What Is 3I/ATLAS? Avi Loeb - #534

Please join my mailing list to get FREE notes and resources from this show, plus your chance to win a real meteorite: http://briankeating.com/yt Join us LIVE with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb for the final verdict on the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, the third confirmed visitor from beyond our solar system. We examine the newly proposed 14th anomaly: the remarkably rare alignment of 3I/ATLAS’s rotation axis within about 8 degrees of the sunward direction at distances greater than 5 AU, a configuration with a probability of less than about 0.5 percent if random. This alignment has major implications for how we interpret the object’s anti-tail jet geometry, rotational dynamics, and overall physical behavior, adding to a growing list of anomalies that strain standard cometary explanations. Whether you are interested in jets, rotation periods, anti-tail physics, or what these observations imply about natural versus technological origins, this livestream offers a rigorous, evidence-driven deep dive. We will lay out the data, compare competing interpretations, and ask the central question: is 3I/ATLAS simply an unusual comet, or something fundamentally different? - Run of Show 00:00 – 02:00 Intro and context: Discovery of 3I/ATLAS, orbital properties, and why it has drawn intense attention. 02:00 – 05:00 What is an interstellar object: Comparison with 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. 05:00 – 10:00 Anomalies 1 through 5: Brief recap of the earliest reported oddities, including trajectory and activity. 10:00 – 15:00 Anti-tail observations and physics: Explanation of the sunward anti-tail and why it is unusual. 15:00 – 20:00 Rotation period and periodic behavior: Discussion of the roughly 15.5 to 16.2 hour signal and its interpretation. 20:00 – 25:00 Recap of the first 13 anomalies: How they are ranked by likelihood and what they suggest. 25:00 – 30:00 The 14th anomaly: rotation-axis alignment: Geometry, probability estimates, and why this feature stands out. 30:00 – 35:00 Possible mechanisms for axis alignment: Assessment of natural processes versus alternative explanations. 35:00 – 40:00 Jet collimation and structure: Why the sunward jet remains narrow and persistent. 40:00 – 45:00 Implications for outgassing models: Where standard cometary physics succeeds or fails. 45:00 – 50:00 Natural versus non-natural scenarios: Clear comparison of competing hypotheses. 50:00 – 55:00 Future observations and missions: What additional data could resolve the debate. 55:00 – 60:00 Audience Q and A: Live questions with Avi Loeb. 60:00 – 65:00 Wrap-up and final thoughts: Synthesis of the evidence and implications for future research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:06Brian Keating?

  All right. We are live and it is exciting to welcome my good friend Avi Loeb, all the way from chilly Boston. It's chilly here in San Diego. How is it there in Boston, Avi?

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Well, it's very cold. It was five degrees below zero. Water was, would have frozen, but there wasn't any water, so I could jog before sunrise this morning.

• 1:31Brian Keating?

  Oh, that's right. That's your calling card. You're jogging for me in spirit. I'm with you in spirit, Avi. You know, it's not, it's not, not that easy for me to get up so early at that time. But, but I'm trying. You inspired me. This, this year I dropped five pounds, Avi, from my, from my chin to my stomach. So you inspired me, Avi, and you may continue to do so in the new year. So this has been a wild year. We started talking about phenomena way back. We've talked for half a decade already, or known each other for more than a decade now. But we started talking about this mysterious object, Three Eye Atlas, which some said, you know, could be technology, it could be something reminiscent of of consciousness, or maybe it's some sort

• 2:14Brian Keating?

  of a spaceship that's going. Using all the Hanukkah gifts my kids got me over here. Abhi, where are we at right now? You just have amazing output as normal. You have a bunch of articles. We're going to go over some questions from the audience and from the members of the channel. You have to be a channel member to ask questions, just a way to give back to my channel members. But tell me, Abhi, where are we at right now? What is your latest assessment? And I'm going to show some of the some of the great Medium articles that you've been writing. But where do where are we at? What have we learned? What questions still remain? So let's start with what is or was Three Eye Atlas and where is it right now?

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Well, thanks for having me. The best is yet to come because this object, the third interstellar object from outside the sun that was spotted by telescopes, passed closest to Earth on December 19. And it didn't do any maneuver, it didn't show any unusual activity, and it basically ignored Earth. And it came closest to the sun on October 29. And at that point, it was on the opposite side of the sun relative to us. So it wasn't even observable from Earth with our terrestrial telescopes, because they needed to be at

• 3:33Speaker 03

  least 30 degrees away from the sun for us to observe it. So what I often say to people who ask me about it is that, you know, we arrived to the cosmic party, the block party of our local neighborhood, just over the past few million years, the human species, any object entering the solar system probably spent billions of years traveling through the solar system at the current characteristic speeds of You know, Three Eye Atlas, this object, which is about sixty kilometers per second. It takes, of order, a billion years to cross the Milky Way disk. And that, you know, if you go back a billion years, we were not around.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Jupiter was the most prominent planet, still is, the most massive, three hundred and eighteen times the mass of the Earth. So we shouldn't be surprised that if we arrive late to the party and we are not at the center of the room. We know that we are moving around the sun and the sun moves around the center of the Milky Way. And then, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that nobody wants to dance with us so late in the party. And but at any event, Three Eye Atlas is an object discovered on July first by the Atlas Telescope in Chile, half a meter in size. This object was very bright and we still don't know its size.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  I mean, the initial estimate was if the brightness we see from the object is due to a reflection from a solid body, then its size needs to be twenty kilometers in diameter. And that is comparable to the size of Manhattan Island or the asteroid that killed a dinosaur sixty-six million years ago. These objects are extremely rare, and that was surprising. But by now, we know that most of the light is actually from a plume of gas around it. And that plume of gas contains all kinds of unusual molecules or elements, atoms. For example, most recently, there was methanol detected with

• 5:46Speaker 03

  two orders of magnitude more methanol than hydrogen cyanide, which is a very unusual ratio. And the thing about hydrogen cyanide, and cyanide was also detected in it, is that it was used as poison gas in the First World War. So actually, just this morning, I calculated whether any concern that, you know, as we approach the holidays, a lot of people are anticipating gifts from. Their family members, the question is, will 3I Atlas, any of the material coming from it, will it deliver a gift from interstellar space to Earth? And the answer is probably not, because if you calculate from the mass loss rate that was measured by data from the Webb telescope,

• 6:30Speaker 03

  if you calculate the distance where the gas would be swept by the solar wind, that distance is only a few million kilometers. And the closest the 3I Atlas got to the circle of the Earth moving around the Sun was about 50 million kilometers. So there is no way that this gas would cross the path of the Earth, because it would be swept away from the Sun by the solar wind.

• 6:58Brian Keating?

