Jan. 16, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:26:47
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day! | ||
| Hello, Avi. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| I'm very good friends with your friend, Lex Friedman, and he highly recommends you as well. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| You know, he asked me about social media and I told him I have no footprint on social media. | ||
| He said, why? | ||
| And I said, I promised my wife when I married her not to have any account. | ||
| And he said, I should get married. | ||
| Yeah, he reads accounts. | ||
| He says he doesn't, but then he does. | ||
| He reads comments and stuff, and then he gets mad at things people say. | ||
| It's kind of funny. | ||
| Yeah, you see, I save the time. | ||
| I don't even read what other people say. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| And I don't care how many likes I have. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| That's wonderful. | ||
| That's a freedom. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's an underrated freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You came on my radar when you were discussing Amuamua, which is an object that we detected in space that you believe could possibly have been extraterrestrial in origin, meaning from some sort of a civilization. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Please explain to people what Oumuamua is, why it's so extraordinary, and why you think it's possible that it came from some other intelligent civilization. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I'm a scientist, and I basically follow the evidence, just like Sherlock Holmes, trying to find solutions. | ||
| It's a detective story. | ||
| You have some anomalies, some things that don't quite match what you expected, and you're trying to find an explanation. | ||
| The thing about Oumuamua is that it was discovered on October 19th, 2017. A little more than three years ago. | ||
| And it was the very first object that visited our vicinity in the solar system from outside the solar system. | ||
| It moved too fast to be bound to the Sun. | ||
| Very first object that we have found coming to us from interstellar space, from other places. | ||
| And at first, astronomers said, oh yeah, it's probably just like the objects we had in our solar system, all the rocks that we have seen before. | ||
| We've seen comets and asteroids. | ||
| So a comet is a rock that is covered with ice, water ice. | ||
| So when it gets close to the sun, the surface gets warmed up and the ice turns into vapor. | ||
| And you see this beautiful cometary tail behind it. | ||
| That's what a comet is. | ||
| An asteroid is just rock without much ice on it. | ||
| Actually, the first person to explain what comets are was at Harvard, the university that I am affiliated with. | ||
| And the story goes that, I mean, it was Fred Whipple that he went to Harvard Square and saw all the slush during the winter day, you know, and came up with the idea that it's just... | ||
| Icy rock or icy rocks or, you know, rocky ice. | ||
| And that's what a comet is. | ||
| And the comets come to us from the periphery of the solar system. | ||
| And, you know, astronomers said, okay, other stars may have them as well. | ||
| And, you know, since they are loosely bound, if they are in the periphery, they can be easily ripped apart from their host star. | ||
| And some of them will fly in our direction. | ||
| We will see them. | ||
| So they said, Oumuamua is probably a comet. | ||
| The only problem is there wasn't any cometary tail. | ||
| So you look for a duck, but it doesn't look like a duck, you know. | ||
| So then the question is, what is it? | ||
| And so people say, okay, it's... | ||
| Just a rock without any ice on it. | ||
| Then the problem was that it exhibited an extra push away from the sun. | ||
| And usually you get it from the rocket effect. | ||
| When you make the cometary tail, it pushes the object in the opposite direction, just like a jet plane. | ||
| A jet plane works by throwing gas out, and that's pushing you forward. | ||
| So a comet has an extra push when it But there was no cometary tail, so why did it show an extra push? | ||
| That was the key question in my mind, at which point I started thinking, maybe it's not a comet and not an asteroid, something else, you know? | ||
| And the other strange thing about it, it changes its brightness by a factor of 10 or more, and the brightness of the object, the light that we see, is simply reflected sunlight, right? | ||
| So just think about it, think about a piece of paper, razor-thin piece of paper, tumbling in the wind, and changing the area that we can see, the projected area of that piece of paper, by a factor of 10 as we look at it. | ||
| That's exactly what we inferred from this object, spinning around every eight hours, but changing its brightness by a factor of 10, meaning that the area projected on the sky That we see that reflect sunlight changed by a factor of 10. So that means it has an extreme geometry, most likely flat, if you try to interpret the light that it reflected over as it was tumbling around. | ||
| And so a flat object about the size of a football field That has an extra push. | ||
| If it were a comet, it needed to lose about a tenth of its weight. | ||
| So a lot of evaporation. | ||
| You can't just say, oh, it's a little bit of evaporation and therefore that's why we don't see it. | ||
| It should have lost a tenth of its weight. | ||
| You know, if we go on a diet and lose a tenth of our weight, that's a big chunk of me. | ||
| So this object didn't lose that because we didn't see it. | ||
| And the Spitzer Space Telescope looked very deeply behind it to see if there are any traces of dust or gas. | ||
| Didn't see anything. | ||
| So then... | ||
| You know, just like Sherlock Holmes, I was trying to think together with a postdoc of mine, Shmuel Bialy, what could explain it? | ||
| And the only thing that came to mind is reflecting sunlight. | ||
| So the object itself is being pushed by the sunlight reflecting off its surface. | ||
| And, you know, that would agree with everything we know about the object. | ||
| But in order for it to work, the object needs to be very thin, like a sail, you know, the sail on a boat. | ||
| So a sail is pushed by a wind, but you can also push an object, a thin object, by light. | ||
| And that is called the light sail. | ||
| And we're actually using this technology now, developing it for space exploration. | ||
| The big advantage is you don't need to carry the fuel with the spacecraft. | ||
| You just reflect light off it and it's being pushed. | ||
| There's a science fiction movie that did something like that. | ||
| I think it was called Sunlight. | ||
| Quite possibly. | ||
| I should mention an anecdote. | ||
| In September, just a few months ago, in September 2020, there was another object that showed an extra push. | ||
| No cometary tail. | ||
| And then astronomers gave it a name 2020-SO, okay? | ||
| September 2020. And then they extrapolated back in time and found that it came from Earth, actually. | ||
| And then they looked at the history books and saw that, indeed, there was a rocket booster. | ||
| From a lunar lander that was kicked into space, and this is the object. | ||
| Now, why did it show this push? | ||
| Because it's a hollow, it's a very thin structure. | ||
| So here is an example where we can tell it's artificial, and we know that we made it. | ||
| But Oumuamua could not have been made by us because it was passing near us just for a few months, very quickly, faster than any rocket that we can launch. | ||
| That's why we couldn't really chase it when it was receding away from us. | ||
| And it came from outside the solar system. | ||
| So, you know, I just do one plus one equal two. | ||
| I say, okay, it looks very peculiar. | ||
| Maybe it belongs to another civilization. | ||
| I just put it in a scientific paper. | ||
| We didn't have any press release. | ||
| Then it went viral. | ||
| The public got extremely interested. | ||
| And the thing that really surprised me is that my colleagues were... | ||
| Pushing back. | ||
| They were very upset that this possibility was even mentioned. | ||
| You know, we had a seminar, a lecture about this object at Harvard, and a colleague of mine, after the lecture, said, this object is really weird. | ||
| I wish it never existed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Now, to me, I was really appalled by this. | ||
| How can you say something like that? | ||
| You should be happy about whatever nature gives you. | ||
| You learn something new. | ||
| If something doesn't look right, it actually teaches us... | ||
| It's a learning experience. | ||
| We learn that we have to revise the way we think about reality. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| That's not a bad... | ||
| You shouldn't always be in your comfort zone and think that the future will be the same as the past. | ||
| So... | ||
| I actually see it as a blessing, you know? | ||
| I can't imagine why anybody would be upset that it exists. | ||
| Like, I wish it didn't exist. | ||
| That's kind of hilarious. | ||
| Because it takes you away from your comfort zone, you know? | ||
| I know, but if you're studying the heavens, you're studying the cosmos, what is the ultimate thing that you could find? | ||
| Another civilization or a piece of something from another civilization? | ||
| That's exactly my point, but if you go back in time, let me give you two examples. | ||
| And Galileo Galilei said, I think the earth moves around the sun. | ||
| But at the time, philosophers knew for sure that the sun moves around the earth. | ||
| You see it moving in the sky. | ||
| It was consistent with their religious beliefs, everything. | ||
| So they said, we don't want to look through your telescope to change our view. | ||
| We will put you in house arrest. | ||
| Now, what did they achieve by that? | ||
| And by the way, I'm in house arrest, but it's because of the pandemic, not because. | ||
| So what did they achieve by that? | ||
| They maintained their ignorance, and the earth continued to move around the sun. | ||
| You know, reality is the one thing that never goes away, irrespective of whether you ignore it. | ||
| You can ignore it. | ||
| Now, there is another example. | ||
| There is a student at Harvard that, as a result of my book on this subject that is about to come out in a week or so, She was inspired to do her PhD on the theme of my book. | ||
| So she invited me to a thesis exam just a couple of months ago, and one of the examiners, a professor, asked her, do you know why Giordano Bruno, an Italian guy, was burnt at the stake? | ||
| And she said, well, he was an obnoxious guy. | ||
| He irritated a lot of people, which is true. | ||
| You know, he was an obnoxious guy. | ||
| But the professor corrected her and said, no. | ||
| It was because he said that other stars are just like the sun. | ||
| You know, there are stars like the sun. | ||
| And they have planets like the earth around them. | ||
| And there may be life on those planets. | ||
| And that was offensive to the church. | ||
| Because if there is life there, and it had sinned, you know, then Christ... | ||
| We should have visited those planets to save them, to save the life forms. | ||
| You need multiple copies of Christ to visit those planets, and that was unacceptable, so they burned the guy. | ||
| Burned him alive. | ||
| People are not really open-minded about the heavens, as you said. | ||
| Well, they're not open-minded when it comes to saying something that could make you an outcast or that could align you with an outcast or open you to ridicule. | ||
| People don't like being ridiculed. | ||
| And I would imagine that's one of the things you've experienced. | ||
| Well, wonderful for you. | ||
| Look, what I care about is... | ||
| I operate by the same theme that basketball coaches tell their team, the team players. | ||
| They say, keep your eyes on the ball, not on the audience. | ||
| I really don't care what other people think. | ||
| I just follow the evidence. | ||
| Now, it may well be that I'm wrong, that this is really an unusual object that is of natural origin. | ||
