DEBRIEFED - Chris Ramsay - Harvard Physicist Wants PROOF of Aliens - Avi Loeb - DEBRIEFED ep. 35
Aired: 2025-04-25
Duration: 01:58:45


=== The Gravity A and B Mystery (03:53) ===

[00:00:00]  So, what do you make of the Gravity A, Gravity B idea from Bob Lazar?
[00:00:04]  People can invent lots of stories.
[00:00:06]  We know that throughout human history, people were telling stories that were not true.
[00:00:11]  I just thought it was interesting because the project that Bob had allegedly worked on was called the Galileo Project.
[00:00:18]  Did he say that before I established the Galileo Project?
[00:00:20]  He said in the 80s.
[00:00:23]  Oh, interesting.
[00:00:23]  I didn't know that.
[00:00:23]  He's not a practicing scientist.
[00:00:24]  I'm talking about people like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
[00:00:27]  He's not practicing science.
[00:00:29]  I don't know when he wrote the last paper, maybe 15 years ago or before that.
[00:00:33]  You know, he's trying to gauge where the wind is blowing and basically trying to be popular.
[00:00:38]  He's basing his assessments on the number of likes he would get.
[00:00:43]  Heard of people in actually who are attached to Harvard, you know, I think of John Mack.
[00:00:48]  John Mack looked into reports from people who claimed that they were abducted.
[00:00:54]  Now, mental institutions are full of people who claim that they are Napoleon, and none of them is Napoleon.
[00:01:01]  There was a new program that started a year before, and they recruited me as.
[00:01:06]  One of 25 people out of thousands that were going to the military.
[00:01:13]  I was the first one to finish a PhD in that program at age 24.
[00:01:17]  I started a project that was the first one to be supported by Reagan's Star Wars initiative, and it was just accelerating masses to high speeds using electric energy instead of chemical.
[00:01:31]  I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons.
[00:01:37]  And that was the first project funded by the Strategic Defense Initiative at the time, SDI or Star Wars.
[00:01:43]  Haim Hashed, who's, you know, the father of the Israeli space program.
[00:01:48]  Right.
[00:01:48]  But he was in the intelligence as well.
[00:01:50]  He was in.
[00:01:52]  Yes.
[00:01:52]  So that's probably where he heard.
[00:01:53]  But I mean, he was also responsible for putting 13 satellites up into space.
[00:01:57]  Oh, yeah.
[00:01:57]  But that was not the source of information that he claims to have had.
[00:02:01]  I think he was referring to things that he heard while being in the intelligence.
[00:02:10]  And one evening, just as the last light of dusk was fading, I was backing out of the driveway and I saw a little red light on the horizon hauling ass towards me.
[00:02:10]  So a few minutes later, I'm driving down this desolate one lane desert road and I get this really weird feeling like something in my head is telling me to look behind me.
[00:02:10]  I had an encounter that was the single most life changing experience I've ever had.
[00:02:10]  And it went right over the top of me and disappeared into the clouds.
[00:02:10]  I had a red light on top of me and just something in my head.
[00:02:54]  quarter mile away, maybe 500 feet off the ground, are not one but Two of these orangish red orbs following me down the road.
[00:03:13]  So I immediately pull over and get out for a better look.
[00:03:15]  And at that moment, they perform this amazing aerobatic display right in front of me, zipping around and circling each other for a solid 15 minutes with no sound either.
[00:03:27]  I even thought of trying to film it, but it was like something in my head told me not to and said this was too important to worry about that.
[00:03:29]  And I should just please, one second before you hit that dial, I promise you this will be worth your time.
[00:03:30]  You see, in the last few videos, we've been subliminally inserting these symbols.
[00:03:31]  Symbols from an ancient alien language.
[00:03:31]  Symbols that you might find in these playing cards.
[00:03:32]  Symbols which can only be seen using a special technology.
[00:03:32]  With this technology and with these playing cards, you'll be able to decipher what these symbols mean.
[00:03:33]  Now, every single video will feature five of these symbols hidden randomly throughout the video.
[00:03:34]  These symbols will translate into a code.
[00:03:36]  Insert this code into our website and you'll get a prize.
[00:03:39]  You see, so far, every single prize has been claimed and they've been claimed by an intern because you see, interns have early access to every single video.
[00:03:47]  Increase your chances by becoming an intern, but don't let that stop you from trying.
[00:03:50]  So, future agents, I appreciate your time.

=== Trusting the Crash Site Evidence (10:26) ===

[00:03:53]  Now, back to your regular programming.
[00:03:57]  Ladies and gentlemen, today my esteemed guest is none other than Dr. Avi Loeb, who is a Harvard astrophysicist, best selling author, also made headlines by suggesting that Oumuamua, a giant interstellar object that entered our solar system, might be of extraterrestrial origin.
[00:04:16]  He was Head of the Harvard Astronomy Department for almost a decade and now currently leads the Galileo Project, which is the scientific search for extraterrestrial technology.
[00:04:31]  Welcome, Dr. Avi Love.
[00:04:34]  Thank you so much for joining me.
[00:04:35]  Thanks for having me.
[00:04:36]  Absolutely.
[00:04:37]  So, very exciting stuff that you're involved in, uh, in all of this.
[00:04:42]  I mean, it's, it's pretty fundamentally groundbreaking, a lot of the work you're doing, and very admirable for anyone looking in from the outside to see, uh, the type of work you're doing.
[00:04:53]  Well, it's, um, it's exciting because of what it may discover of the future.
[00:04:59]  Um, you know, very often, and you mentioned that your podcast is ranked high within the history category of podcasts, but in fact, It should rank much higher within the futuristic or the future, uh, brand of podcast because, um, um, you know, we haven't looked up enough.
[00:05:21]  We keep focusing on what happens on earth and, um, uh, we might have a neighbor that is far more advanced than we are.
[00:05:27]  And, you know, I've seen a week ago, I've seen a turtle that is 150 years old.
[00:05:33]  It was in Necker Island.
[00:05:35]  I visited Richard Branson there and, um, That turtle was born in the 19th century.
[00:05:42]  It lived through all the major advances of modern science and technology.
[00:05:47]  But we should think of alien civilizations that could have existed for millions or billions of years before us, and therefore they have much more advanced abilities.
[00:06:00]  And it would be like this turtle on steroids.
[00:06:03]  Yeah, it does seem logical to think that way.
[00:06:07]  And it's just so strange that we don't collectively.
[00:06:10]  Oh, well.
[00:06:10]  As I often say, we are not the pinnacle of creation.
[00:06:14]  There is room for improvement.
[00:06:16]  You just need to read the news every day.
[00:06:19]  And I do think that one solution that perhaps is the best for bringing back the sense of O with respect to reality.
[00:06:26]  I mean, traditionally, it was religions who sold ideas about the existence of a superhuman entity called God that can do miracles and is far more capable than we are, controls what happens to us.
[00:06:43]  And then, You know, about 150 years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, said, God is dead.
[00:06:50]  And that was the beginning of the secular age that we live in and with modern science and technology.
[00:06:56]  But there is a way of bringing back the sense of, oh, and that's through the discovery of a superhuman entity that lived on an exoplanet somewhere else.
[00:07:09]  And I think it's much more natural to expect that things better than us existed for billions of years than to argue that there is nothing out there, we are alone, and it's an extraordinary claim to imagine that, which is what most scientists would say.
[00:07:28]  Yeah.
[00:07:29]  And it's very interesting as well, even hearing you say this coming from such a prestigious background.
[00:07:34]  You know, we've heard of people in actually who are attached to Harvard.
[00:07:38]  You know, I think of John Mack and I think of also.
[00:07:42]  Who we had on a few weeks ago, Danny Sheehan, who are both, you know, part of Harvard, but also both very pro this idea that this phenomenon could exist, does exist, should exist.
[00:07:53]  Yeah, but they addressed it from the human perspective.
[00:07:57]  For example, John Mack looked into reports from people who claimed that they were abducted.
[00:08:06]  Now, you know, mental institutions are full of people who claim that they are Napoleon.
[00:08:12]  And none of them is Napoleon.
[00:08:16]  And you might say, okay, the story repeats, therefore it must be true.
[00:08:19]  I say, no, it has nothing to do with truth.
[00:08:21]  A lot of people have the same issue.
[00:08:24]  And in fact, I was contacted yesterday by a group of people that wants to have a court appearance by eyewitnesses that will describe their experiences of UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena.
[00:08:43]  And the argument is that.
[00:08:45]  If enough of them say the same thing, then maybe it will provide enough evidence to convince a jury and then the judge that what they're saying has some merit.
[00:08:56]  But, you know, from my perspective as a scientist, you shouldn't rely on people when you decide what the physical reality has, holds.
[00:09:09]  Because even within the court system, the legal system, we know that about 17% of the exonerated.
[00:09:17]  People who were on death row were found to be innocent based on DNA evidence when there were eyewitnesses that claimed that they did the crime that deserve, you know, death row.
[00:09:33]  That's a very serious crime, but they were not responsible for it.
[00:09:37]  So the point is, you can't rely on what people tell you.
[00:09:41]  Because people have wishful thinking.
[00:09:44]  I mean, FIFA already knows that they decide, they use cameras to decide about controversial or debatable.
[00:09:52]  Uh, decisions on the soccer field.
[00:09:54]  They don't go around and ask the players or the audience.
[00:09:57]  They rely on instruments.
[00:09:58]  That's the way science is done.
[00:10:00]  What we need is data.
[00:10:02]  And that's what the Galileo project that I'm leading is trying to get scientific data so that we don't have to listen to people.
[00:10:08]  That's why what I'm doing is very different from what John.
[00:10:12]  I mean, the issue is I don't care what people tell me.
[00:10:16]  I just want to see the data, the evidence.
[00:10:18]  And then everyone can be the referee.
[00:10:21]  When you are doing science, the beauty of it is.
[00:10:23]  You don't need to believe anyone.
[00:10:25]  You just look at the data.
[00:10:25]  If it looks convincing, you know, that's fantastic.
[00:10:29]  And the bliss for me as a scientist is to be flooded with data so nobody can deny it.
[00:10:37]  Welcome to the bunker.
[00:10:38]  No windows, no Wi Fi, just old files, redacted documents, and a transformer that probably doesn't work.
[00:10:45]  Here's the thing I spent a lot of time down here trying to stay off the radar.
[00:10:48]  But out there, well, there are companies watching everything you do.
[00:10:53]  They're called data brokers.
[00:10:54]  And their entire job is collecting your personal information, your browsing history, your purchases, and even where you've been.
[00:11:01]  And then, Well, they sell it to whoever wants it.
[00:11:06]  That's why I use Incogni.
[00:11:08]  You see, Incogni is like a digital countermeasure.
[00:11:11]  You authorize them once, and they go out into the wild, contacting dozens, sometimes hundreds of data brokers on your behalf.
[00:11:19]  They legally force them to delete your data, not obscure it, not rename it, delete it.
[00:11:25]  While I'm off the grid in the bunker, Incogni makes sure I stay off grid online.
[00:11:31]  Go to incogni.comslash area 52.
[00:11:34]  And use code area 52 to save 60% off an annual plan.
[00:11:38]  Take your privacy underground and keep it there.
[00:11:41]  Yeah, that's well said.
[00:11:43]  And for the record, a lot of people might take that as you don't believe anything, but it's not that.
[00:11:47]  It's just that there's a lack of evidence, and you don't feel like solely having one piece of intel would be enough to come to a conclusion.
[00:11:58]  You need multiple pieces of intel and multiple data points, things that objectively show some form of activity.
[00:12:05]  Just consider the eyewitness testimonies in the congressional hearings.
[00:12:10]  Okay.
[00:12:10]  So I believe all these people that testified under oath were very sincere.
[00:12:14]  And in fact, I spoke with all of them before.
[00:12:17]  And I think they were telling what they really believe in and to be the truth.
[00:12:23]  But imagine the U.S. government having a retrieval and reverse engineering program from crash sites.
[00:12:31]  And I very much believe that they do have it.
[00:12:35]  Because every now and then in a battlefield, an airplane or something else, a drone would crash, and you need such a program in order to analyze the technologies that our adversaries are using, right?
[00:12:51]  So you would want the US government to analyze materials from crash sites.
[00:12:58]  Now, suppose they found technologies that the US does not possess, or suppose they found something they don't fully understand, they might give it the label of this is, you know, extraterrestrial, superhuman, just so that nobody would speak about it in a serious manner if they happen to hear about what the US recovered.
[00:13:23]  And then someone else will hear that term, extraterrestrial, and say, oh, actually, we have evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations that.
[00:13:32]  Technologically, and it's all a matter of rumors that propagate without any substance behind them.
[00:13:40]  And so, when someone high up in the administration hears that, oh, we have access to technologies that are extrapersonal, you know, if they haven't seen the actual materials, if they cannot give me any details about what they saw, it could be misguided, not because of any bad intentions, but simply because they haven't been.
[00:14:03]  Close enough to the evidence to, for me to trust it.
[00:14:07]  And also, in order for me to be convinced as a scientist, I should be able to look into it and, and share it with the rest of humanity.
[00:14:14]  You know, if it, if it's something that is from outside the solar system, it's not a national security issue.