  But I do need to point out, Avi, in the spirit of the holiday season, that you, although 3I Atlas won't provide you with any gifts on Earth, you can get a real-life fragment of a within this interstellar asteroid called, that produced the Campo di Cielo meteorite shower down in Argentina. You can get that if you're one of the lucky winners each month at briankeating.com/yt. Or if you're like me and Avi and you're blessed to live in the best country in the world, the United States, and have a .edu email address, go to briankeating.com/edu and you will get a fragment of these guaranteed. So, Avi, back to your description of the gifts or lack thereof.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, no gift made of gas, but then you ask, okay, what about particles? And dust particles that are smaller than a micron would be swept by the solar radiation, away from the Sun, so again, not intercept the orbit of the Earth. And then bigger particles, bigger, let's say, than a millimeter, will not be affected much by the solar radiation of the solar wind, so they could potentially rain on Earth. But such particles would be burned up. Any particle much smaller than a meter burns up in the Earth's atmosphere. So it will never reach the ground, we shouldn't worry about it. And then bigger than meter, there aren't enough such objects that could be shed by 3I Atlas based on the mass loss.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Rate that was measured uh for us to worry that any of them would collide with the earth. So I did this calculation, doesn't look like we'll get the gifts. It ignores us in terms of the trajectory. Uh, and the interesting point is that it's heading now towards Mars. It will get, sorry, towards Jupiter. It will get to Jupiter on March sixteenth, twenty twenty six. And actually, it will arrive exactly at the distance, which is called the Hill radius, where Jupiter's gravity dominates over the sun's gravitational tide. And the question is whether that has any significance, but it's it's arriving at fifty three point five.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Um, a million kilometers from Jupiter, and that's very close to where the Hill radius is. And by the way, the Hill radius is the also the separation of the Lagrange points from any massive object. And it's a good, the Lagrange points are a good place to deposit devices, uh, because they don't need much fuel to to stay there. We put the web telescope at the second Lagrange point from from Earth. And so it would be interesting to watch it all the way to Jupiter. And after that, if nothing unusual is observed, then of course, I will downgrade the the rank of this object to potentially uh or or most likely uh a a natural object.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  And in fact, I I I always thought that it's most naturally a natural object. Uh, but uh, I think that we must consider the possibility of it being technological because of fifteen anomalies that I noticed. Uh, and those fifteen anomalies that I listed in one of my recent essays require that we take the technological option seriously. Why is that? Uh, for the same reason that the intelligence agencies revised their practices after September eleventh, two thousand and one and October seventh, twenty twenty three. Uh, they did that because they realized that black swan events uh should not be ignored.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  These are events where we assign a small probability for them materializing. But uh nevertheless, we should spend resources in collecting as much data as possible to prevent.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Them from materializing and that was the mistake made on both dates by intelligence agencies saying, oh, it's very unlikely that something that would would happen. And scientists, you know, very often do the same, take the same approaches as was taken before these events and and say, well, at the ninety nine percent confidence level, you know, we believe this is the correct interpretation. Now, in most cases, there are no implications to society. Like, for example, a week ago, there were two papers published in Nature magazine about the experimental searches for a ghost particle called sterile neutrino. And they both failed to find it.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  And it was originally believed to exist because of anomalies in previous experiments. Now, the fact that it could have existed or that it doesn't exist makes no difference to our daily routines. It doesn't affect society at all. And most of the time, you know, even with significant discoveries, academic discoveries, there is no impact on society. So scientists are used to that situation.

• 11:52Brian Keating?

  Thank God. Thank God there's no impact of our faculty committee meetings, Avi. I mean, that would be a fate worse than cyanide coming down there. I mean, think about being run by, as William F. Buckley Jr. I think said, you know, the the first hundred people in the Boston phone book versus your fellow colleagues at Harvard. I know what I would take, Avi, but but thank God we don't have to worry. We only have to worry about cyanide from comments, but go on, go on.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Actually, actually, Henry Kissinger said that he, when he decided to go to Washington, DC and leave Harvard, you know, he had an appointment there as a professor, but he had to give up because the there is a rule that Harvard faculty cannot take a leave for more than two years. And he said that at universities, professors spend a lot of time on inconsequential decisions, like where to put the bicycles, you know, and whereas.

• 12:49Brian Keating?

  Time to have the faculty meetings.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  In in in politics, you know, he was attracted by the impact of the decisions to, you know, society. And and so anyway, coming back to what I said before, I think this is a situation where we have a visitor to our backyard. There is a chance that this visitor will enter through our front door. So if you see an animal in your backyard, you you can say, well, it's most likely a street cat. But then if you find that the the tail is coming from the forehead of that animal, then you should start asking questions about whether it's indeed a street cat. And the the reason I bring this up is because Three

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Eye Atlas is showing a jet that is going in the direction of the sun, instead of going away from the sun, the way that cometary tails look like, where they are pushed, I mean, the gas and dust making up the the plume of gas and dust around the the object, they get pushed away from the sun by solar radiation and solar wind. And so in the case of Three Eye Atlas, from the beginning, on July 21, when the Hubble Space Telescope took an image, it was clear that there is elongation of the glow around it in the direction of the sun by a factor of two. And then when you correct for the projection

• 14:15Speaker 03

  angle, you find that the elongation is actually a factor of 10. So there is actually a jet that is 10 times longer than it was wide in the direction of the sun. And actually, right now, we are also seeing a similar jet from Three Eye Atlas towards the sun, again, very tightly collimated, 10 times longer than it is wide, and stretched over a million kilometers. We've never seen an anti-tail, a jet from a comet that stretches across a million kilometers in the direction of the sun, being the most prominent feature that one can see in the image.

• 14:56Brian Keating?

  And and is that is that when you compare, I'm sorry, when you compare Three Eye Atlas to Oumuamua and Boreas, is that the main anomaly that clearly breaks the pattern of of, you know, purely non-anomalous or or, you know, kind of homogeneous compared to previous examples? Is that the most

• 15:13Speaker 03

  In terms in in terms of the properties of of the object, because Another thing that was pointed out in a paper just a week ago is that we see a wobble of this jet, the anti-tail. We see that it wobbles by eight degrees around the rotation axis of the object. So, think of it as a procession of a pulsar, a pulsar beam of light, or a lighthouse, where the beam of light is not aligned with the rotation axis, so that you get wobbling. And the point is that this rotation axis is in the direction of the sun to within eight degrees. And why would an object coming from interstellar space

• 15:58Speaker 03

  have its rotation axis aligned with the direction of the sun at large distances? This is really surprising. And it means that the object has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. Because, and the jet is emitted from a base, it's launched from a base very close to the pole, one of the poles of the object. And that was when it was arriving to the sun. Now, when it's receding away from the sun, there is again an anti-tail, but it must originate from the opposite pole. So somehow, if you think about, let's say, the conventional interpretation, you would say there is a pocket of ice near the north pole and near the south pole.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  And that pocket of, these two pockets of ice dominate the evaporation. And so when one of them gets illuminated by sunlight, you end up getting a jet in the direction of the sun from one pole. And when the other pole gets illuminated by sunlight, you get it from the opposite direction. The problem is that if you just have a pocket of ice on the surface of a rock, it will not generate a very tightly collimated jet.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  It will evaporate to a hemisphere. And then, you know, this very broad fan of gas coming out will get pushed back by the solar radiation and wind. And so that's what we see in comets. We end up getting a cometary tail. Here, we see a very tightly collimated jet. So how can you collimate the outflow of gas from a pocket of ice? Well, one way is you drill a hole. So you have a pit. And at the base of the pit, there is some ice. But that would mean that in order for the sunlight to reach it, it really needs to be, the sun needs to be overhead. And that will happen only for a short period of time. So it's really not easy to collimate

• 17:56Speaker 03

  the gas that comes out of a pocket of ice sublimated by sunlight. And what I'm saying is, we can't argue that we understand this object until we explain how the jet gets collimated and why is it in the direction of the sun? And how come that it's always in the direction of the sun, even when the object, you know, moved?