| And by the way, some of the mainstream astronomers try to explain it, but they always came up with an explanation that is the first object of its type that we have ever seen. | ||
| So all I'm saying is, if it's nothing that we have seen before, Why not contemplate also the possibility that it's artificially made? | ||
| Why is that so offensive to people? | ||
| And besides, science is about evidence. | ||
| So let's look for other objects and not always assume that we know the answer in advance. | ||
| If you took a caveman and showed the caveman a cell phone, a modern cell phone, the caveman would think that it's a rock, just a shiny rock. | ||
| And I can understand the response of my colleagues, but on the other hand, I would expect them to be more open-minded. | ||
| That's the whole purpose of science. | ||
| It's a learning experience. | ||
| We should be humble. | ||
| We should be modest. | ||
| We shouldn't assume that we always know the answer in advance, and we shouldn't worry about our image. | ||
| It's not about us. | ||
| It's about finding what... | ||
| The heavens are. | ||
| Now, the pushback that you've received, is there pushback on your interpretation of the evidence? | ||
| Is there pushback on the evidence itself? | ||
| Like, what is the pushback? | ||
| Is it just the possibility that it's extraterrestrial in origin? | ||
| Just the possibility bothers people. | ||
| And they say, you know, we shouldn't even discuss it. | ||
| There is a taboo on it. | ||
| Some of these people that are very vocal about it, some of them I think of as just like this congressman that for many years was making anti-gay statements. | ||
| And then in March 2020, he confessed that he's gay. | ||
| So I believe that some of them, deep inside, are really intrigued by this possibility. | ||
| And they speak out in a way that is against it. | ||
| But... | ||
| They will jump ship as soon as the evidence becomes undisputable. | ||
| To me, it's just a possibility that we should entertain because it affects the way we behave in the future. | ||
| If we search for other objects of the same, we might find even more conclusive evidence. | ||
| If we don't look for unexpected things, we will never discover them. | ||
| You know, if we put blinders on our eyes. | ||
| So all I'm saying is, it's a reasonable possibility for this, a reasonable interpretation for the evidence we have for this object, which is unusual, because all the natural interpretations also assume something that we have never seen before. | ||
| So I say... | ||
| Okay, so let's consider the possibility of a message in a bottle. | ||
| You know, when you walk on the beach and you see most of the time seashells or rocks that were naturally produced, every now and then you encounter a plastic bottle that was artificially made. | ||
| And perhaps Oumuamua was the first plastic bottle, you know, that carries some message for us. | ||
| And that would change our perception about our place in the universe. | ||
| You know, we are not alone. | ||
| Also, I don't think that we are the smartest kid on the block, if you ask me. | ||
| I think that we are probably quite typical because half of the stars, like the sun, have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same distance, that could have liquid water on the surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. | ||
| Now, you open a recipe book for cakes. | ||
| You can see that you can make very different cakes out of the same ingredients, depending on how you mix them. | ||
| You can take flour, sugar. | ||
| So you get very different outcomes. | ||
| What's the chance that if you took the soup of chemicals that existed on Earth and put them together in some random fashion to get the life as we know it... | ||
| That you got the best cake possible. | ||
| The chance is minuscule. | ||
| I think we are sort of typical, like ants on a sidewalk. | ||
| You know, we are not really special. | ||
| That's why nobody is interested in us. | ||
| It's very arrogant to say, we are unique. | ||
| We are special. | ||
| The aliens are coming to haunt us. | ||
| They don't care about us. | ||
| We are just like ants on a sidewalk. | ||
| And at the same time, we might learn from them. | ||
| So if we approach this from a modest perspective, that we are not really the sharpest cookie in the jar... | ||
| Then, by looking at the sky, we may learn something about more advanced technologies that we can bring here, for example. | ||
| Suppose we see a technology that we didn't even dream about. | ||
| It would be a better investment of our time to learn about it than to go to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley. | ||
| Instead of us developing it over hundreds of years, suddenly you see something that we can use here. | ||
| Well, let me push back on a couple of these things. | ||
| First of all, I don't think if people do believe that there is alien life, I don't think they necessarily think that we are the best of life in the cosmos. | ||
| I think most people agree there's room for improvement when it comes to the human race. | ||
| But we are clearly the most advanced animal that we're aware of, that we can prove it. | ||
| But we're not smart. | ||
| Look at the newspaper. | ||
| We're not perfect, but we're far more... | ||
| The word intelligent is a rough word, right? | ||
| We're definitely more intelligent than a lot of other animals that we can observe. | ||
| But what we can do that is interesting is we can radically change and manipulate our environment. | ||
| And I think it's preposterous to think that that wouldn't be interesting to another species. | ||
| Now, if you're thinking of something that's infinitely more advanced than us, millions and millions of years more advanced than us, it probably won't be impressed with us. | ||
| But we have... | ||
| Biologists go to the jungle to study bugs. | ||
| I mean, we have people that spend a large portion of their life looking for strange little mammals that live in the forest. | ||
| But think about it. | ||
| Our technology is evolving on a three-year timescale. | ||
| So, you know, it's a century old, the technologies we have. | ||
| So think what it would be a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, a million years from now, a billion years. | ||
| I believe that an advanced technological civilization probably builds a cocoon around itself. | ||
| It's not really interested in establishing contact with lesser civilizations like ours. | ||
| But why wouldn't it be? | ||
|
unidentified
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Because we're, you know, not... | |
| First of all, the only thing that can happen as a result of interaction with us is that they will downgrade their lifestyle, the quality of life. | ||
| So the only way for us to learn about them is from the trash they throw out. | ||
| Just like investigative journalists looking through the trash of celebrities in Hollywood to find out what are they doing. | ||
| But I don't think they will care much about us. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Let me offer you up another possibility. | ||
| What if they have recognized that all life, regardless of the ingredients in the cake and how they're put together, that all life seeks innovation and seeks to advance, and that this is a constant throughout the universe. | ||
| That things go from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms to interstellar travelers. | ||
| And that they continue along this path as long as they don't fall into a few possible scenarios that could lead to ultimate destruction, like nuclear war, like climate change, like all the things that we're involved in right now. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| I think advanced civilizations are probably short-lived because of stupidity. | ||
| Now, look, for example, at the concept of racism. | ||
| You know, that's not new anymore. | ||
| You know, there was the Nazi regime, okay, in the Second World War, and racism is still around us. | ||
| What is it based on that somehow the color of the skin of a person, you know, makes a difference as to... | ||
| Well, it's essentially tribalism, right? | ||
| Because if it's not the color of the skin, then it's the origin of the religion. | ||
| But it's stupidity. | ||
| It's stupidity. | ||
| Yeah, it makes no sense. | ||
| If you look at the genetic making of humans... | ||
| The color of the skin is completely superfluous. | ||
| So the fact that humans always want to feel superior relative to each other, they fight each other. | ||
| Most of our money, time and energy. | ||
| Look at the newspaper. | ||
| Most of our effort is in fighting each other. | ||
| That is not a sign of intelligence. | ||
| A sign of intelligence is working together, dedicating all the resources that we have towards a better future such that we can benefit from it. | ||
| So how can we waste all these risks? | ||
| You know, just to give you an example, in my book I talk about Winston Churchill. | ||
| Winston Churchill in 1939 wrote an essay about the fact that There could be life on other planets, around other stars, and we should search for it. | ||
| Now, he didn't have a chance to publish it because he became prime minister and then had to fight the Second World War against the Nazi regime. | ||
| So much money was wasted in that war. | ||
| If that money was allocated to the search for extraterrestrial life the way that Churchill envisioned it before the war, We might have known the answer by now. | ||
| And what I'm saying is this is just an example for how non-intelligent we are. | ||
| We are not working together towards a better future. | ||
| We're fighting each other. | ||
| And that's the answer to your question, that we might not live very long. | ||
| But you're saying this as you work at Harvard and as you're writing books on extraterrestrial objects. | ||
| I don't necessarily agree with you. | ||
| I think there are massive problems with people, but I think we are far better than the human beings that lived 2,000 years ago in that regard. | ||
| And I think that we will probably be looking back on this day and age and mocking how stupid we are when we are more advanced 2,000 years from today. | ||
|
unidentified
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I really hope so, and that's I think we're moving in that direction. | |
| Well, that's what I'm trying to promote, but I'm not necessarily as optimistic as you are. | ||
| I think our cake is still in the oven. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's hope so. | |
| I really want that future. | ||
| I'm doing my best, but you can see from the pushback... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| To which I don't have access because I don't have an account on the social media. | ||
| Congratulations again for that. | ||
| I think there's conflict, but I think for whatever reason, the way human beings operate, we oftentimes need conflict in order to make improvements. | ||
| We need a yin and a yang. | ||
| We need to give in a poll. | ||
| If we don't have that, we get complacent. | ||
| Why can't we understand the best path forward without... | ||
| You know, it's just like using a GPS system and it says recalculating. | ||
| Every time we have a crisis, recalculating. | ||
| So we recalculate our next move based on all the mistakes we've made. | ||
| Why can't we be smart in the first I think we have biological limitations that are based on our ancestry. | ||
| And our ancestry is filled with tribalism and chaos. | ||
| And we're primates. | ||
| I mean, that's part of the problem. | ||
| And I think that our issue with racism is the same issue that we have when we have religious discrimination or cultural discrimination. | ||
| It's tribalism. | ||
|
unidentified
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I agree. | |
| And we are, you know, it's wired into our DNA. Now, my problem is, why couldn't science, given that... | ||
| You know, there are billions of Earth-Sun systems within just the Milky Way galaxy. | ||
| And then a trillion galaxies like the Milky Way in the observable volume of the universe. | ||
| You know, why can't the mainstream of astronomy simply say, conservatively, you know, just assuming the most conservative, not speculative assumption. | ||
| Conservatively, we are the middle of the road, you know, kind of life. | ||
| It's very likely that we're not unique and special. | ||
