Another Alien Asteroid - Avi Loeb - #502

In this episode, I sit down with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb to explore his provocative new article analyzing the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS — a visitor from beyond our solar system that might not be natural. 🛰️ We dive into his recent article on Medium https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-interstellar-object-3i-atlas-alien-technology-b59ccc17b2e3 and get into: • The strange anomalies in 3I/ATLAS’s orbit, size, and speed 🌌 • How the Dark Forest Hypothesis could change the search for intelligent life 🕵️‍♂️ • Why even unlikely cosmic risks deserve serious scientific attention 🧠 • What Pascal’s Wager teaches us about ignoring possible extraterrestrial probes 🪐 💥 Plus, Avi answers 5 gripping questions designed to maximize your curiosity — from the first signs of alien tech to the biggest risks humanity faces if we stay silent. 🎧 Don’t miss this mind-expanding conversation with one of the boldest thinkers in astrophysics. 1️⃣ “Is This Alien Tech Hiding in Plain Sight?” 2️⃣ “The Dark Forest Theory Just Got Real” 3️⃣ “Avi Loeb: The Alien Probe We Can’t Ignore” 4️⃣ “3I/ATLAS: Interstellar Visitor… or Something Else?” 5️⃣ “What If They’re Watching Us? (The 3I/ATLAS Mystery)” For those of you who don't know him, Avi is a professor of science at Harvard University, theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, and cosmologist. He is also a bestselling author and a dear friend of mine. By the time you see this, Avi will have published his new book, Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars. In it, he explains why we need to become an interstellar species to ensure our survival and lays out a plan for how we can settle among the stars. As usual, we take some time to judge a book by its cover and discuss what went into the making of this book. We also dig into the recent Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean to retrieve spherules of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, which was led by Avi, and discuss whether they found evidence of alien life. - Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Intro (00:00) Asteroids that are Interstellar (00:44) On extraordinary evidence (08:13) Does Avi have proof of alien technology (13:55) On David Grusch and government obligations (78:01) More on Interstellar and what it means to become an interstellar species (1:16:56) Rapid fire audience questions (1:19:20) Outro (1:50:57) — Additional resources: 📚 Interstellar by Avi Loeb: https://a.co/d/gN18ylO 📺 Watch my most popular videos: Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:56Speaker 02

  I see science as a privilege to maintain our childhood curiosity. And I was particularly happy a couple of months ago when I attended a gathering of about 100 CEOs and some of the most accomplished in the world and some of the most accomplished celebrities. And at the coffee break, I saw Margot Robbie. And I, you know, I had no way of starting a conversation with her because I don't have much in common. She's a very successful actress. But then someone came with my book to sign it, and she noticed it and she said, "Oh, are you Avi Loeb? I really wanted to hear your talk, but I have to go to a wedding.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  And would you mind telling me about your work?" And for 20 minutes, we discussed my work, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In the middle of it, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, showed up and he wanted to shake her hand. He ignored me altogether. And she wasn't really into money. She wasn't interested in learning more about Nvidia. She really wanted to know whether there is extraterrestrial intelligence. To me, that is the greatest satisfaction because I address a question that the public and everyone cares about.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I'm not afraid of being ridiculed or, in fact, just a few days ago, I wrote an essay with two psychologists, trying to analyze why astronomers in the mainstream have a problem dealing with extraterrestrial intelligence. You know, the mainstream of the astronomy community decided in the CATAL survey of 2020 to dedicate of the order of $10 billion over the next two decades to build the Habitable World Observatory to search for microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets, the chemical fingerprints of microbes. And I have nothing against microbes and I have nothing against searching for them.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  I just find them boring and I think we should hedge our bets and search for intelligent beings out there with roughly the same investment of funds. And in fact, this second path to discovering life in the universe was not recommended at all. It's in the periphery of mainstream astronomy. However, the public sees it as one of the most exciting questions of science. So you ask yourself, why is it that academia shies away from it? And in this paper that is posted on Medium.com with two psychologists, Omar El-Dadi and Gershon Tenenbaum,

• 3:40Speaker 02

  we actually analyzed the mainstream experts and we offer an explanation for why there is so much pushback. And, you know, I'm not a therapist. I advise those that, you know, have fever when they hear about suggestions that there might be technological objects near Earth. I suggest them to find a therapist to calm them down. Because the point is, this is a scientific possibility that we should explore like any other scientific possibility. You know, we dedicated billions of dollars to the search for specific types of dark matter. We haven't found it. We searched for supersymmetry with the Large Hadron Collider, you know, at the cost of $10 billion. We haven't found it. Did anyone say that was a waste of money or time?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Here is a question the public cares about. Let's address it the scientific way.

• 4:29Brian Keating?

  Absolutely. I think, you know, there's nothing that says, you know, people's attention more, that gets people's attention more than mentioning Margot Robbie. Uh, I should, I should say that, you know, she was, she was accused of being, you know, very mid, whatever that means, I don't know, but uh.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Well, I find her priorities, I found her priorities to be in the right place. She cares about science more than money.

• 4:51Brian Keating?

  Yep. And, uh, so let's just get into, you have this article, I posted it in the YouTube description down below, people can find that. After the episode's over, we'll, um, we'll have more links and so forth to go to it. But what, what's the thing that you think that the scientific community is overlooking when it comes to this object? First of all, describe the object that has this unusual name, but it's very logical, and describe the two predecessors, one of which is inextricably connected to your career.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Right. So, um, interstellar objects were discovered only over the past, uh, decade or so, uh, because we had surveys that were looking for near Earth objects as a threat. We know that dinosaurs were killed by a giant object roughly 10 kilometers in diameter that impacted the Earth 66 million years ago. We are smarter than dinosaurs, we have telescopes, we can get an early warning. And that was the agenda of building the, uh, several survey telescopes, one of which was Panstars in Hawaii that discovered the first interstellar object, Oumuamua, in 2017. After that, an amateur astronomer, uh, found the,

• 6:02Speaker 02

  uh, an object that was a comet, very similar to the comets in the solar system. Uh, his name is Ganadi Borisov, and the, that comet, interstellar comet, uh, was named after him. Uh, so the first one, uh, one I, uh, Oumuamua was, uh, one, and the second one, two I, Borisov, uh, was found, it was a comet. Oumuamua was anomalous, uh, it was pushed away from the sun without having any cometary plume of, uh, gas or dust. And it wasn't clear what's pushing it. And I suggested maybe it's very thin, it's just the, the sunlight pushing it. And we see that human-made, the space trash, uh, is actually pushed by reflecting

• 6:46Speaker 02

  sunlight. In fact, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered an object called 2020SO that was a rocket booster from 1966, pushed by sunlight. So if we produce space objects that are pushed by sunlight, why not consider aliens doing that? But the third one was discovered on July 1st, 2025, this year, just a few weeks ago. And the reason I realized it was discovered very quickly is because I was invited for a two-hour radio interview on coast to coast. And they asked me to wake up at 3:00 a.m. to speak with them. And I actually woke up at 2:00 a.m.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  I usually wake up early for my morning jog before sunrise. Every day I jog three miles. So I was up. And then someone that attended the interview that I had sent me an email and said, "There is a new interstellar object, at least a candidate at that time." That was just the night over which it was realized by a few amateur astronomers that indeed the ATLAS survey, that's a telescope of half a meter, which by coincidence discovered the third interstellar object, 3I ATLAS. And the reason it is an interesting coincidence is because during the same time,

