"Asteroid Could Hit in 2032?!" & Did Webb Telescope Just Spot Aliens?

Brian Keating dives into some of the universe's biggest mysteries, from the search for extraterrestrial life and the nature of the Big Bang to cutting-edge discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. Joined by Young and Alive, they explore how scientific beliefs are constantly evolving, how astronomers confront existential threats like asteroids, and why a sense of wonder drives the quest to understand our place in the cosmos. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:55Brian Keating?

  I don't know if you heard about this, but there was an asteroid spotted. We might have a 1%, 2%. This week it got as high as 3% chance of being impacted by a 300-foot wide, you know, bigger than a Foxborough Stadium.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  If it does hit the earth, I think it's like, it was like 2032. I would think it was, right? By then, do you think we would be able to do anything about it in 2032?

• 1:19Brian Keating?

  That's a very good question. So this is only seven years from now, Brian, right? Astronomy is not an experimental science. It's a purely observational science. We have time machines, so telescopes are time machines. They allow you to look back in history and see it as it was then. Web is able to do things as far back as the beginning of the earliest galaxies. Not quite the big bang, but closer to it than ever before. And one of the most interesting aspects of it is to look for extraterrestrial life on other planets and the formation of so-called exosolar planets that could harbor extraterrestrial intelligence. It's one of the most exciting discoveries, if if true, that could ever be made.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  So are there any big unanswered questions about the universe that keeps you up at night right now?

• 2:10Brian Keating?

  They don't keep me up at night. They keep me fully employed. You know, that's the nice thing about being a scientist is you never run out of mysteries. You know, science is what's known as an infinite game that you, you know, the object is to keep playing. But it's made up of a whole bunch of finite games, you know, getting into college, getting into graduate school, getting into, you know, prestigious postdoc or working as a faculty member. These are all things that are mandatory to succeed. And then they can keep going, getting tenure, winning a Nobel Prize. But luckily, nature supplies us with an unending supply of mysteries that have varying degrees of importance, interest to the general public and interest to scientists. So they don't keep me up at night, but they get me so excited to get up in the morning. That's the more important thing.

• 2:54Brian Keating?

  Have the questions, to have the tools, to have the collaborators to really unravel what would have seemed like God-like abilities, you know, just 100 years ago. I mean, we've learned so much, but there's so much more left to learn. So yeah, it's a fascinating job. It's the best job in the universe. I can't believe I got paid to do it, you know, and not very much, but as a public employee at a university in California. But it's, but it's really the best thing I could have ever imagined doing.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Now, is there any, are there any mysteries right now about the universe that are getting you going that you're really working on or trying to figure out? Or that the collective is trying to figure out?

• 3:28Brian Keating?

  Yeah, we're trying to unravel what happened before the Big Bang. The Big Bang is thought to be the origin of the universe. Now, whether that was the origin of time, whether that was the origin of all matter, all energy, everything that was, is, or ever will be, is one of the hottest questions in all of science. We know, we don't know for sure that our universe is unique. In other words, there could be other universes, parallel universes, universes that exist parallel to us in time or in space, you know, at the same time, or both. And there could be as many as, as an infinite number of so-called universes within the multiverse, what's called the multiverse. So that is perhaps one of the biggest mysteries of all time, not just of, you know, modern day science. And until now,

• 4:12Brian Keating?

  Hasn't been possible to identify ways to answer that question. You know, people ask me all the time, you know, do you, I was a there's a podcaster, not, not as successful as you. His name is Sean Kim on Instagram. He's got 16 million followers. Um, he's been trying to get me on this podcast for a while, but you know, I had to go on uh, you, Brian first, because you know, fellow Brian, even though you spell your name with a Y, it's a, it's a uh, you know, we can, uh, mine's an anagram for brain. So that's the only advantage of, of my, my spelling. But he's, uh, put a tweet today or put out a post on Instagram, you know, 55,000 likes so far. You know, do you believe in evolution? So I wrote him back provocatively. I don't believe in evolution, not at all. I'm not, uh, as a scientist, I don't believe in evolution. I have evidence for evolution.

• 4:56Brian Keating?

  And that's the distinction that most people don't realize. We don't talk about belief. You know, I don't believe in, you know, unicorns or the tooth fairy either, but I also don't have evidence for them. So the difference between scientific pursuits that a good scientist should do, and not many, not all scientists are good scientists. There's as bad, many bad scientists as there are bad, uh, you know, accountants or lawyers. Uh, so it's not immune from that, just because we study something that seems to have no practical benefit. People assume that we're all altruistic and just want to give, uh, you know, of ourselves. But no, we have a whole lot of, uh, ordinary desires and, and greed and jealousy and envy and all sorts of petty things as well as wonderful traits as well, curiosity, imagination. And this sense of wonder that's very childlike, and I think it's, that's delightful, but

• 5:40Brian Keating?

  we don't believe in things. A good scientist shouldn't believe in these, shouldn't believe, you know, uh, you know, in, uh, in germs. You should, we have evidence for germs, viruses, co, you know, vaccines, work, uh, all sorts of things that are controversial to, you know, general public. But, uh, that doesn't mean I'm denigrating faith. You know, faith has a place as well in, in human endeavor. And we're creatures of faith and language. And because of that, people conflate and mix together belief and evidence. And science is the one place that shouldn't ever happen. So I don't believe in gravity. I don't believe in the big bang. I don't believe in, uh, in evolution. I have evidence for them. So the, the thing, you may be to answer your first question less flippantly. That's the thing that keeps me up at night is that

• 6:22Brian Keating?

