Is 3I/ATLAS Alien Technolgy? Avi Loeb & MIchael Shermer DEBATE - #514

Get my My new book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner -- https://a.co/d/hi50U9U It's just 99¢ on Kindle for launch week ONLY. It’s the perfect companion to this conversation—lessons in thinking clearly, staying curious, and pushing past conventional wisdom from my conversations with 22 Nobel Prize winners! Brian Keating sits down with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and renowned skeptic Michael Shermer to dissect the latest enigma sweeping through our solar system—3I/ATLAS. • What makes 3I/ATLAS extraordinary? • It’s the third confirmed interstellar object to visit our solar system—after ʻOumuamua and Borisov—racing through space at hyperbolic speeds and exhibiting an orbit intriguingly aligned with our ecliptic plane • Observations by Hubble and James Webb reveal a coma dominated by carbon dioxide, with traces of water, carbon monoxide, nickel, and cyanide—an unusual chemical signature even among comets. • Avi Loeb’s provocative hypothesis: He and collaborators propose that 3I/ATLAS might not be natural at all—but potentially a piece of alien technology, given its improbable trajectory, ecliptic alignment, and close approach to Mars and other planets—arguably orchestrated rather than accidental. • Michael Shermer pushes back: A constructive skeptic’s view on whether the evidence truly supports Loeb’s scenario, grounding the discussion with a critical evaluation of observational data versus speculative inference. Don’t miss this rare convergence of cutting-edge astrophysics and disciplined skepticism—because how we interpret 3I/ATLAS could redefine our understanding of interstellar visitors. Key Takeaways: •00:00 NASCAR Fascination with 3i Atlas •07:40 Cosmic Anomalies Suggest Tech Origins •13:02 Interstellar Comets: Ubiquitous Wanderers •17:11 Interstellar Object Frequency Dilemma •23:46 Challenging Mainstream Scientific Conformity •31:09 Balancing Exoplanet Exploration Funding •35:33 Comet Nickel Detection, No Iron •38:39 Open-Mindedness in Scientific Consensus •45:53 "Trusting Experts vs. Skepticism" •50:09 "Assessing Extraterrestrial vs. Natural Objects" •55:48 Hallucinations During Transcontinental Bike Race •01:02:13 Eyewitness Testimony's Unreliability •01:05:34 Government Secrecy and National Security •01:12:54 Seeking Direct Evidence of UFO Claims •01:16:44 Comet: A Dirty Iceberg Analogy •01:21:27 New Astrobiology Approach: Onsite Sampling •01:29:18 Analyzing Spacecraft Non-Gravitational Acceleration •01:31:52 Free Moon Rocks: Myths and Offers 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

  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 blog, 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 set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Brian Keating?

  All the stats and see how many people are there. I'm not able to stream on Amazon. That is fine, but I'm here where it matters on X, on Facebook and on other worlds on YouTube. Let us just check and make sure we have two extremely handsome doctors that are joining us today all the way from the East Coast. We have, we have Professor Avi Loeb. Avi, how are you today, my friend?

• 0:55Speaker 02

  It will take an hour to discuss it.

• 0:59Brian Keating?

  Well, luckily that's all we get before Michael has to jet off to some other big wig podcast. Michael Shermer, Dr. Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine, Skeptic or Michael Shermer Show on podcast channels. Michael, how are you up there in Santa Barbara?

• 1:11Speaker 03

  I'm doing well, thank you. Everything is good.

• 1:14Brian Keating?

  This has been a really exciting time for astronomy, for astronomers, for physics. It's not too often that you get the world captivated on objects, objects that may be suspicious, they may be malevolent, they may just be ordinary. And we may learn a lot about astrophysics along the way. And today I'm here to hopefully shed some light on this very unusual object called Three Eye Atlas. And we'll get to what that is in just a moment. We'll start off with a question for Avi, kind of recap what we've learned about this object from the very beginning, but also what we've learned since our very popular live stream. It's got hundreds of thousands of views over the summer. And we'll get Michael's take on it too,

• 1:57Brian Keating?

  because he's interviewed some of the leading lights in the field as well. But before we get there, a man's got to pay his bills. I want to first notify my beloved audience that I have a new book, my fourth book. Believe it, guys. I've interviewed both of you guys many times, but I've interviewed 22 Nobel Prize winners on the Into the Impossible podcast, and I've distilled their life lessons into two books so far. So my second book is called Into the Impossible: Think Like A Nobel Prize Winner. But Tuesday, my newest book comes out, Into the Impossible: Focus Like A Nobel Prize Winner. And it's basically, as it says, "Lessons from the laureates to ignite your curiosity and your career." So this is really a self-help book for my STEM nerdly friends out there. I hope you'll get it soon. The hardcover is pretty expensive,

• 2:42Brian Keating?

  but the Kindle is only 99 cents for the next week. So there's a link in the description below. Please click it, get it for 99 cents. If you've gotten anything from me, I've sent out over 10,000 of these meteorites to my fans. So hopefully, you've gotten a piece of interstellar action as well. That is my favor. I'll only plug it three times today, I promise. Okay, now to my good friends, Avi Loeb, joining us from Harvard, Dr. Michael Shermer, The Michael Shermer Show, Skeptic Magazine. We're going to talk today about this interesting object. I want to start with you, Avi. Can you explain the basics of this object? What have we learned from the beginning? How did it get on your radar, so to speak? And moreover, what have we learned since our very popular livestream back in July? There's been a lot of activity.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Thank you, Brian. First, I would like to say that it's quite rare that there is an event or an object that attracts so much the public attention. And that's extremely important, because science is fun. It's not about getting the Nobel Prize. It's about understanding nature. And I'll give you just two anecdotes very quickly. One, I received an email from a former US Air Force pilot who said, you know, because of you, he was referring to me, my daughter is now excited to become a scientist, and she keeps speaking about aliens.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  And then a second anecdote. Last night, I get a text message from one of the racers at the NASCAR car race. And he says, "I want to put an image of Three Eye Atlas, the object that we will talk about, and you on the hood of my car." And you are now a very hot commodity among car racers in NASCAR. And I'm planning to meet him, actually, within a few weeks. There will be a race in Vegas, and I hope to go there. But these are just examples of how much this object captivated the public's interest. And think about it, if CERN would have discovered the lightest supersymmetric particle,

• 4:48Speaker 02

  which we did not discover, I should say, and it would have been the dark matter, that would not necessarily inspire a girl to become a scientist or a NASCAR car racer to put it on the hood. So what I would like to say is that this is a rare opportunity, and that's why I wrote more than 50 essays over the past two months on Medium.com that discuss how science is working progress. We don't know what something is. We're trying to figure it out by using data and evidence. And that is a thrilling experience, you know, in difference from politics, where you know the answer sort of in advance, and it has nothing to do with necessarily a way of betting whether it's real or not.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I mean, you just tell a story and try to become popular. So science is different. It's not about us. It's not about prizes. It's about figuring out nature. And the best approach is to be modest and say, "We don't know. Let's figure it out." Now, with respect to Three Eye Atlas, it was discovered on July 1, 2025 by a small telescope, half a meter in size, because it's bright. And if you translate its brightness, you find that it has to have a diameter of somewhere between 20 and 46 kilometers if what we are seeing is a reflection of sunlight from a solid surface. It's not obvious, because you might argue... Maybe there is a cloud of dust.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  However, if there was dust around a much smaller nucleus, then the dust would be pushed behind the object by solar radiation pressure. We know that from comets. We see a cometary tail behind them. And the Harvard Space Telescope looked at this object on July 21st, took a very high resolution image. There was no tail behind it. We saw glow ahead of the object towards the sun. And I'm actually writing a paper trying to explain that. That was not seen before. It's of an anti-tail. Instead of a tail behind the object, there is something preceding it ahead of it towards the sun. But the other issue is that if it's such a huge giant rock,

• 7:00Speaker 02

  the way that my colleagues are arguing, then it's a million times more massive than the previous two interstellar objects that were found. An interstellar object is an object moving too fast to be bound by the sun. This object actually is moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the frame of the galaxy nearby and also relative to the sun when it entered the solar system. So it's really fast. And there is just not enough rocky material in interstellar space to give us such a giant rock once per decade. So either it's a very small rock surrounded by a lot of dust, but then why don't we see the tail? Or it's actually not a rock.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  And of course, in that case, it might target the inner solar system and then the statistics has nothing to do with delivery of one rock per, you know, decade of such gigantic dimensions. It's twice as big as Manhattan Island if we believe the results from the Spherox data. Now, Spherox is a space observatory that actually inferred that there is a huge plume of gas around it containing mostly CO2, carbon dioxide, 95% by mass, 5% is water vapor.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  And you know, that implies that it may not be a water-rich comet, the way it was. And there was also some data from the Webb Telescope that, in fact, inferred very clearly the dominance of carbon dioxide and the no tail. But after that, we had some data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile that indicated that in the plume of gas, there is also nickel without iron. And you don't get nickel without iron, except through an industrial process on Earth that produces nickel alloys, partly for spacecraft.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And therefore, the question arises is whether this was technological in origin, the fact that there is only nickel but no iron observed. Now, the most interesting anomaly, I should say, besides the size of the object, is that the trajectory is aligned with the planets around the Sun to within five degrees. That's a probability of one in 500 out of a random orientation. And in fact, the previous comet, Borisov, was at a very high inclination, very high angle relative to the ecliptic plane. But the good news is that on October 3rd, that's very soon, within a few weeks, the

• 9:50Speaker 02

  3I Atlas, this object, would come within 29 million kilometers from Mars. And there is a camera there called HiRise onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that could take a high-resolution image of it with a pixel resolution of 30 kilometers. And that would allow us perhaps to infer the size of the nucleus and settle, once and for all, this question of whether it's anomalous in its size, whether it's a million times, you know, why do we see an object that is a million times bigger, more massive than the previous two?

