a summer intern that her name is Sophie Bergstrom. She was interested in shadowing me, basically following me because she wanted to be a science journalist and wanted to see how science is done. And at some point when I came back, she said that if I can be of help doing the science, I'd be glad to help. And I arranged her a pair of tweezers and a microscope, and she found 650 of more swirls. So altogether, we have more than 700, most of them found by Sophie. And that allowed us to do the statistics of where they were found. And we found that most of them were most of the extra ones, the ones that are beyond the background, because we went to control sites that are far away, so we could tell what the background is. And there is an excess along the meteor path, showing that we did uncover some of the debris from the meteor. But moreover, we now are analyzing those materials using a mass spectrometer at Harvard. have some very interesting results that we hope to report in a scientific paper soon, that I cannot speak about until the paper comes out, but stay tuned, it should be exciting. Zaza: So what have you found? Avi Loeb: I cannot tell you. If you were to interview me at the beginning of September, I would be able to. Zaza: Okay, can you say with any certainty if these are kind of natural occurring materials from space or were they actually made Avi Loeb: So the Zaza: by Avi Loeb: first Zaza: some Avi Loeb: question we are trying to address is whether the material composition is different from solar system materials because the entire solar system was made out of a cloud of gas that was enriched by a nearby exploding star, supernova, and it has very uniform abundance, at least it had initially, a very uniform abundance of elements, various elements. So if something came from outside the solar system from another region that was exposed to a different star that exploded with different abundances, then we should be able to tell clearly from the element abundances whether it's solar system materials or not. I mean the first thing you can tell easily is whether something came from the sky because even within the solar system when an object, a meteor passes through the air, some of the elements get evaporated and it loses them during the fireball phase. So if you see spherules, you can tell that they are not from geological activity on earth, they're not terrestrial, because they are missing some elements, they lost them, those are called volatile elements, they lost them as a result of the heat when the object entered the earth's atmosphere. and then so we can easily separate you know spirals that were that came from a meteor that was you know arrived to earth from outside of earth relative to material that was on earth all along that can be easily differentiated but beyond that we can also tell if something came from outside the solar system that's the first question that we are addressing and then the second You know, can we say that it's technological in origin? That is more complicated. And of course, the obvious way to do that is if you find a big piece. Because if you find a big piece of the object, you can easily tell the difference between a piece of a rock and a technological gadget. Because a gadget might have buttons on it. And then in the last class of the spring semester at Harvard, I asked my students, if we find a gadget with buttons on it, should we press a button? And half of the class said no, because we are worried about the consequences. Half Zaza: Let's Avi Loeb: of the Zaza: press Avi Loeb: class. Zaza: it. I'm all for pressing it. Avi Loeb: Yeah, you'll belong to the second half, which was very much in favor. They wanted, they were very curious. And then one student asked me, what would you do, Professor Loeb? And I said, I would take it to a laboratory and examine it before engaging with it. Zaza: scientific answer. Avi Loeb: Yeah. Zaza: So what if these civilizations are so advanced that even with really tiny objects you can tell if they're some sort of nanobots or whatever? Would Avi Loeb: Ah. Zaza: that be possible? That they're tiny but you can still tell that they were actually made by someone, it's not a naturally physical Avi Loeb: Well, Zaza: derived Avi Loeb: since Zaza: thing? Avi Loeb: we were looking just for those molten droplets, that was the only thing we could detect in this particular expedition. You know, one thing you can do is, for example, you had the semiconductors, so you had the computer screens that were melted, you would notice unusual abundance of rare elements. So some technological devices, have rare elements in very different abundance than nature so that is the kind of thing you can look for but you cannot hope to since these were melted by you know the fireball and we didn't yet find a big piece which is you know the focus perhaps of a future expedition we will go after the big piece next but first thing we are doing is trying to tell you know demonstrate