Avi Loeb Fights Back: Response to Brian Cox & the 3I/ATLAS Critics - #529

Become a channel member to ask questions! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb returns to break down the newest data on 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar object captivating the world — and triggering fierce debate among scientists. In this extended conversation, Loeb responds directly to recent public criticism from Brian Cox, Jason Wright, and others, clarifies what the data actually show, and explains why humility and open inquiry remain essential to the scientific method. The latest images of the interstellar object show a single intact body, a sunward jet, and energy requirements that challenge familiar comet models. These anomalies have ignited one of the most heated scientific debates of the decade. We explore the latest observations since 3I/ATLAS’ October 29 perihelion: • Why its jets, brightness, and spectral changes are so unusualt • What would distinguish natural sublimation from technological propulsiont • How its orbit, size, and mass budget challenge standard modelst • Why the public response matters for the future of sciencet • How criticism of scientific inquiry mirrors the historical treatment of Galileot Follow Avi's latest findings and discoveries here https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-is-still-a-single-body-with-a-sunward-anti-tail-after-perihelion-667fe41c0071 In this livestream, Avi will address: • Why the post-perihelion images complicate the natural-comet interpretationt • Whether a technological origin is still on the tablet • Why critics insist the anomalies are trivial — and why Avi argues they’re nott • How scientific consensus forms, breaks, and evolves under stresst • What the new mass-flux and energy calculations imply for 3I/ATLASt We’ll explore the science, the skepticism, and the stakes — and we’ll take live audience questions from channel members. Join our esteemed set of members here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Whether you’re convinced, skeptical, or undecided, this is the conversation the public deserves: open, rigorous, and unfiltered. 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Brian Keating?

  All right, all right, all right. Let's see what we're doing here today. We've got a very good friend of the show, Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University. Avi, how are you doing today in the beautiful Cambridge suburbs?

• 1:18Speaker 03

  Oh, it's quite amazing. I wake up at 3 a.m. every day just to go over the 300 emails that piled up in my inbox overnight. And there are lots of interesting surprises I should tell you. Let me just mention a few anecdotes if you don't mind.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  So our dishwasher broke down. And I call to order a new one. And I speak with someone random. And that person says, is this Avi Loeb?

• 1:53Speaker 03

  And I say, yes, it is. And he says, oh, I'm following you on all the podcasts. Can you please give me a brief overview of Three Eye Atlas? And I was just trying to get a dishwasher.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  And also, I went, I got a haircut this morning. I go to the the woman who who cuts my hair and she says, you know, the boss of my daughter came to her and says, you need to listen to this podcast with Avi Loeb. And she said, well, that's, that's the person that my mother cuts the hair off. And, and he's, are you sure that your mother cuts the hair of Avi Loeb? So now I cannot really escape, you know, because everywhere I go, I go to a restaurant that people know. And but that, I guess it's, I have to get adjusted to this.

• 2:43Brian Keating?

  Well, you can be, you can tell them that, you know, they're the cosmetologist to the famous cosmologist Avi Loeb. You know, cosmology and cosmetology share the same prefix. It means beautiful and it's beautiful to be with you. A lot of people watching today and we're going to be doing a really fun kind of, you know, I don't want to call it postmortem. This object is still so fascinating and it's still doing interesting things. And, and it has taught us more perhaps about not only the scientific features of interstellar interlopers, but it's really illuminated to the, to the scientists, how the public views these objects and why it's so interesting, why it's so important, what more may portend for the future.

• 3:26Brian Keating?

  We're also going to get into some of the controversy, some of the criticism, because you've never, you know, said at all that this is guaranteed to be technology and you can't be in control of what people say about you in your name. However, there is some criticism, some of it legitimate, some of it not. And I want to get into that as an important, critical distinction, as a teachable lesson to the audience and to the wider scientific and non-scientific world that pays our salaries as, as scientists. We have the best job in the world. And then lastly, we'll take a lot of questions from the audience. The only catches I want to give, I have a huge audience, members that just pay to be members of the channel. And I love them and I want to give back to them. So if you want to ask questions of Avi, you got to be a member of the channel. It's 99 cents, not a big deal, but it shows me that

• 4:11Brian Keating?

  you care and gives me and Avi and the other great guests that we have on the show coming up. I have Terrence Tao coming up on Monday. So these are ways to give back. But Avi, this is incredible. Before we get to the really interesting, you know, details, what we've learned about 3I Atlas in the couple of weeks since it's been since we spoke, I want to get into some of the personal side of this object as a scientist, as a human being, as a father, as a human, as a very, very popular popularizer of science, but also a hardcore scientist. Tell us about the latest, you know, kind of gifts that you were bestowed upon, featuring none other than, you know, my other favorite astrophysicist, Galileo Galilei. You know that I've got my fingerprints.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Before I get to that, I just need to say that 3I Atlas was an amazing gift in the sense that, you know, it's a big object, bright, coming in the plane of the planets around the sun, and therefore it allows us to monitor everything that happens to it. And that attracts a huge amount of attention from the public. And I see that as an unprecedented opportunity to actually bring young kids to realize that they might want to become scientists because they see the scientific process of collecting data and being able to infer what the object is. And I get lots of emails from mothers and fathers saying, my daughter, my son now want

• 5:38Speaker 03

  to become a scientist. And, you know, that doesn't happen very often, even if the Large Hadron Collider were to discover a new particle. I don't think those kids would come forward with the excitement that they do. And, you know, they ask for telescopes as a gift for the holidays. You know, it's really genuine, and I get it from many people. I got maybe a dozen emails over the past week from parents who say, you know, that's remarkable, and we are really happy about that. And the second thing is the public appreciates science. It's not The work of the elite, when you have amateur astronomers, where you have lots of data coming in from all directions, hundreds of telescopes around the world.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  And they get to see how science is done. We don't need to say in advance what we think. We can just follow the data. That is really what science is about. And so if I had to summarize everything, and I did that yesterday, and I'll explain why I did that yesterday. There were a hundred people gathered at the Harvard College Observatory for a special celebration that I'll mention. What I said at the end of it is that the foundation of science and art, creative science and creative art, is the humility to learn. It's not the arrogance of expertise. Now, this sounds trivial, but what you find in academia

• 7:04Speaker 03

  and also among popularizers of science is the arrogance of expertise. So not only I'm an expert, I will tell you what this thing is, but also how dare you speak about a subject that you are not an expert on. You know, both of these arguments, which are completely irrelevant, because a kid should be able to figure out something that an adult doesn't. And Albert Einstein was not at all within the expertise of the, you know, the people who dominated physics when he was just 25 and came up with his ideas. It's not about authority, it's not about arrogance of expertise. It's about the humility to learn something new.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  And as much as this sounds simple, it's really not understood in academia and beyond. And that is the underlying theme. Now, where did I mention this? There was a special celebration of 51 watercolors and two sculptures of Galileo Galilei. The watercolors are of distinguished scientists, and what they said. All of this work of art was produced by Greg Wyatt, a very famous, he's called the

• 8:18Speaker 03

  America's Rodin, okay, so he's that accomplished. There is the famous sculpture of the Scholar's Lion at Columbia University's campus, if anyone visited and they could see it. He is extremely accomplished. He decided to donate those works of art to my office. And now I basically removed all the file cabinets that I used to have. I said, I'm not defined by the past. You know, I have, I had piles of paper that accumulated during the nine years that I served as department chair of the astronomy department at Harvard. And I just got rid of all, all of it, including the file cabinets themselves, and emptied my office in order to accept this amazing gift.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  And I still don't fully understand why he was so generous because it's basically, you know, things that he created just once, all these watercolors, and he gave it to me. So it's like, he doesn't have it anymore. It's in my office. And, you know, it, it offers me an opportunity to fundraise by charging admissions to this mini museum that I have, but I will not do that. And we just had a gathering for about an hour and a half, during which he explained how, what is the creative process for him. And moreover, we had some music, original music, composed by David E. Bett, who was inspired by the latest images of Three-Eye Atlas.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  He created a symphony related to Three-Eye Atlas, also related to Omu Omu. So it was a celebration of arts and sciences, the interface between them. And my point is that creativity, both in the arts and sciences, you know, it has similarities. Basically, you have to have an appreciation for things you don't know, for the unknown, and then have the humility to, to learn about it through your mind, a creative mind, rather than be completely wedded to past knowledge, to, to things we already know. You know, when you try to pioneer something new, you have to be

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Be creative and you have to be humble in a fundamental way. Absolutely. And so that was the unifying theme and I really enjoyed that. And there were a hundred people gathered and all of them said that it was wonderful. We don't have those events very often. And so that that happened yesterday and it's a testimony that science could be inspiring to artists. There is actually a manager of a singer, Ollie Swan, in the UK that is releasing a new single called Alien Surreal. And his manager approached me and asked me for a blurb that will accompany the release of this song. So it should come out, you know, this month.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  The other thing I wanted to say is that Greg gave me another gift, which I did not expect at all. And maybe the biggest one, he gave me the foundation and the sculpting tools plus plastilina to create a new bronze sculpture. So I now have the ability to design a new sculpture that later would be made of bronze. So it starts with plastilina and you create the structure and then it turns into bronze. And so I decided to call this, you know, piece of art, I haven't created it yet, the alien.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  So I would try to create what I conceive in my mind as an alien being, not necessarily based on science fiction movies, either based on my imagination or if we ever meet them in the near future, I will obviously try to depict that. Just the way that Galileo Galilei drew the moon, which was a piece of art. You know, his drawings of the moon, which were actually watercolors, is a piece of art. And at the same time, it was at the frontier of science. So if we ever find an alien, I will try to make a 3D model of it in my hands. But otherwise, it will be my imagination and then it will turn into bronze. So I will work on that as soon as I finish teaching after the first.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Week of December and and that's an amazing new new hobby that for me at least.

• 12:43Brian Keating?

  That's great. Yeah, I looked at that. Of course, uh, uh, the famous sketches of the moons of Jupiter, which are not very artistic by Galileo. It's just like, you know, basically circles and little dots. But those, you know, five little icons changed the course of science and humanity forever.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Right, that that's the moons of Jupiter, but he also did of the moon, our moon.

• 13:06Brian Keating?

  No, sure, yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Six, six, six sketches of our moon, which were the first, uh, you know, res- result.

• 13:13Brian Keating?

  Right, through a telescope. That's right. And Edward Tuft, Tufty, I think you pronounce his name. He's a well-known kind of expositor, like meta-scientific things. And he called Galileo the father of data science because those images don't only convey the scientific description, but they're also interlaced with the humanity of Galileo, that he was a man. And when he drew the crater, I think it's Copernicus on the southern, on the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, he drew it. It's like five times bigger than it is in reality, but that was intentional. Galileo was a great artist. His father was a musician, as you know, too. And Galileo sketched it, but he sketched it because that's the way it made him feel. In other words, he had the impression that this crater is so magnificent.