| And let's just look for evidence, you know, search for it. | ||
| Why should there be a taboo on discussing this subject? | ||
| That makes no sense. | ||
| For example, astronomers are now thinking, contemplating new telescopes of the future that will cost billions of dollars to taxpayers, okay, that would search for oxygen. | ||
| In the atmospheres of other planets around other stars, because oxygen could be indicative of life, microbial life. | ||
| I say it will never be conclusive, such as such, even if it costs billions of dollars, because the Earth, for two billion years, the first two billion years of the Earth's history, didn't have much oxygen in its atmosphere. | ||
| There were microbes, but the oxygen level was quite low. | ||
| And then it suddenly rose after two billion years, half of its life. | ||
| So not finding oxygen doesn't mean there is no life. | ||
| And then if you find oxygen, it can be produced by many natural processes like breaking water molecules or other things. | ||
| So it will never be conclusive. | ||
| How can you make a conclusive statement if you find industrial pollution in the same atmosphere? | ||
| You just search... | ||
| For CFCs, these are the molecules produced by refrigerating systems, by industries. | ||
| If you find evidence for that, there is no way that nature can make these very complex molecules naturally. | ||
| So I say to the mainstream of astronomy, use the same instruments and motivate them by this question of, can we detect industrial pollution? | ||
| And I wrote a paper about it. | ||
| And the thing is, the public is extremely interested in this question. | ||
| And the public funds science. | ||
| So how can the scientific community shy away from a question that it can address with existing technology, you know? | ||
| When the public is very interested in that, how can there be a taboo on this question? | ||
| That's the thing that really puzzles me. | ||
| Now, you know, I wasn't working in this area until the last five years or so. | ||
| I was working in studying black holes, studying the universe, and I came across a number of ideas that led me into this rabbit hole, into this subject. | ||
| Now I'm about to publish this book at a popular level, but also a textbook, Six months later, that describes all the science that we have related to the search for life outside Earth, far from Earth. | ||
| And I'm just amazed that it's not part of the mainstream. | ||
| You know, it's really surprising to me. | ||
| And I think it's inappropriate because you look at physics, theoretical physics. | ||
| There are lots of speculative ideas in it, like people talk about extra dimensions, the multiverse, supersymmetry, superstring theory. | ||
| All of these have no evidence to their credit. | ||
| There is no experimental test, not even thought about, like in the next decade, the next two decades. | ||
| But these ideas are part of the mainstream. | ||
| So you see physicists giving each other awards and doing intellectual gymnastics, just demonstrating that they are smart. | ||
| And to me, that's an unhealthy situation in physics. | ||
| You know, you can do it in mathematics where it's completely detached from any application to reality. | ||
| But in physics, we are supposed to describe reality. | ||
| And yet you have this intellect. | ||
| So it's as if the physics community, some parts of it, decided that the most important task is to demonstrate that you're smart. | ||
| And that is really strange to me because, you know, we're supposed to understand nature, not show that we are smart. | ||
| You know, Einstein made three big mistakes at the end of his career in the 1930s. | ||
| He argued that black holes don't exist, gravitational waves don't exist, and quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. | ||
| You know, he argued all these three things at the end of his career when he was the most experienced, you know. | ||
| And he was wrong. | ||
| We have experimental data that shows that he was wrong on all three. | ||
| And what is the lesson from that? | ||
| Even the smartest person that was last century in physics can be wrong if he works on the frontier because you never know exactly where the truth lies. | ||
| You have to take risks. | ||
| And if people want to just demonstrate that they are smart, it's better not to take risks. | ||
| And how do you not take risks? | ||
| If you work on ideas that will never be tested against data, against evidence. | ||
| So if you work on superstring theory or on extra dimensions or on the multiverse, you can do intellectual gymnastics and impress your colleagues that you're smart. | ||
| And you will get jobs, you will get recognition, you will get awards. | ||
| If that's your goal, that's a completely legitimate framework. | ||
| But I see it as a violation of our commitment as physicists to understand nature. | ||
| You know, it's not really about us. | ||
| Physics is a dialogue with nature. | ||
| You listen to nature. | ||
| You see what the experiments are telling you. | ||
| And you learn. | ||
| And perhaps you were wrong. | ||
| You take risks. | ||
| It's not about your image. | ||
| It's not getting more likes on Twitter. | ||
| So that's why I don't really care what my colleagues say. | ||
| If this object looked... | ||
| Unusual. | ||
| I just talk about it the way I would talk about any other anomaly. | ||
| And people were asking, you know, why isn't he backing down? | ||
| Well, I will back down as soon as there is evidence. | ||
| You know, if I saw a photograph showing that it's a rock, or if I saw some other objects like it, that we definitely have clear evidence that they are naturally produced, then I will give up on it. | ||
| And I'm not afraid of being wrong. | ||
| You know, that's part of any work on the frontiers. | ||
| This is my thoughts on the quantum physics aspect of this. | ||
| I think there's not enough people that understand what they're doing to criticize them, so there's no social pressure. | ||
| The difference between that and the concept of exploring extraterrestrial life is extraterrestrial life is inexorably connected to nonsense. | ||
| It's connected to crazy people that think that they're talking to aliens. | ||
| They're channeling people from the other planet. | ||
| I have an answer to that. | ||
| Suppose there was a whole literature on COVID-19 that is completely fictitious. | ||
| People were saying crazy things about COVID-19 that make no sense whatsoever. | ||
| You can find them. | ||
| Suppose there were books about it. | ||
| There were films about it. | ||
| Now, would that mean that scientists, reputable scientists, should not work on a vaccine for COVID? No, no, no. | ||
| So who cares if there are people that say nonsense? | ||
| You don't care. | ||
| You ignore them. | ||
| COVID-19 is a real thing. | ||
| You can prove it in a lab quickly, instantly. | ||
| I mean, it's universally acknowledged as being a real thing. | ||
| The problem with extraterrestrial life is there's no evidence that it's real. | ||
| Well, but if you step on the grass... | ||
| And you say, look, it doesn't grow, then obviously because you're stepping on it. | ||
| So if you bully anyone that works on the subject, then young people don't enter into this research field. | ||
| If you don't fund it at all, you dry it up, then there will not be discoveries. | ||
| And then you say, look, there are no discoveries. | ||
| I step on the grass, it doesn't grow. | ||
| Therefore, there is no point in continuing to wait for it, you know, to grow. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| No, I think it's a side effect of our social interactions. | ||
| And I think a lot of professors, a lot of people in academia, they come from maybe a more socially awkward... | ||
| They come from a lot of people that get into teaching. | ||
| A lot of people that get into being professors. | ||
| They weren't like the class king. | ||
| They weren't like the most popular person. | ||
| And social interactions with them, you know, maybe they were bullied. | ||
| Maybe they're like Dr. Carl Hart, who's an academic who was on a couple days ago, was actually talking about this very subject. | ||
| And that a lot of academics, they try to undermine other people's work. | ||
| And they do so in kind of a bullying fashion. | ||
| Yeah, because it's all about the ego, you see. | ||
| I was asked by the Harvard Gazette, the Harvard University Gazette, which is the Pravda of Harvard, you know, this official newspaper of Harvard. | ||
| They asked me, what is the one thing you would like to change about the world? | ||
| You know, a very big question. | ||
| So I wrote an essay. | ||
| I said, I want my colleagues to behave more like kids. | ||
| Because as a kid, I remember that. | ||
| You know, I was mostly curious about the world. | ||
| I would not be afraid of making mistakes. | ||
| I wasn't worried about my ego or my something... | ||
| Really strange happens to those kids that take risks and are not worried about themselves so much. | ||
| Something bad happens to them when they become tenured professors in academia. | ||
| Tenure is supposed to give you the freedom to explore directions that may turn out to be wrong. | ||
| That's what Einstein demonstrated at the end of his career. | ||
| So You would expect people to take advantage of that but instead once professors become tenured for life meaning that there is no risk to their job They are starting to pursue honors and awards, status, recognition. | ||
| They are afraid of making mistakes. | ||
| They build these echo chambers where they have students and postdocs repeating their mantras so that their voice will sound louder, so that they will get even more recognition. | ||
| Now, I say the scientific inquiry is not about us. | ||
| It's about the dialogue with nature, trying to figure out what nature is. | ||
| It's not about elevating our status, our image. | ||
| You know, we will all die in several decades. | ||
| So, you know, it's really not that. | ||
| Now, you know, actually, Lex Friedman was asking me, Avi, you know so much, what do you think is the meaning of life? | ||
| And I told him, look... | ||
| I think we just exist. | ||
| Any meaning that we assign now will go away in a billion years because the sun will boil off the oceans on Earth. | ||
| There will be no life on Earth. | ||
| All of these things that we call meaning, they are really temporary in the big scale. | ||
| We should just enjoy the process, just like eating good food. | ||
| I will not mention another example. | ||
| You know, doing this, like eating good food, you enjoy the process. | ||
| So learning about the world, figuring out what the world is, is very enjoyable. | ||
| You know, if I realize something nobody else did... | ||
| And understand something that nobody else did, it gives me pleasure. | ||
| So just the process of doing that, that gives me meaning because I enjoy it. | ||
| So you should live your life in a way that you enjoy it. | ||
| If you like good food, that's good enough. | ||
| You can live your life just eating. | ||
| That's what animals do. | ||
| You can have sex. | ||
| You can do all kinds. | ||
| But... | ||
| If you want a deeper sort of satisfaction, I think understanding the world is what humans are capable of doing. | ||
| And that's really a deeper level of enjoying life, so to speak. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of examples of professors going out on a limb, being incorrect, and then being punished, being ridiculed, losing their status in the community, or even being correct, but not having the support of your peers who turn on you and turn against you, And then it turns out ultimately they were correct, but there's very little repercussions for that. | ||
| There's this thing that happens with people and ideas where they get scared to take on something that could easily make them look ridiculous. | ||
| And the best example of that is extraterrestrial life. | ||
| It's so easy to get ridiculed for believing in it. | ||
| It's like Bigfoot and then extraterrestrial life. | ||
| No, I want to change that. | ||
| I say this is a subject the scientific community can address with scientific tools, okay, with telescopes. | ||
| Let's discuss it. | ||
| The public is interested. | ||
| You know, let's forget about the past and look for a better future, right? | ||