• 10:23Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I wanted, I definitely want to cover all these aspects. You've covered, you know, just the highlight reel so far. But before we get, you know, down to particular explanations, I do. Want to get Michael's perspective on this. So, Michael, you've heard about this for a long time. I want to know from your perspective, what is the simplest explanation, like Occam's razor, Wilhelm of Occam? Where should we start? Where do you think, you know, a curious layperson, or even someone who's, you know, more expert than a curious layperson? Where should you start? What should be our first supposition from your perspective?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Uh, well, Bayesian, that is to say, let's put some probabilities on it. Uh, no, no one would ever put a one or a zero to it. So 100% it's extraterrestrial or 0% it's extraterrestrial. By which I mean technology. Um, so somewhere between, let's say, one and 99 or, or 0.01 and 99.9. Let's just put it that way. So we're always keeping an open mind. If the evidence changes, I'll change my mind. The problem with interstellar objects is we have, how many total in our database? Three in the last couple of years. So when, when someone says, well, this is a really unusual object.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Compared to what? I mean, what, how deep is our database? So this is what's often called the low information zone, like in the study of UAPs and UFOs. Um, you know, you can't quite make it out. We're not quite sure what it is we're looking at. The object is blurry. The videos are, are grainy, you know? And so there, our imagination fills in the blanks and we can speculate all we want, which is fine. That's all part of science is, as Avi says. So, okay, that's good. Um, but, uh, what do we actually know about these kinds of objects? I'm not a planetary scientist, but, uh, my podcast guest yesterday, Alan Stern is. Uh, he's one of the world's leading planetary scientists. He was head of the New Horizons spacecraft that went to Pluto.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  I had him on my podcast for other reasons. He's worried about the current Congress shutting down New Horizons. Along with 54 other space missions that are currently underway for budgetary reasons. So I took the opportunity to ask him about this. Uh, he's well aware of 3I Atlas. He's been following it. He knows you, Avi. He's a big fan. He loves you. So I'm going to read his opinion. So it has nothing to do with you personally. He likes you. He thinks the Galileo project is great. He thinks what you're doing to promote science is super. I read in the little blurb from your email about, um, the NASCAR guy wants to put your mug on the hood of his car.

• 12:53Brian Keating?

  Michael, you are a member of the Galileo Project, correct?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  I am, yes, absolutely. Yeah, support it, absolutely. And, you know, all that would be good for science. Anyway, here's, I teed it up for him, but as you did, Brian, and here's what he says. "I beg to differ. I know a fair amount about this. I'm not now one of the world's leading experts, but I used to be. I've published scientific papers that were peer-reviewed about this phenomenon. And the way it works is this," he says, "bear with me for a moment to give you some background, so we'll do that for your general listeners, Brian. Almost every star that we look at, as we see planets have formed, or they're forming now if it's a young star. So planets are ubiquitous, and when planetary systems form, and you get to real big objects, the ones we call planets,

• 13:35Speaker 03

  their gravitational muscle clears out the regions between the orbits of the planets, and it just starts flinging stuff out. Now, that's not a technical term, but in effect, that's what happens. And just like the Voyager spacecraft intentionally would get flung, or like my New Horizons spacecraft, that me and 2,500 of my best friends built and flew to Pluto, got flung by the planet Jupiter to get to Pluto faster. All of these inanimate objects get thrown all around the solar system, and many of them get thrown out of the solar system altogether into interstellar space. And so for a long time, ever since the 1960s and 70s, scientific papers were predicting that there was an uncountable number of these interstellar comets,

• 14:18Speaker 03

  and that as our solar system moves through space, they're passing by, sort of like in the fall when you see a cottonwood tree, just seeds going by in the wind. And we've recently, in the last less than 10 years, developed the capability to find these needles in the haystack. 3I Atlas is one of them. Now, 3I Atlas is the third one we've found, and we're probably going to find a lot more now that we know how to do it, which is great, because these are samples from other solar systems, so they're scientifically valuable. But 3I Atlas has not gotten close to any planets. It's going past the orbits of planets, but it's not even within millions of miles. It's within tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of miles. So when you hear it's passing by Mars,

• 15:03Speaker 03

  It's passing by Mars at a great distance. It's passing by Jupiter at a great distance. It's just flying through our solar system as an inanimate object that's close enough for us to study. And we're going to learn a lot from it, but it's not like a Voyager spacecraft that's been targeted to fly by for close reconnaissance observations. So when you're reading the press about it, and the language is sometimes not as precise as the scientists would use it. But I'm telling you, when you read that it's passing by all these different planets, it's very far from them. For example, the closest you will get to Mars is 29 million kilometers, or roughly 20 million miles. That's 100 times as far as from Mars as the moon is from Earth. It's crazy far away.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  So then I ask him about the outgassing. Does it look like a comet? Or is that changing now? What's your opinion? You know, as far as it goes, it looks like a comet, a big comet. Because, and by the way, the reason it's big is because the only ones we can detect are the big ones. Later, when our capabilities are better, we'll detect smaller ones. But it has a lot of these same gases and we see come out of comets in our solar system. And some of the properties look a lot like a comet. But as we study more and more of these, hopefully we'll learn about the variety that different solar systems make in throwing these objects out into interstellar space, just like our solar system did long ago. And so it's a new area of astronomy because we didn't have this capability until 2017 or so.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  So I didn't say, so it's something like a probability issue? And he says, right, there's something like 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. And if solar systems are common, as we think they are from the data, then every solar system has ejected somewhere between a billion and a trillion of these interstellar objects. So the galaxy is populated with something like a billion times 100 billion to a trillion times 100 billion of these things. They're everywhere. And then I say, oh my God. I say, oh my God.

• 17:01Speaker 04

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• 17:27Speaker 03

  He says, yeah, and of course, space is enormously big. That's why we call it space and they're very spread out from one another, but still the numbers are, not to make a pun, they're astronomical.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Michael, this is poetry what you're reading and I just wanted to explain that obviously this is what we expect. What he's describing is what we expect. What I was describing is what we see. And if we see an object that is tens of kilometers large, a million times more massive than the previous interstellar object, it's not a selection effect. We saw 100 meter objects, you know, like Omuamua and Borisov before. Now we are talking about an object that is hundreds of times bigger. Okay. So where are the objects in between? And the point is, it's not the poetry where you say, oh, there are plenty of them.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  No, we should have seen a million objects, the size of Omuamua or Borisov before we see one giant rock like that. And I wrote a paper as soon as it was discovered. It's all about the details. I wrote a paper showing that you really cannot, it's untenable to account for the delivery of an object that is tens of kilometers in diameter, once per decade to the inner solar system by orders of magnitude, by a factor of at least 10,000. So you fall short of the mass reservoir of rocky material in interstellar space. You just can't deliver such a giant rock once per decade. You can do it once per tens of thousands of years if you package all the rocky material

• 19:01Speaker 02

  into 20 kilometer rocks. Okay. So that's one aspect. The second is whether it's passing close to planets or not. Well, I'm talking about the fact that That the orbital plane, you know, the the the trajectory of this object is aligned with the with the orbital plane of the planet is to within five degrees and the chance of that is one in five hundred. These are all numbers.

• 19:21Brian Keating?

  What was the inclination of Amumu? I've forgotten.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Oh, it was huge. You know, we are talking about things of order forty, sixty degrees. I I don't even remember that.

• 19:31Brian Keating?

  Just to explain for the audience, the reason that this is

• 19:35Brian Keating?

  sort of uniquely or suspicious in some way, Avi, is because you'd expect if they're truly random, they come from anywhere. That means that their inclination with, if you think about the solar system as a disk, just for the audience. You think about it as a disk, that disk is relatively narrow if you project it in space, right? So space is, you know, all three hundred and sixty degrees and one on one axis rotation or one hundred and eighty. That's a that's a very large phase space to occupy. And the probability of an object entering in within a narrow acceptance angle is what you're saying is therefore suspiciously low or is low. Now, there's many ways that you could get.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Numbers. You see, it's all about numbers. All I'm talking about is about specific details on this object. And of course, if it was coming at a random angle, if it was the size, you know, of order a kilometer or less, the way the other objects were. You know, I would never mention that as anomaly, you know, that would never. Now, of course, what what Stern is saying is entirely correct, and that's what we would expect. But we don't see it. It's not what we see. We see evidence for a giant. Now, one may say, OK, maybe it's a cloud of dust, but then we don't see a commentary tail behind it. So, you know.

• 20:42Brian Keating?

  Could we have missed, though, as as Michael pointed out, could we have not missed many, many smaller objects because of A, the the technology wasn't sophisticated?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  No, no, because the point is that to detect an object by reflection of sunlight, you just need to be bigger than a hundred meters. OK, we know the sensitivity of our telescopes, the Pan STARS, or in this case, the Atlas Telescope, or now we have the Rubin Observatory. So we can see objects that are of order the size of a football field or bigger. But this one is hundreds of times bigger if it is a solid object. So that's that's my puzzle, because, you know, the mass scales like size cubed. And if you increase the size by a factor of a hundred, you need a mass that is a million times bigger. And usually, you know, objects that are a million times more massive are a million times rarer because you just don't have the materials to make them.

• 21:33Brian Keating?