• 13:58Brian Keating?

  He wanted to convey that to the viewer that couldn't see it through his telescope. He guarded his telescopes very, very carefully, jealously almost. So he was really the first person to marry, not only to view things telescopically in the heavens, but but also to explain what it felt like to be a scientist. And that's part of our discussion today. How does it feel as a human being to go through what you've been going through almost single-handedly, although not entirely single-handedly, but but driving and setting the pace for not only other scientists, but the public and even members of Congress. So let's, let's take a little look through what we've learned since in the last two or three weeks, since Atlas made its perihelion approach. Where is Atlas now?

• 14:41Brian Keating?

  What have we learned about it? And has it gotten more anomalous, Avi, or less anomalous?

• 14:47Speaker 00

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• 15:16Speaker 03

  Well, that's excellent. An excellent introduction to the subject. So on October 29, three Atlas passed closest to the sun. A week earlier, it was in conjunction relative, solar conjunction relative to Earth, meaning exactly in the opposite side of the sun, almost in the same plane, orbital plane as the Earth. It crossed the ecliptic plane, which is the plane, the orbital plane of the Earth. Around the sun, it crossed it when it came close to Mars on October 3rd. That's when it got exactly into the ecliptic, which is again, I mean, all of these are amazing coincidences. So when it came closest to the sun, about 26 days later, on October 29,

• 16:01Speaker 03

  it was almost behind the sun. Okay, within a few degrees. And so, of course, telescopes from Earth could not look at it because they need at least 30 degrees separation in order to not to be blinded by the sun. And it was too close to the sun, so we couldn't see what happens to it. There were a few observatories that are away from Earth, looking towards the sun. And one of them is Soho, another one Stereo and Goze 19. These three took images and realized that, I mean, from these images, the scientists realized that it became bluer than the sun and actually much brighter by about an order of magnitude

• 16:46Speaker 03

  relative to what it was, you know, before October this year. And so it wasn't still yet clear whether it broke up. Into pieces or not because it was warmed up by seven hundred watts per square meter. That's enough to definitely disrupt an icy object made of especially carbon dioxide. The which was the main constituent found by the Webb telescope on August eighth, twenty twenty five. So so at any event, we didn't know much what what happened to it. And then as soon as it started being separated from the sun.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  There were observatories on earth that started revealing the status of three I Atlas. And the one thing that was revealed is that it has more than seven jets coming out of it. Tightly collimated jets, which is amazing. You see those jets coming out in all directions, including the direction of the sun and away from the sun. And these jets go out to a distance of a million kilometers in the direction of the sun and three million kilometers away from the sun. And then I did a simple calculation. You know, given the fact that the jets going towards the sun have to penetrate through the solar wind.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  You know, they have to be denser than the solar wind because we know that the solar wind moves at the four hundred kilometers per second or so. And we know that sublimated ices on the surface of a rock. You know, like if we imagine it being a natural comet, they would acquire at most the the the the speed of sound or the thermal speed of the particles that get evaporated from the surface. And that's only four hundred meters per second. In under best circumstances, it could be much slower than that. So if you take four hundred meters per second compared to four hundred kilometers per second,

• 18:55Speaker 03

  you realize the factor of a thousand that more for the speed of the solar wind relative to the jets. According for a natural comet, that means that the jet in the direction The sun needs to be a million times denser. Because what matters for the ram pressure is the mass density times the velocity squared. Okay, so the velocity ratio is a thousand, velocity squared is a million. So the density of the mass density of the jets needs to be a million times more in order to go out that far. And then I can calculate how much mass is, you know, being ejected by these jets.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  And I find that, you know, over an area of order a million kilometers squared, you need about five billion tons of material. And that's huge. And then I ask, okay, if it's five billion tons, you know, in order to evaporate these ices, you need some energy, the sublimation energy. So there needs to be a large enough area collecting sunlight such that you would get that much mass evaporated. So I calculated how much energy is needed. Turns out that during the passage of Three Eye Atlas, which took about a month, near Paris Center, that's where most of the heating took place.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  During that time of a month, the area has to be bigger than 20 kilometers on a side. Meaning that's for CO2 ice, carbon dioxide. If you consider water, the size of the region that absorbs sunlight needs to be 50 kilometers on a side. That's huge. It's much bigger than the estimated size of Three Eye Atlas. It's untenable because from the Hubble Space Telescope image, the conclusion was that it's much smaller than that. So what could be the resolution? Well, maybe it's not a single body anymore. It broke up into a lot of fragments. And that's why the surface area, when you sum up all these fragments, the surface area is bigger than the original object.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  That's one way to resolve it. So I said, Did it break up? And then a day later, there was a new image that was obtained from the Nordic Optical Telescope by Dave Jewitt and Jane Lu. Very good work that both of them did. And the conclusion of that image that they obtained is from a 2.6 meter aperture telescope is that it's single. Three Eye Atlas is still single. It's a single object. They see only light coming from a single object. There is no evidence for breakup.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Of course, maybe the pieces are still relatively close and they would get separated by the gravitational tide of the sun. That's possible in the coming weeks. But as of now, it looks as if it's a single body.

• 21:51Brian Keating?

  But I just want to interrupt Avi for one second because that was one of the criteria that you stated would cause you to reevaluate a hypothesis that this was a comet. But I want to point this out. This is what people do that are good scientists. People that are bad scientists, that are cherry picking, that are prone to confirmation bias will come to a conclusion before the object has collected, we've collected any data on it and preestablish a condition based on the scientist that's reporting it. In other words, ad hominem and personalize the scientific, where it should be scientific only. And this is a classic example of that. You didn't say, well, if, because Brian Cox is not an astronomer and knows nothing about

• 22:32Brian Keating?

  planetary science, when he called it a comet, you know, three weeks before Perihelion confidently saying it's nothing more than a comet, before we had the evidence, he didn't make a false viability claim. He didn't say, well, if it actually doesn't break up, that would, that would mean it, maybe it's not a comet, maybe it's an asteroid or, but he didn't say any of that. He just said, it's a comet. Then the data came in and now he's, you know, taking a victory lap. We're going to get to him and Jason Wright and other people.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  I don't, I should say that among the emails I received were many Brits, maybe many people from the UK who apologized to me on behalf of the UK people for the behavior of Brian Cox. That's amazing. You know, I'd be happy to share the emails with you. But and those are distinguished people, by the way, people, thinking people that are saying his standpoint is not scientific. And he claims to represent science, and this is really unfortunate, you know, he's embarrassing us. That's what they say about Brian Cox. Anyway, coming back to this issue, I definitely say that if the object breaks up, or if a large fraction of the mass of the object gets sublimated,

• 23:41Speaker 03

  then there is no doubt that it's a natural object, because we will be able not only to infer that,

• 23:47Speaker 03

  you know, it broke up and it was not strong and so forth, but also the composition of the object, you will see carbon dioxide. You know, obviously, it's not a spacecraft. So that was my point. Now, with respect to the jets, there are two possibilities. Either these are pockets of ice that were evaporated by sunlight, or, you know, maybe these are thrusters. And I'm now saying it's very easy to tell the difference, because when you have sublimation of ice, you get a speed that is at most the thermal speed or the sound speed of the molecules in that gas that comes out of the ice. And that is 400 meters per second. So if we now measure with spectroscopy,

• 24:28Speaker 03

  with using telescopes on the ground, or the web telescope, or the habit test, we measure the speed of the jets. If it turns out to be just 400 meters per second or less, then it's definitely a signature that we are dealing with a natural comet. If, on the other hand, we get much larger speeds, then that's what you can get from a thruster, because a rocket has a characteristic exhaust speed of a few kilometers per second. That's what we use. Or an ion thruster of a spacecraft has several tenths of kilometers per second. And this is our technology. And of course, if you imagine alien technology being much more advanced,

• 25:09Speaker 03

  you might find even higher speeds. And when you make the speed higher, you might, you need much less mass to, mass density to be in the jets, because they can penetrate the solar wind as a result of the high. High speed, not as a result of the high mass flux. And so my point is, if it's artificial, you don't need as much mass as in the case of a natural comet. And then everything, you know, the fuel will make up a very small fraction of the total mass. However, in the case of a comet, I get numbers that are not compatible unless unless it broke up. And that's the reason we see so much mass in those jets. And we should see, I mean, so my point is, in the coming weeks, we'll get even better data.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Because so far, most of the data that I described was obtained by amateurs. But I'm sure that there are telescopes looking at it right now. And eventually, in early December, we'll have the Webb Telescope, the Hubble Telescope, looking at it. In a few days, my hope is next week, we will get the high-rise images obtained on October 3rd by the high-rise camera on on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images were held hostage for forty-five days by bureaucracy within NASA. Since there was the government shutdown, the claim is they were not allowed to release those images. They were allowed to release any images that this camera took of Mars, because they didn't need processing.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  However, the images of 3D Atlas required some work, and as a result, couldn't be released as a result of the shutdown. If that's the case, we should get them out within a few days. That's what I hear should happen. And we'll see if they reveal anything. They should have pixel resolution of about thirty kilometers. So that would be very nice. The other thing I should say is, the Nordic Optical Telescope images show an anti-tail all over again. So we see a single object with an extension that is much more prominent towards the sun, towards the sun.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Not like comets where you see the the cometary tail extending away from the sun because of radiation pressure from the sun or the solar wind sweeping up small dust particles or the gas. And in this case, you see mostly an Alonggation towards the sun, there is a slight elongation in the opposite direction. Keep in mind, the object passed close to the sun just two weeks ago. That was the point where the solar radiation and the solar wind peaked in terms of the impact they have on any dust particles or gas particles. So you should have seen the cometary tail in its full glory. The way if this was a comet of the type that we're familiar with.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  No, it still shows this anti-tail after passing close to the sun. What is going on? And the point is, whenever, you know, people say it must be a comet. Okay, well, explain to me, what is the physics behind those jets? How can they carry so much mass flux? How do you get these jets pointed towards the sun? Rather than away from the sun, if there is the standard, if they are typical cometary.

• 28:26Brian Keating?

  But even if it is a comet, this is the thing that irritates me about the criticisms from people like Jason Wright and Brian Cox and Michio Kaku and others. You have not said that this is definitively not an object from our, you know, an ordinary object, a comet or asteroid or some interest in our object. But you've said the opposite, you said, if it turns out to be that you are wrong, that it is, you know, completely natural origin, not, you know, made by some intelligence. And that was the null hypothesis, that should be the null hypothesis, that you'd be delighted because of how much information we learn about this.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 29:03Brian Keating?

