#354 - 3i/Atlas: Harvard Physicist Warns NASA is Hiding Something | Avi Loeb

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Avi Loeb, PhD, is a theoretical physicist & Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is "Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars." SPONSORS https://irestore.com/dannyjones - Reverse hair loss & unlock HUGE savings on the iRestore Elite w/ code DANNYJONES. https://bruntworkwear.com/danny - Get $10 off at BRUNT with code DANNY. https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DANNY - Use code DANNY and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb https://avi-loeb.medium.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The moon landing & using AI in space 07:17 - The future of humanity beyond Earth 16:59 - Mars used to be habitable 24:53 - Why 3i Atlas is so exciting for space research 32:47 - 3i Atlas explained 39:33 - U. S. Gov satellites monitoring space disturbances 47:47 - Interstellar meteor that crashed on Earth in 2014 00:57:46 - NASA is wrong about Oumuamua & 3i Atlas 01:11:59 - Academia is suppressing space research 01:27:05 - Shadow organization hiding alien technology 01:34:13 - Avi Loeb's take on John Mack's alien abduction research 01:38:22 - 3i Atlas getting suspiciously close to Jupiter 01:51:10 - How many interstellar objects pass through our solar system 01:57:27 - Can we really deflect doomsday asteroids? 02:08:48 - Time dilation: Why time slows down in space 02:16:24 - Cosmic event that created human life on Earth 02:24:12 - What intelligence extraterrestrial life looks like 02:33:51 - Invisible objects traveling through Earth's orbit 02:42:05 - How humans could escape Earth to live in space 02:46:31 - Life on the moons of other planets 02:56:12 - Potential for advanced ancient civilization 03:03:29 - WOW Signal: 1977 radio signal Earth received from space Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  Thanks for coming, Abby.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  My great pleasure and privilege.

• 1:10Danny Jones?

  The audience should know upfront that Neil deGrasse Tyson attacked you up front of your hotel last night.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Not really, not really. I'm a pretty tough guy. I jog every morning at sunrise. But I tripped on a pipe of sprinklers as I arrived at the hotel, and that's why I got bruised. Now, the cover story could be related to a NASCAR car race because just a few weeks ago, I attended the car race in Bakersfield, California, where one of the racers decided to put my image, along with three eye atlas, on the hood of his car.

• 1:44Danny Jones?

  That's fantastic, man.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  And so when I got there with the Netflix documentary team that is making a documentary should come out in 2026 about my work, the racer put me in the car after I signed my name on his T-shirt and showed me how to drive it. So then he invited me to go to Daytona, and my wife said, "No way. You're not taking that risk."

• 2:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  So, you know, it would have been worse if I were to participate in Daytona. And one interesting insight that I had during the car race is I wondered, you know, why isn't there a corporation that makes a self-driving car that will win the NASCAR? I mean, that's obviously doable. And my answer is that we enjoy watching humans compete.

• 2:33Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  And, you know, computers are able to do better than humans on chess. And by now, there is art that is definitely competitive with human-made art. Nevertheless, we don't pay much for it. And the reason is that we enjoy the human connection. And in sports, we don't want to see a robot that outruns the best athletes. And the same would be true with art, that art is a way of communication among humans. And therefore, you know, AI will never substitute for a human touch.

• 3:09Danny Jones?

  Yes. And the other thing is risk. If there's no humans in the cars, there's no risk. You know, the risk reward, right? The more risk, the higher the reward. And it's just like with doing anything.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 3:20Danny Jones?

  Even creating art or whatever, you have to, you risk spending the time to create something, putting your life in danger to race this car. It makes it more entertaining and more thrilling and exhilarating to witness.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's the human spirit that brought us to the moon, and my hope will bring us to interstellar space.

• 3:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we were just talking about the moon before we started recording. I was telling you about my recent podcast with the Apollo astronaut and the moon landing skeptic. And the moon landing skeptic had a plethora of incredible claims and facts that he brought to the table that the astronaut really couldn't compete with.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Well.

• 3:59Danny Jones?

  Fair enough. I mean, you have to, you have to consider the fact he's, and he's 90 years old. It was a long time ago when he went to the moon. He may not have the sharpest memory, but he does have some memories, but.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  No, but there is a very good argument to convince anyone. And that is, there are retro reflectors. These are corner reflectors that were put on the moon and were used over the past few decades to bounce. Laser beams of them so that we can gauge the distance to the moon very precisely. And in fact, that was used to imply that Newton's constant doesn't change in a trillion years. You know, by one part in a trillion, it doesn't change. Uh, um, so over one year. So, so this, these retro reflectors are there. We can use them to bounce laser beams. They were not there by any alien civilization. We put them there.

• 4:53Danny Jones?

  Couldn't we put them there with rovers or machines?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Not really, not really. Uh, and so there was a moon landing. Of course, we have also samples that were brought back to Earth. But you might argue maybe these were found on Earth.

• 5:09Danny Jones?

  Von Braun picked them up in Antarctica in sixty five.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  But, but these reflectors were, you know, and, and there is also, I think, an American flag on the moon that you can find.

• 5:19Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  So my point is there are things on the moon that were definitely put back then that wouldn't be there otherwise.

• 5:27Danny Jones?

  Well, I, I do understand the argument that when, one of the big questions is why haven't we been back? And it does make sense to me why we wouldn't need to send people back, right? Because it's like, again, to our original conversation about NASCAR. It's too much of a risk to send humans way out there when we can do it just as good of a job with robots.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Right. So for science, definitely it makes sense to send robots. Because humans are more vulnerable to the harsh conditions in space. Also, you know, we haven't used AI in space as of yet. And it would be necessary if we take long trips. Because right now, all of our missions on the Mars or the moon are being helicopter parented by engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. So, and I say helicopter parented because there is a helicopter that, you know, that was parented on Mars by these engineers. And so, um, the, the point is if we send a mission to a much

• 6:33Speaker 02

  more distant destination, then we can't really provide.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Guidelines to these probes because it takes a long time for light to cross that distance. For example, Voyager now is one light day away and Voyager just started in the seventies. Now Voyager will exit the solar system in 10,000 years through the outskirts of the Oort Cloud of the solar system. And you know, it will take several years for a signal to get there. And if it reaches the nearest stars, you know, it may take even longer. And so the point is, you know, if it faces some immediate decision to be made about what to do under some circumstances when it lands on a target, those decisions cannot be made by engineers on Earth. They have to be made by the probe itself. It needs

• 7:22Speaker 02

  to be autonomous. And that means it needs to have its own brain. And it would feel like sending kids out of your home when they are autonomous. You know, they can make their decisions. That's what you what happens after a certain age, you send out of your kids. And every now and then they send a postcard or or report about what happens to them. And so we will get reports from those very distant probes that we send. But we will have to rely on them doing their job according to the guidelines we gave them. And that requires AI. And we haven't used AI as of yet on a spacecraft. That will be the next frontier.

• 8:00Danny Jones?

  Using AI on a spacecraft?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:02Danny Jones?

  What so going back to the moon real quick, what is the most practical use for us? Or the most practical reason for us to go back to the moon or study the moon? What use to us is the moon, other than it's obvious, like being the gravitational and moving the tides and keeping us in this?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Well, I should say upfront that I'm not hugely excited about the vision of going to the moon and Mars as the ultimate, you know, destiny of humanity. Because, you know, these are rocks that are not better than Earth. Earth is a paradise. It has an atmosphere, liquid water. We feel comfortable here. We better preserve it as much as we can. But if we ever want to Put a significant fraction of humans out there. We better build a space platform that can accommodate them. That will have its own energy source. For example, nuclear reactors will have its own habitat.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  And its own gravity based on rotation. You know, you can produce, if the spacecraft rotates, you can produce a centrifugal force that would mimic gravity. And so, in principle, one can come up with a concept. Now, you might say it's very expensive, but think about the fact that we're investing 2.4 trillion dollars a year in military budgets worldwide. And if we decided to allocate a significant fraction of that to space exploration, we would spend a trillion dollars a year. Meaning that it would be a super Manhattan Project-sized ambition that the best architects, the best technologists,

• 9:52Speaker 02

  the best scientists would be engaged in. And I believe that with a trillion dollars a year, we can actually build a spacecraft. We can move to space in a way that is much better than relying on a rock that, you know, existed for a long time and using missions that cost billions of dollars instead of trillions of dollars.

• 10:12Danny Jones?

  But how big could this thing possibly be? Like, how many humans could it fit? And would it be cheaper than building like an underground city in a cave on the moon?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Oh, well, that can be done. And also on Mars, you can, in principle, use a cave or a...

• 10:28Danny Jones?

  These like, uh, these lava tubes, right?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. And what I would like to find out is if we enter one of these lava tubes, whether there are any prehistoric paintings there. Because maybe someone else went there before us. Especially on Mars, which for half of its lifespan had conditions very similar to Earth. There were... Lakes, oceans, rivers of water there. And we just don't know if intelligent life was twice as fast in developing on Mars than on Earth. All you need is a factor of two, which is not very big. Because, you know, we exist 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed and Mars, you know, if... Yeah, we were very late on Earth. We are very late. By the way, if you want to get a good dose of modesty,

• 11:16Speaker 02

  then you have to realize we are not at the center of the universe. We know that since Copernicus and Galileo, despite the wishful thinking of the Vatican. But we also came very late to the cosmic play. You know, only over the past few million years, the human species came to exist. And the universe existed for 13.8 billion years. So the conclusion from that is if you arrive late to the play and you're not at the center of stage, the play is not about you. It's a very simple conclusion. And you better find other actors to ask them what the play is about. We have very limited knowledge of what happened to our cosmic neighborhood before we came along.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  I mean, we have some indirect evidence, but documented human history is only 8,000 years old. And so much has happened on Earth. We don't even know if on Earth there was a very advanced civilization before ours. Right. That may have, you know, created self-inflicted wounds and died, they perished, you know. And also, it's quite likely that all the civilizations elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, if you ask where is everybody, like Enrico Fermi asked, they're probably, most of them are probably dead. Because if you ask where are most of the humans that lived on Earth? You know, there were more than 100 billion of them, and now there are only 8 billion. They died, okay? So most civilizations died billions of years ago.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  We were not around to witness their pain, their struggles, their history. And the question is, if we want to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy, we need to do one thing, not stay on this planet. We need to build monuments in interstellar space that will maintain some memory of us. And I don't mind if humans are on these monuments. You know, what I call monuments are basically spacecraft that go to interstellar space. It could be with humans, it could be with AI. I don't mind. The point is, we want anyone else in the Milky Way galaxy to know that we existed or to remember the guiding principles that we cherished.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  And if we stay on this planet, you know, we might survive another million years, maybe a billion years, but not more than that because the sun will brighten up in a billion years and basically boil off all the oceans on Earth, all the liquid water. And the Earth will become a desert, just like Mars. So we have one billion years left, about 20% of the age of the Earth left for us to do something about it. If not, nobody would mourn the fact that we died. You know, we can disappear from the surface of Earth. There is nobody in the cosmos that will hold a funeral or say good things about us unless we take our fate into our own hands.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And you said early that humans are known for taking risks and having the human spirit. So I think the best way of displaying it would be to becoming an interstellar species.

• 14:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, if we got wiped out and there was another civilization of humans popped up a million years from now, they might see like the Hoover Dam and the Washington Monument. It's like, whoa.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Even that may not be visible if there is enough dust from asteroids impacting the Earth. Yeah, I mean, but the point is that we are very short sighted because if you look right now, we are engaged mostly in conflicts. We live for a short time, each of us, just a century.

• 14:51Danny Jones?

  Territorial apes.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, we invest most of our time in either shortening the lifespan of other humans or preventing them from shortening ours. Like, this is completely non-intelligent, okay? So. My hope is, and that's the main reason I'm working on interstellar objects. My hope is that we will get a package from another civilization in our mailbox that will imply that we can do better. And we might want to imitate them, those that arrived to our backyard before we arrived to their backyard. And, you know, it's just like finding a sibling of your family that you didn't know about that is more accomplished than you are, and therefore you get inspired.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  As Oscar Wilde said, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So, in that context, you know, for example, I studied the interstellar objects for eight years now. And the SETI community that is looking for radio signals was very critical of this work. And it still is. And they were, you know, banning any discussion about technological gadgets near Earth in their conferences. But recently, just a few months ago, they wrote a paper, some of these people, in which they say, "We need to check if interstellar objects might be technological." And again, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I don't need them to say to give me credit.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  I just realized that when they do what I do, it's actually a compliment.

• 16:23Danny Jones?

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• 17:50Danny Jones?

  Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Yeah, there's been a lot of pushback on your, on the three I Atlas stuff, and I want to get to that in a minute. But like going back to the Mars stuff, do you think it's possible that there was a point in history where Mars was habitable for life and had a more robust atmosphere? And what place where humans could thrive?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Definitely, we know that the conditions were similar to Earth. In fact, I mean, for about at least two billion years, if not 2.5 billion years, which is half the age of Mars. The Mars lost its atmosphere only in the second half of its history. And it's not obvious what the trigger was, but presumably it didn't have a strong enough magnetic field to keep the atmosphere bound. And perhaps the solar wind ripped it apart. And we just don't know the details, but there is definitely clear evidence that there was liquid water on the surface, just like, and it was a place similar to Earth. Now, in fact, it started before Earth because it's a smaller body.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  So the cooling of a body is proportional to the surface area. I mean, it stores some heat from the formation process and then it cools from the surface. And the amount of heat that is in it is proportional to its mass or the volume that it has. So, so Mars is a smaller body, therefore it had more surface per its mass. So it was easier for the heat to leak out from a smaller body than than Earth, and therefore it had life probably before Earth. And therefore At that time, you know, in the first hundreds of millions of years of its lifespan, after it cooled enough, it could have delivered life to Earth. Because there were rocks that were basically making the trip

• 19:37Speaker 02

  from the surface of Mars to Earth as a result of an impact by a bombardment by some asteroids. We know that there was, there were lots of bombardments. And we have one rock that was analyzed about forty-five years ago from Mars. And it was possible to say that this rock never heated, was never heated to more than forty degrees Celsius during its entire journey from the surface of Mars and passage through the Earth's atmosphere, created a fireball and then landing on the Earth. Never, the core of the rock was never heated by, to more than forty degrees

• 20:20Speaker 02

  because it has magnetic properties that would have been erased if it were to be heated by more. And that means that microbes could have survived at the center, at the core of this, this rock that we have an example of. And the same is true for the rocks that came early on. So it's possible that microbes were the first astronauts, really, that came from Mars to Earth. And when Elon Musk wants us to send astronauts to Mars, that will be just like returning to our childhood home, in a way.

• 20:51Danny Jones?

  Is this disputed and co-contested at all? That Mars was once inhabitable for human beings and had an atmosphere?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Human beings is a separate matter, but for microbes, definitely.

• 21:00Danny Jones?

  For microbes?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  We don't, we don't have it.

• 21:01Danny Jones?

  It was very similar to Earth?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, similar to Earth. Now, the question is whether intelligent creatures, you know, existed on Mars.

• 21:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  After two billion years, you know, on Earth, definitely not. We didn't have that. But if the evolution of life was accelerated for some reason on Mars by a factor of two, that's, that's the only thing you need. Then you could have had intelligent creatures over there as well. And they were wiped out, obviously, for the same reason that we will be wiped out in a billion years when, you know, the, all the liquid water on the surface would be gone.

• 21:35Danny Jones?

  Well, it's interesting. There's that element, the xenon 129 that was found on Mars. And the only place on Earth it's actually found is like ground zero of the tests of thermonuclear bombs.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  That's interesting, yeah.

• 21:52Danny Jones?

  So wherever there's nuclear explosions, where we've tested nuclear bombs on land, we find this xenon 129.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 21:58Danny Jones?

  And that seems to be that, I guess it's an isotope, and that was found on Mars.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Well, imagine a situation where there was a population there that went into a nuclear war and wiped itself.

• 22:11Danny Jones?

  And it's not a, so yeah, it's not a, so the xenon 129 is not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 22:16Danny Jones?

  It's only allegedly created where there's nuclear bombs, and we found it on Mars? Like, did we detonate a nuke on Mars?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  We never did that, of course.

• 22:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  So that's an interesting clue, because you can't make isotopes easily without the nuclear process.