  The general public has a misplaced perception of how much they should trust in science and how much work and kind of activity of their mind, they should outsource to scientists. So I'm trying to do my part through my, you know, public outreach on YouTube and and podcasts and so forth and my appearances on other shows like this to give back to the public who pay my salary. A way that they can interpret and use scientific reasoning to improve their lives and improve their interpretation of this very brief moment in time in the universe's history that we get to call being young and alive.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, isn't there some, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't there some like doubts about the big bang right now? Like, wasn't there like some recent thing that that came out about it? I might be wrong. I'm not sure.

• 7:04Brian Keating?

  Oh, no, you're absolutely right. Yeah, there's always doubts. Look, the big bang is not the final word. Einstein is not the final word, you know, and that's the beauty of science. Science is always provisional. That word may not be, you know, familiar to many of your listeners, or maybe it will be. Science is provisional. I could be wrong tomorrow, and that's a good thing. And scientists most of all should be welcoming the idea that they could be overthrown, overturned, made irrelevant. And the swifter that occurs, the better, because the more frequently you can iterate, improve your reasoning and your thought process, the better, because then you can make more progress. Again, we scientists should be very stoic. We should believe that we have a very limited amount of time to be alive, to do the

• 7:45Brian Keating?

  type of work that we do. Most scientists do their best work when they are young, when they are, you know, kind of below fifty, over fifty, but but younger than fifty is kind of the common age, younger than thirty even in some cases to win Nobel prizes, to win accolades, and so forth. So we have a limited amount of time, but we shouldn't be afraid of being wrong. And so I'm not at all afraid of finding out the big bang didn't happen. And in fact, I have videos on my podcast with many, many of the most eminent minds that I respect so much, and they believe the big bang didn't happen, or perhaps it happened in a different way than we had originally thought. But all these things are very recent and developments in this three pound supercomputer that sits on our shoulders called the brain.

• 8:29Brian Keating?

  This has only been around for, you know, it's fifty Sixty years at most out of two hundred thousand years of being Homo sapiens. So the fact that we can even comprehend this stuff, let alone prove it via data, via evidence, via scientific theories and paradigms that get overthrown and replaced by better ones. So a good way to think about this is, you know, I've got a globe in the back. I don't know if you can see it. My, my bokeh is so creamy lately. I've gotten addicted to lenses and stuff, Brian. It's, it's an addiction that, you know, hopefully my wife will forgive me for. But, uh, but the, there's a globe in the back, sort of right around here. If you've got a widescreen. And it's perfectly round, but the earth is not perfectly round.

• 9:11Brian Keating?

  It's not flat and it's far, farther from being flat than it is from being round. So if you think it's flat, you're completely wrong. You're unequivocally wrong. You know, the flurfers that believe that, but if you think it's round perfectly round, you're also completely wrong in a technical sense. And then it's not round. And in order to specify its shape, we need a much more complicated, complex overturning of that. And that was a good thing. Because originally people thought it was, it was flat and then they thought it was round. And for a long time they thought it was round, but thinking that it's purely round is also detrimental. It's the thing. It's flat means you, you think you're going to fall off the edge of the earth. What does that do that impedes scientific progress and exploration? People thought they'd fall off the edge of the earth. They were more reluctant.

• 9:51Brian Keating?

  Might be apocryphal. I'm not sure that actually was seriously believed by intelligent people or explorers even. But let's just say you believed it, that you could fall off the edge of the earth. That would make you reluctant to explore other frontiers. Literally, you'd think you, there is no frontier. You just fall off the edge of the earth.

• 10:08Brian Keating?

  And that was bad because believing that would impede the scientific knowledge that actually we live on a planet and that planet goes around. And there's still millions of people that believe this, as I joke, all around the globe. There are people that believe the earth is flat. Now, beyond that, believing the earth is perfectly round is also a mistake, less, less egregious, but it's a mistake. And that would also, if you were dogmatic about that, Brian, you would then, you know, remove the possibility that you could ever determine that the earth is rotating and that the earth formed from a more molten state when it was more plastic. And its rotation causes it to bulge slightly at the equator like some of us when we get older. The earth bulges slightly. It's not a perfect sphere. It's a flattened,

• 10:51Brian Keating?