| And my point is... | ||
| There are many examples for unborn babies in science where people were ridiculed and ideas were never pursued or delayed. | ||
| For example, looking for planets around other stars. | ||
| That was something that was suggested in 1952 by an astronomer called Otto Struve, who said if you take Jupiter, the planet Jupiter, put it close to the Sun, then it will move the Sun back and forth A lot. | ||
| And you could tell if there is a close-in Jupiter near other stars by looking at their motion. | ||
| Or looking as it occults the star, comes in front of it, transits in front. | ||
| He suggested that 1952, for four decades, astronomers ignored that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they said, we know that Jupiter in our solar system is far away, and we understand why it's far away, and therefore we shouldn't waste our time even looking for something like that. | ||
| Then, in 1995, a couple of astronomers found a hot Jupiter, a Jupiter close to a star, and they got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for that. | ||
| So my point is, this is an example of a baby that was eventually born. | ||
| So people would say, oh yeah, science works, you see, eventually it was found. | ||
| My point is it took four decades. | ||
| In those four decades, you know, we could have done a lot to advance science. | ||
| And the other thing is, I say, okay, this baby was born, but there might have been other babies that were not born. | ||
| You know, ideas that were put forward and were scrutinized for no good reason just because people are close-minded. | ||
| You know, the strange thing for me is that I see a lot of innovation in the commercial sector. | ||
| You see, you know, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you know, Apple, Google. | ||
| They have parts of their companies that are doing blue sky research, things that are not applied. | ||
| It all started with IBM and before that. | ||
| And then in academia, I see a lot of conservatism, much less innovation as in the commercials. | ||
| Now, the commercial sector is after making a profit. | ||
| You would expect academia to be even more open-minded, but it's not. | ||
| And to me, that must change. | ||
| Is this something that you had as an idea before publishing these thoughts about extraterrestrial life? | ||
| And did that accentuate it for you? | ||
| I didn't expect the response that I received. | ||
| It doesn't bother me. | ||
| I have more than 800 papers that I published and eight books. | ||
| In all of these, I talk about anomalies. | ||
| Over the years, I talked about anomalies in other contexts, like in the early universe and And when I mentioned speculative ideas in other contexts, there was no pushback. | ||
| It wasn't threatening to anyone. | ||
| But something about the subject of extraterrestrial life bothers people. | ||
| And frankly, I'm just like a kid. | ||
| I try to be as close as possible to the way I was at a young age. | ||
| I'm just doing it innocently. | ||
| Working on this subject the same way I work on other subjects, and I get this response that... | ||
| Now, the only reason the two of us are speaking, you know, and I get a lot of media attention is because my colleagues are not behaving the same way. | ||
| If everyone would accept... | ||
| You know, I think it's common sense. | ||
| What is common sense to me, if everyone would accept it, I would be no different than the person next to me. | ||
| You wouldn't be speaking to me. | ||
| Sure I would. | ||
| No, I still would be. | ||
| I would love to talk to you. | ||
| You know, I grew up on a farm, by the way. | ||
| I'm not a typical astronomer. | ||
| Yeah, you were explaining that. | ||
| Did you grow up in Israel? | ||
| Yeah, I grew up in Israel on a farm. | ||
| I used to collect eggs every afternoon and drive a tractor to the hills and read primarily philosophy books. | ||
| I was interested in the big questions. | ||
| But then, you know, I had to serve in the military. | ||
| And I had two options, either to run in the fields with a machine gun, you know, Which I did partly. | ||
| Or to do intellectual work. | ||
| And I could do that if I were to work in physics. | ||
| So I said, okay, I'll do the physics. | ||
| And I was recruited to a special program that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24. And then I worked on, not on astronomy, but then I visited, I actually led the first project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative of Ronald Reagan back in the 80s. | ||
| The first international project. | ||
| So General Abramson came to visit Israel and we presented the project to him. | ||
| I was the theorist leading that project and he liked it a lot. | ||
| So it was the first project to be funded outside the U.S. related to SDI, the Star Wars initiative. | ||
| So that brought me to visit Washington quite often because we were funded by the U.S. And in one of the visits, I went to Princeton because I heard that Albert Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Study and wanted to see the place. | ||
| Someone introduced me to John Bacall, who was an astrophysicist there, working mostly on the sun for his career. | ||
| I didn't know how the sun shines when I met him. | ||
| Eventually, he invited me for a month-long visit and then offered me a five-year fellowship. | ||
| And at that point, I said, okay, I have this offer. | ||
| I cannot decline it. | ||
| I'll go into astrophysics. | ||
| So I switched into astrophysics. | ||
| I had to learn the vocabulary. | ||
| And then a position came at Harvard, junior faculty, and nobody wanted it. | ||
| There was someone else that was offered it. | ||
| He turned it down because the chance of getting tenured at Harvard were very small at the time. | ||
| And I took it because I could always go back to the farm. | ||
| You know, that was a plan B for me and maybe even better plan because... | ||
| You know, I enjoy nature. | ||
| But then they promoted me to tenure in three years, and I became the chair of the department a decade and a half later. | ||
| So I was the longest serving chair between 2011 and 2020, so that's three terms. | ||
| So, you know, I'm in a way part of, should be regarded as part of the establishment, because I was the chair of the Harvard astronomy department for nine years, three terms. | ||
| And I also chair the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. | ||
| And I was a member of President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington. | ||
| And I'm also chair of the Starshot Initiative of the Breakthrough Foundation. | ||
| I have a lot of leadership, and I'm the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard and the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative, which is a center just focusing on black holes. | ||
| So I have all these leadership positions, but fundamentally, I'm just like a kid. | ||
| I don't care about these labels. | ||
| I try to keep my eyes on the ball. | ||
| Now, to go back to Oumuamua, you were saying that it was moving at a speed that was inconsistent with something that's being thrown from the sun and that it moved faster than any rocket that we can shoot out. | ||
| How fast was it moving? | ||
| It was moving when it went close to us, over 50 kilometers per second, which is, you know, think about it, well, of order, 30 miles per second, second, not hour. | ||
| So, very fast. | ||
| Now, by the time we spotted it, It was already moving away from us. | ||
| So it's just like seeing a guest for dinner and then noticing that the guest is weird once it left through the front door into the dark street. | ||
| So you can't... | ||
| By now, you know, as it moved out, by now it's extremely faint. | ||
| It's a million times fainter than it was when it was close to us. | ||
| What is the normal speed of a comet? | ||
| It's at least twice as slow. | ||
| So all the comets and asteroids we have seen before are bound to the Sun. | ||
| And so they come from the outer part of the solar system. | ||
| They are sinking on an orbit that almost goes towards the Sun, but not quite. | ||
| And so they pass near us, some of them. | ||
| Most of them are moving far away from us, so we don't see any cometary tail. | ||
| Because they are bound to the sun, they are not moving as fast as an object that came from outside that is falling near. | ||
| And we could tell that it is an interstellar object. | ||
| That was the first thing noticed. | ||
| We didn't expect it because I wrote a paper about 12 years earlier saying... | ||
| That this telescope in Hawaii that discovered Oumuamua, and that's why it has this name, by the way, because it means a scout in the Hawaiian language, a messenger from far away. | ||
| Oumuamua. | ||
| It was discovered by a telescope called PANSTARS on Mount Haleakala in Maui, in Hawaii. | ||
| We actually visited that observatory in July 2017 with my family. | ||
| We were on vacation in Maui. | ||
| But back then... | ||
| They didn't spot Oumuamua when it was approaching us at that time. | ||
| They spotted it only in October that year when it was receding away. | ||
| If we would have known about it when it was approaching us, we could have in principle sent a CubeSat, a satellite, with a camera that would meet it. | ||
| Halfway and take a photograph. | ||
| Not only that we didn't spot it approaching us, but we also didn't suspect that it's something special. | ||
| Now, there was a second object that came later called Borisov. | ||
| It's called after a Russian amateur astronomer, Gennady Borisov. | ||
| They discovered it by chance, and it looked just like a comet, a typical comet with a cometary tail, also came from interstellar space, just what we expected. | ||
| So then people came to me and said, okay, you see, this one is a comet, it's interstellar as well. | ||
| Doesn't it convince you that Oumuamua was also natural in origin? | ||
| And I said, you know, when I went to the first date with my wife, I thought that she's special and unique. | ||
| The fact that I met a lot of women since then didn't change that opinion. | ||
| I still think that she's special. | ||
| So the fact that we saw Borisov, like a typical, regular, usual comet, after we saw Muamua that didn't look like a comet, doesn't change my opinion. | ||
| So you think they were just hastily looking to dismiss your observations? | ||
| Well, it was not my observation, but they were trying to make the case that it's also natural. | ||
| So, you know, the community as a whole, there was a group of astronomers that came together and said, it is natural. | ||
| It is unusual, but it's probably natural. | ||
| They just said that. | ||
| And it reminded me of a story about in the early 1930s, there was a group like of 30 physicists that decided to write a book showing that Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong. | ||
| So when Einstein was asked about it, he said, you know, why do you need 30 physicists to write such a book? | ||
| You know, one of them would be enough. | ||
| You know, if he makes a good argument, that would show that my theory is wrong. | ||
| So, a kid can make a good argument and show that something is wrong. | ||
| You don't need a group. | ||
| The only reason you need a group of people is if there is sort of a herd, you know, just like in Africa, if you have a group of lions coming together, then they feel much more strong, you know, and so it's just a sign of authority. | ||
| They want to establish authority. | ||
| My point about Oumuamua is you don't need a group of astronomers to come together and say that it's natural. | ||
| I just want them to look at the evidence and explain it. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Now, the speed in which it was traveling, you said that it's twice as fast, at least, as the average comment. | ||
| Have there been other things that have been observed that are as fast as it? | ||
| No, this was the first object that we saw coming from outside the solar system. | ||
| So it was the fastest... | ||
| At the place where we saw it. | ||
| The fastest ever. | ||
| Because all the other objects were bound to the sun. | ||
| And by the way, there is this principle that is called the Copernican principle that says we are never at a privileged time or space. | ||