• 18:17Speaker 00

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• 18:48Speaker 03

  Now, to recede away from the sun. So you do see the anti-tail is more prominent than the tail in those latest images. And because there was a second Hubble image taken on November 30th. And again, it shows an elongation primarily in the direction of the sun. So this, you know, this is

• 19:06Brian Keating?

  How rare is that, just as a non-expert, how rare is that for comets in our own solar system to have an anti-tail?

• 19:11Speaker 03

  We don't see, we don't see an anti-tail. I mean, we do see situations where it looks as if

• 19:17Brian Keating?

  Not, not parallax anti-tail, but, but actual

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's, so that happens to be a perspective, an effect of perspective. When the earth is at the right angle, it looks as if there is a, a tail pointing at the sun, but it's not really because we're just seeing it from a strange angle that gives us that optical illusion. Other than that, you know, there are cases where there is a little bit of extension of the glow around the comet in the direction of the sun, and that's the gas being sublimated from, from ice on the sun-facing side. But then soon afterwards, the, everything, you know, gets deflected backwards. So you do see a much more prominent tail.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  And so that is not really an anti-tail of the kind we see now, because right now we see a jet stretched over a million kilometers. That's two and a half times the distance to the moon. Just think about it as if the earth were to generate a jet that stretches a few times farther than the moon. That's a huge jet.

• 20:20Brian Keating?

  And it's persistent, right? I mean, Avi, how long has the anti-tail been observed for? Months?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  From the beginning until now. So we see it now. And, and, and it's also, you know, at the beginning at least, we saw it wobbling around the rotation axis. So there are all these geometric coincidences of the rotation axis being aligned with the direction of the sun, which need not be the case. I mean, you, it's a half a percent chance of that happening. And then half a percent chance that you get your jet within eight degrees of the rotation axis. So there are all these geometric

• 20:57Brian Keating?

  Right. I just want to pause for one second to just set the stakes for everybody else out there. From the beginning, Avi has maintained that the most likely explanation for this object was that it was a normal, natural-forming object. It had some probability, though, of being unnatural. I think that's any scientist should say that, even if they think that probability is less than, you know, a part in a billion or something like that. You set the probability maybe higher than others, but from the very beginning, as a good scientist should, Avi has been very steadfast that this could be a natural object. And so, from the beginning, I've asked you, Avi, even, well, I shouldn't say even if,

• 21:38Brian Keating?

  I said, when, if indeed it does turn out to be beyond the Loeb scale, you know, the lowest level of the Loeb scale, i.e. it is natural, then what would we learn about cometary and solar system and extrasolar objects that would be interesting? And there, you also made the point that this object is revolutionary. So I think it's important for the audience of laypeople that may be in the audience, although we have the smartest audience in the known multiverse, that the object has taught us a tremendous amount of information. And I don't think, Avi, you can't say this because you're too, you're too sneout, you're too humble, but I can say it. I don't think a lot of the attention would have been paid. I mean, a lot of great scientists have studied this object, but I think you gave a special

• 22:21Brian Keating?

  spotlight to this object, and I think you do deserve credit for that.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I had an interview with the former Speaker of the House, Nuit Gingrich, who has a podcast, and just before it started, he thanked me for bringing so much attention to space exploration. He said that, you know, that's a subject that deserves much more attention, and there wasn't much given to it before I started speaking about 3A Atlas. So he was very grateful, and of course, there are these parents that are grateful because their kids now want to pursue science after they heard me speak on television or podcasts. So, you know, irrespective of what the nature of 3A Atlas is, it clearly served a very important purpose, where people were curious about its nature. And the way I approach it is that science is work in progress, you know, it's a learning

• 23:09Speaker 03

  experience, and why would we pretend to be? The adults in the room that know the answer in advance, when we can actually collect data and ask questions. In fact, the more questions we ask, the more we can learn. And there is no reason to assume that it's the same type of comets that we have in the solar system. It may, it may be coming from a completely different environment, just to give an example. It may have originated from a molecular cloud, and that's why it has mostly carbon dioxide. I mean, who knows? It may not be from a protoplanetary disk. And so people make assumptions. They initially said, well, it must be water rich, but it's not water rich. Why pretend to know the answer? Let's just figure it out and let's be curious about the anomalies.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  I think that's a fundamental aspect of science. And we know that because both of us work in cosmology and there are lots of questions in cosmology that are not resolved. And nobody punishes a theorist that puts on the table additional possible explanations. You know, right now, there is the possibility that dark energy may be evolving. So I wrote a paper saying, no, it's not the dark energy evolving. It may be the dark matter is evolving. And nobody went after me, you know, no zealot started saying bad things about my character just because I said that. Why? Because

• 24:31Brian Keating?

  Or that you're a cult leader. Remember, you're a cult leader, according to some of the professionals.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  I'm not a cult. I don't have any social media and I don't lead any cult. I just say what sounds to me like reasonable. But the point is that science is done very often in exactly this fashion. And for those zealots, for people who are not even practicing science, to resist hypothesis making just because they don't like those hypotheses is anti-science. This is not the way. Now, the other thing that happened was that I was interviewed just a few days ago by News Nation. And the digital media group at News Nation decided to make a big deal of the fact that they said that it's most likely a natural object because they said, oh, he changed his mind. I didn't change my mind.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  I said it from the beginning. If you look at my first paper on technological possibility of three I Atlas, I just said there that it's most likely

• 25:28Brian Keating?

  You said it on this podcast.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I said it many times and so they decided to make a splash just out of this statement as if it's new. And then, of course, a lot of those critics said, oh, he's changing his mind. I didn't change my mind. I so I wrote, I tried to explain that yesterday. I wrote an essay, basically it's showing now it's all in writings. So I can point to links of where I said what, and you can just read those things and you will find it there. Now, what really happened is reporters are trying to make statements that attract clickbait. So so they say he is predicting

• 26:08Speaker 03

  that this is technological. I didn't say that. And so then other people respond to what the reporter said, as if this is what I said. So distortions by the media trigger a negativity from some people, but they are, they should understand that they are just responding to the reporter who made an incorrect statement based on what I said. So this is an unfortunate reality, but there is an even more unfortunate aspect of the reality that we live in. And that is that a few weeks ago, there was a YouTube channel after with my name on it, where they used AI to generate the creators generated content, videos with me saying things. Yeah,

• 26:50Speaker 03

  yeah, deep fake. And and of course, some fans wrote to me and said, this must be fake, because the clock behind you is not changing, you know, the time is not changed. And also, it contradicts what you said in your medium message, they said. And I wrote to YouTube, and it took them some time, but eventually they responded and said, why do you think that it invades your privacy? And I said, look, this is someone is stealing my identity. It's like an impostor that is trying to make money possibly out of making content after my name.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  And and this is inappropriate. And in fact, I was in consultation with legal advisors at Harvard about it. And also, a reporter from Futurism wrote an article about it. And NBC News invited me for an interview that evening. So I said, the story will get bigger unless you correct it. So then they removed the YouTube channel and they made a statement to NBC News that appeared when I I was interviewed there. And then, you know, obviously this worked, but only for one week. And by now, there are many other channels that are i- i- under different names, creating fake videos.