  what's called, you know, oblate spheroid. It's more spherical than flat, but always being open to overthrowing your previously held paradigm allows you to learn more and more things. So in science, the controversy now that you alluded to in your question is whether or not the big bang happened. I would be overjoyed to find out either way. People ask me, what do you hope to discover with your $200 million project that you co-lead in Chile? And we could talk about that. I don't hope to find anything. I hope to discover the truth and get closer and closer to it with more and more data, more and more evidence, more and more facts, and more and more of this unique capability that humans can do for now, which is called the scientific method.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Real quick, before we jump back in, I want to take some time to thank today's sponsor, Aura. This is the only sponsorship of the podcast, by the way. Bank of America recently had a data breach and they didn't tell anyone for months. On average, it takes companies 277 days to report a breach. That means that your personal data could have been exposed nearly a year ago and you're just finding out about it now. And it's not just them. Citigroup, JP Morgan, and other banks have had breaches too. Do you really want to give criminals a 277 day head start on you? That's why it is a really important time to be talking about today's sponsor, Aura. Aura alerts me if they find my phone number, email, or social security number, or on the dark web. They're going to let me know fast if anyone tries to use this information to access my credit or

• 12:14Speaker 03

  bank accounts. They give me up to $5 million in identity theft insurance should the worst-case scenario happen. They also provide a bunch of other features to keep you safe online, all inside of one app. You can go to my link, aura.com/youngandalive to try 14 days for free. That will be enough time for Aura to find out if any of your personal data is exposed. That's aura.com/youngandalive to try it free for 14 days. Do not wait until it's too late. Now, back to the podcast. Yeah, if you look at like the history of like scientific discoveries, it's always like beliefs being challenged. Like they, people used to think that the earth was the center of the universe and then that was challenged. Like there's all these beliefs that we have and then they're constantly challenged. So, you know, I hope, I hope people these days can be open to that, the fact that some of these common beliefs that

• 12:59Speaker 03

  we have about the universe might not even be true. And then who knows what discoveries will happen in your, my lifetime, right?

• 13:05Brian Keating?

  I couldn't add anything to what you said. It's perfect.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  So for people that don't understand how big the universe truly is, how like, what's a good analogy that you can use to like, really get it through them?

• 13:17Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So for a long time, we thought the earth was effectively the entirety of the the known universe. We knew about objects in the night sky that were fixed in place. They seemed to be glued on to some fictitious globe that surrounded us called the the night sky. But there were five other objects that seemed to move against those fixed stars. And those were the, you know, obviously the sun and then the moon and then Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, those those planets, the first five planets from the sun. Those are all that were known for since antiquity, since, you know, two, 3,000 years ago. And that only really changed our perspective when the telescope was was invented in the late 1500s.

• 14:01Brian Keating?

  And then perfected by Galileo in early 1609 and 1610 in Padua in Italy. And what he did with that telescope is really move the earth from being the center of the universe. So think of the telescope as a lever. I have a telescope somewhere around here. Never too far away from a telescope as an astronomer. But what he did was he moved it like a lever from its place where it had been centered for, you know, innumerable years and eons. But that wasn't the end of it. Again, good science is about overthrowing. So the earth is not the center. He claimed the sun is the center of the universe, which was the solar system, just the solar system. We had no idea how far away the stars were at that time. So the universe expanded from being just the earth, just a part that we could, you know,

• 14:45Brian Keating?

  kind of explore in a human lifetime or a few human lifetimes. We hadn't even explored most of the continents, you know, the Antarctica, for example. It wasn't reached for 400 years later. So this whole, you know, kind of epic story of discovery is one of sort of blows to our cosmic ego. Because we first thought we were the center of the universe. We thought the center of the the earth is the most important place in the universe. Aristotle, even up to the church, etc., in the Renaissance. They really believed that the earth is the center of the universe. Then Galileo, Copernicus, based on Copernicus's ideas, demonstrated the earth is not the center of the solar system. It's in fact, one of the, you know, five planets that orbit around it that were known at the time. And then later, more planets would be discovered.

• 15:30Brian Keating?

  Then we learned that the sun isn't the center of the galaxy, that we live in a galaxy. It's sort of an island of a hundred billion or more stars. Many of them like the sun, many of them very different from the sun. They, we have all sorts of weird and exotic stellar objects. These are objects that undergo nuclear fusion that produce heat and light. In most cases, some of them, when they die, they become really exotic materials called neutron stars. We don't have to get into that or black holes, you've probably heard of. And then it was found that, that the earth and the sun are actually going around, orbiting around the center of the galaxy at a distance of some, you know, 30,000 or so light years. So a light year is the distance traveled by light in one year.

• 16:12Brian Keating?

  And this was phenomenal discovery and, and later it was just demonstrated that there are more than one galaxy, that the objects that were formerly thought to be part of our galaxy, such as what was called the Andromeda Nebula, but is really a galaxy, that that object was actually located 2.5 million light years away. So when the very first hominids in Africa were coming out of Old Devi Gorge, 2.5 million years ago, the light that we can see tonight from the Andromeda Galaxy left on its journey to my eyes or your eyes or a telescope. You actually see it with your naked eye if you live in a dark spot. I don't know, where do you live, Brian?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  I live in Boston, so no chance, yeah.

• 16:54Brian Keating?

