Did We Find Alien Technology? Avi Loeb Explains - #545

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 Brian Keating sits down with the ever-curious Avi Loeb for a mind-bending exploration into some of science's greatest mysteries and controversies. The conversation spans everything from the evolving understanding of comets and meteors—highlighting the false starts and surprising twists in scientific history—to the tantalizing possibilities of extraterrestrial life and the intrigue surrounding potential government disclosure. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Aliens.gov: Speculation and Mystery 06:02 Satellite Imaging Unveils Unusual Objects 15:37 Alien Claims or Smokescreen? 26:16 Interstellar Object Anomalies Explained 31:46 Life Clues on Icy Object? 39:08 Academic Harassment by Editors 47:05 Finding More Interstellar Objects 54:05 Life on Mars: Earth Origin? 59:15 Life Transfer: Natural or Directed? 01:08:32 Dwarf Stars and Habitability 01:16:06 AI: Alien Intelligence's Impact 01:23:37 Technosignatures and Extraterrestrial Communication 01:29:22 Are We Ready for Answers? 01:41:38 CMB Analysis: No AI Allowed 01:44:46 Open Science via Simons Observatory - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #AviLoeb #AlienTechnology #UFO #ExtraterrestrialLife #SETI #Astrophysics #SpaceDiscovery #UAP #Interstellar #ScienceExplained 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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• 0:59Brian Keating?

  What do you make of the history of all this? That we came to learn so late that comets were not, like meteors, that comets were not in our atmosphere, they were something from far beyond? What do you make of the great scientists that can be right about some things and spectacularly wrong about other things?

• 1:18Speaker 03

  Well, you know, our imagination allows us to think about many possibilities, and all of them except one applies to the physical reality we all share. And very often, the truth is something we resent because a virtual reality makes us happier. And that's why a lot of people prefer to take recreational drugs. I know that now the metaverse is not a business anymore, even though originally Mark Zuckerberg assumed that people would love to live in the metaverse by putting goggles on their head. The point is physics is a way of us narrowing down possibilities using experimental data evidence. And we learn about the laws of physics.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  And if something is relatively low in the atmosphere, there is friction on air. And it wouldn't survive in that orbit. In fact, satellites do go down if they are sufficiently low in the atmosphere. And you know, if there was a satellite that was launched by the ancient Romans at around the 1,200 kilometers, we would see a Roman satellite coming down. We haven't seen that. I mean, the only thing we find from the Roman Empire are archaeological relics and nothing in the atmosphere, nothing like satellites. So they didn't have advanced technologies. And of course, the farther you go back in time,

• 2:47Speaker 03

  you know, the higher the object needs to be in order not to come down

• 2:54Speaker 03

  as a result of friction with air. And what we see about comets is that they actually move way far from Earth. We can figure out the distance because we can follow their trajectory and they are influenced by gravity. And then their distances are comparable to the Earth-Sun separation when we see them. They are basically icebergs that originate from the outskirts of the solar system where water ice was condensing around the rocky materials. So they're sort of like dirty ice balls. And Fred Whipple, Harvard astronomer, was the first to recognize that nature of comets by going through Harvard Square during a winter day.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  And as you may imagine, it was snowing and the kids were throwing ice balls. And he just thought, well, maybe comets are made of the same thing, dirty ice balls. That's what his model was all about. And indeed, that's what we now understand as comets being. They are sort of a mixture of ice, water ice and rock. And from the early formation of the solar system, these are the relics that are far out. And of course, closer to the sun, You end up with just rocks that may have lost their eyes. These are asteroids. And so we find two types of objects quite prominent in the solar system.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Either asteroids, bare rocks, and comets that are icebergs. And those comets are losing their water as a result of warming, getting warmed up by the sunlight as they come close to the sun. And that results in a cloud of dust and gas surrounding them. And the dust and gas are pushed away from the sun. The dust by the solar radiation and the gas by the solar wind. And as a result, you end up with a cometary tail that is the characteristic feature of comets.

• 4:56Brian Keating?

  So, speaking of things that aren't in our atmosphere, recently posted on your Medium, abi-lobe-medium.com, what will be the content of the website, aliens.gov? So, it made me, I wasn't aware they were going to actually launch this website. But I went to the website, Abi, and it's really a thing of beauty. There's, it says, "This site can't be released." So I'm sure that's going to put to rest all the notions that the government is, you know, concealing information about aliens. What do you make of this? Some say, you know, cynically, that the, that the attempt to disclose or announce and keep teasing and hinting and disclosure is just a giant distraction.

• 5:40Brian Keating?

  They always accuse Trump distracting from the Epstein files. What do you make of all this, Abi? And what do you make of the content, of the future content of aliens.gov? Do you think it was a good choice of names, by the way?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Well, I think the Pentagon is thinking about releasing some information. And the Secretary of War, Pete Hexeth, shortly after President Trump announced, gave a directive to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to release any information related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, extraterrestrial life.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Or anything to do with these interesting subjects. The Pentagon is planning to do that and it's not surprising that the White House secured these domains. Now, they don't have websites associated with them because they just secured the domains in the last few days. And the question is, what kind of content will be there? And you can think of either an optimistic best-case scenario or a pessimistic worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is that we will get access to imagery with high resolution. For example, the US government satellites that are routinely monitoring the Earth,

• 6:54Speaker 03

  they may have noticed objects moving in ways that our best technologies cannot reproduce. That's quite possible because when you look at Earth from a satellite, you know the distance, right? Because the satellite is moving and the object is moving, you can figure out the velocities and accelerations of objects that are looked at. And in fact, the resolution can be better than 10 centimeters. I mean, you can resolve objects quite well with present-day cameras on satellites. So if we had a high-resolution image of an unusual object in the way it looks, it doesn't look like human-made drones, balloons, airplanes, or anything else.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  And it also moves in ways that exceed the performance envelope of human-made technologies. That would be quite intriguing. And then the question is, what is it? What kind of technologies are being employed? So that's the kind of imagery of videos that could be extremely revealing, that we are dealing with something else and we should figure it out. And obviously, I would be extremely excited if that happens and be happy to help the US government figure things out. The reason they're speaking about this as related to aliens or extraterrestrial technologies is probably because they ruled out the possibility that it relates to adversarial nations. So that's the optimistic scenario, if they have access to that data. We don't know.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  There could also be some materials that they retrieved. I don't know. If they have it or they delivered it to corporations and so forth. But one thing is clear that the government is not a scientific organization and their day job is national security. So they put this data aside if it's not related to adversarial nations. And also, they don't want the US Congress to look over the shoulder and say, you're not performing your job. You're not, we are putting a trillion dollars, you know, into the defense budget for 2026 and you're still unable to figure out what things are. So to avoid this scrutiny, they might classify and not even let others know about it.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  And perhaps this, this release would give us some information. Another possibility, which is the worst case scenario, is that we'll see some documents that are redacted. We know the feeling already from the Epstein files and, and that, you know, it will be full of inconclusive statements that we can't make much of without much scientific quality data. And that will only fuel conspiracy theories. And I fear that we, you know, we might be in that situation. We just don't know. So let's wait and see what is the content that is provided on this website.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  I'm sure there will be something because both President Trump and the Secretary of War, Pete Exeth, said that there are, that this will happen. And it may happen relatively soon or, or it may take more time. That depends on the level of classification of the information that they're planning to release. And, you know, the question is, is there, is there something that we should think about? And, and I don't know the answer to that because I never signed a nondisclosure agreement. And, and without evidence, without data, you know, I really am very reluctant to believe storytelling. Yeah. We know about a lot of people who tell stories that are not substantiated.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  We know about eyewitness testimonies that put. People on death row and then DNA tests exonerate them. So the way science makes progress in our knowledge is not based on what people say, but based on the evidence collected by instruments that have no wishful thinking. You know, that's the key here.

• 10:50Brian Keating?

  Right, that's what Galileo, another Galileo quote, that our job as scientists is to measure what's measurable and then make measurable what is not yet so. And from our conversations in the past, I know that you guys have an unlock sequence, a code, you know, kind of a rubric that you'll go through if there's an evidentiary, you know, claim made. What is the minimum standard, you know, in terms of evidence that the government should use before it posts something, you know, on aliens.gov or has some press conference or something like that? If you're advising them, what's the rubric? Go through the unlock codes.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  It must be, if you want to claim that it's not human made, it must be clear, there must be clear evidence for the either velocity acceleration of the object exceeding anything that humans can produce, or that the imagery of the objects appear to indicate something very different than what we are used to from all the technologies that we possess. And for example, the Galileo project that I'm leading built three observatories over the past four years, and the most sophisticated one is in Nevada. We have, it has three units and as of last month, we used three units to triangulate and figure out distances to objects in the sky.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  So that is key, knowing the distance is key. And so far, whatever imagery we have seen in congressional testimonies had no distance measure. I mean, we could see an object moving, but you don't know if it's moving fast because it's close to the camera or because the camera is moving relative to the object. So distance is key and in any such data released by government, I would like to know the distance so I can calculate the velocity based on the angular velocity. And then the acceleration and so forth. And also, if they have any material evidence,

• 12:45Speaker 03

  that would be amazing. And, you know, if people might say, well, if the data was collected by classified sensors, or the data is unclear, maybe we shouldn't release it, it should be classified. But my point is, if there is data from decades ago, let's say fifty years ago, it's completely irrelevant to present day battlefields as to what technologies humans were using back then. So if there was anything unusual back then, we should be able to look at it. And, you know, it's all about the evidence. And let's put it out and figure out what it means in the standard scientific way. And if there is any doubt about whether

• 13:28Speaker 03

  we should release it or not, I'm happy to help government figure it out. You see, I'm interested in knowing the answer. You can think of me as a kid. And if there is something that is truly out from out of this earth, you know, I don't really care what the Nobel Committee would think about it, if they pay attention to it or not, if they invite me for a cocktail party in Stockholm, I would really not spend time on it, because this would be far more exciting, you know, for us to figure out if we have a neighbor, and if so, what can we learn from our neighbor?