whether the object came from outside the solar system and whether its elemental balances are unusual. Zaza: one step at a time. Avi Loeb: Yeah, one step. Zaza: Professor Stephen Hawking once famously cautioned that if aliens visit us, the outcome would be much like when Christopher Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. He wasn't Avi Loeb: Well... Zaza: very keen on us trying to make contact with anyone in outer space. However, in your new book Interstellar, I want to read it, I haven't had the chance yet because it's going to be published in a week, I believe you advocate for the exact opposite. What gives you this confidence? Avi Loeb: Well, because in the case of Columbus, he was a human and he found humans just in a different geographical location. In the case of the visit by some advanced civilization, you know, first of all, they may be very different than humans in the way they are constructed, but also they may have evolved technologically to become something that is way beyond us. Okay, so the situation is like... having a biker on the street, you know, look at the colony of ants in the pavement, the biker doesn't care less about the ants, you know, whether they go into one crack or another, whether they belong to one colony or another colony, although from the point of view of those ants, it's extremely important, they basically compete with other colonies and, you know, just like nations here on earth. So... You know, obviously the ants may want to believe that the biker cares about them, but they see the biker moving so fast that they can't make sense of it. And that, that would resemble more or less the way we look at them. Another way to think about it is us looking at our technological future. You know, it may look to us incomprehensible, just like a cave dweller going to New York city and looking at all the gadgets around. you know, wouldn't really figure out what, how, how that is possible. And, uh, you know, would have some, oh, uh, looking at those things and come back to the family in the cave and say, you know, there are some miracles out there that we cannot really understand. And so I think that would be the natural interactions. And I don't, therefore not afraid because I don't think they care about us. I think it's. a signature of self-importance when you are afraid of something, you think that the other entity has you know is actually trying to compete with you, but now if there are so much superior they don't care about us. And on the other hand it's an opportunity for us to learn from them. Okay so that's the way I see it, just like if you come to a class and you see there is a much smarter rather than worry that the kid may harm you. Zaza: So you're saying that if they wanted to because they're so advanced they could have crushed us already if Avi Loeb: Oh Zaza: that Avi Loeb: yeah, Zaza: was their intention Avi Loeb: that's another definitely they could have done it long ago. Why would they wait for this time to do it? Yeah. Zaza: Just build a highway like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, build a highway through Earth, no questions Avi Loeb: Yeah, Zaza: asked. Avi Loeb: well, you know, for so many millions of years, we were not even distinguishable from nature, like we were just like animals. Zaza: Right. Avi Loeb: You know, so the humans came to exist a few million years ago, and most of the time we were in caves, you know, we're just like animals, a little bit different, but not very different. So only over the past century, we started being different. Maybe they, you know, they didn't even notice that. But at any event, what I'm saying is we have an exponential growth of our technologies right now and if you extrapolate that a thousand years into the future or a million years or a billion years You know just think about what they may have accomplished by now Zaza: Professor, you said you don't like science fiction, but I gotta ask you this. When we picture aliens or extraterrestrial life, what do you think we get most wrong usually? Avi Loeb: Oh, we think that biological creatures would visit us. I think it's unlikely because travel through space is very hazardous. There are cosmic rays that can damage our body very quickly. Of course, maybe biology will evolve in the future. You know, like we know of worms that were found in the Siberian permafrost. Just a couple of months ago, there was a report about them. They were revived after 46,000 years and came to life. And even though they were frozen for 46,000 years in Siberia, so maybe there is a way of preserving biology for very long periods of time. We haven't figured it out yet. So until we do that, I would be skeptical that we can survive for so long. it makes more sense to me that we will send AI astronauts that do not have biology at all, that are just technological, because in principle they can have 3D printers, they can reproduce themselves once they get to a planet and use