  Well, Boston's got a lot of attractions associated with it. So you can, you can certainly glimpse it through a telescope at Harvard or MIT or Boston College or Boston University. Anyway, so that was then discovery that we live in the, and just one of perhaps 100 billion more galaxies. Each one filled with 100 billion or more stars. Each of those stars harboring 10, maybe 100 types of planets or asteroids, comets and Kuiper belt type objects. And so the scale of the universe has gotten bigger and bigger. But all those discoveries, except for the discovery of the sun being the center of our solar system, all of those were made in the last 100 years exactly. In other words, the fact that we live in a galaxy was not known until nineteen twenty three.

• 17:38Brian Keating?

  The fact that there were other galaxies and that those galaxies are in fact moving away from us. And over time, people have suspected, uh, at each moment, we're the center of something. First center of the earth, next center of, uh, of the solar system, next center of the galaxy. And now we know we're not the center of the galaxy, maybe we're the center of the universe. No, we're not the center of the universe. Every point in the universe is the center of itself, uh, of the universe, and the universe ke- keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's expanding, expanding into what? We don't exactly know, but it could be we're expanding towards other universes. Now would be the ultimate kind of Copernican revolution, starting with the earth not being the center of the universe to our universe not being the center of the multiverse. That is the hottest topic in all of science in my opinion right now.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Hmm. So I, I have a theory, and before I say it, keep in mind that this is coming from a twenty five year old psych- I have a psychology degree, like this isn't my field, but I do have a theory that like, that just like, like the atoms and stuff that make us, make us up, like, is it, what's the chances that like, the universe itself is like that, where we're something making a bigger structure? Does that make sense?

• 18:44Brian Keating?

  The, the, the universe is like a cell in some organism or something? I'm not, I'm not, or, or an atom in a, in a-

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so it's like, uh, yeah, it all makes up like a bigger structure. Whether that's, that's, that's my stupid theory, but what do you think about that?

• 18:57Brian Keating?

  Well, okay, so it's, it's not stupid in the sense that, uh, most of the interesting things that occur in the universe in, uh, in nature, et cetera, are networks. And in fact, you know, we're, we connected through a social network, right? I mean, uh, so, so these are phenomena of the importance derived not from the individual components of, of the, of the network, but the network connections between other things. So for example, each, you know, neuron in your brain is connected to hundreds or, you know, perhaps thousands of others, um, and, and what are called synapses. And those spread out and there's perhaps a hundred trillion, you know, uh, known possible permutations of connections in a human brain.

• 19:38Brian Keating?

  Um, the galaxy is made up networks held together by gravity of stars, of planets, of comets and things like that. Galaxies are held together in what are called clusters and then clusters of galaxies, perhaps a thousand galaxies like the Milky Way are held together in super clusters of perhaps tens of thousands of galaxies. And those create these vast filaments. And if you look at the filamentary structure- Seated with with planets, with podcasters, with stars, with galaxies. You also have a lot of dark matter and there's dark energy and exotic materials called neutrinos. All of these things are bound together in a network. And if you look at those networks, they spread out and they they they look kind of like this spongy type material where there's

• 20:21Brian Keating?

  pockets where there's nothing, there's pockets where there's very high density. And and that's where the interesting stuff like you and me reside. So now, whether that then expands, you know, into a bigger structure called the universe, called the multiverse, is not understood. There are theories that that actually also has a spongy like structure instead of the individual material, the sponge being galaxies or clusters of galaxies. There are neurons, they're they're universes. That's very speculative. There's no evidence for it. But so where there's no

• 20:56Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses setup required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 21:21Brian Keating?

  Evidence, you're free to speculate.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  So what have we learned from the from the James Webb Telescope? That went up in 2021, right? Around that time?

• 21:31Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it was launched in Christmas Day 2021, and it's been in orbit, you know, revealing the universe in wavelengths that the human eye can't see called infrared radiation. And that's slightly longer. It's the way it's the type of radiation that causes a sensation of heat. So you can go outside on a sunny day. Here it's finally sunny. And you could put your hand up and you can keep your eyes closed like this, and you can move your hand around. You could locate the sun, right? You could imagine your your hands are acting like crude eyes, but only because they're sensitive, the molecules rub together and they're heated up by the infrared radiation, not the visible radiation. You can actually block out the visible light, and you'll still be able to detect it with your hand using the infrared, you know, transmitting portion of these filters.

• 22:16Brian Keating?