  I don't think you could have anticipated back in March, when you and I first started talking about this object, or a little bit after that, maybe.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  July, yeah.

• 29:09Brian Keating?

  That the public would be so enthralled by this object. And I think it's, there's this, there's this effect that people wanna shoot the messenger. I mean, that was the famous, you know, tie into Galileo as well. They wanna shoot the messenger, then they wanna say, oh, everything that you said is wrong from the beginning without data. Then they wanna say that if it turns out that you're right, it's despite your efforts, you know, to be right. And if they turn out to be right, quote unquote, that their null hypothesis, which is that it's a comet, which is fine. They'll be ecstatic. It's very bizarre, right?

• 29:40Speaker 03

  First, I should say. Just today, a paper that I wrote about the Ante tail, trying to explain the physics of it. And this is the first one out of two papers. It was peer reviewed and was accepted for publication in monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I'm publishing papers trying to explain these anomalies in a natural way. You know, I'm doing my best to try and figure this out. But the people who are attacking the way you describe it, they are not publishing any scientific papers about it. Now, one paper that they wrote, actually, and Jason Wright was on it, was to basically say, "We must contemplate the possibility of technological objects

• 30:24Speaker 03

  among the interstellar objects that enter the solar system." So in other words, they basically reiterate my point while attacking me at the same time for considering that possibility. Which you might ask, "Why is that?" And well, they don't want me to get the public attention. That's one thing, out of jealousy, probably. And at the same time, they want to be, to claim that the argument is theirs by writing a paper about it. And so you see the hypocrisy here. If you're really enthusiastic about looking for technological artifacts, then you should ask the question whether each and every interstellar object might have some anomalies that would be significant. And if you think it's not, then write a paper explaining it.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Don't attack the person who talks. It's not about me, by the way, just to explain. It's about 3I Atlas. That's the focus of the discussion. And indeed, it's an amazing opportunity to learn about objects that we don't see in the solar system that are different. And you know, the fundamental question of "Why is it in the plane of the planets?" You know, there is no way to explain it because the plane of the Milky Way is at 60 degrees away from that. There is no natural reason for the third object to be one out of 500 in probability of being aligned with the planets. And so that was one of the main reasons I said, "Look, this is peculiar. Therefore, we should consider the interpretation of a technological designer."

• 31:54Speaker 03

  The second one is, of course, the size of the object. If it's as big as I'm just mentioning, you know, 10 kilometers or even bigger. It's just, you know, it's a million times more than umuamua in terms of mass. And how can you claim both of them are rocks? Like, why would we have the third object be a million times more massive than the first object? You would expect a million small objects before you see one big one. You know, that's just the statistics of having many more small objects, given the limited mass reservoir of rocky material or whatever ises you want to put on top of it. So there might be factories that make a carbon dioxide ice, icebergs that are different than what people think.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Fine, they make big packages like three, then you have to explain why is it coming in the plane of, of the planets, maybe by chance, but it's a small probability. And then why is it packaged in such a big thing? And I calculate that there isn't enough rocky material in interstellar space per unit volume to deliver such a package within one decade. You would expect it once per 10,000 years. Nobody among those critics addressed this important issue of how do you explain the mass budget of delivering such a giant object to our backyard within a decade out of the materials that you might expect in interstellar space? And I'm saying we're missing something, okay? So you can argue with me about what we are missing.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Maybe we're missing a factory, a natural factory that will do that. Maybe we're missing something to do with how the object arrived. Uh, and it might be a natural process. I, I don't know, but I'm just saying, you know, it's, it's a paradox, it's enigmatic. And, and just claiming that it's all understood is, is really inappropriate. It's just like those adults in the room who told the kid that, you know, the emperor has clothes, you just can't see them.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  We cannot hear you, Brian.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Just lost.

• 34:26Brian Keating?

  Oh yeah, uh, can you hear me now?

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:28Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so I wanna go through the, uh, the very strange, you know, piece that, that Jason Wright put on his, on his website, cuz it's got a lot of attention and, and there was a lot of, uh...

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Not from me, by the way.

• 34:42Brian Keating?

  What's that?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Not from me.

• 34:44Brian Keating?

  No, I know. Uh, you, you kinda just go on and do your work, but people like Mick West, the famous Mick West, who I've had on my show, and he, he does a good job at certain things.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Uh, but he's not a scientist.

• 34:55Brian Keating?

  No, I know he's not. He's a video game designer. He, he does a lot of things with, you know, kind of, uh, the, the perspectives and optics and, and flares, and so he has done good work, uh, as it turns out. But, but here, I point out that he was merely one of the many people who kind of joined in this gleeful, you know, dance upon the icy grave of, of Atlas, which I think is quite bizarre, but, but the most prominent of the critics, who also isn't an astronomer, a scientist, I'm not exactly sure what he does. I know he's a professor in Manchester, but that's, uh...

• 35:31Speaker 03

  And by the way, one of the people who apologized for his comments, we're talking about Brian Cox, is, uh, you know, a, a, a, a journalist from Manchester who's helping Manchester United, apparently, and, uh, he apologized on behalf of Manchester City for Brian Cox.

• 35:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah, well, I don't wanna get into the, uh, politics of Manchester, you know, city or, uh, anything to do with that.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Because presumably, I, I mentioned that there are two types of people when you deal with soccer, and of course, Manchester United is famous for its soccer team. Uh, there are the players on the field, and there are the commentators, okay? And the commentators have an easy job. They can just express their opinion. The problem is that only the players can score a goal, okay? And I'm a player in the field. I'm writing scientific paper every week. Uh, in fact, just now, there was a paper accepted after peer review to Nature magazine where, uh, with a visiting student and, uh, and, uh, my former...

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Our postdoc, we were able to show that a passing star might have triggered a meteor shower

• 36:40Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  On Earth, 2.45 million years ago. And you can check my essay from today on Medium about it. So at any event, I'm, you know, just today, I had one paper accepted for monthly notices, another one for Nature. So I'm really in the trenches doing the science. And then you have someone like Brian Cox that haven't written any paper on triatlas, not to speak about other subjects, I think, in recent years.

• 37:05Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  And he makes statements as if he's protecting science. Now, how can he protect science when I'm the one practicing it?

• 37:14Brian Keating?

  All right. So here's a statement that he has made on, that you sent to me, or I found out from the Times of London. Lobes detractors include Professor Brian Cox, the stargazing physicist. I don't know if that's actually true. He might be a star, but, and BBC presenter. That's definitely true. Cox says that although the comet is remarkable, not least for having survived seven and a half billion years, therefore being a relic of the time before Earth's existence, Lobes' theory is a little more than drivel. By the way, what is Lobes' theory? Let's get into that in a second. Lobes, meanwhile, says Cox is a commentator who no longer practices science that has made a profession talking about what other people are doing. So he posted Jason Wright's thing, but before that, as I mentioned, he did say that this was a comet. He said this.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Um.

• 38:01Brian Keating?

  Comet is a comet. He kept saying it was a comet. And as if, you know, that kind of wish cast.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Um, we lost your sound, um, for some reason?

• 38:18Brian Keating?

  So, uh, so he posted a, uh, you know, kind of a claim, oh, I'm looking for a teapot around Mars. Basically, just kind of putting this in the same category as that. Uh, but the foundation layer for Brian, let's not talk about Brian anymore, but, um, uh, because there's only one Brian that matters around here, and that's Brian, Brian Greene, Brian Greene. Uh, my kid's favorite physicist named Brian. Uh, but, uh, the, the claims rest upon Jason Wright, who is a professor at Penn State University.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Is a SETI advocate.

• 38:50Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  And I should tell you, um, he is the one that initiated the ban. He chaired a committee that banned any discussion on.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs, or any possibly technological objects not manufactured by humans, you know, that the US government is talking about. He banned any discussion about that in SETI conferences. Okay, so he is a SETI advocate, but a UAP zealot, basically trying to ban discussion. And he feels the privilege of bullying other scientists who might follow the scientific method in figuring out what UAPs are. Now, why do I say it's completely inappropriate? Because there are two possibilities. Either UAPs are human-made objects. Okay, in which case it's a serious national security issue,

• 39:46Speaker 03

  because the intelligence agencies, serious people, you know, that they have a huge budget, they find objects they cannot explain, meaning they're not doing their job, even though we put a trillion dollars towards the defense budget of 2026. There are objects in the sky that we don't fully understand. And so they're saying, they call it UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena. And I say that's a major, a major concern that they're not doing their job, okay? That it's a... So as a scientist who cares about the United States, you should feel an obligation to figure out what these objects are and help the Pentagon in its mission to protect the nation. That's a civil obligation.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  That's one possibility of interpreting these objects. A second possibility is they are extraterrestrial in origin. Okay, so in that case, obviously, a scientist should do it. So I'm saying it's a win-win situation. There is no reason to ridicule the discussion of UAPs and ban, in particular, ban any discussion about them in conferences. But that's what Jason Wright is doing. He's banning a discussion on a subject that could be either national security important or crucial or a major way of discovering some evidence for extraterrestrials in our neighborhood. So I'm saying either way...

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Either way, he just doesn't have his mindset right. And as much as, you know, he calls himself Astro Right, I would call him Astro Bully. Why? Because he's using his role as a SETI advocate to bully anyone that discusses the possible artifacts of extraterrestrial civilizations near Earth. And there is no room for bullying. I don't want to mud wrestle with him or people like him because mud wrestling gets you dirty.

• 41:53Brian Keating?

  And all these people, Avi, all these people, I'm reading one from this guy Hector Sokas Navarro, who I guess is an astronomer in Europe. And he calls it how the fallacies behind the cult of Avi Loeb. Have you seen this article?

• 42:09Speaker 03

  There is no cult. There is no cult.

• 42:11Brian Keating?

  There's a cult, I guess. Yeah. A group of people characterized by great devotion to a person idea. Or do you think that's what's caused it, Avi? You're so powerful and charismatic. People find you cult-like?