• 28:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I don't think that's gonna be the case. I don't think that's true. I think it's bad for YouTube. Uh, let's, let's go on.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  And, and by the way, it's bad also for science because the que- you know, the biggest um, uh, enemy of science is misinformation.

• 28:25Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  So if you have content that people believe to, and in fact, some reporters even put video excerpts from this fake account on their reports, as if I said those things. You know, that generates a, a, an intellectual um, climate of misinformation, content that is taken out of context that is, has nothing to do with what I really want to say, and that is pretty bad. And I'm sure I'm not the only one, and I'm sure that it will be a very important challenge in the future. And my advice to young people is always go to primary sources.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  And in, in my case, interviews like the ones, the one we have right now, or on television, or um, or my essays on medium.com, that these are the primary sources where you can see me speaking with someone. They cannot easily fake that.

• 29:19Brian Keating?

  Right, exactly. It would take a lot more to do that. I mean, I, I've always said if you can fake being sincere, then you're really fantastically well off. Okay, Avi, the other thing that you've talked about recently that we haven't talked about is this kind of 16-hour heartbeat that you mentioned is one of the anomalies. Can you talk about this? What is this periodicity? I wasn't familiar with it until this most recent Medium piece. It's a rotation period. And, and, and then most, most critically, could it be an instrumental artifact?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  No, so that was reported back at the end of July, uh, observationally. So first of all, they detected the brightness of three eye atlas, um, uh, repeating every 16 hours. And with, with some pattern, uh, so there was some modulation of the brightness. And the authors of that paper assigned it to the object being, uh...

• 30:10Speaker 03

  A spheroid like a football so that as it rotates it reflects different amounts of sunlight. But that must be wrong because only about a percent or less of the light that we receive from the Atlas comes from the nucleus itself. We know that from the Hubble image that the brightest pixel that contains the nucleus accounts for less than a percent of the total light. So then you cannot get variations at the level of 20% just by the object rotating and showing us a different surface area. That makes no sense whatsoever. I don't know. I mean, again, this is a paper that was peer reviewed, published and celebrated. People make mistakes.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Okay, so that cannot be the explanation because we know that there isn't enough light coming from the nucleus to explain 20% variations, modulations every 60 now. So I suggested that instead what happens is we know about the jet, the anti-tail. And so imagine a jet coming from the object and that jet is being, you know, is moved around. It wobbles because of the rotation. Okay, so it wobbles around the rotation axis and because of that, the amount of light that you see reflected sunlight from the particles in the jet, that gets modulated. So the variations are because the jet itself is wobbling and you are seeing variations

• 31:37Speaker 03

  in the brightness as a result of that because the jet is creating also the coma, the plume of gas around the object. So.

• 31:46Speaker 00

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• 32:16Speaker 03

  Now, you can think of it like a heartbeat because in the case of a heartbeat, you have, you know, the pulsations of the bloodstream into the veins and that originates from the heart. And in this case, you know, the object itself is basically pulsating in the material that it sends into the surrounding plume of gas through the jet. And so it's sort of like a heartbeat that every 16 hours it repeats as far as the observer is concerned. And so that is my interpretation. You know, it's relatively straightforward and I didn't publish it, but this seems to me like the most natural way of explaining the variability of the object.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  And then we don't have a similar measurement after the object passed closes to the sun. I'm waiting for that data.

• 33:10Brian Keating?

  And the other, you know, kind of anomalies that we have to, you know, always be, you know, mindful of at least is what sorts of, you know, kind of multiple in a Bayesian sense probabilistically, are there correlations between some of these anomalies? You know, the rotation axis alignment, the jets, the alignment with the solar system? I mean, there are many, are the planets of solar system.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:34Brian Keating?

  Are there any hidden, you know, off diagonal elements in the covariance matrix? I mean, let's just explain what could go into it? What assumptions could go into?

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so one of the anomalies is the very high polarization, unprecedented polarization of the light coming from 3I Atlas. And that could be indeed the result of the jet, you know, because of the tightly collimated jet 10 times longer than it is wide going out to a million kilometers right now. So that could result in polarization that is unusual because of the asymmetry of the jet. So indeed you are right that some anomalies may be related to others, but, but for example, the alignment of the trajectory with the plane of the planets around the sun, you know, the ecliptic plane. You know, there is no simple way to explain that because

• 34:27Speaker 03

  the disk of the Milky Way galaxy is misaligned by 60 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane. So if the objects come from the disk of the Milky Way galaxy, why would the third one select this ecliptic plane? When the chance for that happening to within 5 degrees is 1 in 500. So you would need hundreds of objects before one of them will likely be in that plane. And we had only three. This is the third. We had two before that. I should also say that when people claim that they are comet experts and they should be believed as authority on this subject, there are no experts of interstellar objects because we had only two

• 35:11Speaker 03

  detected by telescopes before 3I Atlas. And therefore, you know, we should be open-minded. My basic point is there is a lot for us to learn. And I would love to actually scoop one of the future interstellar objects and bring some materials to Earth so that we can check if that material has the building blocks of life as we know it. Even if it's a rock, you know, it's the first time we'd have access to actual material from a big object that came from another star. And finally, I would say that if I had an opportunity to hitchhike 3I Atlas, I would love to take it for a ride out of the solar system.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I wouldn't survive that long. It will take it 8,000 years to get out of the solar system. By the year 10,000 CE, you know, so by the year 10,000, it will actually exit from 100,000 times the Earth-Sun separation. That's the edge of the Oort Cloud, where out to which we have objects still bound by gravity to the Sun.

• 36:17Brian Keating?

  Well, you keep jogging, Avi, at 3:00 in the morning and you'll undoubtedly get there, or not.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  By the way, I should say, I just wanted to compare that to Voyager. You know, Voyager, you can ask, how long will it take Voyager to get to the same distance? It will take it 28,000 years. So Voyager will get out to the outskirts of the solar system by the year 30,000. Uh, CE, whereas Three Atlas will do it much earlier. So I, I would much rather, you know, if, if travel agencies uh will at some point sell tickets, I would buy one and I would love to ride such an object, a fast object like Three Atlas out of the solar system.

• 36:57Brian Keating?