  So when you do that, you're able to detect the sun. So we're actually able to sense it, but not with our eyes. So what the James Webb Space Telescope said, well, this whole invisible universe that we can't see, but we can feel in a sense, we can detect more phenomena than we have seen before. And so it's really focused on that. And the types of findings that they're unveiling have to do with everything from the earliest galaxies in the universe. What did they look like? Did they look like our Milky Way? Do they look different? Sort of looking back in evolutionary terms, you know, astronomy is very hard, because we can't do an experiment. You know, you can do an experiment in your psychology class, you know, you can put some marshmallows in front of some toddlers and see if they grab them, right? I mean, you've probably done a bunch

• 23:00Brian Keating?

  of, you know, you can threaten to electrocute people, you know, and be jailers, like in the Stanford Prison Experiment. And I'm sure you're familiar with all these things with your background. And so you can do it. And what are you doing? You're taking one set of subjects, you're subjecting them to some variable, you know, electric shocks, marshmallows, you know, hopefully more marshmallows and electric shocks. Hopefully you're a nice guy. And then you're, and then you're doing an experiment. What are you doing? You're comparing the ones that you shock or give marshmallows to, to the ones you didn't give marshmallows to, or the ones you didn't shock. So you have a control. You have a variable and you have a control. With astronomy, we can't do that. I can't go out and say, hmm, I wonder what happened if I turned the magnetic field of the earth, you know, up a thousand times, and then I watch what happens. Or the

• 23:45Brian Keating?

  sun's temperature, can I change the sun's temperature by a thousand times, and then see what happens to sunspots, or solar storms, or all sorts of things. Or what if I added 20 times more dark matter in our galaxy? So it's obvious. We can't do any of those things. So astronomy is not an experimental science. It's a purely observational science. And that's very, very unusual in the annals of all scientific endeavor. So what can we do? Well, that happens to be the good thing that we have access to two really unique tools that no psychologist, biologist, or chemist could have access to. And that's we have time machines. So telescopes are time machines. They allow you to look back in history and see

• 24:25Brian Keating?

  As it was then, unlike, you know, what we do with archaeology, we see, not unlike what we do with her. So we see a fossil and it kind of has some aspects of what it was like when it was alive. You know, maybe it was eating something, maybe the dinosaur was pregnant, maybe it was, you know, trapped in this kind of geological formation. So you can kind of understand the invite, but you can't see it as it was like a television movie of the dinosaur moving around like on Jurassic Park. Uh, but with astronomy, we can, we can look back because these things are so far away from us. We see them as they were when they were babies or alive, if you will, young and alive. And so when you look back, you see galaxies and you can ask, what were their evolutionary paths? From that time, and then you look at young, uh, older and older galaxies or younger and younger galaxies going forward in time.

• 25:09Brian Keating?

  And then you see what they look like. And you see, are they similar to galaxies today? Uh, are they different? Do they, do they have the same structure, the same number of stars, the same color? Temperature of stars, were they undergoing fusion, uh, at the same rate? Was there as much dark matter? Was the dark energy affecting it? All these things blend together and, uh, that's what the web can do uniquely. So, uh, such a wonderful job of. It can also do stuff much closer to us in our own galaxy, in our own solar system. It's looked at Jupiter, it's looked at this asteroid. I don't know if you heard about this, but, uh, there was an asteroid spotted. I write about this on my newsletter, it's briankeating.com. Uh, you can find it there and, uh, there's an asteroid, not like this one. So I give these away.

• 25:52Brian Keating?

  Um, my bulk is too, too luxurious of blending it out, but if you're watching, I'm holding up a chunk of an asteroid. So this is a chunk, not the asteroid that could come and destroy earth, but it's still an asteroid. Uh, fragment nonetheless called a meteorite. So it fell in Argentina, um, in 1604 or something like that. I wasn't there. But, uh, but we dated it and I give them away on my website, briankeating.com. So you can subscribe for that. And I write about like, what are the implications of this psychologically? On knowing that we might have a 1%, 2%, this week it got as high as 3%. Chance of being impacted by a 300 foot wide, you know, bigger than, uh, bigger than, uh, uh, Foxborough Stadium there where I used to, uh, hang out, uh, when I was.

• 26:35Brian Keating?

  At Brown University. So yeah, these, these objects are just phenomenally interesting. And James Webb was able to reveal that actually has a lower percent chance. You know, say, don't, you know, don't, don't take those Jell-O shots that people are talking about or whatever. You know, keep living your life. It's, it's probably not going to hit, but it's good to think about those things existentially, philosophically and psychologically, because it makes you appreciate what we have even more in being alive. And the present moment, what we call memento mori, you know, is, is, is a very important concept in, in humanity. And we shouldn't lose sight of that literally or figuratively. So Webb is able to do things as far back as the beginning of the earliest galaxies, not quite the big bang, but closer, closer, closer to it than ever before.

• 27:19Brian Keating?

  And as close as an asteroid in our own solar system. So it's just an incredible instrument. And one of the most interesting aspects of it that I've worked, I've, I've had it on my podcast, some of the most brilliant and popularizers of science, David Kipping recently, Adam Frank, is to look for extraterrestrial life on other planets and the formation of so-called exosolar planets that could harbor extraterrestrial intelligence. And we could talk more about that, but James Webb has been able to spot the, the possible habitable worlds that these things could live on. If they exist. Now, there's no evidence for them. We don't have belief in things in science, as I told you earlier. So right now we have to say there's no evidence, there's no belief warranted, but nevertheless, it's one of the most exciting discoveries.

• 28:04Brian Keating?

  If, if true, that could ever be made.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Now, what if the asteroid is coming our way and it is going to hit us? Do you think, what is it?

• 28:12Brian Keating?