  And now, Michael, you are very closely related in my mind, you're kind of the living embodiment of this man, Carl Sagan, he's got a longer neck than you do, my finger puppet here. Carl Sagan's very famous for saying such things as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Avi and I are practicing scientists, and I've never reached into a drawer of the, you know, I've got my evidence over here, Michael, and then now, but I'm gonna pull out the extra- I mean, evidence is evidence in the Bayesian framework. So, when Avi is mounting this very logical case, what's going through your mind? When does it reach the standard of Saganism of being extraordinary? And what does that even mean?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Well, again, we have an N of three, so it's hard to know how representative any of these objects are. So, and Avi says, well, this one's 100 times larger than the other two. Okay, but, you know, maybe we got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar out of the random sample of humans. It's just, you know, with three-

• 22:32Speaker 02

  The thing is that Kareem is a rare person, right? In terms of his height.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what I'm saying. I mean, by chance, any of this could- same thing with the orbital trajectory, by the way, I asked Alan Stern about this. All right, so let's say this is our, you know, let's use my guest book here, the plane of the ecliptic. So, you know, objects could come in from here, from here, from this angle, from this angle. So, we have three, an N of three, two of them came from just random angles, and so did the third one, but Avi's saying, oh, but it came in at this angle, more along the plane of the ecliptic, which is the kind of thing a planetary scientist working for NASA would do to program the spacecraft to hit as many planets as possible. Again, with an N of three, I just, how could we really-

• 23:16Speaker 02

  What about nickel without iron?

• 23:18Brian Keating?

  Oh, before we get there, hold on, Avi, hold on. I want to ask you, Avi, if you would, if I, we were having this podcast in 2013, okay? If podcast even existed, who knows, but back then, if podcast even existed. No, Michael's show certainly did. If we were having this conversation, and I said, well, you've been doing this, you've been doing this a long time. If I said to you, Avi, you know, professor, please tell me, what are the odds that we're gonna see- Three objects, let me just say even the one object that even you agree is a comet, right Borisov is a comet. That was interstellar number two, right? So let's say, what is the odd that it's gonna have these exact properties? You know, sort of the look elsewhere effect. What would you have told me back then? Like, we're never gonna see it, we're always gonna see it.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Very small probability and you know, I don't like science fiction. If I never read the rendezvous with drama. And in retrospect, R O C Clark did talk about the, you know, a technological object that is roughly those dimensions of tens of kilometers, okay? And I would completely dismiss it back in 2013, I would think it's unreasonable. Now, let me explain another thing. Why am I advocating for that? It's because the mainstream is not reasonable, okay? So for example, when Sphyrax realized from the flux that it could be forty six kilometers in diameter. They immediately write in the next sentence and they see it as a problem.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  They immediately write in the next sentence, well, it must mean that ninety nine percent of the of the flux that we see is being scattered by dust around the object. But then they don't ask the next question of why don't we see a commentary tail? So there is this tendency of mainstream scientists to hide anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking. And that is one of the main reasons I'm trying to bring it to light. Just also to demonstrate that it's not as if things are done in a fair way, in an open minded way. We didn't go very far from the days of, you know, Galileo Galilei. There is still a lot of resentment to anything that doesn't agree with what we think it should be.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  And you might argue, science is supposed to be based on evidence, yes, but scientists know very well that when the evidence doesn't conform, they can hide it, they can sort of smear it. They can call it a dark comet, even if you don't see a commentary telling, meaning that, you know, that the emperor has clothes, but the clothes are not visible. You know, that's what the story of Hans Christian Andersen was about. And scientists are very good at that. And that's why there are very few discoveries per decade now compared to a hundred years ago. I was at the Niels Bohr Institute. Just last week and I was amazed because I went to the auditorium and I saw the

• 26:00Speaker 02

  the place that I remember from a photograph that was taken 1930 with Niels Bohr sitting next to Werner Heisenberg, sitting near Lev Landau, all the pioneers of quantum mechanics. And I, you know, I sat on the bench and they said, it was a wooden bench and they said, "Oh, you're sitting where Wolfgang Pauli sat in that conference in the middle." And I, all I can think of is, you know, that it's not very comfortable. This bench is not comfortable. And they must have had very, you know, much worse quality of life back then. But I would trade everything I have to go back 95 years and be there, just because the spirit of the conversation was very open-minded.

• 26:43Brian Keating?

  Yeah, let me, let me.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Nobody was ridiculed for imagining something like quantum mechanics.

• 26:49Brian Keating?

  Let me, uh, let me, let me play this for you guys and audience has to tell me if they can hear it. Uh, because this is exactly what Avi, I think, is referring to. And I want to get Michael's response to it. The, the public square, the bench that you're talking about nowadays has played the role, the role is being played by the Joe Rogan experience. Now, all of us have been on the show. Uh, but yesterday, in fact, I believe there was this gentleman talking with Joe. And you'll kind of note a little bit of the dismissive attitude that Joe takes. So I don't know if you guys can hear it out there. So, audience, you need to give a thumbs up if you can hear it or a thumbs down if you can't hear it. I'm gonna play it now.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  I can't hear it.

• 27:27Brian Keating?

  Can you guys hear it out there? Please put a thumbs up if you can hear it.

• 27:32Brian Keating?

  Thumbs up or thumbs down if you, okay, you can hear it or type in the comments if you can hear that, please. Did you hear the Australian accent playing?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  I don't hear anything.

• 27:42Brian Keating?

  Uh, you guys won't hear it, but I think the audience. Alright, so here he's gonna continue talking to Joe.

• 28:10Brian Keating?

  I don't think we can hear it out there. Okay, so the folks are saying they can't hear it. Unfortunately, I can't hear it.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Who is the guest? I'm looking at the list of Rogan's latest guests.

• 28:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, let me, uh, let me.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Was it Ben Van Kirkwick?

• 28:23Speaker 05

  We're gonna find out, like this three eye atlas.

• 28:24Brian Keating?

  There we go.

• 28:25Speaker 05

  Thing.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, what is that?

• 28:26Brian Keating?

  I think we can hear it.

• 28:27Speaker 06

  Well, Avi Loeb is convinced that it's a UFO.

• 28:29Brian Keating?

  Aight.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  But that's what he does.

• 28:31Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 06

  He did with that other one, Omunuma.

• 28:34Brian Keating?

  Amu Amua.

• 28:35Speaker 06

  Amu Amua? Yeah, so that one was a little odd.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  That was weird. So not, it wasn't, the weirdest thing about Amu Amua seems to be its, its, its path when it took, after it turned around the sun and accelerated. Like that was the, you know, standard model of physics said it shouldn't have done that. And it seems to have exhibited sort of motion that was not what we predicted it would do.

• 28:56Brian Keating?

  A significant amount of acceleration?

• 28:57Speaker 05

  It accelerated. It was.

• 28:59Brian Keating?

  Okay, so you get the point here. Did you go, I don't know if you guys heard it, but Joe's expressing skepticism.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Who is that?

• 29:05Brian Keating?

  Um, I, I'll look it up. I'm sorry. I don't want to get.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  The guy, Ben Van Kirkwick, who was on yesterday, uh, who's an independent researcher exploring ancient mysteries. Anyway, I mean, I'll, I'll just come in on that. I mean, um, you know, Joe's exaggerating what he thinks Avi is saying. Avi has not said, I absolutely believe it's a, an alien spacecraft. He hasn't said that. But to the point, uh, Brian, of how the public perceives these things, Joe is reflecting how most people, when they listen or read, uh, Avi, they don't nuance when he cautions and, and has qualifications about his statements. They just hear him saying, I think it's aliens.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  And, uh, and so if I make a slightly larger point, Avi, I mean, the reason, you know, TV crews and, and media are pounding at your door every day and they want to put your face on a NASCAR race car and they're not doing that for Alan Stern is because he's just saying, I don't know what it is. It's probably just a typical commenter of some kind of, and you're. Saying more than that, you're saying, yeah, it probably is that, but it could be an alien spaceship. And the, you know, the brains of the general public just auto corrects to Avi says it's an alien. Well, he didn't say that.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  It's not, it's not the brains of the public. It's, it's more the reporters that want clickbait. And what I would argue, what I would like to argue is that, you know, science can be exciting if you allow yourself to explore possibilities. If you know in advance what it's all about, that it's a rock and there are plenty of them. And then you start talking as, as if you're a poet, that, you know, distances are vast, times are long and the, you know, who cares? Let's look at the details of this object. Are there anomalies or not? That's pretty much what we are discussing here.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  I mean, Avi, you said, look, I, I think I've found a new kind of comet. That is, doesn't exist in our solar system, but this new comet exists in this other solar system.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  That's, that's what was said about a warm one, by the way.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  You would not, you would not have anything close to the interest in, in your articles and what you have to say.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but here, here is my point, Michael, and you, I think you would agree with that. Right now, the mainstream of the astronomy community puts, you know, its highest priority, you know, in astrobiology, in the search for microbes on other exoplanets, you know, the molecular fingerprints. And the situation is similar to you living in a house, okay? And you know that microbes exist in the house long before you came there and they still are there. And then you just look at other houses on the street, which are, you know, Earth, Sun's analogues that we see in the, in, in, in the Milky Way galaxy. So, you know, we know that there should be of all the billions of them. Okay. And we see those houses on the cosmic streets.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  But then, you know, my colleagues, the mainstream astrobiologists say, oh, imagining that they, these houses have residents is really, you know, extraordinary and we should not contemplate that. Let's just imagine that they have microbes in them. Now, the problem of that is that you really need to build a huge telescope to look through the window of your home and figure out if there are microbes in the other houses on the street. That's really difficult. And that's what they, they want to do. They want to put more than. Ten billion dollars in the search for the molecular fingerprints in the atmospheres of twenty five exoplanets within the habitable world observatory. What I'm saying is, let's hedge our bets, because if there is a resident in one of those houses,

• 32:33Speaker 02

  the resident might knock on our door, we might find a tennis ball in our backyard, or we will see some construction project happening at the yard far away. That would be much easier to detect. So what I'm saying, let's bring some sense, common sense into academia, and split and hedge the bets, and split the funding. Put a few billion dollars towards searching for microbes. I have no issue that we should do that, because they must be very common. But also put billions of dollars towards the search for intelligence. And what I hear back is no, zero federal funding to the search for intelligence. More than ten billion dollars over two decades to a search for microbes. Now, Michael, what would you do? That's extremely balanced time funding.