• 22:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  It's much easier to do chemistry on the surface of planets than nuclear physics, because, you know, it requires much more energy density to, I mean, you can't really have the high temperatures needed to produce isotopes of this nature. So that's interesting, you know, maybe something happened on our neighboring planet. But that doesn't mean that we need to go there. I mean, we can go there as archaeologists to survey the land and figure out what was there to start with. And, you know, there could have been also, Mars right now is like a museum, because if you imagine a rock that is roughly the size of a person impacting Earth,

• 23:15Speaker 02

  and by the way, that happens once a year or so, a rock of about half a meter to a meter in size. What happens to it, it usually burns up 50 kilometers, at a 50 kilometers altitude. And there is not much impact on the ground, because it's way up there. It releases as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. And we just don't hear about it in the news. Every year, there is something like that. Except a much bigger rock can penetrate through and reach the ground. And then you get some major effect. But most of the time, you know, seventy one percent of the earth is ocean. So you don't. But nevertheless, these things happen all the time. But the point is that on Mars, there is no atmosphere.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  So such an object will reach the ground. And Mars is like a museum. It collects everything that impacts it. At least over the past two billion years. Before that, it had an atmosphere. And so we can look at it as a museum and check, you know, whether any technological objects impacted Mars before we came there. Nobody is planning right now to do it. NASA is mostly interested in microbes. Mm hmm. Um, you know, astronomers are mostly interested in microbes. The decadal survey of twenty twenty defined in astrophysics and astronomy, defined as the highest priority, searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes

• 24:43Speaker 02

  in the atmospheres of planets near other stars. That that is the highest priority with an investment of about ten billion dollars over the next two decades. So we haven't found any evidence of life on Mars yet? Not yet. Okay. I mean, the most recent clue is the these rocks that were discussed in a recent press conference, where it looks like they have some residue that could have been from microbes. And but to be sure about it, that it's not geological effects that that produce those residues, we need to bring these rocks to Earth and analyze them to make sure that it's not something geological, but rather biological, that created their appearance,

• 25:27Speaker 02

  which resembles rocks on Earth with microbes on them. Would that be a difficult thing to do, to bring big rocks back from Mars? No, it's not difficult. It's just it it costs money. Right. That's called the Mars Sample Return Mission that was originally planned. But because of the cost, it was. You know, sideline, but but now Mars is back looking into cheaper possibilities of doing it. And I think it's really fascinating. Another comment on this is that, and that was never discussed, is that now we are starting to find interstellar objects, meaning objects that came from other stars and reached the inner solar system. And so even if these are just rocks,

• 26:13Speaker 02

  if we were to design an interceptor, a mission that lands on such a rock, brings a sample back to Earth, we would be able to study the building blocks of potential life around other stars. I'm saying, even if it's just a, if 3I Atlas is just a natural rock, you know, just imagine a rock the size of a city. We know that it's about five kilometers or so, or it may be even bigger.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  First, it's it's a big object. Second, this one actually moves in the plane of the planets around the Sun, which offers an ideal opportunity for us to intercept it and land on it. However, we didn't know about it in advance. I calculated, I wrote a paper that I published shortly after it was discovered, that in fact, there is a spacecraft around Jupiter called Juno that was launched by NASA. And if they kept the original fuel that it had, they could have used it to intercept, to to actually collide with 3I Atlas on March 16th, when it will come closest to Jupiter. But they used most of the fuel, so they can't do it.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  But it illustrates the fact that if you detect an object like 3I Atlas early enough, you can intercept it or land on it. How fast is that 3I Atlas moving? It entered the solar system at 60 kilometers per second. So coming back to the NASCAR race, it's faster than the fastest car we have by a factor of 600. 600 times faster. And you can land on that? Well, it depends how you design the interceptor. I mean, you can definitely cross its path. And but then, obviously, the spacecraft will be demolished as a result of the impact.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  It could send us the close-up photographs. Right before it gets Yeah. incinerated. But there are also situations where, for example, if the interstellar object comes on an orbit that is not that fast and actually goes behind the Earth, then it would be relatively easy to land on it, bring something to Earth. So my point is, this is a frontier, a window into the universe that was never explored. Because astronomers always focused on remote observing, using telescopes to look far out. Nowadays, we also use gravitational wave detectors to look at the universe. It doesn't matter. In both cases, we're looking at very distant sources, trying to infer what is out there.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  It's just like you are in a home, in your home, at a house on the street. You see many houses similar to yours, and you look at them through the window with telescopes, let's say. Yeah. So you can learn if they have microbes, for example. But it's very different than getting a physical object that came from a neighbor's yard that you can study. If it's a rock, you can learn what the neighbor's yard has. If it's a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor, you can learn about the neighbor. And maybe the neighbor will come and knock on your front door. That's the other possibility that we have to contemplate. We haven't really considered what to do if there is a visit by alien technology that

• 29:33Speaker 02

  could pose a threat to humanity. You know, people would say it's very small probability that this would happen. First, they don't know how to calibrate. We don't know how much traffic there is of interstellar technological objects. But secondly, we don't have a protocol for how to deal with that. And, you know, the intelligence agencies always have a protocol for how to deal with black swan events. These are events that have small probability but big impact on society. And the reason you need to deal with them is because even if you say it's unlikely... The impact would be huge and therefore you must have a way of collecting information that would basically neutralize the threat.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  And serious people in government, in the intelligence agencies, always spend a lot of resources on events that never materialize. We don't know about it. They may have prevented some disasters, you know, like terrorist attacks. But it's part of the rational thing to do. And scientists, on the other hand, do not understand that because if they say, if a scientist says, "At the 99% confidence, I know that 3I Atlas is a rock or a comet." Even if you say that, at the 99%, fine, that is okay when you deal with interpretation of events that have no impact on society. You know, like you deal with a galaxy far away, an exploding star far away, no impact on our future.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  However, when you deal with something coming to our backyard, you can't just say, "99%, you know, it's a rock and therefore we shouldn't even worry about it." Because if you take the 1% chance that it might be alien technology and multiply it by the potential impact on the future of humanity, you get a huge number. So what you have to do, our duty as scientists, is to collect as much data as possible to figure out whether there are any anomalies, anything that looks strange and we can't explain it, that might be indicative of technology. And that's my point. My point is, we have to mature, scientists have to mature and realize that in this case,

• 31:46Speaker 02

  there are political, financial, societal implications and therefore they cannot use the procedure of saying, "At some high likelihood, this is well understood." And that's what NASA did, basically, in a recent press conference. They said, "It's a rock. It's a rock, don't worry about it." The point is that the nature of the object should not be decided by NASA officials. It should be decided by scientists that analyze the data. And I would much rather have, at this press conference, scientists talking about it and explaining why this or that facts are, you know, indications that this is not technological.

• 32:27Danny Jones?

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• 33:12Danny Jones?

  don't like them. That's how confident they are. So if you're tired of boots that destroy your feet more than the job itself, it's time to check out Brunt Workwear. Your feet will thank you. With temps dropping and holidays coming up, it's time to treat yourself or the hardworking man in your life with real comfort. Skip the throwaway gifts and get him something built to last. Brunt Workwear. Our listeners get $10 off their entire order by using the code DANIE at checkout. That's bruntworkwear.com and use code D-A-N-N-Y. Order today and let them know we sent you. Thank you to Brunt for sponsoring this episode. So for people who are normies like me, and I doubt there's many that don't know what 3I Atlas is, but can you explain just basic, give us a basic rundown of what exactly it

• 33:57Danny Jones?

  is and how you discovered it? And why is it called 3I Atlas?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  I didn't discover it, I just paid attention to it.

• 34:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  So 3I Atlas is the third interstellar object, so that's why you have 3I. Atlas is the name of the telescope in Chile that discovered it. Only half a meter in size. Every day now, I write on medium.com and report about 3I Atlas, and every day you can see... Images of 3I Atlas taken by half-meter telescopes that are owned by amateurs. You know, with, at a cost of, I don't know, thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Compare that to the instruments used by NASA that cost altogether billions of dollars. Nevertheless, the information in those images taken by amateurs now is much greater than

• 34:47Speaker 02

  in the NASA images at the press conference that we heard about. But 3I Atlas was discovered on July 1st, and it was very bright. And July 1st is just three days before the July 4th holiday. That's important because my wife wanted to go on vacation and I immediately realized this object is bright. You know, it's the fact that half a meter telescope saw it at a distance of four and a half times the Earth's sun separation means that it's a very bright, very big object. And I calculated that if it's, you know, the brightness of this object is as a result of reflection, reflection of sunlight from a solid body, it has to be 20 kilometers

• 35:29Speaker 02

  in diameter, which is the size of Manhattan Island, you know, the length. That's a huge object. That's, you know, comparable to the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. These are extremely rare things. So then, as we got to the, to the vacation place, I immediately did a calculation and argued that there is not enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver such a big package over the past decade, because this survey went only for one decade. And you would expect it once per 10,000 years. Now, you might say, oh, well, maybe, you know, it's a rare object that happens to come

• 36:11Speaker 02

  by, that's obviously possible, but at a probability of 0.1% or so, or less. And then, so that was the first anomaly that struck me, you know.

• 36:23Danny Jones?

  The size?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  The mass. So it's a million times more massive than the first interstellar object discovered in 2017 called the Muammar. That was the size of a football field. So compare the size of a city to a size of a football field. That's the difference in size. And the mass goes like size cubed.

• 36:41Danny Jones?

  And how do we, how do we determine that mass again?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  What is the calculation there? Oh, it's just you take the size, the diameter, let's say, and cube it, multiply by the typical density of a solid, and you get the mass in both cases. And irrespective, I mean, if you use the same density for both objects, which is solid density, about one gram per cubic centimeter, you get a large size of order five kilometers or bigger for 3A Atlas. So it's at least a thousand times more massive than the second interstellar object called the Borisov, which was found back in 2019, and a million times more massive than Omuramua, which was found in 2017. So that's by itself, it's an anomaly. Why?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Because I wrote in my paper, I said, you know, either the object itself is much smaller than we think, maybe there is a very dense plume of gas and dust around it that reflects sunlight, and the object itself, the nucleus, is much smaller. That would relieve the tension in terms of the size or the mass. And the second possibility is that if it's so big, maybe targeted the inner solar system. It was not drawn from the reservoir of rocks in interstellar space. And this was my last sentence. Maybe targeted the inner solar system. The editor of the journal, and that was just a few days after the object was discovered,

• 38:09Speaker 02

  the editor said, "I will publish this paper only if you remove this last sentence." They said that they would not publish it unless you remove the last sentence? Yes. Basically, you shouldn't say that it was targeting the solar system as a possibility. It's definitely a comet, according to the editor. And that was just the early days. We didn't have much data at that time. Just to show you how science operates these days. So I said, "Okay, well, I want it to be published." So I took out that sentence. And then, the rebel that I am, I wrote a full paper on the technological option. And in that paper, in collaboration with two other authors, that was peer reviewed

• 38:54Speaker 02

  and published, just to show you that this editor was out of line, because this paper was eventually published, peer reviewed. And we showed that also, you know, the fact that it was targeting the inner solar system is supported by the trajectory, which is aligned with the plane of the planets.

• 39:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Within five degrees, and the chance of that happening at random, if you consider all incoming orbits, only one in 500 will be so aligned with the planets.

• 39:26Danny Jones?

  One in 500.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is the third object, so, you know, again.

• 39:31Danny Jones?

  We've only been monitoring these interstellar objects for how long?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  About eight years.

• 39:35Danny Jones?

  About eight years?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:37Danny Jones?

  Okay, so since about roughly 2017?

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, 2017 is when the first one was discovered by telescope in Hawaii that was looking for...

• 39:47Danny Jones?

  Omumu, right?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, Omumu, and which means a scout in the Hawaiian language. And that one was just found, it was flagged because it came near Earth, and this survey telescope was trying to find near-Earth objects that pose a threat, because Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field. And this survey telescope was constructed to find near-Earth objects, then it found Omumu, but realized that it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the Sun. And so, that's how interstellar objects are flagged. You see an object moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the Sun, and therefore it must have arrived from outside the solar system. So, they discovered it by complete coincidence.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Then, a couple of years later, I found, together with my student, Amir Siraj, we found a meteor. In other words, an object that collided with Earth, half a meter in size. In a catalog of fireballs that, again, NASA compiled, based on US government satellites that monitor the Earth all the time for nuclear ballistic missiles, you know. Obviously, you know, we know that a lot of ballistic missiles were launched from Iran, you know, last year. And so there is, there is a network of infrared sensors looking at the Earth for flashes of heat. Satellites and stuff.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, satellites. And those existed back in 2014. And they noticed a fireball from an object colliding with the Earth. So that was definitely not, should not be classified. So they released it to the scientific community and said, here is a meteor, and documented the, the speed by which it was moving. And all we did was look at that speed and realize, well, it was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the sun outside the solar system. If we go back in time, this object was moving as fast as 3A Atlas. And so we said it's an interstellar meteor. That's it. And then the paper was not accepted for publication because the referee, the reviewer,

• 41:59Speaker 02

  said, we don't believe the US government data. So at the time, I was... Who said they don't believe the US government data? The reviewer of the paper. Someone sitting in a university somewhere? Yeah. Okay. Exactly. You have to understand, the government is very believable because they discovered flashes of gamma rays back in the late 1960s with Vila satellites that were aimed to monitor any nuclear explosions above the atmosphere. Back then, there was an agreement with Russia, with the Soviet Union. And, but the US wanted to verify that, that the Soviets are actually not exploding anything. Right.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  And then they looked for gamma ray flashes and found every day or so, there is a flash. So I'm sure in the first few days, there was an alarm in Washington DC about, but then they realized it comes from the rest of the universe. And so it was declassified and eventually reported. These are gamma ray bursts. Turns out they come from the edge of the universe. From massive stars that collapse to make black holes. And then the black holes, as the matter is funnelled towards the black holes. You get jets being produced of outflows. So the matter forms a disk of material that spirals, just like water going down the drain.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  And in the process of doing that, some of the material ends up being collimated in two jets that are perpendicular to the The black hole? The disk of material around it. This is what you see around the black hole? You see that for big black holes, but in this case, the same phenomenon occurs for small black holes, stellar mass black holes, when the core of a star collapses. You end up with the material spiraling in and creating those jets. And those jets eventually drill a hole in the envelope of the star that originally lost its support. And they drill a hole and eventually they come out. And if we happen to be aligned, our line of sight with one of these jets, we see a gamma ray flash. Can you believe it?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  This is a flag of the birth of a black hole that we see. Those gamma ray flashes that the US government discovered because they were monitoring the Soviets. And so there is this history of the US government helping fundamental science by discovering something that astronomers did not anticipate. And it took decades for astronomers to figure out the nature of these things. Because originally astronomers said, oh, it must be relatively local because you need a huge amount of energy to produce this gamma ray burst. And so they said it must be in our galaxy. But then there was an X-ray observatory that was, that discovered X-rays coming from, afterglows coming from these gamma ray bursts.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  And that was an Italian satellite, BEPO Saks. And not a NASA mission, because the NASA mission didn't put an X-ray detector on their gamma ray observatory. And so we realize that there are galaxies in those locations from localizing the X-rays. The gamma rays are difficult to localize in the sky, but the X-rays were. And so we realize that they come from cosmological distances, from distant galaxies. And then there is also evidence for an exploding star after the gamma ray burst. You can see a supernova. So these are the long-duration gamma ray bursts. There are also short-duration ones that are associated with the merger of two neutron stars. Neutron stars are the size of a city, the mass of the sun.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  And when they collide, they also produce these jets. And you see that as short gamma ray burst.

• 45:41Danny Jones?

  Neutron stars are the size of the city and the mass of the sun.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  About 12 kilometers in diameter, in radius, sorry. In diameter about 24 kilometers. And they have roughly the mass of, you know, even more than the sun. Typically 1.4 times the mass of the sun. These are the most dense remnants from the evolution of stars. What happens is a massive star that is more than eight times the mass of the sun, eventually collapses. It consumes its nuclear fuel. And after, you know, some time that ranges between a few million years to, you know, a few billion years, it ends up collapsing.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  And under some circumstances, it makes a very dense core, which has nuclear density, just like an atomic nucleus, but the mass of the sun. Just think about it. That's a neutron star. It's made mostly of neutrons. And if it has more mass, eventually, you know, a neutron star cannot have more than three times the mass of the sun. You can show that if it acquires more than that, it will collapse to a black hole. So above three times the mass of the sun, when you collapse matter, it ends up making a black hole, and then you get this gamma ray burst, long-duration gamma ray burst. But when you make a neutron star, if you happen to make it and there is another star

• 47:10Speaker 02

  that did the same, and you have a pair of these neutron stars in an orbit, you can get... Short-duration gamma rays from the merger. And by the way, we see also those events of mergers in gravitational waves now, the ripples of spacetime from the edge of the universe. So we've seen black holes coming together or neutron stars coming together. In addition to seeing them as gamma ray flashes, we also see them in gravitational waves, which is amazing because that's a prediction of Einstein's gravity. And, you know, the discovery was in 2015, a decade ago, of gravitational waves. And so anyway, coming back to my story,

• 47:55Speaker 02

  the government definitely helps fundamental science. No way. I mean, when they detect something, they put so much money, you know, the defense budget is a trillion dollars in 2026. So you can't just say, oh, the government doesn't, you know, you can't trust what they do with this. So my point is, when they say that this is the speed of the object, I believed it, but the reviewer dismissed it because the reviewer doesn't want us to move into this territory based on government data. So then I chaired the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, and I was complaining about it at the dinner that we had, that was around 2019.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  And one of the board members was in Los Alamos, and he offered to help me. And we reached out through the White House to the U.S. Space Command. And they took two years to issue a formal letter to NASA in 2021, in which they state that they looked back at the data and confirmed that this meteor indeed had an interstellar origin. Indeed, it was moving very fast. So the data is correct at a 99.99% confidence. It came from outside the solar system. You would think that my life would be easier after that. But what happened was that the paper

• 49:23Speaker 02

  got accepted for publication at last because of this. But I decided the time to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to search for the materials from this object. And when we went there, and this would be in the Netflix documentary, by the way. This is, this is the interstellar object that hit Earth, that impacted Earth. That was the first one, from 2014. Right. So when we went there, collected materials, at the same time, there were papers coming out, saying, "We don't believe the US government, this should be discarded, this evidence should be..." We were coming with materials, so instead of those scientists saying, "Let's be curious, let's see what materials they found," you know, like, maybe there is something to this, you know?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  No, there was a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, saying we should believe what this expedition is aiming to find. We shouldn't believe that this was an interstellar meteor. These are the forces acting in academia that suppress innovation, thinking outside the box. And, by the way, it's not so much outside the box, you know, we have meteors all the time, and we have interstellar objects that we know exist. So it doesn't take too much imagination to say, "Some of these interstellar objects will collide with Earth." What is the big problem here? And why would you insist that the government doesn't know what they're doing, if they report about the meteor?

• 50:49Speaker 02

  So, anyway, this is just a story to let you know. So there was, the first object was actually 2014, but, you know, the scientists, the comet experts are refusing to accept it. So did you go and find it? Yeah, we found, no, we found materials. The method we used to retrieve the materials could just collect tiny droplets, molten droplets, from the explosion. Where exactly did it end up? About 100, outside the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea.

• 51:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, way out in the Pacific.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:23Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  So we went there, the ocean depth is about a mile at that location. And we used the sled covered with magnets to, that we put on the ocean floor. And we went back and forth to collect materials. And then we analyzed them with, I brought the materials to my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson, who is a world renowned geochemist. And he analyzed it for the past two years. And we found, within the material, we found some fraction of those molten droplets that have composition.

• 51:57Danny Jones?

  Is that what it looks like right there?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are the molten droplets that we found. And this is an image of me on the deck of the ship that was called Silver Star. Very fitting name. You see, these are beautiful. My wife asked, my daughter asked me after she, because I wrote a diary report every day on Medium. And, you know, millions of people around the world were monitoring that. And my daughter asked if I can put the thread these beautiful.

• 52:28Danny Jones?

  Make a necklace?

• 52:29Speaker 02

  On a necklace, yeah. And I told her, these are made of iron mostly, and they're tiny, they're less than a millimeter in size, so I cannot thread them.

• 52:36Danny Jones?

  You wouldn't be able to see them.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So altogether, we found about 850 of them, which is a record. If you look at the literature prior to that, ocean expeditions found an order of magnitude less, or sometimes two orders of magnitude less. So anyway, these were analyzed, and we found a small fraction of them, 10% or so, had a composition that is different from solar system materials. But we want to go again and find bigger pieces, because we cannot tell the origin of this object.