| You know, Copernicus Was arguing that we are not at the center of the universe. | ||
| We're not at the center of the world. | ||
| And you can generalize it and say also that we are never at a special time, okay? | ||
| So if we saw this object over a period of a few years that the survey of PanStars was going on, In the region of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, that means that there are many more out there. | ||
| You know, you can't just be lucky that over a few years you see the only object that passes in our vicinity over billions of years. | ||
| You know, that makes no sense. | ||
| So there will be many more that we will find in the future if we just look. | ||
| And in three years, there would be another telescope much more sensitive than Pan-STARRS called the Vera Rubin Observatory. | ||
| That could see one such object every month, you know? | ||
| The only thing that complicates the picture is that Elon Musk wants to launch all these SpaceX, all these communication satellites. | ||
| And, you know, they reflect sunlight. | ||
| So when they go in the dark sky, they appear on the telescope images. | ||
| So we have to know where they are and subtract them off. | ||
| But that's all. | ||
| Now, this object you also deemed, when you were talking about its reflective surface, that there's something about it that is much more reflective. | ||
| I believe you said 10 times more reflective than the average... | ||
| Than the typical. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| Okay, so how did we get that? | ||
| The Spitzer Space Telescope was trying to detect heat coming off the object because we know how close it came to the sun. | ||
| And we know what temperature it was heated to, okay? | ||
| So the amount of heat that we can detect from it just depends on its size. | ||
| If it's very big and it's hot, we would easily detect the heat. | ||
| And this is about the size of a football field? | ||
| So then, yeah, so it's less than a football field. | ||
| So from the fact that the Spitzel spacecraft didn't see any heat coming off it, you can put an upper limit. | ||
| You can say the size is smaller than something, okay? | ||
| Roughly the size of a football field. | ||
| And then you can infer how much reflectance it should have so that you see as much light, as much sunlight coming off it as we saw. | ||
| And it's at the shiny end of the objects that we have seen before. | ||
| I mean, it's not completely unprecedented. | ||
| There are objects that are as shiny as this one, but it's not, you know, one of the dark objects, you know, like middle-of-the-road kind of objects. | ||
| It's at the shiny end. | ||
| And so that, in your mind, what is similar in terms of what you would expect from something that's this reflective, that's that shiny? | ||
| So what we've seen before are asteroids and comets, a small fraction of which are as shiny. | ||
| None of them is 10 times longer than it is wide. | ||
| So it's cigar-shaped, roughly. | ||
| And the comets that show as much push as this object exhibited, they have very clear cometary tails. | ||
| So I say, you know, okay, suppose it represents 10% of the objects that show one anomalous property, and then 10% of the objects that show another anomalous property, and then 10% of the objects that show another anomalous property. | ||
| You multiply all these probabilities, you get a very small likelihood. | ||
| Of getting such an object. | ||
| And this is the first that we have seen. | ||
| So it should be typical. | ||
| So how come the very first interstellar object, or maybe one out of two if you include Borisov, how come it's so unusual relative to the objects we have seen in the solar system? | ||
| So my point is, let's Let's be open-minded. | ||
| Why assume that we know the answer in advance? | ||
| What is so problematic in discussing? | ||
| I don't think it's a speculation that there are other civilizations out there. | ||
| Maybe they're dead because they killed themselves. | ||
| You know, they produced the means for their own destruction. | ||
| They didn't take care of the climate. | ||
| They fought each other through nuclear wars. | ||
| Maybe they are dead by now. | ||
| But just like we find evidence for dead civilizations on Earth by digging into the ground, doing archaeology, the Mayan civilization is not around anymore. | ||
| But we can find evidence for it from the things that they left behind. | ||
| We can do the same thing in space. | ||
| Space archaeology. | ||
| We can look for relics from dead civilizations. | ||
| And one type of relics are those space junk, you know, the things that they threw out that we can find visiting our solar system. | ||
| So why not check for it? | ||
| Now, everything you've said is very rational. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| What are the arguments against this? | ||
| Like when your colleagues disagree with you, what fuel do they possibly have? | ||
| For example, they say it's never aliens. | ||
| It's never aliens. | ||
| Never, until the aliens come. | ||
| What do they think about things like Commander David Fravor's interpretations of the experience that he had off of the coast of San Diego, where something moved from 60,000 plus feet above sea level to one in a second? | ||
| On that, I would say, on unidentified flying objects, I think the scientific community should invest some effort at examining these reports. | ||
| Basically, you can deploy a whole set of instruments. | ||
| In the ocean where the Nimitz carrier was and search for objects similar to the reports and do a scientific study of this rather than dismissing it and moving on to work on extra dimensions. | ||
| Given that the public is so curious about these issues, I just find it inappropriate not to listen to the... | ||
| By the way, I don't think of science as an occupation of the elite. | ||
| It's not something that is supposed to elevate you to a higher status. | ||
| You know, when a plumber comes to my home to fix a problem with the toilet or with the pipe, you know, I help the plumber and we figure out what the problem is based on all the clues that... | ||
| This is my way of life. | ||
| I think about a problem in the sink or in the toilet, just like I think about a problem in physics. | ||
| Trying to apply common sense, look at all the evidence, the clues, and figure out what's going on. | ||
| And I think anyone, even without professional education, should be able to follow what the scientists are doing. | ||
| But my colleagues argue we should... | ||
| Be quiet as long as we are not sure about the interpretation. | ||
| You know, once we decide that we have the right answer, we come out to the public and tell the public what it is. | ||
| Because otherwise nobody would believe us that there is global warming, for example. | ||
| My point is exactly the opposite. | ||
| I say... | ||
| Nobody would believe you if you don't show, expose the process by which you arrive at the conclusion. | ||
| So, most of science is not... | ||
| We're finalized. | ||
| Most of the scientific process does not have enough evidence. | ||
| We don't know exactly what's going on. | ||
| So we're trying to collect clues, evidence. | ||
| And that's part of the process. | ||
| It's a learning experience. | ||
| Sometimes we make mistakes. | ||
| It's completely human to make mistakes. | ||
| We should show the public that it's okay. | ||
| The public will understand that because it's part of our experience. | ||
| And then when scientists have enough evidence to conclude something, The public will believe it now because they see how the process goes, that as you collect enough evidence, eventually it's clear. | ||
| Instead of forcing scientists to be quiet until the last moment, and then they look like teachers in a class coming out with a press announcement of some result, and every now and then those press conferences end up being wronged. | ||
| So their quarrel with you is that they think that your assumption that it's alien in nature is incorrect or hasty? | ||
| No, we shouldn't discuss it because the alien interpretation could be contemplated in many other occasions. | ||
| But this is not a typical situation. | ||
| We have the first object from interstellar space. | ||
| It looks strange. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Let's collect more evidence. | ||
| The public is interested, so what's the problem? | ||
| I don't see any problem with discussing this possibility, putting it on the table, and looking for more evidence. | ||
| Why would there be a taboo on this subject? | ||
| What is their interpretation of the evidence? | ||
| When you lay out all the things you said about the shape of this object, the speed of it, where it's coming from, all these variables that are very unusual. | ||
| So they say each of them is indeed unusual. | ||
| But probably there is a natural explanation. | ||
| And then they say, it's within my comfort zone to just ignore it. | ||
| Let's forget about it. | ||
| It's natural. | ||
| The first ever interstellar object moving twice as fast as any comet we've ever observed with no tail, with a shiny reflective surface that has an extremely unusual shape that's ten times longer than it is wide, and they just want to ignore it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems silly. | ||
| And it's flat, most likely flat, according to this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I'm telling you that, frankly, I don't benefit from this exchange with my colleagues. | ||
| On the contrary, I'm sure that behind my back they are saying bad things. | ||
| But the way I see it is when I served in the military, and I did some training in the paratroopers and so forth, There was this saying that sometimes a soldier has to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can pass across. | ||
| And the way I see it is that I'm trying to create an atmosphere, an intellectual atmosphere that would be... | ||
| More open-minded that would allow younger people to have a better future and discuss these subjects. | ||
| To me, I also think that it's just inappropriate, unhealthy for science to speculate about extra dimensions, about all these things, while avoiding even the discussion on technological signatures. | ||
| They're not the same people, though, right? | ||
| Not the same. | ||
| You're saying science in this gigantic blanket. | ||
| Yeah, but there is this culture. | ||
| But quantum physicists and astronomers... | ||
| They're not the same, but think about it. | ||
| The mainstream... | ||
| I mean, astronomers are completely fine with the discussion on extra dimension and the multiverse. | ||
| They don't complain about it. | ||
| But it's not their field of discipline, right? | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't threaten them in any way. | ||
| I think there is something about extraterrestrial life that is so important for us. | ||
| That they prefer, just like my colleague said, I wish it never existed. | ||
| But it's kind of crazy for someone who is an astronomer to not want there to be evidence of extraterrestrial life. | ||
| Or at least extraterrestrial civilization. | ||
| Some discarded piece of civilization that's hurling through our galaxy. | ||
| And that's what you believe, right? | ||
| You don't think it's actually a ship. | ||
| You think it's some sort of an object that's like... | ||
| Artificial. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| It could be just a surface layer. | ||
| But there's something about the way it was moving. | ||
| Yeah, it was pushed by sunlight, in my view, just like this. | ||
| Was it tumbling, though? | ||
| It was tumbling, so it probably was not functional. | ||
| It could be a piece of a surface layer of a spaceship that was ripped apart. | ||
| It's something that... | ||
| Now, let me mention a few examples that my colleagues suggested. | ||
| So, those mainstream astronomers that try to explain... | ||
| The observed properties of Oumuamua. | ||
| An example for an explanation that is natural was that it's a dust bunny. | ||
| You know, the kind of thing you find in a household. | ||
| The collection of dust particles. | ||
| A dust bunny, you know, you find in the corner. | ||
| But a size of a football field and a hundred times less dense than air that is pushed by sunlight. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Very porous. | ||