  I think, yeah, I think we, uh, we can start selling shares on that to, uh, uh, to uh, uh, supplement our academic, uh, incomes. Okay, so speaking of fun things, I, I've been asked by uh, people in my offline mailing list that you can get to at briankeating.com/yt. And again, you'll enter to win a real fragment of an asteroid that's four billion plus years old, older than our Earth, right, Avi? I mean, these meteorites formed from some object before that. Is there a name for the solar object that exploded, a type two supernova, I presume, that, that created our solar system?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, now we have more data about our immediate environment, that, you know, some tens of light years around us, there is a bubble where a, a group of about ten massive stars, you know, finished their life and exploded presumably in a multiple supernovae, uh, about ten million years ago. And so, um, the sun may have formed as a result of the blast wave created by this explosion. We can see the location where, you know, if you look at the bubble, the hot bubble of material, of, of gas, uh, you know, the sun is, uh, offset from that center. And in fact, the original stars, the remnants of whatever resulted from those stellar

• 38:12Speaker 03

  collapses and explosions, um, the remnants must have been kicked out of that location. Now, we haven't found, for example, a pulsar yet, or, or a, a, a black hole remnant. But definitely, there was some violence in our neighborhood that led potentially to the formation of the sun 4.6 billion years ago. And so there was a, uh, the, the, the clump of gas that made the sun, you know, could have resulted from the blast wave because the blast wave from these stellar explosions condensed the gas. And then these blast waves often are unstable to fragmentation. So they make clumps. And one of these clumps was the proto-sun cloud.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  And, uh, as the material reined in to make the sun, it had some rotation, some angular momentum Created a disk of gas through which the sun was fed early on and a small fraction of the mass was left in that disk, about a percent or so, which then started making the planets. And they all move in nearly circular orbits. And that's why we have the ecliptic plane as the characteristic plane of the planets orbiting the sun.

• 39:23Brian Keating?

  And they were, they were probably, you know, worried about something like their Instagram followers, you know, right before 10 supernovas went off, Avi, right? Knowing the nature of consciousness. Okay, so I have a playful question that came from offline. Are you, you, you'll be taking questions from the audience, from members of the channel, which means you pay a, a huge fee of 99 cents or more a month to support the channel. It costs thousands of dollars to run the channel, team of people, and it's been a phenomenal year, Avi. I don't know if you knew, but I won this huge, massive award. I have it in the back there. I can't even pick it up. Maybe you could pick it up, you're so buff. But it weighs about 16 pounds of pure copper from the Signal Awards, Listener's Choice Award that I won this year. It's been great.

• 40:06Brian Keating?

  We reached eight, top eight podcasts for a day on, on Spotify. It's been an incredible year. Next year's gonna promise to be even better. Great guests are coming on as usual. But my audience has asked questions, including this one. If an engineer were asked to design a propulsion system that produce a very tightly collimated, persistent sunward jet like Atlas observed, like Atlas is observed to have, what constraints would immediately jump out to him, it, clock, you, whatever you call this object, they're pronouns, in the, in this other galaxy? What, what sorts of engineering constraints would they face?

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. So the question is, why would we have a sun-facing jet? What would be the purpose of that? You know, in the first half of the The orbit of 3I Atlas, you might have thought it may be related to some attempt for maneuvering, but not really, because it was in the direction of motion and now it's opposite to the direction of motion. The only sensible thing is, so it wasn't also to clear out the objects in front of it or to illuminate the path, because now it's opposite to the direction of motion. The only sensible thing is that the solar wind may cause damage on a technological device

• 41:28Speaker 03

  when it impacts the surface, because it releases of order 100,000 times the energy per mass of TNT. The solar wind is moving at 500 kilometers per second. So when it impacts the surface of some technological device, it may cause damage. And so when you approach a star, you might want to deflect the solar wind. And one way to do that is by creating a jet, a head always towards the sun, that deflects the solar wind. So that is the only thing I could come up with. But I would argue that it's really difficult to guess the mind of technological designers.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  And that's what makes it difficult, because, you know, I had some exchange with Professor Josh Nguyen from Princeton, where he said, "Could you forecast the technological signatures of an interstellar object?" And the problem is that, you know, we don't know who sent a technological object to our backyard and therefore, we don't know the intent. It's really difficult to guess ahead of time what would be the technologies that are employed and what would be their signatures. One thing we can look for is, of course, outliers, objects that have unusual behavior that we've never seen before. And that's the purpose of me putting out this list of anomalies that I mentioned, because that's the only way for us to make progress.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Basically, ask, "Is there anything that distinguishes this object from the normal comets that we are familiar with?" There was nothing really substantial about Borisov, the second interstellar object. It looked just like a comet from the solar system. There was a lot... Different in the case of Amu Amua, but in a different way. It was definitely not a comet of the type that we are familiar with. There was no gas or dust around it. And then it exhibited the non-gravitation acceleration. So at first people said it's a comet. But then there was no gas or dust. They said it's an asteroid, but then it showed non-gravitation acceleration. So they said, well, maybe it's a dark comet.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  And so the point is if something doesn't fit neatly into categories that we are familiar with, we should be curious about it and figure it out.

• 43:40Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  And that's why I'm listing the anomalies. It's really a way for us to learn. If something is not familiar, let's use it to learn something new. Because, you know, finding material objects from another star is a completely new frontier in astronomy. We are used to looking at things remotely with a telescope and also with gravitational wave detectors. But finding a material object, a large material object that arrives to our backyard is an opportunity to learn about its source. And it would take us millions to billions of years to visit those stars.

• 44:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  So it's just an amazing, amazing opportunity.

• 44:18Brian Keating?

  Not to mention the fact that the last, you know, major one that came to visit the Earth and did leave some material with it was a, you know, giant dinosaur killing, you know, hunk of rock that hit off the coast of the Yucatan, right? So it not only has informational and scientific interest, it has survival, civilizational, existential benefits to us and for protection, even if it's not technological. I made a post on X, on Twitter today about, you know, we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Voyager, you know, launches. As you mentioned earlier today, they're barely one light day beyond the Earth's, you know, a distance from the Earth and the Sun.

• 44:57Brian Keating?

  Uh, so they're relatively, you know, kind of uh on the doorstep, really. They haven't left the home yet. They're like teenagers that won't move out, right? Uh, but uh, but I said, what would you put on a golden disk? And it made me think, A, well, I'd like to know, what would you put on a golden disk, A, Avi? And if a civilization found a golden disk, what would they say about it? It's it's just like, you know, the critics, the the the haters. Would they say things like, uh, you know, oh, it's just a, it's just a flat, you know, piece of a of a golden old golden metal from a supernova? I mean, they'd be making all these natural explanations for it, the haters, the the jealous ones, that the

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:31Brian Keating?

  The trolls.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  I mean, they would be, they would behave just like a cave dweller that is finding a cellphone, because the cave dweller would argue it's a rock of a type that I've never seen before. Uh, and that's also what was argued about the Tesla Roadster car when it was confused for an asteroid just this year in on on January second by the Minor Planet Center. So

• 45:51Brian Keating?