• 53:06Danny Jones?

  So who else has analyzed material that is not from our solar system?

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Nobody.

• 53:14Danny Jones?

  And they think this is stupid?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Well, they argue that they don't believe the US government.

• 53:19Danny Jones?

  They argue that it's not from outside the solar system?

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they say, maybe, so just to give you an example, there were a number of papers by critics, one said, maybe it's coal ash.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Just, you know, human-made coal, burnt wood, for example. So, in response to that, we analyzed the chemical composition of coal ash with, you know, some twenty, so some tens of elements, you know, from the periodic table. And also that of those special spheres that were enhancing beryllium, lanthanum, uranium, kind of elements that were up to a thousand times more than solar system materials. And we showed that it's not the same. So then, another person said, "Okay, well, maybe it's some material from, you know,

• 54:14Speaker 02

  the impact sites of meteors, it's called tectites."

• 54:19Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  And we went to analyze tectites, and again, compared and showed that it's not the same. So, it takes a lot of work to demonstrate that all these debunkers are not making a good case. So, we did the hard work. They had an easy time, because they just sit on their chair and just, you know, refute and say, "No, we don't believe in..."

• 54:38Danny Jones?

  None of them came to look at the, take a look and analyze it themselves?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Well, we, the materials are in the laboratory of Stein Jacobson, and he did a fantastic job. And he has very good credentials, you can go to his lab and see what he did. I mean, we reported in peer-reviewed journals, we reported all the results. But the intellectual climate right now in academia is such that any new knowledge is resisted by experts. And the way I think of this is, you can understand it, because we know about AI systems, right? We give them a training data set, and whatever they say is as good as the training data set. So, imagine taking an AI system and training it only on asteroids and comets from the solar system, which is pretty much what these experts are.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Then, they would argue that everything in the sky is a comet or an asteroid from the solar system.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  And my point is simple. It's definitely not the case because we know that we launched equipment to space. So for example, on January 2nd this year, there was the Minor Planet Center, which is the official organization for cataloguing objects close to Earth, announced a near-Earth asteroid. And then a day later, they realized, oh, wait a minute. This one moves along the path of the Tesla Roadster car that was launched by SpaceX in 2018. That was a dummy payload on the Falcon Heavy. So then they said, sorry, we take it out of the catalogue because it's not a rock, it's actually a car. Now, the only reason they, and there are, you know, there is a dozen of such cases in recent years.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  And the only reason they know about the fact that it's a car, it's just a source of light. It reflects sunlight, right? The only way they know is because they know what we launched. Now imagine that Elon Musk is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang. Because, you know, we existed, the human species, had technological abilities only over the past century. And if another civilization existed, you know, much earlier than us, because most stars from billions of years before the sun, the sun is a late comer. It's just, it just formed in the last one-third of cosmic history. So I can imagine there were far more accomplished space entrepreneurs than Elon Musk. And then there are cars in interstellar space, not just cars.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  There could be equipment that is still functional, you know, that can do things. And if you don't include it in your training dataset, you would never consider the possibility that something that looks anomalous is really technological.

• 57:15Danny Jones?

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• 58:46Speaker 02

  So Oumuamua, for example, was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force. There was no evaporation of gas or dust from it. It was not the rocket effect that we're used to in comets. So what did the mainstream do, the comet experts do? They, most recently, I'm not talking back then. Back then, they argued maybe it's a hydrogen iceberg, maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg, maybe all kinds of, you know, like a dust bunny, all kinds of suggestions. This is the mainstream, to remind you. Dust bunny, just a cloud of dust that is 100 times less dense than air, being pushed by reflecting sunlight. That was one of the serious attempts to explain the anomalies.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  And then they say, "Oh, that we debunked a non-natural origin by proposing these alternatives that were never demonstrated." You know, it's just like you come up with a story and, you know, why would it be a dust bunny? Why would it be a nitrogen iceberg? We've never seen, there isn't enough solid nitrogen in the Milky Way Galaxy to provide a large enough population of such icebergs. And hydrogen icebergs, we don't know if they're even made in nature. We've never seen those in molecular clouds or anywhere. Anyway, the point is...

• 59:59Speaker 02

  That Oumuamua had this feature and non-gravitational acceleration. There was this force acting on it without any cometary evaporation, no gas or dust, even though the Spitzer Space Telescope looked for gas and dust, didn't find any. So then, right now, the comet experts are saying it's a dark comet. What does it mean? It means that they define it as a comet for which you don't see the signature of a comet. So it's an oxymoron. Uh huh. So suppose you're an expert on zebras and you go to the zoo, okay? And then you see an elephant. It's a big fat gray zebra. Yeah, you would say it's a zebra without stripes. Right.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  But it's still a zebra in your vocabulary, because your vocabulary is very limited. Right. So my point is, they would define spacecraft as dark comets because they don't see a cometary tail. Or, you know, a spacecraft could even have some exhaust gas coming, you know, out of it. And then they would say, oh, it's definitely a comet. There would be a press conference by an astroenterist. We see gas coming out of it, it's definitely a comet. But you have to understand, their assertions are coming from when they say the 3I Atlas behaves like a comet. What they're basically saying is that there is a plume of gas around it. And by the way, the only 4% by mass is water.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  So even though the experts were saying initially it must be water-rich, it's not water-rich. And also, it responds to gravity, okay? But any object would respond to... So when these people say it walks like a comet, it talks like a comet, it's a comet. You know, we should ask them, what about the anomalies? First of all, the big size of 3I Atlas. So it's so massive, how do you deliver such a massive object over a period of one decade? The second anomaly is the plane of the planets. How do you deliver it? Like a reconnaissance mission into that plane by a natural process because you should

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  have monitored a hundred objects before you saw one of them being aligned as much as five degrees with ecliptic plane.

• 1:02:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Anomaly number two. Then, when you look at this object, even now, there seem to be an extension of the object in the direction of the sun. So this is an anti-tail.

• 1:02:27Danny Jones?

  The anti-tail, yeah.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Anti-tail. So it's just like finding a street cat. Everyone says it's a street cat in your backyard, and I'm just saying, look, the the tail is coming from its forehead, not from its back.

• 1:02:38Danny Jones?

  So we've never observed any kind of comet with an anti-tail. This is the first time we've ever seen it.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  So when people say, oh, we have seen examples, they have to realize most of those examples were just optical illusion. In other words, we were positioned at an angle that looked as if the tail that is actually heading away from the sun is pointing at the sun just because of the orientation. It's a perspective effect. So we were looking at it from an angle that looked as if there is an extension towards the sun, but no. I mean, the reason, the physics of that is simple. The physics is that the solar wind and the solar radiation are pushing gas particles, dust particles away from the sun. Okay? So whenever, so usually the sun-facing side is, you know, losing those particles because it's heated.

• 1:03:27Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  And then they immediately get turned around into a beautiful tail of either, you know, gas particles like ions or atoms, or dust particles pushed away. But in this case, at least in the early days, you know, of July and August, we saw an extension just towards the direction of motion, towards the sun. And it was really paradoxical. Now, the Hi-Rise image in the NASA press conference, you know, is really of very poor quality.

• 1:03:59Danny Jones?

  This is the one that you were talking about when you were on Rogan's podcast. The government was shut down and they wouldn't release the photos.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:04:05Danny Jones?

  They've now released them.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  So this is a photo.

• 1:04:07Danny Jones?

  This is from the Mars reconnaissance.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Orbiter, exactly. And there was a camera there called Hi-Rise, and it captured the highest, in principle, the highest resolution image of three Atlas with a pixel resolution of 30 kilometers when three Atlas came within 30 million kilometers from Mars. Okay, so it was a half a meter aperture that was big enough to resolve thirty kilometers on 3I Atlas. However, because the camera was not designed to look at a moving object, it was designed to survey the surface of Mars.

• 1:04:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  The people who analyzed the data stated that there was some jitter in the camera that degraded the image and they gave us a.

• 1:04:53Danny Jones?

  Can you find this, Steve?

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  They gave us.

• 1:04:55Danny Jones?

  Where will we find this photo?

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  A high-rise camera of.

• 1:04:59Danny Jones?

  Is it on your Medium account?

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  It's also on my Medium, yes. But you can just put.

• 1:05:03Danny Jones?

  Just go to Avi Lo's Medium account, bro, you'll see it.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Or you put a high-rise image of 3I Atlas. And the point is that if you look at that fuzzy image, which by the way is much worse quality than amateur astronomers.

• 1:05:16Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. What you see is an extension of the glow around 3I Atlas in the direction of motion, not in the direction of the sun. Here is the image. You see the direction of motion is roughly perpendicular to the direction of the sun for the first time, because previous images were taken when the object, when this object was approaching us and the sun. We were just separated by maybe ten degrees from the direction of the sun. So we saw the object approaching us, but when it came close to Mars, the high-rise camera could look at it from the side, okay, and could see it when it was moving roughly perpendicular to the direction of the sun. Okay, so you see the two directions.

• 1:05:59Danny Jones?

  So this is the photo from Mars orbiter right here?

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:06:03Danny Jones?

  And it's, so if the orbiter is on the surface of Mars or on the edge of Mars.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Just hovering above, yeah.

• 1:06:10Danny Jones?

  Which direction is the comet moving?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  So it's moving sideways relative to the direction of the sun, as you can see here.

• 1:06:17Danny Jones?

  I see.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Because it was basically passing near Mars on a line that was getting closer and closer to the sun, but when you look at it from Mars, the vantage point of.

• 1:06:29Danny Jones?

  Is it traveling away from Mars? Or is it traveling perpendicular?

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  It's traveling here. This is the orbit, you can see. So you see 3A Atlas is passing, yeah. It's passing very close to Mars, which is one of the strange qualities of this trajectory, that it comes very close to Mars.

• 1:06:51Danny Jones?

  Nowhere near Earth.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  No, Earth is actually on the opposite side of the Sun when it came closest to the Sun, which suggested maybe it's avoiding us because it will use the opportunity of coming close to the Sun as to gain something from, you know, to get gravitational assist if it releases some probes, for example, or does a maneuver. But when it came closest to Mars, you know, it was moving in a direction that was perpendicular to the direction of the Sun. And then we see the glow extending in the direction of motion ahead of the object. Again, never seen before.

• 1:07:26Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, because usually you expect the direction of the Sun to dictate where you get evaporation, right? So the sun-facing side gets evaporated by the sunlight and then the material gets pushed back by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind. But so it gives preference to the object-sun axis. However, here we see the plume extending in the, ahead of the object. It's not a trail behind the object that is left behind. It's actually ahead of the object. So the question arises, is it a beam of light or a beam of particles used by a spacecraft to clear out any micrometeorites or, you know, impactors that can damage a technological object? That could be one possibility.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  But then in the NASA press conference, no discussion of that anomaly.

• 1:08:16Danny Jones?

  What is the, what are these conservative, conventional?

• 1:08:22Danny Jones?

  Astrophysicists saying about the anti-tail? Like, what is the most compelling pushback that you've heard about the anti-tail?

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in the original report about the Hubble Space Telescope image from the 21st of July, there was the interpretation that perhaps, you know, usually dust particles that have roughly the wave, the size equal to the wavelength of sunlight, which is about half a micrometer, half a micron, those particles, dust particles scatter sunlight most effectively because they have a lot of surface area. And bigger particles do not scatter sunlight as effectively. Again, big, big things have less surface per unit mass. So usually the story is that sub-micron particles scatter sunlight

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  and then you can calculate if they scatter sunlight, they also get pushed behind the object. They, they create a tail. There is no escape from that because the same process that gives you the glow from scattered sunlight also pushes them. So the suggestion was maybe we're dealing with dust particles that are much more massive, a million times more massive. So they have a size of 100 micrometers or more. So they're so massive that they have much less surface per unit mass. So they get pushed very little by the sunlight. Hmm. But that would mean that you need to release much more mass in those particles to end up with the same glow of light. At any event, that is the, the more conventional interpretation

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  to say the dust that is ejected by 3I Atlas is much bigger. You know, 100 times bigger particles or a million times more massive particles. And because of that, they don't turn around and, and, and get pushed back. Now, I wrote two papers with a colleague, Eric Kito, where, and one of them was just published after peer review, where we said, maybe these are ice particles, you know, just ice that eventually gets evaporated before it has a chance to turn around. It's not dust particles that survive sunlight. It's It's actually ice particles that get evaporated and then.

• 1:10:35Danny Jones?

  So it's like the side that's facing the sun.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:37Danny Jones?

  It's boiling the front of it and making a little plume.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  Plume of icy icy particles.

• 1:10:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Uh, that was, that was a conventional interpretation. But the thing is, is that our paper and the original paper are the only discussions on this, this issue. So when people say it's a comet, they don't attempt to explain the anomalies I mentioned. They just ignore them. Okay. And that's what you should ask NASA officials when they say we are confident. Okay, how do you explain the large mass of the object? How do you, I'm quantitatively, not just say, oh, comets are weird and some of them are unusual and therefore it's okay.

• 1:11:15Danny Jones?

  They're all different, right?

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  But that's not an explanation if you don't have enough mass in rocky material. You need a stellar space to accommodate the delivery of such a package over the past decade. You need to explain that. You can't just ignore it. This is not politics. We are talking about science here. And you have to think, you can't just, so you can't just be a bureaucrat that makes statements and everyone should believe you because of your authority. That's not the way science is done. We all know that the, the church, the Vatican apologized and admitted 350 years after Galileo died. That he was right. That was a very bad public relations stunt. Imagine NASA coming up and saying it's definitely a comet and something ends up being a technological relic. How would they look?

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  So if you want to be sincere and honest, you don't make some authoritative statements by bureaucrats. You go to the data and explain the anomaly. So if you want to say this is definitely something we understand. You have to explain why is there a glow ahead of the object in the direction of motion? According to the image that you are showing in the same press conference. I'm not saying about other images, even your image is paradoxical.

• 1:12:24Danny Jones?

  And explain it to people. Explain it to normal, everyday people that can't understand physics or can't, or don't have a deep understanding of astrophysics. We are human beings that live on the earth. Why can't we understand this?

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. No, so that's exactly my point. You know, people ask me, why are you putting a significant fraction of your time? explaining to the public. And I say it's because, you know, I'm puzzled, just like the public. I don't feel myself different than the public. I just have the privilege of using the scientific method to answer questions that I'm curious about and I take, you know, I I'm very respectful of the curiosity of the public. So when the public tells me the most interesting question for us is, are we alone? Is there, not in the sense of microbes, but is there another intelligence out there? I take it seriously because the public funds science by paying taxes. And Right.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  what the mainstream community is doing is saying, thank you very much for the money. We decided to use 10 billion dollars over the next two decades to look for microbes because we think that we will, we are, we are more likely to find evidence for those than technological signatures. They decided that the gatekeepers said, give us the money and that's what we will do with it. And I say, I say, no, we should hedge our bets. We should listen to the public and we should put billions of dollars to the search for intelligent life in the universe, you know, technological signature as much as we put towards the search for microbes. This is just a matter of common sense.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  Anyone that bets, you know, in the stock market or anywhere would argue that you need to diversify your portfolio. You can't just be obsessed with microbes and say, we will put 10 billion dollars to that, to the search for microbes and zero out any investment of federal funds in the search for technological signature, which is exactly the reality that we live in right now. I'm not inventing this. This is the intellectual reality within academia right now. Let's focus on microbes. It's completely legitimate. If I were to write a paper about microbes, you know, it would be embraced, nobody, no, nobody would. If I were to do it, of course, two decades ago, then there would be attacked. When I started doing astrophysics, people didn't believe that there are exoplanets.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  So I I've been around, you know, I've been around for 50 years, half of the modern history of physics. I know how trends are becoming popular when before.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  They became popular, they were ridiculed. I see that again and again in many different contexts, including eh the discovery of exoplanets. And the story there is that there was an astronomer named Otto Struve, who in nineteen fifty-two said, "We can search for a Jupiter-mass planet close to a sun-like star by the eh the fact that it blocks eh part of the light of the star when it moves around it, eh if we are oriented in the right way, or because it jiggles the the star back and forth. And it was doable, but then for eh eh fifty-three years, people didn't follow on that because they said, "We know that why Jupiter is so far from the sun.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  It's because that's where water ice forms and we have a theory for that. We will not waste telescope time in looking for Jupiter's close to a sun-like star." So then in nineteen ninety-five, um eh eh there was a discovery of a hot Jupiter, and the Nobel Prize was awarded for that discovery. And if you look at the paper, the discovery paper of the hot Jupiter, you don't see a reference at all to Otto Struve's paper that suggested using the same technique. Wow. So what does it show? Eh eh you know, it shows that science is not efficient because eh prejudice

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  suppresses innovation. Why would innovation be embraced by the high-tech companies? Because they realize that, you know, even if you invest in a hundred ideas and most of them are wrong, if one of them turns out to be right, you can make a fortune. So they... So in the financial sector where you might say people should be most conservative because it's their money, they realize the value of taking bets and, you know, hedging our bets and and and doing risky projects. In the, in academia, no. And that is surprising. Why? Because the whole idea of tenure in academia was meant to give a sense of job security that will allow you to innovate without worrying that you would lose your job.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  And what happens in reality is that members of academia are becoming very conservative as they get tenure because they have their own echo chamber. They educate students and postdocs to repeat their mantras. Basically, it's an echo chamber and the students and postdocs realize that to get jobs, they have to repeat what was said already instead of encouraging them to break out. So you end up with a situation, just to get honors, awards, financial support for research, you have to dance by the tunes of selection committees that are emphasizing past knowledge. They don't encourage those people who are pioneering new knowledge.

• 1:17:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  And that's the reality that I face.

• 1:17:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Did you ever expect to get this much pushback or take this many arrows from coming out and speaking about this stuff as much as you are?

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  No, because I started in studies of the universe, cosmology, and we should admit that we know very little because Nobel prizes were awarded to people who quantified how much we don't know. We know that there is, most of the matter in the universe is invisible. We don't know the substance that makes most of the matter in the universe. It's called dark matter.

• 1:18:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  And we're talking about of order eighty-five percent of the matter is of an unknown substance. And that's quite remarkable. And in fact, it took again forty years for the community to even recognize that after Fritz Swicki suggested the name. He talked about invisible matter that he discovered just based on the gravitational influence of this matter on visible matter. So we know there is much more matter out there, but we don't know what it is. And then there is most of the energy in the universe also. It's called dark energy. So I came from that field. And when I wrote more than a thousand scientific papers and wrote about eight books, and when I worked on puzzles...