| That was an explanation. | ||
| Of a natural origin. | ||
| Why would it be so reflective? | ||
| They didn't discuss that. | ||
| Then there was another suggestion that it's frozen hydrogen, like a hydrogen iceberg, that evaporates, but hydrogen is transparent, so you can't see the cometary tail. | ||
| The problem with that is we showed in a scientific paper that it would not survive the journey because hydrogen can easily get evaporated by starlight impacting on its surface. | ||
| So, you know, these are the kinds of ideas that were... | ||
| And then there was another idea that maybe it's a piece of an object that was shredded by a star when it passed close to a star. | ||
| But the problem with that is usually you get shrapnel or pieces that are elongated from such a disruption, whereas this object was most likely flat, according to the analysis of the light curve. | ||
| So, you know, these are the ideas of the mainstream astronomers that try to explain it as a natural origin. | ||
| Now, this object, the way it's detected, you can't see a clear image of it. | ||
| No, you can't, because it's too small. | ||
| From the distance it had from Earth, you know, our telescopes are not big enough to... | ||
| So how do we detect it? | ||
| What are we detecting? | ||
| We detect the reflected light from it. | ||
| The sunlight that bounces off its surface, we can see it. | ||
| So, you know, it's just reflecting some light and we see it as a point source. | ||
| But if we were to discover it when it was approaching us, we could have sent a camera that would come close to it and take a photograph. | ||
| So there's no images of it that anyone can look at? | ||
| No. | ||
| So when the machine, when the observatory is detecting it, they are detecting it as data? | ||
| As a point source of light. | ||
| A source of light that cannot be resolved. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That's what they're seeing? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the thing that is circled is Oumuamua, and all these other dots that you see are trails of stars. | ||
| Now, Oumuamua was moving in the sky very fast, but if we focus on it, then the stars are moving relative to it. | ||
| And that's why you see from a sequence of snapshots, you see these trailing trails of stars. | ||
| Now, is there anyone who agrees with you? | ||
| Well, the people that I worked with. | ||
| Yes, but I mean, are there other astronomers that have stepped out with you and said, I think he's got some really good points here? | ||
| Not stepped out, but, you know, behind the scenes. | ||
| One of the reasons I wrote it up is because, you know, people that I respect told me that they think this is really unusual. | ||
| The behind the scenes people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They don't want to step out in public. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Isn't that unusual? | ||
| Yeah, but I don't... | ||
| Or not even unusual. | ||
| It's just sad. | ||
| It is sad. | ||
| The entire situation is sad. | ||
| Well, it's not that sad because, you know, a lot of people are discussing it because of the fact that you have the courage to talk about it openly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's not sad. | ||
| It's just, it sort of just explains the state of modern academia and that it's filled with human beings and human beings are flawed. | ||
| And there's some really typical psychological traits that people that, you know, might be a little socially awkward display. | ||
| But, by the way, the public is different. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Very different. | ||
| I get a very different response. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| We're dumb, and we depend on people like you, and stories like this are fun. | ||
| I would turn it around. | ||
| I would say that you are open-minded, and you are much more forward-looking. | ||
| Yes, I think the public is more forward-looking when it comes to extraterrestrial life, but also less informed. | ||
| You know, they believe things they maybe shouldn't believe. | ||
| And it's a complex, very bizarre issue. | ||
| But my point is, unless you look, you will never discover those things that you have convictions about. | ||
| So if the scientific community shies away from this subject, obviously there will be no news, and the public is starved. | ||
| The reason I get this attention is the public is starved, really wants to know more about it. | ||
| The scientific community has the ability to explore it, but they shy away from it. | ||
| So I'm sitting in between, you know, in this very awkward, strange situation. | ||
| I told my wife, you know, when this story broke out, I said, look, this is, I just cannot believe this, that it's so obvious that the scientific community needs to explore it because the public funds science and its common sense. | ||
| You know, I just apply common sense to it. | ||
| And yet my colleagues do not agree with me. | ||
| You know, I cannot believe this. | ||
| Well, I believe it also. | ||
| I think it's also part of the thing that they didn't come to the same conclusion. | ||
| Even if your data and your interpretation of the data makes sense to them, if they didn't come to that conclusion on their own and you are also in the same field as them, they might want to just diminish their findings. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There is this tendency as well that stems from jealousy to the attention and so forth. | ||
| But the way I see it, and frankly, it's not about me and it's not about the... | ||
| Public media attention and so forth. | ||
| It's about, are we alone? | ||
| And are we the smartest kid on the block or not? | ||
| And the only way to find out is by collecting evidence. | ||
| So let's look for more objects of the same. | ||
| And that's all I'm trying to advocate. | ||
| Let's be modest, not say that we know the answer in advance because that would resemble those philosophers that put Galileo in house arrest. | ||
| Let's be open-minded. | ||
| And the good news is that science can address this question now. | ||
| You know, so it's an opportunity that I just cannot believe that my colleagues are not taking advantage of because public is excited. | ||
| Public funds science. | ||
| One plus one equals two. | ||
| Let's get the public engaged behind this to fund future astronomical research at a much higher level than is currently funded. | ||
| No, instead, the scientists say, no, no, no, thank you. | ||
| We don't need this gift. | ||
| We don't want to deal with it. | ||
| Now this much more powerful observatory that you're saying comes online in three years, where is that going to be located? | ||
| In Chile. | ||
| Is that the VLT? No. | ||
| Well, there is a VLT there in Chile as well. | ||
| But that's already up? | ||
| Yeah, that's already up. | ||
| This is called the Vera Rubin Observatory. | ||
| And it's even more potent than the VLT. It's a telescope that will survey the sky. | ||
| The VLT is focusing on a small region of the sky. | ||
| This is a survey telescope that would look through the sky. | ||
| Now the purpose of PANSTARS or this telescope was originally defined by Congress that said astronomers should find all the objects that are endangering life on Earth. | ||
| All the killer asteroids that could wipe us out because the dinosaurs were killed by a giant Stone, you know, a rock, the size of a big city like Manhattan, you know, tens of kilometers in size. | ||
| And it must have been an amazing sight to be a dinosaur back then because you see this rock coming at you and then boom, and you're gone. | ||
| They didn't have astronomy, right? | ||
| The dinosaurs didn't have science, so they couldn't really forecast this day. | ||
| We have science so we can at least alert ourselves to that danger and perhaps deflect, nudge those killer asteroids that are heading our way. | ||
| And, you know, there are various ways to nudge them off. | ||
| You can evaporate part of their surface, just give them a little kick so that they miss the Earth. | ||
| But first you need to find them. | ||
| So that's why Pan-STARRS was funded. | ||
| And it's one of the goals of the Vera Rubin Observatory to identify all these objects that are endangering. | ||
| But in the process of doing that, you know, Oumuamua was discovered. | ||
| So when this new one goes online in Chile, will they be looking specifically for the same kinds of things that... | ||
| No, so science, you know, you just survey the sky. | ||
| You don't need to know what you're expecting to find. | ||
| So it's just a blanket view of the sky. | ||
| Yeah, it's just surveying the sky. | ||
| And then when they see an object that's moving... | ||
| Fast, and then if you see that it looks weird, just like Umumu, you can follow up on it. | ||
| And how much more potent will this one be? | ||
| Oh, it will be much more sensitive, and it will detect an Umumu-like object roughly once per month. | ||
| Here it is right here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The telescope will produce the deepest, widest image of the universe, 27-foot mirror, the width of a single tennis court, 3,200 megapixel camera. | ||
| That'll be on the new Samsung Galaxy phone. | ||
| Each image the size of 40 full moons. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a survey of the sky. | ||
| 37 billion stars in galaxies. | ||
| You know, the biggest challenge with this observatory will be the huge amount of data that it will produce. | ||
| We cannot store so much data. | ||
| Look, it says there are 20 terabytes of data every night. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Up to 10 million alerts, a thousand pairs of exposures. | ||
| So the only risk I should say to this survey comes from the communication satellites, these constellations that, you know, at the tens of thousands that SpaceX is planning to put in space. | ||
| And At first they were not really aware of their risk. | ||
| But then the astronomers told them, look, you are contaminating our images. | ||
| And so now they're thinking about coating those communication satellites so that they are dark enough, they don't reflect as much sunlight. | ||
| We're trying to work together with them, but obviously they have a commercial incentive to put these things out. | ||
| They do, but what if it puts us in danger? | ||
| What if we don't see asteroids because they want to get, you know... | ||
| Well, let's party until the end. | ||
| You want to get internet access in Antarctica. | ||
| It just seems a little silly. | ||
| I mean, it's great, but I don't know if it's the only way to get internet access. | ||
| I just think the more things we have in the sky, the more things we can't get out of the sky. | ||
| The problem with the space junk is there's no real tenable plan to take that stuff out. | ||
| True. | ||
| That's why I think we will eventually have to leave Earth. | ||
| Of junk? | ||
| Yeah, because of all the self-inflicted wounds. | ||
| But the way I see it is also like the printing press of Gutenberg. | ||
| Once it was established, it produced many copies of the Bible. | ||
| Before that, there were very few copies, and each of them was extremely precious. | ||
| But after the printing press by Gutenberg, there were many copies, so if one of them got damaged, you wouldn't worry too much. | ||
| So I think that we should produce what we have here on Earth. | ||
| Currently, all our eggs are in one basket on Earth. | ||
| But if we spread them in space, in other places, like going to Mars, going to the stars, then if something bad happens on Earth, It wouldn't be that bad, you know. | ||
| It will be one copy out of many. | ||
| And you might ask, how can we do that? | ||
| How can we avoid? | ||
| So, you know, there is this story in the Bible, in the Old Testament, about Noah. | ||
| It's called Noah's ark. | ||
| He was worried about the great flood that will come and wanted to preserve animals. | ||
| So he built an ark. | ||
| And by the way, the dimensions of the ark are mentioned explicitly in the Bible, and they are very similar to the dimensions of Oumuamua, but by coincidence. | ||
| Anyway, so he put the animals on it and saved them. | ||
| Now, what is the moral of this? | ||
| How can we preserve life that we have on earth? | ||