  So what would you put on a golden disk? And then, uh, yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, um, I would actually right now, uh, put an AI chip. Uh, because that's our most advanced technology and it brings in the the, you know, the the technology of artificial intelligence and uh, in fact, even have a a an AI brain on on on that uh, record that we put, uh, just be in order to demonstrate that we can create intelligent systems, uh, which is a milestone for us, because that's the first time we are, you know, our own technological child may have a higher level of cognition than our brain, you know, and

• 46:35Speaker 03

  uh, this hopefully will bring us a sense of modesty that we desperately need. And if not, then of course, alien intelligence superior to ours will do the same. So for it to meet an alien civilization, you know, will demonstrate that we are able to create things that are better than us, okay?

• 46:53Brian Keating?

  And we we could, we would do it without embedding a deep fake of, you know, Donald Trump, uh, pushing some meme coin, some Trump coin. Uh, okay, so let's, let's get into some more.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  By the way, I should, I should mention an anecdote that just a few weeks ago, I had a, an interview by a high school student from Taiwan and she's, she was very young and her teacher was, was with her on the call. And then she asked me, what's your advice for younger students? And I said, then most, my most important advice is to have human friends and not AI companions. And then the second most important is to go to primary sources and not rely on AI systems because that's just like consuming junk food that is bad for your body. In this case, it's intellectual junk food provided, processed by AI that is bad for your brain. That's really my concern about young people.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  They will get dumber if they were to rely just on AI because they don't have critical thinking. And so, uh, she said, could I share the video with my father? And I said, of course. And then, then the teacher informed me that her father is one of these billion, multi-billionaires that, that is, um, uh, in the tech business associated with AI. And my hope is that he sees the light, that even though he develops AI, he would agree with me that his daughter should refrain from being addicted to AI.

• 48:27Speaker 00

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• 48:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it is incredibly addictive. I use it all the time. I use it every day. I enjoy it. My kids use it. I think it is, you know, possible that the people who use it, you know, for its intended purposes will find great success with it. I don't think that it was capable of doing what I care most about, which is new physics, at least in terms of GPUs plus LLMs. There may be some other thing that this girl's father's worried about.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Well, I'm really worried that already now that I wouldn't be surprised if 10% of the papers in journals are being written by AI.

• 49:29Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  And I worry, I worry, I worry that some of the data which is reported is fake. Because how would you verify unless you do the experiment yourself? So the AI system can create fake data that looks as real as real data. And then it's not easy to tell the difference. And so I'll give you an example. I saw a paper the other day on the archive where postdocs and senior people post new papers. And I looked at the content. It didn't make any sense. There were lots of mistakes. The physics is wrong. And I then looked at the author. The author has papers both on quantum gravity in the early universe and on asteroids.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  And I thought, no postdoc can have so much, such a rich repertoire. And it looked to me like all these papers were written by AI. And this postdoc is basically trying to beef up their resume. And, you know, and the other clue was that all these, none of these papers was submitted for a peer-reviewed journal. They all appeared on the archive. So to me, it says, there are people out there, you know, that produce papers that have no meaningful content. And they appear on the archive. There are moderators on the archive. But the moderators are paying attention to the length of the paper, all kinds of superficial aspects.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  They cannot really judge whether the content makes sense. So there are lots of papers written by AI that are completely wrong. So then the question is, you should check it out and before you blame the stupidity of the co-authors, it may be the stupidity of the AI system that created the paper.

• 51:13Brian Keating?

  And they have this problem that afflicted beef in Great Britain in the late nineteen nineties. Remember mad cow disease? Now I call it mad bot disease, where these AIs are training on data that they themselves are making and regurgitating things. So I don't believe that this is the way to get to a theory of everything, quantum gravity, new predictions in cosmology or serendipitous observations. But there may be another technology that does it. And I I kind of want to springboard that. I I should say that I get about three papers a day submitted to me from people that have, you know, come up with a theory of everything. And they're they always say the same thing, you know, press Keating, you know, we vetted it. It's a past chat GPT or Gemini, and they all say I'm brilliant and I'm the greatest.

• 51:56Brian Keating?

  I said, well, be careful, because I asked that, you know, chat GPT, what books has Brian Keating written? And it came back with, you know, losing the Nobel Prize featuring Avi Loeb. It came back with Into the Impossible, and then I came back with A Brief History of Time. And I said, well, you know, I need to get a couple percent of Stephen's, you know, book sales. But but I said, at least their theories of everything, you know, are at least as maybe untestable or unverifiable as string theory, you know? So it's it's not like, which was created long before we had a theory, we had AI.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  And it's still not being tested and it will not be tested in the. So the question is, why is it physics? But the thing I wanted to say about the the best contribution that AI can make to science would be to

• 52:40Speaker 03

  for AI medicine to in- in- increase the longevity of scientists. So that, you know, you can use the experience and the wisdom that you gained over the decades to make new discoveries. I think that will be, I mean, if Einstein were to live a few hundred years, I'm sure he would have. benefited humanity far more and

• 53:02Brian Keating?

  right I see people like yesterday I was looking up Ed Witten you know he was on Brian Green's YouTube channel talking about string theory in the year 2037 I don't know how they came up with that but I got the I got the notion you know and I was talking to to friends about this you know that like you could make it you know string theory in the year 25,000 that it would probably still be the same you know they

• 53:22Speaker 03

  well yeah I mean it will be if you think about it it's similar to the story about the Lubavitcher's Rabbi that you know they had the theory that the Rabbi when he dies will become the Messiah yeah and then he died and there was a data point he died and he didn't come back so you might say okay well does that demonstrate the theory is wrong not at all because they say we only have to wait more and then the same is true about supersymmetry for example we didn't find it with the Large Hadron Collider and the answer is okay we need a higher energy collider and we might find it there and this is actually a good situation where you can actually test the theory but in the context of string theory

• 54:06Speaker 03

  there is no definite prediction that can be you know we had a talk at the Institute for Theory and Computation the time serving as the director of and the string theory said that you know we could explain the evolving dark dark energy in the universe based on inspired by ideas from string theory and I said great you're making a prediction suppose we now find that it's all false and indeed the dark energy doesn't evolve would that rule out string theory and he said no string theory will always be right it's just that my conjecture may be wrong about it and how can you operate in this way where you don't you know stick your head and you know to to an empirical test you basically say irrespective

• 54:48Speaker 03

  of what the experiment will say I want to to gain the benefits of a successful prediction but then if it's not successful then it doesn't say anything about my theory I mean that's what that's what it's impossible to eat the cake and leave it you know

• 55:03Brian Keating?

  that's what your former colleague Natty Seiberg said you know no matter what we find if it's not consistent with string theory we'll say it's part of string theory you know string theories those things that they're not concerned I always say you know quantum computers are really good at predicting the properties of quantum computers And they may be useful for other things, I'm not sure yet. But a, uh, but, but string theory is very good at describing the mathematics of, of string theory. And, uh, I want to just point out the, you know, kind of something we, we hinted at, but we're talking about the deep future. You know, it has been said that it's impossible to, to really think that in a thousand years from now, people will still care about the Civil War in America. But they'll, they'll care about Maxwell's equations, which came about in the exact same decade, right?