  Our way? No, no, no, it's make no mistake, it's coming our way. But will it hit the earth? Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  If it, if it does hit the earth, I think it's like, it was like 2032, I would think it was, right?

• 28:22Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Would we, by then, do you think we would be able to do anything about it in 2032?

• 28:28Brian Keating?

  That's a very good question. So we have actually had a mission from NASA, I should say, I'm not involved with it, called the DART mission, which actually shot an impacter. So you can imagine this thing being, you know, a couple of hundred meters across. And then they shot a little tiny, you know, a BB compared to the size of this thing. Maybe even smaller than a BB, but just to visualize it. And then that impacted it and made this huge explosion on it and changed its orbit tiny, tiny bit. Now that was about four or five years ago. We learned a lot about that. There are other ways to do that because you can think about if it did actually make an impact on it like the movie Deep Impact or you know,

• 29:05Brian Keating?

  if you blow it up, you don't solve the problem, right? And you may have made it much worse. You turn a single, you know, you've turned a single nine millimeter bullet into a shotgun spray of, you know, millions of BBs. Okay, so each one won't destroy the earth entirely, but each one will take out a city and now you've got a million cities that are going to go up in smoke. So that's not a good way to do it. Other ways have been proposed, attaching a small rocket to it to nudge this thing out of the way, starting early enough now. Now, this is only seven years from now, Brian, right? It's not like we have a hundred years and like Elon Musk will do, you know, instead of going to Mars, he'll go, I mean, I don't, I don't think that's necessarily possible. On the other hand, we have a space program unlike the dinosaurs, right? So the dinosaurs didn't have a very good space program 65 million years ago,

• 29:51Brian Keating?

  and they couldn't do anything about that, but that ended all of their civilization. So it's incredibly high impact. I mean, the consequences of this thing hitting us is incredibly high, but you multiply by an incredibly low probability. Let's say it was 3%. That's, that's actually very high. It's gone down to less than a percent again. Started off about a percent, went up to 2%, went as high as 3%, now it's back down below a percent. But imagine, you know, Brian, if you had a, you know, one in 30 chance, every time, every 30 times you get in your car, you're going to die. Would you stop driving?

• 30:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 30:24Brian Keating?

  You wouldn't stop driving. You'd keep going?

• 30:27Speaker 03

  What? Oh, one in 30? I was, okay, so I know like the statistics are pretty up there for getting in an accident and like people do it anyways, but one in 30 is, yeah, one in 30 is no, I'm not doing that.

• 30:37Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I wouldn't do it. Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  I'm taking, I'm taking the train. I'm taking the train.

• 30:40Brian Keating?

  Exactly, exactly right. So now, so what 3% is one in 30 roughly, right? So the question of whether or not this is going to, you know, literally be civilization ending, multiplied by, you know, a lower probability now makes people a little bit more sanguine that we can, you know, evade complete destruction unlike the dinosaurs. So yes, there's, there is, you know, there's, there's wiggle room. The last way of looking at this, my friend is a professor at UC Santa Barbara, Philip Lubin. He's devising a way that we could take lasers, you know, which are non-destructive and over the years slightly push these things away. Now, these would be space lasers, not Jewish space lasers. I am Jewish, he is Jewish.

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• 31:47Brian Keating?

  But we're not using space lasers in this capacity. And actually move the asteroid off its path without any destructive thing at all. Not making new projectiles spraying forth from it. Just gently pushing on it, using the pressures of light itself. Remember I told you you can feel the heat of the sun without seeing it? Then you could detect it. The photons from the sun have momentum and they have very, very tiny amounts of momentum each. But there's a huge number of them. So with a laser in space, you could generate a tiny amount of energy per photon. But literally trillions upon trillions of photons pressing for five years, say four years, three years even. And actually, we could do that from the earth too, if we needed to.

• 32:27Brian Keating?

  So the smaller the asteroid, the less momentum change you need to get it to deflect its orbit. But the earlier you have to act. So it's a trade-off. Right now, I'm not particularly worried. I'm still paying my taxes and, and you know, shaving on occasion. So yeah, it could happen. But it's just a piece of evidence that James Webb unexpectedly has contributed to and was never designed to do. But that's one of the brilliant things about science. You know, Galileo didn't, you know, invent his form of the telescope to prove the Copernican theory, you know, was correct. You know, he invented it and used it first to look at, you know, boats that were really far away. So that he could sell it to the government at the time. The literal Doge government, it was called. And, and that would then be used to make him a lot of money.

• 33:12Brian Keating?

  And he tried to make money because he had three illegitimate children that he had to support and mistresses. So he had practical reasons to do it. That was the reason he invented it and used it. And then only later did he realize that, no, I actually proved the earth is not the center of the solar system.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  So you had this debate on Rogan about extraterrestrial life and you seem to be very like you seem to not think there's other life out there. Why is this?

• 33:38Brian Keating?