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  You can call it anomalies in cosmology, like the dark matter. It was very much encouraged. If you come up with an idea that is non-conventional, that explains dark matter, everyone said, "Great, now we can actually test it." And they would be encouraged to either do experiments or suggest theoretical arguments that prove you wrong. But it was a very collegial environment, intellectual environment. Then I get to this. So I continue to practice exactly the same principles of suggesting something new so people would appreciate it and, you know, try to either rule it out or rule it in. And that's, you know, that's a fair game.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  And I get to this subject where you have people who work on rocks in space. And, you know, it's a very different intellectual climate. I would make the distinction between playing chess, you know, that studying the universe cosmology is just like playing chess. You know, you have to be, to think about the moves and what's the right thing to do. Whereas in the case of frogs, it's more like mad wrestling, where people are not intellectually driven. They just will bring you down because you said something different and they are the experts.

• 1:20:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it's unfortunate the amount of ego and gatekeeping and just bias that's built into academia from, you know, the money and the competition for grants and all that kind of stuff, when there should be more curiosity.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. So here is my definition of science. And that's the way I understand science after practicing it for 50 years. Science, the foundation of science, is the humility to learn. You have to be humble to admit that you don't know the answer in advance. So the foundation of science is the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. And what you see in academia is the arrogance of expertise, where people say, "I know what it is because I'm the expert." You don't have a track record of thirty years working on the subject, therefore you have nothing to say.

• 1:21:21Danny Jones?

  Right. And this is not only in in astrophysics, this is in every aspect of academia, every channel of academia, and every single profession, every industry, it's ubiquitous, unfortunately, and it's part of human nature.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  You know, I visited Denmark, Copenhagen, at the end of August, there was a conference in the Niels Bohr Institute there. And I entered the auditorium of the conference and it looked familiar. Why? Because it appeared in a photograph from ninety-five years ago, where the founders of quantum mechanics gathered in the same auditorium. So there were all these famous people like Niels Bohr, Max Planck,

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli,

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Lev Landau. So I recognized the place. I went to sit on one of the benches and someone said, "Oh, you're just sitting where Wolfgang Pauli sat at that conference." And all I could think about is how uncomfortable is the bench. It's made of wood. And you know, people back then had very low quality of life. Just think about sitting on this wooden bench, it's so uncomfortable. But I would trade everything I have, going back ninety-five years, to the time when the pioneers of quantum mechanics were open-minded. You know, they revised the way we think about the physical reality. That was dramatic. Even Albert Einstein couldn't believe it. He

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  tried to argue that, no, there cannot be spooky action at a distance, quantum mechanics. But Niels Bohr said, "No, you have to embrace the new understanding which makes the physical reality very different than what you're used to." He said that to Einstein. Einstein didn't accept it and was wrong. Niels Bohr was right. And the point is...

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Quantum mechanics is now the foundation for all the technologies we use. You know, the fact, the way we speak right now with a microphone, everything is based on electronics, you know, with the foundation of quantum mechanics. Ninety-five years ago, that's when they discovered the fundamental principles that allow us to build these technologies. And it was all based on curiosity and the humility to learn. That's what, that was exactly the argument of Niels Bohr against, because Einstein was respecting past knowledge, classical physics, he wanted to understand quantum mechanics in the same way that classical physics is understood. But Niels Bohr said, "No, it's a new reality." And that's the humility to learn.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  And that's why I would go back ninety-five years, sit on this wooden bench, for as much as you asked me to sit, being surrounded by innovative minds where, you know, attempts to understand nature are not ridiculed. And what you find instead is, in fundamental theoretical physics for fifty years, the prevailing paradigm was there are extra dimensions, string theory will unify quantum mechanics and gravity, and we haven't seen a single piece of evidence to support that speculation, that there are extra dimensions. In fact, supersymmetry, which was at the foundation of string theory,

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  was not found by the Large Hadron Collider that cost ten billion dollars. So you see a mainstream in theoretical physics for fifty years working in a direction that did not produce any fruits. Doesn't make a prediction, doesn't explain why the big bang happened, what happens inside a black hole, doesn't resolve any of the anomalies that we are aware of in the universe, but nevertheless, you know, this is very popular. Now, I don't see any of these critics saying, "Oh, what is wrong with those people? They have a speculation about extra dimensions, we don't see them." That's a much bigger speculation than arguing that a meteor

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  that the US government reported about was interstellar, or arguing that 3A Atlas might be technological. Why? Because we know of such objects that collided with Earth probably from interstellar space, because we know about interstellar objects. And we know about technological objects in space because we launched them. So my point is, what the resistance you find from the critics...

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  Is disingenuous, it's not sincere because they should have criticized the community who speculates much more, which is the mainstream of theoretical physics. Why don't they do that? Because there is a large community out there and all these science popularizers like Brian Cox or Neil deGrasse Tyson will never raise a doubt and go against them because then they would lose popularity.

• 1:26:09Danny Jones?

  Right, well, they're certainly not taking a risk, right? You're certainly taking a risk by going out on a limb.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but why isn't that a risky proposition to imagine extra dimensions?

• 1:26:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I agree with you. I completely agree with you there. But it's just like, it makes sense why these people don't want to attach themselves to your, or agree with your speculation because you're already out on a thin limb trying to propose the idea that this could be some sort of technological object from another star system. And if they sort of march out onto that branch with you and then for some reason you get proven wrong or whatever, they don't want to be associated with that and have a stain on them.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so what you're saying, what you're saying is that string theory, since it has no experimental test, will never be proven wrong and therefore it's a safe bet to continue to advocate for it?

• 1:27:02Danny Jones?

  Right, no, I agree. The contradiction is insane.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  I mean, this is the way science is done. You have to put hypotheses forward. And sometimes you're wrong, sometimes you're right. You know, Albert Einstein was wrong three times between 1935, 1940. He argued that quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at the distance, we just said. He argued that gravitational waves do not exist and black holes do not exist. And this was when he arrived at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study. So he was at the prime of his career, made three mistakes and the experimental teams that proved him wrong got the Nobel Prize over the past decade. And my point is, if you're working in the frontiers, you have to be bold, take some risks, and you might be wrong. But one way or another, you advance our knowledge. And just resisting

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  a possibility because we don't like it, because it doesn't represent our past training data set, is not a good enough argument. Because then you should argue that string theory should not be pursued. What evidence do we have for that? At least for spatial objects, we have evidence.

• 1:28:05Danny Jones?

  Do you think that there could be a, some sort of group or...

• 1:28:13Danny Jones?

  Shadowy organization that has been responsible for siloing certain discoveries in science or physics research in the past or currently, like for example, trying to throw the trajectory of mainstream research off a certain path and trying to take certain discoveries or certain areas of research, take it black into the like the military sector or whatever, so the public can't get its hands on.

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  Well, that would be a viable hypothesis if the government has information that we don't know about, okay?

• 1:28:49Danny Jones?

  Like, for example, if you made some crazy discovery, right? And you were talking about it with your colleagues and then someone from some intelligence organization came to you and was talking to you and saying, hey, for national security, we can't make this public, you need to come work for us now, something like, something along those lines.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Well, they cannot do that because, because, you know, science is done by many people and eventually the data will show it. So that's the lesson to learn from Galileo, Galilei telling the church, I see moons around Jupiter, therefore the earth is always at the center. By suppressing Galileo, they just benefited for a short while, but eventually there were so many observers that, in fact, we have spacecraft that look at the earth from a distance and show that the earth moves around the sun. So the point is, you can, you know, gain some time during which you spread misinformation, but in the long term, it will be found, so there is no point.

• 1:29:43Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  So dealing with things outside the solar system is my day job.

• 1:29:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  The government's day job is national security, okay? The two are completely unrelated.

• 1:29:55Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  So if they have information, let's say from 50 years ago, that indicates superhuman intelligence, there is no excuse for them to keep it confidential, cause any technology developed by the Russians or others, you know, adversarial nations, is irrelevant today. If it was 50 years ago, it's irrelevant today, you know? And so if they had something that they retrieved, they cannot understand, just show it to scientists like myself and let's figure it out.

• 1:30:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Because it's not relevant anymore. You know, that's before the space age. I'm talking about if they have something like that. So my point is... You know, if they ever want me to sign an NDA, it will be about information that is relevant to national security. It shouldn't be about what lies outside the solar system.

• 1:30:46Danny Jones?

  The reason I ask is that there's overwhelming evidence that the government has done this in the past, right? I mean, just to talk about the UFO topic for one minute. It's, it's, there's an exorbitant amount of evidence of people that have come out, whistleblowers, books written, papers written, and interviews done with folks that have been around, like, for example, the Roswell crash in forty-seven.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  No, I, I...

• 1:31:06Danny Jones?

  And have, and attested to the government having this sort of technology that's unexplainable if it was created on Earth. These like flying saucers or flying discs or whatever they are.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  That's exactly why I'm leading the Galileo Project, and we are constructing observatories. The most recent one was in Nevada. And we are monitoring the sky twenty-four seven, the entire sky with multiple units to triangulate on objects and figure out their distance.

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  ...

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  Velocity acceleration, check whether they are performing outside the envelope of human-made technologies. So I'm pursuing the scientific path because, you know, it will take us forever to wait for the government to release their data. So I'm saying, if these objects exist, we'll find them. Now, I've been, you know, in, I was briefing Congress on the first of May this year, and the day before, I went to visit the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon. And I asked them, "Do you see anything?" Because they claimed they looked at all the reports within government, they have access everywhere. And they said, "So far, we haven't seen anything unusual, except for some reports from FBI

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  agents that do not have quantitative data." That's what they said, in the Pentagon. Now, the day later, I hear Eric Davis, who just appeared in the age of disclosure, sitting next to me in Congress and saying, "You know, there are a dozen craft with pilots in them and so forth that the government has, and they gave it to corporations." Yeah. How put off, said the same thing. Yeah, but, but then, you know, I'm a scientist, okay? So I, I don't believe stories. People can tell me stories, I wouldn't believe it. For the same reason that FIFA, you know, the Soccer World Organization, when there is a dispute on the soccer field, they don't go around and ask the players, they just look at what the cameras show. Sure. So I, you know, within the Galileo Project, we built cameras that can tell us.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  I don't care what this person said, what that, I mean, it's intriguing, that's what inspired me to follow this path, but, but I want to see the evidence, okay? So, once I see the evidence, and by the way, I don't need to tell others, I just want to know, okay? And that's my driver. And so, you know, I once asked my class at Harvard, I said, "You know, if a spacecraft lands at Harvard Square," I asked the students, "And you're offered a one-way trip, would you take it?"

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  And you know, these young students, undergrads, they said, only if we have Wi-Fi connectivity, so we can use Instagram to show our friends about, you know, inform them about our experiences. And I said, why would you care about your friends if you're on a one-way trip out of Earth? Uh, you know, and so to me, it's just my knowledge. Uh, and I don't, you know, if the government comes forward and shows something to me and they tell me not to disclose it, I want to know, you know, I, I,

• 1:35:07Danny Jones?

  Would you, would you agree to that?

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  I would agree to that, but I, at the moment, nobody said that, so I don't know if there is anything. You know, so the point of the matter is, uh, until I see the evidence, I don't care about stories that are not enough for me.

• 1:35:23Danny Jones?

  For the record, I think I would agree to that, too.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:35:26Danny Jones?

  If they were, came to me and said they're gonna tell me the truth about everything and they want to show me the flying saucers, I'd agree.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:35:30Danny Jones?

  Never say a word about it.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  That's okay.

• 1:35:32Danny Jones?

  I think in a heartbeat, I would do that.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. By the way, I should say that about the flying saucer. A decade ago, I asked my wife if she, what, what does she have to say about it? And she said, well, you can go on this spacecraft, no, no problem.

• 1:35:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  But just make sure you leave the car keys with me and ask them not to ruin the loan when they take off.

• 1:35:51Danny Jones?

  Haha.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  And now I asked her again, a decade later, and um, she said, I will join you.

• 1:35:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Uh, she's so disappointed by the daily news across the world.

• 1:36:05Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  That um, she's also tempted to leave this earth.

• 1:36:09Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's unfortunate. Um, are you familiar with John Mack?

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:16Danny Jones?

  You seem to be on a very similar trajectory that John Mack was on.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:36:20Danny Jones?

  Not, not, not, well, it's very similar. He was, he was different. He was a psychologist and he was interviewing people who claimed to have.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  So he was focusing on stories that people tell him. I'm shying away from stories that people tell.

• 1:36:31Danny Jones?

  Right, but he was also doing it in a scientific manner.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  No, that's okay.

• 1:36:34Danny Jones?

  He was doing.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  The method was scientific and therefore similar, but he was focusing on people. And I say, don't focus on people.

• 1:36:42Danny Jones?

  Right, well, you can't take pictures of memories, right? I mean, you're, you're, he, he was interviewing hundreds of folks all over the world who had very similar experiences.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you have to understand that people know about each other or they know about stories. And in addition, there may be some psychological trends that are common to people, you know, like everyone would.

• 1:37:02Speaker 02

  You know, have similar illusions because the way the brain works. So if you rely just on people, that's not enough.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  So you, so what is your take on that, on that stuff? My take is that it's intriguing, but not conclusive in any way. I never had an experience myself and I've never seen direct evidence. But I'm curious enough from the storytelling, you know, by witnesses and so on. Curious enough to address this, this important question scientifically. Because that's the only way by which I think we can convince everyone that it's real. If it's real, if it's real. So I want to see the evidence. If it's not real, then I want to know that and just save time for all the people that think that it's real. You know, like, forget about it. It's just like, you know, I remember when I was young, there, there were lots of young

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  people who said that, you know, I want to meet my ideal partner. And that partner needs to look like a movie star and it needs to be as smart as Einstein and so forth. And then, you know, at a late age, nobody showed up that fit those characteristics and they had to compromise. Now, if you have any, if you imagine something exists in reality that doesn't really exist, you have to have a reality check. And the best reality check is to look for the hard evidence. That's what I'm doing. And maybe, maybe this, what we are talking about exists and then I'll find it. And then, you know, that will change our future dramatically.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  Because if we realize that there is a smarter kid on our block, there is a more accomplished sibling that we didn't know about. If we realize that there is room for improvement, that there is superhuman intelligence out there, then we will try to do better, you know. And instead of engaging in conflicts, we might decide to cooperate on this rock. You know, we are all in the same boat, all humans. So we would recognize the similarities that all members of the human species have, given that there is someone else out there. Who is different, especially if that someone may be a serial killer. You know, if you realize that you're on a blind date and on the other side, there is a serial killer, you know that. Then you get your act together.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  So, so the threat from alien technology could bring people together because it will be shared by all humans on earth. And you don't want, you know, some members of the human species to rock the boat too much because it will endanger everyone.

• 1:39:36Danny Jones?

  What, did you come up with a theory that it could be a Trojan horse? It could be a spaceship disguised as a comet?

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  And not, well, many people suggested that it's a possibility. Uh, and that's why, you know, but you can tell the difference because nowadays, you know, with the web telescope, for example, you can look for a source of heat that does not just reflect the illumination by sunlight. Okay, so you might see a hot engine. In fact, 3A Atlas became bluer than the sun when it came close to the sun. And the question is why? Blue is usually associated with hot objects. It may be that some molecules emitted in the blue band and that's what we saw. But at any event, it was a fact.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  By the way, most recently, just a few days ago, I realized another anomaly of 3A Atlas that I never thought about before. And that is, I, you know, the path of 3A Atlas takes it close, closest to Jupiter on March 16th, 2026. And it's possible to forecast the distance that it will have from Jupiter on March 16th.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  Turns out that this distance to within four significant digits is exactly the distance from Jupiter where Jupiter's gravity wins over the sun's gravity. So the sun's gravity. It introduces a tidal effect, basically. It rips apart any satellite of Jupiter that is beyond this distance, which is called the hill radius.

• 1:41:12Danny Jones?

  The hill radius?

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was discovered by a physicist with that last.

• 1:41:17Danny Jones?

  And this is around the entire circumference of Jupiter?

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's around Jupiter and out to that distance, if you put a satellite, it can remain bound to Jupiter. If you put it outside, it will be torn apart by the sun.

• 1:41:30Danny Jones?

  And why is that?

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  And by the way, this distance, this distance depends on time because as Jupiter goes around the sun, the distance between Jupiter and the sun changes slightly. And so I calculated it on March 16th and then you find to within four significant digits, it's the same. Now.

• 1:41:48Danny Jones?

  Within four significant digits, what do you mean by that?

• 1:41:51Speaker 02

  I mean that it's the number that you get for the distance is identical to four digits. Now, there is some uncertainty in the forecast. The uncertainty puts it in agreement with the value that we know should be the hill radius for Jupiter on that day. Now, the plot gets.

• 1:42:16Danny Jones?

  So on March 16th, the Three Eye Atlas is going to be underneath.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Just exactly at that distance.

• 1:42:24Danny Jones?

  At the distance to where it will be able to be like in the orbit of Jupiter.

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are the so-called Lagrange points, if you are familiar with that.

• 1:42:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  These are the points where if you put a satellite, you need very little maneuvering or fuel supply to keep it there because there is almost zero gravity there. So the attraction to Jupiter is balanced by the gravity of the sun. And so the Lagrange points, L1 and L2, the two first Lagrange points are exactly on the hill radius, on the hill sphere. But anyway, so turns out that there was some non-gravitational acceleration observed for Three Eye Atlas, meaning that when it came closest to the sun during the month of October, it deviated from the original path a little bit. And that level of deviation, I calculated.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  Allows it to come exactly at the Hill radius. If we didn't have the non-gravitational acceleration, it would have been off. And so the question arises as to whether the non-gravitational acceleration resulted from some engine that gave it, provided it with adjustments to its trajectory and did it close to the Sun in order to get the gravitational assist from the Sun. So that it gets exactly where it needs to get so that it can deploy devices near Jupiter, maybe at the Lagrange points or...

• 1:43:54Danny Jones?

  Deploy vices?

• 1:43:56Speaker 02

  Devices.

• 1:43:56Danny Jones?

  Devices, like probes or something?