• 33:16Speaker 04

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• 33:42Brian Keating?

  Michael, let's say you're in charge of NASA. You get appointed through some uncanny means, but you're head of NASA now. At what threshold of Bayesian confidence, you keep mentioning, rightfully so, when do you start to devote serious attention, which means money and people's careers and time, to guarding or investigating it as if the assumption, maybe low probability or not, it actually is technological in origin and possibly relevant?

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I don't think it would be.

• 34:12Brian Keating?

  I mean, again, I'm saying there's always a probability, right?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  I would say the probability of finding an extraterrestrial spacecraft of some kind or a signal from Teddy or whatever is extremely low, probably less than 1%. But if I had, if I was the economic czar and I can hand out money and I had ten billion dollars to hand out, I'd give Avi or whoever a billion of the ten billion. Because I think the Import of the discovery is so massive, so important, so huge, so interesting in terms of our place in the cosmos. And you know, it's one of the oldest questions of all time in all of history, science is, is there somebody else out there? Are we alone? And so I think it's worth the money. You know, I support the SETI program. I, you know, it's unfortunate

• 34:59Speaker 03

  that, you know, that that their budget got cut back in the, I think it was the early 90s.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  1993.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, 93. Yeah. So

• 35:06Speaker 02

  You're, you're repeating Pascal's wager, which basically he argued that we should consider, we should discuss God because the implications would

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Well, I think if there are aliens, that is, they are gods to us. I think that if there is a God, it's going to be a extraordinarily advanced extraterrestrial intelligence.

• 35:27Brian Keating?

  Let's, let's stick with evidence because Avi did mention, you know, some very unusual properties, such as the presence of nickel without iron, unlike the meteorites you get when you go to briankeating.com, potentially winning one of these and you're guaranteed to win if you have a .edu email address and live in the United States. I've sent that, like I said, thousands of these and you'll get a bountiful amount of knowledge when you investigate this extraterrestrial object called my next book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, comes out on Tuesday. You can get the Kindle edition for one week only 99 cents. Come on, can't beat that deal in this or any other multiverse. Now, Michael, if we were to see some objects that are some aspects of this object, what would be sort of the

• 36:11Brian Keating?

  most convincing to you as a skeptic? I mean, that's literally your brand. If you were a skeptic, what would it be? Would it be something like this? Or I actually have the original monolith from 2001. We heard about rendezvous with Rama. Here it comes. Here's the monolith. Here's one of these things. What level of, you know, of so-called proof? I mean, we can't prove it, right? In any case, but what level of confidence interval would be established? Is the presence of, for example, nickel without iron as obvious as already mentioned? Is that, you know, piquing the curiosity and increasing the Bayesian confidence?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  That one, I forgot to ask Alan Stewart about, and I don't know anything about that, so.

• 36:48Brian Keating?

  Well, maybe Avi can explain it. Avi, why is that significant? And then, why should Michael be, you know, interested in this? And why should I be interested?

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Very Large Telescope detected the significant amount of nickel, but put only an upper limit, a quite large upper limit,

• 37:05Speaker 02

  on the ratio of nickel to iron. So, in other words, there is no detection of iron. And that is very different from other comets, where you see both of them together. Because these two elements, nickel and iron, are produced in supernova explosions, exploding stars. And in fact, iron in the solar abundance of elements has a higher fraction. And nevertheless, in this case, we see only nickel. And so, one suggestion that was made by the authors of that paper was to say, maybe there was a production of, preferred production of nickel through a carbonyl pathway.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  The carbonyl pathway is known from the industry. That's the path by which we produce nickel alloys. And nickel alloys without iron are very useful, as, you know, the skin of spacecraft, for example. And so, they mentioned in the paper that maybe nature follows the path that we are using industrially. We haven't seen that in other comets. I looked at the distribution, and in all of them, the iron-to-nickel ratio is of order unity, you know, with some variations, but definitely not as extreme as in this particular case. So, that's just another anomaly. I don't make a lot of it, but I'm just saying there are anomalies of this object. And, you know, I asked myself, should I,

• 38:32Speaker 02

  will I be happy if it ends up being a rock? And of course, I will be happy, because there is less risk for humanity, no threat. But on the other hand, I think humanity desperately needs a wake-up call. If you just read the news every day, you know, our priorities are really not very, do not testify that. We are intelligent, you know, we invest most of our resources in in conflicts, you know, that's what we tend to do. And instead of coming together and, you know, towards a more prosperous future for all of us, and perhaps just finding a threat in the sky would bring us together,

• 39:13Speaker 02

  because we would realize we're all in the same boat. That's one reason I I think that will be good news if it ends up being technological.

• 39:22Brian Keating?

  Well, that was Reagan's argument. So how do we guard against, Michael, reading too much into maybe esoteric, you know, things like chemical line abundances, or instrumental artifacts and systematic? How do you guard against that, but also maintain, you have to be optimistic. It's too depressing to be a scientist without some of the optimism. Now, we're not all blessed to have the supernova-like optimism of our good friend Avi. But how do you guard against, you know, kind of over exuberance or over pessimism? You know very well, you're always, you know, accused of being a wet blanket, right? So how do you guard against those two, you know, Silai and Karibdi?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Right, and I'll try to answer the previous question that you asked as well, that what would it take for me to be convinced, well, I'm not a planetary scientist, so I would I would defer to what the, you know, the consensus is among the scientists that know about this, people like Alan Stern, who does not have a grudge against Avi, he's not dogmatically close-minded. And by the way, Avi, I think I would disagree with some of your history of science there. I mean, Einstein was was harshly criticized at first. It was a long time before he became, his ideas became accepted. And then he became rather dogmatically close-minded about quantum physics, for example, when he became the authority. I don't think there's

• 40:41Speaker 03

  anything different now about like the rate of discoveries and things like that. I mean, you've cited some journal editors who say you can't mention that three I Atlas could be technological. Well, you know, that's not good, but I don't think that's typical. I think most scientists are open, relatively open-minded, but they're conservative in the sense that most extraordinary claims- Names turn out not to be true. And you know, most ideas that scientists are spitballing in their labs turn out not to be true. And you know, this is just very common. And so

• 41:17Speaker 02

  It's very, it's very common also in the mainstream. As I mentioned, the, the suggestion for dark matter, like the lightest supersymmetric particle that turned out to be wrong. And they, you know, I, when I entered astrophysics, that was the dominant popular view. And people got awards, prizes, honors for just suggesting that. And they were sure that it must be true. And then, you know, the Large Hadron Collider didn't find, find it. So what I'm saying is it's, it's, we cannot necessarily trust the mainstream, those people who you call experts.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Not alone, but, but without it, what have we got? I mean, we

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Oh, without it, we have our imagination, Michael.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  I know, but you have all the alternative physics guys that write you and me and everybody and Brian and everybody else with their, you know, theories of everything that they've worked out in their garage over on the weekends. You know, and there's just nothing to them. Most of them have, you know, no contributions to make. So, uh, working scientists that are busy simply don't have the time to entertain every single hypothesis.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  No, that's not, I would, I would disagree with that. I would say that there are gatekeepers that are maintaining the herd in a very tight configuration along one path. Wait a second, along one path. And very often this path leads nowhere. And if we were to explore multiple paths, I'm not saying infinite number of paths or any, you know, person who has an idea, we, we should explore it. But I'm just saying, let's allow more diversity of, uh, and nourish those, uh, that diversity of opinions. Because we may not know in advance which path leads us to a discovery. And I think that would improve the efficiency of science if we allow that. You see that also in corporations, right?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Because if you allow people to brainstorm and most of the ideas turn out to be wrong, you know, it turns out to be very,

• 43:01Speaker 02

  financially viable for corporations to do that. Because one, one good idea pays for everything else.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  You mentioned the word gatekeeper and Michael, you know, I have a gate around my pool here. I think it's a law in California. We have a gate around the

• 43:14Brian Keating?

  It's called the border. A lot of the people that support, you know, the stuff that Avi's doing or President Trump do are extremely supportive of gates in certain circumstances. Do you view gatekeeper as a pejorative when people accuse you of that?

• 43:27Speaker 03

  No, but Avi's a gatekeeper. He's at Harvard. Come on. He's in the mainstream. So Avi, you're in a position to do something about the gate being not porous enough. It's too tight. Okay, then loosen it up a little bit. Fine.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Okay, that's what I'm trying to do.

• 43:43Brian Keating?

  Now, let's talk about, yeah, so let's talk about what does the public have as a right, or for example, I'm often, you know, hear things like it's our data, we paid for it, et cetera, et cetera. You know, to the extent that the average person could do data analysis, Avi, what can we really expect as professional scientists? What do we have an obligation to provide to the public so they can do their own research, as it said, and not be gatekeeper accused of being a gatekeeper?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  So here is my take. Currently, the practice is the scientists find out the answer. They decide about the press conference and they tell the public what the public should know. Okay, and that feels like being in a lecture room where the lecturer tells the students what they need to know. And there is a hierarchy here. You don't allow the public to feed back into the process. There is no oversight. And the problem with that approach is that, you know, first of all, there are lots of taxpayers' funds which are spent on things the public doesn't care about. Okay, and I include, you know, extra dimension string theory in that for decades, okay?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  And just because there is no oversight, because the same scientists are sitting on committees that are providing the funding and deciding in their echo chamber that it's worthwhile doing without any feedback from an outside world, okay? And that's a problem. But the second thing is, I think it's inappropriate to communicate to the public what they should know, but rather also listen to the public. If the public cares about a subject and the public pays taxes to support science, science should attend to that subject. Okay, if, for example, the public wants to know There is intelligence out there. You can't just say I zero out federal funding to this subject while I'm paying tens of billions of dollars towards the search for microbes.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Why? Because the public wants to know the answer to the other question. And so how can you ignore it? And you know, that alienates the public and creates this sense of hierarchy.