  So again, the key word when talking to a scientist is evidence. If people believe things without evidence, that's up to them. That often is is what faith is all about. I mean, faith literally means, you know, trust or belief in something without evidence, right? I mean, if you knew for sure that Jesus Christ, you know, existed or that the sea with Red Sea was split, you wouldn't get any credit. I mean, you'd be foolish not to believe, you know, if you will, and have faith in that. And that would be evidence, right? You'd have to have evidence for it. So the the fact is in religion, you get credit for believing in things for which you don't have evidence for, and that's fine. But on the other hand, the the concept of aliens kind of transcends things because people believe that we do have evidence, but it's being covered up.

• 34:22Brian Keating?

  And it's being covered up by powerful conspiracies and government, you know, machinations to deceive their public citizens and even scientists like me are covering it up because it would threaten my very, you know, livelihood and all sorts of nonsense. But the fact is, again, we have no evidence for the existence of any extraterrestrials. We have, you know, currently no studied fragments of, you know, extraterrestrial craft. We have a lot of claims from pilots, you know, in the Navy, from Air Force officers like David Grush, from a lot of retired, you know, people, Ryan Graves, people I've talked to on my podcast. And then we have claims from, you know, people that were in certain programs like this guy, Lou Elizondo.

• 35:05Brian Keating?

  And then we have all these counterclaims. This week I had on Nick Pope, who is the inspiration for the character Mulder on The X-Files. And he's been, you know, in the government circles investigating crashed UFOs and so. And he even admits there's no hard evidence for it and there's a lot of tension behind it. But there's always this hope of so-called disclosure right around the corner. So I talked to Rogan almost two years ago now, and at the time they were saying all sorts of, you know, oh, just trust us, you know, and disclosure is imminent, there's it's about to happen. And in fact, the title of Well, Zando's bestselling smash hit book that he's been on all sorts of podcasts, including Rogan and Smartless. And he hasn't come on mine yet, but hopefully he will. And that was, it's called imminent, meaning that imminently, we're going to find out.

• 35:50Brian Keating?

  Now, this book was written, you know, over the last five, 10 years. There's no, there's no, you know, imminent, anything that's really come out other than stalling, you know, dragging feet, et cetera. Whereas there have been conclusive demonstrations that many of the sightings, up to 95% of them, can be explained through ordinary means. Now, if I told you, you know, you, you were listening to the weather, weather forecaster. And, and you thought that you're sure that there's, that there are, you know, kind of gods and goblins and ogres and trolls. And they make the weather. And only, you know, you don't have any evidence for it, but it's being covered up because, you know, NASA and, and NOAA and Channel, whatever, seven news there. They all have vested interests, so they're covering things up from you, Brian.

• 36:35Brian Keating?

  But you admit that 95% of the time they get it right. I mean, you'd be kind of foolish to believe the other 5% is really your best hope for things. And if you continue to dive down deep into it, you start to find out things that are, you know, even more incredible, meaning unbelievable. And the people that they bring forth and the eyewitnesses and the fact that it's predominantly seen in America and not really seen throughout the world. These are all things that make me highly skeptical, but a good scientist will never say there's no chance of it. Even if I knew for sure that all these people are lying, that they're all grifters, they're all trying to sell their books or sell, you know, get on Rogan or do whatever.

• 37:15Brian Keating?

  I would still, I would say that is irrelevant because what's important is whether or not we have evidence for stuff. And the more and more we collect evidence and there are actual legitimate scientists, my friend Avi Loeb, not far from you at Harvard University, is working to detect stuff, but even he doesn't say for sure these UAPs are alien technology sent from, you know, the distant past. Had to be thousands of thousands of years ago sent here for what purpose? I don't know, but there's certainly no evidence for it. So yes, I'll remain skeptical, but you have to have an open mind. Just you shouldn't have it so open that your brains fall out of your skull.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  What's your, what's your relationship with religion despite being an astronomer?

• 37:56Brian Keating?

  I was actually, yeah, both my parents are Jewish, but, but my mother and father divorced when I was a kid. And then they each remarried non-Jewish people. So I was actually raised with my non-Jewish Irish Catholic stepfather. And at age 13, instead of having a bar minh swah, I had, I was an altar boy in the Catholic church in Dobbs Ferry, New York. And it was one of the greatest experiences of my life, you know, learning and developing. I was confirmed and baptized. I went much farther into Christianity and Catholicism than I ever went into Judaism. That all changed after September 11th. So after September 11th, I certainly, everybody was very knowledgeable about, about Islam and, and kind of the threats that, that jihadist fundamentalism represented.

• 38:41Brian Keating?

  And, you know, the whole world was on, on notice at that point, although, you know, many people knew about it before then. And certainly that ideology of Al Qaeda and so forth is still, is still with us scarily and terribly in places like Gaza and elsewhere. But, uh, but the notion that we could, um, that we could kind of ignore the third religion. So I knew everything there was to know about being a Christian and Catholic. Uh, I knew a lot about Islam. I knew nothing about Judaism because I had stopped practicing it when I was seven years old. And I, you know, you don't really know much when you're seven, but I came back to it, learned more about it. Taught myself how to read Hebrew, which was not easy. Um, and then later, you know, longer and longer, wanted to, you know, get married to someone who was Jewish to keep, you know, kind of the tradition and the faith and culture going.