their raw materials. So why carry those bags of water, the what we call life here on Earth, why carry those bodies of water with you on a journey that is so long. and so dangerous if you can in principle replicate them using the raw materials on another planet so the way i would think of it is seeding the galaxy with life as we know it not by taking the life from here and bringing it there but instead using the raw materials there to make life as we know it and that to me sounds possible within a century from now we will have the technology to do that and then You know, biology does it already. If you look at the dandelion flower, you know, it sends out seeds with the wind. It doesn't connect them with an umbilical cord, doesn't give them guidance what to do at all, it just sends them out and they carry the DNA of the dandelion. They make many more dandelions. We can do the same thing, send probes that would self replicate just like biology does already. Zaza: Professor, if other civilizations are there or were there or aliens, do you think they have a sense of humor? Avi Loeb: Yeah. Zaza: Do you think a sense of humor is like a universal law, like, I don't know, mathematics or some say music? Avi Loeb: Well, I do think that a sense of humor improves your longevity. You can live longer if you do have that, because if you get aggravated by any setback or any pushback in life, and there are many of those throughout life, if you pay too much attention and get angry, it basically it's like erosion of metal, you know, like it eats into you. And then You see those people who are very upset at what is happening around them and they develop gray hair very quickly. They don't last very long. So if you want to live long, you better learn how to ignore things that upset you and always have a forward looking approach, like being an optimist, you know, because life is a self-fulfilling prophecy very often. If you don't believe in something, it will not happen. So. For example, I went to this expedition, what is the chance of finding millimeter sized spherules at the bottom of an ocean, two kilometers deep across a region of 10 kilometers, you know, zero. Uh, and then I could have listened to the people who tell me, why are you going there? It's a waste of time, waste of money. And I said, you know, instead I said to them, I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm doing the heavy lifting. You just sit back and relax. You can be a pessimist if you want. But the point is just by being an optimist and going there, you know, we were able to find those things. Okay. And it would have been very easy to give up. There were many failure points that one can imagine for this expedition. First of all, you know, maybe the location of the meteor was wrong. We wouldn't find anything. Maybe the, uh, we would not get funded. Maybe I would not be able to recruit qualified engineers that would design the appropriate. machinery, you know, the sled. Maybe the sled would never get on the ocean floor. Maybe it would never collect enough materials of spherules, you know, of the meteor. And then maybe we won't be able to find them relative to the volcanic ash, the black powder. Or even after we found them, maybe we won't have the mass spectrometer that allows us to tell the composition. Zaza: Wow, a lot Avi Loeb: And Zaza: of Avi Loeb: so Zaza: things Avi Loeb: there are Zaza: could Avi Loeb: so Zaza: go Avi Loeb: many... Zaza: wrong, right? Avi Loeb: Yeah, exactly. Zaza: So you think sense of humor and positive outlook on life go hand in hand. So aliens, even if they have a very advanced technology, they're still laughing at fart jokes. Avi Loeb: Yeah, well, yeah, I think it's like, I think in interstellar space, survival of the fittest applies just like Darwin imagined it. Except in space, it's those that survive very long. And that means that they send probes outside of their home planet, because eventually they die on the home planet when the star boils off. all the oceans there like the sun will do to us in a billion years so you want to send things out and you want to be optimistic forward-looking you want to send whatever you want to replicate and you want to be joyful and part of it is laughing you know Zaza: Right, Avi Loeb: that's Zaza: last Avi Loeb: being Zaza: two questions really quick before I let you go. I'm getting greedy with the intensity of my questions, I know, but it's not every day I get to talk to a world-class astrophysicist, so you have to forgive me for that. Maybe this is more of a theological question, but just personally, why do you think the universe is growing life? Why is life when the conditions are right, springing up at all? Avi Loeb: Oh, first of all, I don't think there is a purpose behind it. It's just, you know, it so happens. It's an emergent phenomena of complexity. So it's the starting point that we exist because of gravity, because gravity basically brought things together in a uniform