• 42:22Speaker 03

  No, in fact, I have no footprint on social media. I don't use my essays for any financial benefit.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  You know, I just, I jog every morning at sunrise. I come up, you know, I read all the data, for example, in the context of 3A Atlas, and I make my interpretation of it. There is nothing wrong about it. You can argue with my interpretation and say why you think it should be different. I lead the Galileo Project, which is building observatories to look at UAPs instead of ridiculing the study of UAPs and banning discussions on them in conference. Instead of that, I'm saying, let's put some scientific, you know, scrutiny or scientific rigor into the study of UAPs. What's wrong with that? Why is that considered a cult? And why are the bullies not actually a cult

• 43:14Speaker 03

  where they come together and attack? You know, it's very similar to the impression you get when you go to a kindergarten where a child that looks different than the rest of the children in the kindergarten. Is very often bullied, pushed to a corner by a group of kids who are, who just feel empowered that this kid is, is different. So I'm different than they are. Is that a good enough reason to bully? I don't think so. And by the way, I don't like to think of myself as a victim. Because, you know, I just do what I think is right, what is the common sense to do. And I get a lot of support from Congress. By the way, I have people in Congress that I'm in regular contact with.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Serious people, also, you know, within other branches of government. You know, these people are reasonable and serious and they care about what matters. And they are discussing with me the kind of work I'm doing, the research I'm doing. While then you see all these other commentators or bloggers having a problem about it. Many of them are not practicing science. Many of them are jealous of the attention that I get. You know, why should I be blamed for the fact that I'm trying to express what sounds to me like common sense? And then it track, it gets some traction in the public. It's not as if I'm, you know, doing any sin. I'm just expressing myself and the public likes it. And by the way, it would be good for science for two reasons.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  One, if the public appreciates science and evidence-based science rather than paradigm-based science, rather than the arrogance of expertise, if they understand science is a detective story, where you can figure out the truth by collecting evidence. It's all for the benefit of science because it's not, it will not be regarded as the occupation of the elite. What those people want is for us to continue to discuss the, the possible investment of $10 billion towards the search for microbes. Because that's what they think should be done. $10 billion to put as high priority to search for microbes. Zero federal funding for the search for intelligence. You know, and I say that, you know, that, that is not common sense.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Common sense says, let's hedge our bets and because the signatures of technological civilizations might, might be easier to detect, let's invest in both of them. That's what I'm arguing for. To me, it sounds like common sense for people who want their way without thinking about it. Uh, you know, it, it's a threat and, and so. So I don't fully understand it. And the other thing to keep in mind, these people are obviously, they would argue that we should have diversity of opinion, diversity in academia. They have a problem with someone who thinks differently.

• 45:59Brian Keating?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think, again, here's here are his motivations. Jason Wright spells this out. And Brian Cox says that his motivation is that he was really upset when people thought that the LHC turning on would create a black hole, you know, and so he that caused people to panic and, you know, and do all sorts of things he claims. And, you know, I believe that he's saying something accurate. I don't think that he extends to you the same credit and.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  By the way, by the way, the the chance of the LHC producing a black hole is, you know, diminishingly small because you can just do the, you know, quantum gravity calculation. And you would realize that the energies of the LHC, even if you go to 10TV, there is no way that you would excite modes of that are excitable at the Planck scale and create black holes. That, you know, if you just do a simple calculation, the chance for that is practically zero. And in fact, there are cosmic rays with center of mass energies far beyond the LHC. And when they collide with particles in the atmosphere, we have never seen any catastrophe. So if a 10TV center of mass energy, you would get a black hole.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Many black holes would have been generated by cosmic rays impinging on our atmosphere. And, you know, we haven't witnessed any catastrophe from that. So there are many arguments why this suggestion that there might be a danger from the LHC makes no sense whatsoever. But it's not at all, you know, related to dealing with an interstellar object that has anomalies. This is very different.

• 47:31Brian Keating?

  Well, he's claiming that, you know, he was deeply hurt by this effect back in a couple of in a couple of instances.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  So he should he should consult his therapist about that. I mean, this is not that you shouldn't apply your bruises from past experiences to something completely different.

• 47:48Brian Keating?

  Right, exactly. So I think of it as this, you know, kind of, you know, Hurt Syndrome, where the victim, you know, is blaming and trying to shame you specifically. Okay, so let's go through his claims, Avi. Jason writes, not Brian Cox, but let's go through his claims and then let us reveal, from, you know, your perspective, what are the actual explanations for this? Now, first of all, I feel like this is in bad faith from the get-go. Let me put on screen, if I can here, so we can both be... I don't know why I cannot show the size of the screen here. I'm gonna put you on screen. Okay, I'm gonna read just the first one. Let me go back to my camera view. There we go.

• 48:29Brian Keating?

  So, the very first thing that he says, and he starts off, which I think is dishonest, he says, "Lobe's Three-I-Atlas Quote Anomaly in Scare Quotes Explained." So he's gonna explain, Avi, he knows, and he's gonna explain for all the rubes out there, why we shouldn't trust Avi Loeb. And then, he begins by saying that these are not, you know, he puts anomalies in quotes, which is very unusual for a scientist to do that, because it implies that it's not an anomaly. And then he goes through the different anomalies that actually make this thing...

• 49:03Speaker 03

  By the way, on many of them, he agrees that they are anomalies. That's the other thing.

• 49:06Brian Keating?

  Exactly, we're gonna get to that. I have that up on the screen.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Yup, yup, yup. In several cases, he says yup. So how can he put quotes on something that is yup?

• 49:13Brian Keating?

  Exactly. So the first thing he says is that Avi Loeb, he impugns her character, he does an an homonym attack. He says, "Avi Loeb continues to contain, has many anomalous features, it might be alien spacecraft. He carefully hedges the probability that it's a spacecraft around 40%, which I don't remember you ever saying to me, but maybe you said it elsewhere, which gives him plausible deniability of the bad faith, just asking questions variety, while still making the comment sound weird enough that lots of people are thinking where it is an alien spacecraft." It certainly gets Avi a lot of TV time and fan mail. Okay, so, that's an an homonym attack, that you're doing this specifically and uniquely for benefit, either attention or grifting and so forth. Then he says, "It's obviously a comet." Now, by the way, this is written last week, right? Or...

• 49:57Brian Keating?

  Earlier this week, and what's so unusual about it, he said the exact same thing in July. All these things were said in July. Now, now, maybe he's right, but but here we go. Lob is repeatedly speculated, but look, it has a tail and a coma and a coma, just like a comet. They have been, they have the gases that we expect to see from a comet. It's brightening and evolving as it warms up like comets do. If Avi had not claimed it could be an alien spacecraft, no one would be talking about it as anything but a comet. Do you think that's true?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, I'm just addressing the anomalies and I don't, I don't, you know, you could have imagined that I didn't exist and asked if anyone would pay. But the fact that I raise attention to the anomalies is not a crime, you know? Why is that a negative?

• 51:12Brian Keating?

  So he says, lots of comet, comets are anomalous, quote unquote anomalous. So he's writing it as if anomalies are common, which is the exact opposite of what an anomaly means.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  An oxymoron, of the same type as the oxymoron that, uh, Oumuamua was a dark comet. By the way, a dark comet is a comet that doesn't show the, the signature of a comet. It has non-gravitation acceleration, but without a cometary evaporation. So a visible cometary. So, you know, they use oxymorons. They say something is a dark comet and a spacecraft would be a dark comet, by the way. So, you know, it's really not intellectually honest, but when you use an oxymoron. Yeah.

• 51:54Brian Keating?

  So, but, but it kind of undermines his credibility, saying that anomalous things are anomalous, but this is not anomalous because it is anomalous. It's a very circular reasoning, okay? So he goes and says that many, now he, then his third thing about the comet now, he's supposed to be talking about the comet, Avi, and he says, lots of comets are anomalous. And then he says, consider the messenger, consider the track record of the messenger. The second thing you need to understand about Loeb is he has no training in planetary science. What does that mean? He didn't go to Penn State? You didn't go to Penn State, right, Avi? So I guess you're not capable.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  I've written more than a thousand scientific papers, nine books, okay? And I have a career that spans, you know, I've been at Harvard 32 years and altogether, a career that spans about 40 years in physics. Half of the modern history of physics I witnessed. You know, and for him to say, "You need a training, a very specific discipline, to say anything about this subject," is ridiculous. Look at Richard Feynman. You know, he went to the committee that examined the challenger when he was no engineer, okay? He was no, not, he didn't have any of the, he was just a physicist that knew the basic laws of physics. And he figured it out with the O-ring. So what's the point here?

• 53:12Speaker 03

  That you need to be an engineer to figure out the O-ring? There were lots of engineers that, within NASA at the time, and only Richard Feynman figured out what really happened.

• 53:20Brian Keating?

  And just like he says, he uses anomalies and admits that it's anomalous. He says, "I am not." He, Jason Wright, is also not a planetary scientist. So, okay.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  By the way, that comes back, like, let me repeat this sentence, that "The foundation of science is the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise." And what I mean by arrogance of expertise is exactly what Jason is highlighting, the arrogance of expertise. Only the experts.

• 53:49Brian Keating?

  He says that I'm not aware of Avi ever admitting he got something wrong with respect to 3I Atlas and retracting a claim. That's very bizarre, Jason, because this is not, we only have gotten data, and some of the data has not yet come in from HiRise, etc. So what is there to retract exactly? You did, you did, you did describe how you can have an anti-tail. You described how it can be an optical illusion, which I'm sure he must know. And then you described that this is not an optical illusion. So that's, that is strange. And then he says, "We expect 3I Atlas to be anomalous. This is only the third interstellar object we've seen." And by the way, two of those, you, so let's say Avi was a UFO grifter, okay? I'm not, I'm not saying God

• 54:32Brian Keating?

  Forbid has for shalom. I'm not saying this is this is true. Let's say you were, Avi. You know what would have been great? You know what have been great in a low information environment? If you said Borisov is also a interstellar piece of technological kit. Did you say that, Avi? I don't remember saying that.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Ever, ever.

• 54:48Brian Keating?

  But that would have been the best time for you to say that. In fact, I pressed you.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Also, with respect to Three I Atlas, I'm saying there are tests that we will do in the coming weeks that will definitely show us the nature.

• 54:58Brian Keating?

  And he wants you to retract now, though. But Avi, you must retract right now. You must admit that you're wrong right now before the data has come in fully from high rise from other things. And and and we should just move on and never listen to you again, I assume.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Well, move on and ban any discussion on UAPs in conferences, right?

• 55:15Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Yes. And that is the intellectual integrity of modern science, right?

• 55:20Brian Keating?

  Well, he says that you have no integrity in some sense. He's saying that you're doing this all by yourself. Avi, have you written a single paper on Three I Atlas by yourself as a lone soul author?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  One, but but I wrote altogether 12 papers. And all other 11 of them were with collaborate co-authors. And many of them were just accepted for publication after peer review. And gladly, Jason Wright was not one of the reviewers.

• 55:46Brian Keating?

  Exactly right. Okay, so consider the track record. So it's an ad hominem attack. Science is very forgiving. So he's consulted with experts like Stephen Dash. Mike, by the way, Avi, Avi, hold on one second. What does a planetary scientist, someone who studies Jupiter, someone like Konstantin Batygin or Mike Brown, both very good friends of mine? In fact, my episode with Mike Brown won the best science episode of the year at the Signal Awards last year. Thank you, everybody. And a reminder, you can get a meteorite if you're like me or Avi. Go to minekeen.com/yeedu. You'll win a meteorite for US educationally based institutions. But Avi, when when we talk about people, let's say like Konstantin Batygin or Mike Brown.