=== Fireballs That Turned Artificial (15:09) ===

[00:14:20]  It's, um, it's just like the information about, um, the universe starting in a big bang, you know, that you can't classify that.
[00:14:27]  I mean, the church tried to, uh, suppress the information that we're not at the center of the universe, right?
[00:14:34]  So they, They, uh, put Galileo in house arrest.
[00:14:37]  They banned forever.
[00:14:38]  Yeah.
[00:14:39]  For his whole life.
[00:14:39]  Yeah.
[00:14:40]  And they banned the book of Copernicus, who was a priest, by the way.
[00:14:43]  He wanted to help them.
[00:14:44]  They had an issue.
[00:14:45]  They couldn't figure out the time of, uh, Easter accurately.
[00:14:49]  And they used the model in which the earth is at the center.
[00:14:52]  And so Copernicus was playing around with the data and realized that he can actually forecast much better the timing of Easter.
[00:14:59]  So he was a priest loyal to the church.
[00:15:01]  He said, here is a model where the sun is at the center and I can give you much better Prediction of when Easter takes place.
[00:15:09]  Heresy.
[00:15:09]  And they said, no, they said, thank you so much.
[00:15:11]  We will use it, but we still believe that the earth, I mean, this is just a theoretical model.
[00:15:17]  And they banned his book until the 19th century.
[00:15:20]  I was in Poland where they celebrated just a year ago when they celebrated 350 years to the birth of Nicolas Copernicus.
[00:15:27]  They invited me to give a public lecture and the Polish government.
[00:15:32]  And I spoke about the next Copernican revolution, which is to say that we are not at the technological.
[00:15:39]  Center of the universe.
[00:15:40]  You know, Elon Musk is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
[00:15:46]  You know, he sent out the Tesla Roadster car as a dummy payload on the Falcon Heavy from 2018.
[00:15:54]  And just on January 2nd, this year, 2025, an amateur astronomer spotted an asteroid he thought that is passing close to Earth.
[00:16:06]  He called it a near Earth object.
[00:16:09]  And within, after the report, Was classified as an asteroid, a near Earth object.
[00:16:15]  A few astronomers noticed that it has exactly the orbital parameters of the Tesla Roadster car.
[00:16:22]  So here you have an example of the astronomical community at first thinking something is natural, but then it turns out to be artificial.
[00:16:29]  There was another case that Oumuamua was discovered by a telescope in Hawaii on October 19th, 2017.
[00:16:37]  And then in September 2020, about three years later, They discovered another object.
[00:16:43]  This one was pushed away by reflecting sunlight.
[00:16:47]  And then three weeks later, they realized, Oh, it's a rocket booster from a 1966 launch by NASA.
[00:16:55]  So there are cases where we identify technological debris that we produced as prosaic, as like a rock.
[00:17:04]  But three years earlier, when Oumuamua was spotted and it also showed a motion consistent with a push by reflecting sunlight.
[00:17:15]  So, as 2020 SO, just solar radiation pressure.
[00:17:18]  If an object has enough area, a large enough area for its mass, then it can be pushed just like a sail.
[00:17:26]  It just needs to be thin enough.
[00:17:29]  And so, Omuomo showed this property just like 2020 SO.
[00:17:35]  And then I suggested maybe it is technological in origin.
[00:17:40]  And since we didn't launch it, it's not bound to the sun.
[00:17:44]  It was moving too fast to be bound to the sun by gravity.
[00:17:47]  I said, but.
[00:17:48]  It's another civilization that was in my mind a very simple suggestion, right?
[00:17:54]  And verified by objects that we launched.
[00:17:57]  But at first, of course, it was immediately published, and the referee even said, Yeah, actually, what you're saying makes sense because it looks like the best fit to the shape of the object is that of a flat pancake like object.
[00:18:15]  And but then, as soon as the media got attention, and you know, a lot of people.
[00:18:22]  Uh, interviewed me and so forth.
[00:18:24]  I had of the other 4,000 interviews since then, you know.
[00:18:28]  Um, then immediately I start getting personal attacks, pushback.
[00:18:35]  And, you know, that's just a human response.
[00:18:38]  I mean, the strongest force in academia is jealousy, as you know.
[00:18:42]  And, um, I don't really pay much attention to it because this subject is much bigger than mine.
[00:18:47]  You know, I will probably not be alive a few decades from now.
[00:18:50]  But if we do have a neighbor, um, It will affect the future of humanity for the very long term.
[00:18:58]  You know, it would change what we think about our place in the universe.
[00:19:03]  It will imply that we are all in the same boat here on earth and there is a neighbor that we can learn from perhaps and study.
[00:19:12]  You know, there would be space archaeology, a new, you know, a completely new discipline where we would collect artifacts from other civilizations.
[00:19:20]  We could learn about new science, new insights that those neighbors had.
[00:19:25]  And they might, most of them might be dead by now, by the way.
[00:19:28]  Most people, there were more than 100 billion people on Earth so far, and only 8 billion are alive right now.
[00:19:36]  So, most of the civilizations that predated us by billions of years may not be around anymore.
[00:19:42]  Yeah.
[00:19:43]  Yeah.
[00:19:43]  I mean, that's definitely fascinating to think about projecting forward and then, you know, what small amount of time that we have here compared to, you know, what's out there.
[00:19:53]  But here's the thing.
[00:19:53]  There have been, you know, lots of lots of reportings and lots of sightings.
[00:20:05]  Do you think that if there were some, because even with the Galileo project, which is currently, you know, searching for, using science to search for extraterrestrial technologies, you know, signals of extraterrestrial technology, what's the best case scenario that changes everything?
[00:20:25]  Because that prevents goalposts shifting.
[00:20:28]  Oh, no.
[00:20:28]  I mean, it's just having enough evidence.
[00:20:31]  So in June 2023, I went to the Pacific Ocean to, in search for, The materials left over from an interstellar meteor, an object that collided with Earth, roughly half a meter in size, back on January 8, 2014.
[00:20:48]  The fireball from the meteor, as a result of its friction on air, released about 1% of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy.
[00:20:57]  And the US government satellite spotted it.
[00:21:01]  And based on that localization, we could go there and search for anything, any.
[00:21:08]  Molten stuff that was left over from the explosion.
[00:21:13]  The ocean floor is two kilometers deep over there.
[00:21:18]  And we had to use a special device that we built, which looks like a sled, but with magnets on both sides that we put on the ocean floor.
[00:21:28]  And now I asked my students before I went there, you know, if we do recover a gadget and it has buttons on it, should I press a button?
[00:21:37]  And half of the class said, no, please don't press a button.
[00:21:41]  Because who knows what it will do to all of us.
[00:21:44]  And the other half said, please do, because we are very curious to see what will be the result.
[00:21:50]  Is it maybe it's ChatGPT 100?
[00:21:53]  Who knows?
[00:21:54]  So then another student raised his hand and said, Professor Lo, what would you actually do?
[00:22:01]  Because it looks like the vote is split in this class.
[00:22:05]  And I said, I will bring it to the laboratory and examine it before doing anything.
[00:22:12]  But in answer to your question, if I If I would find a gadget, and by the way, we are now planning the next expedition because all we recovered were tiny beads, molten droplets that are less than a millimeter in size.
[00:22:25]  That's based on the equipment that we use, but we have access now to a robot that we can put on the ocean floor with a video feed and collect much bigger pieces from the wreckage.
[00:22:35]  It will cost about six and a half million dollars, this expedition.
[00:22:39]  And I'm currently seeking someone who would fund it.
[00:22:43]  And that person could join us for the expedition.
[00:22:46]  We have an exceptional team.
[00:22:49]  We've been there, we know the place, we have the ship that we identified with the robot.
[00:22:54]  All we need is funding at the moment.
[00:22:57]  And my point is if we recover a big part of the original object, turns out to be a Tesla Roadster car that was produced by another civilization, or something much more exotic than that, or even a rock, you know, that would be a major breakthrough because a rock from outside the solar system, you know, was never available for scientists to touch, you know.
[00:23:24]  All we have seen before were rocks from the solar system, from the main asteroid belt, or from comets that collided with Earth.
[00:23:34]  And you learn something new when you have access to the actual material.
[00:23:38]  You can't see everything through telescopes because they are so far away.
[00:23:43]  What if it is that?
[00:23:43]  What if it is something paradigm shifting?
[00:23:48]  Do you think that the academic, just academia in general, would accept this?
[00:23:55]  Because it's such an anomaly to the current model that people have a hard time.
[00:24:00]  They prefer ignoring the anomaly because it doesn't fit the model than completely changing the model.
[00:24:05]  And we've seen this over and over again.
[00:24:06]  Well, I've seen it over the past two years because when we went to the expedition, there were a number of scientists who said, We don't believe the U.S. government.
[00:24:17]  Um, this data is not reliable.
[00:24:20]  Therefore, it's not clear that it's an interstellar meteor.
[00:24:24]  And I, at the time, I was chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the national academies and I complained about it at dinner.
[00:24:30]  I said, look, what else can I do?
[00:24:33]  I mean, the satellites, you know, are very reliable because they're supposed to detect the heat coming from ballistic missiles.
[00:24:41]  You know, the, the defense, I mean, budget is now 900 Billion dollars a year, you know, it's, um, so they obviously perfected the art of figuring out the, you know, the measuring the velocity of, of, of a fireball, you know, that's an elementary thing.
[00:25:03]  Uh, but the scientists were saying, no, uh, we just don't believe them.
[00:25:07]  So I reached out to the US Space Command through the White House and they released a letter confirming that based on the data they have, this object, the 99.99% came from outside the solar system.
[00:25:20]  I'm just talking about Data obtained by the US government that is being validated by the US Space Command.
[00:25:27]  And scientists have a problem accepting that.
[00:25:30]  Wow.
[00:25:30]  I mean, and just keep in mind that in the 19, at the end of the 1960s, beginning of 1970s, the US government detected gamma ray flashes.
[00:25:41]  The idea was to monitor any atomic explosions above the atmospheres.
[00:25:46]  They put the Vela satellites to look for that and then they found some flashes of gamma rays.
[00:25:52]  Initially, they must have been classified because they thought the Soviets are.
[00:25:55]  Explode, detonation.
[00:25:57]  Yeah.
[00:25:58]  But, um, and that was after a treaty was signed that they're not supposed to do that.
[00:26:02]  But then they realized, oh, it's coming every day, you know, and it's not coming from the vicinity of Earth.
[00:26:10]  So then they realized we can publish it as a paper in, in, in, in astrophysical journal.
[00:26:15]  And, and then this became a whole field of gamma ray bursts that come from the edge of the universe produced by explosions.
[00:26:23]  You have an example of a new field being opened by data collected by the US government.
[00:26:29]  Why would you be host?
[00:26:30]  Nobody back then said, Oh, we don't believe the US government.
[00:26:33]  But when I say this is an interstellar meteor that nobody else identified before, they have an issue with that.
[00:26:40]  Uh, and then we went there.
[00:26:42]  We collected materials and then people said, Oh, you went to the wrong place.
[00:26:46]  This meteor could have been a truck.
[00:26:50]  And I said, What?
[00:26:51]  How can a truck produce 1% of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy?
[00:26:55]  And then said, No, no, no.
[00:26:57]  We are talking about the fact that you were also looking at some seismometer data in the vicinity of that location.
[00:27:03]  And there was a blip in the seismometer, and that blip could have been caused by a truck.
[00:27:09]  And I say, Well, but that's not the reason we went there.
[00:27:12]  It was the fireball.
[00:27:14]  So they say, Oh, yeah, but the fireball could have been maybe in a different way.
[00:27:19]  Anyway, so it was not.
[00:27:20]  And then another person said, Oh, you must have found coal ash, something that is terrestrial.
[00:27:27]  I mean, this is like completely unprofessional because we had the materials.
[00:27:33]  This person didn't have the materials.
[00:27:36]  We were analyzing it with the best instruments in the world in a laboratory that is the most reliable, you know, out there by a geochemist named Stein Jacobson, my colleague at Harvard.
[00:27:47]  We were, we analyzed 60 elements from the periodic table, show that it's not cold ash.
[00:27:52]  But I'm just showing you how people are trying to beat under the belt, you know, without any reference to evidence they have to counteract.
[00:28:02]  It's just to destroy, to kill the, and, and, and, and to, um, Remove any credibility from the scientific study being done.
[00:28:11]  Now, it takes a lot of work to actually, uh, first of all, identify the object in the data that was released by NASA.
[00:28:20]  Then write a paper about it.
[00:28:22]  Then design a plan to go to the Pacific Ocean, get the ship, get the funding of one and a half million dollars.
[00:28:31]  Do the work.
[00:28:32]  Go there for a few weeks.
[00:28:34]  Spend time on the ship.
[00:28:35]  You know, I didn't sleep much.
[00:28:37]  Bring the materials back.
[00:28:39]  Then analyze them for a year.
[00:28:41]  All of this is a lot of work.
[00:28:43]  Those critics, all they're doing is sitting on their chair and raising dust and claiming they can't see anything.
[00:28:50]  And it's really frustrating because, as far as I'm concerned, they're anti science.
[00:28:55]  They just want to step on any flower that rises above the grass level because of jealousy, because of I don't know what.
[00:29:04]  The point is that you can't innovate in science within such a climate.
[00:29:11]  So this is to answer your question.
[00:29:13]  Indeed, um, there is this, um, you know, um, goalpost shifting.
[00:29:20]  Well, yeah, culture of scientists and it is anti-science.
[00:29:24]  Yeah.
[00:29:24]  You know, it's often portrayed as if anti-science sentiments come from the general public.