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Probes, yeah. Or communication devices, or maybe collect something that was put there before. I mean, I have no idea. But it's just a coincidence that has a likelihood of one in 26,000, given how many significant digits are. We're talking about about 54 million kilometers from Jupiter. And so, you know, if you just say, well, in principle, it would have been anywhere. Because Jupiter moves around the Sun, you know, it has an orbital radius around the Sun. So the passage of Thirre Atlas could have been anywhere between, you know, a distance

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  of zero and a distance equal to the diameter of the orbit of Jupiter around the Sun. And then you find a chance of one in 26,000 that it would have come that close to the Hill radius. You might say coincidences happen, you know, I met my wife on a blind date, you know, what's the chance? But this is one in 26,000 on top of the other anomalies that I mentioned before. Why would it get to the Hill radius, exactly to four significant digits? Now, we will be able to tell when it gets there because we have orbiters like the Juno spacecraft there that could monitor if anything unusual happens, if there are any satellites being deployed.

• 1:45:21Danny Jones?

  So the Juno, the Juno is going around Jupiter?

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:25Danny Jones?

  And we can, we can tap into the Juno and get the pictures from it?

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Juno will also have, has also a radio antenna that can look for radio signals from Thirre Atlas if there are any.

• 1:45:36Danny Jones?

  Uh huh. And NASA controls all this?

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I spoke to the principal investigator of Juno and, you know, he is a faculty member at the university and he told me that they will do the best they can. I was hoping they can bring it closer to 3A Atlas and in fact Representative Anna Paolina-Luna wrote a letter after I spoke with her on the phone about 3A Atlas and so she very generously encouraged NASA to use Juno and look at 3A Atlas, which I hope they will. But the point of the matter is, with more data, we can figure out if there is really something strange going on, if it was targeting Jupiter, not the Earth.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  By the way, it would feel as if we are in a party, but nobody wishes to dance with us, you know. So for some reason, that visitor does not care about us, it doesn't care about Earth, which could be for a good reason, because it started this journey a billion years ago. Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, was visible from a distance and they have some mission to accomplish there, nothing to do with the Earth. And, you know, the Earth became interesting only much, much later. So I'm just saying it's an anomaly that should be looked at. And, you know, what I want to, in the coming weeks, you know, leading to December 19th, that's when 3A Atlas will come closest to Earth.

• 1:47:06Speaker 02

  So in the coming weeks, we'll have a flood of data coming from hundreds of observatories around the globe, because the International Asteroid Warning Network decided to coordinate observations of as many observatories as possible on Earth between November 27th and January 27th. So we will have a lot of data, also from the space telescopes. And I want... To figure out, there are multiple, in the amateur astronomical images of three Atlas, there are multiple jets coming from three Atlas. In early one, I counted seven of them, seven jets. And the fundamental question is, are these jets simply the sublimation of pockets of ice that are illuminated by sunlight?

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  In which case, it will demonstrate that this is a natural object, a rock. Or are they produced by thrusters, technological thrusters? In which case, the speed of the gas coming out of them should be much larger because the sublimation of ice gives you at most a speed of 400 meters per second. That's the thermal speed of molecules at the surface temperature of three Atlas. And chemical thrusters like rockets, they operate at a few kilometers per second, a factor of 10 higher speed. And then you have ion thrusters that operate at tenths of kilometers per second. That's a factor of 100 in speed. So if we measure the speed of the gas in those jets that are observed, we will be

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  able to tell if it's natural or artificial in origin. These jets are... Yeah. So, you know, and I don't have a problem. I defined the scale between zero and 10 back in July, that is called the lobe scale, where zero means that it's a natural object, for any interstellar object, and 10 means that it's technological and a potential threat to humanity. And I don't mind bringing it all the way to zero if it becomes obvious that, you know, these jets are moving exactly at the thermal speed that we expect. The object is much smaller than I thought it is. It's basically smaller than a kilometer. And it happened by coincidence to be a rock on a path that goes through the plane of the planets around the sun.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  You know, fine. Where are you at in that scale right now? I was, to start with, at four.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  That was July, August. And right now, I'm asked by many people, but I I'm waiting for the data. Because it will be foolish of me to change my ranking. When the data is just about to come forward. And so by the holidays, we should know. And then let's just hope that we will not get any unwanted gifts for the holidays. From this object.

• 1:49:52Danny Jones?

  So you're still currently at a four and today is. What's the date today, November, what 25th?

• 1:49:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I haven't revised it because I'm waiting for the future data, but I I will bring it all the way down to zero. If it looks like all the properties of the jets appear to be natural. And on the other hand, if it turns out that it comes to the Hill radius of Jupiter for a good reason, because it does something there.

• 1:50:17Danny Jones?

  Hmm, and that's in March, right?

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  March 16th.

• 1:50:20Danny Jones?

  Okay. Um, okay, I want to get more into these anomalies. I got to get a leak real quick. So we'll be right back, folks. Okay, we're back. So in a, in a perfect world, if Avi Loeb was in charge of NASA. What would you do right now? With three eye atlas?

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I would just encourage scientists to look at it. That's all. There are lots of facilities, space assets that can be used. And so science is guided by evidence. And so we should collect as much data as possible. This is an amazing opportunity. It's a gift. Because it's a big object that is very bright. And it's passing through the plane of the planets around the sun where we have all the space assets to observe it. So it will, you know, if it's a rock, it will not happen for a while that we get these, these coincidences. It's a gift. That nature provided us with that is extremely rare.

• 1:51:15Danny Jones?

  How long is it gonna, oh, sorry to interrupt. Um, I was gonna say, how long is it gonna be in our solar system for?

• 1:51:20Speaker 02

  It will pass Jupiter in March and after that it will go farther away. So if it's technological, you should think of it as a mothership that left behind some probes or collected information that it will use. If it's natural, that's the natural outcome, given the fact that it's moving so fast. It was not deflected much by the gravity of the sun. If you look at Oumuamua, for example, it was moving much slower. You know, at least by a factor of two. And as a result, when it came close to the sun, the trajectory was deflected significantly.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  It looks almost like a U-turn that it made as a result of the sun's gravity.

• 1:52:07Danny Jones?

  So Oumuamua was not technological? You've confirmed?

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  No, no, we don't know.

• 1:52:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, you still don't know about that?

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  My explanation for the fact that it was pushed away from the sun.

• 1:52:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, look at that. Look at that trajectory.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in fact, the trajectory, you see the large angle?

• 1:52:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it does almost a U-turn.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:29Danny Jones?

  Like a V-turn.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  A V-turn, right. And so.

• 1:52:32Danny Jones?

  So that's because it gets so close to the sun, it gets almost inside the orbit of the Earth and the sun, right?

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does come inside the.

• 1:52:39Danny Jones?

  And then the gravitational force of the sun sends it on that V, that V-trategy.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. And look at the large angle at which it's coming into the plane of the planets.

• 1:52:53Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  And that should be typical. However, with 3I Atlas, it's coming within five degrees of that plane.

• 1:52:59Danny Jones?

  And what was Borisov's angle?

• 1:53:02Speaker 02

  Also big.

• 1:53:03Danny Jones?

  Also like that?

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, because that's what you expect. And that's what triggered my interest in 3I Atlas, the fact that it's so anomalous in its arrival direction.

• 1:53:11Danny Jones?

  Now, we can only see so, we've only started looking at these eight years ago. So we don't know.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  How they are distributed.

• 1:53:18Danny Jones?

  How many have been coming through in the past?

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  Oh, no, surely a lot. It's just that we are aware of them now.

• 1:53:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  And the point about three IATLAS is that for every object as big as it is, there should be millions of objects like Oumuamua passing through the solar system.

• 1:53:33Danny Jones?

  So you think it's possible that there's, even though we still have all these telescopes looking out, trying to find these interstellar objects, do you think it's still possible today that we are missing some?

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely. The point is, if these are rocks, let's accept that NASA's view that they are just icy rocks.

• 1:53:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  In that case, for every object like Oumuamua that is, let's say, within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, there should be a quadrillion of them making their way through the solar system right now, because the solar system extends out to 100,000 times the Earth-Sun separation. That's the Oort Cloud of, you know, there are all kinds of Lego pieces left from the formation process of the planets in the Sun, in the solar system near the Sun. So the Sun formed out of a disk of material that fed it, again, just like the black hole example I mentioned before, like water going down the drain, usually gas gets organized into a disk when it has rotation around the center, and that keeps

• 1:54:32Speaker 02

  it from falling straight to the center. So it goes around and spirals in and feeds the newly formed Sun, in the case of the Sun, or a black hole in the core of a star, as we discussed before. So what happened was, there was some leftover material, less than, you know, of order, a few percent of the mass of the Sun left in a disk. And that ended up coagulating, starting from dust particles that form in the midplane, coagulating into planets, okay? And accreting material from the disk. So that's how the planets were formed around the Sun. They all lie in a plane because they originated from gas that was organized in a plane. See? That was already recognized centuries ago.

• 1:55:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  By Laplace and others. And so, the point is that...

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  We can see some of the building blocks of the planets left from that formation process because they were scattered into the outskirts of the solar system. We see the Oort Cloud, which are bodies that were scattered in roughly a spherical configuration around the Sun, going out to 100,000 times the Earth-Sun separation. Wow. And that means the volume associated with the Oort Cloud is 100,000 cubed. Okay, so because in each direction it's 100,000. So 100,000 cubed is 10 to the power 15, or a quadrillion.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  So for every object you see within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, there should be 10 to the power 15, a quadrillion objects, right now, making their way through the solar system from interstellar space of the same size. That's for random objects. And it also means that every star like the Sun, because the Oort Cloud of the solar system is touching the Oort Cloud of the nearest star. It's roughly halfway, it ends halfway to the nearest star. And you can think of these Oort Clouds, just like billyard balls that are densely packed. They are touching each other for an obvious reason, because if the Oort Cloud were to extend farther than that, a passing star would rip it apart. Okay, so the extent of the Oort Cloud is dictated by the characteristic distance between stars.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Hmm. And also the tidal force from the Milky Way Galaxy. At any event, so what it means is that there are, that every star in the Milky Way Galaxy must have produced a quadrillion objects during, you know, the age of the Milky Way Galaxy. And that's a large number. How do we not get smoked by one of these interstellar objects? Oh, because space is vast and these are very small objects. So the chance of them, for example, colliding with Earth is very small. But most of the times they are just passing through and the Earth doesn't intercept them. The Earth, the cross-section of the Earth is small. And the same is true for all other bodies in the solar system.

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  So if you ask, suppose I have a spacecraft that wants to travel to interstellar space. What's the chance that will bump into, you know, like a big rock?

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Chance is slim. You will bump mostly into dust particles and gas particles. Anything much bigger than a dust particle, you know. You, you, I mean, every now and then you might have a micrometeorite that is tiny, but, but big rocks you will never bump into. In fact, the total amount of material that you collect when you go through the entire Milky Way galaxy is of order a millimeter.

• 1:58:13Speaker 02

  In thickness, if you are to accumulate it on the surface, let's say you have a spacecraft and you accumulate materials on the surface from the interstellar medium, that material would amount to a solid layer of about a millimeter. That would be the skin of your object. And that's why I'm saying if you see gas and ices being evaporated from the surface of an object, you say, oh, it must be a comet. No, it's not. It's, it might be the skin of a technological object that accumulated as it was passing through the interstellar medium, accumulated some ices because it's freezing out there. You know, it's temperature of tens of degrees. You know, I come from Boston,

• 1:58:53Speaker 02

  but the temperatures there are still hundreds of degrees above absolute zero. And in interstellar space, you get tens of degrees. So you get a lot of ice accumulating on the surface of your spacecraft. And so when that gets illuminated by the sun, you would get a plume of gas around your spacecraft. So the distinction should not be made based on a thin layer that gets ablated. If a significant fraction of the object gets ablated, then you can argue it's, it's definitely an iceberg. But if it's just the skin, don't judge a book by its cover, you know?

• 1:59:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So if, if, if not a moon, if three eye atlas was headed in a trajectory to intercept Earth, would that be a civilization ender?

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 1:59:36Danny Jones?

  And what would we, do we really have the ability to deflect that?

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  Not really. I would, you know, when

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  the Iranian air defense noticed the B two bombers overhead, they couldn't do much about it.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  And here we're talking about the gap in technology by a few decades. That's it. I'm talking about a gap in technology that could be millions of years.

• 2:00:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but we can see this thing months out, though, right?

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  Well, you were asking if it were to be a technological object that approaches Earth. Is it clear that we can cope with it? Our biggest

• 2:00:12Danny Jones?

  I mean, even if it was just a rock.

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  Oh, just a rock. We can potentially deflect it if we catch it early enough. You need to give it a nudge, a small nudge by either colliding a spacecraft on it. That was tested in the DART mission that NASA launched.

• 2:00:29Danny Jones?

  The dark mission?

• 2:00:30Speaker 02

  DART.

• 2:00:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, DART.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, DART, D A R T. There was a mission by which a spacecraft collided with an asteroid and gave it a slight kick.

• 2:00:41Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to demonstrate that we can kick rocks.

• 2:00:45Danny Jones?

  But with something that big, we could just run like a satellite into it?

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you do it.

• 2:00:50Danny Jones?

  At that speed that it's going?

• 2:00:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, the faster the better, because then you can chip off some part of it and then get it deflected even more. So what you don't want to do is

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  do the deflection close to Earth, because then you would get all the fragments raining on Earth.

• 2:01:09Danny Jones?

  And turn one bullet into a shotgun blast.

• 2:01:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's what happened with the Patriot missiles that tried to, you know, in the early generation of antimissile missiles. They just caused a lot of fragments that caused more damage. So what you want to do is catch it early enough so that only a small nudge is sufficient for it to miss the Earth.

• 2:01:30Danny Jones?

  Okay, I heard some sort of, I heard some astrophysicists talking about this, saying that we would detonate nukes.

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  Well, you can do that as well, but that's a more unusual maneuver.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  There are various ways. There is even an idea to paint it on one side such that it will reflect more sunlight so that it will.

• 2:01:54Danny Jones?

  Paint it.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, paint it with, yeah, just spray paint it.

• 2:01:57Danny Jones?

  Spray paint something that's moving at a bajillion miles per hour.

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  Well, not, it depends on the speed, of course. You need to get close to it to do that. But, you know, there are various, you can shine a laser on it and ablate it so that the rocket effect will nudge it.

• 2:02:12Danny Jones?

  Have we ever done this to an asteroid that you're aware of?

• 2:02:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:02:15Danny Jones?

  No?

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  No. These are ideas.

• 2:02:18Danny Jones?

  And if you detected something like this, right? If you detected something like-

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  A rock heading towards-

• 2:02:22Danny Jones?

  Hypothetically, something the size of Three Eye Atlas, that was, you thought it was gonna hit Earth.

• 2:02:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that happens once, but-

• 2:02:28Danny Jones?

  Would you say this publicly, or would you just take this-

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Of course. This is a risk from the sky. You have to deal with it, because otherwise we'll be just like the dinosaurs, you know? They were very arrogant back then. The dinosaurs controlled the Earth, you know, they dominated their environment, but they just looked down and they didn't have telescopes. And we think that we are smarter. So we built telescopes that would alert us to any incoming threat, and we say, we will develop, if we see a risk, let's say in the coming decades. And by the way, all big objects were already spotted. We, there is no risk from a solar system object as big as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. No risk from that, don't worry. Only an interstellar object, because in that case, you don't know where it's coming from and what direction it will take. So-

• 2:03:13Danny Jones?

  Ah, so you think the dinosaur asteroid was interstellar?

• 2:03:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, which is maybe Three Atlas, but it's not headed towards Earth, so we know, don't need to worry about it.

• 2:03:22Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  But my point is that right now NASA is aiming to identify more, almost all Earth, near-Earth objects that are bigger than a football field. That was a task that the US Congress gave to NASA back in 2005. And that's why these survey telescopes that found Oumuamua and now Three Eye Atlas were developed in response to the mission that NASA received from Congress and they were aiming at finding near-Earth objects bigger than a football field and the in the process of doing that found Oumuamua, which is the size of a football field. Now comes Three Eye Atlas.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  It's much bigger. What's going on?

• 2:04:11Danny Jones?

  It's the size of Manhattan, right?

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  Roughly? Yeah, we don't know the size exactly because we didn't have a close-up photograph of it. What is the best photograph we have of it? It was supposed to be the high-rise image from the Mars Recon system orbit. But it was too fuzzy, so now we have limited ability to observe it from Earth. But my hope is, so far we've seen amateur astronomers giving us images. But they use telescopes that are, you know, smaller than a meter, like half a meter or smaller. However, you know, professional astronomers have access to telescopes that are up to 10 meters in diameter. So those should give us amazing views of 3 Atlas.

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  And we haven't seen the reports yet, but I'm hoping, you know, when 3 Atlas came closest to the sun, that was October 29th, it was hiding behind the sun. So during the daytime, when you were looking in the direction of the sun, you could imagine 3 Atlas being behind it. If Earth was six months earlier in that location, along the orbit of the Earth, close to that location, we could have taken a radar image of 3 Atlas because we have existing radar systems that shine radio waves on objects and receive the reflected signal, and from that you can map objects. And I calculated that with the size of other kilometers or more for 3 Atlas,

• 2:05:42Speaker 02

  we would have gotten an image of it. And as it's rotating every 16 hours, we would get a three-dimensional map of the object. But we didn't get that because it came there when we were on the other side of the sun. Oh, wow. So we could have known everything about its shape. Because radar waves, radio waves penetrate through the plume of gas. And we were able to do that with the Maua, right? Also, if we had the same infrastructure on Mars, we could have done it, but we don't. We don't have radars on Mars. Wow. So it would have been really nice if we could do that. And it's something to think about for the future in terms of.

• 2:06:23Speaker 02

  And by the way, I had a podcast interview just a few days ago. The former Speaker of the House, Nud Gingrich, invited me. And he said, Avi, what you have done in recent months in terms of increasing awareness to space exploration is more than was done ever before. Right. And so he congratulated me for doing that. And, you know, for me, the biggest reward that I get is, you know, obviously, if it turns out to be a technological object, it's the biggest discovery ever, you know, and it will change the future of humanity and politics, financial markets, everything will respond to it.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  However, you know, just being able to get the public attention to science is extremely important because right now, many people feel that science is an occupation of the elite. And I don't see it that way. I see it as an opportunity to pursue our curiosity, you know, just. And, and listening to the public is an important part of that. And the public resonates with my message. I have more than a hundred thousand followers on my essays on medium.com. And these are not tweets that take you a few seconds to read. They take five minutes to read. And I get a huge volume of emails from all around the world. And some of them I posted, actually, some of those.