universe. You know, it started pretty much uniformly with density of matter everywhere being the same, but then clumps, there were small in homogeneity, small differences in density, and then they grew to make objects. And like the Milky Way galaxy, which fragmented again by gravity into smaller objects inside, like stars, like the Sun, but in the process of the Sun being made, there was some fragmentation of the debris left around the Sun, the formation of the Sun, and that made the planet like the Earth. And so life was delivered and then there was the chemistry of life as we know it that initiated everything we know. So there is evolution of complexity and it's all enabled by gravity making the earth bringing water to earth and allowing the chemistry of water on earth. Now why is life so robust? It's because it's able to adapt to changing circumstances. Of course, it requires some minimal ingredients, it needs nutrients, life needs nutrients, but the only way that we know it can exist is by liquid water allowing the nutrients to be processed. So that's why chemistry in liquid water is the only form of life we know. So once, for example, Mars lost its liquid oceans because it lost its atmosphere, it became a desert. It's not easy to see life on Mars right now, nothing is moving. and that's because there is no water so but at any event if you give it water and nutrients life is able to adapt to changing circumstances you know the entire earth froze solid became an iceberg uh some along its history multiple times we see that in the record and life was able to go through those things there was a huge impact of an asteroid a rock the size of big city that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of all life forms, but nevertheless we came to exist after that. So life is able to adapt as long as it has water and the nutrients, and that is an amazing property of complexity. It's so complex that it's able to, through Darwinian evolution, to adapt to changing circumstances, and that's why we see it so robustly on earth. But eventually Earth will become just like Mars, it will lose its liquid water and then there would be nothing that is living on its surface, but however if we are smart enough to send things to space, you know life, the signatures of life will be out there, so you know that's to answer your question, it's intelligence that would, which is a sign of complexity that allows us to venture into space and Zaza: So no planetary confederacy like in Star Trek or something would we meet other aliens and then? Avi Loeb: Well, you know, if we do encounter someone, we might want to ask if there are any parties in our neighborhood. I don't know, maybe there are. Zaza: Alright, last question, professor. The title of this podcast is Euro Trash. So I have to ask you something trashy at the end. Do you think it's possible that aliens came to visit Earth, saw how they were represented in our pop culture, got really offended and then left? Because let's face it, Avi Loeb: Thank Zaza: in Avi Loeb: you. Zaza: movies, at least, you know, a, they usually don't look very attractive and b, they're almost always trying to kill us. So maybe they visited in the 90s saw Independence Day and Mars attacks and we're like, we don't deserve to be treated like this. These people are not ready. Bye bye. Avi Loeb: Everything is possible. We should just do better in our future dates with such encounters. So let's try to be better. Zaza: Is that why you don't watch science fiction movies? Avi Loeb: No, I don't like it just because it doesn't, the storyline doesn't make sense but very often I can't enjoy it as a physicist when I see things moving faster than light or, you know, the journey lasting human lifetime, that makes no sense. Zaza: All right. Thank you so much for indulging me, professor. This was absolutely fantastic. When will your book be published and where can people get it? Avi Loeb: August 29th, 2023, and it's called Interstellar. First it will appear in English and then in translations, but it can be found on August 29th everywhere, in any bookstore that sells books, it's everywhere. Zaza: So the release is global. Avi Loeb: global and moreover, keep monitoring my essays on medium.com, avilob.medium.com where I will put an update about the results from the expedition hopefully by the end of August, 2023. Zaza: Perfect. Do you still not have any social media? Avi Loeb: Yes, I don't and it saves me time and it also, you know, when you design an airplane, you make it so that the friction with air is minimal. So it minimizes my friction with anyone else so that I can fly higher. Zaza: Oh, wow, that's amazing. Oh, I wish I could do that. All right, so medium.com and they can, people can find your book anywhere in all fine bookstores across the globe. Professor Loeb, thank you so much. This was absolutely splendid. I enjoyed every second of it. I hope we can do this again sometime in the future. Avi Loeb: Same here.