=== Investing in Technosignatures Now (15:38) ===

[00:29:29]  I got a lot of, you know, there were a few million people that were following my diary reports on medium.com while the expedition was going.
[00:29:37]  There will be a Netflix documentary coming out in a year.
[00:29:40]  The public was very much excited, curious to see what we find.
[00:29:46]  Of course.
[00:29:47]  The anti science sentiments came from scientists.
[00:29:50]  Yeah.
[00:29:51]  And not from the government.
[00:29:52]  And that's the one thing.
[00:29:53]  The government is another.
[00:29:54]  Yeah, they supported the US Space Command, checked the data, confirmed it.
[00:29:59]  And usually the government, like in this space, in the UFO space, you know, a lot of people like to think, well, the government's been sort of anti disclosure and they're hiding things.
[00:30:08]  But in this case, they were very supportive, which is really interesting.
[00:30:11]  But it wasn't the government that was stopping or stifling the research.
[00:30:14]  It was the scientists.
[00:30:16]  The scientists.
[00:30:16]  Now, you know, you might say, okay, well, it doesn't really matter in the long term, but it does because now when I'm trying to seek funding at six and a half million dollars for the next expedition, I have difficulties because people see all these claims that are completely unsubstantiated.
[00:30:35]  Right.
[00:30:36]  So the effect of that is, you know, just like the cancel culture.
[00:30:42]  It also explains why terrorism is so effective because if, you know, it's much easier to destroy a building than to build it.
[00:30:50]  I mean, it could take years to build a empire-style building, but then a terrorist will just bump into it with an airplane.
[00:30:56]  That's it.
[00:30:57]  And so if you want to uncover new knowledge, you know, about anything, then it requires a lot of effort.
[00:31:07]  That's what I was putting into it.
[00:31:09]  And then to destroy it is very easy.
[00:31:11]  So what do you think is the amount of evidence that you require?
[00:31:15]  In order to silence these people?
[00:31:17]  Or do these people, no matter what it is, even if you present an act, if you pull a UFO out of the ocean?
[00:31:22]  Oh, no.
[00:31:22]  I think eventually, if I have enough data, there will be no way for them.
[00:31:27]  So that's why I'm saying.
[00:31:27]  What does that data look like?
[00:31:28]  Yeah.
[00:31:29]  So right now, the Galileo project is funded a few million dollars.
[00:31:33]  Okay.
[00:31:36]  But if I had funding at a level similar to other scientific projects, like for example, the search for dark matter was funded a few billion dollars in recent decades.
[00:31:47]  They haven't found, I mean, we haven't found anything yet.
[00:31:50]  We don't know what the dark matter is made of, but that's the nature of scientific inquiry.
[00:31:54]  Okay.
[00:31:54]  And the Large Hadron Collider was funded at $10 billion.
[00:31:58]  And we only verified that the Higgs boson exists.
[00:32:02]  You know, that's a notion from the 60s.
[00:32:05]  Nothing major.
[00:32:07]  We didn't find the dark matter.
[00:32:08]  We didn't find supersymmetry, things that were really motivating the study.
[00:32:12]  And now CERN is contemplating a plan to build the next accelerator that will cost at least 17 billion euros.
[00:32:21]  And it will be completed by 2070.
[00:32:24]  Just to show you, they put a huge amount of money.
[00:32:27]  I mean, the discovery of the Higgs is a good thing.
[00:32:30]  The verification or the measurement of known parameters of the standard model of particle physics was important, but the real goal was to discover new physics that we haven't thought about.
[00:32:40]  It wasn't done.
[00:32:42]  My point is, we, you know, this, the question of whether we are alone, whether we have a neighbor is the most important question in science.
[00:32:52]  It will have a huge impact on society.
[00:32:54]  How can we have zero federal funding right now to this subject?
[00:33:00]  I mean, maybe not zero, maybe hundreds of thousands, but I'm talking about billions of dollars.
[00:33:06]  And on the other hand, the private sector could provide this funding if people are organized.
[00:33:12]  And I have very specific.
[00:33:15]  Details as to what needs to be done.
[00:33:17]  You know, in the context of the interstellar meteors, we have another one, but if I had the six and a half million dollars, I could go there and try to bring bigger pieces.
[00:33:28]  I can go to the site of the second interstellar meteor that was also uncovered with the same government satellites.
[00:33:36]  I have an idea of a space telescope that could search for interstellar objects.
[00:33:42]  These are objects coming from outside the solar system.
[00:33:46]  The good news is we have a lamppost in our vicinity.
[00:33:50]  It's called the sun.
[00:33:51]  The sun illuminates the darkness of space.
[00:33:54]  And so it's easier to find your keys under the lamppost.
[00:33:58]  So when objects from outside the solar system come close to the sun, they get illuminated, they get heated.
[00:34:05]  So from a distance, you can see them.
[00:34:07]  And you can also, if they evaporate as a result of coming too close to the sun, you can actually detect what they are made of.
[00:34:14]  Sure.
[00:34:14]  And so I wrote a paper a month and a half ago, just explaining that A meter sized telescope in space could detect every five hours a new object that comes within the orbit of Mercury around the sun, which is three times closer to the sun than the earth is, just because the sun illuminates such objects so brightly.
[00:34:40]  And I'm talking about objects that are of the order of a meter in size.
[00:34:45]  You know, Oumuamua was 100 meters in size, the size of a football field, bigger than Starship.
[00:34:53]  You know, our biggest rocket that we ever.
[00:34:55]  So, here I'm saying there are many more smaller objects than big objects.
[00:35:00]  I mean, we launched only smaller objects.
[00:35:02]  So, just doing the math, every five hours there should be such an object coming from interstellar space into the region where the orbit of Mercury is.
[00:35:13]  And we should be able to see it with a space telescope.
[00:35:16]  So, I have specific things that I would have done.
[00:35:19]  If I had the billions of dollars to invest in a space telescope, uh, and, you know, it's really a question of priorities.
[00:35:28]  Right now, the astronomy community decided that the biggest priority is the so-called habitable world observatory to be constructed, you know, by 2040, in the 2040s.
[00:35:40]  So we are talking 20 years from now.
[00:35:43]  It will cost more than $10 billion.
[00:35:45]  And the goal of that observatory will be to find microbes.
[00:35:50]  In the, you know, by detecting the composition of atmospheres of planets around other stars.
[00:35:58]  So, if you see oxygen, you see water, methane, molecules that are indicative of life here on Earth, we will have some clues that maybe primitive life, microbes exist on those planets.
[00:36:14]  But I say we should hedge our bets.
[00:36:16]  We don't know if only microbes are out there.
[00:36:20]  There might be intelligent life, in which case it might be even easier.
[00:36:24]  To figure out.
[00:36:26]  No, I mean, if we were to discover a gadget in the vicinity of Earth, or even just space trash, you know, we are producing a, you can imagine space trash being removed from planetary systems by the evolution of the star.
[00:36:44]  When the star becomes very bright or produces much more wind, a much stronger wind, it can carry out all the technological debris that a civilization produced.
[00:36:54]  It doesn't need to be the civilization launching things all the way out of the of the planetary system that was its birthplace.
[00:37:02]  And so my point is there could be a lot of space trash around it.
[00:37:06]  We haven't really looked except for the past decade.
[00:37:09]  We discovered some interstellar objects.
[00:37:10]  The Oumu Oumu was the first one.
[00:37:12]  The meteor was another one.
[00:37:16]  The point is, uh, we haven't really explored what comes into our backyard and we might find a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor.
[00:37:25]  We need to invest, in my opinion, billions of similar funding or at the very least, 10% of the funding in the search for technological signatures, as the astronomy community is planning to spend on biological signatures.
[00:37:42]  But what?
[00:37:42]  Okay, so let's say, in a perfect scenario, hypothetically speaking, that you had this funding, right?
[00:37:50]  That you had all the tools, all the telescopes, all the everything to collect, all the data that you wanted to collect.
[00:37:57]  What does that look like where you have a perfect scenario where you capture something incredible?
[00:38:04]  How much of that data needs to be collected for something to change?
[00:38:08]  Because the way that I see it currently, that we're gathering semblance of data right now, but even that, even statements such as, like, I worked on a UFO, or there's a UFO crash that happened, or there were alien bodies, like all of these things, which are Massive statements.
[00:38:26]  But even that, I mean, I feel like even if they produced a body or a piece of a UFO, an actual piece of UFO, a lot of people still wouldn't.
[00:38:36]  No, I do believe that once the evidence is tangible, if I can actually present it, there wouldn't be any doubt.
[00:38:44]  You think so?
[00:38:44]  Yeah, yeah, definitely.
[00:38:46]  So I think at the moment, as far as I'm concerned, from a scientific point of view, either the government has something, so I would encourage them to share it with me.
[00:38:55]  I'm not signed on any NDA at the moment, a non-disclosure agreement.
[00:39:00]  Nobody showed me something that is convincing as of now.
[00:39:03]  It may well be that they have something in their possession and I would like to see it before I say anything.
[00:39:09]  But the other approach, I mean, we don't need to rely on the US government to tell us what lies outside the solar system.
[00:39:16]  You know, the sky is not classified.
[00:39:18]  The oceans are not classified.
[00:39:19]  So in that context, if something exists, we would see it.
[00:39:24]  Okay.
[00:39:24]  Because the government is not focused on this matter.
[00:39:27]  They just want to.
[00:39:28]  You know, protect the nation from national defense.
[00:39:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:34]  And so my day job is really what lies outside the solar system.
[00:39:42]  And all I need is funding.
[00:39:44]  And I know exactly what needs to be done.
[00:39:46]  So at the moment, it's limited by funding.
[00:39:48]  If we had the level of funding that is needed, then we can move forward.
[00:39:54]  Now, my complaint about the astronomy community is that, you know, when people say it's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, They don't really put, they're not seeking the evidence, they're not putting funding into this research because they already assume that they know the answer or they say it's too speculative.
[00:40:14]  But, you know, the existence of exoplanets, planets outside the solar system, was considered speculative when I started doing astrophysics about 40 years ago.
[00:40:26]  And people just didn't look at the right places.
[00:40:30]  You know, there was a paper by an astronomer named Otto Struve from 1952 who said that if a planet like Jupiter happens to be close to a star like the sun, we could easily detect it because it would move the star back and forth.
[00:40:47]  It would block a significant fraction of the light if it happens to orbit just in front of the face of the star as it moves around.
[00:40:56]  And people just ignored that.
[00:40:59]  And for You know, 40 years, not much time was allocated on telescopes to looking for such planets because people said, We understand why Jupiter is very far from the sun.
[00:41:14]  We have an understanding, and it must, you know, if it exists elsewhere, it must be for that reason and it will never be close to the star.
[00:41:22]  And then in 1995, there was a discovery of a planet, you know, so called hot Jupiter, Jupiter that is close to the star, and that led to a Nobel Prize.
[00:41:36]  And I looked at the paper of the discovery paper.
[00:41:38]  They didn't really cite Otto Struve.
[00:41:41]  It was completely ignored.
[00:41:42]  Now, you might say, well, eventually it was discovered.
[00:41:44]  Yeah, but it took 40 years.
[00:41:46]  So there is, when you suppress the study of a potentially new frontier just because you don't believe that you have some prejudice or you have some classification, whatever it is, you know, then you would never find the evidence.
[00:42:03]  So it remains as an extraordinary claim.
[00:42:06]  So my point is, first of all, the fact that we exist.
[00:42:09]  Is obviously accepted by everyone.
[00:42:12]  And that something like us exists on planets that had similar conditions, being at the same distance from their host star, you know, and made of rock and potentially having an atmosphere.
[00:42:26]  You know, there are billions of planets like that based on the latest statistics.
[00:42:30]  And so just arguing that something like us existed billions of years ago, you know, is an ordinary claim.
[00:42:40]  It's not extraordinary.
[00:42:41]  Yep.
[00:42:41]  And I say billions of years ago because most stars formed billions of years before the sun.
[00:42:46]  The sun formed only in the last one third of cosmic history.
[00:42:50]  So the point is, I think it's an ordinary claim.
[00:42:53]  I think that we are sort of in the middle of the class, if you imagine a class of intelligent civilizations.
[00:42:58]  And moreover, that requires ordinary evidence.
[00:43:03]  But to find the evidence, we just need funding and scientists who are willing to do it.
[00:43:08]  I'm willing to do it.
[00:43:09]  I have a team of people willing to work on it.
[00:43:12]  The only limitation is funding.
[00:43:15]  Sure.
[00:43:15]  The mainstream of astronomy is not funding it at the level of billions of dollars.
[00:43:20]  That's the issue.
[00:43:21]  They're funding the search for microbes with the argument that microbes appeared on Earth very early.
[00:43:28]  Okay.
[00:43:30]  But, okay.
[00:43:31]  So, indeed, microbes might be much more prevalent, you know, everywhere.
[00:43:36]  The issue is that to find evidence for them is very difficult because they affect in a very subtle way the atmosphere, the composition of the atmosphere of a planet.
[00:43:47]  In a way that you might not be able to distinguish.
[00:43:49]  You need more sophisticated instruments to even pick up signatures of that.
[00:43:53]  Well, it's very difficult to do that, but also the intelligence.
[00:43:56]  You're saying it's easier to look for extraterrestrial technology than it is to look for microbes.
[00:44:00]  Well, if you find a gadget, not only it tells you that life exists out there, but also that it's intelligent.
[00:44:06]  So even though it might be rarer than microbes, uh, if you've, finding it and interpreting it might be easier just because it may be targeting, let's say, the earth or Even if it's just space trash, you can easily distinguish it from a natural origin, you know, and can say that's a piece of technology that we didn't produce.
[00:44:30]  So, my point is, we should hedge our bets.
[00:44:33]  Whenever you invest, you need to, you know, given the fact that, for example, in the context of dark matter, we searched for 50 years, didn't, you know, with laboratory experiments, looking at the sky, haven't figured out the nature of dark matter, billions of dollars.
[00:44:48]  It's not as if we were always successful when we invested in searches.
[00:44:53]  So, we might search for microbes.
[00:44:55]  We might find them.
[00:44:56]  We might not.
[00:44:57]  But if you invest more than $10 billion in one direction, you should at least invest, let's say, 10% of that in a different direction because it might be more productive.