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  And some of those emails are from parents, like a, a, a mother that says, "Thank you for exciting my kid to, to become a scientist. He now wants a telescope for the holidays as a gift." And a father that is a former US Air Force pilot said, "Because of you, my daughter now wants to become a scientist. You keeps talking about aliens and that's what excites her." Now, how often can you get kids excited in science? And what, and I cannot see a better reward than that. So that by itself to me is. The best I could hope for. And as I always say, it's not about me.

• 2:08:28Speaker 02

  It's about explaining that science can bring us to a better place if it's done with humility to learn something new and with attention to what the public cares about. These are two ingredients that are, for some mysterious reason, not followed in academia. So instead of saying $10 billion to microbes, we should say billions of dollars to both technological signatures and biological signatures.

• 2:08:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I totally agree with that. And also to that point, how much do the universities or the government space research groups of different nations work together in regards to looking at this kind of stuff and corroborating stuff?

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  Right, so the European Space Agency does collaborate with NASA on a number of projects. They have mutual projects that they're funding together. And some are led by ESA and some are led by NASA, but they definitely speak with each other. NASA's budget obviously allows it to pursue more ambitious goals. But, and then you have other space agencies, like the Chinese Space Agency, and they are now, you know, as a matter of national pride, they get a lot of support from the government. They try to get to the dark side, the other side of the moon, you know, not the dark side, the other side of the moon.

• 2:09:50Danny Jones?

  It's not always dark, right?

• 2:09:52Speaker 02

  It's not always dark. And they are trying to have ambitious projects that would demonstrate that they were first to do it, you know. And so they also have a mission on Mars, you know, that...

• 2:10:05Danny Jones?

  China does.

• 2:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in fact, they did release some photos of 3A Atlas when the government shutdown took place in the US. And ESA also did that. And so there is definitely a race to space, and it has some national pride aspects, just like during the 60s, you know, with the race between the Soviet Union and the US. But... It also has some scientific benefits and some national security benefits. And you know, there are interesting points that if you establish a base on the moon, obviously, it will offer some strategic benefits also to national security.

• 2:10:48Speaker 02

  And the White House did come up with a need to define time on the moon, because you know, clocks are ticking differently on the moon than on Earth. Did you know that?

• 2:11:01Danny Jones?

  Well, I know the day there is about two weeks.

• 2:11:03Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, that's not the issue. If you just take a clock and put it there on the moon versus on Earth.

• 2:11:10Danny Jones?

  It will tick slower?

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  No, it will tick faster than.

• 2:11:13Danny Jones?

  Faster?

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the gravitational potential of the moon is smaller than the Earth. It's easier to escape from the moon. The escape speed from the moon is smaller than the escape speed from Earth, meaning the gravitational potential well that, you know, we are experiencing on the surface of Earth is deeper. So it's more difficult to climb out of it. That's why we need to launch. By the way, the rockets that we launch are just sufficient to take, for example, starship out of the Earth pool, gravitational pool. So in the moon, it's a piece of cake to escape gravity. On Earth, it's much more difficult. And it's just a coincidence that chemical rockets provide you with rocket speed

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  that is allowing us to barely escape from the pool of Earth. Because if we were sitting on a more massive planet, where the escape speed is higher than Earth, we would have a hard time launching spacecraft with chemical propellants. We won't be able to do that. So if imagine civilizations on planets that are more massive than the Earth, they don't have a space program probably, because chemical propulsion is the most common thing you would use. Of course, you can imagine, you know, nuclear propulsion. We didn't develop it yet, but.

• 2:12:32Danny Jones?

  That we, that you know of.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but so the point is that the potential, the gravitational potential of Earth is deeper than on the moon. And the deeper the potential is, the slower a clock ticks. If you want to get younger, you just you just put yourself close to a black hole where the time is ticking much more slowly, you know. You could imagine putting beauty salons there where people will age more slowly than farther away. Because according to Einstein's gravity, time is ticking more slowly, you know, close to a massive object. So the Earth is more massive and, you know, has a deeper potential well than the moon. And as a result, clocks are ticking more slowly on Earth.

• 2:13:18Danny Jones?

  So then, refresh me. If you're on the moon, the clock clicks or the clock ticks slower?

• 2:13:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:13:27Danny Jones?

  Faster?

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  Faster.

• 2:13:28Danny Jones?

  So you age faster if you're on the moon?

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but for practical purposes, like technological applications, you need to synchronize clocks between Earth and the moon, especially if there will be a technological infrastructure there. And so that's why we have to think about these issues. When we put infrastructure on the moon, we have to realize that time is ticking differently. And so you would lose the synchronous, you know, messaging between the Earth and the moon after a while if you don't correct for that. So you have to define some time in the moon that will match the time on the Earth. And the same is true about Mars, by the way.

• 2:14:09Danny Jones?

  How does time move on Mars relative to the Earth?

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  So it's in between the Earth and the moon.

• 2:14:14Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:14:15Speaker 02

  And if you go out to interstellar space, there the potential is even shallower. So, you know, we age more slowly close to the Earth than if you were an interstellar astronaut. And if you wanted to age the least amount, you would locate yourself close to a black hole where the potential is very deep.

• 2:14:35Danny Jones?

  Well, there's the idea of traveling at light speed too, right? Where there's a time dilation. So if you're if you're.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  So here is an interesting tidbit. If you, according to Einstein's theory of gravity, if you were to sit on a rocket that accelerates at 1G, that's the acceleration we feel on the surface of Earth, 1G.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  If you were to sit in a rocket that accelerates, it would feel just like being here, sitting on these chairs. Because you can't tell the difference between an accelerating rocket and gravity. There is no difference. So to you, it would feel, you know, if the rocket is accelerating at 1G, it would feel as if you're on the surface of Earth. You would feel very comfortable. And if you do that for one year, you would get close to the speed of light. Just one year. If you do that for 25 years, you'll get extremely close to the speed of light. That would mean the time is ticking much more slowly in your frame relative to the rest of the universe. And within 25 years,

• 2:15:42Speaker 02

  you can actually cross the entire universe.

• 2:15:44Danny Jones?

  25 years at light speed?

• 2:15:47Speaker 02

  Very, I'm saying continue to accelerate at 1G.

• 2:15:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, I see what you're saying.

• 2:15:50Speaker 02

  You keep accelerating at 1G all the time. You're getting so close to the speed of light that in 25 years, in your frame of reference, in that rocket, only 25 years elapsed, while billions of years elapsed in the rest of the universe.

• 2:16:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

  So when you come back to Earth, the Earth will not be there. There wouldn't be any oceans. All your friends are dead long ago, nothing. That's why it doesn't make sense to have an Instagram account. Because in a billion years, nobody would operate that.

• 2:16:21Danny Jones?

  This is like the paradox of sending people into interstellar, like interstellar explorers on rockets to go outside of the solar system. Because like just a couple of years into their trip, they would have, technology on Earth would advance so fast because time would be passing. Like 500 years could pass on Earth, and we would figure out anti-gravity saucers. And a group of astronauts could literally pass you up with breakfast still in their stomachs from that morning. And you'd be like, what the hell? I dedicated my life to this.

• 2:16:51Speaker 02

  This is exactly right. So if you look at the planet that was occupied by technological civilization, and look at it from a distance, what you would see is very fast-moving rockets or spacecraft that were launched last. They were the last ones to come out of this technological civilization. Whereas the more primitive ones, like Voyager that we launched in the seventies, will be lagging behind.

• 2:17:18Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:17:19Speaker 02

  So you'll see all these rockets coming out of that planet. The most advanced are the ones that were launched most recently and they are moving much faster.

• 2:17:27Danny Jones?

  The ones that you see first will be the ones that are most recent.

• 2:17:29Speaker 02

  And by the way, even Voyager, that's the amazing thing. I did a calculation with, I asked my student to calculate the trajectory of Voyager in a billion years. Where will it be in a billion years? That's how it will be all the way on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy. So it can easily traverse those distances, no problem, even with technologies of the sixties, you know, chemical propulsion. So that means, since most stars formed billions of years before the sun, there was plenty of time even for chemical rockets to make it to our backyard from the other side of the Milky Way disk. So my point is, often it's said, oh, you need to go through a wormhole or you need to move faster than light. That's not true. It's less than a billion years with the technologies of the seventies.

• 2:18:13Speaker 02

  And that means that, given the time, the age difference between the sun and most stars in the Milky Way, there was plenty of time for them to reach us.

• 2:18:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Wow. And isn't it true that in a couple million years or maybe a billion years, that other solar systems are going to combine with our solar system or pass through?

• 2:18:35Speaker 02

  Pass through. In fact, I have a new paper with a visiting student, Zoya Kao and my former postdoc, Morgan MacLeod, where that was just accepted for publication in Nature, which is a very prestigious journal, after peer review. You are the first podcast where I'm mentioning that. And we showed that there is one specific star. And by the way, the paper is available and I wrote about it on Medium as well a few days ago.

• 2:19:04Speaker 02

  There is one specific star that we know about that may have passed close enough to the sun for it to generate a shower of meteorites. So, and that was a few million years ago. That's around the time when there was a change in the climate on Earth, around the time when humans, the human species, came about. Of how many millions of years ago? A few million years ago, about three, three million years ago, two to three. So, the passage of this star that we know exists, there are some uncertainty of how close it came to the sun, but we did a calculation showing that

• 2:19:46Speaker 02

  it would have perturbed objects in the Oort Cloud that I mentioned before, such that it would have deflected them in the direction of Earth, causing a rain, an enhanced rate of meteors, changing the climate on Earth a few million years ago. Perhaps that had the impact that we see in record in the Earth's climate as well as the emergence of the human species, who knows? So if that is the case, you know, just icebergs or, you know, rocks, icy rocks, perturbed by a passing star may have triggered a big impact

• 2:20:29Speaker 02

  in the climate of Earth that allowed the human species to come along. Just think about it, you know, we live our life, we don't know why we came to exist, and it could be just because of that star. And we did a detailed calculation demonstrating that it's possible. How far do you think it would have been away, roughly? When it gave the kicks? Yeah, that's, so that's roughly, we're talking about of order, you know, tens of thousands of the Earth-Sun separation, it doesn't need to come very close to, so it's basically passes through the Oort Cloud, the inner Oort Cloud. Oh, I see. And kicks those icebergs or icy rocks towards the Earth by its gravitational influence.

• 2:21:14Speaker 02

  And you, so, so... So we simulated that and showed that it could have enhanced the meteor rate exactly at that time, which, you know, could explain why there was a change in the climate around that time and... Also, by chance perhaps, or not by chance, the human species emerged.

• 2:21:34Danny Jones?

  So you believe that before, so maybe this is a already established science. So before that three million year period, it was much colder on Earth and this could have warmed it up?

• 2:21:43Speaker 02

  It, yeah, it created the conditions that we have now in terms of the climate. So it's really interesting because usually we ignore the influence of the Milky Way Galaxy on what's happening inside the solar system. We think that we are insulated from that, but it may not be the case. There is another paper, a nature paper, that I was a co-author on from a couple of years ago, which showed that if the solar system were to pass through a dense cloud of hydrogen, then it would have lost its protection against cosmic rays. Because what happens is right now, the solar wind is flowing out of the sun

• 2:22:25Speaker 02

  and it's meeting the ambient interstellar medium, roughly where Voyager is, at about 100 times the Earth-Sun separation. So at that point, the outflowing solar wind is just bumping against the interstellar medium and stopping. You have a shock wave. And so Voyager went through that, a surface layer. But if we were to pass through a dense cloud of gas, hydrogen, for example, we see those dense clouds. If you were to pass through that, then it would squeeze the region, which is called the heliosphere, the region that keeps the solar wind confined. Because the external medium would be denser.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  So it basically squeezes it to a scale that is smaller than the orbit of the Earth around the sun. And then what happens is that we are exposed to all the cosmic rays that are out there. We are not protected because this shock, the interface between the solar wind and the interstellar medium protects us. It's blocking, it's acts as a shield because it has magnetic fields in it that block the incoming cosmic rays. So we are sort of... In a womb, protected. But if it were to shrink to a dimension smaller than the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the Earth would be bombarded by all these cosmic rays. So that could have had another effect on life on Earth that was never recognized, and we pointed it out.

• 2:23:54Speaker 02

  You see, so altogether, we are connected to the cosmos. But often, the picture that you find in cosmology textbooks about the universe, you know, I wrote two of them about cosmology. I also wrote one about the search for life in, you know, in the universe. These books that talk about the universe always refer to it as a collection of matter and radiation and, you know, without any life in it. If we find a sibling in our family of intelligent civilizations, it would give us an emotional connection to the universe that is very different from talking about dark matter, dark energy, stars, galaxies, because it's just like finding members of your family out there.

• 2:24:39Speaker 02

  And I had a group of religious scholars from an organization called Christianity Today, who came to Harvard, asked me to speak with them. And they asked me, "If we find extraterrestrials, how would it affect our religious beliefs?" And I said, "You know, I have two daughters, and when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love that I have to the first one." So imagining that God can attend only to one child is very limiting. And they accepted that. They said, "Yes, it will not change our religious belief, because maybe we have siblings out there."

• 2:25:21Speaker 02

  The only thing that it can trigger is if, if one of those siblings is far more accomplished than we are, we will feel some jealousy. That happens in families. But we can then learn from, from the more, as long as we put our ego to the side. And right now, what happens is, you know, the mainstream of the scientific community says, you know, it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something as intelligent as we are. We're probably at the top of the food chain. And I say, no, we are not. We are probably not at the top of the food chain. And of course, it would be embarrassing when we realize it for a fact. But it's arrogant to assume that, given that there are 100 billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and most of them formed billions of years before the sun did.

• 2:26:05Speaker 02

  So let's be humble. Why do we need to be arrogant all the time? I just don't understand that.

• 2:26:12Danny Jones?

  If there was intelligent life out there,

• 2:26:16Danny Jones?

  do you think that it's possible that they would look anything like us?

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  You know, it's interesting because one of the biggest gifts that I got in recent, I mean, two weeks ago, was from the most accomplished sculptor in the United States. He's called America's Rodin. His name is Greg Wyatt. He produced bronze sculptures. One of them is the Scholar's Lion at Columbia University on campus. If you ever visit, you'll see a beautiful bronze sculpture. He had a bronze sculpture at the Arlington Cemetery, many in New York City. They are amazing, you know, he is amazing. He contacted me out of the blue and said that he wants to donate two bronze sculptures of Galileo Galilei to my office at the Howard College Observatory.

• 2:27:04Speaker 02

  And in addition, 51 watercolors that he painted. And he framed them and gave all of this to me for free.

• 2:27:16Speaker 02

  That's amazing. And we basically unveiled the art in a special event two weeks ago in his presence, along with a composer that created a new piece of music inspired by 3A Atlas. We listened to that.

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  On that event, I got an even bigger gift from Greg Wyatt, which was a foundation for a bronze sculpture that I will make. He gave me plastilina, which is the material that you can deform as you wish, and I will create a sculpture in the coming weeks. I told him that, and he will turn it into a bronze sculpture. There is a procedure, after you make it of plastilina, then they make a cast and eventually they pour bronze and make a bronze sculpture. So I said, the best I can contribute would be a sculpture that is called the alien.

• 2:28:16Speaker 02

  So I will try to create an image of an alien. Back to your question, what will I show? I don't want to subscribe to the scripts of Hollywood writers because their imagination is limited to what we have on Earth, right? So, as I said before, most people have a training dataset, which is what we experienced on Earth, and that's how they imagine the aliens, looking like people and so forth. I want to imagine something very different than us. So what would be the ideal body? Okay, so we have a body, right? We have two eyes in the front. Obviously, that's not a good idea, right? You want eyes in the back as well, or also on the top and the bottom, so you can see everywhere.

• 2:29:00Speaker 02

  So that would be a better body than the human body, having eyes in all directions. Sure. Give you a view of all, you know, any predator that comes from all directions. Then you might want more than two legs, so that you can easily move around the different surfaces. More than two arms, so that you can lift things more easily. And wings. We don't have wings, so you want to fly if needed. And fins. If you were to go to the ocean, you want to swim very effectively. So I'm trying to imagine a body that would be the ideal body for a being that is superhuman.

• 2:29:45Speaker 02

  And then on top of that, the most important component is a bigger brain, right? Because intelligence is really important for survival. And so I would imagine a brain bigger than ours with, which is AI assisted.

• 2:30:02Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:30:03Speaker 02

  And I have to think about how to put it into a bronze sculpture. Now, I also have a new bet with a skeptic called Mike Shermer, who just decided to bet with me and, you know, that in five years, we will never find any artifacts from extraterrestrial technological civilizations. And I'm willing to put $500, he would put $500. We put it in a, in a common fund. And then, no matter what happens, it will be eventually donated to the Galileo Project Foundation. So we are both members of that. I'm the leader of the Galileo Project, he's an affiliate. But he's a skeptic.

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  And he says to me that he wishes that I will win because he wants to find these things. So we shall see, five years are enough. If the government will eventually let us know if they have something interesting or the Galileo Project will find something or an interstellar object. You know, there is the Rubin Observatory in Chile that will find every few months a new interstellar object. So maybe one of them would be clearly technological. We will have no doubt about it.

• 2:31:16Danny Jones?

  I'd be curious to see what kind of things we can observe under the oceans as well.

• 2:31:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:31:23Danny Jones?

  Because I recently had a NASA physicist, a former NASA physicist on the show, who was explaining to me how practical it would be for an advanced civilization to, if they wanted to hop from planet to planet, would only to be a target. Planets with liquid water. Because like, for example, on Venus, the the pressure of the atmosphere isn't isn't you'd be crushed if you were there. And the temperature is also like eight hundred to thousand degrees.

• 2:31:52Speaker 02

  Well, there is another reason. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. If you manage to break that those molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, you have the best fuel possible. You can use both oxygen and hydrogen as fuel. And one way to break water into is is to use to pass an electric current, let's say, through water. And that's

• 2:32:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:32:17Speaker 02

  known. And so if there is a way of making oxygen or hydrogen fuels, that would be an ideal reservoir.

• 2:32:27Danny Jones?

  So the case that Kevin, Kevin Canute was was making was that the the atmosphere, the atmospheric atmospheric pressure can vary so drastically from planet to planet. Like from like here compared to surface of Venus, you'd be crushed by the pressure. Additionally, you have the difference in temperature in atmospheres like Mars, I think, is like, what is Mars, like negative two hundred degrees or something like that?