• 8:14Speaker 02

  the Rubin Observatory, which is roughly the same place in Chile, they are neighboring each other.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  celebrated that the survey telescope in the world was inaugurated, this small telescope that is only half a meter, whereas Rubin is 8.3 meters in diameter. So this small telescope discovered an interstellar object. Now Rubin can follow up on it and see it as well. Why did it discover this tiny telescope? This object is 4.5 times the Earth-Sun separation in terms of distance. The reason is, it's very bright for its distance. In fact, if you assume that it's a solid object, like an asteroid, a rock, then it has to be 20 kilometers in diameter. And that's twice as large as the asteroid that killed the non-evian dinosaurs. Just think about it.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Such an asteroid hits the Earth once every sixty-six million years. We get impacts by asteroids the size of a meter or so every year. So there are many more small objects than big objects. And the minute I realized that, the same morning, you know, when I realized, oh, this one is so bright. I looked, I calculated the size, twenty kilometers. I said, this makes no sense, because there are a million objects the size of a muamua, tens of meters, for every object that is twenty kilometers in diameter, in the main asteroid belt of the solar system. So I said, we haven't discovered a million muamua's before we discovered this one. How come it's so big? It makes no sense.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  And, you know, at the time, just a couple of days later, I was supposed to go with my wife on vacation. It was the Fourth of July, and she wanted us to go to Aruba. So here I am at the hotel in Aruba, thinking about this interstellar object. And I decided to write a paper on the Fourth of July, and submit it to the archives, submit it to research notes of the American Astronomical Society. I basically made a very simple point. I said, this object, you know, cannot be an asteroid, twenty kilometers in diameter. If it's a solid object, it must be something else.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  And I calculated, there is not enough matter in rocks in interstellar space to account for a twenty-kilometer one that we will detect over a survey of a decade. You know, the Atlas surveyed for five years or so. We would never find a twenty-kilometer object, because it would mean that there is more mass in interstellar rocks than, you know, the, all the metals in the Milky Way galaxy per unit volume cannot account for that. In fact, it's about a quarter of the mass in stars that you need per unit volume. And most of the mass in stars, ninety-eight percent of that, is in hydrogen.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And helium, so you can't have a rock that big detected from interstellar space once a decade, it's just not possible by orders of magnitude. So I wrote this paper, I also said we should have seen a million or muammar's like objects, and my suggestion was, well, maybe it's a comet that is very small, less than a kilometer, then there wouldn't be a problem with the mass budget. And it spews out a lot of dust and gas, so you see it as a bigger object just because it's a comet. But when I looked at the images, they didn't look like Borisov, the comet that we have seen before, there was no clear cometary tail that surrounds it, there was a little

• 12:16Speaker 02

  bit of fuzz around this object, and that fuzz actually was looked at, there were two papers that took a spectrum of the object, and they didn't see any signature of molecules associated with gas surrounding comets, they didn't detect any spectral fingerprints of gas, the only thing they saw is the object is red, so the reflected sunlight from it obtained reddening. Now reddening is something you see for coeterbelt objects in the outer part of the solar system,

• 12:54Speaker 02

  it's a result of the surfaces of these objects that are icy being bombarded by cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation from the sun, and you end up with organic molecules forming and objects appearing red. So a red color doesn't mean that we are looking at a cloud of dust, it could mean that, but it could also be that it's the surface of an object that was impacted by cosmic rays. So we don't know for sure whether it's a comet or not, and then I realized, well, this object is strange in many other ways, and that led me to collaborate with two colleagues,

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Adam Hebert and Adam Crowell, on a paper that I posted today. It will hopefully appear on the archive, I wrote a medium essay about it, where I described eight anomalies about 3I atlas, and if I wanted to summarize these anomalies, my basic message would be, if you are planning...

• 14:00Speaker 02

  An annual vacation, do it before October 29th. Take your vacation before that date. Why? Because this is the time that 3I Atlas will arrive closest to the sun. And guess what? It will arrive closest to the sun when the Earth is on the opposite side of the sun. So, why would it do that? One possibility, it doesn't want to be observed by our telescopes from Earth when it gets close to the sun.

• 14:34Brian Keating?

  This is like the fighter pilot technique of going into the sun to elude your... Before there was stealth and before we had advanced technology in World War II, fighter pilots would always attack with the sun behind them, correct?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  That's interesting. No, but here there is a more practical reason. People may be aware of something called a birth maneuver. What it means is that if you want to use your engine in order to accelerate or decelerate, the best time to activate your engines is when you're moving at the highest speed, because then you get the biggest boost in kinetic energy for the engine that you have, for the thrust that you impart on your spacecraft. So that means you need to do it closest to the sun, okay? And you, you know, we do it for space missions.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  This maneuver in order to boost them up in velocity so they can escape from the solar system. But you can also do it to brake, to decelerate. So if you have an interstellar object coming, then closest to the sun, that spacecraft could brake and get into a bound orbit and in fact, visit the inner planets like the Earth. So if they want to do it, that would be the point where they would brake.

• 15:56Speaker 04

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• 16:25Speaker 02

  That is also a good point for them to move very fast relative to Earth because this object is also on retrograde orbit. It moves in the opposite direction to the motion of the Earth around the Sun. So the Earth is moving at 30 kilometers per second around the Sun, we know that for a while. And then this object would move at 68 kilometers per second in the opposite direction. That means the relative speed would be 98 kilometers per second. No chemical rocket that we launch from Earth can reach that speed. The highest speed that we can reach with chemical rockets with a reasonable amount of fuel, given the rocket equation, you know, which tells you that you need to increase the amount of fuel exponentially

• 17:09Speaker 02

  to just benefit a little bit in speed. The maximum speed is a third of that 98 kilometers per second. We can't really...

• 17:16Brian Keating?

  Somebody say that's proof that it's not made by technology, anything like ours. And in fact, that would be more evidence that it's naturally occurring, not a nitrogen iceberg, but it could be something natural, correct?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so, but then I'll just finish saying one more thing about the orbit. This orbit, the plane of the orbit of 3I Atlas is aligned with the ecliptic plane, the orbital plane of the Earth. So it's on a retrograde orbit, the opposite direction of motion relative to the Earth, but it's in exactly the same orbital plane to within five... Degrees. The chance of that

• 18:01Speaker 02

  is 0.2%. That, you know, the two angular momentum vectors of the orbital motion of this object and the Earth would be aligned within five degrees. It's a very small chance. And this object came, approaches us from the direction of the galactic center, which has a lot of crowding by stars. So if you wanted to hide yourself, you will come from the direction of the galactic center, where there are lots, plenty of stars, so early detection is difficult. And then, once, you know, terrestrials, earthlings, recognize you, you are moving so fast, they can't reach you, which is the situation we're in right now.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  We cannot launch a rocket that will reach this object in time. And it could do a maneuver just when we can't see it, behind the sun. When you put together all of these coincidences. Now, it turns out also that, let's assume the orbit was drawn randomly, okay? So you take exactly the orbital parameters that this object has, you just change the time of arrival. So you assume that the time of arrival is random. And then you ask yourself, what's the chance that it will come so close to all the inner planets, like Mars, Jupiter, Venus? It turns out that the chance of that happening, it comes really close to all three of them,

• 19:28Speaker 02

  except the Earth, because the Earth is on the opposite side of the sun. Yeah. The chance of that is 0.005%. So out of all arrival times, there is a very special arrival time that is associated with 3I Atlas, in which it passes really close to these planets. And guess what? With just a ballistic missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile, the type that the Iranians are using, you can launch something from this object at less than 5 kilometers per second.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And reach any of these planets Venus Jupiter, you know, or Mars. So, I mean, one possibility is that it's a maneuver that allows it to send probes from a mothership, you know, to those planets. Now, why is this hypothesis at all worth considering? Now, I'm not claiming that it's not a comet. It may well be a comet. And we will know about it. Once it gets closer to the sun, we'd see the, we will see the cometary tail. We'll, we'll be sure it's a natural object. But it's worth thinking about this, you know, for the same reason that Pascal had the wager about God.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  You, you may know about it. Pascal basically argued that, you know, what are, what are the benefits? And the, and, and the downside of thinking about God? I mean, the benefits, if God exists, are tremendous because that would have huge implications. The same is true here, implications for humanity. We have to consider this possibility. We have to get as much data as possible. It's possible that this object is just a comet. That's the most likely situation. But it's an interesting exercise to have because there will be 50 other objects that Rubin Observatory will find, and we are developing a methodology. And I actually wrote an essay just a week ago.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  How to distinguish a spacecraft from a rock? You know, what would be the signatures of a spacecraft that you can look for? And distinguish it from a rock? And, you know, we should check all 50 objects that we find. If one of them happens to be a spacecraft, you know, obviously it would have huge implications for humanity. I don't think I would spend any time going to Stockholm if that happens to be the case. Because it would be far more important to figure out. What we are dealing with than to pay attention to a price given by humans to humans.