• 14:06Speaker 03

  We can't hear you, Brian.

• 14:08Brian Keating?

  Sorry. A layperson might want to know, you know, what, what do we do next? Why, why is this so controversial? Why do we keep getting teased? You know, disclosures coming, there's movies about disclosure, and there's bombshell revelations. And then, I mean, it's, it's, imagine if you had a press conference, you know, say it was about discovery of inflationary gravitational waves at the Center for Astrophysics, you know, exactly twelve years ago this week. Yesterday, St. Patrick's Day, two days ago. Imagine, you know, and you're a part of it. You're the director of the CFA at the time. And then like nothing, we're going to make an announcement, but then we never make the announcement. Okay, we made the announcement. We had to retract basically the claim, as you know, and as I've written about.

• 14:51Brian Keating?

  But the announcement of the announcement reminds me of my friend, you know, who's a bachelor at my age. He's in his 50s and he's engaged to be engaged to be engaged, you know, it's, it's, what is the benefit? I mean, doesn't it undermine, even if it is a distraction and a psy-op, as they say from the Epstein files, which I'm in, by the way, you know, because Epstein sponsored a conference at UC San Diego, that I was a speaker at. I'm not, he didn't know me or mention me or anything like that. But, but it shows you the influence of big money. And let's say it was a distraction in the government and Trump wants to, Hegseth, whatever, whoever it is. Why would they keep failing to deliver anything? Right. So why?

• 15:31Speaker 00

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• 16:02Speaker 03

  One motivation could be that the US develops a very advanced technologies and they want the public to be confused if they happen to witness those. You know, that may be what happened in Area 51. That may be, you know, in the early days of the B2 bombers, they didn't want people to know about them. And so it's quite possible that there are very advanced tools being used already now. But the public is kept, you know, is kept in the dark on that. And moreover, in order to confuse the narrative, they introduce the alien component to it. And for example, another.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Possible reason is suppose there is a retrieval and reverse engineering program within government related to adversarial nations. Whenever there is a crash of, let's say, a Russian or Chinese airplane or missile from Korea, whatever, there is a whole program trying to figure out the technologies being used by retrieving those materials. And of course, it may involve pilots, and you might want to confuse the subject by saying, oh, this is just alien pilots and alien technologies that we are looking at, and there is this program. And some people may not be privy of the details, and they hear, some people within government hear these rumors as if it's really alien material.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  So there could be many possible reasons to confuse the public that have to do with national security, and then there would never be any substance behind them. And so to figure out if it's a smokescreen or not, we just have to look at the evidence. And I frankly do not get excited until I see the evidence. Where is the beef? Okay, so as long as people just tell me stories, it's not convincing. But one thing is clear, that there are objects, and you know, former President Obama talked about it, and the current President Trump said it's classified when, after hearing him speak about it. It's clear that there are objects that the US government cannot figure out, but whether they are human-made or something else is unclear to me until I see the data.

• 18:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, that was very surprising on a podcast that he, you know, dropped this bombshell, and then the review of the podcast or interviewers, you know, follow-up was, you know, basically like, what color is the couch at the new Obama Presidential Library? It was like, zero follow-up. I'm like, this could be the biggest, but you know, it turned out to be, you know, kind of a nothing burger, and he walked it back, I think. But, um, yeah. Now, let's say they come out with the evidence, and it says, we haven't found any evidence of anything. There's no evidence of alien life, no evidence of alien crafts, aliens, you know, aliens.gov is basically a big, you know, red X, nothing exists. Does that settle anything, or does it raise more questions, you know, than an answer?

• 18:55Speaker 03

  No, I mean, to me, it's all about the evidence, and if they don't show evidence, I would just ignore it and move on. Now, of course, there is a matter of national security, because it's clear that, I mean, that there were reports from the Director of National Intelligence, the US Congress, that are objects they cannot figure out, there are reports of military personnel, of very reliable people that see things they don't understand. Okay, so it's a matter of aviation safety, it's a question of whether we are, you know, there are, there is espionage in the sky. We know about the Chinese spy balloon, okay? And so that was found by citizens, because it was big. But there may be a lot of drones around that are being used for espionage, and the US government is not protecting us from that.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  And we need to know that, okay? So if, in case it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials, let's figure out what these objects are for the, for, for national security. That's a serious matter, and that's why I, I would not feel that my time leading the Galileo Project is, is wasted, because the technologies that we develop, the sensors, the machine learning software that we develop, can be used by the Pentagon in the future to defend the nation. It's not a waste of time to figure out things that are not well-understood, even if it has nothing to do with visits by extraterrestrials. So we need to clear this up. And I think it's a good subject for mainstream science to figure out things

• 20:21Speaker 03

  that the US government is confused about, because, you know, we are paid by taxpayers, and, and also, you know, there is some remote chance that we might see something we have never expected, which is a visit by some neighbor.

• 20:35Brian Keating?

  Right, and you mentioned that in a recent article on Medium, which I link to below. It's entitled, "Should We Worry About Interstellar Predators, Not Just Interstellar Intelligence?" And the money quote was for me, is the main scenario we should not, we should lose sleep over, is of alien predators who noticed Earth a long time ago. And decided to monitor the situation like The Rock or, you know, one of these guys. They're monitoring the situation from up close, forecasting that it may lead to the development of space technologies pose a threat to them. Why is this the most kind of, um, you know, kind of insomnia inducing scenario for you?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Oh, because, um, you know, the earth, uh, could have been discovered by civilizations around about a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy because the transit probability of the earth, I mean, depending on the orientation of the observer relative to the earth sun axis. You know, earth sun, uh, the, the earth moves around the sun in a plane and, and it blocks, um, uh, as a part of the sun only for, uh, about half a percent of all possible viewing angles. So, so there is a chance of half a percent that an observer at a random orientation relative to the earth sun system will see the transit of the earth and will figure out that there is a habitable planet in the solar system called earth.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  And given, you know, that a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy constitute about half a percent of the total population of stars, you can imagine another civilization knowing about the earth long ago, billions of years ago. And so, uh, they might tell, you know, if they are, if they have imperialistic ambitions, they might worry about them us developing ultimately the technologies to pose a threat to them. And so they might leave some monitors, uh, in the solar system, for example, in the outer solar system. We wouldn't know about it because we can see only objects bigger than a football field out to about five times the earth sun separation. Beyond that, we can't see enough reflected sunlight from them. So we don't really know what lies in the outer solar system and it could be that there

• 22:45Speaker 03

  are some monitors out there, technological monitors that could respond to whatever happens on earth relatively quickly. Otherwise, you know, if we just say, oh, they haven't started the journey because they don't know that we develop technologies. When will they know? When they detect the first radio signal that was transmitted from Earth. How far did it go? A hundred and twenty light years, because the first electromagnetic signals, artificial signals, were produced about a hundred and twenty years ago. So there is this bubble of about a hundred and twenty light years in radius that contains of order twenty thousand stars. Okay, only twenty thousand stars. Now, if we wait a millennium,

• 23:30Speaker 03

  then there would be a thousand times more stars engulfed within this transmission bubble of ours, because the volume grows as the time cubed. And this growth continues until you reach about a thousand light years, which is roughly the thickness of the disk of the Milky Way galaxy. After that, the disk itself is two dimensional. So the growth of the volume of the number of stars would go like the time squared, not the time cubed. So, but at any event, if you wait a millennium, there will be a thousand times more stars aware that we exist. Instead of twenty thousand, it will be twenty million.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  And so that's a big increase, and perhaps that's why we haven't heard from any of those. Now, how long will it take any civilization within that volume that alerts them to our technological advances? How long will it take them to reach us? Well, that depends on the technologies they use. If they use a laser beam as their weapon that propagated the speed of light, they can reach us within the light travel time between their location and us. And that could be, it could be thousands of years, you know? And if they are at a distance of a thousand light years. We so we still have some time, you know, before we will notice that. And if they use rocket technology, it could take, you know, a billion years for them to arrive

• 24:55Speaker 03

  at our backyard. So so we have some time before we would know that they noticed us if they're at their place. However, if they realize that the Earth is a potential threat long ago and they came close to us, they we might hear very quickly from them. Another scenario that we could hear from is if they produced, you know, they self replicating probes that go all across the Milky Way Galaxy. They can fill up the Milky Way Galaxy with probes and we would see them as interstellar visitors. And so we should check those interstellar objects that arrive into the solar system from outside. And I should say that, you know, you might think, oh, if we don't notice a spacecraft, then we are probably safe.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Not necessarily so, because you could imagine a Trojan horse situation where the outside looks like a comet, whereas they planted some technological gadgets in the interior. That's quite possible. And in fact, if we wanted to venture to interstellar space, I would argue that we should have intercepted 3I Atlas with a capsule that we would, you know, we would send on a collision course with 3I Atlas and plant it in deep inside 3I Atlas. Because 3I Atlas is moving out of the solar system at 60 kilometers per second, faster by at least a factor of two than any any space probe that we launched. So just to give you an example, in November, 3I Atlas came close to the Europa Clipper

• 26:24Speaker 03

  and the JUICE spacecraft that were launched by the European Space Agency on their way to Jupiter. And they would arrive to Jupiter in 2030 and 2031. That's when these two spacecraft that humans produced. We've got, but 3I Atlas arrived to Jupiter this Monday. So it was next to them in November. It's already past Jupiter on its way out. This is clearly a better carrier for any technological gadget that we would like to send.

• 26:58Brian Keating?

  But to be clear, we don't have any evidence that it's non-gravitational acceleration, or do we?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, no, there is, there is non-gravitation acceleration, but it's very small. The correction is minute to the trajectory.

• 27:09Brian Keating?

  How much is that 60 kilometers per second is, is non-gravitational?

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Uh, practically, I mean, less than a percent of a percent. It's, it's pretty much negligible. Okay?

• 27:20Brian Keating?