• 45:44Brian Keating?

  Right. But to counter argument, you know, just to push back with love and respect, as I often do, you know, if you ask the public that the top podcasts that are above me and Michael, half of them are about UAPs. Fine. The other half are about Sasquatch. So, you know, there's an awful lot of interest in the public and things that have nothing to do with either one. If you cancel microbes, just like when they canceled the superconducting supercollider, as you know, it didn't go into, you know, condensed matter physics or astrophysics. It went away. That budget went away. And so, Michael, look, and I do want to compliment both of you guys because you guys do an exceptional job of science communication and you're not paid to do it. NASA doesn't pay you, Michael. NASA doesn't pay Avi to do what he's doing. You guys are the epitome of what scientists should be because Avi's right. Our employer

• 46:29Brian Keating?

  at some level is the taxpayer. That doesn't mean we always have to do what the taxpayer, you know, demands of us to do. Even I as a humble state employee of the state of California. But and I do want to make a note that we will take audience questions because I often love to take questions from the audience. You have to be a channel subscriber in order to ask questions, but we'll do that down below in just a little bit.

• 46:48Speaker 04

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• 47:15Brian Keating?

  Okay, Michael, what would it take for you to falsify the null hypothesis in your case? That this is not, and then I'm going to ask Avi, how could you falsify your, you know, uh, you know, positive hypothesis that it is alien technology? Michael, you first, what would it take to kind of convince you? What would it take? A combination of, of, would it be purely scientific? Or would there be, would we bring in other types of, of, of epistemological searching? What would you, what would it take?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Well, I guess if, if the consensus among planetary scientists that study these things was that, uh, this is of technological origin, then yeah. Uh, I mean, how should I know again? But let me make a broader point. How do any of us fact check anything we read in the public? You know, you read, you hear RFKJ say vaccines are extremely dangerous and they've not been tested. How would I know if he's right or not? I have to go to the experts who study this stuff now. Sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes they exaggerate and so on, as we saw during COVID. And the public trust in the CDC, for example, and Anthony Fauci and, and, uh, and, and Francis Collins, you know, plummeted because of that.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  So we have to be careful, but without that, then you have nothing but RFKJ type, uh, vaccine skeptics in that particular field. So there has to be some way that the average person can check these things. I mean, 99% of knowledge that's out there, I have no idea personally if it's true or not, you know, was the 2020 election rigged? How the hell should I know? I mean, I depend on the justice department and the people that run these things to tell me if it was or not. So that would be the case here. If, you know, if someone like an Alan Stern said, you know, I think, uh, that this new photograph we got and data from the, uh, the Mars, uh, uh, camera, you know, shows it, it probably is technological, like, okay. I don't have a dog in the, I'd be glad for it to be technological.

• 49:06Brian Keating?

  And so Avi, let me ask you the same question. So I'm reading from our friend, uh, David Kipping, who put out a respectful, but you know, very contrary, uh, you know, video to, to kind of dispute some of the claims with respect. He also was on Rogan doing the same thing. So he points out all these different, uh, factoids, the interstellar asteroid abundance. He argues we don't know it fully yet, the velocity and the local standard of rest. We'll get into that later. He's talking about the different, you know, reasons why, for example, Oumuamua. You know, he says that that was moving slowly. Now you're saying that this object is moving quickly. The unusual orbit is an observational selection effect, et cetera, et cetera. And then lastly, he gets into the technology of solar sail. How do you refute that?

• 49:47Brian Keating?

  And what would it take for you to say him and other people who are experts in this field? Not, he's not a planetary scientist. I don't think he's a specific planetary scientist, but astrophysicist in general. He's very, you know, well known and respected. So what would it take for you to refute your null hypothesis?

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Right, so first I should say, you know, the truth is not decided by authority. I don't care about what Alan Stern says. I don't care about what David Kipping says. If the data shows something really anomalous, they can continue to say that it's a dark comet. You know, on January 2nd, January 2nd, 2025, there was an object cataloged by the Minor Planet Center, the main authority designated by the International Astronomy Union. They found a near earth asteroid and gave it a name. And then they realized a day later, oh, that one follows the path of the Tesla Roadster car that was launched by SpaceX in 2018. Removed it immediately from their catalog.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  And there were dozens of cases like that where astronomers say it's a rock. Oh, wait a minute. No, it's a spacecraft or some space debris that we launched. Now what about spacecraft or space debris that other civilizations launched? We don't know their trajectories. And those same astronomers that Michael calls experts would say and insist that they must be rocks of a type that we've never seen before. That was done for Oumuamua. There were experts that Michael would really respect that said, you know, it's a hydrogen iceberg, it's a nitrogen iceberg, it's a dust bunny. These were the mainstream suggestions. Can you believe it? Things we've never seen before.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  A dust bunny being Oumuamua, a hydrogen iceberg. These are the experts that. Michael wants us to listen to, and I'm saying, science depends on the level of evidence. So obviously, eventually, if we have enough evidence. So what I would like, you know, if I saw that Three Eye Atlas was maneuvering, just to give an example, if it was maneuvering, then obviously, you know, the the stock market may crash. Because that kind of a maneuver that cannot be accounted for by the rocket effect of a comet, if it's like zigzagging or approaching Earth or doing or releasing some mini probes, you know, that would be clear indication that it's technological. Or if it has some, it broadcasts something or has artificial lights.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  However, if it becomes, you know, clear that it has a cometary tail of the type that is expected from natural objects, I would, you know, I invented a scale last month, calling it, now it's called the Loeb scale, where zero means natural, ten means artificial and likely to threaten Earth. And so far, I gave it a four, Three Eye Atlas, but I would bring it down to zero. If we get more data, it comes close to the sun and it erupts, just like a comet, I would say, yeah, it's natural, I bring it down to zero. Now, you may ask, how is it that you are changing your mind? Is it under pressure? No, it's because we have more data.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  And science, you know, whoever pretends that scientists know the answer is wrong. Because, you know, we thought that we detected B-mode polarization from inflation. It ended up being dust from, you know, the Milky Way galaxy. And that's just an example of how science is done in iterations. It takes, you know, more and more data eventually to figure out what's going on.

• 53:13Brian Keating?

  And that was the subject of my first book, which reminds me to make sure people know about my fourth book, which is now out, coming for ninety-nine cents only to your Kindle on Tuesday. Focus like a Nobel Prize winner, click the link down below. Michael, what would you do to avoid this sort of, you know, impasse that we seem to have? We have to listen to experts, but then some experts we shouldn't listen to. So how does a layperson, again, a lot of the audience, mostly audiences are laypeople. So how do they know who to listen to? Should it be people like Kipping? Should it be Avi? What do we do?

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Well, Avi is one of the experts that we should listen to. He's not an outsider. He's not a fringe thinker. He's at Harvard, for God's sakes. I mean, it doesn't get more mainstream than that. So, but I mean, Avi, you know, are your children vaccinated? And if so, why did you vaccinate them? Did you do your own research? Did you rely on experts who know something about this? Like your own personal doctor, your pediatrician that takes care of your kids? I mean, this is nonsense that we shouldn't listen to the experts and do our own research. That's just bullshit. I mean, this is the death of expertise. This is a problem that we're facing.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  I guess what Brian is asking you, Michael, is how do you know if the experts are not just fooling you?

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Because, because there's a community of scientific experts. Don't listen to any one of them. But, you know, there's a point. If, if all peer review is completely broken, then what's the point of having any standards of evidence at all? I mean, everything you're talking about, Avi, is, is based on evidence. Okay? Well, you don't think we should just throw out all the evidence and just?

• 54:48Speaker 02

  No, I don't think we should throw it away, but I also know for a fact that a lot of the review process is highly sensitive to subjective, you know.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  What, what are you proposing?

• 55:03Speaker 02

  What I'm proposing is a different system where innovation takes center stage. Right now, the, the, you know, the practice is that risk-taking is, is avoided by most scientists because they're worried about what people are keeping will argue against them if they were to say something different. Or what, you know, there, there is a lot of pushback now, but the main harm that is done by people criticizing me is in discouraging young people to, to think differently. Because the young people see it and they worry about their job prospects. And I think the culture right now in academia and science is not sufficiently innovative, and we can correct that.

• 55:42Brian Keating?

  Now, Michael, why did you join?

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry.

• 55:44Brian Keating?

  Sorry, Michael.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  One way you can correct it, Avi, is through all those billionaires you've been meeting that want to courtesy your favor there. Get some of them to get the checkbook out and.

• 55:58Brian Keating?

  I agree. Well, he has, he has, and I want to.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Funding of science is has a long.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  I just, you know, last week I hired three new postdocs in the Galileo Project. I'm trying to do my best, but.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  See, you're the gate, you're a gatekeeper and you've opened the gate. That's a good thing.

• 56:13Brian Keating?

  Yes. Now, Michael, why did you join the Galileo Project, aside from the fact that?

• 56:18Speaker 03

  I agree with everything Avi's saying here about the need for, well, first of all, it's of course, you know, the greatest subject of all is there now, you know, somebody else out there somewhere and have.

• 56:29Brian Keating?

  Cosmology, come on, give us some cosmology.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  That's it. And, and so, you know, Avi wants to actually look with better cameras. It's the UAP thing, again, that low information zone where, you know, why are they always grainy videos and blurry photographs when there's, you know, a couple billion high resolution phones walking around Earth? Okay, well, let's do something about it. And then, you know, of course, I'm a fan of Galileo.

• 56:53Brian Keating?

  Michael, you might be also the only person, you know, I don't think that the entire audience is familiar with your encounters with extraterrestrials. Do you want to explain your?

• 57:04Speaker 03

  My alien abduction?

• 57:05Brian Keating?