=== Hedging Our Scientific Bets (06:24) ===

[00:45:08]  I agree.
[00:45:09]  And so, unfortunately, it's right now the number is not a few billions, it's zero.
[00:45:14]  And I say that's a completely insane approach to the subject.
[00:45:20]  Yeah.
[00:45:21]  Yeah.
[00:45:21]  No, definitely.
[00:45:22]  I think most of us would agree that we would love to see funding in that direction.
[00:45:26]  You know, speaking of all this, you'd mentioned just a little bit before of like detecting these things if we put them on satellites.
[00:45:36]  You know, part of your early, I think, academic career as well, you were involved in such work, correct?
[00:45:44]  Yes.
[00:45:44]  Yeah, you had, you would think that during that time, you would have seen something or you would have heard some rumors or something, right?
[00:45:56]  In that type of line of work when you're working on, you know, this theoretical physics or plasma physics or, you know, like you didn't hear of anybody talking about these things that might have been hidden or never came across?
[00:46:13]  I, I, I was not exposed to these kinds of reports, and it's possible that my line of research was completely separate from that.
[00:46:23]  Yeah, it was just because, yeah, I mean, because you hear things like even Haimah Shedd, who's, you know, the father of the Israeli space program.
[00:46:31]  Right.
[00:46:32]  But he was in the intelligence as well.
[00:46:34]  Yes.
[00:46:35]  So that's probably where he heard.
[00:46:37]  But I mean, he was also responsible for putting 13 satellites up into space.
[00:46:41]  Oh, yeah, but that was not the source of information that he claims to have had.
[00:46:45]  I think he was referring to things that he heard while being in the intelligence.
[00:46:48]  The intelligence, right.
[00:46:49]  Okay.
[00:46:50]  So they, yeah, they, they would have compartmentalized that, uh, then in that case.
[00:46:53]  And I, I was never in the intelligence.
[00:46:55]  Yeah.
[00:46:55]  Uh, as far as we know.
[00:46:56]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:46:58]  Um, so, okay.
[00:46:58]  That's, that's, I mean, that's interesting because there are rumors too, like, cause you'd mentioned, uh, somewhere that I'd read that, um, it was basically the Israeli version of the Star Wars initiative, which was started by Reagan in like 80.
[00:47:11]  No, no, no.
[00:47:12]  Okay.
[00:47:12]  3 or 87.
[00:47:14]  So that is part of my, um, history.
[00:47:17]  Yes.
[00:47:17]  So I, well, first I started, I grew up on a farm.
[00:47:21]  Um, And I was interested in philosophy, the existential questions that we have.
[00:47:28]  And then there is obligatory military service in Israel.
[00:47:34]  So at age 18, I had to be drafted.
[00:47:37]  The question was whether to be a soldier in the field or with a machine gun running, or do something that was closer to philosophy, as far as I'm concerned, which was actually doing science and physics.
[00:47:50]  And there was a new program that started a year before, and they recruited me as.
[00:47:55]  One of 25 people out of thousands that were going to the military.
[00:48:01]  Wow.
[00:48:02]  Because I was good in physics and mathematics.
[00:48:05]  And I was the first one to finish a PhD in that program at age 24.
[00:48:11]  But I always wanted to do research because it was closer to my love, early love to philosophy.
[00:48:17]  So I started a project that was the first one to be supported by Regan's Star Wars initiative.
[00:48:25]  It was just accelerating masses to high speeds using electric energy instead of chemical propellants.
[00:48:34]  And that was the first project funded by the Strategic Defense Initiative at the time, SDI or Star Wars.
[00:48:41]  And they funded us at a few million dollars a year and did this project.
[00:48:49]  And it was a result of a visit by General Abramson, who came to Israel for a visit.
[00:48:56]  And I presented the project and he liked it.
[00:48:59]  And so that's what brought me to the US.
[00:49:02]  We used to visit Washington.
[00:49:04]  And then in one of the visits, I spent a day at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where I was offered a long term fellowship, a five year position, under the condition that I'll switch to astrophysics.
[00:49:19]  So, one thing led to another, and I ended up being offered a position at Harvard University, a junior faculty position, five years after that.
[00:49:28]  And nobody wanted it because the chance of getting promoted there were very small.
[00:49:35]  But I took it because I could always go back to the farm.
[00:49:38]  I had a job security.
[00:49:39]  You could fall back.
[00:49:42]  And then three years later, I was tenured because Cornell University offered me a tenured appointment.
[00:49:49]  I see.
[00:49:50]  And so, you know, at that point, I realized I'm, you know, already too deep into this.
[00:49:57]  And, you know, even though I'm married, I'm actually married to my true love because there are questions that are very fundamental that we can address using the scientific method.
[00:50:08]  And so that's where I am.
[00:50:10]  And that's why I think differently.
[00:50:12]  I think about the big picture more than most physicists or astronomers.
[00:50:16]  It just looks to me like this is a subject that should have received much more funding, much more attention.
[00:50:23]  So that's what I'm promoting right now.
[00:50:25]  But before that, I worked on black holes a lot.
[00:50:28]  I founded the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, that Stephen Hawking came for the inauguration of that center.
[00:50:34]  And I also served as chair of the astronomy department for three terms, the longest serving chair.
[00:50:43]  I'm still the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard.
[00:50:49]  So I had many leadership roles.
[00:50:51]  I was also chairing the board on physics and astronomy for the National Academies.
[00:50:54]  I was a member of the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology Policy in the White House.
[00:51:04]  And so, you know, the reason I'm not afraid of the headwind is because I have a lot of experience.
[00:51:17]  You know, I know the scientific community.
[00:51:23]  I know that what I'm doing is not very different from other parts of science where we don't know the answer in advance.
[00:51:30]  So that's the way you approach it.

=== Leading Physics from Harvard (05:28) ===

[00:51:33]  And I think this is a subject the public cares a lot about and we should.
[00:51:38]  Therefore, address it scientifically.
[00:51:39]  I think a lot of scientists just avoid it because it's risky.
[00:51:43]  We don't know the answer in advance, and there is a huge interest from the public, so they try to avoid that sentiment.
[00:51:53]  And I see it as a great benefit because science is funded by taxpayers' money.
[00:52:01]  And therefore, we should listen to what the public is interested in.
[00:52:04]  In fact, we should work on the subject that the public cares about.
[00:52:08]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:52:09]  I think there's also, um, you know, when you look at what you're getting out of it versus what you're putting in and the implications of this being real versus the amount of evidence that exists, which isn't much physical evidence, uh, but the implications far outweigh anything because even if we have 1% evidence, the implications change everything, right?
[00:52:29]  So it's worth putting a lot of eggs in that basket.
[00:52:31]  Just think about the Moses, uh, who in the, according to the biblical story in the Old Testament, he was, he witnessed the burning bush and that convinced him of A superhuman entity that he called God.
[00:52:44]  And if we were to show Moses a cell phone, I think he would have been much more impressed than a bush that is burning without being consumed.
[00:52:54]  And also, the cell phone would have served a very important role because Moses went for 40 years in the desert before he got close to the promised land.
[00:53:04]  With a GPS system of a cell phone, he would have spent much less time and would have gotten there within a few weeks.
[00:53:10]  All I'm trying to say is that finding a piece of technology that is far more advanced than we produced could fill us with O in the similar way that Moses was filled with O. Uh, it will not, you know, just like the cell phone, the cell phone is produced by humans, not by superhuman intelligence.
[00:53:33]  It's just a higher level of science and technology that allowed us to make it.
[00:53:38]  And if someone else in our cosmic neighborhood had more than a century, we just had one century since quantum mechanics was discovered.
[00:53:45]  You know, it was exactly a century ago.
[00:53:47]  And nowadays, all the chips that are manufactured for artificial intelligence, they are based on our understanding of quantum mechanics that is only one century old.
[00:53:57]  And so just think about it.
[00:53:59]  What if we had a thousand years, a million years, or maybe a billion years of science?
[00:54:05]  How far can we go?
[00:54:07]  Yeah, even just another hundred years because it seems really exponential at this point.
[00:54:10]  Oh, yeah.
[00:54:11]  You know, that's something I often ponder too is like when we see or hear about these reports of these crafts doing these incredible things, you think to yourself, well, the way that technology is doubling down, especially propulsion technology, if you look at, you know, we went from wood burning to coal burning to, you know, and then nuclear.
[00:54:30]  And what, whatever the next step is there, but it's exponential in what we're getting back.
[00:54:35]  The one caveat is that, um, as AI systems get smarter, human gets, humans get, uh, dumber.
[00:54:43]  Yeah.
[00:54:43]  Because the tasks that were done by humans before that, uh, you know, it's just like an athlete, uh, exercising.
[00:54:50]  Obviously the muscles are in good shape.
[00:54:52]  But if we, uh, if we just give those tasks to AI systems, um, Our brain will be less capable.
[00:55:04]  It'll shrink.
[00:55:04]  It will shrink.
[00:55:05]  So, so that actually, when people estimate the time when artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence, they might be overestimating how long it will be because humans will get dumber very soon.
[00:55:18]  Yeah.
[00:55:19]  You know, I was actually in Necker Island.
[00:55:23]  They had lunch with Richard Branson a week ago, and they were serving chicken there.
[00:55:32]  And someone said that, you know, that's what they eat because it's very good for your diet.
[00:55:38]  And I said, the only reason that we are serving chicken, you know, on the menu is because we think that chickens are less intelligent.
[00:55:48]  Imagine putting an implant on.
[00:55:54]  An AI implant in a chicken's brain so that it makes it much smarter, we would have reservations of eating a chicken that is as smart as we are, right?
[00:56:06]  And the reason it's important to consider that is because imagine aliens arriving at our planet, they could serve us for their lunch.
[00:56:15]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  And that's one of the big arguments, too, is like, you know, you think of these stories like John Max.
[00:56:24]  Covered and everything else, you know, that they're coming here and they're doing these terrible experiments.
[00:56:28]  You're like, well, is that so different from what we're doing to other species on this planet?
[00:56:32]  The idea is definitely viable.
[00:56:34]  The only problem that I have with what John Mack was doing is that he relied on people.
[00:56:39]  I mean, if something is out there, we should be able to document it, right?
[00:56:42]  Just like we do.
[00:56:43]  So I'm taking the approach of FIFA, okay?
[00:56:46]  Yeah.
[00:56:47]  It doesn't go around, ask the players, it just looks at data from cameras and figures it out.
[00:56:52]  So what do you make of like the theoretical stuff?
[00:56:55]  Like, let's say, like, The gravity A, gravity B idea from Bob Lazar.