• 22:06Brian Keating?

  Well, I think that's wonderful. You've touched on all my favorite hot button issues, Avi, but let's get into some. We got a thousand people watching already and, you know, we just barely have gotten started. You mentioned, and this is Brian Bate, I think, all the way. You mentioned this might be related to what's called the dark forest hypothesis. I did a video recently about all the different reasons that we might not have seen aliens. I had a sort of dark Petri dish hypothesis, which is that we're all kind of microbes in the Petri verse, which is what I called it, and bacteria waged war on each other just as well. Talk about the dark forest hypothesis. Let's start at a layperson level because there's undoubtedly a few laypeople out there among the thousand people watching.

• 22:51Brian Keating?

  What is the dark forest hypothesis? And how does this change the way that we look for extraterrestrial life, including this rock, which you may get a fragment of if you go to my website, briankatie.com. I'll give one to Avi next time I see you. But Avi, what is the dark forest?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's one of the proposed solutions to Fermi's paradox. Enrico Fermi in 1950 had lunch at Los Alamos. He was not afraid discussing extraterrestrials with his colleagues. You know, that was not ridiculed at that time.

• 23:20Brian Keating?

  My great colleague Herb York was with him here from San Diego.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just shows you that this is a question that we should all address. It should be part of the mainstream. This should not be ridiculed. It's ridiculous for us to ignore it. It's actually not intelligent for us to ignore the possibility that we are not the smartest kid on the block. That is a sign of non-intelligent scientists to ignore that possibility. But at any event, Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody? And one possible solution is that, you know, our cosmic neighborhood is full of aliens. You know, there are many of them out there, but they are silent. And that explains why the SETI community was searching for radio signals. They didn't find anything.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Because all these civilizations are afraid of predators. I mean, some of them were bruised, probably, in engagements. And, you know, it's just like a dark forest. You don't know if you are at the top of the food chain. There might be an animal more powerful than you. It's dark, you don't know what's out there. And the best strategy for survival would be to avoid contact, to be silent, not for nobody to recognize that you exist. Now, obviously, the biggest threat to you would be a young, emerging technological civilization, because they might become more powerful than you are. So you really want to do a reconnaissance mission to, you know, nearby stars to figure out

• 24:53Speaker 02

  if there is any potential risk looming on the horizon. And 3I Atlas actually arrived into the solar system. And here, I'm talking about the outer boundary of the solar system, the outskirts of the Oort Cloud, which is, you know, the boundary is 100,000 times the Earth-Sun separation, 100,000 AU. If you take 60 kilometers per second, which is the interstellar speed of this object when it entered the solar system, it would take such an object about 8,000 years to cross the entire 100,000 astronomical units. So 8,000 years, that's roughly when humans started to document their history on Earth.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  So this object entered the, you know, came within halfway to the nearest star about 8,000 years ago. And then entered the solar system on its path towards the Sun. And of course, you know, if it's by design, then we cannot do the statistics assuming that it went on a random trajectory. And then you get that if it's 20 kilometers in diameter, there isn't enough mass in rocks to account for such an asteroid. Instead, if it came straight into it on a plunging orbit towards the Sun... There is no statistical argument that you can you can use to figure out how much mass

• 26:20Speaker 02

  there is in objects like that, because by design, it came in our direction. And so, in a way, you know, this could be evidence for the dark forest if this object is technological, and we need to find out by collecting more data. And it's just a useful exercise of also demonstrating to the public that, you know, science can be helpful in saving humanity. I mean, we are all aware of issues related to climate change, issues related to AI. But I'm offering here one additional issue. When we discover interstellar objects, we should check whether any of them might be

• 27:04Speaker 02

  technological in origin, because there is a possibility that we are not alone.

• 27:09Brian Keating?

  Soon I'll ask you, what I've always wanted to, but probably never asked you, what you would say upon first contact if it was indeed found to contain alien intelligence. But before we get there, what is, you know, kind of the best hope of mankind? Say, what is the best-case scenario for this object?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Right, so so there are two possibilities. If you believe in the dark forest hypothesis, which was, by the way, was popularized in a book, Dark, The Dark Forest, by Xi Jin Liu, who also wrote the books about the three-body problem, a Netflix documentary. So, you know, it's obviously, you know, there is the possibility that they're very friendly, you know, and and they just come to visit us, in which case we should accept them with open arms.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  And if you're an optimist, you know, going on a blind date, if you go on a blind date always assuming that your partner has good intentions, you know, maybe you will be lucky and you will be right. But I assume that many people who went on blind dates found there is some probability that your partner will not be necessarily with good intentions. And that's the second possibility, right? And in that case, you know, it's an existential threat. We have to worry about it because we don't know how advanced their technologies are. We don't know their intentions. And, you know, here on earth,

• 28:50Speaker 02

  we serve in restaurants on the menu, animals that we think are less intelligent than we are. You just find a cow, you find, you know, I had a difficult time actually looking at the menu of a fish restaurant in Boston that had an octopus on the menu because octopus are, you know, they are quite intelligent and eating them is not, you know, with an easy heart. And at any event, we eat animals that we think are less intelligent than we are. Just think about another species visiting us, they could put us in their soup.

• 29:25Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I know. Maybe the proof of their lack of intelligence or the limits of their intelligence is that they don't know that they're on the menu, as Stephen Hawking once put it. So here's what I want to ask you. You are at the arguably the top university, the east coast version of UC San Diego, and you have very strong resources because you're so persuasive. I've often said, I've heard it said, actually, Avi, I've never mentioned this to you, but if you're good at salesmanship, that has a dirty connotation, but I don't think it should. I think I have to sell things as a scientist to the public, to funding agencies. Doesn't mean I'm deceptive. But I've heard it said once by someone like

• 30:07Brian Keating?

  Jim Simons, actually, that if you're good at salesmanship, you can basically do anything, and your colleagues who aren't as good as you will hate you for it. And I want to ask you, you have resources at your disposal, you have great people at your disposal, brilliant minds like Margot Robbie and Jensen Huang and everything else. What would you use to do, what would you do if we found out that you have one hour to sort of communicate with this object? What would be the first question, the first comment or warning? What would you do if you found out there was indeed extraterrestrial intelligence associated with either the creation of or the navigating thereby of this object, 3I Atlas?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Well, first I should say my work is really easy because this subject is of great interest to wealthy individuals and to the public. And the way I see it is that the mainstream of the astronomy community is shooting itself in the foot by saying, let's not discuss it. So they're avoiding a subject that could bring huge funds to research. And I can say that because I'm getting those funds, okay? People, I don't rely on funds obtained from the National Science Foundation or from NASA. I'm getting wealthy individuals to...

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  ...my front door at home that come to see me and are providing me with the research funds that I'm using in the Galileo Project. And there is a missed opportunity here. And all I'm saying is, even within federal funding, if the astronomy community were to hedge the bets and allocate a significant fraction of the funds, not just to the search for microbes, but to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, there would be much more enthusiasm in the public, among taxpayers, to fund those projects. But coming back to your question, which is the more serious one, you know, I really am seeking a higher intelligence in interstellar space because I don't often find it here on Earth. That's one reason I do that.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  And the question that I would like to ask such a higher intelligence, the first one, would be what happened before the Big Bang? So, you know, with the Simons Observatory, you are searching for the clues of what happened after the Big Bang. I really want to know if they know what happened before the Big Bang. Because for that, I mean, you might not have any observational clues, but if they have a theory of quantum gravity, it would educate us about, you know, what happens inside a black hole.