  Would you say that you, you wrote an article in Medium that I have on screen, or apparently I put it on screen now. Um, there's 22 anomalies in 3I Atlas before it faded from you. It hasn't really faded, it's just passed you, it's still in our solar system, it's still in our front doorstep. So what single anomaly is the hardest for, you know, the detractors who say it's, it's just perfectly normal, not a natural thing? What's the hardest anomaly to explain naturally?

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Well, there are a few of those. One is geometric, the fact that it arrived in the plane of the planets around the sun within five degrees. You know, that is a one in 500 chance. And obviously, people who just assume that it's a comet would argue this is just a coincidence by chance. Um, a, a, another one has to do with the mass and the abundance of such objects. In order for us to detect one in the last five years, you know, this is an object that is roughly uh, estimated at 2.6 kilometer diameter based on the latest Hubble Space Telescope images. Uh, and uh, given, so you, one can estimate the amount of mass carried by the object.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  And it's of order, or at least uh, a, a billion tons, okay? So uh, given that mass and the number density of such objects from apparent population, so that one of them would be seen over a five-year period of the survey. Uh, you end up with a certain mass per unit volume of, of this population of objects in interstellar space. And the other thing that was discovered is that there is a very anomalous abundance of deuterium and carbon 12 relative to carbon 13 that led two papers a week ago to conclude that it originated from a metal poor star, from a star that is old, somewhere between

• 29:11Speaker 03

  10 and 12 billion years old, formed early on in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, and also had very little abundance of heavy elements. Now, the problem with that is, even if you take all the heavy elements in stars of that population, all the heavy elements are missing by a factor of 10, the necessary amount of mass per unit volume in interstellar space. And I'm not mentioning even the fact that the planetary discs around these stars will carry, you know, less than 10% of the mass of the star, so you lose another factor of 10, and then not all the objects will be of the size of 3A Atlas.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  If you have a mass distribution, you will lose another factor of 10. If you put these two additional factors of 10, you end up with a discrepancy by a factor of 1,000. I wrote a paper about that and submitted it for publication. A factor of 1,000 discrepancy between the needed mass budget and the mass reservoir of heavy elements in the population of stars responsible for this object. Another thing about 3A Atlas is, we did some analysis of the 40 Hubble images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope, and when you remove the circular glow around the object, the coma around the circularly symmetric glow, you end up with three jets coming from the

• 30:35Speaker 03

  nucleus that are equally separated from each other by 120 degrees. A very nice symmetric system of jets, in addition to the antitalle. Again, it's opposite to what you find in comets. And so the question is, is that a network of thrusters? Why are they so symmetrically oriented relative to each other? And then there was the nickel without iron.

• 30:59Brian Keating?

  Let me, before you move on, you say that for a technological object, a beam of particles... Might be used to block the solar wind from impacting the nucleus surface at a relative speed of 500 kilometers per second. Are you saying that this thing could be some hybrid thing where it's technology, but it's also embedded within a naturally occurring nucleus?

• 31:19Speaker 00

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• 31:50Speaker 03

  Well, it could be. I just don't, I don't have a good explanation for the, for all these anomalies that I listed, 22 of them, including the Antetel. You know, it must be really associated with a relatively big particles that are not feeling the drag on the solar wind or that are not pushed back by the, by the solar radiation. And then you have the system of three jets and the rotation axis of this object is also pointed roughly at the sun. An unusual geometric coincidence. There are lots of unusual coincidences. At the end of the day, you might say that all of them are just chance coincidences. It may well be the case, but it makes it quite a unique object.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  And I don't think anytime soon, if these are just the natural coincidences, we shouldn't expect to be so lucky with a giant object that have, you know, by the way, it's, it's much more massive than Muamua, the first interstellar object, you know, by a factor of 100,000. So just think about it, you have an object that is 100,000 times more massive as your third object after the first object was tiny. Why didn't we see 100,000 objects the mass of Muamua, you know, before we see one that is as massive as the three Atlas? That's another interesting question. There must have been many more small ones than a big one based on our experience with the solar system.

• 33:20Brian Keating?

  So the other anomalies that, you know, is kind of curious to me is that people are often, you know, kind of confused what this object might look like if they could quote "see it." And I guess the first thing is, you know, what was the kind of maximum visibility that it had? And what would, if anything, have made it look strange, you know, that a layperson might recognize if they looked at it through a telescope, for example?

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we couldn't, we couldn't resolve the nucleus of the object. All we could resolve is the glow of gas and dust around it, which includes the jets and includes the coma, the plume of gas surrounding it. By the way, we detected also, in the plume of gas, we detected organic molecules, which was quite fascinating. And the methane that was detected, I mean, many of them are biosignatures, but methane was detected only after the passage closes to the sun, which was surprising because the volatility of methane, CH4, is in between the volatility of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. And we saw both CO2 and CO early on, and then methane somehow appeared only late.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  And my fundamental question is, are we, is this evidence for life on this object? Is it possible that it carries any microbes? And the methane is the product produced by those? You know, there is definitely nutrients for life on this object. And the question is, you know, is it just a dead iceberg or there is something else there? Altogether, we haven't gotten an image of the central nucleus. What we, the best, highest resolution image was obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope. There were 40 images released between November 30th and the middle of February from the Hubble Space Telescope.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  And by analyzing those images, we could get a sense for the brightness profile.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Of the coma and the nucleus. But there was only an indirect constraint on the nucleus. We could never observe it, resolve it. And you may ask, how can we do better in the future? Well, two ways. One is to design an intercept mission, which would be within the budget of space agencies like NASA and ESA. ESA has a comet interceptor, but it just cannot maneuver by more than two kilometers per second. So an intercept mission, just like Juno, could have intercepted 3I Atlas if it had all the fuel that it started from. So if you have an advance warning, let's say six months ahead of time, you can bring a spacecraft to the path of an object like 3I Atlas.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  And then coming close to it, the cameras on this interceptor could take a close-up photograph or even land on it and bring some materials back to Earth. So we can examine the building blocks of life, whether they exist on an object that came into the solar system after billions of years traveling through space, you know, from another star. That would be amazing, even if it's a natural object. It's a completely new pathway for astrobiology. Nobody talks about it. I mean, the astrobiologists are focused on looking for microbes through the habitable world observatory, remote observing of the chemical fingerprints of microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets. But here is another way of learning

• 36:44Speaker 03

  about the building blocks of life near other stars. And that is by bringing materials from interstellar objects that took all this time to arrive to our backyard. We should take advantage of that. And 3I Atlas was one of the best opportunities for that because it came in the plane of the planets around the Sun. It passed very close to many of our space probes. And we could have used that opportunity to bring something from it to Earth. We haven't done so. And yeah.

• 37:12Brian Keating?

  No, I want to get back to the anti-tail. Because, you know, for experts out there, you know, this was one of the most difficult things for them to explain. Even Jason Wright, you're, you know, number one. Detractor, you know, at some level. Even he said, you know, oh, there's not 10 anomalies. You know, there's only four anomalies, you know, but that was sort of one of them. It's like, well, we don't know and fine, okay, so we don't know. So it's it's bad when Avi says we don't know stuff. Um, but anyway, so let's talk about this. There's a 400,000 kilometer long sunward, you know, tail, anti-tail with no known commentary analog. So what, you know, in the six months since, since, you know, or sorry, a year since we've been talking about this object.

• 37:52Brian Keating?

  You know, what if the boffins, the nerds that that are experts, you know, you're not an expert according to like Jason, right? So.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Well, no, I I I am. I published a peer reviewed paper on the physics, a physical model of this anti-tail. What could it be? What what maintains this anti-tail? I submitted a second paper on this um as well. So it's now being refereed. Uh, but I should say the first paper that we submitted was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. And the editor that was assigned to it, she said, this paper is not of interest to the astrophysics community at large. Okay, I said, well, maybe, maybe that's the case. Okay, so we submitted it to a different journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It was accepted immediately there, immediately. Okay, not much.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Okay, then I sent a second paper about data regarding 3A atlas that we collected with an observer, Tony Scarmato, that indicated the rotation of the object every seven hours. Submitted it to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, got the same editor. She sent the same message. This paper is not of interest to the astrophysics community in general. Therefore, I will not send it to referees. So we had to send it to another journal. Then I sent a third paper where we, together with my postdoc, discovered an interstellar meteor in the latest data from the NASA JPL catalog of fireballs. And it was very clear evidence that many sig, many standard deviations.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Has had nothing to do with the 3I Atlas, had to do with an interstellar meteor. And then the same editor was assigned, all of this within a three-month period. You know, I write papers all the time about different subjects. I send it because I thought it's significant. And because there aren't many interstellar meteors that we know about. And the response from the same editor was, this paper is not of interest to the general community of astrophysicists. At which point I said, that makes no sense. That makes... So I contacted the chief editor. And when I didn't get the response, I basically wrote an essay just about that. And now the entire world knows the name of that editor.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  And many people told me that they will stop submitting papers to a journal in which she serves as an associate editor because of the way she responded with a prejudice. Because within, you know, the practice that I've encountered before of that journal, my papers were always sent to a referee. Now, the referee may say, this is, you know, I have some objections, scientific objections, that's completely legitimate. But for the editor to block the peer review process, and so that later they can say, this paper was not peer reviewed and not published, so that they can argue that it may not be... That is completely inappropriate.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  And I call it academic harassment, in the sense that the editor is imposing an opinion and not letting the community at large review a scientific proposal.

• 41:00Brian Keating?

  And if it had been blind, you know, submission and blind, you know, perhaps then it would have been obviously accepted, at least moved on to refereeing.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  You know, suppose I was an editor in that capacity. And by the way, the power structure is such that the editor has all the power. I have no way to respond to an editor saying this should not be submitted for refereeing, for peer review. I have no way to object to that because no scientific claim was made by the editor. But it's basically academic harassment. But if I were an editor that's and if I were to think that a paper should not be published, what I would do is I would immediately identify a reviewer who I know will say that this paper should not be published and send it to that reviewer and then get the response that it should not be published and then I'm covered.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  You know, it doesn't show any bias on my behalf. But doing it three times in a row, in three months, to the same author in different combinations, in different contexts, is what I call academic harassment, completely inappropriate. And this is just to show us a phenomenon that must be quite problematic to young scholars. The reason I'm able to fight this is because, you know, I'm sufficiently senior, I don't care about this editor, I've never met that editor, never had an exchange with that editor. That editor has a bias. Imagine a young person that tries to deviate from the beaten path, some scientist that gets attacked in the same way. How would they be able to establish a career? I mean, they have no way of fighting the fight.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  And I'm sure there are lots of, and in fact, I heard from a lot of young postdoc students that had very similar experiences.