=== Wormholes and New Physics (07:54) ===

[00:57:01]  He has this idea that there are two types of gravity, they behave in waves, and that gravity A is this sort of gravity B is like the planet, you know, the general gravity, and then gravity A is this gravity that's manufactured that you can increase at a point to sort of snap forward.
[00:57:19]  Well, what we know about gravity is what Albert Einstein summarized in his theory of general relativity.
[00:57:26]  Now, there There could be things that go beyond the technologies that we possess.
[00:57:31]  I mean, so when we launch spacecraft, we are just responding to the standard gravity that the Earth, the Sun, planets, any other body generates.
[00:57:44]  And as far as we know, there are only positive masses that produce gravity.
[00:57:49]  Gravity is attractive.
[00:57:50]  That was the idea of Newton.
[00:57:53]  He saw the apple falling and realized, oh, yeah, there is a gravitational force pulling it towards the Earth.
[00:58:01]  Now, it turns out that's not the full story because we see the universe expanding, but the expansion is not slowing down the way the apple would.
[00:58:11]  I mean, if you throw an apple up, it will fall, it will decelerate, slow down.
[00:58:16]  But the universe is accelerating its expansion.
[00:58:18]  It's as if you threw the apple up and it will move faster and faster as it goes away from you.
[00:58:25]  That's like repulsive gravity.
[00:58:27]  And according to Einstein, it's possible to get an effect of repulsive gravity.
[00:58:33]  If the vacuum itself has some mass density, that's called, that was termed by Einstein the cosmological constant.
[00:58:42]  And as of last week, there is some preliminary evidence that indicates that it's not really a constant, maybe, maybe it's evolving.
[00:58:52]  But at any event, you can get repulsive gravity on average in the universe at large.
[00:59:01]  The question is, can you bottle That can you create a negative mass?
[00:59:06]  Because if you could just imagine a positive mass and a negative mass next to each other, the positive mass would pull the negative mass because it has attractive gravity, the negative mass will push away the positive mass, and so they will move together, accelerating both of them together.
[00:59:26]  Uh, and they would accelerate all the way to the speed of light without any fuel.
[00:59:31]  You don't need any fuel for that.
[00:59:34]  It's just a result of the existence of repulsive gravity.
[00:59:37]  If you were to bottle that, yeah.
[00:59:39]  Yeah.
[00:59:40]  So, you may ask, okay, where is the energy of the motion coming from?
[00:59:46]  Well, if you have a positive mass and negative mass, the total energy is zero, the total kinetic energy.
[00:59:52]  Right, nothing's happening.
[00:59:53]  So, but no, something here.
[00:59:55]  I mean, the two of them, I mean, if you were to sit on, let's say you are sitting on Earth, and next to Earth, you put a negative mass Earth, you know, we would.
[01:00:05]  But the action reaction is canceling out.
[01:00:07]  Well, we would accelerate together with this negative mass up to this, very close to the speed of light, no fuel needed.
[01:00:15]  And you would not feel any problem living on that planet because the acceleration would be comparable to 1G, the one that we usually sense.
[01:00:24]  And if you accelerate for 1G for a year, you get very close to the speed of light, actually.
[01:00:30]  And after that, you get extremely close to the speed of light.
[01:00:33]  So in fact, you can go in with such a vehicle, if it existed, you can go throughout the entire observable universe in your lifetime within several decades because you will get so close to the speed of light that light would, um, Slow down in your frame of reference.
[01:00:50]  So, even though billions of years are passing in the rest of the universe, in your accelerating frame, which is just accelerating at 1G, you know, it's nothing.
[01:01:00]  I mean, our body can tolerate that easily.
[01:01:02]  You will actually cross billions of light years, uh, and time would tick much more close and much more slowly in your frame.
[01:01:10]  Anyway, this is just one example of a situation where gravity follows Einstein's theory, except that there is some new ingredient like negative mass.
[01:01:21]  Um, We don't know if such a thing exists.
[01:01:23]  And the same, you know, if such a thing exists, you could show that you can build a time machine also, that you can go back in time.
[01:01:32]  If I had access to a time machine, I would go back to the Second World War, just before the Second World War, and shoot Hitler, by which I might save the lives of six million Jews.
[01:01:47]  You know, that would be my preference.
[01:01:49]  The fact that it never happened, In our timeline.
[01:01:54]  Yeah, means that no Jew had access to a time machine.
[01:01:59]  Or, yeah, but then there, you know, brings up the whole other bunch of paradoxes when you start going down that road, like the multiverse idea, or, you know, there's other theories that if you were to go back and kill patient zero who had COVID, then you would be patient zero and you would start COVID.
[01:02:17]  There are logical issues, and that's why Stephen Hawking argued that.
[01:02:24]  Perhaps there is some censorship.
[01:02:25]  He called it a new principle that allows, it's called the chronology conjecture that allows history.
[01:02:39]  You can never violate the chronology.
[01:02:42]  It would always fix itself.
[01:02:43]  Somehow it will be prevented.
[01:02:44]  Now, one idea that was suggested already by Einstein and Rosen, Nathan Rosen, his postdoc back in the 1930s, was.
[01:02:59]  Maybe you can build a bridge that will connect different regions of space and traverse the distance through a sort of a tunnel, a wormhole.
[01:03:08]  Sure, yeah.
[01:03:09]  Shorten the.
[01:03:11]  I mean, one way to think of this is imagine, you know, two points on a surface of a balloon.
[01:03:21]  And if you were to pass from one point to the other without going across the surface, it would be a shorter path, you know.
[01:03:28]  So, at any event, They came up with a solution of a wormhole, but then it was found that such a solution is not stable within Einstein's theory of gravity.
[01:03:39]  And it basically snaps off before you're able to traverse the wormhole.
[01:03:44]  And even if you do that at the speed of light, it snaps too quickly.
[01:03:49]  And then it was realized that perhaps you can stabilize this wormhole again if you had access to exotic material that produces negative gravity, kind of a negative.
[01:03:58]  It's like element 115 type deal.
[01:03:59]  No, no.
[01:04:01]  I'm still talking about negative math.
[01:04:03]  No, what Bob Lazar talks about, you know, if he knew how to do it, if he had access to any real material or data that he could demonstrate, he would have gotten the Nobel Prize.
[01:04:18]  You know, that would have been new physics.
[01:04:22]  I think that was the problem, though, is that he didn't have, like, once he was out, he didn't have access to, you know, working with that material again.
[01:04:29]  But he can then suggest how this, This works, you know, and he didn't write any scientific paper that I saw that looks convincing.
[01:04:38]  So at the moment, just again, it's just like these eyewitness testimonies.
[01:04:43]  If you don't, you know, where is the beef?
[01:04:46]  You know, if you don't see the actual thing, people can invent lots of stories.
[01:04:51]  We know that throughout human history that people were telling stories that were not true.

=== Observing Anomalies Publicly (15:17) ===

[01:04:56]  Okay.
[01:04:56]  That includes the story of the Vatican, you know, that in 1992, they admitted that Galileo Galilei was right.
[01:05:05]  And that was, you know, 350 years after he died.
[01:05:09]  It didn't help him.
[01:05:12]  It was 20, you know, two decades after humans landed on the moon.
[01:05:16]  So, you know, at that point, it was ridiculous for them to insist that the Earth is at the center of the universe.
[01:05:23]  So, my point is it's not about someone telling you a story, it's more about the evidence.
[01:05:30]  That's the key the data, the evidence that will be beyond any reasonable doubt, that nobody can dispute.
[01:05:37]  Everyone can be the referee.
[01:05:39]  And it would be so clear and abundant that there will be no way out.
[01:05:43]  That's what we need.
[01:05:44]  No room for story.
[01:05:45]  Yeah.
[01:05:45]  No, no room for storytelling.
[01:05:47]  And, you know, we can potentially get that evidence in the context of science.
[01:05:52]  What I'm doing, it's just a matter of investing the funds to do the research.
[01:05:56]  The fact that scientists do not have such evidence is simply because they haven't done the work.
[01:06:00]  Okay.
[01:06:01]  And almost all of them are not willing to do the work.
[01:06:04]  I'm willing to do the work in the context of government.
[01:06:09]  If they do have something, just because they monitor the sky for so many decades, you know, if they do have the evidence, I want to see it.
[01:06:18]  Okay.
[01:06:18]  I don't need people to tell me that they have the evidence.
[01:06:21]  That's not enough.
[01:06:22]  Wouldn't it make sense that they wouldn't show you?
[01:06:25]  No, it doesn't make any sense.
[01:06:26]  You don't think so?
[01:06:27]  It doesn't make any sense.
[01:06:28]  You think that they don't have like a good enough reason to keep it hidden?
[01:06:33]  The only reason I can see is if they haven't figured it out, they still suspect it might be from an adversarial nation.
[01:06:41]  So in that case, When they admit they have something they cannot figure out, it may show their weakness.
[01:06:48]  Wouldn't that look the same if that adversary was potentially extraterrestrial?
[01:06:53]  Wouldn't that look identical to the situation?
[01:06:56]  Because let me give you an example.
[01:06:57]  Suppose you live in a house, okay, and you see all these other houses that look just like yours on the street.
[01:07:05]  Sure.
[01:07:06]  And your family members, in my case, it's my colleagues, keep saying, We don't know if they have any residents, these houses.
[01:07:14]  They might be completely empty.
[01:07:16]  It's an extraordinary claim to say.
[01:07:18]  That there are residents in these houses, even though the houses look just like yours.
[01:07:23]  And then one day you go out to your backyard and you find an empty trash bag or a tennis ball that came from a neighbor's yard.
[01:07:34]  And then you realize, well, actually, I might have a neighbor.
[01:07:39]  Then you sit at dinner and a dinner table, and you have two options either to inform your family that you found this thing and that we might have neighbors, or to keep it quiet.
[01:07:53]  And my choice would be very simple.
[01:07:55]  I would immediately tell all my family members about it because it doesn't make any sense to hide such a fact because one day the neighbor will knock on the door or come to your backyard or affect your home in different ways.
[01:08:10]  And everyone should be aware of that because that's part of reality.
[01:08:13]  You know, we need to recognize that we live in a neighborhood where there are neighbors.
[01:08:17]  Sure.
[01:08:17]  But also, like, you know, the implications of this type of technology, if detected by a single government, If retrieved by a single government, and let's say there is some hypothetically some type of Cold War situation where they're all trying to back engineer the same tech, but nobody's doing it successfully, like that would make for a situation where you don't want to show your hand.
[01:08:41]  Well, but you know, we had wars for the past century, and I haven't seen any technological gadget that goes beyond what we understand with our science.
[01:08:53]  Well, it did with the Manhattan Project at the time.
[01:08:56]  Not really.
[01:08:57]  I mean, nuclear physics was understood before.
[01:09:00]  I, I would, you know, the most plausible scenario for me is that the government may have something that they cannot figure out.
[01:09:07]  That's the only thing.
[01:09:09]  So they keep it under wraps because, you know, they just classified it as something that is not fully understood and they just don't want to expose what we know, what we don't know.
[01:09:19]  And maybe, you know, maybe there are some corporations that are looking into it and they, Want to get paid so they don't figure it out either.
[01:09:30]  And I see it sits somewhere.
[01:09:32]  Um, that's the only plausible scenario.
[01:09:34]  But since I haven't seen that thing, you know, I would love to see it, you know, I would, because, you know, if they have something, then I'm, I'm wasting my time.
[01:09:43]  Uh, you know, for me, it's really the, uh, the discovery that matters.
[01:09:49]  It's not who does it and when, you know, it's just let's, let's figure it out.
[01:09:54]  And, you know, if we search and not find anything, then, um, I think we, just like in the case of the search for dark matter, we learned something out of that.
[01:10:03]  Yeah, there's the search.
[01:10:05]  I think it's important to have both of those.
[01:10:07]  I think the search is important, what you're doing, and using the Galileo Project and all these other amazing efforts into documenting and tracing data and trying to find observables, but also to have people knocking on doors and kicking down doors and subpoenaing and like, hey, let's see what you got.
[01:10:28]  Open up the vault.
[01:10:29]  We want to see if you're.
[01:10:30]  You know, actually, have some exotic, even if it's just metals, you know, or whatever that is.
[01:10:35]  Either that or maybe even satellite data or other data that some people in government talked about.
[01:10:41]  What do you make of all the like FLIR footage that was released, like in 2017 and all that stuff?
[01:10:46]  What do you make of that?
[01:10:47]  The data that was released was not sufficiently convincing, but it's quite possible the government has additional data that was discussed behind closed doors.
[01:10:58]  That was more sensitive, a little bit more revealing.
[01:11:01]  I mean, the official statement comes from the.
[01:11:03]  All domain anomaly resolution office.
[01:11:06]  And, you know, they said that 97% of all the objects or all the reports that they looked into, first of all, they say they have access to everything.
[01:11:17]  And then they say 97% of what we looked into can be explained as mundane, you know, things like prongs, balloons.
[01:11:27]  And then there is a small subset of reports that.
[01:11:35]  Keep coming up and they cannot figure out.
[01:11:37]  Okay.
[01:11:38]  And so to me as a scientist, you know, the Galileo project is already having data on millions of objects in the sky.
[01:11:45]  Okay.
[01:11:46]  Much more than anyone else had before.
[01:11:49]  And it just takes time for us to go through it.
[01:11:52]  We need triangulation.
[01:11:53]  We need multiple units that look at the same object so we can figure out the distance.
[01:11:58]  We will hopefully have that by this summer.
[01:12:00]  We have one observatory that was the initial observatory that we developed at Harvard that just to get everything working and It looks at the entire sky in the infrared, optical, radio, and audio.
[01:12:13]  And then we analyze the data with machine learning software so we can look for any unfamiliar objects, objects that are not drones, balloons, satellites, airplanes, leaves, clouds.
[01:12:26]  So we automate the, and then once the system identifies objects of interest, we, we will very closely look at them.
[01:12:35]  Um, but the issue is that we need triangulation to figure out distances because without distance, you don't know the actual speed of the object.
[01:12:42]  You don't know the actual acceleration or the size of it.
[01:12:44]  So we are building.
[01:12:46]  Two other observatories that should be completed by this summer, summer 2025.
[01:12:51]  One in Pennsylvania, another one in Nevada.
[01:12:54]  And I got funding for both.
[01:12:56]  And there is another observatory perhaps within the next two years that will be built in Indiana.
[01:13:02]  That's exciting.
[01:13:03]  In a STEM education center.
[01:13:06]  Wow.
[01:13:06]  That I see as very important because the goal of that one would be to educate young adults about how exciting science can be.
[01:13:16]  You know, the fact that many scientists dismiss this subject and are not attending to the interests of the public has two negative effects.
[01:13:24]  First, this subject is not being studied.
[01:13:27]  We don't collect data.
[01:13:28]  The second is that it makes science sound more boring and formal.
[01:13:35]  But in fact, it's just following your childhood curiosity.
[01:13:39]  Science allows you to figure out the answers to questions without waiting for the adults in the room to tell you the answer.
[01:13:48]  We don't need to wait for the government.
[01:13:49]  We don't need to wait for scientists to tell us the answer.
[01:13:52]  We just need to collect the data.
[01:13:54]  And the point is, once we have good enough data, we will be able to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt what's going on.
[01:14:02]  Have you found anything currently of interest?
[01:14:04]  I know that you need to triangulate to get more data, but is there anything that is exciting in terms of things that you have observed that might lead to a really substantial discovery, or is it all too preliminary?
[01:14:17]  It's preliminary.
[01:14:18]  My hope, and I'm telling that to my research team all the time, that You know, we can put limits on how, you know, even if we can put limits at the level of one part in a million right now.
[01:14:30]  Um, I'm not talking about three percent that arrow.
[01:14:34]  Yeah, three percent is pretty big.
[01:14:36]  Yeah, one part in a million.
[01:14:37]  It's much better.
[01:14:39]  Um, but I'm telling my colleagues that in the team that, um, if we find one object that seems really unusual, then we will write a paper about that and you will know about that.
[01:14:53]  Uh, if we write papers only about statistics means that we haven't found that object.
[01:14:58]  I see.
[01:14:59]  I'm very much in line with what you're suggesting and I hope that we will report back.
[01:15:05]  And you know, so my hope is in 2025, we will have.
[01:15:10]  Two new observatories in interesting locations because Boston is not really interesting as far.
[01:15:16]  We just put it there because it's close so we can make sure that everything works.
[01:15:21]  But yeah, going to Pennsylvania and Nevada could be very exciting.
[01:15:26]  And in addition, I hope that we will get the funding for the expedition to go again and bring bigger pieces from the interstellar meteor and go to the second site of the second interstellar meteor, which was closer to Europe actually.
[01:15:40]  And then I hope that the Rubin Observatory in Chile, that will start operations in the summer of 2025, will find more objects like Oumuamua.
[01:15:52]  It has the capability to find such an object every few months, for sure.
[01:15:59]  Do you?
[01:16:00]  So, there's this idea as well.
[01:16:02]  Now, have you met Chris Bledsoe?
[01:16:05]  No.
[01:16:07]  Interesting guy where he says he claims to summon these orbs, is what it seems to be.
[01:16:14]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:16:15]  I heard about it.
[01:16:16]  Yes.
[01:16:16]  Is there any interest in working with someone who has these claims to see if that can increase the amount of data or the amount of like?
[01:16:29]  Because the problem with observing anomalies is that you don't know when they happen.
[01:16:33]  Right.
[01:16:34]  But if you can control when they happen, I mean, it gives you far more data.
[01:16:37]  That would be fantastic.
[01:16:38]  I mean, not him, but there was another person who suggested that, and we gave it a try.
[01:16:44]  There was nothing unusual.
[01:16:46]  Yeah.
[01:16:46]  Okay.
[01:16:47]  Yeah.
[01:16:48]  And what do you make of this like psionic talk these days?
[01:16:52]  There's this, I don't know if you're familiar, there was a alleged whistleblower named Jake Barber who came out and talked about some type of telepathic.
[01:17:02]  Yeah, sure.
[01:17:03]  This psionic sort of telepathic interfacing with technology to sort of bring them in or invite them in and then microwave cannons to take them down.
[01:17:12]  Yeah.
[01:17:13]  You know, I have nothing against such proposals as long as they work.
[01:17:16]  You know, and is that something you'd be willing to if such a person wants to give it a try?
[01:17:22]  You're not opposed to it.
[01:17:24]  No, I mean, if it doesn't work, you know, I'm very much driven by whatever the evidence shows, and people claim to, of course, we don't want to waste our time, but it would be worthwhile trying it.
[01:17:41]  I love that answer.
[01:17:42]  I think it's such a great.
[01:17:43]  Outlook on this subject because again, we're met, you know, as people who are seeking, you know, extraterrestrial life and at some level want it to be real, right?
[01:17:54]  There's like, there's a profound philosophical sort of like level that I'm like, wow, that would be amazing and it would create awe and it would be awe inspiring.
[01:18:02]  Trying to not let that, you know, confirmation bias skew my, you know, direction too much.
[01:18:08]  But it is so fun hearing someone who is not close to the idea, but who's also so closely connected to.
[01:18:17]  The mainstream scientific community.
[01:18:20]  And so, you know, because I know my audience and I know a lot of people are going to say, well, what about all the whistleblowers or what about all the testimony of people who said they saw a UFO or all of this?
[01:18:31]  And, you know, what I'm hearing from you is quite clear.
[01:18:34]  It isn't that you're against any of that.
[01:18:36]  It's, you know, we need to see it.
[01:18:38]  We need to observe it.
[01:18:39]  We need to validate it.
[01:18:41]  We need to validate it.
[01:18:42]  Right.
[01:18:42]  And I think it's amazing.
[01:18:44]  It's just like someone, you want to buy a used car and someone tells you stories.
[01:18:48]  I mean, that's not good enough.
[01:18:50]  You have to bring it to a mechanic to make sure the car works.
[01:18:53]  Yeah.
[01:18:53]  Yeah.
[01:18:54]  I think that's a great way of approaching the subject from a scientific viewpoint.
[01:18:59]  Personally, I'm still heavily invested in stories.
[01:19:03]  By the way, the way to think of me is not as a university professor.
[01:19:10]  It's more, you know, I'm just trying to follow common sense and, you know, and make my assertions based on evidence.
[01:19:20]  You know, I'm trying to be as real as possible.
[01:19:23]  Of course, you know, you can take.
[01:19:24]  Recreational drugs and imagine a reality that doesn't exist, but that will be in your head.
[01:19:30]  What I'm trying to understand is the reality that we all share, meaning that whenever we see it, we will all see the same thing, right?
[01:19:38]  So if there is something real in all of this subject, we should be able to get very solid evidence that it's out there.
[01:19:46]  And that's what I'm after.
[01:19:47]  Yeah.
[01:19:48]  Yeah.
[01:19:49]  It's interesting stuff.
[01:19:51]  It's an interesting time that we live in that we're able to even talk about observing these things in a public light.
[01:19:57]  I think, uh, and, and finding some support, you know, I think is, is, uh, well, it's a selection effect.
[01:20:02]  You know, if, um, you live at the wrong time and you talk about things that people around you do not agree with, you don't survive for very long.
[01:20:09]  Yeah.
[01:20:09]  So, um, is that part of the reason you named this project, uh, the Galileo project?