• 33:08Brian Keating?

  Well, you know that Tractate Halgiga says it's forbidden to speculate on what happened before days were created. But luckily, you know, rabbis don't review our grant proposals.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  No, you know, I spoke with rabbis and I also spoke with members of Christianity today that came to ask me, what will happen, you know, if we discover extraterrestrials? And my comment was, you know, it wouldn't change your belief in God, because, you know, I have two daughters and when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of my love to the first one. So to imagine that God can attend to only one,

• 33:47Speaker 02

  you know, child, so to speak, in the entire cosmos is really demeaning. I mean, there must be a lot like us. We might not be the smartest in our family. There might be siblings that we wish to meet. They might be more accomplished than we are. And the religious people accepted that. They have no issue with that. But the thing about what happened before the Big Bang is, once you have that recipe, you can figure out what God may have done before the, you know, the story that you find in the Old Testament. You know what? In fact, you can play the role of God. It's like having a recipe for a cake. If you know how to make a cake, all you need is an oven.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  So in this case, you will need to create the maybe plank temperature, plank density medium in an accelerator that we currently cannot really accomplish. But if you know the recipe, you might aspire to bake that cake, to create a baby universe. So that would be my first priority. Then, of course, the second one is, you know, where is the nearest meeting place? The hub where I can meet extraterrestrials? You know, I would really enjoy the conversation and learning from them, figuring out what their problems are, what their life experiences are. I see it positively because I believe that in life it's better to be an optimist because life is very often a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  But maybe I'm naive, you know, Stephen Hawking was really very afraid of contact. I think of it this way, I, you know, we are short lived. We just live a century or so at best. You know, let's just have the most fun. Let's learn the most. And, you know, by meeting neighbors, we can have a significant, you know, jump in our understanding of the cosmos that they would take us a lot of time to learn ourselves.

• 35:41Brian Keating?

  I want to talk to you about a conversation I had with Govert Schilling yesterday. You endorsed his most recent book, Target Earth. And I brought up the fact that there are three major impacts. Let's see if I can. That there were three major impacts that at least were related to the formation of this conversation taking place. I don't see why I'm not able to get this video up. Hold on a second here, Avi. So there's three impacts that at least in my mind have been responsible for the fact that we've, we've had the ability to have this conversation. The first was that there was this impact called

• 36:20Brian Keating?

  Eta, which took out the early solar systems, first initial constituents, shall we say? In other words, the, the pre-existing Earth here. I'll play the video one more time. You can't see it, but I'm showing a large object the size of, the size of Mars or something hitting the early Earth, right? So that was, that was collision number one that formed our moon, which is obviously quite critical to our existence in many ways. The next one was the late heavy bombardment.

• 37:38Brian Keating?

  El siguiente nivel de, ya sabes, no de consultas con aliens o algo así, pero

• 37:49Brian Keating?

  habría sido responsable de la próxima generación de vida en la Tierra, o

• 38:03Brian Keating?

  incluso para evitar la muerte y la destrucción.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Así que otra idea interesante que tuve durante la semana pasada es la siguiente. Sabes, estamos planeando, o al menos la comunidad astronómica en los Estados Unidos está planeando gastar más de diez billones de dólares en los próximos dos décadas en el Observatorio del Mundo Habituado para ver si hay vida en planetas lejos, ¿de acuerdo? Observando su composición atmosférica. Están muy lejos. Y si encontramos oxígeno, o metano, o otras moléculas, podríamos ser engañados por los procesos geológicos que producen estas moléculas. Pero aquí hay otro método para encontrar si hay vida alrededor de otras estrellas que pensé durante la semana pasada.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  El método es, si hay un objeto interestelar que viene cerca de la Tierra, por ejemplo, si viene detrás del movimiento de la Tierra alrededor del Sol, entonces la velocidad relativa de este objeto relativa a la Tierra no sería grande. La velocidad de escape en la ubicación de la Tierra es 42 kilómetros por segundo. Así que podrías tener un objeto interestelar que se mueve a 42 kilómetros por segundo en la ubicación de la Tierra, y la Tierra se mueve a 30. La diferencia es solo que...

• 39:24Speaker 02

  12 km/s, which is something that a rocket can easily accomplish. So we can, in principle, send a mission, just like the Osiris Rex mission that we sent to the asteroid Benu. And we can land on this interstellar object. Now, when we brought 120 grams of material from Benu to Earth, it was examined in laboratories. And just half a year ago, there were a number of papers, one of which was in Nature and the other one elsewhere, that they reported that more...

• 40:22Speaker 02

  That you can have these building blocks on a rock. And in addition, there is a Martian rock that was analyzed decades ago that didn't heat up by more than 40 degrees Celsius, and microbes could have survived. So here is an interesting possibility. Suppose there is an interstellar object that we land on. We bring some materials back to Earth, just like Osiris Rex did for the asteroid Benu. And then we examine those materials and find evidence for microbes or evidence for the building blocks of life. It would be really interesting to see if those are the same building blocks of life as we know it.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  This is a completely different approach to finding evidence for life, primitive life, near another star. Okay? So it's not based on remote observing. It's based on taking a sample from an interstellar rock. And that's in the case of, you know, primitive life, microbial life. And of course, if it's a technological gadget, then we can learn much more. So that's what I wanted to bring up in this context. But I also calculated in the same essay that I wrote about this idea on medium.com. I calculated what's the chance that Earth was hit by an interstellar object?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  You know, and I found that there should have been tens of impacts by objects the size of a Muamua or Buriso, but not of the size of 3I Atlas. And, you know, those could have brought life to Earth. Who knows? Maybe life was brought from another star. We just don't know that.

• 42:10Brian Keating?

  So in terms of, you know, what your colleagues and you will be looking for in the next few months, just before I take some questions from the audience. So reminder, can ask questions here on Twitter, X, whatever you call it as well. Down below, I'll take some of the good ones. And don't forget, you can win your own fragment of an interstellar meteorite. Maybe not interstellar, but it's an actual meteorite. If you go to briankeating.com/yt or X, you'll win it guaranteed to win one if you have a .edu email address. I love to give these out because it's a tangible piece of something older than the Earth and people don't realize that you can see these things, you can collect these things. I'm going to be interviewing Dante Loretta, who's the PI of the Benu mission return sample in just a few weeks. As I said, I interviewed Gover Schilling yesterday.

• 42:54Brian Keating?

  You gave a beautiful endorsement of his book. I was sharing with him some of those encounters. What's the latest on Omuamua? Is there anything that is, you know, been learned since the seven, eight, what is it? Eight years now since you just, it was discovered and then you put forth your astonishingly bold hypothesis of it being extraterrestrial? What's, what do we know now about Omuamua that we didn't last year when we talked the last time about this topic?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  We don't know much because it became very faint and we couldn't really observe it beyond the early 2018. So we just saw it for a few months and the astronomy community thought that it's a rock. First a comet and then when it was not a comet, an asteroid, but then it was pushed away from the sun. The bottom line is that too many questions that we have no answer to because there is no. way of getting more data on it. And as a result, you know, the current approach of the mainstream of comet experts was summarized in a paper written, published in December 2024 that argued, maybe it's a member of a class of dark comets, meaning comets that don't have a cometary tail

• 44:03Speaker 02

  that is visible, which is an oxymoron, because a comet is identified by the cometary tail. And there wasn't any around the Muammar. So actually, in that paper, there were a number of dark comets that were reported close to Earth. And with a colleague of mine, this is a paper in preparation. We're actually demonstrating that most of them are space missions by the Soviets and the Americans over the past 50 years. Most of them are debris, space trash that was left around. And you can call them dark comets, but they are not comets.

• 44:38Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 44:40Brian Keating?