• 56:30Brian Keating?

  They're planetary scientists. They're arguably the top institution in the world.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  I can tell you Konstantin Batygin was a postdoc next door to my office.

• 56:39Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, and before he went to Caltech as an assistant professor. And we had a lot of discussions and a year and a half ago, we had a conference celebrating 20 years to the Institute for Theory and Computation, for which I serve as director still, since the time that he was there. And, um, and so he was completely focused on a talk that I gave about Oumuamua and came to me afterwards and said how impressed he was with my integrity in discussing the subject in an innovative way. Okay, that's Konstantin Batygin. He knows the bruises that he's suffering for talking about Planet Nine. And that is a simple variation on things we know already, but.

• 57:25Brian Keating?

  But my question is a little bit more nuanced than that, you know, to give myself credit. It's that Stephen Dash, for example, or any planet, or Konstantin Batygin, my friend, or Mike Brown, my friend. If they were asked about Three Eye Atlas, they check, they check, uh, Jason Wright's box of being planetary scientist, but they have no subject matter expertise with this because I, who does have expert? Who studied these things in graduate school, Avi? I mean, you teach them in graduate school. Nobody did because they, the first one was discovered as a muamua in 2017. So who could be like an expert in extrasolar interstellar? Now, people have made, you've written more about this. You predicted stuff like this before, uh, Three Eye Atlas, long before it was, long before many of the critics were born. Go ahead. Sorry.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  I wrote, I wrote the first paper that forecasted interstellar objects, how many of them we should find. There was a paper that I wrote with Ed Turner at Princeton, 2008.

• 58:21Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  And, uh, uh, and, um,

• 58:25Speaker 03

  You know, that was the first suggestion that interstellar objects may be found. And, you know, so I pioneered this, the idea that interstellar objects may be found. Then the first one was found by, you know, the Panstars telescope in Hawaii in 2017. So I wrote papers about that. I wrote papers about 3I Atlas. And I'm just trying to figure this out, you know, that I have no agenda whatsoever. You just have to understand my mindset because I worked in cosmology for three decades. And in cosmology, there are many things that are not understood. You know, we don't know what the nature of dark matter. We don't know what the initial conditions of the universe were, you know, at very early times. Trying to figure that out with the Simons. There is a lot that we don't know.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  And what you learn from that is, you know, that we should appreciate innovative ideas that can be tested experimentally. So cosmic inflation is one such idea. There are many others to do with the nature of dark matter. And I'm coming from that culture where it's celebrated to think in an outside the box. It's completely celebrated. Nobody bans a talk about a specific type of dark matter within a conference in cosmology. Then I get to this subject where everyone is convinced that whatever comes to the solar system from outside must be rocks. And they will ban talks about something else. They would prevent publication and they would ridicule in public whoever discusses something different than a rock.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  And I find that to be completely unacceptable in the context of an open discourse in science. It's really unfortunate because it suppresses innovation. It suppresses the ability for us to gain new knowledge in this context. And we know, by the way, I think of these experts as AI systems that are trained on a limited data set. So when you have an AI system and you train it just on comets, it will say that any object you see in the sky must be comets. That's the way they operate. And I'm saying something really simple to Jason Wright and all the others. I'm saying, add another class of objects to your training data sets.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  These are the objects that humanity launched to space. Their objects are spacecraft. Now imagine humanity in a million years. They might launch bigger spacecraft that go longer distances. Within a billion years, they will cross the Milky Way galaxy. Add that possibility to your training data set. If you take an AI system that is trained both on comets and on spacecraft, it will not have the difficulties that Jason Wright has in accepting the discussion on this second category. He is basically objecting to the discussion.

• 1:01:02Brian Keating?

  Okay, so I am, I'm looking up. So he says, oh, so he appeals to authority, which is to say that you should not trust somebody who doesn't have planetary science consultations, if not a degree in it. So I looked up his first call, the first person that he mentions, who is a frequent critic of you, again, for reasons that possibly may involve.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Well, for the same reasons that on whales, you find these small fish that feed off them, you know. So you always have, you know, if I get a lot of attention, my daughter told me, you will have haters around you because they are, they are getting to the limelight as a result of.

• 1:01:37Brian Keating?

  Right, but Stephen, Stephen, Stephen Dash is, you know, an eminent professor in the School of Earth and Space Sciences at, at, where is he? Arizona State University. I think it's a, it's a great institution. But let's look him up. Let's see what his, his expertise are. Maybe he has expertise in, in objects, in interstellar objects. Okay, well, no, actually, he's a professor of the school. His, he especially studies the origin of chondroles and meteorites. He works on the field of exoplanets and astrobiology. Do any of those have anything to do? Geochemical cycles on exoplanets to aid searches for signs of life on other planets? He has modeled icy bodies.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is a common denominator between him and, and Jason, and that is the attempt to gain visibility out of attacking me. That's basically it.

• 1:02:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so I'm just pointing out the fallacy of appealing to expertise. And of course, you can appeal to authority. That's not, it's not wrong just because of the fallacy. It just doesn't mean that they're right because they're experts. Okay, so here are some other things. We expect things to be anomalous. Okay, so I. Avi's list of 10 anomalies, going back to Jason Wright. It's retrograde trajectories aligned to within 5 degrees of the ecliptic. To paraphrase Einstein, your math, Avi, is fine, but your statistics are atrocious. The best takedowns are by Hector Socas Navarro, who I mentioned before, calls you a cult leader. Basically, if someone had predicted ahead of time what the properties of a spacecraft would be like, and matched them then, they'd be on to something. But Loeb chose specific aspects of the comet's orbit to compute probabilities of life, for after he knew what they were.

• 1:03:10Brian Keating?

  Is that the classic fallacy and misuse of probability theory that Jason claims it is?

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

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• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so here is the way my argument is based on statistics. So, together with my student, we simulated a whole population of trajectory, like Monte Carlo simulation. You imagine that objects are ejected from planetary systems around stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and you follow all their trajectories. And you find at what angle are those objects coming into the solar system? And you find that 1 in 500 would come so close to the ecliptic plane. And so I say, okay, if we had hundreds of objects, one of them would be so close to the ecliptic plane. But we had only 3, okay?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  So there is a factor of 100 difference between the statistics that you expect. There is nothing wrong with this statistics. Basically says the chance of seeing what we are seeing is less than a percent, okay? Just the orbit, just the trajectory. On top of that, the mass of this object is a million times bigger than the other objects that we have seen. Again, I say, I argue that the probability for that is less than one in a thousand. So just these two anomalies combined, say it's a chance of one in a hundred thousand or something of finding such an object. So isn't that strange? I mean, not getting into the other anomalies at all. That's, you know, by itself.

• 1:05:11Brian Keating?

  So here's the next one. This is the next one. He says during July and August, it deplayed a sunward antitail. That is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective. And then, then, then Jason says, it's true that not many comets do this, but it's hardly unique. He also falsely, so it's an anomaly that's not an anomaly, but it's an anomalous non-anomaly. He also thought, it was hard to say, by the way, but he false, you falsely claim that he's the first to explain why this may happen when this was understood for 50 years. Did you explain, you're the first that it would happen in general or specifically for three I atlas?

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  No, we, we built a model for three I atlas, and that's the paper that was accepted for publication after peer review today. And I, just to explain, I wrote a scientific paper trying to explain the physics of a phenomenon observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Okay. Jason didn't write a single paper on, on, on this subject. So he criticizes me for trying to explain this. I mean, this is, once again, I mean, I, I cannot follow exactly the logic.

• 1:06:14Brian Keating?

  The nucleus is a million times more massive than a Muammar Burisov while moving faster than both. Altogether, the likelihood less than 0.1%. He says, this is completely incorrect. You made a math mistake, which I've known you for 20.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Well, the paper was published, you know, it was reviewed by the editor, was published with these numbers. There was a follow up paper by Daryl Seligman, making exactly the same point. So I can, I can give you the.

• 1:06:40Brian Keating?

  Agreeing with you, agreeing, not with Jason.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Agreeing with me, yeah, the same point that there is a problem with the mass budget. Unless the object is very small. If the object is less than a kilometer in size, everything is fine. I'm talking about an object of all the 10 kilometers. Okay. In diameter, that's, that's the, where the discrepancy arises. If the object, and I said in my paper that I published on. The subject, if the object is less than a kilometer, then of course, everything is okay, but the difference between one kilometer and 10 kilometers is a thousand in mass. You know, we're talking about a thousand times bigger um in mass and and by the way, Dave Jewett uh uh saw my paper and re- referenced it in his papers and uh nobody pointed out any arithmetic mistake in what I did.

• 1:07:26Brian Keating?

  Good, okay, then it's then his next claim is that it's arrival time, you claim is fine tuned. You didn't say it was fine tuned that the arrival time was was fine tuned. You said that there was a probability of approaching perihelion being observable of five uh thousandths of one percent. Uh so he claims that this is hardly anything surprising about a comet in the ecliptic passing by some of the planet. Now, I'm a stupid experimental cosmologist, Avi, so please forgive me.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Let me explain, let me, let me explain.

• 1:07:55Brian Keating?

  Hold on, hold on, well, let me just say one thing, Avi, because even I, you know, I'm I'm a humble cosmologist that builds telescopes. You've been to, you know, you've you've you've heard about a lot of them, right, that I've built and and will continue to build. But he's saying that there's hardly a dash is saying that there's hardly something surprising about a comet in the ecliptic passing by some of the planet. Avi, wait a second, that's true of comets in our solar system. Is that to be expected from something of a completely random object from a completely different solar system? Again, I'm I'm just asking questions.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  So so so here is, well, that's apparently a sin to ask questions, but here is the calculation. We say, let's adopt the trajectory that it takes, okay? And only vary the time of arrival to perihelion. So in other words, we are randomly uh playing with arrival time to perihelion. Then only one in 20,000 cases gets so close to three planets like uh Mars, Venus and Jupiter. We tried that and the reason is simple because those planets, you know, like Jupiter, you know, and and Mars, they are moving around the sun over a period of years.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  And you and and their orbital period is if, you know, somewhere between one and a half to five times uh the earth sun separation. So you want the object to pass within a fraction of an astronomical unit.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  To a planet that moves around, you know, across a region that is a few times the Earth-Sun separation. And you just do the math and you find that the probability of it coming so close to those is very small. Now, it may be a coincidence, fine. But I was talking before about two other anomalies that by themselves are already giving you a probability of 1 in 100,000. So are we arguing that it's a probability of just 1 in 100,000 and not 1 in a billion? Is that really the argument that it's not as unlikely as a billion?