=== The Galileo Project Origins (04:33) ===

[01:20:14]  Because of this idea that Galileo Galilei, you know, presented heliocentrism and was, you know, uh, was basically house arrested, uh, you know, because of this notion.
[01:20:26]  Is that how you see studying UAP?
[01:20:28]  Do you see?
[01:20:29]  That kind of.
[01:20:30]  Yeah.
[01:20:30]  Interestingly, in 2012, I was invited to give a series of lectures at the Scuola Normale Superior, which is one of the most prestigious institutions in Italy, in Pisa, where Galileo worked.
[01:20:44]  And it was called the Catedra Galileana.
[01:20:48]  And that, that was a honor for them to invite me.
[01:20:51]  And I gave the talks.
[01:20:52]  And I, that, that was my first introduction to his pioneering work.
[01:20:58]  And he basically improved the ability of a telescope that was invented around the same time and was able to see four points of light around Jupiter, realize that they're moving around Jupiter, could see that they're moving, meaning that not everything in the sky is moving around the Earth.
[01:21:19]  And that validated the argument that Copernicus made before him.
[01:21:25]  And he obviously was.
[01:21:29]  You know, making a big fuss about it, and the church didn't like it, and he was put in house arrest.
[01:21:36]  Now, just a month ago, I received a sculpture, a bronze sculpture by one of the most accomplished sculptors in the US.
[01:21:45]  His name is Greg Wyatt, and you know, he made sculptures that are in New York City, in Washington, at the Arlington Cemetery.
[01:21:56]  He's a very celebrated artist, and he just decided to donate to my office a sculpture.
[01:22:04]  Titled Galileo Galilei Looking at the Four Moons of Jupiter.
[01:22:09]  And I have it in my office.
[01:22:11]  He will give me another sculpture and some watercolors that he made.
[01:22:15]  And so my office right now starts looking like a museum.
[01:22:21]  I basically removed all the file cabinets about a couple of months ago.
[01:22:24]  And it's testimony that the work I'm doing is inspiring also for artists.
[01:22:32]  Poet that just finished a book where he dedicated many of the poems to essays that I write on medium.com, where he was inspired to write these poems.
[01:22:44]  And there is a playwright that wrote a play about my work.
[01:22:48]  And there is another sculpture that is supposed to be brought to my office from Spain.
[01:22:58]  And it's resonating with a lot of people.
[01:23:00]  A lot of people.
[01:23:01]  There is a songwriter that wrote a song.
[01:23:06]  So, and I'm going actually to meet with the most prominent celebrities in Hollywood and the most accomplished entrepreneurs.
[01:23:18]  Actually, within a month, they wanted me to present my research.
[01:23:22]  So, I will spend a couple of days with all these important people.
[01:23:27]  I asked my wife if it's okay for me to have breakfast with Margot Robbie.
[01:23:33]  And she said, Yeah, definitely have fun.
[01:23:36]  I guess she trusts me.
[01:23:38]  But, you know, I do get to see a lot of interesting people, and every day I get people from the public or otherwise interviews that bring ideas that I write about in my essays on medium.com.
[01:23:56]  I also am finishing now or writing a book about the expedition for MIT Press.
[01:24:04]  That hopefully will come out in a year and a half from now.
[01:24:09]  We're going to do maybe one more question, then we're going to hop into some of the questions from the audience.
[01:24:14]  There's a couple of questions that they're really eager to ask you about.
[01:24:18]  But one last final note on the Galileo project, just a fun tangential thing.
[01:24:22]  As you walked into my office, you noticed the Bob Lazar poster.
[01:24:25]  Yes.
[01:24:25]  I'm a big fan of story, I'm a storyteller, and I enjoy story.
[01:24:30]  But I also, you know, my personal belief is that although it might not be the best evidence, you know, personally speaking, for me, that human connection is very important and very real when, you know, I look in someone's eyes and they're telling me something that they believe is real.