  Your abduction, yeah, no, in all seriousness, let's, let's go through it because I, I think it'll be instructive for my audience members that may not know your backstory.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, gosh, okay, yeah, I've written about that quite a bit. Yeah, so this, I was abducted by aliens in, in August of 1983 on the side of the road in Nebraska, outside of Hagler, Nebraska. It was a large ship, a large craft with bright lights and, and the aliens got out. And now, interestingly, they looked exactly human. In fact, they looked a lot like people I know. So the context of this is the 3,000 mile non-stop transcontinental bicycle race across America that I was competing in in 1983. And I'd ridden non-stop from the Santa Monica Pier all the way into Nebraska, it's about 1,280 miles with zero sleep.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  And almost no stops. And so I'm just hallucinating. I was just simply, and what I was hallucinating was reflecting a deep memory I had from childhood of a TV show called The Invaders, starring Roy Dennis on CBS, in which this was a body snatching motif, in which aliens had come to Earth and were basically snatching the bodies, you know, just body snatching, it's called, where the aliens look exactly like your neighbors. And so, but for the plotline, they had to have some way for people to tell. And so it was a stiff little finger. For some reason, they could traverse the vast distances of interstellar space, but they, and replicate a human and DNA and all that, but they couldn't bend the tendons in their little finger. Anyway, it was just a plot device.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  But all that happened to me on the side of the road. It was just my support crew. I'd been hallucinating. And I slept for 90 minutes and got back up and you can actually watch this. If you go to YouTube and type in Michael Shermer, alien abduction, you'll see me explaining to Eric Hayden, in the ABC Wild World of Sports camera crew, exactly what happened. Cause he goes, how's it going? I said, not so good. I was abducted by aliens. He's like, what? So I told him the whole story. So it actually happened all in my head, of course.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  By the way, I should comment, Brian, that when I agreed that to bring Michael to the Galileo Project, I told Michael that, you know, if we do find evidence, you know, my hope is that Michael will change the name of his magazine from Skeptic to Believer.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Actually, you know, obviously since that time, there is a magazine called Believer. So how about just Believe?

• 59:32Brian Keating?

  Okay. So I want to, I do want to take some questions from the audience in just a few minutes. You'll have to be a subscriber to ask questions. I gotta pander in some way or another. But before we go there, you mentioned a little bit ago, and there is some rumbling in the chat, you know, whether or not Michael is coming at this from a religious perspective. And I wonder, Michael, if you could talk about what you mentioned before, that if they are real, then they would sort of be like our gods. And obviously there's a lot of a skeptological and other kind of overlays always with the alien topic. You think that is, I mean, we don't, we don't have that in like cosmology necessar- I mean, we have the, you know, Genesis 1:1, but I mean, besides that, we don't, we don't really talk about God and, you know, if I'm doing condensed matter, you know, pneumatic phase transitions and superconductors, I'm not gonna let, hmm, let me think about like if God, you know, orient to,

• 1:00:17Brian Keating?

  why is it so prevalent in, in topics like, you know, aliens, UAPs, UFOs?

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of my early Scientific American columns was called Shermer's Last Law, because you shouldn't name laws after yourself.

• 1:00:29Brian Keating?

  Okay, Avi, you heard that, right?

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Or scales.

• 1:00:31Brian Keating?

  What about scales? What about scales? Like the lobe scales?

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's, I was just a riff off of Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law. Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. That is to say, if we do encounter aliens, they're not going to be just five years ahead of us or behind us. Well, they won't be behind us because we've just got, achieved space travel, but they'd be, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years more advanced than us. And if you just take Moore's Law, you know, doubling of, of technological capabilities every one or two years, and you extrapolate that out, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, million years, they'll be able to do things that to us would look like, you know, omniscience and omnipotence. So, anyway, that was my point of that little tongue in cheek.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  Sagan made this point that, you know, it's not original to me, that the impulse, the religious impulse to know that we're not alone, that there's somebody, some agent, something out there that knows we're here, and, you know, cares about us or in some way is more moral than us, is, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. And it's probably the basis of most religious impulses, related to those big questions, where we came from, why we're here and so on. And so I think the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in a way is, I'm not saying it's a religious thing, it's, it, it, it's driven by the same questions of like, we all want to know, it's like roots writ large, you know, what, where, where did I come from?

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  And, and I have to say, I mean, it is one of the greatest questions. I would love to know the answer. I would love to know that we're not alone, you know, we just don't know. And so, the point of-

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

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• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  There is another aspect to it that, you know, one reason I'm seeking a higher intelligence in interstellar space is because I don't often find it in academia. And then, you know, so it's just like-

• 1:02:50Brian Keating?

  You are in academia. Come on.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but-

• 1:02:54Brian Keating?

  That's why I can criticize you.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Think about attending a party and then you just don't like the way the partygoers are behaving and you're looking through the window for an incoming guest that will improve the situation. So there is an opportunity for us to learn, of course, and, you know, one question is whether it will affect in any way the belief in God that religious people have. And I was asked this question by a group of scholars from Christianity today and I said that, you know, I have two daughters and when the second one was born, it didn't take away from the love I have to the first one. So, so, you know, if you think of God as being able to attend only to one child, you know, that that is very demeaning. And, you know, if we have siblings, of course, we would be jealous if they are more accomplished

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  than we are, just, you know, like having a sibling that is more successful. But there is no conflict with the notion of the religious God, you know.

• 1:03:51Brian Keating?

  Now, Avi and Michael, we're gonna lose Michael in a few minutes, but Avi and I will continue in a little bit more technical level, talk about some of the technical details after Michael has to be abducted for his next appointment. Michael, we have a question or a statement really, but I'm gonna pose it to you and that's that eyewitness testimony is nearly useless. What do you make about that? There's so many accounts from eminent pilots. I've had on Ryan Graves on my podcast. I've tried to talk to people like Lou Elizondo. He won't come on, but he keeps sending me stuff. But hopefully I'll get him on. But all these eyewitnesses, Michael, they can't surely all be making stuff up, can they?

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  Eyewitness testimony is not reliable. We know that from tons of studies. Let me read to you a quote from the astronaut and pilot Scott Kelly at a NASA press conference dealing with the latest flap of UAP sightings in which the believers were saying, "Look, you know, just this pilot saw it." And, you know, they have, you know, great credentials and, and great vision and they know what they're seeing in space and in the atmosphere. Here's what Scott Kelly says, "In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions. So I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it's going really,

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  really fast. Remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military Operating Area and my RIO Radar Intercept Officer, who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn't see it, so we turned around to go look at it. Turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon." My brother Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and now also a US Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago when he was the commander of the STS 124, the space shuttle. They were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the space shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt. They couldn't quite figure it out and they were potentially

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  going to have to go do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that, my brother grabbed his camera and they took a picture of it. And when they blew up the picture, they realized this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay. It's the International Space Station 80 miles away. He says, "There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It's just a very, very challenging environment to work, especially at night."

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I can support that by mentioning an anecdote where I had someone send me an email, you know, a camera photographer of weddings, and he said, "I just have the best photo ever of a UFO that I captured during a wedding, and I want you to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement." He asked me, I said, "I'm not signing any NDA. You want me to look at it? Just send it over." And so he agreed and sent it over, and I showed it to the Galileo Project research team, and we realized that it was actually a napkin that was flying in the wind behind the groom. And I told it to him, and I assumed that he was disappointed.

• 1:07:04Brian Keating?

  Michael, what about the fact that the US government recently admitted that it was running basically what's called a psychological operation on members of the military? What, how does that, you know, affect your credulity or not? First of all, why would they do that? And would they possibly do that because of the existence of the real, you know, objects that they want to keep covered up? What do you make of that?

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, the latter, right. I mean, you know, did anybody know about the U-2 spy plane or the SR-71 Blackbird, you know, when they were under development? I mean, you know, the SR, the U-2 spy plane was developed in Burbank, you know, right there in the middle of Los Angeles, and nobody knew about it, right? So governments can't keep secrets. Some secrets leak. Sometimes they cover up things that they're doing. We know that governments lie to their citizens. All governments, including democracies, do this. Our own government does this. We know that's from the history of the CIA and the FBI. You know, they're not always forthcoming, to say the least. And so my interpretation of that is, you know, sort of like with the Roswell incident, you know, they initially said, you know, it was a, well, initially they said, "Look, here's some debris." And they, "Oh, it's

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  a weather balloon." Well, it turns out it wasn't a weather balloon. It was Project Mogul, which was high-altitude balloons with acoustic equipment to listen for nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere that we were afraid the Soviets might be testing. And so of course they lied about that, because they're not going to say, "Hey, by the way, that debris you saw was from this secret..." ...project mogul that we're using so we can know what the Soviets are doing because now the Soviets know we're doing it. So they lie for national security reasons, yeah, and so on. It could be something along those lines and maybe there's some slight sense of humor about the whole thing. Look at what all these UFO nuts are talking about. Let's go ahead and float some of those ideas out there into the public and let them run with it so that we can keep doing what we're doing. That's entirely possible.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  You know, it's, it's not a very open, transparent approach to a democratic civil society, but that's the world we live in.

• 1:09:02Brian Keating?

  And speaking of that, Avi, you've, first of all, I want to give you credit because all these people, and some call them haters, and you've got like a whole bunch of people that troll you, both in our professional academy as well as, I mean, Michael, maybe you're not aware of this because you don't play the petty games that we professors play. But, but there's a lot of hatred that goes towards Avi. And I found it very interesting sociologically because a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, you got this on the radar of Congresswoman Luna of Florida. And, and she's since taken this mantle up. And at that time, it was to look at, using the spacecraft Juno, Juno, what I know, it's the Jupiter observation, which, which is still in orbit and could do observations of this.

• 1:09:47Brian Keating?