| By sending out a spaceship. | ||
| So you might think, oh, if we build a big enough spaceship, we can put whales, we can put elephants, we can put birds on it. | ||
| That's not the smart thing to do. | ||
| You can just take a small spacecraft, a CubeSat, put a very advanced computer system on it with artificial intelligence and a 3D printer. | ||
| and you load to the computer system the DNA information of all the animals that you want to reproduce somewhere else, and then you produce them synthetically in other places using the raw materials that are on other planets. | ||
| So you just send the spacecraft. | ||
| I call it NOx spaceship. | ||
| You send it to those places, and you produce what you want out of the raw materials. | ||
| Wouldn't you think that if some civilization got that advanced that they wouldn't be satisfied with the design that we currently experience? | ||
| Like the design of the animals, the design of the people. | ||
| Wouldn't they want to make that better? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Make people that can breathe underwater. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Make people that don't get cancer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think maybe the ultimate, you know, we are evolving. | ||
| You know, we started just like animals and we are getting better. | ||
| But eventually it may be silicon-based things that will be the future. | ||
| Well, that's a speculation that people have when they look at the archetypal alien, right? | ||
| With a large head and no genitals. | ||
| What that is is some sort of an advanced version. | ||
| Of intelligent life, like that life, as life becomes sort of immersed in the world of technology, it becomes, they have these symbiotic relationships where their parts get replaced by artificial parts, which we see now with people. | ||
| We see artificial limbs and artificial... | ||
| And I think, you know, any form of life, even biological life that we find on another planet, we will be shocked when we see it. | ||
| For example, the nearest star to us is called Proxima Centauri. | ||
| Now, it's not like the sun. | ||
| It's much smaller, 12% of the mass of the sun. | ||
| And it's much fainter. | ||
| But it has a planet close enough so that life can be on the planet. | ||
| The planet has a permanent day side. | ||
| It's facing the star because it's so close to the star, 20 times closer than the Earth is from the Sun. | ||
| That planet, Proxima b, is facing the star with the same side. | ||
| So there is a permanent day side. | ||
| Like the Moon. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Like the Moon. | ||
| And a permanent night side. | ||
| And the permanent day side is warmer than the permanent night side. | ||
| That's what we think. | ||
| Now, my daughters said that, you know, the real estate value would be highest in between the day side and the night side because you would have a permanent sunset strip there. | ||
| And, you know, if you want a home, that would be a perfect... | ||
| Vacation place, you know, kind of. | ||
| But if you think about the animals that may exist on the day side and on the night side, they would be very different. | ||
| And also the ones on the day side, since the star is much colder than the sun by a factor of two or so, it's cooler, like 3,000 degrees instead of almost 6,000 degrees for the sun. | ||
| Then most of the light emitted by the star is infrared. | ||
| So these animals would have infrared eyes. | ||
| Our eyes detect sunlight. | ||
| That's what we have. | ||
| But on that planet, Proxima B, the closest... | ||
| You need infrared eyes to survive. | ||
| So these animals will be something very different. | ||
| They will have infrared eyes. | ||
| I don't know how they would look. | ||
| I think even if we find evidence for biological life, it would be shocking to us not to speak about... | ||
| You know, technological instrumentation, you know, if they are much more advanced than we are, it would look like magic to us, you know, an approximation to God. | ||
| It will do things that are really crazy for us. | ||
| So, when you think about taking a 3D printer and genetic material and recreating life on other planets, I mean, it sounds crazy to say today, but no crazier than a cell phone would be if you put it in the hands of someone who lived in the first century AD. It's not completely crazy because there is a colleague of mine, | ||
| a Nobel laureate at Harvard, Jack Shostak, has a laboratory in which he's very optimistic that he will produce synthetic life, meaning starting from building blocks, chemical building, and making... | ||
| A living cell. | ||
| That sounds like a horror movie, doesn't it? | ||
| No, why? | ||
| Because he gets out of hand. | ||
| Like some guy decides, I'm going to make something. | ||
| I'm going to make a giant Wolverine. | ||
| Well, you have to trust that guy. | ||
| I don't trust anybody like that. | ||
| I don't trust anybody with new life. | ||
| Yeah, but you can't prevent it. | ||
| It's just like, you know, the exploration of the atom that led to eventually nuclear weapons. | ||
| You know, you can't stop science. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| So I think it will happen in the next few decades that we will be able to create synthetic life. | ||
| Did you have an interest in extraterrestrial life before this? | ||
| Has it changed at all? | ||
| No, so I can tell you, maybe a decade ago, I was working on detecting radio waves from hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, from early cosmic times. | ||
| And astronomers built observatories To test the calculations that I've worked on. | ||
| And then one of the problems was that radio stations, TV stations, would introduce interference to these observatories because they operate at the same frequencies. | ||
| So I said, oh wait, if we are producing interference, can't we use these telescopes to also look for, to eavesdrop on other civilizations? | ||
| You know, I Love Lucy, radio transmissions, you know, with the same instrument. | ||
| So that was my first paper on the subject. | ||
| Then I was in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| I was invited to give a talk in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| Even though I'm Israeli, you know, I'm also American. | ||
| So it was fine. | ||
| I went there. | ||
| And then the tour guide showed us around. | ||
| We also went to Dubai. | ||
| And then he was bragging. | ||
| He said, you know, these lights at night, he was showing us around, they can be seen from the moon. | ||
| So then that inspired me to consider the possibility of us seeing artificial lights from a distance. | ||
| So with a colleague of mine, Ed Turner, we asked, how far away can the Hubble Space Telescope see the city of Tokyo? | ||
| And we found that on Pluto, if there was a city like Tokyo on Pluto, we would be able to detect it with the Hubble Space Telescope. | ||
| That was my second paper on this subject. | ||
| But there is no city like Tokyo on Pluto. | ||
| What's interesting is the type of light that you were talking about being infrared light on this small planet. | ||
| It would be really interesting if a civilization figured out a way to avoid light pollution. | ||
| Because I think light pollution is one of the biggest impediments to us understanding our position in the universe. | ||
| Because we don't see the universe anymore. | ||
| We just see a dark sky. | ||
| Unless you send a space telescope. | ||
| Unless you go somewhere. | ||
| You can go to the middle of the wilderness and look up on a dark night. | ||
| And you can see everything. | ||
| And it's stunning. | ||
| It is stunning. | ||
| I went to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii once during a dark moon or when there's no moon out in the sky and it was amazing. | ||
| You could see everything. | ||
| You see the full Milky Way. | ||
| By the way, I'm a theorist. | ||
| I work mostly with ideas. | ||
| So we visited Australia. | ||
| I was invited for a month. | ||
| We went to Tasmania and there are no city lights in Tasmania and there was no internet connectivity. | ||
| So I was forced. | ||
| I couldn't check my email. | ||
| I was forced to go out At night and look at the sky. | ||
| And suddenly I see the Milky Way in its full glory, you know, and the Andromeda Galaxy. | ||
| Things that I've talked about through my scientific papers out there. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| You know, in particle physics, you talk about the Higgs boson, you talk about particles. | ||
| You never see them. | ||
| I mean, here in astronomy, we're talking about real things out there. | ||
| And light pollution prevents us from seeing them every day. | ||
| Yeah, if you go to the Big Island, right, they have those diffused lights in their streetlights. | ||
| It's a different kind of lighting that doesn't interfere with the light that you can see from the sky so that it doesn't screw up the observatory. | ||
| But when you do manage to see the heavens for the way they are, it's one of the most spectacular things you could see. | ||
| And the fact that it's... | ||
| That we're blind to it in most of the Western world because of the civilization that we've created that's all light-based. | ||
| There's lights everywhere. | ||
| I think it's responsible for our detachment. | ||
| There's a lack of wonderment that comes with the universe because it's just dark. | ||
| That's what Henry Thoreau, you know, he... | ||
| Yeah, he wrote about the fact that the modern technological life prevents us from seeing nature. | ||
| And he went to the Walden Pond and wrote about it. | ||
| And he was right, just following what you said. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The thing that astronomy is sending us is a very clear message that most of us miss. | ||
| The message to me is very simple. | ||
| Be modest. | ||
| You have to be modest when you see how big the universe is. | ||
| If you are an emperor or a king and you conquer a small piece of land on earth, a lot of alpha males, white alpha males, were extremely proud. | ||
| I conquered this piece of land on earth. | ||
| Even if they conquered the entire earth, They were not more significant than a single ant hugging a grain of sand, a single grain of sand, in the landscape of a huge beach. | ||
| It's not very impressive. | ||
| How can you ever be proud of yourself, given this big landscape? | ||
| And moreover, you know that the Caesars in Rome used to have a person next to them. | ||
| Whenever they would win a battle, that person, his duty was to whisper in their ears, You are mortal. | ||
| Remember that you live a short amount of time. | ||
| And that's very sobering. | ||
| We are a small component of the universe. | ||
| We're also living for such a short time. | ||
| And I realized it when both my parents passed away over the past few years. | ||
| And I said to myself, the hell with it. | ||
| Forget about all this nonsense. | ||
| Let's just... | ||
| Just like in Gun with the Wind, I said to myself, I don't give a damn about what other people say. | ||
| Let's just focus on substance, okay? | ||
| And not pay attention so much to ourselves. | ||
| We're not that significant. | ||
| Not assume that we are unique and alone in the universe. | ||
| Let's just, you know, find out the answer. | ||
| I think the public and I think even you could tell me whether the scientific community agrees with this, but I think people are more apt to believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life today than ever. | ||
| And I think part of that has to do with some of the stories that have been published like in the New York Times in 2017 and then accounts from people of experiences with unidentified flying objects like Commander David Fravers and some other people that are very reputable people that also are fighter pilots and people that understand what they're looking at and then are using Not just their eyesight, but they're also explaining that this thing jammed their radar. | ||
| It moved at an impossible speed. | ||
| It was tracked with equipment. | ||
| These revelations, I think, have led people to relax some of their skepticism. | ||
| Me, personally, I could say from my own personal experience, I never denied the idea that alien life is possible. | ||