=== Scientific Rigor vs Stories (09:05) ===

[01:24:48]  You know, personally, I take that as my own ontological evidence that forms my reality.
[01:24:53]  Right.
[01:24:53]  But obviously, that doesn't hold up in a, in, in, you know, scientific standards, which.
[01:24:56]  Well, it holds in court.
[01:24:58]  We know that in the court.
[01:24:59]  In court, it does hold up.
[01:25:00]  But, but, but, scientific rigor is different.
[01:25:02]  Exactly.
[01:25:02]  Yeah.
[01:25:03]  I, I should, I should again say that, um, You know, the beauty about physics is that, you know, when you learn something new about how electrons behave, you know, all the electrons in the universe behave following the same law of physics, right?
[01:25:22]  So we've never seen an electron that goes in a path that no other electron ever went through, given the laws of electrodynamics.
[01:25:35]  And it goes beyond that.
[01:25:38]  It's.
[01:25:38]  It's not only true throughout the entire universe, it's also true throughout the history of the universe.
[01:25:44]  You know, the recombination of electrons and protons 400,000 years after the Big Bang followed the same rules as recombination of electrons and protons in the laboratories on Earth.
[01:25:58]  And, you know, back then it was a soup of elementary particles that filled up the universe.
[01:26:05]  There is no free will.
[01:26:06]  Electrons can, for electrons, they can.
[01:26:09]  Cannot do whatever they want.
[01:26:10]  Now, this is very different from people, right?
[01:26:13]  Because people, you know, can do unexpected things.
[01:26:17]  We know that because we decide about societal laws and then people break them.
[01:26:23]  Okay.
[01:26:23]  That's why we have the court system.
[01:26:26]  In the court system, you know, we punish people who deviated from the law.
[01:26:31]  So, and we do that based on eyewitnesses and so forth.
[01:26:36]  But, you know, by the way, that raises a whole question of, you know, if we are made of electrons and nuclei, you know, and atoms and so forth, elementary particles, how come we have free will when these particles do not have free will?
[01:26:53]  And my answer to that is that the human brain is very complex.
[01:26:58]  You know, the AI systems we are currently developing still have less number of parameters than the number of synapses in the human brain.
[01:27:06]  When you have such a complex system as the human brain, it's practically unpredictable.
[01:27:11]  You know, even three bodies, according to Newton, you know, when they move around according to the law of gravity that Newton came up with, they also show some chaos.
[01:27:21]  There is the inability to predict the outcome from slight changes in the initial conditions, even within a three body system, not to speak about the complex architecture of the human brain.
[01:27:33]  So I think that what we call free will is simply the inability to forecast what such a complex System like the human brain can do.
[01:27:41]  I don't think there is anything beyond electrons, protons that make up the human brain.
[01:27:46]  But coming back to the difference from the courtroom is that, you know, we rely in assessing whether someone committed the crime.
[01:27:59]  We rely on eyewitnesses and science has a much higher standard and that is based on instruments.
[01:28:06]  And I should say it's not easy to come up with new physics because we have so much.
[01:28:13]  Data on everything that happens that if there was new physics, it would be so dramatic.
[01:28:20]  Now, it's possible that UAP exhibit new physics because they were manufactured by civilizations that had access to much more science and technology.
[01:28:28]  So they developed things that we cannot imagine.
[01:28:32]  It's possible.
[01:28:33]  But to make sure that we understand what these things are, we really need to be flooded with data, which is what I'm aiming at.
[01:28:42]  I suppose the catch 22 in all of this is, you know, we rely on human observation for certain data that we use in the courtrooms.
[01:28:54]  Right.
[01:28:55]  But then we rely on very structured data that we rely on scientifically.
[01:29:00]  However, the people controlling science are human.
[01:29:04]  Yes.
[01:29:05]  And so now we're running into a problem that's inhibiting the study of it.
[01:29:10]  Right.
[01:29:10]  So a lot of people, I think.
[01:29:12]  The best way to remain ignorant is.
[01:29:15]  To avoid the collection of data.
[01:29:17]  That's what the Vatican wanted.
[01:29:20]  The church wanted during the days of Copernicus and Galileo not to get more data.
[01:29:24]  We don't want to hear about it because to maintain our political power, we need to tell our believers that the earth is at the center.
[01:29:32]  That was the dogma because if earth is at the center, then God pays attention to us all the time.
[01:29:38]  Imagine, I actually had a meeting with a group of people that is called Christianity Today.
[01:29:45]  They came to Harvard and asked me to speak with them about extraterrestrial.
[01:29:48]  intelligence.
[01:29:50]  And I tried to explain that if we find evidence for another civilization like ours, they should not be worried about it because, you know, I have two daughters.
[01:30:02]  And when the second one was born, it didn't take away from my love to the first one.
[01:30:08]  So thinking that God can pay attention only to one civilization is very demeaning.
[01:30:12]  You know, it basically says God has a limited attention span.
[01:30:17]  If you really believe in God being capable of everything, then There shouldn't be any problem with having other, you know, um, siblings on exoplanets, you know, other, yeah.
[01:30:30]  And, and the only issue is that if those other civilizations are much more accomplished than we are, then it might indicate that the parent, you know, whoever that is, may pay more attention to them than to us because they are more, more talented.
[01:30:45]  That's the only kind of jealousy you can have when you have a sibling.
[01:30:49]  But, you know, I mean, I think that it shouldn't go against religion to imagine that something like us exists.
[01:30:55]  Sure.
[01:30:56]  No, I think that makes sense.
[01:30:57]  Um, I just, I, I guess I just wish, and I, I think I speak for many people that, that more scientists would take this approach.
[01:31:03]  And I think if more scientists took the approach that you took, we'd have, you know, obviously way more information and possibly we would all, we would have already solved this, this problem.
[01:31:13]  Um, the, you know, the last funny thing, because, you know, I, I see like a dichotomy here between, um, you know, Bob Lazar, who represents a little bit more of the sort of story, uh, side of it.
[01:31:26]  He's not a practicing scientist, by the way.
[01:31:28]  Right.
[01:31:28]  So you have to distinguish practicing scientists from people who talk about science.
[01:31:32]  Yeah.
[01:31:32]  There are lots of popularizers of science and people that give you stories based on time that they worked as a scientist.
[01:31:39]  That's very different from a practice.
[01:31:40]  Well, he works with, uh, like right now, he works with uranium and has a, yeah, here in, in his own lab.
[01:31:46]  In his, well, I'm talking about practitioner, you know, it's just like soccer players.
[01:31:50]  Okay.
[01:31:51]  So there are people who played soccer in the past.
[01:31:52]  They can be coaches.
[01:31:54]  They can tell you stories about the past.
[01:31:55]  Yeah.
[01:31:56]  Then there are people on the field playing soccer right now.
[01:31:59]  Who would you believe in terms of, You know, what is happening right now?
[01:32:04]  You would believe the people who are on the soccer field, you know, on the playing because they are practicing it.
[01:32:10]  I'm a practicing scientist.
[01:32:12]  I publish scientific papers every month, several of them every month.
[01:32:16]  I'm actually in the trenches.
[01:32:18]  You have also science popularizers, you know, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson as an example.
[01:32:24]  He's not practicing science.
[01:32:26]  He, you know, he's, I don't know when he wrote the last paper, maybe 15 years ago or before that.
[01:32:33]  He's not producing scientific research.
[01:32:37]  I'm a practicing scientist.
[01:32:38]  That makes a whole different, you know, what he says about UFOs, what he says about any other type, you know, of science is based on, you know, he's trying to gauge where the wind is blowing and basically trying to be popular.
[01:32:53]  He's basing his assessments on the number of likes he would get either from the scientific community or from the public, but he always tries to be, um, Yeah, no, I don't have an issue with it at all.
[01:33:07]  I think both can exist, coexist.
[01:33:09]  In fact, you know, I think we, I think it's important to have the stories like Bob Lazar who inspire people to want to pursue it scientifically.
[01:33:16]  Oh, sure.
[01:33:16]  And it's important to have the people who are inspired scientifically to, you know, produce actual evidence.
[01:33:40]  Um, I just thought it was interesting because, you know, we talk about Bob and then we talk about this stuff.
[01:33:46]  And, you know, the project that Bob had allegedly worked on was called the Galileo Project.

=== Detecting Stealth Technology (08:34) ===

[01:33:53]  Oh, I didn't know that.
[01:33:53]  Yes.
[01:33:54]  This is, this is why I just think it's very interesting that we have.
[01:33:57]  Who said that?
[01:33:58]  What is that?
[01:33:58]  Uh, this is according to Bob and the documents that he read.
[01:34:00]  He said there were several projects that he was read into.
[01:34:03]  Did he say that before I established the Galileo Project?
[01:34:05]  He said in the 80s.
[01:34:07]  I didn't know that.
[01:34:08]  But it was Project Galileo.
[01:34:10]  Okay.
[01:34:10]  And it was based on the propulsion system that he, you know, allegedly was back engineering.
[01:34:17]  So serendipitous, maybe.
[01:34:19]  I just think it was very interesting.
[01:34:21]  Well, maybe it's the spirit of pioneering new knowledge by evidence.
[01:34:26]  Yeah.
[01:34:26]  Yeah.
[01:34:26]  Okay.
[01:34:27]  We're going to get to a few questions from the audience.
[01:34:30]  I think you might enjoy this one.
[01:34:33]  So, RxFaro asks, might ETs be masking their signals to avoid detection?
[01:34:44]  And how could search methods evolve to find them?
[01:34:48]  Yeah, that's definitely a possibility because of predators.
[01:34:52]  You know, if you're worried that someone will come to your home, you might want to somehow avoid being noticed.
[01:35:04]  And we all know about stealth.
[01:35:10]  Fighter jets that are trying to avoid being recognized by radar.
[01:35:15]  Now, I can think of at least two ways of avoiding detection by electromagnetic means.
[01:35:23]  Suppose you were to produce something made of dark matter, you know, then you wouldn't see it.
[01:35:35]  Okay?
[01:35:35]  And it will be invisible because we can't see dark matter.
[01:35:39]  The only way for us to detect it is gravitationally.
[01:35:42]  So, once we develop, we have right now, LIGO, which detects gravitational waves.
[01:35:48]  And I actually did a calculation.
[01:35:51]  I wrote a paper where I calculated that an object that weighs about 100,000 tons, that moves close to the speed of light, that comes very close to Earth, would be detected by LIGO.
[01:36:09]  But that's a very massive object, 100,000 tons, and it needs also to move close to the speed of light, because if it moves much slower, Then it doesn't match the frequency of signal to which LIGO is sensitive.
[01:36:23]  But it's interesting that LIGO can detect not only gravitational waves, but also the gravitational tidal effect of a passing object.
[01:36:31]  Wow.
[01:36:32]  If it's massive enough and moves fast enough.
[01:36:34]  And I was already able to put some constraint that, you know, nothing like that happened within the operation period of LIGO.
[01:36:43]  And one can set limits on the existence of objects that are 100,000 tons that are moving not Close to the speed of light.
[01:36:49]  Turns out that their mass density cannot be bigger than dark matter, actually.
[01:36:54]  But we would need a much more sensitive interferometer observatory than LIGO in order to detect things that are either lighter or moving much slower.
[01:37:08]  In principle, you cannot avoid gravity.
[01:37:12]  So eventually, when we build, for example, there is a plan to build LISA, which would be an interferometer in space, it would be sensitive.
[01:37:22]  To smaller objects moving slower.
[01:37:24]  So that would be interesting to see if we detect anything that we can't see.
[01:37:28]  Right, with the naked eye.
[01:37:29]  Yeah, or even something like a massive asteroid, but it doesn't reflect any sunlight.
[01:37:36]  So, what is going on?
[01:37:37]  We see an object passing and we don't.
[01:37:41]  So, if something like that is detected gravitationally, I think some people will immediately jump at the opportunity and say, oh, this might be the dark matter passing through, but it could also be a stealth.
[01:37:52]  Some type of technology.
[01:37:55]  Yeah, it could be that.
[01:37:56]  That's interesting.
[01:37:56]  So I'm saying there will be a new window that will open up once we are able to detect gravitationally because you can imagine things that avoid detection of electromagnetic.
[01:38:06]  Now, another thing that we tried for 70 years is detecting radio signals from other civilizations, which is similar to SETI.
[01:38:16]  And by the way, SETI people are very hostile to UAP research.
[01:38:21]  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people in this space that think that it was almost like a.
[01:38:26]  Campaign against.
[01:38:28]  Against.
[01:38:28]  Yeah, I can tell you that Carl Sagan, who is, you know, a part of it was vehemently sort of against this idea.
[01:38:32]  And they now ban discussions on, on such a subject like UAP in their conferences, which is really inappropriate.
[01:38:40]  It's not only that not working on it.
[01:38:42]  It's just strange.
[01:38:42]  They're trying to prevent discussion, which makes no sense.
[01:38:47]  No, because that's the reason they were established essentially, theoretically, they were established the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
[01:38:54]  No, but also that this particular search can be done in different ways.
[01:38:57]  It's not just looking for electromagnetic signals or looking for.
[01:39:01]  Primitive life, or looking for, you know, you could also search for objects near Earth.
[01:39:07]  Why is that banned?
[01:39:07]  It makes no sense.
[01:39:12]  I mean, this should be part of the methods, the variety of methods that one is using.
[01:39:19]  Is, you know, in the context of dark matter, we use many different approaches to detecting dark matter.
[01:39:23]  And I've never heard of a community of people who search using one method banning the discussion on the other method.
[01:39:32]  You know, that makes it seem a little selfish.
[01:39:35]  Well, also they were never, they never found anything.
[01:39:38]  Okay.
[01:39:38]  So if their method produced results, I would say, okay, we now have something, you know, we caught some fish.
[01:39:44]  We should use the same hook, but they haven't caught any fish.
[01:39:47]  And so I'm suggesting a different approach.
[01:39:50]  Why would that be banned, you know?
[01:39:52]  But at any event, we looked for radio signals, but you can imagine signals that are not communicated by electromagnetic means.
[01:40:02]  For example, imagine that we can produce or another civilization can produce Waves in the dark energy that fills up the universe.
[01:40:12]  So, you know, then, then it would be a completely different approach to communication that is not being detectable as of now by all of our detectors.
[01:40:22]  So in principle, there might be civilizations that maintain longevity just because they managed to avoid the most obvious ways of detection.
[01:40:33]  And there are no predators.
[01:40:35]  I mean, we might have predators coming to our planet.
[01:40:38]  It's just that we transmitted radio signals for a hundred years.
[01:40:41]  So there aren't many planets.
[01:40:43]  Many stars out to a hundred light years.
[01:40:47]  Uh, but you know, within a millennium, we will have, uh, our signals will go 10 times farther.
[01:40:56]  And that would mean a thousand times more stars.
[01:41:00]  And if there is a civilization, if there is a predator around one of these stars, they might come to our planet.
[01:41:07]  It's the dark forest theory.
[01:41:08]  The trouble may take some time.
[01:41:11]  Okay, so we will not hear immediately.
[01:41:12]  But if there is anything out there, I wouldn't be surprised if within a few thousand years, someone would come to visit us if they have a fast enough technology.
[01:41:24]  If they are using chemical propulsions, rockets like we use, They would get here within millions of years, which is again a very short time compared to the billions of years that characterize the.
[01:41:40]  But if they're using something else, they could do it very fast.
[01:41:44]  Very fast.
[01:41:45]  But so it's just like in the theory of evolution studied by Darwin, the fittest survive.
[01:41:55]  And the fittest would be the one that is able to avoid being noticed.
[01:42:02]  Detectives.
[01:42:02]  Yeah.
[01:42:03]  Do you think, I mean, but that also, yeah, obviously leaves open the possibility that that may have already happened and that their technology is just, I mean, we can't even detect it yet until perhaps we have this gravity detecting technology, which I think is super exciting.
[01:42:17]  So I think that'd be really interesting.
[01:42:19]  And that's why I wrote my paper, just saying that LIGO is sensitive, but to a very extreme conditions.
[01:42:26]  Yeah.