• 39:26Brian Keating?

  And I became more and more curious about this legacy and heritage that I had been introduced to. And you're absolutely right. Not only most astronomers, 90% of all scientists either do not believe actively that there is a God or don't know, in other words atheist or agnostic. Um, and so it's very unusual for the seven to 10% of us that, that have a faith practice, you know, like the, the way that Judaism influenced my life is that I observe the commandments that are unquestionably good in a sense. So, um, every Saturday, Friday night to Saturday night, I don't work. I won't like speak, I won't go on a podcast, you know, Rogan invites me, sorry, I can't do it.

• 40:10Brian Keating?

  And and those things have happened. I've had to turn down a lot of, you know, wonderful opportunities. But the payoff is so much better. I get to be with my wife, my kids, my friends, my family, my my community. We often have a lot of non Jews that that participate in our services and are, you know, kind of events together. And so it's wonderful. And that gives me so much more life and joy and meaning and, you know, stopping for one day and saying you don't own everything in that you think you own that, you know, detaching from the spiritual from the spiritual during the week, but then reconnecting with it, detaching from the material. One day a week. It's a it's a wonderful thing. And now you see more and more people talking about

• 40:49Brian Keating?

  digital sabbaticals and and like, you know, quiet quitting and all these things. These are all manifestations of ancient wisdom that was known thousands of years ago that I just was ignorant about. Until I investigated. So I treat it like a scientist. I don't believe literally, you know, that the, you know, there were two people start like started all of life on earth, but I also don't believe that all of it's false as well. I believe that there's a lot of very interesting truths that where it doesn't intersect with suspension of the laws of nature or scientific truth and scientifically plausible. I have to be a scientist. I can't say a hundred percent for sure. The Red Sea didn't split. I I have to look. Well, is there any evidence for it? Could it be some natural phenomenon? But the more you do that, you have to start thinking, well, what was the purpose of that?

• 41:34Brian Keating?

  And, you know, why is it that the earth was created and the sun were created on the fourth day after the creation? Isn't that the big bang? So what does all that mean? And so it's it's actually given me a great richness. And least of all, you know, it's impossible to be a cultured, educated human being without knowing at least about, you know, the New and Old Testaments, which I feel like I'm quite expert. So to me, it's given me a great amount of enriched my life greatly. And I feel somewhat sorry for my colleagues who are, you know, just obstinate atheists who hate the idea of religion, think it's pure evil and and, you know, I've talked with many of them, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, all these great minds, but, you know,

• 42:16Brian Keating?

  ultimately, I've never been persuaded that I would be a happier person to reject the practice of religion.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  So my last question for you is, if you had a minute with your younger self, what would you tell him?

• 42:26Brian Keating?

  Ah, that's you stole from my podcast. Um, I usually ask in a different way. So my podcast is called Into the Impossible. And I usually ask people, you know, if you had one minute, 30 seconds with your 20 year old self, what would you tell them? To give them the courage to go into the impossible. So, um, a minute, I would say, um, very little because the way that my life has played out has been so spectacularly fortunate, there's almost nothing I would change. And so by definition, any perturbation to the life trajectory, what we call in physics, the world line, which is the past history and from an omniscient God's perspective, the future path of, of a, an individual can only be made worse. Um, and I give the following analogy, like there are many ways to have, if you take 52 cards, right?

• 43:11Brian Keating?

  And a playing card deck and there's literally effectively infinite number of ways you can arrange them, sort them, shuffle them, throw them around, do whatever. But there's only one way where you can stack them all in order, right? If you just think about it, um, and, and so there's many more ways that you could and similarly in life and happiness. I don't know if you have a wife or kids or plan to, or whatever partner. But, um, but someday you'll, you'll have kids maybe and, or, or those, maybe you'll adopt a kid. I don't even care. I don't, I don't care how you have kids. But I just think it's important for people to have kids because otherwise we won't have a planet worth, uh, inhabiting. We won't have anyone inhabiting. So, um, all scientific progress depends on humans, by the way. So, um, and when you have kids, you'll realize there's an infinite number of ways your life has been made better.

• 43:57Brian Keating?

  But now there's also an infinite number of ways your life could be, uh, infinite times worse your life could be. And I won't even mention it because it's, you know, considered bad form to do. Maybe I'm superstitious. I don't give a crap. I've got good enough scientific bona fides. But you're not really supposed to talk about certain things, uh, but you can use your imagination and, um, and it would just be, uh, uh, inconceivable to live a life without taking those risks. And by, by definition, any change in my history, in my past would only deflect me from the person I was supposed to marry and, and the, the, the children that we have together and the job that I have and the opportunity to talk to people. Like you and your audience. So I wouldn't change anything. And so I'd just say, you know,

• 44:40Brian Keating?

  everything's going to work out. Uh, you know, you're doing fine. Uh, I don't think I live to really impress anyone other than myself. And I think, you know, I'm impressed with my 20 year old self and I'd continue to be impressed with my 50 plus year old self, but I have a lot more to go and a lot more to do and just really stay hungry, stay curious and never give up.

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