  First of all, I want to congratulate you for that. Second of all, I want to congratulate you for making your haters say, well, Avi's, you know, wrong about this being an object from interstellar, you know, technology, but he's got a good idea, but my idea is better. I'm going to use it to look for a plume from Vega, you know, whatever. So that was an epic troll. I don't know if that was your intention, but why should the, you know, what, what level does this government thing go up? Does it go all the way up to the president? I mean, what, what are they doing in Congress with our taxpayer money? And what could they be doing to maybe shed some light on this interesting object and other objects that are undoubtedly coming our way, right?

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Congresswoman Luna did call me by phone and asked me for an update about 3I Atlas. I met her before at the briefing that I gave on May 1st, 2025, in the US Congress. And, you know, I advocated for the scientific approach, where she doesn't need to listen to storytelling the way that Michael describes, you know, because stories, you know, can be fabricated. And, and science is really our best hope. The, the method of science is collecting evidence. You don't need to listen to people, just collect as much data as possible. And you can tell the difference between, you know, a, a, a genuine scientist and a conspiracy theorist. The way to tell the difference is give both of them a lot of data.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  The conspiracy theorist will be very worried about it, because it may go against the narrative. The scientist, a genuine scientist, would be delighted, because even if it changes the view that, that scientist had, you know, we learn something new. So that is the process of scientific learning. Now, I'm not saying that practitioners of science, scientists, are all genuine scientists. Many of them are anti-science. They have a view, they have an echo chamber, and they want everything to conform to that. And so that's my problem with some of the scientists. But I should say, actually, that just last week, there was a paper out saying, "We should look for technological signatures of interstellar objects."

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  And I look at the author list, and in the author list, there are people who are attacking me personally on YouTube and, you know, on, on blogs. And I asked myself, "How come?" And then I re- I remembered what Oscar Wilde said, that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Okay, so I, I don't mind, as long as they say what I'm saying, that's fine. But what they are trying to do is basically say, "If we happen to find technological signatures of an interstellar object, we want credit for that. This was discussed long ago, it's not about Avi." So they give me a hard time, but at the same time, was to diminish, they want to diminish my prospects of getting recognized for saying that, if it happens to be true.

• 1:12:27Brian Keating?

  Now, Michael, just because you have to go in a Couple of minutes. I want to ask you this. You stated very eloquently the challenges of eyewitness testimony. But let's talk about the title of this hearing is, I understand, is the Whistleblower Protection Act. Now, why would we need whistleblower protection if these objects are not real? Or if they are representative of psychological operation? What do you make of this whistleblower?

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Well, the idea there is you have insiders working in the government. These aren't just, you know, the farmer Bob out in the field says he saw a light. These are people that presumably, you know, working in government know something. So when you see like the Grush hearings and some of those congressional hearings where, you know, they know somebody who knows somebody who worked in government that actually touched the spaceship, saw the aliens, studied them and so on. And then you ask, well, who was that? Well, we can't tell you. Well, where was this? Can't tell you. Okay. So, and when you ask, well, why not? Well, it's classified or, you know, they're afraid of being punished. So, well, we have whistleblower laws and that's what those are for, so that we can have transparency in government. These government agencies. So let's get it out there. Just release all the files.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Release the UFO files, the JFK files, the Epstein files. Put them all out there. All right, gentlemen, I gotta go. I'm gonna disclose with this final statement. Avi, you started off by saying scientists don't care about the Nobel Prize. They just want evidence. So 3I Atlas turns out to be extraterrestrial intelligent technology. And the Nobel Committee calls you at 5:00 in the morning and you're not already out on your early morning run. Would you turn it down?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  I will do the Bob Dylan act because if we know that it's an intelligence, alien intelligence, it's much more worthwhile of my attention than a bunch of old people giving an award to another person. You know, I would do the Bob Dylan thing.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Oh, you just wouldn't show? Okay. All right.

• 1:14:17Brian Keating?

  All right. Michael, thank you so much. Keep up the skepticism. Tune into Michael Shermer Show every week.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  We'll see you tomorrow, Avi. Yeah.

• 1:14:26Brian Keating?

  All right. So Avi and I are going to continue for, I have another 10 minutes if Avi does as well. So Avi.

• 1:14:34Brian Keating?

  There. Good. Michael's still there, but that's weird. He's not supposed to be there. All right, let me put in Avi. There we go. And I'm going to replace there with me. There we go. And I'm going to take that off there. Okay, Avi, we're back live. Avi, if you were at the, are you going to the testimony next Tuesday?

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Uh, no, but I was asked to comment on that, so I will, I will watch it probably.

• 1:14:56Brian Keating?

  Okay.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  From a distance.

• 1:14:57Brian Keating?

  All right, there's 4,000 people watching us right now. If you could ask a question, you know, be promoted or demoted to Congressman Loeb from the state of Massachusetts, what would you ask these witnesses?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Well, I want to know if they have firsthand evidence. I want to, to understand what, what it is. Okay. And that's my main concern, that people who talked about the subject were either hearing the story from other people or sort of indirectly hinting from documents that something might be out there, that the government is in possession of things. And, you know, I was sitting next to Eric Davis, the congressional briefing in May, and he was saying that the US government has 12, about a dozen spacecraft and also biological pilots that were recovered. And, you know, I have no idea of whether this bears any, you know, truth or not.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  And the only way to find out is to get, you know, either clear photographs or see the actual physical evidence. And before I, I have that, I would just be, just like Michael, skeptical about it.

• 1:16:07Brian Keating?

  Would you take them up on an offer if they did ask you, I mean, you're very heavily astrophysical theory focused, but also sensor focused. Your multi-domain, multi-modal technology that the Galileo Project employs is unparalleled in this. I mean, you even use sound sensors. It's incredible. But what would you trade? You know, would, would you like to have hands-on biologics? You're not a biologist, but, but, you know, they talk about non-human biologics. They talk about objects that clearly, I mean, you're one of the world's experts in relativity and black holes. You're, you're not a one, I mean, you're going to publish 800 papers or more, maybe. Maybe that's your H-index, I forget. But, but, Avi. When you hear about things such as what David Grush has testified that this object is bigger

• 1:16:49Brian Keating?

  inside than it is outside, it has all sorts of things that always are claimed to defy the laws of physics. You're an astrophysicist, I'm a physicist. What do you make of those claims? What would you do, aside from the Galileo project? You have access to people, testimony, evidence, physical evidence, and eyewitness evidence. What would you do?

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Well, if I have access to the evidence, if the US government, for example, signs me on a non-disclosure agreement, which they didn't, and they show me the actual evidence, I would help them figure it out. Now, you will not know about it, because I won't be able to speak about it publicly, but you will see that I'm not talking anymore about this subject. I would just like to know, you know, you can think of me like a kid, okay? I just want to figure it out. I want to know whether we are alone. I think it's the most romantic question in science, whether we have a partner out there. And, you know, it's a blind date, of course. Our imagination is limited to our experiences on Earth, and nature is more imaginative. So I don't want us to assume that we know the answer in advance.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  I want to see the evidence, and if the government has it, I'm happy to help them figure it out. But I haven't seen the evidence as of yet, and the Galileo project has three observatories in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. And one thing I told them, that in the coming months, as 3I Atlas comes close to the sun, we should monitor for any anomalous activity in the Earth's atmosphere, just in case it released any mini-probes, you know, if it's a mothership. But if we don't see anything, so be it. You know, if it's a rock, then fine with me. I mean, you know, imagine being on a blind date. You know, obviously, it would be disappointing if on the other side, there is a rock.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

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• 1:19:02Brian Keating?

  We have some questions from the audience about the actual composition of it. So what is the strongest evidence of all the four, five, or six different attributes that you've talked about, we've talked about? Explain what a comet is, basics of a comet, and then how this thing differs from it for people that might not be familiar. And then which of the pieces of anomalies are most clear cut of interest to you?

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Right, so a comet is basically a dirty iceberg, ice ball. And actually, Fred Whipple came up with that idea. Before him, it was not the case. He was at Harvard and he went to Harvard Yard one winter and saw all these people throwing ice balls at each other and realized, actually, comets might be just like that, dirty ice balls. And we now know they are a mix of rock and water ice. Most of them in the solar system are like that. And they come from different distances and we can see them erupting when they come close enough to the sun.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Because when they are far away, the ice remains in the ice phase. But when the ice is warmed close enough to the sun, and that's within a distance of a few times the earth-sun separation, at that point, the ice turns into water vapor. It sublimates. There is no liquid in between because liquid water can exist only under external pressure. So that's why there is life on Earth because there is the atmosphere that provides pressure that allows liquid water to When ice is being melted by sunlight. However, if there is no atmosphere on a piece of rock that has some ice on it, then the ice goes straight into vapor, into gas form,

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  and that is called sublimation, and that's what you see in comets. Now, the ice is dirty, it has dust particles in it. So when you get this vapor, it also, it contains also some dust particles, some of which have size comparable to the wavelength of sunlight. And in that case, it scatters sunlight, and you see this glow behind the comet that is just scattering of sunlight by either the dust or the gas that comes off the comet. And we see a lot of comets in the solar system because these are the building blocks that were left over in the outskirts of the solar system where the water ice formed.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  In the inner part of the solar system, you know, there is not much water ice. Of course, on Earth, we find the liquid water because of the atmosphere that keeps it in place. But if there was no atmosphere, like in the context of Mars, all you find on Mars without a significant atmosphere is either some reservoir of water ice on the cold part of parts of Mars, or nothing at all, it's a desert. And that's what you find on an object without an atmosphere.

• 1:22:16Brian Keating?

  Land the spaceship here. Tell me what to expect on October 3rd, besides the Nobel Prize ceremonies, which are coming up, and you might be up early that day. But Avi, what prediction might you make for the public to judge and maybe help, you know, settle the issue or contribute more information to the debate?