=== Quantum Mechanics Interpretations (05:54) ===

[01:42:27]  You need an object with 100,000 tons and a speed of light.
[01:42:30]  Yeah.
[01:42:31]  A fast, big object.
[01:42:32]  All right.
[01:42:32]  Let's get to the next question here.
[01:42:35]  This is from Ginger.
[01:42:42]  We touched on this a little bit, I think prior here, but what are your thoughts on emotional states manipulating the collapse of a wave function?
[01:42:50]  So this is a little bit more out there.
[01:42:53]  Yeah.
[01:42:53]  No, I think there is a fundamental problem with quantum mechanics, which we don't understand as still a hundred years after it was discovered.
[01:43:02]  And that is, you know, what, what triggers the collapse of a wave function?
[01:43:08]  How does the observer interact with the quantum system?
[01:43:13]  And, you know, so in the original definition, Of quantum mechanics, there was an observer that is a classical system, and then there was the quantum system which has states.
[01:43:24]  And once the observer figures out by a measurement process the state in which the quantum system is, then the system collapses to that state.
[01:43:35]  And previously, before that, it had some probability of being in different states.
[01:43:41]  And so that's irreversible.
[01:43:44]  That collapse changes our conception of the system.
[01:43:48]  And the question is whether.
[01:43:51]  There is something about our consciousness that once we are conscious of the state of the system, it changes the system.
[01:44:05]  So there is some interaction.
[01:44:06]  And we don't have a solution to this problem of we don't understand quantum mechanics.
[01:44:12]  It works because if we just don't think about this fundamental problem, we're able to do calculations that agree with all experimental data and that.
[01:44:24]  We can produce gadgets that operate based on the principles of quantum mechanics.
[01:44:28]  Probability.
[01:44:28]  Yeah.
[01:44:29]  But so there are lots of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics that are still being discussed.
[01:44:36]  Um, we don't have a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity.
[01:44:40]  Okay.
[01:44:40]  So, I mean, there are people claiming to work on it for 50 years in context of string theory, but they don't give a specific theory that makes predictions that can be tested experimentally.
[01:44:53]  There are lots of possibilities.
[01:44:55]  And they cannot really explain things we know about, like the Big Bang or singularities of black holes.
[01:45:01]  So it's not really a real physical theory, I would say.
[01:45:04]  So we don't have a theory of quantum gravity.
[01:45:07]  We don't know if string theory is the correct path for that.
[01:45:11]  It's possible that the problems we have with figuring out quantum mechanics have to do with the way we conceive of space and time, and that once we have a theory of quantum gravity, the entire collapse of the wave function will be understood at a more fundamental level.
[01:45:27]  I wouldn't be surprised if.
[01:45:29]  If the lack of quantum gravity, a theory of quantum gravity is connected to our lack of understanding of the fundamental interpretation of quantum mechanics, do you think that that might have something to do?
[01:45:46]  You know, there is this theory that's being postulated by, you know, especially parapsychologists and looking at that consciousness is the fundamental level and that, you know, materialist physics is on the way here.
[01:45:59]  I was to obey that.
[01:46:00]  Yeah.
[01:46:00]  I heard a podcast that was just focusing on this.
[01:46:03]  And, um, I don't think so.
[01:46:06]  I think, as far as we know, we're made of elementary particles and there is nothing else.
[01:46:13]  And the only, I mean, the only reason we assign some unusual qualities to humans, as far as I think, is because the human brain is such a complex machine, you know, and there is a simple, this is not just the theory, what I'm saying.
[01:46:30]  We can test it.
[01:46:31]  And we can test it with AI.
[01:46:34]  Because once we develop an AI system that has as many parameters as the human brain, my prediction is that it will show the other qualities of the human brain.
[01:46:46]  It will show, you know, a behavior that is consistent with it having consciousness.
[01:46:53]  And it will show a behavior that is consistent with it having free will.
[01:46:59]  So you would not be able to tell the difference between the behavior of a human Turing type.
[01:47:06]  Yeah, but it's touring to a higher level.
[01:47:09]  It's not touring by a system that can fool you.
[01:47:12]  That already exists now.
[01:47:13]  I know of people that fall in love with large language models and people that consult them.
[01:47:20]  In fact, just last week, someone approached me and said, You know, I came to this summit and I asked my AI system to tell me who I should speak with.
[01:47:30]  And the system identified you as the person I need to speak with.
[01:47:34]  So he spoke with me.
[01:47:36]  I also have an avatar that.
[01:47:39]  A company constructed basically trained on all my interviews and my writings and my recordings, and potentially also having video appearance.
[01:47:51]  I said that's great because I can send that avatar to podcast interviews like this one and save time.
[01:47:58]  You know, I had to fly here in order to speak with you.
[01:48:01]  And if I have an agent that you know can imitate what I say, that's good.
[01:48:06]  I'm sure they appreciate you being here and not an avatar.
[01:48:09]  You can testify that I'm not real, yes, yeah.
[01:48:13]  Definitely.
[01:48:14]  I definitely.
[01:48:14]  Well, I mean, so far as I know what real is, but yes.
[01:48:17]  All right.
[01:48:18]  Brilliant.
[01:48:19]  Uh, thank you for that answer.

=== Are We Inside a Black Hole (10:23) ===

[01:48:21]  Very interesting stuff, though.
[01:48:22]  I mean, that's like the, the, the cutting edge, you know, theory stuff is like, okay, what's, what's the unifying theory there?
[01:48:30]  What are we at?
[01:48:31]  And I think that's why a lot of people get really, that's why people who don't study physics, but just kind of read upon it, like myself, we sort of interject ourselves into the conversation because there's an unknown variable.
[01:48:43]  And now we're like, well, we also feel the need, although we're not scientists on some core level, we still feel the need to want to fill that void with some explanation.
[01:48:53]  It's really important to keep in mind that our scientific knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance.
[01:49:00]  There is much more that we don't know than we actually know.
[01:49:04]  You know, scientists often pretend to be the adults in the room, to know a lot, you know, for the glory of science.
[01:49:11]  I think that's misleading because we should admit how much we are ignorant, you know, about.
[01:49:18]  And it was obvious during the pandemic, you know, when the scientific community, by and large, you know, was opposed to the notion that the virus came from a lab leak.
[01:49:32]  And now it's becoming folklore that it actually did.
[01:49:36]  Back then, I mean, obviously, there were some scientists who didn't want this notion because gain of function research that could have caused that leak by accident, not intentionally.
[01:49:49]  It was not developed for military purposes there in Wuhan.
[01:49:54]  But they were worried that, you know, if 20 million people die out of this pandemic, that somehow it will negatively impact science.
[01:50:07]  What is the reality of the situation is that their denial of the possible connection hurts science much more.
[01:50:16]  So, not being honest about our ignorance and insisting about something that sounds better is the worst you can do for science.
[01:50:25]  And, you know, that's exactly what's happening when I'm studying what we brought from the ocean floor.
[01:50:32]  And, you know, that's why I'm saying that anti science sentiments may often originate from the way that scientists behave.
[01:50:41]  Wonderful.
[01:50:43]  Last one here.
[01:50:45]  This is more of a philosophical question, so you might appreciate this last one a little bit more.
[01:50:55]  If you were chosen in making first time contact with NHI, what three things would you ask?
[01:51:00]  This is by Mustard Mustache.
[01:51:02]  Okay, well, the first thing is obvious.
[01:51:04]  I would ask what happened before the Big Bang?
[01:51:08]  Because not only does it address our cosmic roots, where we came from, but more importantly, it would help us develop a theory of quantum gravity if we knew.
[01:51:20]  What were the ingredients that led to the birth of our universe?
[01:51:26]  And it's just like baking a cake.
[01:51:29]  If you know the ingredients, how to put them together, and how much heat to apply, then you have a recipe for a cake.
[01:51:38]  And the only thing you might be missing is an oven where you can put the cake and bake it.
[01:51:43]  But anyone that has the recipe for a cake, in principle, Can apply for the job of a cook or a chef.
[01:51:56]  And anyone that has the recipe for making a baby universe can apply for the job of God.
[01:52:03]  You know, that's at the top of the food chain.
[01:52:07]  And if I knew how to make a universe, that would have been amazing.
[01:52:13]  You know, I wouldn't ask for anything more.
[01:52:16]  The other two things, you know, Uh, are for example, what is inside a black hole because that's very difficult to tell unless you get into a black hole.
[01:52:30]  There are um uh theories floating around these days that that we might be inside one.
[01:52:35]  Oh, no, that's completely unsubstantiated.
[01:52:37]  I can guarantee that because the inside of a black hole is very different than what we find in the universe.
[01:52:43]  When you are inside a black hole, you actually the the roles of time and space um uh exchange and and and You end up inevitably at the center, near the singularity where your body would be ripped apart.
[01:53:00]  There is no way out.
[01:53:01]  So, you die in a finite amount of time inside the black hole.
[01:53:06]  In the universe, on the other hand, things are smooth and you can live for as long as the universe exists.
[01:53:13]  And I mean, the only existential risk for a cosmic resident is that eventually the universe will cool down, will freeze, okay, because of the expansion.
[01:53:25]  So, the death is of a very different nature.
[01:53:28]  You die out of loneliness, out of freezing.
[01:53:33]  Slowly.
[01:53:34]  Okay.
[01:53:35]  Whereas in a black hole, you die after a short amount of time when your body gets ripped apart.
[01:53:40]  These are very different realities.
[01:53:42]  Yeah.
[01:53:43]  So we don't, as far as we know, we don't live in a black hole right now.
[01:53:50]  I think it was, they observed like 300 galaxies.
[01:53:54]  Did you read about this?
[01:53:55]  Yeah.
[01:53:56]  And two thirds were spinning one way and one third was spinning another.
[01:53:59]  And one of the postulated sort of like proposed theories, and it's not accepted, but it was like the idea that, That inside this black hole originally, we might have all been spinning one way and then like only a few are spinning the other.
[01:54:13]  Yeah, I don't, don't, don't put my eggs that fast.
[01:54:17]  Don't lose any sleep on that.
[01:54:19]  Okay.
[01:54:21]  You know, the third question is actually, you know, related to what we talked before.
[01:54:29]  Is it possible to make a time machine or to have a negative mass?
[01:54:33]  Because, you know, based on what I know from, Physics that would allow us to do a lot of things that are more fascinating than just traveling through space.
[01:54:48]  You know, if you just build a spacecraft, which is the best we can imagine, you know, that's the biggest wish of the wealthiest person on Earth is to build a spacecraft that will take humans to Mars.
[01:54:59]  Just think about it how limited that concept is.
[01:55:04]  First of all, we are going from one rock to another rock.
[01:55:08]  That's not very imaginative, right?
[01:55:11]  A much more imaginative thing is at least to board a spacecraft that can support you, that has the habitat, that, where you can live, you know, and then you can go places, go anywhere.
[01:55:21]  Okay.
[01:55:22]  Why go from one rock to another rock that nature gave you?
[01:55:25]  I mean, and the other rock, by the way, doesn't have an atmosphere.
[01:55:27]  The temperature on the surface changes by hundreds of degrees between day and night.
[01:55:31]  It's, it's bombarded by cosmic rays.
[01:55:33]  It's not a good place.
[01:55:35]  Like, it's like going from a high rise in New York City to a slum, you know, somewhere.
[01:55:41]  Uh, why would you do that?
[01:55:42]  Um, at any event, All of this is in the context of travel.
[01:55:47]  Okay, so we can board a spacecraft, let's say, that is habitable and you can go on a journey.
[01:55:53]  It would take a long time.
[01:55:54]  You'd get to a destination.
[01:55:55]  This is way beyond what Elon Musk is talking about and still not the whole.
[01:56:04]  If you could board a spacecraft that could be propelled without any fuel because you are using a negative mass to boost it, or if you can go back in time to fix things in history, these are tasks that go well beyond space travel.
[01:56:26]  Just imagine the world with these abilities.
[01:56:29]  So, the first thing I would like to do is be able to know how to make a baby universe, but then I would really love to.
[01:56:38]  And the black hole question was just a matter of curiosity.
[01:56:41]  I advised some of my colleagues that work on string theory to go into a black hole and check whether the theory is right at the center, but they said they have an interior motive of sending them.
[01:56:52]  But that was just curiosity.
[01:56:54]  But the question about going back in time or having negative gravity, repulsive gravity from negative mass, these are things that go well beyond what we currently imagine.
[01:57:08]  Yeah.
[01:57:10]  Well, maybe one day we will get one of those three answers.
[01:57:14]  Thank you so much, Avi, for joining me here, for traveling all this way and having this conversation.
[01:57:21]  It was an immense pleasure listening to you and being able to just even discuss these things at the highest level with someone like you is a great honor for me.
[01:57:30]  So thank you so much.
[01:57:31]  Thanks for having me.
[01:57:32]  And is there anywhere that the audience should go if they want to learn more about any of these things?
[01:57:37]  Can you direct them?
[01:57:39]  Yeah, so every day or two, I write an essay on medium.com.
[01:57:44]  So if you just search for Avi Loeb at medium.com, you can subscribe for free.
[01:57:50]  So you get the essays by email.
[01:57:52]  I don't charge anything.
[01:57:55]  And then there would be a number of things that will come up.
[01:57:59]  First of all, the observatories will start being constructed and give us data.
[01:58:04]  So it would be quite exciting.
[01:58:06]  There will be the Netflix documentary that everyone is welcome to check out.
[01:58:11]  Within a year, there will be my book about the expedition.
[01:58:15]  And I'm currently in discussion with a television company that wants to have a series, a science series, about the history of the universe and the search for extraterrestrials.
[01:58:26]  And that would be in the spirit of Carl Sagan.
[01:58:30]  And in difference from him, I will discuss very favorably the possibility that we might have objects near Earth that came from another civilization.
[01:58:42]  Love to hear it.
[01:58:43]  Thank you so much, Avi.
[01:58:44]  Thanks for having me.