• 42:44Brian Keating?

  Hmm. So the anti-tail, what is the going theory now about how, what it could cause?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what we proposed in the first paper was that the anti-tail is made of large chunks of perhaps ice

• 43:00Speaker 03

  that so that these large chunks are not being, you know, they have a small cross-sectional area per unit mass because they're big. And so they don't get much of a pushback from the solar wind or the solar radiation and they don't turn around. And so that's why you get such a jet in the direction of the sun. If you imagine a technological origin for this anti-tail, you might say, well, the solar wind, you know, especially flares and all the coronal mass ejections, they could cause damage to electronic devices passing close to the sun. So one way to protect them is to basically deflect the solar wind with a jet of particles.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Okay, and so that could be a way of defending your electronics or whatever technologies one is using from any damage created by the outflow from the star that you're passing next to. So that could be another possibility. I also did some calculations about if it was made of dust particles, how big they should be, and they should be bigger than than 10 microns. And then, you know, once you make them much bigger than 10 microns, if you make them a millimeter in size, you start getting into a regime where there is too much mass coming out of the object that you can't accommodate. The mass loss rate is so big that the object would disappear

• 44:29Speaker 03

  with the necessary mass loss rate, given the the size of the antital. So, so, yeah, it could be either particles in the 10 micron, 10 to 100 micron range, like very large dust particles, or it could be a beam of particles that are that is artificially created.

• 44:49Brian Keating?

  How massive is this thing compared to other comets?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  It's roughly a kilometer in radius, so it's pretty big compared to a Muamua that was, you know, at least 10 times smaller in in radius. And then it was another factor of 10 smaller in width, you know, because it had a very extreme shape. Borisov, the second interstellar object, was a few times smaller. So, so it's it's a pretty big thing. It's the biggest interstellar object that we have seen. And that raises the question of why do we see such a big thing? Or maybe we are mistaken and the object is is actually smaller. I actually was on a paper this week, just a few days ago, that tried to estimate the size and the mass of the object

• 45:36Speaker 03

  based on the measured non-gravitation acceleration that it has and the mass loss rate. So when an object loses mass, you get the rocket effect if the mass is flowing in a preferred direction, just like a rocket. And so from the amount of mass being lost that we can measure based on the plume of gas and dust around it, we can estimate how much momentum is given to the nucleus. Because we can also calculate the the speed by which this mass is lost for a natural process, sublimation process. And so from that, we if we detect the acceleration of the object, we can tell how massive it is, because if it's very massive, it will not be accelerating much as a result of this calculated force.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  If it's low mass, it will be accelerated a lot. And so we've we calculated the the mass and the size of the object just based on the rocket effect. There are some uncertainties in this estimate, but it gives, you know, at least a size of of a radius of four hundred meters or so, and perhaps kilo more than a kilometer comparable to the estimate from the the brightness profile from the Hubble Space Telescope.

• 46:48Brian Keating?

  So you also mentioned this other object, which I hadn't heard about, comet twenty twenty six maps might have some relationship to this object. Can you talk about the possible connection, Avi, between this maps object and and the three I Atlas?

• 47:09Speaker 00

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• 47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not likely to be connected because, I mean, the only reason to think about it is because it was only discovered in January. And you might ask, why was it discovered only in January? It's passing so it's actually a sun grazing comet. It's a comet that comes extremely close to the sun within a few times the the radius of Of the sun, that's amazing. And then the question is, I mean, within a week from now, it should become very bright because it should get abladed. But that's one way of figuring out the nature of comets. If they come, if they are grazing the sun, you can, it's like putting someone whose nature is unclear under interrogation.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  You put, you, you increase the, the pressure on, on the subject that you're studying. And in this case, it's the sunlight that basically evaporating any, any solid material, you know, including if it was made of even metal, it would have melted when it comes so close to the sun. Because the temperature there is thousands of degrees and uh, at the surface. And so we would see what this object is, how quickly it breaks up. Uh, but the fact that this object was only discovered in January uh, raised the question of whether it's related to three, maybe it's a fragment that was peeled off three I Atlas, but uh, unfortunately i- i- it has nothing to do with it because

• 49:03Speaker 03

  the inclination is very different. Also, the size, the estimated size of this particular comet, the sun grazing comet is comparable to that of the nucleus of three Atlas. So it's, we would have seen it long ago as part of three Atlas. And also, you know, the trajectory is very different. So the, the orbital planes of the two objects are different by thirty degrees. That's the difference in inclination.

• 49:29Brian Keating?

  You expect in the future with Rubin and other instruments, we'll see, you know, binary comets, interstellar binary comets like that?

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Definitely. Uh, well, it depends if they exist, but we should see dozens of new interstellar objects. And by the way, my recommendation is that whoever is going on dates, uh, don't marry the first person that you meet on a date. Because you just don't have a good enough sample to decide how exceptional that person is, right? And so, uh, the lesson, uh, in the context of interstellar objects is we had only three uh, discovered by telescopes. But now the Rubin Observatory will increase the sample to perhaps several dozens. Over the next decade and that will allow us to figure out how unusual is, for example, Oumuamua or 3I Atlas.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Do they really belong to populations of a lot of other objects similar to them? So just to give an example, the most detailed paper that analyzed the Hubble Space Telescope data concluded that we missed a lot of 3I Atlas-like objects because of the large abundance that they conclude in order for us to detect it. There should be a lot of those and we missed many of them because they are much brighter than Oumuamua was. And so we should have seen them and we didn't. So maybe the Rubin Observatory will find many more. And then also Oumuamua, we should have seen 100,000 of those small ones for every big one. So where are these?

• 51:00Speaker 03

  And I'm really curious to know if there are populations of objects that contain many of them that look just like Oumuamua or like 3I Atlas. And we just don't know because the sample is not big enough. And if we don't find them, that would make both of these objects quite anomalous. If we never see an object like Oumuamua or 3I Atlas, you know, we would start asking, you know, why were we lucky to see them in the first place?

• 51:29Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and it's not every day we get a dating advice from two astrophysics. You know, I tell young ladies when I, you know, when I counsel them and I, you know, giving advice to some woman who asked me for, you know, how do you meet, you know, how can I meet the perfect man? And I say, it's impossible. My wife got the last one. Okay, Bobby.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  No, no, wait, wait. I have another dating advice, which I think is quite important. And that is when you go on a date, aim high, don't aim low. There are many more, you know, mediocre dating partners than exceptional ones. And you need to aim, it's very easy to find a mediocre dating partner, okay? Now, how is that related? Well, you know, most of the astronomy community is invested in searching for microbes. In the astrobiology community, that was the first priority of the Decadal Survey, to work on the Habitable World Observatory. All of that is in seeking evidence for microbes.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  And, you know, I am saying, let's search for something more intelligent than we are, not, not aim low and look for the most common thing. Now, you might say it's easier to find the most common thing. Well, it's much more abundant, that's for sure. But it's not necessarily easier, because, you know, if we happen to have a technological gadget flying through the inner solar system, the evidence might be easy to identify. So it's all a question of how easy it is to detect oxygen, methane, other gases that are indicative of life on exoplanets, and make sure that these gases are not made by geological processes,

• 53:18Speaker 03

  compared to detecting or taking a high-resolution image of an interstellar object that will demonstrate buttons on the surface, and not, that is not a rock, for sure.

• 53:29Brian Keating?

  Well, yeah, I want to turn to things that, you know, could or could not be rocks. Here, we have an image of some debris, but perhaps something more mysterious. So on screen now, if you're watching, on the YouTube channel or on Spotify. By the way, we are gonna get questions from the audience in a little bit, coming up soon. But there's a strange-looking object. It sort of looks like a truncated cone. And it's an image from the mast camera aboard NASA's Curiosity rover. It's actually, you know, almost four years old, three and a half years old now.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:02Brian Keating?

  It was taken in 2022. So they found this mysterious object. It looks like a cylinder, a fragment of a cylinder. What is, as a scientist, what was your first reaction to seeing it? Technology?

• 54:13Speaker 03

  I couldn't, I couldn't believe it.

• 54:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's hard to resist the call that it could be technology, but it could be natural. So what do you make of it?

• 54:19Speaker 03

  No, I think it's definitely, I think it's definitely technological, because if you look at it, it's very distinct relative to the background, a regolith or, or rocks near it. Uh, it's about twenty centimeters in, in length and it's buried partly within the regolith, so it's not like it's sitting on top of it. Uh, and the question is whether it came off, uh, uh, Curiosity, the rover, or something else that flew above this region. Uh, and the, the point is it was not noticed by NASA. Uh, it was noticed by some amateur. Uh, and then, um, when you go back to the data set collected by the, the, the cameras onboard the Curiosity, you find the views of it from different angles.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  So it's suddenly out there. Uh, and my point is, you know, this, uh, right now, Curiosity is about eight kilometers away from this object. I think we should go back, uh, I mean, at the, at the highest speed of Curiosity, it would take two days to return, uh, to that location. But of course, there are, there is topography to cope with, so maybe it will take, I don't know, two weeks. I think it's worth going back and checking what this object is, because if it's, uh, not human-made, it's very curious. Uh, and then, after all, you know, this rover is called Curiosity and uh, I think it's ironic that the, the operators of the rover are not as curious as they're supposed to be.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  Uh, and NASA didn't make any statement about this. Uh, they basically are completely silent, uh, which is really strange. I mean, what's the goal of doing sciences if not attending to anomalies, to things that are really strange-looking and we should figure them out. I mean, uh, I don't know how much, uh, how many exciting tasks they have for Curiosity to accomplish in the coming weeks. But then, compared to this one, I, I, you know, I would put this one as, as the highest priority. When I pointed this out based on, um, uh, the discovery by, uh, other people, you know, by the amateur, um, uh, I, it became viral within the public.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  I mean, and a lot of people agree that this should be looked into.