  So we have some questions from the audience, most brilliant in the known universe. Don't forget to subscribe. You would be surprised, Avi, only like 30% of the people that are addicted to the show actually click that little button. And, you know, doctors say, be like Avi, exercise your digits, push that thumbs up button too. Okay, Avi, Bob Gray is asking, could we land on Atlas? Could we land on 3I Atlas? Or is it moving too fast?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it moves, it will move at perihelion closest to the sun at about 98 kilometers per second in the opposite direction relative to Earth. And there is no way that we can reach it with chemical rockets. In fact, we could have had a chance to intercept it if we would have detected it at least a year earlier. And perhaps if it's by design, if this orbit was selected, it was selected such that the object would move very little in the sky when it's far away and it's in the direction of the galactic center. So we wouldn't notice it. And indeed, we didn't notice it. With the Rubin Observatory, we can do better and perhaps detect many more interstellar objects.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  But my point is that right now, we detected it so late that there is no way with chemical rockets to even intercept it. You know, we include some plots in our paper that you can find in my Medium essay. And you will see from these plots that we lost the opportunity. If we were to detect it a year earlier, we could have intercepted it.

• 46:10Brian Keating?

  Okay. So Ammo CatDog, which is a name I almost chose for my newly acquired cat slash dog, asks, "Is it possible to view it through an amateur-sized telescope?" I mean, the Atlas telescope's only a half-meter, right? So there are a lot of amateurs I know that have half-meter bigger telescopes even. We're building one here in San Diego, actually, to do polarization of asteroids. But tell me, obviously, yeah, could we see it?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  The answer is definitely yes, especially if it's a comet. Because if it's a comet, as it gets closer to the sun, it may start to get activated. There will be more heat deposited on its surface, and you will start to see those plumes of gas and dust coming off it.

• 46:56Speaker 00

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• 47:25Speaker 02

  And then it will reflect more sunlight. So definitely watch out. And the coming months are the most exciting. We could see it from Earth until October 1st. Okay, so the coming months are interesting. It will get closer to the sun. And then we won't be able to see it during the month of October. That's when it's most, when it's the brightest. But as I mentioned before, it just happens to be blocked by, I mean, there is an eclipse of this object by the sun. That's an unusual solar eclipse, an eclipse by the sun of an object behind it, instead of what we are used to. We are used to eclipse in the other way. So this object will be eclipsed until the end of October, but then in November you

• 48:09Speaker 02

  can see it again. And in December, the earth comes back to the other side of the sun and it will get to the closest distance to this object, if it's a rock or a comet, you know, so that it doesn't change course. Of course, the reason I said you should take a vacation before October 2009 is if it happens not to be a comet. So if we don't see a cometary tail, that would be really intriguing. Irrespective of the trajectory, just the fact that it's a 20-kilometer object, you know, it cannot be, there is not enough mass in rocks in interstellar space to give you a 20-kilometer object every decade.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  And, and, and what I'm saying is by orders of magnitude, I'm not talking about the factor of two, orders of magnitude, several orders of magnitude off, the, the numbers just don't match. So if it's not a comet, it's really strange and we should be worried about being, it being technological.

• 49:09Brian Keating?

  Okay, so the next question was the Amumuwa stuff from SnackEntity, who asks, let me add that up back there. SnackEntity says, "If the stuff about Amumuwa is still scientifically legitimate, what do you, Avi, think about the UFO activity and the recent, you know, claims from even the Pentagon that some of it at least was an intentional psychological operation meant to haze our soldiers, which is reprehensible? But does this, did the recent disclosure, you know, kind of nothing burger in some sense, did that cause you more or less belief in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence or just cast doubts about the stupidity of natural intelligence?"

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Well, the point is, I don't rely on people. Uh, I, I want to rely on data. And that's why I established the Galileo Project. We have three observatories. One in, uh, in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, and a third one that we are now assembling in Nevada. And we will collect data about these UAPs and be able to tell if all of them, millions of them every year that we will monitor, we will have the largest dataset ever collected in the coming year. We will be able to tell you whether one in a million

• 50:25Speaker 02

  seems not to be human-made. If all of them are human-made, so be it. I will not feel as if I wasted my time because whatever we learn can be useful for the Department of Defense. They cannot identify all the objects. That's a national security concern. And my point is the, uh, uh, machine learning software that we develop, the assembly of sensors that we put on our observatories. I will be delighted to give it to the Department of Defense for them to improve, uh, our safety. You know, national security, uh, needs to be informed about, um, you know, uh, any objects, uh, that were produced by adversarial nations. And so I would not feel that the time was spent,

• 51:10Speaker 02

  it was wasted because they can use it. But on, um, May 1st, 2025, just a few months ago, I actually gave, um, I, I attended the briefing in the US Congress. And I spoke for 20 minutes saying, "Look, this is an issue of importance for national security. But if we do find, uh, that one of these millions of objects is extraterrestrial in origin, that would be the biggest discovery in science." So it's just the icing on the cake. And it's clear to me that this should be done by scientists. Uh, so people say, "Well, the Department of Defense invested billions of dollars in sensors." My point is, it's not about the sensors. It's the question of how you analyze the data.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  You know, we all know that you really need the best minds to work on a problem in order to solve it. It's not the hardware that is doing the analysis. It's the people who apply AI software. And, uh, you know, the best example is the Manhattan Project that recruited. The most talented physicists. And I said to the congresspeople that were there. I said, look, if you think that it's a national priority, I recommend investing a billion dollars in figuring out the nature of unidentified anomalous phenomena. That's what I said on May 1st in US Congress. And I said, look, that would serve well the Department of Defense because you will be able to attract the best minds in physics to do the job over a period of a few years.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  And just like the Manhattan Project, if you think it's a national priority, we should do it.

• 52:42Brian Keating?

  So Avi, if you were the kind of monarch Malek for a day and you had access and control over every major observatory in space on Earth, landers, probes, etc., but you only have a day and you could coordinate one day's worth of all the astronomical glass on Earth in space and elsewhere perhaps, what would you do? Military, civilian? What would you do? What would be your top priority? And how would you deploy this vast arsenal of telescopic technology?

• 53:15Speaker 02

  It would be the same as my priority right now. Searching for objects near Earth or within the solar system that are moving in ways that appear to be anomalous. These are outliers that do not look like rocks. You know what I discovered just a few months ago? That there is a whole class of objects that is labeled as empty trash bag objects. Apparently, you know, some amateur astronomers see objects that are moving in zigzag motions. They think it must be broken pieces of satellites that are being pushed by reflecting sunlight. So they call them empty trash bag objects. And they just ignore them. It's not reported. You can't find the data.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Why? Because maybe it's important for national security. So when people say there are no anomalies, it's because they are brushed under the carpet, either because they might be of national security relevance. So the government keeps them secret. Or astronomers, just anything that doesn't behave the way they expect, they ignore. What did they do about Omuamua? They said, "Well, it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before." Now, some say it's a dark comet. Just by assigning the word "comet" to it, even though there is no evidence that it was a comet, you say, "I can brush it under the carpet of traditional thinking." That's the wrong approach. That's actually anti-science, the way I see it. Because as a scientist, you should be curious.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Science is the privilege of maintaining our childhood curiosity. So when there are things we don't know, we should admit it. We don't know what the dark matter is. We don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what some of these objects that show non-gravitational acceleration, like Omuamua, were. We should admit it. We don't know. And what does it mean? It means we should collect more data on objects like it, so that we can figure them out. That's the approach of science. It's not the ridicule, the pushback against alternative explanations. We should have the technological option on the table, that we are not alone, that there are things like us that existed for billions of years. Why should we have that on the table? Because we exist. And we know that, you know, there are billions of Earth-Sun analogues

• 55:30Speaker 02

  in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and most of the stars from billions of years before the sun. So how dare we be so presumptuous to think that we are unique and special? You know, my daughters, when they were young, they thought that they are unique and special because they were at home. We paid attention to them. They saw other houses in our street, but they never imagined that there are children just like them in those houses. And they had a psychological shock on the first day in the kindergarten. And my point is, we see other houses. We see Earth-Sun analogues. And the mainstream of astronomy, believe it or not, claims that they have no residence. These are empty houses. And it's an extraordinary claim to imagine that there are neighbors.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  And I say, "No, it's actually an ordinary claim." And let's just find, let's collect evidence. Let's put a billion dollars, or 10 billion dollars, towards figuring out whether these houses have residence.