• 1:09:55Brian Keating?

  My question is a little bit more simplistic, Avi. It's that he's making quotes about, he's basically saying, oh duh, Avi, a comet in the ecliptic passes by planets. That is 100% true for objects in our solar system. But to my knowledge, again, simple, just reasoning, an object from a completely different solar system, which everyone, Jason Wright, Stephen Dash, Brian Cox, you know, Michio Kaku, Kim Kardashian, they all agree that this object came from another solar system. What are the odds of that one entering into our solar system in our ecliptic? I think that's a fallacy that Dash is making. As esteemed as Dash is, I think that he made a mistake. Now, I didn't look at the links and I only have so much time and I've got a thriving career myself.

• 1:10:40Brian Keating?

  But tell me, Avi, am I wrong? Am I wrong?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  You're not, and that's exactly my argument. And, you know, he should publish a paper if he has a simple quantitative argument why this should have happened.

• 1:10:54Brian Keating?

  So, okay, the next one he's going through is, let's see if I can get this one up. Okay, five. It's gas plum contains much more nickel than iron, as nickel, including borisov, would likely be below 1%. Then he says, so we're only up to, we're only up to, you know, item five. Three of them have been true anomalies that even Professor Wright would admit as being anomaly. He says, this is a genuine anomaly in the sense that it's an extreme value. But it's also something that's very consistent with what we know about comets. Because there's no, and he says, there's no standard iron to nickel ratio or nickel to cyanide ratio in comets. They vary. A lot. We're seeing Nick three at a much larger distance from the sun than we normally

• 1:11:36Brian Keating?

  look for it. And pretty standard chemistry can explain why it will have a large anomaly out there. So, okay, so but he already said you should admit that you're wrong. But now he's saying, we need more data. So which is it, Jason? I mean, you said that like he obviously should retract all of his claims and and hang his head in shame and be thankful he doesn't meet Bruno's fate. But but now you're saying that we don't, we expect it to come into line as it heats up. But it has come into it's not heating up anymore, right, Avi? So where's where's why is this not an anomaly? Let's let's see if we can make sense of what

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  This is an anomaly. We find the mostly nickel in industrially produced alloys. And you know, we just don't know if a process like the carbonil pathway that we use in the industries exists in nature. And if you look at those papers, they basically say, we know about nickel without iron and through the carbonil process, and maybe the same process that we use in our industries also operates in nature. That's what they are suggesting. And I'm just saying, it's it's an anomaly. Okay, so let's just admit that. And maybe we will figure out why. But but usually what happens is nickel and iron come together because they are produced by exploding stars. And you can't just separate them unless

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  you know, you have a process similar to the one we use in industries. And these are the nickel alloys used for aerospace applications. So what's wrong about discussing that as a possible technological signature?

• 1:13:02Brian Keating?

  Okay, here we go. Now we're up to I think we've counted four that are truly anomalies. Even that he says is true. But these are quote anomalies, Jason, right? You're trying to scare me. But Avi's made some blunders. And what he calls anomalies are not anomalies. Here's a fourth one. It's gas plume only contains 4% by water. And then he says, Yep, that's weird, but not unheard of for comets, though. Three Eye Atlas is outgassing all the normal things. And the fact that it's outgassing all those things says it's a comet. Some comets are weird, and we expect this one to be weird. Weird is a synonym for anomalous, correct, Avi?

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Right. My question is really simple. If you want to follow this logic that he's using, just imagine a real spacecraft that is coated with some ices that were collected along its journey, and it's shedding them off as a result of sunlight illuminating the object, and it has also some means of propulsion or some means of generating energy in order to activate whatever it has inside of it. And so just imagine an object like that and say, when would Jason actually notice that this is not an icy rock? He will argue whatever we see must be the result of a natural process, irrespective whether we've never seen it before, irrespective whether the chance of this spacecraft to fly straight

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  on a reconnaissance mission is very small.

• 1:14:21Brian Keating?

  We shouldn't even be thinking about it, Avi. You're for shame. Tis, tis. We should not even be looking at this, Avi. This is beyond the pale, even for you. Okay.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  But just think about the fact that he wants to ban discussions in conferences and on 3I Atlas, wants to ban discussions. Now, what does it remind you if you go back centuries ago? What does it remind you of the clergy? Now, he is pretending to protect science by doing the work of the clergy.

• 1:14:47Brian Keating?

  Right. The index. He's putting you on the index of banned topics, Avi. Now, again, he's an eminent scientist. People have respect for him. He runs the center. You know, he's probably as good to his mom and his dog. But this is not scientific in nature. I feel like it's... And I'm not going to impugn his... I'm going to give him more credit than he seems to give you. I'm not going to impugn, why is he doing this? What reasons would he do this? I'm not even going to ask you to speculate. Okay. Next one, Avi, because this is near and dear to my heart. Has negative extreme polarization, unprecedented from all known comments, including to Ibarasov. And then he says, guess what he says, Avi? Yep, that's weird. Weird being a synonym for anomalous.

• 1:15:32Brian Keating?

  It's normal.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Why quotes? Let's go back to the initial sentence. Why did he put quotes? If he agrees to several of these anomalies, how can he put quotes around them?

• 1:15:42Brian Keating?

  So Jason, and I'd love to host him. I'd love for him to come on. I don't think he would care to, he doesn't want to associate with me perhaps because I, you know, have done these things with you. But I push you to, Avi. I mean, you know, from our first talk on the podcast four or five years ago when your first book came out. I, I made some, you know, provocative claims to you that like, one of them in particular, if you, and I remember telling you this, Avi, if you're so convinced that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial, it seems to me you wouldn't be spending your time with Breakthrough Starshot. You would start your own initiative to look at these objects and then you later did, you know, prove me wrong. You started Galileo Project, but you were kinda, I mean, I was pushing back on you and I said, also I'd send a spacecraft after it and try to catch up to you. He said, oh no, Brian, trust me, there'll be many objects to come.

• 1:16:26Brian Keating?

  And I said like, you know, if I didn't propose to my wife, Avi, you know, I could have said, well, there'd be many women to come, but I would have missed out on, on the best one in the world, right, for me. So I said that to you and, and you were like, no, trust me, Brian. And, and I didn't trust you honestly back then, but, but now I do trust you. Okay. So it shows extreme negative. So how many, Jason, how many anomalies would it take? Even if they're all unrelated, but just the preponderance of the evidence that this object is strange. And are you truly upset that this object is getting attention? And you're not a planetary scientist. Steve Dash is not the planetary scientist who studies extrasolar comets and asteroids and so forth.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Brian, I just want to highlight one fact that what Jason is advocating for is for the object to remain boring, uninteresting to the public and not worthy of our attention. That's what he's advocating. Let's forget about this object being important and interesting and unusual and anomalous. Let's just move on with our business and continue to argue that we need to search for radio signals.

• 1:17:30Brian Keating?

  Yep. Okay. So now he says the WOW signal thing is ridiculous, even though he agrees with the probability. We, so for what it's worth, it's not as if we know aliens are out there in the direction of the WOW signal. The WOW signal failed the sky localization test and I think most SETI practitioners believe it was some sort of instrumental glitch. Okay, fine. I'll give him that. Let's give him that and let's just move on. Cause you, you never claimed it came from the solar. System, you know, the, uh, the galaxy perhaps or solar.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  It was just a coincidence of arrival direction.

• 1:18:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So you didn't, you didn't, uh, right. And now people brought that up and, uh, but near.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  I, I, I use this to motivate radio observers to look at the eye at us because we don't expect a, a radio transmission from a rock.

• 1:18:13Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  And I heard back from them and they said they're on the target. So I'm just trying to encourage observers.

• 1:18:19Brian Keating?

  Which they wouldn't have done if you hadn't brought attention to this object. And I put that out in this and somebody said, you know, uh, Avi, you're saying that nobody would have cared about this object. If Avi didn't ma- make it a big deal. I said, read what I wrote. What I wrote is that Avi has given more attention to this object. Where, for whatever reason that you have, but we only have one opportunity. So it's very different than the LHC converting a black hole, Brian Cox. Because that's a one time, you know, event that can be falsified by merely doing, you know, doing the, uh, experiment. And then obviously a lot of people don't believe that it didn't create a black hole. Okay. So forget about that. But this object was under extreme time pressure, Avi. It's very different than the LHC.

• 1:18:58Brian Keating?

  Because you can restart the LHC as they did, uh, but you can't restart this comet on its trajectory. So if you didn't bring attention to this object as you did, I claim that it wouldn't have damaged, it wouldn't have generated as much interest in the media, in the public and jealousy among other scientists. Let's keep going. Okay. Here's another one. This is, I mean, Jason, it's embarrassing to read this. I mean, I, I really wish you would, you have the integrity at least to, to have a conversation with me, uh, if not with Avi. I, I know Avi's would be up for it too, if, if it could be done in a, in a and let me know in the comments if you want me to, to kind of put that together. I'm willing to do that. I've gone through, you know, your writing. I've tried to be respectful of what you're saying. I'm not mocking or doing any ad hominem attacks, but here we go again, Jason.

• 1:19:40Brian Keating?

  Number nine, near perihelion. It brightened faster than any known comet and was bluer than the sun. That's weird. And he says, yep, this is an interesting anomaly. No scare quotes this time. So maybe he's run out of ink, uh, with it, with the quotes, but, but it did brighten very quickly for a comet. But again, we expected the bright unusually as it comes coming in unusually fast. Although this calculation tries to, to, to, also bluer than the sun is a weird way to express. An anomaly, the light it's reflecting depends on the composition of the gases of its gaseous coma. No, the light doesn't depend on that. The, the, uh, the light that it is reflecting doesn't, that's coming from the sun, right? He's, I think he's wrong here. He's saying the light that is reflecting depends on the composition of the gas.

• 1:20:21Brian Keating?

  What we see, the, the reflected light that we see is depends on the composition of the gaseous coma.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  I suggested, yeah, I suggested actually one explanation, possible explanation. And apparently Jason is not reading what I write, but I suggest maybe.

• 1:20:35Brian Keating?

  I think he is.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  I ionized carbon monoxide. That's the only thing I could think of as a natural origin. Uh, so that's a carbon monoxide is carbon and, and oxygen combined, making a molecule. And if you remove one electron, it has transitions in the blue band. So that, you know, if it emits spectral lines in the blue band, maybe that gives this blue color. But you would need a lot of emission, you know, the equivalent width of that, those lines needs to be very large. And there is no evidence so far for spectroscopy that would illustrate that.