• 56:36Brian Keating?

  Oh, definitely is a fascinating object. And yeah, you have to look at their prioritization. What else, you know, is good use for this, for the rover, which has, you know, the capability to go view it. But for me, it brought up an interesting, you know, kind of paradigm that I've been thinking about for a long time, which is that it's almost certain there's life on Mars. It's just the question of whether or not it's from Earth, right? Because, you know, I have here this meteorite I keep promising I'm going to give to you when we meet again. But this is from the moon. You won't get this at my website, briankeating.com/yt. But you will potentially get one of these, will definitely get one of these metal, iron meteorites. If you have a .edu email address, briankeating.com/edu and you live in the US. But others I do give out on occasion. But this is from the moon.

• 57:21Brian Keating?

  I do have a piece of Mars, which is similar to the one I gave to Joe Rogan as a joke. You know, he hasn't, you know, sent me a thank you note for it, but you know, it might have been smoked. I can't, I can't, he might have ground it up and done so. Anyway. But this object came from the moon, but I have Martian meteorites as well. Not collected by rovers, collected, you know, delivered by gravity. And that's because the Earth and Mars exchanged material at the rate of many, many tons per year. So there's likely a time in the Earth's history where the Earth was wet and moist and full of life. And Mars was wet, at least, and could have, and warm and enough to support life. So the fact that we don't observe, you know, Martian life now,

• 58:03Brian Keating?

  can we use that to set a prior on the, you know, facundity and the fertility of rocky planets? Or is it really kind of, you know, too difficult to implore a Bayesian framework in that way?

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Based on what we see on the surface of Mars, there is no doubt that there were lakes, rivers, oceans of liquid water, just like on Earth, on early Mars. And in fact, Mars cooled before the Earth because it's a smaller body. The cooling is proportional to the surface area. The amount of heat that is stored in a planet scales as the volume. And a smaller body has a larger area per unit volume of the object. So that means that it cooled earlier. And if it was as Fertile as the earth, it might might have developed life before earth. And the two planets exchanged rocks, we know that for sure. Uh, during that early time, because they were bombarded by asteroids and. Uh, it's possible that life started on Mars, delivered to earth.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  That's more likely than the other way around, I would say, and in which case we are all Martians. Uh, and when we think about going back to to Mars. You know, it's like going back to our childhood home, you know, uh, in a way. Uh, it became a desert about two and a half billion years ago, but when it lost its atmosphere. So that's a separate matter because, I mean, it's a smaller object and. Uh, the magnetic fields were not strong enough and it lost its atmosphere, became a desert. Uh, but the possibility that there was life on it is is very high. And in fact, it may have been delivered to earth, we might, it might have been the same form of life. There is a whole debate about the the results from the Viking. Uh, spacecraft that visited Mars collected some material.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Um, uh, for example, I was just corresponding this morning with Steve Benner. Uh, Stephen Benner argues that the Viking results indicate. Uh, that there is life actually in the soil and. We just didn't do the right experiments, the right interpretation of the of the Viking experiment. Uh, and in in in principle, if you drop a a drop of water. Let's say on the Martian soil, it would be very interesting to examine the gases that come out. Unfortunately, NASA never followed on Viking, they became very risk averse. They didn't want to uh get into controversies, they sent rovers, but didn't do the elementary. Uh, experiments that would indicate if there is life in in in the soil that could be revived.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Um, and then, you know, in principle, it could be there. Uh, and the the whole story of a transfer of life, you know, panspermia. Uh, this week, there was a new paper that was published. Uh, saying that the uh, there was an experimental team that the. Uh, uh, took some extremophiles, some micro.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  Microorganisms and eh eh eh put them under very extreme pressure eh up to about eh eh of order eh eh two giga pascals eh about eh you know eh eh eh ten thousand times the atmospheric pressure on earth eh and eh and they eh realize that they can survive. So that means that during a meteor eh eh an asteroid impact on the surface of a planet where you get eh eh a very high pressure eh blast wave that basically chips off eh some some surface rocks eh microbes could survive and then eh there is one rock that

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  was brought to eh eh that landed on earth and was analyzed eh about eh forty six years ago and eh was found not to be heated, it was never heated above forty degrees Celsius. Any microbes, any eh tiny astronauts in the core of this rock would have survived because it was never heated when it was chipped off the surface of Mars all the way until it landed on the surface of earth, never heated more than forty degrees Celsius. And so definitely the transfer of life is possible eh between Mars and earth and also in other planetary systems that are densely packed like Trappist One, it has seven planets that are close to each other. Eh we don't know if there is life there, but if there wasn't one of

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  them, it could have been eh eh that planet could have infected or or spread life eh to others. All of these are natural processes, by the way, the panspermia, but there is also a possibility of directed panspermia where eh intentionally, deliberately, there is an interstellar gardener that decides to spread eh eh life throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and that could be far more effective, you know. Eh in in the context of rocks, we think about eh just like the dandelion seeds are being spread by the wind and they sometimes eh eh land on fertile ground and then they produce more dandelion seeds. But eh eh in the case of eh eh eh deliberate process, you can spread life far more effectively.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  We can do that, by the way, if we were to plant microbes in the belly of a 3A Atlas. We could have intercepted 3A Atlas and dropped some microbes in it so that when it comes close to another star, they might spread and perhaps land on on another planet or away.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

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• 1:03:47Brian Keating?

  So, speaking of Mars and the Martian, this week, the movie Project Hail Mary came out, and it is a delightful story. I've not watched it yet, but it's from the author, Andy Weir, of the book, The Martian. He's actually, like Mark Zuckerberg, he went to UCSD, but he didn't graduate. So, you know, it's kind of our eternal

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Well, maybe it's a good thing, because otherwise, we wouldn't hear about him if he were an academic. But I'm planning to see him tomorrow.

• 1:04:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  You never know. Life, things that you regard as unfortunate events during your life may be actually a blessing, because they direct you, yeah, in an original path.

• 1:04:31Brian Keating?

  So, you know, moving on from The Martian as a blockbuster movie, to, I'm just showing in the background, a video interview I did with Andy Weir a couple of years ago when the book first came out. What about the scenario? I mean, it's not a spoiler to say, you know, it's about aliens and the possibility of alien microbial life that attacks the sun. What do you make of this scenario that he's outlined?

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Well, there could be, I mean, just like the pandemic that we went through, you can imagine alien microbes approaching Earth. That could be a real serious issue. And that's why I would never shake the hand of an alien. If we have a visit and they happen to land in my backyard, I would never shake their hand. I don't, you know, I'm worried that they might bring disease. You know, it's just like the visit of South America by Europeans and the The biggest weapon that was used was the disease, the spreading of the disease, which was pretty bad. So I would be quite worried about that. There is also the possibility

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  of mirror life, which is quite harmful to our bodies, that if you have a, you know, our, all of life on Earth is, has a particular helicity. The molecules are oriented in a, a particular way. And then, uh, you could have a, an identical chemistry if you had the reverse orientation of those molecules, an opposite helicity. Uh, and so, uh, and so if, if there is a visit by life with the opposite chirality, I should say, uh, then it could be quite dangerous to us because our body would not detect, uh, viruses or microbes that are, uh, of the opposite chiralities. So, so, um, we should be careful.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  So definitely, uh, there could be a risk to life on Earth from visitors. Uh, I'm not sure about the sun because the sun, the sun will simply, uh, burn up, uh, uh, any life form. So I, I don't know about the, the, the storyline there, but I would be less worried about the sun.

• 1:06:38Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly. So, uh, moving back to terrestrial, you know, news, um, you, you published something I thought was quite clever about the state of the union, but you, instead of state of the union, you changed it to state of the universe. Uh, what is the state of the universe right now?

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  So first I should say that, uh, in all the textbooks about the universe, cosmology, and some of which I wrote, um, we think about the universe as a cold and lonely place made of matter and radiation. Uh, and we describe the dynamics of matter and radiation using the equations, uh, Albert Einstein's equations, um, and, and then hydrodynamics and so forth. And, uh, This perspective that we have about the universe would change dramatically if we realize that there are intelligent beings out there, because then we will have an emotional connection to the universe. If they visit our backyard, we might want to visit their backyard. It will make the entire description of the universe quite different, because intelligence allows

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  for new, I mean, we often talk about free will. It allows for new realities in the future that do not resemble in any calculable way the past. The whole point about intelligence is that it's, it involves such a complex set of considerations that you can't just plug it, plug the initial conditions and end up with knowing the final, what will happen. And that's why we have this idea of free will, where we are responsible for what will happen in the future. It's not like you can attribute everything to the initial conditions, put it into a computer and figure out the final outcome. So, so if we find intelligence out

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  there, the perception of the universe would look different. You know, in principle, all the siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations can unite and decide for a brave new world where we would do something, some cosmic engineering. I corresponded about that about a decade and a half ago with Freeman Dyson, about cosmic engineering. You know, what can we contemplate doing in collaboration with other civilizations? For example, coming together so that we don't get separated from each other by the cosmic expansion, you know, things like that. But the state of the universe without knowing about the intelligent beings is pretty much depressing, I would say, because we see the universe at large expanding, and

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  not only that, but accelerating its expansion. So, once the universe gets older by a factor of 10, according to the standard cosmological model, all the galaxies that we see, all the sources of light beyond our own galaxy, will move away from us faster than light. And that means that, you know, we won't know what, the whereabouts of anything. Except for our own galaxies, our galaxy will be surrounded by vacuum and there will be darkness outside, except for the stars that get ejected from the, the hypervelocity stars getting ejected from the Milky Way. There will be the only uh uh uh tracers of what happens outside