• 56:26Brian Keating?

  So I can't resist but to ask you questions that are not related to extraterrestrial intelligence. If you'll indulge me, Avi, how often, you know, we only get to talk every so often. But recently I had on the former spokesperson of the DESI experiment, Kyle Dawson, who's a professor at University of Utah. And as you know, there was recently a claim that they have 4.2 sigma evidence that excludes a cosmological constant. So what does this mean? How did you react to this information? Tell me what papers you've already written about it. Because you have just the most prolific of any living scientists that I get to talk to, you have the honor of talking to. But, you know, what does this do for our buddy old Einstein over there? What is he, is he thrown out the window or not? And then we'll get into AI.

• 57:11Brian Keating?

  I still want questions from the audience. Avi is going to be generous a few more minutes. So put in some more questions in the chat. And Avi, take it away. What is this new result on dark energy?

• 57:20Speaker 02

  So the real, the real problem with the DESI report was not so much that the dark energy has an evolving equation of state. You know, the cosmological constant has had a simple equation of state where the pressure equals minus the mass density. However, the DESI results suggest that the proportionality constant is actually smaller than minus one. Okay, now this is called phantom in particle physics, phantom behavior. It violates the null energy condition. It's a huge problem because if you have a proportionality constant less than minus one, you can potentially build a time machine.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  You can produce negative masses. It intro, I had a conversation with Juan Maldacena just last month at a conference. And it's just untenable for all we know about the quantum field theory, cosmology and so forth. So having a proportionality constant less than minus one is really a serious issue in physics. And it's sort of like imagining that you have negative masses, which we cannot imagine. So I would suggest a different solution. In fact, I wrote a scientific paper that suggested a different solution. Instead of-

• 58:42Brian Keating?

  I knew it.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, instead of and you know that paper, we are now writing the follow-up paper to that as we speak, in fact, in this week, it should be completed. And that is done with Shingang Cheng. We wrote a paper suggesting that the problem is not with the dark energy, it's with the dark matter. So if you allow the equation of state of the dark matter to evolve instead of the dark energy, then you could get the same result regarding the DESI data. And we showed how it's possible and we are now even examining the possibility that it will resolve the Hubble tension, which is a completely different problem.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  But my issue with the DESI results is if this proportionality constant called W being less than minus one, because it creates huge problems for fundamental physics. And you know, one thing, you know, as a theoretical astrophysicist, one thing you should always keep in mind is, you know, just minimize the casualties to traditional physics. You can't say, oh, we break everything, this is the result from the X. You have to think about a way of accommodating the result with a more conventional explanation.

• 1:00:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah. I talked to Lawrence Krauss recently about his new book, The War on Science, and you'll be happy to know that Harvard plays a big role in that book. I won't spoil it, it comes out in two weeks. But there's considerable doubt on his part on these four-point, whatever sigma claims. And he pointed out, I was part of an event, perhaps is one way to call it, as were you, that was five sigma announced there at lovable Harvard University CFA when you were in direct.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  The issue is really systematics. I mean, often people call the statistical errors, but... We might be misinterpreting the data. For example, they are mixing different data sets, including supernovae, which might not be as reliable because we don't understand the physics of supernovae as standard candles. By the way, Adam Riess told me privately that the reason he, you know, went in the direction of using supernovae, type 1A supernovae, as a cosmological ladder, as distance indicators, is because he was a student in my class when I came to Harvard, the first class on cosmology. And I basically explained to the class that we can learn about cosmological parameters by measuring distances.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  And he, you know, realized that's a great thing for him to pursue for his PhD. And later on, postdoc, and he got the Nobel Prize for it. So he thanked me for mentioning that in my class.

• 1:01:28Brian Keating?

  And you don't think he'll have to give it back, right? He won't have to give back his Nobel Prize, I hope.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  No, no, no. He discovered it. I didn't discover it. I just suggested.

• 1:01:36Brian Keating?

  I mean, he won't have to give it back if dark energy turns out to be not a cosmological constant.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  No, he could get, if the Hubble tension pans out, he could get a second Nobel Prize, you know?

• 1:01:47Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Okay. First Cause, First Cause asks you, could an intelligent species accumulate so much data, information, that it creates a gravitational black hole? Basically, talk about the notion, both of which were coined by the same guy, John Archibald Wheeler. Did you know Wheeler when you were at Princeton? Or was he?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I met him on occasion, but I was not close to him. I didn't collaborate with him.

• 1:02:13Brian Keating?

  I'm sure. Yeah, so he talked about information, it from bit, the creation of the universe, the black hole. He coined the term, or was responsible for coining the term. You're the director, the former director of Black Hole Initiative. Tell us about that. Could?

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Right, so a black hole has a characteristic size. It's like a prison from which you cannot escape. Another analogy, it's like Las Vegas. Whatever happens in it stays in it, okay? And so the size of a black hole was already figured out by Carl Schwarzschild. The 1916, shortly after, a few months after Einstein came up with his equations. And he sent a postcard to Einstein from the front of the battlefield during the First World War. And Einstein published it, and then he died a few months later. But the point is, there is this Schwarzschild radius of the event horizon of a black hole, which you can derive actually by saying, you know, how do you know if a rocket escapes from Earth? I got this question this morning, actually.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  And I explained, a rocket escapes from Earth if its kinetic energy exceeds the gravitational potential energy. So the kinetic energy is one, per unit mass is one half the velocity squared. The potential energy is Newton's constant G times the mass of the Earth divided by the radius of the Earth, GM over R. And if half V squared is bigger than GM over R, the rocket escapes. Now imagine equating V to the speed of light. That's the maximum speed that you can have. That means that if the object, if you have a point mass, there is a radius inside of which the escape velocity would be bigger than the speed of light.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Because GM over R would exceed one half C squared. That's exactly the Schwarzschild radius, okay? So inside the Schwarzschild radius, even photons, particles of light, cannot escape. Why is that important? The Schwarzschild radius is proportional to the mass of the black, of the point mass in the middle, the black hole. So you can ask, what is, how much do I need to pack that mass? You know, what kind of density do I need to reach before the black hole would form? I need to bring all this mass within the Schwarzschild radius. So the mass density that I need to accomplish is the mass of the object divided by the volume associated with Schwarzschild radius, which is 4 pi over 3.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  It's the volume of a sphere, 4 pi over 3 times the Schwarzschild radius cubed. And the Schwarzschild radius is proportional to mass, okay? So the mass over the mass cubed is one over mass squared. So small black holes require huge density to make them. If you ask, uh, what is, uh, possible with stars? We can reach densities comparable to nuclear densities, you know, in a neutron star. And if you just increase the mass of a neutron star, eventually it will collapse to a black hole. These are, uh, the kind of black holes we find with the LIGO experiment. Black holes that have a mass bigger than that of the sun. Because only then, you know, somewhere between a few times the mass of the sun,

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  up to hundreds of times the mass of the sun. There was just a recent discovery of a black hole with a few hundred solar masses

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  by the LIGO collaboration. So, only there, you know, you can pack this mass within the Schwarzschild radius by the collapse of the core of a star. But if you go to a mass less than the mass of the sun, you need to reach densities that exceed nuclear densities. We don't know how to do that. So, in terms of engineering, if you wanted to make a black hole up to, you know, uh, with, with the kind of density of water, let's say. Suppose you wanted to bring water, uh, into a small enough region. How big is that region? Uh, it turns out that this would be a way of making a black hole that is roughly a hundred million times the mass of the sun. If you bring it to within the orbit of Ju...