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  For me, the biggest anomaly, you know, is putting the trajectory aside. Let's imagine it's an object on some rare trajectory by chance, okay? It's the size of the object, okay? And the high-rise camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Able to resolve thirty kilometers and that is roughly the scale of the nucleus if it's big. And I would like to see the images coming from there. I know that the European Space Agency will also employ all of its, uh, you know, probes. It has the Mars Explorer and some other probes. And I, I, I look forward to seeing the data from all of these probes. And if we see that, you know, the most of the reflection of sunlight indeed comes from some compact cloud of dust, which we can tell, you know, if the size is of order forty-six kilometers comparable to the size of a pixel.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Then, you know, I will say, uh, if it's a cloud of dust, then it's probably just a regular comet with a small nucleus. But if it turns out to be a solid surface of an object that reflects the sunlight, then I, I, I think we have a problem because how can you get such a giant rock uh, every decade to the inner solar system? That's untenable by the reservoir of rocks in interstellar space.

• 1:24:04Brian Keating?

  Now, what if it does turn out, you know, in the fullness of time to be just a comet? What makes it scientifically exciting still?

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  Oh, and here is an interesting point. If we had the foresight to have some interceptor waiting for it so that we can land on such an object, collect some material like a hundred grams, the way we collected from the asteroid Benu and bring it back to Earth. That's a completely new approach to astrobiology. You know, right now astrobiology is about looking at the atmospheres of exoplanets. I'm saying, let's retrieve some material and check what are the building blocks of life there? If we find the same building blocks, the amino acids that we find, that we found on Benu, uh, that are the building blocks of life as we know it, we know at least that around other stars,

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  you have the same building blocks, amino acids that perhaps give rise, life as we know it. I would like to know that. That, that is a completely new way of doing astrobiology.

• 1:25:02Brian Keating?

  Very good. Okay. So in the five minutes we have left or so, I want to do some rapid fire questions from the audience. So Edward asks, why would aliens disguise themselves as a comet? Why would they care?

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. It depends on their intent. So, you know, when you go on a blind date, you never know what the other side is hoping to accomplish. It could be exploration. It could be that they go through planetary systems, the habitable zone of planetary systems for a reason. Or, for example, it could be that it represents a dark forest hypothesis, which is a solution to Fermi's paradox. When he asked, "Where is everybody?", one solution is, "The aliens are not very far from us, but they are quiet because they are worried about predators." And when they see us evolving technologically, you know, they would like to visit and either figure out exactly what's going on

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  or maybe even pose a threat to humanity because we danger them, you know. So you never know your neighbors until you see them.

• 1:26:09Brian Keating?

  That's right. Well, my wife knew what my intentions were on the first date. But Avi, tell me about the glow Tom Colby is asking that came from in front of the object.

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  Right. So that is very puzzling because what happens usually is you get the glow from dust particles that have a size comparable to the wavelength of sunlight. So they scatter sunlight very effectively. But for the same reason, sunlight pushes them very quickly. I calculated, within a day, they should have ended up behind the object. And so that's why you see a cometary tail usually. So it's either, you know, the cloud of, the plume of gas being pushed by the solar wind or the dust being pushed by the solar radiation. In both cases, you end up with a plume of gas stretching behind it like a trail. And that's the origin of cometary tails being pushed away from the sun.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Now, we don't see that here. So what could be the reason? It could be that there is not much dust. What we are seeing is reflection of sunlight from ice, water ice primarily, because CO2 ice can get evaporated very quickly. So the only remaining ice that can go a distance Is water ice and then this water ice is evaporated from the front, the sun facing side of the object. So you you see it when it scatters sunlight, but then it gets evaporated at some distance and it doesn't go behind the object anymore. So then you get a preference ahead of the object towards the sun.

• 1:27:46Brian Keating?

  Carl Rollo asks, how did it get past the heat bubble of our Oort Clouds? This is a general comment. Forget about if it's a comet or a, I don't know, it was a Freudian slip. I said comet, not comment. But just ignore that it's possibly technological. How could a comet get through the Oort Cloud is what being asked.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a great question. Space is mostly empty. And I actually did the calculation because this object is going through the asteroid belt, which is actually a collection of fragments left over, you know, from either planets that were destroyed or the the building blocks of planets that were left in the solar system. We find them in the main asteroid belt and the density of rocks there is much greater than anywhere else in the solar system. And I calculated and it turns out that the chance of this, an object even that is, you know, 40 kilometers in diameter, the chance of it colliding with anything significant is negligible. I mean, most of the time it collides with dust particles, but they don't do much damage. And if you ask

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  how much material does it scoop along its path, it's really completely negligible. It's much less than a millimeter, even if you integrate over billions of years when it goes through interstellar space, you know, it doesn't collect much material because space is mostly empty. Every now and then there are dust particles colliding with it, molecules, atoms, but that doesn't add up to a lot. We are talking about of order a millimeter over billions of years.

• 1:29:14Brian Keating?

  Right. Okay. Native 95 is asking, how do you explain the high levels of pure nickel without the presence of iron? We touched on that earlier, but just a brief.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Well, one way to explain it is if there is a process similar to the industrial production of nickel alloys, and that's called carbonene. You can find it on.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Online and this is a process that can make that releases nickel without irony because it's nickel related. And that's how we make those alloys industrially now. If nature doesn't do that often because we haven't seen it before. Then maybe it's a signature of industrial production of whatever surface. Three I Atlas has, in which case it might be technological.

• 1:29:59Brian Keating?

  And why would they use that versus steel or something like that? Why would they focus on?

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  Well, steel is, I mean, it will still. I mean, because that's what we use for spacecraft, by the way, that what you call steel or. Material used on spacecraft is nickel enriched relative to iron.

• 1:30:18Brian Keating?

  Uh, right, but there are other alloys, other.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  There are, there are, yeah, of course. So we, we, yeah, I'm just saying this is unusual. This is an anomaly relative to what you find in in comets within the solar system. That's all.

• 1:30:32Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Galactic Hurricane is asking, why is it red like Oumuamua? Is that true?

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  Right. So that may well be if it's not a cloud of dust, as I mentioned, around it that is reddening it. Then it most likely is just the surface that. Appears red because it's bombarded for billions of years by cosmic rays. And we see that in the Kuiper belt, we see objects that are red. And what happens is that organic. Compounds are being made as a result of the bombardment by cosmic rays. And you end up with a red color. So Kuiper belt objects like a rock of that was an object that was studied quite a lot. In the Kuiper belt, they appear red and and the same was true for Oumuamua. It was relatively red, so. And apparently, objects that are exposed to conditions in interstellar space are.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Becoming red. It has nothing to do with political views of whoever. The passengers on these.

• 1:31:29Brian Keating?

  Congresswoman Luna's, you know, favorite color. All right, last question, our friend Stephen

• 1:31:36Brian Keating?

  Vicecosil asks, Professor Loeb, a three eye atlas shows non-gravitational acceleration or anomalous spin. Would you consider evaluating it not only as a natural object, but a test of coherence, which I think means intelligence? Is there some putatively natural thing like spin, but then acceleration plus spin? Is there some combination of forces? You know, you see the golden ratio in these things, he's asking. What would you then say is technological in origin?

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's interesting. So I'm now looking into the data on the trajectory of this object. I want to find how significant is the limit on non-gravitational acceleration. But of course, at any point along the orbit, we might see a maneuver. And that usually happens for spacecraft closest to the sun. When we want to give spacecraft the most boost thrust, we activate the rocket effect when it's closest to the sun, because that's when gravitational assist from the sun is most effective. And so I would like to wait until October 29th and see if there is any maneuver.

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  Of course, if there is, that would be a clean signature that we're seeing something technological as long as the non-gravitational acceleration is at a level that is far greater than you expect from the rocket effect of cometary evaporation. I calculated that the level of cometary evaporation of this object is very weak and the non-gravitational acceleration is almost negligible. It would be really difficult to detect it. And so if we see something significant that change in the trajectory that is significant, I would argue that's very intriguing.

• 1:33:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah, very much indeed. Okay, well, this has been an intriguing conversation and I want folks to know how rare Avi is, both in terms of his courage, his bravery, but also his productivity. And that reminds me to remind you that my new book is a productivity book. So you too can take on the mantle of leadership, courage and productivity that Avi Loeb has exhibited. These are less. From nine of the 22 Nobel Prize winners I've interviewed on this very show, including eminent luminaries from Harvard, from all walks of the academic lifestyle. This book is on sale on Kindle right now for the low, low price of just 99 cents. So Avi, this is, you can't beat this, this low price. There it is. There. Get your own copy. Avi, I want

• 1:33:59Brian Keating?

  to thank you for inspiring me and a generation of astronomers. We'll have many discussions on this. Maybe on October 4th, if, if we're still here to tell the tale about it, right?

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  Thank you. I look forward to that.

• 1:34:12Brian Keating?

  This has been great. So everybody, thank you so much. Thank you to Avi. Thank you to Michael Shermer. And stay tuned. We have been interviewed with Thomas Hurtog, who Avi knows very well as well, is Stephen Hawking's final collaborator. That comes out tomorrow or tonight. If you're a member of the channel, don't forget to go to my website, listed down below, where you can get some high nickel, but mostly high iron from a meteorite that fell to earth older than the, is older than the earth itself. It's four and a half billion years old. And once in a while, I give out a moon rock, Avi. This guy Bart Sibrel claims we didn't land on the moon. And he claims I'm committing a felony by having this piece of moon rock. But I'll, I'll tell that tale to the federales. No, my lawyers tell me I'm, I'm totally safe and secure. I give a moon rock out. I give out meteorites guaranteed

• 1:34:54Brian Keating?

  if you have a .edu email address, if you live in the United States. So click on the link right there. Avi Loeb, thank you so much. We'll talk again soon.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:35:03Brian Keating?

  Bye.