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  uh uh the galaxy. And other than that, we'll have our own galaxy. And it's pretty depressing if you think about it, unless there would be some, you know, deo- deo sex machinery, some unexpected uh behavior of of the constituents of the universe. So, right now, you know, the most popular idea is that we have a cosmological constant. If it's indeed constant, the acceleration will continue forever. And by the way, uh uh the the most common stars are dwarf stars, about a tenth of the mass of the sun, and they could outlive the sun by a factor of a thousand. They can live up to uh of order ten trillion years, and

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  the sun will die within seven point six billion years. And you may ask yourself, how come we exist near a star like the sun when the most common stars are smaller and they live longer? Why, I mean, the most likely situation is for us to exist next to a dwarf star in the future. There is much more time in the future. There are many more stars like dwarf star. How come we exist near the sun today? And one possible answer is because dwarf stars are faint, and so the habitable zone, the region where life can exist around them, is closer in. And if you put a planet there, and in fact, we know of a planet near

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, has a rocky planet in the habitable zone, but it's twenty times closer than the Earth-Sun separation. And that location, the planet is vulnerable to eruptions from the star to flares, to the stellar wind. And it's possible that the atmosphere of rocky planets in the habitable zone around dwarf stars, the atmosphere gets ripped, ripped apart, it gets stripped. And so life cannot exist because the situation would be similar to Mars that we talked about before. If you, if a planet loses the atmosphere, there could be no liquid water on the surface and becomes a desert. So it's possible that all the habitable planets around dwarf stars are basically like Mars.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  They lost their atmosphere and therefore they have no liquid water on the surface, no life on them. And that's why you, we find ourselves next to a star that is not typical, like the sun, where we can be far enough from the star to maintain the atmosphere of the earth. The earth is a big enough planet to keep its atmosphere. So, you know, it's a very interesting question. There would still be nuclear furnaces, stars in existence up to 10 trillion years from now. Even when the universe gets dark and lonely, we could still live there. And our descendants would still be around near those campfires, you know, these dwarf stars. But we might do some cosmic engineering, you know, to make our life.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  And not just rely on those nuclear furnaces, you know, that nature gave us right now. We rely on the sun, but in the future, we might build a space platform that has its own nuclear reactor. It doesn't rely on, you know, fusion in the sun. And because the sun will eventually die, you know, and everything dies in the universe. It's really, I once went to an optometrist's office and she was, the receptionist was complaining that things change too fast with the computer system. And I said, everything will change, the sun will die one day. And she said, really? Are you sure about that? And I said, of course, I'm sure because,

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  you know, how do you know that we will die? That you and I will die? It's because we go to a graveyard and you see, you know, the people, whatever remains from people that that existed before us, they died. And the graveyard of the Milky Way galaxy is full of corpses of sun-like stars that died by now. These are called white dwarfs. You can see them. There are billions of white dwarfs that represent stars like the sun that died by now. So we know that the sun will die. And she said, oh, that's too bad. It's against my religion. And I said, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we know it for sure. And so, you know, everything good lasts for a while, but then goes away. And we should make plans. If we want our civilization

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy, we want to leave the Earth. And not by going to Mars. You know, that vision that Elon Musk had. I don't think that's the right approach because it's a rock that is less hospitable for life. You know, it doesn't have an atmosphere. It's a desert, bombarded by cosmic rays. Why would we go to a worse place from a place like Earth? The best way for us to leave Earth would be to produce something like Noack's Ark. You know, I call it Noack Spaceship, where we build a platform the size of a city that can accommodate humans, produces artificial gravity. And, you know, if we if we can do that, maybe another civilization did that. And if we find those spacecraft,

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  it will inspire us to do it.

• 1:14:59Brian Keating?

  Well, you speculate in one of your articles on Medium that an AI system might detect alien signatures and that maybe alien intelligence itself could be artificial. So, you know, if we find something, how do we tell the difference between a biological artifact or from a biologically active civilization or an autonomous AI probe? How could we distinguish that? Could Galileo Probe Project distinguish it?

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, that's an excellent question. So it really depends on how long the journey was as to whether we will encounter biological or technological objects. I mean, I think most likely it will be artificial intelligence that is guiding whatever gadget comes close because the benefit of that is that it doesn't get bored, you know, the AI system can stay around, you can make it sufficiently

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  robust so that it

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  it doesn't need to get any guidance from the senders because the time it takes a signal to cross the gap between the sender and the and the craft is so large and you know, we are used to helicopter parenting our rovers on Mars from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, but when you engage in interstellar travel, you don't have that luxury and sort of like sending your kids out of home, you don't expect them to report back on every step. Perhaps they will send a message once in a while, but you know, you need to have, any such interstellar traveler needs to have its own brain to decide what to do under unexpected circumstances. And I expect that to be

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  artificial intelligence. I mean, we have exponential advances in our AI systems and just think what they may include within a century from now. So far, we haven't launched to space an AI-guided rover or spacecraft, but I think that's the future and and on the other hand, we might decide that to use AI-assisted medicine to augment the human body such that it could survive very long journeys, you know, like millions or billions of years and that so that could also be something that we encounter, some mixture of technological and biological organ.

• 1:17:27Brian Keating?

  It also occurs to me, you know, feeding off of your previous comment about chirology and and opposite handedness and so forth of but it might be that, you know, an AI wouldn't care about humans at all and it might just care about our AIs, which will outnumber humans, you know, by the same ratio as microbes outnumber humans pretty soon. I mean, we're talking in less than 10 years. Yeah. So, you know, and if they did that, wouldn't it be much more efficient for an AI to talk to another AI? I mean, a computer could talk to another computer. I mean, we gave it these concepts and, you know, for loops and all sorts of structures and and and now we have AI models, LLMs, neural networks, but they might have a much easier way of communicating that's at a meta level that we can't understand. It's like, Yeah.

• 1:18:12Brian Keating?

  you know, our dogs communicate in ways that we can't understand.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

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• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  But there are two requirements for that. One is the architecture of the two devices that are communicating need to be to be matched. They need to sort of connect in the way that they think. And the second is, of course, they need to have sensors that allow them to to detect whatever the other entity is transmitting. As of now, you know, the AI systems we use only has access to the internet, doesn't have sensors that communicate with another AI system the way the human brain does. I mean, we have ears, we have a mouth that can speak and so. So but in the future, maybe with robots, that will be possible.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  A robot connected to an AI. Agent could potentially serve as, you know, the analog of biological systems. And with respect to artificial intelligence, you know, we should think about it as alien intelligence. I mean, we often, you know, people discuss aligning AI systems to our guiding principles. But to me, it sounds like trying to put lipstick on a pig in the sense that we're trying to make it resemble us. But it's really a very different entity because it's made of silicon chips and not flesh and blood.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  And if you ask me what's the biggest danger in the future, I'm not so worried about job losses and things like that. I think the biggest risk from AI is that it will sabotage the human mind in the sense that it will make humans dumber. And I already see signs for that in students and postdocs that I interact with, those that are addicted to AI agents. They are losing their edge. They are not as bright as I remember students and postdocs being a decade ago that didn't have these tools. It's sort of like you have the ability to use public transportation and you're not using your muscles to walk anymore.

• 1:20:45Brian Keating?

  Or you're using, I mean, how often do you not use GPS in your car? Or how many phone numbers do you have memorized right now?

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Now, in the context of doing science, you know, there is now a new AI agent that can write papers for you. You just have to guide it and it will do all the work for you. And I know of a number of people who are using AI quite routinely. And they say that it's doing better, much better than their students or postdocs. So, and in fact, one of them said that it's performing better than, you know, it's performing 90% of the task that this distinguished researcher performed throughout his career. And so that is a remarkable milestone. I think in recent weeks, AI systems are really making a difference. And I can tell you that a few weeks ago, this meteor that I mentioned that we discovered with my postdoc,

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  it took us 10 minutes to do the analysis, asking an AI agent to help us. Whereas when I asked an undergraduate student six years ago to do the same, it took a week. And so it's definitely an amazing tool now in making science progress faster. But we have to be careful. For example, you can't test students in the class. The question is, what is the purpose of education? Okay, so education will not be about the transfer of information anymore because you can get the information from AI. It will be more about teaching students how to think. And if you want to test them, you have to put them in a Faraday cage. Because you don't want them to use AI or any other electronics to figure out the answers.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  Uh, and then you have to do it in person.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  We use AI to see if they're using AI. It becomes a counterintelligence.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, especially, you know, I'm quite confident. Mossad agents at every, in every classroom.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  I'm quite confident that the substantial fraction of papers being written right now, maybe even more than 10% are being written by AI. And some of them are faking either the results or the calculations. And I'm not sure that the editors of journals are able to catch those. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I had the experience of seeing a paper written by some postdoc in the, in Europe. And I thought, who is this postdoc? How come he knows so much about asteroids? And then I, I looked at the other papers of this postdoc uh, on the archive, the Astrophysics Preprint Server. And I saw that he wrote a paper about, you know, the early universe, what happened around the Big Bang inflation. He wrote about a large range of topics.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  And I thought to myself, how come he's so broad? He's just a postdoc. And then I realized that none of these papers were submitted for publication. These are all papers written by AI presumably to beef up his curriculum vitae, his CV. And, uh, you know, we have to be really careful about assessing the statements being made in scientific papers. I think AI poses a huge risk to science in terms of misinformation. And then, you know, I experienced that personally when, oh, about four or six months ago. There was a website that imitated my voice and my image and it was AI-generated.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  And some people created a YouTube channel that provides misinformation and of content that I do not approve of. And then I let it go because I wasn't sure how dangerous that is. This website got a million views within a week and they made money out of it, out of my name, basically. And I continued to let it go because I was busy with science until an old lady, eighty-two years old, who came to my office and said, "My name is Abby Rockefeller. I'm the daughter of David Rockefeller. And, you know, I wanted to tell you that there was a video with you in it that was very attractive.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  I really believed it and I shared it with my friends until one of them told me that it was completely fake." And so I was very frustrated, she said. And as a result of that, I decided to establish my own YouTube channel so that once I get a hundred thousand subscribers, you know, I established it about two months ago and I have already close to thirty thousand. So once I get to a hundred thousand, then I can basically ask the authorities at YouTube to remove all the fake channels. But the bigger problem is that the public gets fooled and misinformation prevails. And how can you judge if something is real or not these days? That's the big question. And I'm actually doing right now, today, just an hour ago, we asked volunteers to

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  fill up a survey regarding fake versus true images and content because, you know, I think that is a very serious problem for the future of science.