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  If you fill the orbit of Jupiter with water, that would be a huge swimming pool. Uh, then you get a, a black hole of a hundred million times the mass of the sun.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  The problem is, there is not enough water in the Milky Way galaxy to do that. Uh, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is, is four million ma... uh, times the mass of the sun. So you really need a giant black hole if you want to lower the density to acceptable values, like the density of water. If you want to go to nuclear density, then you can make a solar mass black hole. You can bring the mass down from... A hundred million to one solar, to a few solar masses. If you want to reach even smaller black holes, you must establish densities that exceed nuclear densities. We don't know how to do that in the laboratory. It's not clear you can do that. If we could have done that, we would have been able to make tiny black holes. You see, the problem is if you want to make a black hole of a few solar masses,

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  you need a lot of material. You need to bring huge amount of mass into that volume. And that's difficult to do engineering wise. On the other hand, if you want to make a reasonable mass black hole, let's say the mass of an asteroid, then it turns out that a black hole, the mass of an asteroid, like a 3I atlas, would need to have a size roughly the size of an atom. The Schwarzschild radius, the size of an atom. Can you believe that? It's a tiny, you know, so such a black hole would fit inside a hydrogen atom.

• 1:08:17Brian Keating?

  Hmm, wouldn't it evaporate incredibly? Wouldn't it evaporate very quickly due to Hawking radiation?

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  No, so Hawking radiation starts being effective when the mass is equivalent to a mass of an asteroid that is a few hundred meters in radius. So less than a kilometer, less than 3I atlas. That's where Hawking evaporation starts being important on the time scale of the age of the universe. But black holes more massive than that could survive for the duration, you know, for the age of the universe. And it's possible that dark matter is made of them. We don't have a way of ruling out asteroid mass black holes that have the masses somewhere around an asteroid between a diameter of 10 kilometers up to the mass of the moon.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  That's a range of masses for which the dark matter can be made of primordial black holes that were made in the Big Bang. The reason we can make them early on in the universe is because the universe itself had these huge densities. So you could have in principle formed such black holes early on.

• 1:09:25Brian Keating?

  I want to ask you just a couple more questions before I let you go. I know it's getting late over there. And I want to thank you for your time. There's evidence that suggests, at least from my guest, David Wiltshire, that perhaps we live in a non-representative part of the universe. Or maybe it is representative, that we're here, we're in a void, that we perhaps experience time differently. And that plays a trick in his time-scape model, implying that we actually are not experiencing an accelerating expansion at all. Forget about a cosmological constant. What do you make of his theory? I mean, a lot of people don't agree with him, think it's, you know, ulterior, you know, kind of ulterior, alternate explanation. What do you make of the time-scape model?

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so as a theory, it's perfectly fine. And in fact, I remember discussing it decades ago. The problem with this theory is that we observe, we map the distribution of galaxies that trace the matter in the universe, and we don't see a big enough void to account for the cosmological discrepancies we have. So in order for this to be effective, it needs to be a substantial fraction of the size of the cosmic horizon. Let's say a third of it, a tenth of it. We just don't see a deficit in the distribution of galaxies, in shells, spherical shells surrounding us. We could have seen it, and then it would have explained, perhaps, the anomalies that we see.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  But we just don't see it in DESI, for example. You can look at the distribution of galaxies. It looks pretty uniform on very large scales, larger than hundreds of millions of light-years.

• 1:11:01Brian Keating?

  Another topic I've been spending some time on, I just don't have enough time to work out on myself, but I figure you probably wrote a paper about it, so I don't need to. And that's that the CMB, a large fraction of the CMB, at least on Twitter, was claimed from a paper written by some astronomers and... And theoreticians in Europe and I believe that the CMB is actually not what we think it is, the thermal radiation left over from the heat that we call the cosmic microwave background entirely, that it's actually a large fraction at a minimum in their conservative model, 1.3% comes from early galaxies, the impossible early galaxies that led some people to say the big bang never happened, but now they're claiming that these galaxies that

• 1:11:44Brian Keating?

  Webb telescope observes are actually not just a foreground, but they're incredibly large contributors to the CMB's energy density. What do you make of it?

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  So the problem is that-

• 1:11:55Brian Keating?

  Am I going to be out of a job, Avi? I mean, should I just hang it up now?

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:11:59Brian Keating?

  Become a podcaster?

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  You don't have to worry about it. I mean, I will not necessarily tell you that AI will not replace you one day as a scientist, but as of now, your job, you have job security because the thing is that if you inject energy that comes from galaxies, it will not have the thermal spectrum, so-called Planck spectrum, that we measure for the cosmic microwave background. And the COBE satellite that first detected the anisotropies in the brightness of the microwave background, also detected or searched for distortion, spectral distortion in the cosmic microwave background, and the limits are at a level of one part in 100,000.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Okay, so we see a perfect Planck spectrum that is the most perfect black body spectrum that was ever detected in the cosmic microwave background. If that radiation obtained a significant contribution from early galaxies, it would not be a perfect black body because galaxies emit over a broad range of frequencies, but they don't emit at 2.7 degrees Kelvin.

• 1:13:10Brian Keating?

  Well, what they're saying, as I understand, I'd love to have the authors on, so if you're watching out there, please get in touch with me. I'd love to have you on the show. I have a response to them that I just, I just don't have time to release it. There's so much interesting, it's such a great time to be in science, right, Avi? I mean- We are so blessed, you and I, to do what we do, to get paid for, you know, I get paid a little bit less than you do, I'm sure, at Harvard over there. But, uh, but nevertheless, I always felt like it was cheating. It was like being paid to taste ice cream, which, which you no longer eat because you're so much more disciplined than me. But Avi, this is the greatest time to be alive, right? I mean, we have AI assistants, we have brilliant students, we have experiments, but it's also a dark time. I want to get into the darkness of the, of the, uh, your.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  By the way, just one, one other point that I wanted to mention with the spectral distortion, you have to account for the energy budget. There is not, just not enough energy density in the radiation coming from galaxies to distort them. If you look at the plot of the amount of energy per unit volume in the microbeacon, the amount of energy per unit volume emitted by galaxies, they make a very tiny contribution to the energy budget of the universe. Anyway, go ahead.

• 1:14:16Brian Keating?

  These guys are saying, you know, I think there's other reasons to be suspicious. They don't talk about the CMV polarization results. They don't talk about Doppler shifts. They don't talk about the acoustic peaks. They don't talk about Compton-Y, Sonjaev-Zaldivich, at least as I can understand it. I've reached out to Renan Barkana at Tel Aviv, or hopefully he'll get on, because they do talk about 21 centimeters, et cetera. But they claim that these early galaxies, when they thermalize, they produce my favorite substance.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  No, no, no. So in, in the 21 centimeter context, what Renan Barkana is working on, by the way, he was one of my mentees early on in his career. That's the radio background. So there, you want, for the 21 centimeter, you need to know how much radio background there is. And it's possible that in some frequencies, very low frequencies, you get dominant emission by galaxies. But that's not the microbeacon where most of the energy of the microbeacon is.

• 1:15:04Brian Keating?

  No, they're, they're claiming that these galaxies, if they form at, you know, a redshift of 12 to 15 in the web field, that they will then produce dust, you know, basically star formation, which will construct, you know, micrometeorites, dust, et cetera, pollute their local interstellar environments, make them very, so they'll emit at something like 30 Kelvin, you know, which is the temperature of dust in our galaxy, as you've taught me and other people have taught me.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Brian Keating?

  And then that gets redshifted by a factor of 10, because they're at redshift of 10. Yeah, I'm just waving hands here. I'm an experimentalist.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  I, I don't, there is not enough energy in stars, emitted by stars, to account for the microbeacon. That's my point. Even if you process all the energy that the stars of the early galaxies would give you, it would never reach the level of the energy density of the cosmic microbeacon. They should check these numbers.