• 55:46Brian Keating?

  So when we look back a thousand years, you know, hence, people studying the data, compare Three Eye Atlas to Oumuamua and Borisov, which is the one that will still be remembered? Or will they all, all be remembered? But, but which one clearly breaks the paradigm?

• 56:01Speaker 03

  I think, uh, well, uh, my guess is the, the one that will be proven to be part of a population that is extremely unusual. And once we have enough statistics, more than three, you know, it's like a blind date. You go on a blind date three times. I mean, some people converge with a, a partner.

• 56:18Brian Keating?

  Yeah, thank God, my wife did that, yeah, she settled for me.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  I would argue that's actually not a good practice because your data set is very limited. You know, if your sample includes only one person, obviously you think that person must be exceptional. You don't have a comparison. Uh, however, if you go on many blind dates, eventually you get a good enough sample to actually assess that the, the, the partner has some rare qualities. And so we just need a bigger sample to appreciate whether Three Eye Atlas or Oumuamua were a, a member of a very unusual class of objects that originate from a source very different than the solar system. And, uh, you know, if you ask me, um, what will happen in a thousand years?

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Let's say, I would argue that, you know, if you look at the funding of science, we are funding projects like the one that you're working on, like some of that I work on, where we study the known unknowns. For example, in the context of cosmology, we know that we don't know the nature of dark matter. We know that we don't know the nature of dark energy. We know that we don't have a verification, uh, that is beyond any doubt of cosmic inflation in the form of gravitational waves. So there are known unknowns. Okay. So things that we know that, that we don't know. These are the kind of projects that we fund, that we put resources towards. That's right.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  And on the other hand, what are the most consequential discoveries in science? These are the unknown unknowns. Right. For example. Yeah. Yeah, these are, these are situations where we don't even know right now that we don't know something. And just to give you an example, back in around eighteen ninety five or so, Michelson gave a talk at the University of Chicago where he said, "Physics is pretty much over and the only thing that remains is to fix the fundamental constants to the fifth decimal point." That was his mainstream point of view. He gave a lecture for a new laboratory opened at Chicago,

• 58:31Speaker 03

  with huge confidence that we are done with physics. And then ten years later, special relativity. Another ten years, general relativity. Another ten years, quantum mechanics. Everything he was talking about is completely sidelined by a new perspective about the physical reality. Now, what does it show? He couldn't have imagined quantum mechanics, because nobody could have imagined, and Einstein had a problem with it. You know, so when I visited Copenhagen just a few months ago, I was struck by this auditorium where the conference was held when I entered into it, because that's the birthplace of quantum mechanics.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  And, you know, Niels Bohr was willing, as a young scientist, was willing to say, "Reality is different," Albert, he was, he would tell Albert Einstein, "Reality is different." Quantum mechanics is not classical physics. And Einstein would say, "No, no, no, we are just missing another variable," or, "You know, it makes no sense that there is this spooky action at this." So Einstein was on the wrong side, because he had traditional thinking. Niels Bohr... Was much more daring and he was right. Now Einstein, of course, is a celebrated figure. But what does this story tell you? It tells you that even the most distinguished mainstream scientist, you know, Einstein was not mainstream when he started,

• 59:58Speaker 03

  but became mainstream at that point. Even those are sometimes too traditional. And therefore, you know, being open minded is really a virtue when you explore the unknown.

• 1:00:10Brian Keating?

  He could have had a good career. You know, he could have been famous if he didn't make those mistakes. Right, obviously, I mean Einstein could have been a well-known individual. So let's talk about, I have a question for my, one of my beloved audience members. This is Stephen Dedalus, 74. And he's asking, do you think Jupiter might hide some alien life? As in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? And that's the reason why 3I Atlas is coming towards Jupiter or seems to head towards Jupiter. What do you make of that speculation?

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  It's really difficult to maintain life in the atmosphere of Jupiter because there is no solid surface there.

• 1:00:47Brian Keating?

  Or its moons, or its moons, right?

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  Ah, moons, definitely. That's definitely possible, yeah. Yeah, so we haven't obviously found much. Actually, on Europa, there are two spacecraft now in the, on their way to Jupiter. And one of them is the Europa Clipper. The other one is JUICE. And both of them of the European Space Agency. And the Clipper, the Europa Clipper, is planning to arrive close to this moon of Jupiter, Europa, where the surface is frozen because Jupiter is far from the sun. But under the icy surface,

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  we believe that there is liquid water, an ocean, a subsurface ocean. And we know that there are cracks in the ice. And out of these cracks come plumes of water vapor, just like a geyser. And the question is whether there are any... Living organisms in those oceans and in particular, you could imagine fish swimming there. And some dead fish on the surface of Europa. We, we just don't know if these dead fish are, you know, uh, spewed out from the cracks in the ice and,

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  uh, and so it would be nice, of course, to learn more about Europa and figure out if there is, uh, there are any organic molecules in the plumes of water coming out, water vapor. Uh, so this is an example of a place where, you know, it's pretty much part of the, uh, mainstream scientific thinking that there is potentially life under, you know, subsurface life. And I should say that I wrote a paper about six years ago, talking about subsurface life. And the idea is that you could ima-, you know, the solar system maintained planets that we see today. But there were many more planets to start with that were kicked out of the solar system because of

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  interactions among the planets that kicked them out gravitationally. And what would be, what would happen to an Earth-sized planet, just like the Earth, a twin of Earth that, uh, let's say was kicked in between Earth and Mars, for example, was kicked out. Uh, it would freeze, obviously, and the surface will be covered with ice, maybe down to a depth of fifty kilometers or so. But there could be liquid water under the ice because of the radioactive warming of the inner core, you know, there are radioactive isotopes that decay and warm up the core of the, of the Earth.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  We know that there is significant amount of heat coming from the core, in addition to the heat coming from Yeah, that's why the Earth has the main temperature that it does, that's why. Exactly. So you could have definitely liquid water oceans under the icy surface of the Earth that was ejected, not at all close to a star like the Sun. And this may be actually the most abundant form of life in the universe because there were many more frozen planets that were kicked out of planetary, planetary systems than those that remained. And therefore, there must be a lot of free-floating planets frozen on the surface that may have life. Inside of them.

• 1:04:20Brian Keating?

  Trapped or signs of past life.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  It would be really difficult to find that that that form of life because you have to either look through the cracks in the ice or drill a hole in order to reach the life underneath. But it may be the most abundant form of life.

• 1:04:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, but so and I've never been afraid of a little hard work of it, you know.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

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• 1:05:09Brian Keating?

  Okay, I have a couple of questions as we come to to the end of the year, the end of the episode, three kind of rapid fire questions as we close out. And I want to thank you for being my most popular guest this whole year. It's been incredible journey. We've had over a million and a half views and downloads of our episodes together. May we have many more. Okay, this one has to do with the name of the month, January. So Janus, the god Janus is a god that looks forwards and backwards to the past and the future. I want to say to you, when you look, you know, backwards at these objects, you know, that are interstellar and then forward to a decade of vastly better surveys and instruments, what are you thinking is going to be, you know, sort of a misstep or a misunderstanding? And what do you suspect the future data that's coming very soon will force us to unlearn?