• 1:25:40Brian Keating?

  So we'll put the link to your YouTube channel in the show notes down below for the podcast and whatnot. But so the final question I want to ask, you know, involves AI as well. And if... You know, it occurs to me, you know, you've spoken a lot about biosignatures and maybe a little bit about skepticism of it. We've talked obviously a lot about techno-signatures involving, you know, possibilities of these interstellar objects being extraterrestrial technology. But it seems to me that, you know, if we move to extraterrestrial artificial intelligence and transitions from biological to digital, then we might need to look in SETI at different, you know, kind of modalities, perhaps. You know, what would an AI techno-signature, what would an AI signature be?

• 1:26:25Brian Keating?

  Would it be waist heat? Would it be, you know, some sort of computational louder limit, you know, kind of violation? Or what would it be looking, looking, what should SETI be looking for? If you could, you know, talk sense into some of your SETI detractor.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's an excellent question because SETI was founded 65 years ago by Frank Drake.

• 1:26:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Uh, searching for radio signals. And frankly, radio communication at the time was quite important on Earth for us. But it was, by now, it's regarded as an old technology that we don't use as much for communication. And in fact, future communication will probably be using lasers in the optical and so forth. We have optical fibers already on Earth. Uh, and so, uh, the question is how the advance of technology changes the means of communication of extraterrestrials. And when you look for leakage of signals, what, what should you look for? Uh, and, uh, you know, there could be other technological signatures that have nothing to do with communication.

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  Uh, for example, if a civilization resides on a planet like Earth and wants to bring cargoes to a planet like Mars, uh, but they want to do it with light sails, meaning, uh, giant membranes that are being pushed by radiation. It turns out that if you want large cargoes that are, you know, many tons, you want to use radio waves for that. Okay, and then how would we detect that? Well, because the beam that is pushing the light sail may have some leakage around the light sail. But how would you know that it's related to a light sail? Because you would see that the two planets in conjunction, they would appear along your line of sight

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  when you detect the signal, because that's the direction that the light sail is heading towards from one planet to the other. And it could be at different wavelengths, but it would be very different from a communication signal, because you would get a burst of radiation this way. And I actually was involved in a paper with James Guelichon back in 2015 that we wrote about this. But then later, I was wondering, together with my former postdoc, Manas Viligam, whether some of the fast radio bursts would be related to that. Turns out that if you want to bring a spaceship close to the speed of light,

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  you could, you need to use roughly the amount of power that is impinging on the surface of the Earth from the Sun and shine it on a light sail that carries a giant spacecraft. And then this beam of light, when it crosses our line of sight, would appear as a fast radio burst. So, you know, there is a question of whether all fast radio bursts are related to magnetars, neutron stars, or something else.

• 1:29:24Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  And then you could look also for artificial lights on the night side of a planet. You know, there is a company now that wants to illuminate the night side of Earth by putting mirrors in space. That is a big risk.

• 1:29:37Brian Keating?

  The Russians tried that 50 years ago. The Russians tried that to get more work efficiency out. I think they also had like a 10-day work week, or maybe that was Chinese.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so now there is a company that wants to do that with 50,000 mirrors that will be a big risk to astronomy. Because they will blind the observatories if they happen to shine on those. But the point is that if you imagine a very ambitious technological civilization that illuminates the night side of a planet, you can easily tell that as the planet moves around the star, because you will not just get reflected light from the day side, you might get some light from the night side of the planet. That's something that was never seeked, never searched for. You can look for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of planets, not just for oxygen or methane, the way that the astrobiologists are thinking about. Just look for molecules produced by industrial origin.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  And we can, obviously, we should look for packages in our mailbox, you know, objects that arrived into the inner solar system. These are all the methods that were not employed by the SETI community in the past. I have no issue with the fact that they focus on what they want to do, but I have an issue with the fact that they ban discussions on some of these methods in their conferences. For example, they will not discuss any unidentified anomalous objects in the conferences. If the US Congress, if the US government talks about it now, I think it should become a subject of discussion within the astronomy community, within the mainstream of SETI and within the mainstream of astronomy. There is no reason for us to ignore a subject that serious people are discussing,

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  you know, former presidents, current president, Congress, Pentagon, intelligence agencies. You know, when there are things that are not understood by serious people, scientists could come to the rescue and figure things out. And that's what makes life fun, you know, making it a learning experience. I often said, and I said that I gave a physics colloquium and a public lecture just two days ago at Notre Dame University. And the opening sentence is of my talks. Was the foundation of science is the humility to learn. It's not the arrogance of expertise.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  And what you find in academia very often is the arrogance of expertise, as if we should know in advance the answer and we should brag and show off that we are experts on something. But the point is, nobody is an expert. You know, we should have the humility to acknowledge that nature could be more imaginative than we are. And we have an opportunity to learn if we only open our minds. If we don't insist that everything in the sky is rocks. But we say, we launch space probes, we launch space technological objects to space. Therefore, someone else might have done that. We may not be at the top of the food chain. We should be open minded to that possibility and increase our learning data set, you know, the training data set to include technological object.

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  And only then we would know if they exist or not. But if we insist in advance on knowing the answer, we will maintain our ignorance forever.

• 1:32:53Brian Keating?

  So, you know, the final question for you before I let you go is, you know, kind of reflecting on your career and how many wonderful conversations we've had over the past, you know, four, five, six years now. And I've known you and looked up to you for a long time before that. You know, you spent your whole career looking at theories, creating new theories, teaching people, writing books, writing textbook, building instruments, leading groups, and making the case, you know, that it at least should occupy a big sliver of our intellectual capital and our, you know, financial capital. Now the government is registering domain names. And we see objects are arriving, you know, faster than we can catalog them. The Rubin Observatory releasing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands

• 1:33:37Brian Keating?

  of interesting objects in the time domain. And AI, as we said just now, is about to change what even detection could possibly mean. It seems to me like all these threads, which were so disparate for so long, they're finally converging into a tapestry. And I'm wondering, you know, are we living, are we the last generation that's going to wonder if we're alone? And if so, are we ready for the answer that we might get?

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  It's quite possible that the best is yet to come and it will come soon. And that would make my life worth living, you know, if it happens. I suddenly wish it on all of us to realize if we have neighbors to know that. And if we don't find it, you know, at least I made my contribution to allowing future generations to make that discovery. You know, the biggest thrill I have is when parents come to me and say, "My kid watched you on television, now they want to become a scientist." And the reason I'm thrilled about it is here is a chance for someone without a prejudice, without, you know, being obsessed with their ego,

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  making a discovery of an important truth that my generation of scientists didn't discover. And so I always, I'm always an optimist because sometimes life is a self fulfilling prophecy. If you allow yourself to imagine a partner better than you are, then you might find that partner. If you say, "Where is everybody? I don't see anyone around me." And frankly, I'm quite exceptional and therefore I shouldn't hope for anything better because I'm at the top of the food chain, which is a narrative that many people in academia and elsewhere are using. And you say that it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something better than you are.

• 1:35:28Speaker 03

  Then of course you're, it's a circular argument, you may be left on your own forever because you will never search for that evidence. And, you know, I can only imagine being an alien and looking down at Earth and seeing what people are obsessed with. All these fights and conflicts that make very little sense in the cosmic scheme of things. You know, we we put most of our money, most of our resources on fighting each other, impressing each other on this tiny rock that we were born on, whereas most of the real estate is way out there and most of the interesting stuff is way out there. We're not looking out there. We are playing in our sandbox and impressing each other.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  And that's ridiculous. That's pretty much ridiculous. So that's why, you know, I was asked actually by Natasha Zouves, the reporter from, she interviewed me for 90 minutes from News Nation. And she said, aren't you afraid that if we encounter extraterrestrials, they will be hostile, you might die during the encounter? And she, because she's fearful of that encounter. And I said, well, you know, I'm happy to encounter them, even if my life will get shortened, because it will be a thrilling experience. And I prefer to have a thrilling life, short life, than a long life that is completely dull, just

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  watching News Nation report about all the nonsense that is going on around the world right now. You know, what's the point of living a long life that is quite dull?

• 1:37:05Brian Keating?

  That's right. Yeah, the lifespan, you know, should be matched by the curiosity span. And Avi, you're one of the most curious and imaginative, creative, and really just all around fun. You know, people don't realize that Avi is out there having fun. While you're criticizing him, while you're trying to take him down, while you're making videos, Avi's just having too much fun. And you can't win. You can't beat someone who's just having fun. Because you're not out there to win Nobel prizes and to get, sell billions of dollars of books. And we'll talk about your media in the in the future. I think you've got a lot of interesting stuff.

• 1:37:39Speaker 03

  By the way, just just an hour ago, I had an interview with a German reporter. And he said, Does it bother you that there is so much antisemitism in the US? And people attack you and sometimes, you know, some of the YouTube videos, especially by a guy who calls himself a professor and was never in an academic position. So he's lying about himself, but then he also uses some antisemitic narratives. Doesn't it bother you? And I said, no, you know, I prefer not to mud wrestle because that gets everyone dirty. I just ignore those people. And I pretty much hope that they have a therapist that will solve their psychological problems. I'm not here to solve their problems.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  I'm here to seek, you know, one reason I'm seeking higher intelligence in space is because I don't often find it here on Earth.

• 1:38:31Brian Keating?

  Well, Avi, this has been great. We'll catch up again soon. Thank you very much for another fascinating set of anomalously entertaining ideas. And we'll get to more as the year goes on. Thank you, Avi. I'm going to stick around, just talk to a few people on the podcast. But yeah, you're free to go. Shabbat shalom to you and I hope to be in touch soon.