• 1:15:52Brian Keating?

  Okay, great. Very quickly, someone's asking just a rapid update on the Galileo project. Maybe give a quick overview of what it is, because someone asked me in the comments on this one, which I can't remember. There's 2,000 people watching right now. But they did ask me, Avi, you know, couldn't you use magnetic sensors to see if this object, I mean, these meteorites?

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  In fact, yesterday, we had a paper on the archive, the Astrophysics Preprint Server. We had a paper yesterday that reports about our first implementation of a magnetic sensor. So just check it out. Search for my name, you'll find this paper from yesterday.

• 1:16:28Brian Keating?

  All right, that's Morgan Chati Byers. Okay. Avi, I mentioned that there are some dark, dark times ahead. We've, we've had a, this movie is really good. It keeps playing in the background, my, my, my crashing meteorite. We, we've, your colleague and my friend and past guest and upcoming guest, Steven Pinker, he'll be on the podcast in September for his new book, which I'm excited to bring to all of you out there. He mentioned in a op ed in the New York Times that I got to speak about with Peter Salovey, who was the past president of Yale University. We got to talk about it, and it was called Harvard Derangement Syndrome. And that Trump, and contrast to Trump Derangement Syndrome, which I think

• 1:17:13Brian Keating?

  your friend and colleague Lawrence Tribe might have suffered from at one point or another, but he was also on the podcast many years ago. Hope to get him back, thanks to you, as many guests do come on. George Church was just on, and his episode will be out soon. Thanks to you. David Reich is coming on. Thanks to George Church, and many other great guests. So, Avi, is it a dark time for science? Have you been through this before? Is this unique? Harvard's getting in the bullseye for, you know, partially justifiable reasons, I have to say, as a Jew who, who did get, you know, kind of harassed and forbidden from certain parts of my campus. You had it much worse. Your campus had it much worse. I don't know about you personally. But talk about the Trump sanctions. Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  No, I, I think this is a self inflicted wound. I think Harvard, in a way, brought

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

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• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  ...it on itself because it adopted a political agenda that is very much to the progressive left. And it didn't need to do that. Scholarship should be apolitical, especially when dealing with science. We shouldn't get into a political agenda. And the issue is, and I said that to the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber, when I met with him after October 7th, to tell him what I think, how Harvard should correct course. This was one of the points I made, that we should focus on scholarship. And Harvard had additional, an additional agenda items. And so, just like many other colleges and universities,

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  you know, it was not focused on what it's supposed to do, which is excellence, research, scholarship. Of course, in political science, you can express opinion. You can always express opinions, but it should not be tilted to one side of the political spectrum. And, I mean, obviously, this was going on for a long while. And the October 7th events sort of put it in bright light. And, and so what happens now is a consequence of that and the elections, consequence of the election. There is a second aspect to it, which is...

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  That people associate these political motives with the way scientific organizations are being managed. Okay, and so as a result, science suffers because it's considered as occupation of the elite. And the COVID-19 pandemic did not demonstrate that the experts really knew what they were advising necessarily medically speaking. And moreover, it looks like these, you know, academic environments are dominated by a particular side of the political spectrum. And science suffers from that. And again, I say, science should not be political. Science should appeal to all sides of the political spectrum.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  We should have right

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  wing scientists, we should have left wing scientists, they should work together. Because science is about collecting evidence, figuring out what the physical reality is all about. And it has nothing to do with politics. And therefore, you know, we should populate our ranks with all stripes of the political spectrum. I think, you know, all, you can have arbitrary political opinion and be an excellent scientist, which is not necessarily the view that, you know, you would get from people that dominated the culture that we had over the past recent decade. They would say, they would demean the other side. And that is a self-inflicted wound.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  And so I, I think that there is a path forward, which is to focus on scholarship, to promote excellence in science, to bring, by the way, one, I actually congratulated the National Science Foundation for 75 years anniversary since its establishment. And I think that in addition to federal funds. It's possible nowadays, something that was not possible 75 years ago, which is to establish a national fund for fundamental science, supported by corporations or wealthy individuals that could have some rights as to the discoveries made, the benefits to, you know, technologies that are made out of science.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  The way that Bell Labs, you know, discovered many Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries over the 50 years that it operated. And it was part of a corporation, Bell Labs. So I suggest, since there are so many wealthy individuals, multi-billionaires, let's tap them by addressing exciting questions that are of interest to the public. The public will support science if we address the questions that are of interest to the public and not shy away from the public into the ivory towers that we have right now. So I think there is a good path forward, which involves engaging with the public, engaging with the billionaires that could be excited about science,

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  establishing, bringing funds into science that are not only from taxpayers through the government. That's, for example, the way I pursue my science most. All of my funding is coming from donations, from individuals. And I think that can be generalized, given the climate we have now. It wasn't the case 75 years ago. It was the technology boom associated with the Internet that allows, and I know many of these, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that got extremely wealthy, that would be really enthusiastic if we pursue the kind of questions the public cares about.

• 1:23:29Brian Keating?

  Very good, very good. Okay, last question from the audience, and then we'll wrap up. Okay, Stephen Daedalus asks, Professor Lub, regarding possible non-human intelligence, what's more likely to happen first, according to you? Direct contact with mankind? Or definitive evidence brought indirectly by scientists like you on the Galileo Project?

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  I think that interstellar travel takes a long time at the kind of speeds that we can envision, given our technologies, and therefore it will not be biological creatures that would visit us. Most likely, it will be technological gadgets powered by artificial intelligence. We are entering that age. We haven't used artificial intelligence in space as of yet, but it will definitely be used in the future. We will have robots in space that think for themselves, just instead of sending astronauts. These gadgets will be able to decide without asking for permission from engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  That is the way I see space exploration in the future with AI, and I think other civilizations might have done that already. And so if we meet and encounter intelligence from outer space, it will be artificial intelligence. And, you know, our AI systems can help us figure out what their AI systems are doing, because they might feel some kinship to those foreign AI systems. But it should be interesting for us to learn what other accomplished in our cosmic neighborhood, because we might not be at the top of the food chain, especially now, if you look at world politics, we are probably, you know, not the envy of our neighborhood.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  There must be more intelligent civilizations out there. And the way I think of it is that natural selection that we realized operates on Earth will also potentially apply to interstellar space. And what that means is, I'm closing here what we started from. It means that we should monitor interstellar objects. And if 3I Atlas happens to be from a predator civilization, we should figure this out as soon as possible.

• 1:25:51Brian Keating?

  Well, we'll leave it on that cliffhanger. We won't tell you what we found inside of the alien bodies on the autopsy. Everybody, check out the article in Medium. Check out the technical article. You guys are some of the most brilliant minds in the known multiverse. And I think it's a it's a treat to get guests like Avi on the podcast. And like I said, we have many great guests coming up. George Church, we have Steven Pinker, just to name the Harvard ones, David Reich, and just those those three from Harvard talking about extraterrestrial life, but also terrestrial life. How did it get here? We have an interview with Michael Levin, who is a crosstown neighbor of Avi's at Tufts University, not far away. And this summer, we're going to have just a cavalcade. We have Stephen Wolfram coming

• 1:26:33Brian Keating?

  back on, Sabina Hossenfelder, many, many other great guests. So I do wish you a great summer until we see each other again, Avi. We share extraterrestrial material and then affection. So go to my website.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  And keep looking up. Don't look down.

• 1:26:47Brian Keating?

  Yeah, don't look down. Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  All the amateurs. Look up at 3I Atlas. We want to figure out what it is.

• 1:26:53Brian Keating?

  It's coming soon. So maybe we'll do a live stream when that comes around in October, right?

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'll be fun.

• 1:26:59Brian Keating?

  Thank you, everybody. Be well. Thank you, Avi.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Bye bye.

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