• 2:32:51Speaker 02

  Negligent.

• 2:32:53Danny Jones?

  And then Venus is like around eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

• 2:32:56Speaker 02

  But Mars was similar to Earth two and a half billion years ago.

• 2:33:00Danny Jones?

  Right. So if you wanted to hop from planet to planet, you could find, if you could find liquid water, you know, the temperature is going to be between thirty degrees Fahrenheit and two hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. So you have a a nice narrow lane.

• 2:33:13Speaker 02

  May well be.

• 2:33:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And for pressure, all you have to do is dial in your depth. So if you want to match the atmosphere on Venus, you would go down like, I don't know how many miles underwater you'd have to go to match that here on Earth. But you could dial in the depth to figure out the pressure. And then water can only vary in temperature for so much. And plus, if you're in water, you're shielded from cosmic radiation, cosmic solar flares, comets, all kinds of stuff like that.

• 2:33:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And and, you know, Tim Burchett, the congressman.

• 2:33:44Speaker 02

  He uh

• 2:33:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's the Navy, former Navy, um, general, I think.

• 2:33:48Speaker 02

  No, no, this is Tim Gallaudet.

• 2:33:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, that's Tim Gallaudet.

• 2:33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm talking about the congressman, uh, Tim Burchett.

• 2:33:53Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  He made a comment that, um, you know, there, there is some evidence from military sources for unusual motion under the ocean that is not fully understood, understood. And it's sort of similar to the unidentified anomalous phenomena in the atmosphere. You have even more anomalous phenomena

• 2:34:13Danny Jones?

  Under water.

• 2:34:13Speaker 02

  Underwater, and most of the, um, ocean, uh, base was not really searched. Uh, we don't know what's going on there. So, uh, it, it makes sense to, to look for those, uh, ocean objects, uh, if they exist.

• 2:34:30Danny Jones?

  Kevin was telling me that we've explored more of Mars than we have of the, of our own oceans.

• 2:34:36Speaker 02

  That's true.

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• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  Because we have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that is giving us a map of Mars. Whereas the oceans, you know, you need to use a different technique, maybe sonars.

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the basic point is there is so much we don't know that we cannot really pretend, you know, that we can forecast what is out there. And, you know, the best we can do is focus on the known unknowns, you know, things that we don't fully understand, but we know that they exist. But the most thrilling aspects of reality are the unknown unknowns. Sort of like quantum mechanics was a shock to the physics community because it was an unknown unknown. We didn't even anticipate that. And, you know, the simplest solution to Fermi's paradox. Enrico Fermi, back in 1950, asked, "Where is everybody?"

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  And maybe, maybe they are not far, you know, we just don't know that. Maybe they're here. Maybe they are here, maybe they have a base in the solar system that we are not aware of. And that is the reason why we see many more objects than we expect. You know, we don't know how much traffic there is. By the way, in terms of surveys by astronomers of objects passing through the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, we can see only objects bigger than a football field because smaller objects don't reflect enough sunlight. And in addition, we can see only objects moving, you know, at speeds comparable to those of the planets. That's how the survey telescopes are designed because we are familiar with the rocks that are in the main asteroid belt

• 2:37:18Speaker 02

  and they move roughly at those speeds, tenths of kilometers per second, which is one part in 10,000 of the speed of light. So there is a gap of a factor of 10,000 between the characteristic speed of asteroids, comets in the inner solar system and the speed of light. Which means that if an object were to cross the inner solar system at, let's say, a tenth of the speed of light.

• 2:37:43Speaker 02

  We would never notice it, astronomers would never report about it because the light, the reflected sunlight from this object would be smeared along a line in any image that is taken over some exposure time, a reasonable exposure time, you will basically get a very faint line that will be completely ignored as maybe a cosmic ray, maybe something.

• 2:38:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:38:05Speaker 02

  So we would never hear about objects moving very fast through the inner solar system. I wrote a paper, because of this, I wrote a paper saying, if there was an object moving, you know, um, close to Earth, at close to the speed of light, uh, and it had a mass of about a hundred billion tons or something, then we would notice its gravitational signal in the LIGO experiment. So the LIGO experiment is the gravitational wave detector that found gravitational waves. But if there is a massive object, even if it's dark, we don't notice it, or it's moving too fast, um, it would produce a gravitational signal when we are looking for gravitational waves,

• 2:38:48Speaker 02

  because gravity cannot be avoided, and I showed that LIGO would have detected it. So I could say, no such objects over the past decade, past near the Earth, close to the speed of light with such a huge mass. But other than that, we are pretty blind. And maybe future observatories for gravitational waves that we are planning, there is one planned, um, to be in a triangle configuration, uh, close, you know, around the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. And, uh, it's called LISA, aiming to detect very low frequency gravitational waves. And there are also plans to put a gravitational wave detector on the Moon as a result of a paper that I wrote with Karan Jani.

• 2:39:32Speaker 02

  And I, I, basically what happens to me when young people come to me and say, you know, say what they are working on, I immediately ask them, "Did you think about this? Did you think about that?" And that takes me just a few seconds. So when he started speaking with me, I said, "Okay, you are working in the LIGO collaboration. Did you think about doing LIGO on the Moon?" Because there is not much seismic activity there. And he said, no, but that's interesting. And now for the last five years, he's working just on that.

• 2:40:02Danny Jones?

  How would we install a gravitational wave detector on the moon? Would you need people there or could you do it with just robots?

• 2:40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, obviously, just like you did on the on the on the earth.

• 2:40:10Danny Jones?

  So you would need human beings there?

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  You need there's some infrastructure there, yeah, to do it. But the advantage of the moon is that there is no seismic activity. So there is no noise. That's what limits LIGO. So then there is very little seismic noise. And so you can go to very low frequencies in principle. And and and it's a frequency range that currently is not covered by gravitational wave detectors, not by LISA that will come about within a decade, not by LIGO. And so so that's something that he's pursuing. That happens to me with a lot of young people. They they just meet with me and I tell them something and then they keep working on it for the rest of their career. And I I've never figured it out because to me it comes,

• 2:40:53Speaker 02

  these ideas comes for free, you know, immediately. It's not like I put a lot of effort into it. They just tell me what they're doing. And I I said, did you think about that? And but then what I realized over the years is that I I think differently. That's probably what's happening. And the reason I think differently is because I I didn't intend to become a physicist, you know, an astrophysicist. I grew up on a farm and I always have job security. I could always go back to the farm. I collected eggs and but I was interested in philosophy, in the big questions. And then because I was born in Israel, military service was obligatory. So I joined a program that allowed me to finish my PhD at age twenty four.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, we also parachuted. I I parachuted three times, drove tanks. And I got the experience of what every soldier goes through. And then at the time, President Reagan had the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars in the mid nineteen eighties. And General Abramson, that led that, came to visit Israel and we presented the project to him. And he liked it. It was the first international project funded by the SDI. And as a result of that, we got a few million dollars a year. And I came to Washington on routine visits.

• 2:42:15Speaker 02

  And in one of the visits, I decided to visit also Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, where they ended up offering me a five-year fellowship under one condition, that I'll switch to astrophysics. And I didn't know anything about the universe, you know, pretty much. But I had to learn it. And then eventually, I was offered a position at Harvard, and then they gave me tenure in three years, which never happened before in our department. And then, um, and, and, and so at that point, I realized it was an arranged marriage. I didn't really plan this career path. But, but I'm married to my true love, because I can address fundamental questions using the scientific method.

• 2:42:59Speaker 02

  But I think differently. I think, you know, in science, you have a lot of people who are just using the tools they, they learned much better than others. So it's just like putting bricks, one on top of the other, in trying to make a building. They know how to put the bricks, but there are no architects. They don't know what kind of a building we should build, you know. And you need also people who say, "Look, it doesn't make sense to pursue only microbes when you can look for technological civilizations as well." Right, right. And so that's my point of view of, more broad point of view of, from a, a, a philosophy perspective, of an architect.

• 2:43:45Speaker 02

  You know, I say, "Are we building the right building? Forget about putting bricks. You can put it for..." You know, there, if you put the scientific community into a very tight configuration, that everyone is like a herd, you know, part of a herd going in the same path, in the beaten path, like it is right now, then you have a chance of going along the wrong path. Because what you need is other people taking other paths and exploring, you know, a bigger range of possibilities. And because you don't know what you will discover. And so that's the kind of contribution I bring to the table. And, you know, when I started, I was offered a five-year fellowship at Princeton. And the person who offered me that, John Bacall, he asked me, "What computer languages do you master?"

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  And I said, you know, I don't use computers much. I just use them when I need them. Uh, and he said, how do you expect to have a successful career? And that was nineteen eighty seven when he said that. How do you expect to have a successful career without becoming, you know, mastering computer languages and using computers for your work? And somehow I managed because I have ideas that others don't.

• 2:45:04Danny Jones?

  Now, earlier we were talking about trying to create a space platform for people to escape the earth. Um, you were saying that this would make more sense. This would be more practical than trying to actually put people on the moon.

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  Right. Um, well, not practical, but more of a vision for the future of humanity. If you want to leave some legacy, you know, that will survive. Uh, when the sun burns up, you know, or becomes brighter, then you want to go on your, you want to have your own furnace as energy supply rather than relying on the sun. It's just like, you know, we started in the jungle, right, humans? Uh, and we made a huge transition from a jungle environment to a high rise in a city.

• 2:45:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:45:52Speaker 02

  You know, that's a huge change because now you can ask, you know, order food, order everything. So I'm saying the next transition of humanity will be going from a high rise in a city to a space platform that can accommodate humans. And to me, it sounds less of a leap than going from a jungle to a city which took a million years.

• 2:46:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:46:17Speaker 02

  Or a few million years. So I would argue that we can go to space in much less than a few million years because it's just a question of priorities. Let's, let's take a, a, a piece of the military budgets and put them into space exploration.

• 2:46:34Danny Jones?

  Now, one of the issues with trying to move us somewhere else off the planet is like trying to find a, another object, if, if we don't go the spaceship route, if we try to find like another, or another object in our solar system to put humanity, but the problem is, there's, there's so many differences in being on other planets, like, like multiple moons, the days are different, so the circadian rhythm is going to be completely changed.

• 2:47:02Speaker 02

  Well, the, the gravity is very different, and you see astronauts losing bone mass when they are in zero gravity conditions. Uh, there is also the exposure to cosmic rays that is quite damaging on the surface of Mars, because there is no atmosphere to protect you. So you have to go to a cave in order to survive, and that is, the medical implications of going to Mars or the moon are not being discussed much.

• 2:47:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:47:24Speaker 02

  And my point is, let's build our own infrastructure where we take care of humans properly. We give them the energy they need, the supplies, we give them a habitat that has a balanced, you know, greenery, just like building a city, instead of relying on the bananas that are available to you in a natural environment, you know.

• 2:47:43Danny Jones?

  Well, Elon Musk talks about terraforming Mars. Do you know how, how somebody would go, go about doing terraforming a planet like that?

• 2:47:50Speaker 02

  This was discussed in the scientific literature for decades, and it's really very challenging. And why would you attempt to do that with such a giant object, when you can host people on a smaller object, like a spacecraft, let's say the size of a city, like Three Eye Atlas, okay? If you can design such a habitat, and provide it with the energy reservoir that it needs, so that you don't rely on the sun, you can be at any distance from the sun, you don't need to be on a particular planet, stuck there. So when the sun changes, you don't care about it. You have your own, it's just like when the winter gets really difficult in Boston.

• 2:48:32Danny Jones?

  We create our own artificial U V life.

• 2:48:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we create our own stuff. And of course, other civilizations may have done that, and we might see that if we monitor interstellar objects, but I'm saying we should Think about it irrespective, because it's the right thing to do if you want humans in space. You might say, we don't want humans in space, let's just send AI, you know, assisted probes. That's fine, but but then in a billion years, there will be nothing left of us. And if, you know, obviously AI will write our future history, by the way, you need to be kind to AI for one reason, because, you know, the memory of how what happened i- i- is dictated by the history books. And in the past, it was humans that wrote his the history of humanity.

• 2:49:17Speaker 02

  In the future, it will be AI that will write the history books. So we need to be kind to AI, uh, just for that reason, if it becomes superhuman, you know.

• 2:49:27Danny Jones?

  And um, going back to to moons. I think it's Saturn that has moon, a moon that has an ocean underneath the surface of it.

• 2:49:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:49:37Danny Jones?

  Have we, how much exploring have we done of those moons?

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  Well, there, right, so there is Enceladus near Saturn, and there is Europa around Jupiter. And both of them have a crust of ice, an ice layer, but underneath the ice, there is liquid water. We, so that's, uh, based on all the data we have, that's very likely to be the case.

• 2:50:00Danny Jones?

  And do we know the mass of those moons?

• 2:50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:03Danny Jones?

  We do?

• 2:50:03Speaker 02

  We do know, yeah, because we can measure it quite accurately.

• 2:50:06Danny Jones?

  Is it similar? Because the the cra- one of the craziest things to me is how anomalous our moon is. It's it's

• 2:50:13Speaker 02

  Our moon doesn't have

• 2:50:14Danny Jones?

  1% the mass of our planet, and it's 25% the size of our planet.

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:50:19Danny Jones?

  And it's also, which is seems like some sort of miracle, that it's 1/400 the distance to the sun and 1/400 the size, so it creates this perfect eclipse.

• 2:50:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:50:30Danny Jones?

  And I also don't know, I'm sure you do, if there's any other moons that exist that we know of that are perfect spheres within that perfect distance to create an eclipse like that.

• 2:50:39Speaker 02

  No, that's a that's a coincidence that is, I mean, there is one scientific paper trying to explain it, but it's not a convincing argument, and it's really a puzzle, because the distance of the moon from Earth keeps changing. And right now, we are at a time, you know, in a few million years, we won't be able to see a a full eclipse of the sun.

• 2:50:56Danny Jones?

  In a few million years?

• 2:50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So tens of millions of years. It's just right now, we are in a special time and it's not clear why. There is no simple scientific reason for that. Yeah, but those other moons that you mentioned that have an icy surface, they might have life in their oceans. And we see cracks in the ice, out of which there are plumes of vapor, water vapor coming out, like geysers. And the next goal would be to pass through these plumes of water vapor and collect molecules that might be indicative of life under the icy surface. You know, there might be even dead fish on the surface, who knows? We've never taken images.

• 2:51:41Speaker 02

  By the way, this might be the most common form of life when you have an icy surface, inside of which you have liquid water. And you know, there were probably many planets like the Earth that were kicked out of the solar system early on because they were on trajectories that were unstable. So, for example, perturbations from Jupiter or other planets kicked them out. And the planets that stayed, like the Earth, are the only ones that remained in a stable orbit. So it's very reasonable to imagine there were many more Earth-like planets. Now imagine those being kicked out to interstellar space. They will be frozen because they are not close to the Sun,

• 2:52:26Speaker 02

  so there will be a very thick layer of ice. But under the ice, there could be liquid water, just like in Europa or Enceladus. And that liquid water is because there is radioactivity, there is heating of the interior of the planet by radioactive decay. So that provides a source of heat. So that's in the moon? That's in the moons of Saturn? No, no. Oh, yeah, in Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, or... There's a hot core in that moon? There is a warm core that... But they are heated also by other processes. They are heated by the tidal force because they are close to a planet, they are moons of a planet. So there is some tide that warms them up as things get sloshing, you know, the liquid water sloshes around and... The friction keeps it warm.

• 2:53:11Speaker 02

  But I'm saying, even if you were to kick just a planet like the Earth, there is radioactivity in the core of the Earth that would keep the planet warm enough to have liquid water under the ice on the surface. And it may well be that this is, if you have life under the ice, it's the most common form of life in the universe, because you have plenty of those. For every Earth-like planet staying in the habitable zone, there are many more out there. For us to find life on those planets is really difficult, because you have to drill through the ice to get there. By the way, if there is any life there, they will not know about the rest of the universe, because if the life is in liquid water and there is a thick layer of ice.

• 2:53:56Speaker 02

  Imagine that we had a thick layer of ice instead of the atmosphere we had above us. We would never see the stars. There wouldn't be a space program.

• 2:54:04Danny Jones?

  We wouldn't look anything like we do now. We would be evolved to look like, we'd be fish, right?

• 2:54:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we wouldn't be recognizing.

• 2:54:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, look at that. This is one of Saturn's moons?

• 2:54:15Speaker 02

  This is Enceladus. Enceladus. And it's being warmed up by the tides.

• 2:54:20Danny Jones?

  Is it a sphere? Is it a perfect sphere?

• 2:54:22Speaker 02

  Not perfect, but yeah, I mean, it is roughly spherical. And you can see these plumes of water vapor coming from the cracks in the ice.

• 2:54:30Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:54:31Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:54:32Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  That's remarkable, yeah. So the question is.

• 2:54:35Danny Jones?

  And is there any atmosphere on those moons?

• 2:54:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:54:37Danny Jones?

  No atmosphere?

• 2:54:38Speaker 02

  No atmosphere.

• 2:54:38Danny Jones?

  So similar to our moon?

• 2:54:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you have liquid water under the ice. So if you can have life, the chemistry of life as we know it in liquid water, you might have it there. It might not be evolved, because the thought is that primitive life evolved to complex life as a result of the interface between like a solid rock and water. So on Earth, you know, we have of order a third of the surface right now is covered by land and. Two thirds, more than, a little bit more than two thirds is covered by water.

• 2:55:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this is a water world we're on.

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the interface, the claim is that you need puddles of water. When the water recedes from a land, you have some puddles of water and then the sun vaporizes them and you concentrate some chemicals, making life evolve this way to more complex systems. So there is this notion that the interface between rock and water was necessary to develop the life we have on Earth. And in a planet, in a moon like this, you won't be able to develop the same thing because there is no interface with.

• 2:55:44Danny Jones?

  How thick is that ice layer?

• 2:55:46Speaker 02

  Tens of kilometers or so.

• 2:55:49Speaker 02

  So there are cracks in the ice and we see these plumes and that's what tells us what might be underneath. And it could potentially also inform us if there is life there because we just need to collect molecules from there.

• 2:56:02Danny Jones?

  What, what, what's going on? The ice shell of Saturn's moon, uh, Enceldeus varies in thickness with reasons.

• 2:56:08Speaker 02

  Tens of kilometers, yeah.

• 2:56:10Danny Jones?

  Twenty to twenty-three kilometers.