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 1:38:53Brian Keating?

  Bye, Avi. So that was a lot of fun. I just wanted to point out, we're continuing to grow the podcast and grow the YouTube channel. It just keeps expanding like the universe, through my waistline. I can't tell which is going faster. But it's really, a really stunning series of interviews that are coming up. I just did one with Vivian Ming, who is one of the foremost experts, neuroscientist, was here at UC San Diego, but she has gone on to do great work in terms of making both yourselves and your children, especially into robot-proofing them, to make them immune to, hopefully, some of the threats to their careers

• 1:39:36Brian Keating?

  and to our sanity and to our own well-being that AI presents. And she's a big proponent of AI. And she's worked with Google and the CIA and Facebook and all the top organizations. I'll come out in a couple of weeks. But on Tuesday, I have an interview with Michael Wong, who's a co-author of a book called Time's Second Arrow, where he and his co-author are both geoscientists at the Carnegie Institution, that they claim they've discovered that the second law of thermodynamics is sort of wanting, and in fact, that there must be a new law of thermodynamics. So, we talked about that, but where that gets interesting is that we dovetail that in with the different arrows of time that we know to exist, including biological time arrows.

• 1:40:17Brian Keating?

  And we actually got into a very interesting discussion on planetary habitability and alien life support, and so that is not to be missed. It was really a unique conversation with a very broadly, you know, kind of widely and broadly discursive mind, and provocative, too, to conjecture that you have discovered a new law of physics is quite astounding. So, you'll be the judge. I push back with my requisite love and respect, but I think it's worth really digging into, and so that'll be out early next week. And then, after that, interviews with Matt Kaplan of The Economist magazine about his

• 1:40:55Brian Keating?

  new book, I Told You So, which is about scientists that were doubted and even perhaps driven mad and to the brink of, in some cases, suicide, due to their ideas, which were later proven to be correct, but not taken to heart in their own lifetime. So, it's quite fascinating to witness. What does that have to say about science and adoption within the public sphere right now? I think it's a very timely book. And then, lastly, in the next four weeks or so, we have a book by Rebecca Neuberger-Goldstein. She wrote Plato at the Googleplex and other books as well, and her new book is about what it means to be a human being, so mattering and meaning.

• 1:41:39Brian Keating?

  And what's so surprising about that, to me, is it's a real physics book. She's known as a philosopher, but she actually studied physics at Princeton and took a class with John Archibald Wheeler, who talked a lot about a form of dark matter himself called black holes. In fact, he invented that term. And so she took classes with him and he deeply influenced her. And so it's turned from a physics, from a philosophy interview to a physics interview. So I hope that you guys will find that really fascinating and enjoyable, too. I've got some really unique guests and trying to not, you know, um, hit the podcast or, you know, kind of circuit you could tell. I haven't had on, you know, a lot of guests that I've had on many times. In the past, I'm trying to get some new perspectives, new ideas. Everyone's talking about AI from,

• 1:42:20Brian Keating?

  you know, kind of jobs and, and agentic and open claw and stuff like that. Uh, and I use that, too. I'm using that on a daily basis, uh, for teaching, for research, and I want to get into my upcoming paper, which was written by AI. I mean, I'm gonna list AI as my co-author. And, and that's, you know, it's not related to my main research and the cosmic microwave background, but what it is related to is, is fundamental symmetry. So one paper I wrote with AI and one of my undergraduate students has to do with, you know, how do we know AGI is here? My claim is that it has to involve predicting some new law of physics, uh, or at least, at the very least, being able to re-derive laws of physics that we already know to be true. For example, general relativity. If A, if ChatGPT existed in nineteen eleven,

• 1:43:05Brian Keating?

  could it have, you know, predicted the effects of gravitation curve spacetime purely from the data that existed back then? In other words, could it exactly mimic what a natural intelligence, what, what Einstein did by coupling his, you know, computing device to, to his, you know, embodiment, his physical form was very important to him. He did have the famous elevator uh, experiment, thought experiment, where if an elevator broke its cable, it, you know, would, would an observer feel any gravitational force? And that led to the Einstein equivalence principle in nineteen oh seven to nineteen eleven. And then that became part core part, and in fact, the, the biggest part of the general theory of relativity. So my conjecture is no, until an AI can reproduce what Einstein did based purely on nineteen eleven

• 1:43:50Brian Keating?

  and before physics. And the challenge is getting data sets that are uncontaminated, training data sets, so hard to get training data that's pure and unadulterated by physics we've learned since then, because Einstein is appears everywhere in movies and obviously all over the internet. And that's what training data sets are used in to comprise training data sets. So. I think it's a fascinating article. It turns out Demis Hassabis also conjectured a similar thing, 2024 Nobel laureate, for, you know, kind of knowing if superintelligence is here. And we started working on this back in 2023. So I did write a paper with AI and my undergraduate student, and I'm, you know, full disclosure, it's going to be in the paper. We'll see if

• 1:44:34Brian Keating?

  it gets accepted, but, but, you know, to obvious point, sometimes it's just important to submit certain things, as long as they're high quality, the data integrity is there, it's mentioned that AI is a collaborator, because it does allow you to scale out. Look, my graduate students are naturally intelligent. And so, you know, whenever they collaborate on a paper, we list them as a co-author. So I don't see anything wrong with doing that, as long as it's clearly listed. I do worry about the AI slop problem, so I'm going to be very judicious, only using AI for my non-CMB-related projects. In other words, my own projects that I can have control over, so to speak, I am the PI of the Simons Observatory, right now, but,

• 1:45:12Brian Keating?

  but I don't want to use AI for issues investigating the cosmic microwave background, because I do feel like we want to keep that, you know, kind of detailed in the, on the data analysis process and our methodology, you know, completely consonant with what's come before, because the stakes are so high for what we're doing with the CMB and the Simons Observatory to claim potentially that we see or don't see, you know, signatures of cosmic inflation when that dataset comes out, hopefully in the next two years, maybe less. I want that to be completely done in accordance with best practices in the CMB field, which to date don't use AI for, for doing, you know, significant heavy lifting. I mean, it might do, you know, some

• 1:45:56Brian Keating?

  literature search. I mean, there are latex tools that work in that field. So what I've, my philosophy with AI is I'm using that for my own, you know, self-controlled, self-directed projects, maybe some more philosophical things like this AI Einstein test, and then for test of Lorentz invariance violation using an optical polarimeter that we built here in San Diego. And that will be hopefully to reveal the, you know, constraints, limits on cosmic biophrингence and polarization rotation, and also on the variability of the speed of light as a function of polarization. So, these are all things which I am not an expert in, you know, in all the details of optical polarimetry, but AI can really come to the forefront there and, and help out

• 1:46:41Brian Keating?

  in the process of methods and procedures, not in generating data. Of course, we'll generate our own data, that's, that's the whole, you know, fun of it. And so too with the Simons Observatory, taking, you know, two years of data as of this, uh, next week, um, with the instrument and, you know, getting to dig your hands into data is what makes it fun to be a scientist. I don't wanna have AI, you know, trusted with that or give that the fun, but there's things like literature searches and, you know, things that we might have missed. Uh, and actually AI has been helpful in terms of, of the business administration of the Simons Observatory, you know, like, are we getting, you know, having the best possible safety practices, you know, with, with visitors that come to visit the observatory?

• 1:47:22Brian Keating?

  For example, I, I, you know, I haven't, you know, studied every single public observatory on Earth and how they get there at the South Pole, you're not allowed to touch any and visit any of the observatories. So how do we do that, constant with best practices, um, you know, and do things, uh, to encourage the participation of Chilean astronomers and Chilean public? They pay a lot of their taxes to support the observatory. I think that's a great use of AI. How can we best, you know, kind of, uh, divide up, you know, the, the amount of battery storage we have for electricity versus on-demand solar pow- power? Can we use it as an uninterruptible power source? You know, these are all great things that are not cosmological, but they are incredibly important to the functioning of an observatory.

• 1:48:04Brian Keating?

  So I am using, we are using, you know, kind of tools to help us in that realm, but we're, we're segregating it, firewalling it off in many cases. And where we don't, we reserve the right to use it, but we're gonna be very transparent about it. I think that's the key. If our collaborators, colleagues, and other experiments, if they can be use AI as a tool and reference it and cite it and prescribe what it can do and what it can't do, and also be completely open and transparent and accountable, which very few experiments have been completely outsourcing, open sourcing the data, but we have a mandate to do that with the Simons Observatory. So you'll be able to look at the data, even though it's a privately funded instrument for the most part. You know, most of the funding came from the privately funded Simons Foundation.

• 1:48:49Brian Keating?

  You can see my interviews with Jim Simons, who passed away two years ago, almost exactly, and David Spiegel is the current president. And that's a big mission, making the science open source and public and available. And that's, it costs a lot of money and time to do that. Oh, we're just gonna leave you, here's all our data on a desk somewhere. It costs a tremendous amount of time and effort. And it does, quite frankly, mean that we're not spending every single second on doing the cutting-edge science that the observatory is meant to do, but we feel it's a trade that we're willing to make to make it available to the public. Because at all levels, the public does pay our salary and allows us to do what we do. So, thank you for the support. There's many, many cool things coming down the pipeline for me, for my group. Many, many cool, just unique interviews.

• 1:49:33Brian Keating?

  Another one is with Adama Stock. He was one of the co-founders, if not the founder, of Stability AI. And he turns out to be a deeply closeted mathematician. I knew he had some math chops, but we talked about his book, The Last Economy, which is kind of a warning cry, creed to core, to get prepared for the coming AI tsunami. And that's more than the AI kind of warning. What's the value of human intellect when there's an infinite number of Nobel-level intellects that come out? But I think, can't wait to see what comes next. So, stay tuned, and there'll be more interviews, and especially with him and his theories on physics as well. So you won't want to miss that interview we did in person last week.

• 1:50:17Brian Keating?

  So, stay tuned, lots of things to come. Thanks for watching Into the Impossible. See you next time.

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