• 1:21:07Brian Keating?

  All right. But my, my point is that I think he's scientifically wrong. Uh, I'm, I'm willing to be proven wrong myself. Again, I'm an experimental cosmologist, Jason. But you're, you're saying something that's factually incorrect. You're saying that the light that it gets from the sun is, is, uh, is dependent on the composition of the comet. That's like saying the light that we see on earth is, is dependent, uh, or the light at the top of the atmosphere or wherever is dependent upon what the atmosphere does. But actually we're talking about the reflected light, which comes from the sun. And so therefore it should look and appear like the sun, except that there's some processes that Avi just, just noted. Well, anyway, so I don't want to get into it. It could be semantics. I don't want to be accused of being semantic.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  No, there, there are two other things that should be mentioned, and that is if there is dust, it would redden the object. It should be redder.

• 1:21:50Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  And we know the object's surface, the nucleus surface should be cooler than the sun and cold temperature are redder. So for those two reasons, we would have expected it to be red and that's what many comets are.

• 1:22:03Brian Keating?

  I don't like talking about dust, Avi, and polarization. You know that.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:22:06Brian Keating?

  You should know that, from bicep two, right, Avi? Okay. You should be more sensitive to my needs here. We're gonna get to questions from the members of the channel in just a minute, and I can only take questions from the members. There's tons of them, Avi. I love my members. Join the channel, it's 99 cents, not a big deal. Really, I don't get any real major compensation for it. But it does send signals to YouTube, which then will get more attention to the great scientists that I bring on. Again, I'm having Terrence Tao, a Fields medalist, the world's second, third smartest man after President-- No, I'm just kidding. Terry Tao's on the podcast, and he's brilliant. He's talking about Trump on Monday on the podcast. You'll get that if you are a channel member as well. Okay, last one. "It exhibits non-gravitational acceleration, which requires massive evaporation of at

• 1:22:51Brian Keating?

  least 13% of its mass," blah, blah, blah. And then he agrees, okay, this one will go down as the most discussion among planetary scientists. So this is an unusual thing, but even if it's correctly measured and his math is correct here, which I don't have time for, so he doesn't think he can do math, which is strange for someone who has over 1,000 citations, was the chair of Harvard, and as, you know, the black hole and all the stuff you do. So he claims that--

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  I actually, I wrote the equation. In my essay, I provided its momentum conservation. It's really simple, and there is no way out of it. And right now, I'm writing a scientific paper that will give the results. You know, I'm collaborating with a student who actually redid my calculation with much more detail, and he found exactly the same answer. About 15% of the mass had to be evaporated, based on the numbers that were reported for the non-gravitational acceleration. Now, the numbers for those, for the non-gravitational acceleration keep being revised, and of course, they may go down, in which case, the level of evaporation will go down.

• 1:24:25Brian Keating?

  So assuming your student can do math, you know, better maybe than some of our, you know, colleagues are doing stuff here. He counts out 10 anomalies and he says only four of them are really anomalous. I count, actually, when I read through the essay, I'm thinking, yep, it's weird, yep, it's weird. Arrival time and so forth, the gas plume is weird. So four out of 10. By the way, Avi, if you go to the doctor, Haas Fa Shalem, and he says, well, we've done 10 tests, four of them are really anomalous, Avi. One of them has a 99% chance that you have deadly cancer. But the other three are, you know, they're anomalies

• 1:25:07Brian Keating?

  too. They have like 10%, 20%. Who cares, right? 99%, that's going to get your attention, especially if there's some false. So he's using this fallacy that it's the number of anomalies, which he agrees, all these are anomalous, maybe the wow signal, let's give it to him, that's, you know, strange or whatever. It has nothing to do with it being the comet itself, whatever. But that was kind of a throwaway thing anyway. But let's say nine of the major arguments you make, almost half of them are true anomalies. Why would he put it in, why is this like, Jason, why are you trivializing this? And then we're going to move on to questions because I have to go teach. Go ahead, go ahead.

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  Another point that I would like to emphasize is even if those are all natural processes that account for the anomalies, we need to understand them. Why? Because we are missing something. Okay. So what, that is nature's way of telling us, you're missing something. And Jason wants us to forget about it or to put it aside because it's a comet, forget about it. And to ban any discussion on unidentified objects that the Pentagon takes seriously, you know.

• 1:26:09Brian Keating?

  And be happy that it's a comet. He's happy that it's a comet because that's what he thought from the beginning. Let's be honest, Jason. I mean, honestly, you knew this was a comet from the beginning. And now this confirmation bias, it doesn't even need to have any further confirmation to rule out or to even investigate it perhaps. And, you know, at least Brian Cox is saying, well, you know, this is, we should be thankful this is a comet. But again, he also called it a comet before Parahelion. Said it very confidently that it was a comet. He didn't mention like, oh, I'm gonna go consult with all these scientists. But after Jason Wright wrote this article, then he helped to accentuate and get attention to it. So Avi, any last words about Jason? Because I do have a bunch of questions.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  No, I don't think, we should not waste too much time on that.

• 1:26:49Brian Keating?

  Okay, great. Okay, great. So we've got channel members that are asking questions here. So the very first one comes from Chase. I'll put it up on the screen. Where, why has the tail gone? And why are people not looking at the propulsion being a fusion reactor? Now, you never really claimed it was thrusters per se. You just said if it was technology, it would have to have some thrust, right? I mean, is that all you were saying? I mean, again, I'm not.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the, um, one needs to understand any technological object, even if it's not using thrusters, needs some power supply. Because there are things to get activated within it that require power. And of course, coming close to the sun is an opportunity to gain power. But for a natural comet, we know exactly how much power was consumed by the surface area of this object. However, if you have some engine, then you have excess power relative to that. And that's a technological signature. So if we see, for example, if a blue color implies a hotspot on the object, then it could be an engine. Or if we see those jets carrying a very high speed outflow

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  that cannot be generated because it's supersonic relative to what, you know, pockets of ice would generate. Then we know that that could be a technological signature. So we just need to check these, you know, properties in order to assess whether we understand the physics behind, you know, the, the energy source of, of, of this object.

• 1:28:19Brian Keating?

  Okay, so next question I want to get, uh, yes, what can we say? Right, that's all good. Okay, so let me get the next question up from, again, you can join the channel as a member and get some, uh, interesting questions answered from our guests here. Okay, um, next question. Pedro Moya says the following. Avi sometimes uses contradictory arguments. He says SETI vetoed him purely out of abuse of power and yet dismisses Brian Cox and others as not being a scientist or not publishing articles.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  What is the contradiction? I don't see the contradiction here. And I didn't say that-

• 1:28:58Brian Keating?

  I guess you're saying that, you know, Brian Cox, saying you, SETI voted you out. Actually, SETI didn't vote you out.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Didn't vote me. I was talking about banning UAP discussions in their conferences. It's not about me. You know, again and again, everyone is focusing on me. I'm saying, let's focus on the substance that is being discussed, which is there are unidentified objects in the sky. And SETI bans discussion of these objects. Now, your viewer is claiming that I said that SETI is banning me. No, I didn't say anything about me. I was talking about UAPs. How can UAPs be me? It's not me. It's the UAPs.

• 1:29:32Brian Keating?

  Right. I don't, you know, to quote Groucho Marx, I don't think you'd want to be a member of the, you know, the PSU SETI extravaganza, if they would have you as a member. Okay, next one comes from Steven Dedalus. Avi, could 3I Atlas be some sort of unknown life form, a conscious celestial object, a living entity itself, and not a vehicle? You're the best.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, everything, anything is possible, but we need to examine what the data tells us. And that's why we need to collect as much data as possible and then analyze it and see if we can come up with a model that explains it. And, you know, maybe, you know, maybe there is something we cannot really imagine. And the CO2 comes from some, some living organism in it, you know, who knows?

• 1:30:20Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, we have to say that's very low probability.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  It's low probability, yeah. I don't want to dismiss anything because I see it as a learning experience. So I suggest, let's follow the data.

• 1:30:31Brian Keating?

  Right. Carl Sagan said famously, my other finger puppet, that, that you should have an open mind, but you shouldn't let your mind be so open that your brains fall out of your head. It is my brain. All right. Next question comes from my friend Peter Halloran, all the way from Ireland. Put it this way, regardless of what it is, Avi has still drawn more attention to this topic than Jason, whoever he is, I've never heard of until now, because Avi has opened up the topic. So where do we go from here, Avi? What's the next, what's next for 3I Atlas? What's next for you?

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I said, well, first of all, I should highlight again, I see that as a precious opportunity to convey the excitement of data-based science in the sense that data is coming in, it will come in in the coming weeks, and it will revise what we think about triatlas. And if you don't allow for that, if you don't get excited by the fact that it has anomalies, and we can figure them out, like in a detective story, you are basically stealing away the inspiration that science brings to society. And people are excited about the process of not knowing and trying to figure things out. So why would we suppress the curiosity of people? Okay, that's what drives the appreciation of science. And the public pays taxes that fund

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  science. So let's make them happy. Why is that a sin, from the point of view of academia, for me to engage with the public? That is a blessing, because now, if the public appreciates the scientific process, because they get engaged in the collection of data, the interpretation, that would be a great boon for science in the future. The second aspect is that, you know, the public really cares about this question of are we alone, is there intelligence out there? And therefore, this is a subject that should be supported and funded at billions of dollars, billions of dollars, not, you know, the small amounts that are used right now.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Billions of dollars, just like the search for microbes. Why? For one reason, we want to hedge our bets. The second reason is that these billions of dollars are coming from taxpayers' pockets. Okay? So if the taxpayers are telling you that this is a subject of great interest, how do we know that? From the millions of readers that I have to my essays, I know that. I'm getting millions of readers per month to my essays. I've never had that. Just because I'm talking about the possibility that we might discover extraterrestrial intelligence.

• 1:32:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's right. Okay, so the next one comes from MB114, new member. Wouldn't advanced civilization modify a massive comet as a spacecraft, instead of building one, since it's already in space and easy to adapt?

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Well, that's possible. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we were talking about mining asteroids in the past. I mean, you know, various politicians talked about it and NASA administrators talked about it. And so the next step would be, you know, perhaps to hollow out a natural object, and it would serve as a Trojan horse. Because if you are worried about something bad happening along the path, then when you have this, you know, envelope that protects you within the interior of a natural object, then, you know, nobody, no civilization would suspect that this is a technological object, and that would be to your benefit. And you often

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  say, Brian, don't judge a book by its cover. And, you know, so it's possible that, you know, and we know that a Trojan horse was able to get into the city of Troy and achieve its goal. And so that is a tactic that could definitely be used by a technological civilization.