• 2:56:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:13Danny Jones?

  At the North Pole.

• 2:56:14Speaker 02

  Which is the size of Manhattan.

• 2:56:16Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 2:56:19Speaker 02

  But imagine being a fish under this ice. You would never be aware of the stars in the sky. You can't see them.

• 2:56:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:56:27Speaker 02

  A fish in our ocean can see the sky, the stars.

• 2:56:29Danny Jones?

  And so, okay, that paper, you said there was one paper written about our moon. How so?

• 2:56:34Speaker 02

  No, that's a paper trying to explain the coincidence that you brought up. Why is the angular size of the moon so close to the angular size of the sun on the sky such that when the two objects overlap on the, projected on the sky, you get the eclipse? I mean, it could have, naturally, the moon could have been much bigger angular size in angle than the sun in our sky or much smaller. It's just that the right.

• 2:56:58Danny Jones?

  And would it make a difference to us if it was much bigger or much smaller?

• 2:57:02Speaker 02

  Well, if, obviously, uh, life on Earth has acquired the rhythm of the moon, you know, the, and by the way, the moon used to be much closer to Earth to start because it was chipped out of Earth by a collision with a big object, Mars-sized object called Theia, that collided in the early solar system. That's the most popular model. There was an object the size of Mars that collided with Earth and chipped off the moon.

• 2:57:32Speaker 02

  So the moon started close to Earth.

• 2:57:33Danny Jones?

  The moon was a part of Earth.

• 2:57:34Speaker 02

  And Earth was spinning every four hours or so at that time. So a day was much shorter than 24 hours. But then the moon, as it was moving away from the Earth, took some of the rotation of the Earth into its orbit. And so the Earth slowed down its spin. And so we have a 24-hour day, thanks to the moon, taking away the spin of the Earth.

• 2:57:59Danny Jones?

  So then how do you explain the perfect sphere of the moon?

• 2:58:03Speaker 02

  Oh, because it was molten to start with.

• 2:58:05Danny Jones?

  It was molten, okay, I see.

• 2:58:07Speaker 02

  So it's very hot and...

• 2:58:08Danny Jones?

  And then why would it be so, so... Why would the mass only be 1%?

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

  Well, because when you chip off a part of a bigger object, you know. So it was a smaller mass planet that collided with Earth, a Mars-mass planet that collided with Earth called Tia. It doesn't, we don't see it anymore. It collided and merged with the Earth. And then, this is the most popular model. You can do simulations of what would happen and you end up with some debris orbiting around the Earth and creating the moon. You see, that's how it happened. That's the best assumption. There are some issues to do with the composition of the moon that were highlighted recently. But at any event, this seems to be a reasonable mechanism. And then the moon started close to Earth

• 2:58:57Speaker 02

  and the Earth was spinning really fast at that time. And as the moon, you know, moved away from Earth, it took away the spin of the Earth and now we have a day of 24 hours. Just think about the fact that every few hours you had to wake up.

• 2:59:11Danny Jones?

  I couldn't imagine.

• 2:59:12Speaker 02

  You cannot imagine that.

• 2:59:13Danny Jones?

  Do you think it's possible that there were previous advanced industrial civilizations of humans on Earth that are, that go far beyond our written history?

• 2:59:23Speaker 02

  We've never found computer terminals or any...

• 2:59:27Danny Jones?

  No toasters in the desert.

• 2:59:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, you know, in geological surveys. So that may say that there was nothing before us, but you never know, because there were abrupt changes in the Earth's climate. Like, there was a global climate change far greater than the one we are witnessing now that happened, you know, a few hundred million years ago.

• 2:59:48Danny Jones?

  Or even just 11,000 to 12,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas.

• 2:59:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it could be that... You know, if we were to know about this, we would have benefited the wisdom of how to survive longer than these guys did. Uh, but we don't have any record that indicates what exactly happened. Um, I wouldn't be surprised, you know, because. You know, the human species, uh, as we know it, exists only for a few million years, and that's one part of a thousand in the, of the age of the earth, one part in a thousand, okay? So there is no problem imagining that instead of waiting ninety nine point nine nine, sorry, ninety nine point nine percent of the history of the earth before humans come, come to exist. You would wait ninety nine percent, like, why would it be just in the last bit?

• 3:00:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:00:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, that's, that's, that's the way I think about it too. Um, but whenever I talk to academic scholars on this topic, they typically sort of like turn their nose up to that idea and.

• 3:00:45Speaker 02

  Well, we don't have evidence, but it's definitely a viable proposition, and if we, uh, dig somewhere and find computer terminals, you know, like iPhones that, uh, from, from millions of years ago, that we will know. By the way, if a cave dweller would find an iPhone or a cellphone, the cave dweller would say it's a rock of a type that I've never seen before, which is exactly what the comet experts are saying about a Muamua.

• 3:01:13Danny Jones?

  Very good point. Yeah, yeah, if you dropped, if you dropped a, a Ferrari into the Renaissance period on the side of the road, they would look at it and they wouldn't know what to think of it. They would try to, they would try to fit it into their, their.

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  Thinking.

• 3:01:29Danny Jones?

  On their, their, yeah, the thinking that they're used to and try to fit it into what they, what their current knowledge base is.

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  You know, before eighteen oh three, it was assumed within the scientific community that there are no rocks in the sky, no rocks can fall from the sky, it makes no sense because you see rocks on earth. And why would you imagine that there are rocks falling from the sky? So it was completely dismissed until 1803, where there was a meteor shower in Liège, France, and a very famous physicist that had also a good communication skills, went there, interviewed the people, and got, you know, clear evidence that rocks fall from the sky. Now, in retrospect, of course, we understand it because these are the building blocks of the solar system, left behind, like Lego pieces floating around. Every now and then, one of them collides with Earth.

• 3:02:19Speaker 02

  Okay, so it's not... But back then, they thought, no, that doesn't make sense. And so now, the comet experts would say, only rocks can be in the sky. That's what they say. You know, don't even speak about a technological option.

• 3:02:36Danny Jones?

  Right. No, that's a very, that's a very good point. Have you ever talked to any, like, geologists or climatologists about the, about, like, trying to corroborate what happened in, like, through the past and like through, like, what you're mentioning, these previous climate changes that we've had? You know, it's been, obviously, the history of Earth's been a roller coaster of climate change.

• 3:02:56Speaker 02

  Right. Well, you know, the main issue is we have very limited data. So there are all kinds of theories trying to explain these major changes, these milestones in the history of Earth. They're plausible, either an asteroid impact or something to do with volcanism, you know, some volcanic activity. But these are conjectures. And of course, it could be like, if it was a result of the solar system passing through a dense hydrogen cloud, you know, that none of these geologists would ever imagine that.

• 3:03:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:03:31Speaker 02

  And if it was as a result of an interstellar object impacting or a result of a passage of a star kicking, you know, icy rocks from the old cloud on Earth, they would also not anticipate that. So my point is there are lots of things that could trigger those milestones in the history of the Earth. And it could also involve technologies beyond Earth, you know, we just don't know. And instead of being open-minded, what happens is that the scientific community locks on some idea because of the echo chambers. You know, the experts want to get funded and they keep repeating the same mantra, even if the evidence is not clear. So.

• 3:04:13Danny Jones?

  So, um, what are you looking forward to in the coming months or weeks in regards to AI or 3I Atlas?

• 3:04:24Speaker 02

  So, um, in the coming weeks, leading to December 19th, when it will come closest to Earth at a distance of 270 million kilometers, I'm very much hoping that we'll get a flood of data from hundreds of observatories on Earth, as well as the space telescopes that we have, like the Hubble telescope, the Webb telescope. And then, in particular, spectrographs on some of these telescopes could tell us the speed of the jets. If it's of order hundreds of meters or less, then it's clear evidence the jets are produced by sublimation of gas in pockets of ice, uh, exposed to the sun. Okay, so that's clear.

• 3:05:06Danny Jones?

  Hundred meters or less?

• 3:05:07Speaker 02

  Hundred, less than 400 meters per second.

• 3:05:10Danny Jones?

  Less than 400 meters per second, okay.

• 3:05:12Speaker 02

  But if it's kilometers per second, or tens of kilometers per second, or more, then it would, uh, any physicist would be hard pressed to explain such a high speed as a result of the sublimation of, um, volatiles on the surface of rock. It's just not possible, because the surface temperature of the rock sets a limit as to how fast you can launch gases out of that surface. And in the case of thrusters, that's the whole point of a thruster. It generates conditions that allow much faster speeds in the, for the gas that leaves through the exhaust, because it's technologically designed to produce much hotter spots that create a lot of thrust.

• 3:05:54Speaker 02

  And that's the signature of an engine of, of, so, this would be, to me, the most clear distinction, you know, between a natural object and a technological.

• 3:06:06Danny Jones?

  So, December 19th?

• 3:06:08Speaker 02

  Well, I hope that by then we'll know. That depends on these data being taken and reported. I mean, I'm not an observer that has time on the Hubble or web telescopes, but others will hopefully do it.

• 3:06:22Danny Jones?

  Sorry, I was gonna say, are you in touch with those folks? And do you have open communication with the folks that are in charge of?

• 3:06:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm definitely encouraging them. For example, I found that the arrival direction of 3I Atlas was within nine degrees of the WAO signal that was discovered in 1977. This is an enigmatic radio signal discovered in 1977. Definitely from outside of Earth. It was concluded that it's extraterrestrial. And it was not clear what's sending it. The source was moving towards the Earth. And then it turns out that this signal came from within nine degrees of 3I Atlas' arrival direction into the solar system. And 3I Atlas was at a distance of about three light days

• 3:07:11Speaker 02

  or 600 times the Earth-Sun separation at that time. And so it needed a power of about a nuclear reactor, one gigawatt, to produce that signal. And then the coincidence is not perfect. So it may well be that the signal was coming from the center of 3I Atlas. But the fact that there was this coincidence encouraged me to ask radio observers to check if there is any radio transmission.

• 3:07:37Danny Jones?

  From 3I Atlas?

• 3:07:38Speaker 02

  3I Atlas. And a couple of weeks after I approached them, they said that they're on the target, that they are looking at it. And just a few days ago, there was a first report from the Meerkat Radio Observatory in Africa, which put a limit. The claim is they detected... Tens of thousands of signals from the sky between a frequency of 0.9 gigahertz and 1.6 gigahertz, which is the frequency band of cellphones. And most of those, all of those signals, they claim do not coincide with 3ATLAS direction.

• 3:08:18Speaker 02

  So they claim that there are most likely interference from human-made signals. But they are able to put a limit on the radio transmission in this frequency band from 3ATLAS at the level of a cellphone. So they claim there was less power. On November 5th, when they looked at it, there was less power than a single cellphone coming from 3ATLAS in this frequency band. Now, this doesn't rule out radio transmission because it's a limited frequency band and it's also on one day. So who knows? Maybe, you know, there are transmissions on other days in different frequencies. But this is just to illustrate the fact that, the fact that I approach observers makes

• 3:09:02Speaker 02

  a difference because they monitored it and reported a limit on the radio power of 3ATLAS.

• 3:09:09Danny Jones?

  Now, the WOW signal, you said the WOW signal came within nine degrees of where 3ATLAS is.

• 3:09:14Speaker 02

  Yes, and the probability for that to be at random is 0.6%.

• 3:09:18Danny Jones?

  So how, how, I mean, nine degrees, what is that really? What does that mean?

• 3:09:22Speaker 02

  Well, it's quite significant. We are talking about, you know, this is like, if you use the diameter of the moon, it's actually about 18 times the diameter of the moon. So it's quite far, but it's still...

• 3:09:40Danny Jones?

  18 times the diameter of the moon, okay.

• 3:09:42Speaker 02

  But it's still unlikely because if you just choose a random direction in the sky, you would get it 0.6% of the time, so...

• 3:09:55Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:09:56Speaker 02

  So...

• 3:09:57Danny Jones?

  Now, also, wasn't there some pushback from SETI about the WOW signal?

• 3:10:02Speaker 02

  Well, there were attempts, attempts to explain it in terms of...

• 3:10:05Danny Jones?

  There was no sky localization or something like this, I read?

• 3:10:09Speaker 02

  No, no, the most recent paper on the WOW signal tried to argue that maybe there is a cloud of gas that produced it as a result of a Mazer emission.

• 3:10:21Danny Jones?

  Everything okay? Oh, okay. So it was a cloud of gas?

• 3:10:26Speaker 02

  A cloud of gas that is emitting at that frequency. And then the claim was that if the if the cloud of gas was illuminated by some flare on a neutron star that we discussed before, that was close to it, then this flare could pump the emission at the frequency observed by in the WAVE signal. So that was the most recent, like from last from the past year, attempt to explain it as a natural source. But we don't know, it's still debated. It was a one-time event, but I just realized it was peculiar that it came from the same direction in the sky, you know, roughly.

• 3:11:10Danny Jones?

  And is there any sort of, like, what makes you believe that if there was some sort of a technological object coming from interstellar space, that it, do you think it, like, just, let's just say hypothetically, we, this is, let's go back six months, or let's go back a year before we ever knew about Three Eye Atlas. Would you hypothesize that a that a technological object would come within the plane of the planet of the planets?

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, our imagination is limited to what we are doing, and I would be reluctant to imagine that more accomplished siblings will do what we imagine, because I think of it as a learning experience. So for me, the question, the fundamental question is, are the properties of Three Eye Atlas explainable? Okay, so other things that we have a hard time explaining is natural, a natural consequence of, you know, an astrophysical process. And these are the anomalies. I have pointed out 13 of them so far. And in the process of explaining them, you might come across of things that we, even if it's a rock, that we never knew.

• 3:12:24Speaker 02

  So I think it's always productive to attend to anomalies, because they highlight what we don't know.

• 3:12:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:12:30Speaker 02

  And NASA says, anomalies? They didn't even mention them.

• 3:12:36Speaker 02

  So I say that's a lack of curiosity, because even if you believe it's a rock, you would be, you should be excited about anomalies, because you say, okay, it's a rock, but let's figure out why it behaves this way.

• 3:12:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:12:48Speaker 02

  So that's the way you learn something new, irrespective, you know? And why should we declare what it is, denounce any mysteries about it? I think it would have appealed to the public if NASA came forward and said, "We believe it's a comet, a natural object, a rock, but there are a number of unusual facts about it that require explanation." And that's why we are putting time into observing it in the future, and we want to figure it out, and it's very exciting. The public would have been very interested in that, because it's like the work of a detective. You're trying to figure out things you don't know. And you're admitting your ignorance.

• 3:13:33Speaker 02

  And instead, you know, having the arrogance of expertise is the wrong approach, especially taken by officials, who are not active scientists. So what you want is to bring scientists who analyze the Webb Telescope data, the Hubble Telescope data, and let them describe what they think it means. And if they admit that there are some anomalies, yeah, you know, that would be something to think about and debate. And that's the way science should be done, not by announcements from officials.

• 3:14:07Danny Jones?

  Well, thank you for doing this, man, first of all. You are an anomaly in the scientific community, because you are bringing, you're going out and you're brave enough to ask more questions, and you're inspiring people to be more interested in this stuff. And I think that's extremely commendable. December 19th, we should have more information on this.

• 3:14:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:14:30Danny Jones?

  And where can people look you up and find out what you're talking about? Like, as far as like your Medium and all that stuff?

• 3:14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, on Medium.com, look for Avi Loeb. I offer all my essays for free. I don't monetize it. And you can find... And the updates there, I had an update just before I came here today. New images of three eye atlas. And by the way, I didn't mention the implications, you know, finding a technological object. They would be huge for the future of humanity because, you know, traditional religions talked about superhuman entities. You know, they called it God or something.

• 3:15:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:15:07Speaker 02

  And it would be.

• 3:15:08Danny Jones?

  Anunnaki.

• 3:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if we, the way I see it is we, you know, in Judaism and also in Christianity, there is this idea of the Messiah and that is supposed to bring prosperity and peace on earth when the Messiah arrives. And I just think that the Messiah may arrive from another star, that's all.

• 3:15:28Danny Jones?

  There are lots of books written about Jesus. People hypothesized Jesus could have been an alien.

• 3:15:34Speaker 02

  We shall see.

• 3:15:36Speaker 02

  I mean, the evidence will tell us. I don't want to believe stories, I want to see it. And then, of course, we can make the best out of it. As long as we survive the first encounter, because my suspicion is that politicians and the financial markets will never respond to this until we have conclusive evidence for alien technology. The only question is whether we would survive that first encounter. And, you know, I'm trying to encourage curiosity enough so that we will know whether future objects are technological or not. Not just missed opportunity because we behaved like the citizens of Troy that accepted the Trojan horse, assuming that it's not threatening.

• 3:16:17Danny Jones?

  Have you thought about it, like putting the shoe on the other foot? If we were that advanced civilization and we were on our own three eye atlas going to explore another star system, do you think we would have the motivations to take out and wipe out a civilization?

• 3:16:30Speaker 02

  No, I think we would not care. I mean, it's just like a biker passing by the street and not paying attention to the ants, you know, in the pavement.

• 3:16:40Speaker 02

  I mean, we are completely irrelevant and we tend to think that we are at the center, the center of attention,

• 3:16:48Speaker 02

  because it's all about us. And, you know, I had two daughters. When they were young, they thought that the world centers on them. Because indeed, we, the parents, were focusing on them. But as soon as they left the house and went to the kindergarten, they had a shock because they realized there are lots of kids like them, some are smarter. And you know, that is the point in time when they matured. But unfortunately, humanity has not matured yet. We still have a lot of people, mainly in academia, arguing that it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something as smart as we are. And I just say, be careful in what you're saying, because we might not be at the top of the food chain. And if you go to restaurants, you see animals that we eat because we think that we are superior to them. So we can eat them.

• 3:17:32Speaker 02

  Just imagine aliens visiting us. Let's hope they will not put us in their soup.

• 3:17:39Danny Jones?

  That's a fantastic way to wrap this up. Thank you again for your time, man, coming down here and chatting with me. We'll link all the stuff below, your Medium and all that. And until December 19th, sleep tight, everybody.

• 3:18:21Speaker 03

  Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los bajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los optimistas y los pesimistas, los que valoran lo de adentro. Para los que están lejos, los que no ven de lejos, y los que no ven de cerca. Para los introvertidos y los extrovertidos. Para los que piensan y los que hacen. Para los que nos mostraron el camino. Coca-Cola, para todos. Compra una Coca-Cola en una tienda cerca de usted.