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Right. So first of all, with respect to 3I Atlas, if we use the web telescope, and I'm sure it was used very recently over the past week, but we haven't heard anything about it yet. If we can take a spectrum of the jets in particular, because the web telescope has an amazing spectrograph and measure the speed of the jet and the composition of the jet relative to the coma, the cloud of gas around 3I Atlas, then if the speed is below a few hundred meters per second, then it could be due to the sublimation of ice, pockets of ice on the surface of her rock.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  However, technological thrusters can produce, you know, chemical propulsion and the exhaust speed of a few kilometers per second. Or in the case of ion thrusters, they could reach tens of kilometers per second. So the speed of the of the jets would tell us a lot about their origin and their and the nature of the object. So that's what I'm looking for in the next few weeks, I mean into January. But more generally, we're entering a new era, starting in January, and that is with the Rubin Observatory in Chile, that was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  And the Rubin Observatory employs a 3.2 gigapixel camera, about a thousand times more than the number of pixels in your cellphone camera. And it also surveys the southern sky every four days. So we expect it to find a new industrial object every few months. And of course, some of that discovery space may be mitigated, may be suppressed by all the communication satellites of SpaceX and others, because they create tricks that sort of compromise our ability to look at the sky without interruption.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  But it's sort of like city lights in the sky, and I'm a bit worried about that. But other than that, the discovery rate should be 100 times higher than we had in the past decade from Pan STARS or from ATLAS. So we are entering a new era where we will have many more, maybe several dozens of, or maybe five dozens, it's hard to tell, in the next decade, of interstellar objects. And that would allow us to gain some insight into the statistics. How unusual are the outliers? And what are their nature? You know, where do they come from? And so this is something I very much look forward to. And then, of course,

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  If we are ambitious, we will design an interceptor

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  that will cross the path of one of these and we can actually take a close-up photograph of an incoming interstellar object and perhaps even land on it and bring some materials back to Earth, which would be amazing, just like we did with Osiris Rex that landed on Bennu and brought a sample of 120 grams. Where we found the most of the amino acids actually on the surface of an asteroid, you know, in the main asteroid belt. So we want to know if the same thing, if those amino acids exist near other stars. And that would be an amazing opportunity for astrobiology that was not mentioned anywhere, by the way. So I really hope for that.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Now, this, this kind of a mission, an interceptor mission, I mean, an ESA already has this mission of comet interceptor in mind. And by the way, it's not so difficult because even our Juno spacecraft around Jupiter could have intercepted 3I Atlas if it just had the original fuel that it started with. I did the calculation, I wrote the paper, published the paper about it. But it just consumed all of its fuel by now, so there is no way.

• 1:09:58Brian Keating?

  Missed opportunity, but.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  So, so these, these kinds of missions, interceptor missions, will cost at the level of a billion dollars, a few billion dollars. The point is, this is pocket change money. If we realize that alien technology is coming our way, then it would make sense to allocate a significant fraction of the military budgets that we spend every year for planetary defense.

• 1:10:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that would be half a percent of the daily, you know, it would be sort of half, half a day of its worth of military spending to pay for a single mission. So can you imagine what we would do?

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So imagine a trillion dollars a year for constructing a warning system for planetary defense. It would, of course, help in terms of people feeling more secure that Earth, that we know now when objects come in, whether they are technological or rocks, just from getting a close-up photograph of them. But it will also boost astronomy in a major way. Just think about all these probes out there. So, so a trillion dollars a year is a very substantial budget.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  For science.

• 1:11:11Brian Keating?

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  And I very much, so that's, people say, why are you so excited about searching for technological artifacts? And the answer is because it will bring us to a much better place where science gets a higher priority, where space exploration serves humanity, you know, and deserves to be funded at that level. Because it's not just about conflicts among people on the surface of this tiny rock, you know, that makes three millions of the mass of the sun. We have some residues, some debris that left over from the sun. We are obsessed with small territorial disputes on it.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  And by the way, Putin, who is one of the main people who are, you know, causing a lot of deaths just over a piece of territorial dispute. You know, he actually was asked on Friday by a journalist in Russia. He had the summary of the year 2025. He was asked about pre-Atlas. And he tried to explain what this object is. But, you know, if he were to get the full picture from the cosmic neighborhood we have, it would immediately suggest to him that his life ambition makes no sense whatsoever.

• 1:12:31Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's right. That's as Carl Sagan said, you know, looking at the pale blue dot, you see humans fighting over the fraction of a dot. Well, Avi, I want to wish you great success in your coming new year as you go forth and prosper. May you be successful. And you've really done so much this year to really highlight the most exciting, most interesting things, other than cosmology and the big bang that I study, right? Okay, I can't dispute that. But Avi, you've done an incredible amount to inspire people, millions of people around the world. And there's much more coming in the new year. And I hope we'll be able to get together because you have this ability to change the way that ordinary people and scientists think about our place in the cosmos. I want to thank you so much. I want to wish you a happy holiday season, a happy new year.

• 1:13:16Brian Keating?

  And remind you, if you want a piece of an actual Asteroid that is probably from our solar system, not interstellar, but it definitely has some DNA on it, Avi, because you know, I lick each one and put it... No, I don't do that, but we can't avoid shedding some amino acids when we put these things in the mail to you. You can get one at briankeating.com/edu if you are a university dweller in the United States, but if you're not, briankeating.com/yt.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Well, I just wanted to say one thing, Brian. When I was a kid, I was told about people that are willing to sign a document dedicating their body to science after they die. Okay? I'm willing to dedicate my body to science while I'm alive.

• 1:14:01Brian Keating?

  Well, you've dedicated so much of your mind and your body. And yeah, I just wanted to be said of me in 150 years, Avi, that I look good for a 200-year-old person. So that's the way that I am. Avi, thank you so much. Have a great holiday season. We'll see you next year and we'll have many more exciting adventures together. Thank you guys so much in the super chats and the members. And tune into my interview with second most popular guest this year, Mario Urich of the Vera Rubin Observatory. We talked about tens of thousands of asteroids in comments that they are discovering and will discover in the coming years with Vera Rubin. So tune into that. I'll put a link to that right here. And for everybody else, thank you for being so supportive. Many great interviews to come, including a long interview with our friend Terrence Tao, part two, a very,

• 1:14:45Brian Keating?

  very wonderful interview with Terry Tao, one of the Mozart's of mathematics. He's kind of the Avi Loeb of mathematics. Avi, thank you so much. Be well, my friend.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  It's getting chilly outside. But you know what that means?

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  It's time to cozy up with Panera Brian. Let's get toasty, cheesy. Oh, hello, broccoli cheddar soup in a red bowl. How about melty? Okay, Chipotle Chicken Avi Melt. It's dipping bread and soupy goodness season. Oh yeah, we are so back. It's Panera season. Order now.