• 1:34:11Brian Keating?

  Okay, coming to the end, we still have a couple more minutes to ask questions. Again, you have to be a member of the channel to ask questions. You don't have to be a member of the channel to win one of these fragments of a real asteroid. Guaranteed Brian Cox to be an asteroid fragment. From older than the Earth, it's about 4.3 billion years old. Get that briankeating.com/yt. Or if you have an EDU email address in the US, you'll win one. briankeating.com/edu. Okay, I love to give out meteorites. Obviously, it's so much fun. Everyone loves them, and they're fun to play with. And this one's very anomalous. It's got a lot of magnetic material. Okay, next one comes from, from NAMI Phoenix. Let's put NAMI Phoenix. What's the current lobe scale of 3I Atlas after everything we know?

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  Right. So I didn't update my number. From the beginning was four, because I'm waiting for the data that will come in the, in the next few weeks. And I would either revise it down to zero, if it turns out that, you know, for example, just to give one example, that it broke up to pieces, and a significant fraction of the mass was evaporated. And as a result, we know the composition of the body itself. Or if we measure the... Velocity, the speed of the jets and it looks like sublimated the volatiles from pockets of ice on the surface of the object. I would also argue, since the amount of mass carried by those jets is so big, it must be natural.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  Uh, so, uh, I, I'm just, it would be foolish to ma- revise the, the ranking right now when we are about to get a flood of data. And I just wait for that data before I update my numbers, probably in mid-December. That's when, uh, in just about the time when it gets closest to Earth on the December 19th. And let's just hope that indeed, you know, it's a not of any threat to us that there will be no unwanted gifts for the holidays.

• 1:36:05Brian Keating?

  So, the next one, thank you very much for that reply. And also, it's very, it's a true lesson in scientific integrity. What Avi said is that he's willing to be proven wrong. From the beginning, he assessed it with a 40% four scale. And now he's saying it could be as low as zero. Now, if someone was truly committed to this thing at all costs and is a cult leader, I mean, it's a kind of reprehensible thing to call somebody. But, but let's just say you were, you would never get that. I haven't noticed, you know, the people that, that, you know, claim, you know, that, that the Branch Davidians or other things, that they were, uh, leading a cult, that they admit that they were wrong. Now they just go and bring their followers down in flames. So I think, I think that kind of language is, is, is reprehensible.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  But let me, let me keep going. What about, what about the advocates of supersymmetry that were proven wrong by the Large Hadron Collider? Were they cult leaders? Uh, I mean, they, they changed their opinion now when we have the data. That's the way science is done and that's what I meant by humility to learn.

• 1:37:02Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Okay. Magic Mike says, can NASA alter the photos from high-rise, uh, uh, camera after the fact? Could you detect any, you know, machinations? Uh, I don't think that's a likely thing, obviously.

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  No, I, I, well, the reason it's very unlikely is because a lot of people are informed. They, it's really impossible and these are scientists. These are not the government employees. You know, the University of Arizona has a team, uh, involved in high-rise. The bureaucracy of NASA prevented them from sharing the data with scientists, but they are not employed. Uh, many of them are not employed by NASA and, you know, they are academics. And there is no way that the government would have modified the data just for us to be fooled. I don't think so.

• 1:37:43Brian Keating?

  Got it. Okay, Grey Scout gave us a nice super chat in Canadian dollars. Uh, fourteen dollars in Canadian dollars. Wow, that is great. I think I can buy some poutine tonight for dinner. Grey Scout, thank you so much. If three Eye Atlas release probes, how close would they get before we could detect the probes, Abi?

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Right, it depends.

• 1:38:02Brian Keating?

  Have they, is there any evidence that they released probes?

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Well, that's an excellent question, because I asked my research team at the Galileo Project to moni- to monitor the, the sky with our observatories, we have three of them, uh, for any unusual activity in the coming months, to see if there, anything came from, um, three Eye Atlas in our direction. That is a possibility, if you have probes that maneuver and change course and go towards the planets. And the same, I, I recommended to NASA to look at data from the rovers on, on, on the, on the ground, at Mars, but, but also from the orbiters of Mars. Uh, for any unusual object that suddenly appear uh, in the sky of Mars as a result of the passage of the three Eye Atlas within twenty-nine million kilometers from us.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  So these are useful things to do in the coming months and, um, it's a possibility, but we can rule it out if we don't see anything. Now, in terms of the size of the objects, if, if these objects are, um, of order a hundred meters, we can see them from the reflection of sunlight uh, out to where three Eye Atlas is right now, if we take deep images. However, if there are, you know, ten, ten meters in, in diameter, then they are a hundred times fainter than we can see at those distances, and you will need them to get closer to us, and so they need to be ten times closer to us than, uh, you know, the Earth-Sun separation for us to see a ten-meter object.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  You have to realize that humanity, most of the spacecraft that we launched are at the level of a few meters in size, and those can be seen only as they come extremely close to Earth, you know, within, closer than the moon, you know, within a few times the diameter of, of Earth, and, and it actually- Even the Rubin Observatory will have a hard time noticing them because they will spend very little time within each frame and you wouldn't be able to actually easily tell that they are, they exist. And so for that, we need observatories just like the Galileo observatories, which are focusing on objects near Earth. And we could see a meter scale or 10 meter scale

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  objects within the Earth's atmosphere with the Galileo project observatories.

• 1:40:21Brian Keating?

  So take the last question before we wrap up from Peter Halloran again, all the way from Ireland. My, my brother probably from my Keating side. And Peter says, get Jason on. I want him to answer some anomalies in relativity, dark matter, Hubble tension, black hole singularities, quantum gravity, Lorentz test, CMB, time loop causality is called science. So if I had him on, you've told me you're willing to debate anyone as long as it's scientific and it has to be done in good faith. So I'd love to have Jason on. I'd love to have him talk about it. Again, I'd love to have two non-planetary scientists. I mean,

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  But actually, what, what your viewer said is extremely insightful because that's the way science is done. Science is done by having conjectures and testing them against data. And there is nothing wrong about talking about possibilities like this object being technological. Nothing wrong about it. Because look at the mainstream of theoretical particle physics, talking about extra dimensions, spatial dimensions in the context of string theory. That was the prevailing hypothesis, completely speculative. We have no evidence for it after 50 years. There are no definite predictions that are testable by future experiments. Nevertheless, it's the mainstream of theoretical physics. So where is Jason criticizing the string

• 1:41:40Speaker 03

  community, the mainstream of theoretical, where is Brian Cox criticizing string theory? And the reason they don't do that is because they want to be liked. So they would never talk about speculations that are popular within the mainstream, even though they are not. There are even more severe speculations than the one I'm making. Because you, you know, for 50 years, you're talking about extra dimensions that were never seen. You know, if you were to do that more than a century ago, you will be put in a mental institution. Nevertheless, there is a whole community of mainstream physics, which are engaged for 50 years and getting honors, awards, appreciation, showing off, doing intellectual gymnastics on something we've never seen.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  And Jason and Brian Cox do not have any problem with that.

• 1:42:31Brian Keating?

  Well, it's unfortunately not that uncommon when it comes to, you know, things that generate a lot of attention, that there'll be people that are affected by it, that have non-scientific criticism. Again, I'm willing to have Dash, Cox, right? I'm willing to have them all on. As Einstein said, you know, when the 100 German scientists said that relativity was wrong, he said, "If they were really correct, then only one would be necessary." Avi, you do great work. I want to thank everybody out there. I do extend an invitation to all the critics. I'll put links to all their articles. I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not Avi's bodyguard. He doesn't need me. He's a big boy. He's been doing this a very long time, a very eminent career. One of the most creative, productive, generous, generative scientists.

• 1:43:14Brian Keating?

  And we didn't even mention, we got, we got to mention, you know, for, for the final clicks, we got to get, we got to get in this, this last picture here of some, some say, you know, that, well, I'm not going to say it because I don't want to sleep in the doghouse tonight. But what I was going to say that there is, there is a picture along with Brian Cox of Kim Kardashian in this article that you said, I don't know why she's there. But, but then actually a truly great-

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  She was, she was interested in Three Atlas. She asked Sean Duffy, the acting administrator, about the nature of Three Atlas.

• 1:43:48Brian Keating?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  That's why she's in this article. Yeah.

• 1:43:50Brian Keating?

  Okay. But then there's Margot Robbie there. So this is totally not gratuitous at all, I'm showing, but Margot Robbie was there too. Tell us a little bit about Margot and your conversation.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  Well, I was attending a gathering where 100 of the most accomplished actors and actresses in Hollywood-

• 1:44:08Speaker 03

  And film directors as well as CEOs worldwide were there and you know during the break I noticed Margot Robbie and then someone came for me to sign my book and she noticed that and approached me and said are you Avi Loeb I really wanted to know more about your research I have to attend the wedding this evening so I'll miss your talk and then we spoke for 20 minutes until dinner started and she was really curious and genuine about it and this is just to illustrate the fact that you know I found her very sincerely curious and interested in

• 1:44:50Speaker 03

  the search for extraterrestrials in the nature of 3I Atlas and so forth and you know I do find people you know among the arts that are far more open minded than in academia and perhaps because they are used to the creative aspect of their profession.

• 1:45:09Brian Keating?

  So I'll put links to it. There's also a thing from ES, the European Space Agency today. I'm gonna put that in the show notes if you missed it. Don't forget you can always chat with the guests that I bring on the show. I like to open it up because the public again pays our salaries. Obviously without their support and their attention, we wouldn't be able to do what we do, right?

• 1:45:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's why I don't feel myself as different from the public. I'm just grateful that I'm getting paid to maintain my curiosity. You know, that is amazing how many jobs exist where you can follow your passion and get paid for it.

• 1:45:46Brian Keating?

  Very good. Well, Avi Loeb, thank you so much for all your time, attention, and just the good nature spirit that you have at this. You don't attack people. I do enjoy that despite all the arrows that come your way unfortunately. Hopefully in good time we'll be together again and we'll have to touch base on the 20th or so of December when it makes its kind of swan song and the outgoing coda to this interstellar interloper. Everyone agrees it's an interstellar interloper.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  Thank you. We should all remember that we live For a short while and you know what we see around us is so much greater and more exciting and more significant that it's not about us. We we have a duty to understand the universe and it it it's just spectacular to figure it out, you know, and it's not about us. We keep being obsessed about ourselves and about attacking other people and so forth. But this is very narrow minded. Just look up and wonder about it. That's it.

• 1:46:47Brian Keating?

  And be grateful that we live in a time where we can see these objects, study them, and most of all, get captivated intellectually and otherwise. Avi Love, thank you so much, and we'll talk again soon. Bye, everybody.

• 1:47:05Speaker 05

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