| I just had extreme skepticism at the people that proclaimed that they had experiences because I know people love to be special. | ||
| And they love to be special without putting in a whole lot of work. | ||
| And one of the best ways you can be special without putting in a whole lot of work is to have a special experience that only you get to have. | ||
| Whether the aliens chose you or the angels chose you or, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| Those people are, you should always be very skeptical of people who claim to be special without having put in any work because it's just a part of human psychology. | ||
| People want to stand out. | ||
| And one of the best ways to stand out is to claim special abilities like psychic talents or I'm a channeler. | ||
| These people are all full of shit, right? | ||
| We all know it. | ||
| But with extraterrestrial life, there's this other component. | ||
| And that component is the vastness of the universe. | ||
| The Fermi paradox. | ||
| The fact that there's... | ||
| You know, hundreds of billions of galaxies, hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. | ||
| And we just have no idea. | ||
| We literally have no idea and we do know there are planets out there. | ||
| But actually, yeah, exactly. | ||
| That last bit that you mentioned is the thing that is important. | ||
| news for me as a scientist the fact that you know people used to say we don't know how many earth sun systems exist similar to ours and by now it looks like it's pretty typical you know and that's again the copernican principles coming back to you saying not only that you are not at the center of the universe but what you find around you is extremely common you Half of the sun-like stars have an earth-like planet. | ||
| So how dare you? | ||
| It says to you in the face, how dare you think that you're special? | ||
| And yet, yet, a major portion of the scientific community says, oh... | ||
| You know, technological life? | ||
| That sounds like a speculation. | ||
| But it exists right here. | ||
| Well, that's what the Fermi paradox was, right? | ||
| If there's all this possibility of life, where is it? | ||
| Well, so, first of all, It may be all around in the sense that the signal is faint. | ||
| You need to reach a threshold. | ||
| So maybe there are lots of signals humming in the background, but we haven't yet developed the sensitivity to detect them. | ||
| An example for that is gravitational waves. | ||
| These are ripples in space and time, just like ripples on the surface of a pond. | ||
| According to Einstein's theory of gravity, space and time are not rigid. | ||
| You can actually perturb them. | ||
| You can create ripples. | ||
| And for example, when two black holes collide, they generate ripples. | ||
| And these are called gravitational waves. | ||
| And the LIGO experiment... | ||
| It was designed to detect those waves. | ||
| And at first, the astronomy community was very much opposed. | ||
| When I was at the beginning of my career, I heard a lot of senior people saying, let's not even try to detect gravitational waves. | ||
| There is no hope for that. | ||
| Forget about it. | ||
| And we don't even know if they exist. | ||
| And there were a few administrators at the National Science Foundation that decided that this is a worthy cause And there was a leader of the experimental effort, Ray Weiss, that was pushing for it. | ||
| And he got the Nobel Prize together with two other people. | ||
| And eventually it was funded. | ||
| And in 2015, the instrument was sensitive enough to detect the first signal. | ||
| And it was a booming signal. | ||
| And then after that, we have tens of events over the subsequent years that were detected. | ||
| So it opened up Flood of signals showing in the detector, and it only was a matter of reaching the threshold sensitivity. | ||
| So I say the same thing. | ||
| The signals may be very subtle. | ||
| It's very difficult to detect a spacecraft, for example, because it sends very little power in your direction. | ||
| So I don't know what the signal is of a technological civilization, but once we reach a sensitivity, we might find The universe humming, you know, the galaxy humming with living, you know. | ||
| Or there is another possibility that most of them are dead by now. | ||
| But we can still do archaeology and find evidence for them because that would help us avoid the mistakes they made and try not to share their fate, you know, not destroy ourselves. | ||
| Have you spent much time thinking about the various kinds of technology that these different civilizations in the universe could possibly have created? | ||
| Meaning they might have a completely different atmosphere, a completely different Understanding of gravity, a completely different combination of elements on their planet, and that our perception or our contemplation of what could be possible is really just based on what we've already observed and experienced, which is such a small portion of the universe. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Now, what we can imagine is based on our experience. | ||
| And when you go on a date, You look at the mirror and you imagine the other person being genetically similar to you. | ||
| And that's not a bad assumption because we all share the same heritage as humans. | ||
| But when you meet another life from a completely different planet that had nothing to do with Earth, For the first time, there is a chance that it would look nothing like we are familiar with. | ||
| As you say, the conditions are different. | ||
| The cake that was baked out of the same chemical soup ended up looking very different. | ||
| It's a chocolate cake, not a cheesecake. | ||
| It's something very different. | ||
| And when a chocolate cake meets a cheesecake, It wouldn't really figure out what's going on there. | ||
| It's also possible, right, that they could have a different kind of environment that doesn't lend itself to the sort of territorial behavior that we have. | ||
| It's quite possible. | ||
| Like other intelligent life, like orcas, for instance. | ||
| They don't go to war with other orcas. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They're obviously very intelligent. | ||
| Speaking about that, I was asked to participate in a debate about Whether the space race between the US and China Is bad or good for humanity? | ||
| It was organized by IBM and Bloomberg News. | ||
| And all three debaters, the other debaters, were talking about the military risks that space poses. | ||
| If you put satellites or things that hover above the Earth, it's a military threat. | ||
| And therefore, we should reach international agreements so that we don't explore space too much. | ||
| And I was just puzzled by this because, you know, we live on a two-dimensional surface of the Earth. | ||
| And of course, there are risks from things hovering above the surface. | ||
| But space is all about going in the third dimension, far away from Earth. | ||
| So if you go to Mars or you go to the stars, as, you know, we are contemplating in the Starshot Project... | ||
| There is no military threat to Earth from doing that. | ||
| It's very narrow-minded to think that space is all about military threats. | ||
| You know, there is also interest from the commercial sector, you know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, to go to Mars. | ||
| And, you know, that would benefit the global economy. | ||
| The way I think of space exploration, as I think of science in general, it's a unifier. | ||
| You know, nations can come together in exploring space, in doing science, like we learned from COVID-19. | ||
| You know, rather than always think territorially, as we are used from the primate phase, as you mentioned, we should come together. | ||
| And science is the best vehicle to bring people together. | ||
| Because, again, it's not about ourselves. | ||
| It's about trying to figure out nature. | ||
| And nature is shared by all of us. | ||
| Space can be shared by all of us. | ||
| So it's not about one nation capturing a piece of land or getting ahead of other nations. | ||
| It's about all of us working together. | ||
| I agree with you, but you also know that the way most nations think about military superiority, they think about technological superiority. | ||
| They think about having the ability to do something that these other nations can't do, and that would put you at some sort of a tactical, strategical advantage, like having some sort of a satellite with nuclear weapons that's hovering above a city. | ||
| Like that they could do things like this that we can't do yet, or that having the ability to go to Mars and return before any other nation would show that they have extreme technological superiority. | ||
| They can actually go to other planets. | ||
| I agree with you, but why can't we work as one team? | ||
| So if we find, for example, evidence for another civilization, don't you think that would give us a sense that we are part of the same team? | ||
| Because now there is another team out there. | ||
| That was the old Ronald Reagan speech. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I agree with Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Yeah, I do too. | ||
| I think that would open up our eyes and it would be very humbling, in fact. | ||
| Yeah, so here is another advantage to working on this subject. | ||
| How do you think people would handle undeniable extraterrestrial visitation? | ||
| Like if there was a mothership that hovered over the White House and just sent some sort of a message that we had to interpret and made some sort of a very clear demonstration of its presence? | ||
| Well, if it says, take us to your leader, we have to say, wait until January 20th. | ||
| Even then. | ||
| But really, I think the smart thing to do is listen. | ||
| If you get into a room full of strangers, you don't want to speak out very loudly because one of them may smash you. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| If they show up, we should listen. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Let's listen and figure out what to do. | ||
| It's also the problem. | ||
| We all have these countries. | ||
| They're run by different people in different styles. | ||
| We have different philosophies and we have very different political climates in different parts of the world where some people can't speak up. | ||
| Some people are completely under the thumb of their own government and their military. | ||
| And it would be really weird to see if it's possible For human beings to have a sort of a universal reaction to superior intelligence. | ||
| Oh no, I think it's very naive to expect humans to behave the same way. | ||
| Different people, different nations. | ||
| And I don't think there is a protocol because The United Nations never thought about designing a protocol for dealing with a situation like that. | ||
| And many people say, ah, let's not think about it because we have problems that are much more serious here on Earth. | ||
| And to them I say what Oscar Wilde used to say. | ||
| He said, we are all in the gutters, but some of us are looking at the stars. | ||
| Don't you think that's a fitting statement? | ||
| Yeah, it's very fitting. | ||
| The idea that we have bigger problems is kind of hilarious, too. | ||
| Because if they came down here and they decided to do whatever they wanted, that would be our biggest problem. | ||
| I mean, if you have something that's capable of interstellar travel with a giant ship that has, you know, millions of little aliens on it that just decided to take over, that's our biggest problem. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Anything that can travel here easily from another planet, that's our biggest problem. | ||
| Or it's... | ||
| Maybe problem is the wrong word. | ||
| That's something that demands our attention. | ||
| But you know, we were careless for a century because we transmitted radio waves. | ||
| By the way, the brightest transmissions that we produced were anti-ballistic missiles, radars. | ||
| You know, we produce very bright emission in the radio wave, and it's now progressed to a distance of about 100 light years. | ||
| So there is this bubble of radio waves that we produced, and if they have, if there is any civilization with radio telescopes similar to what we have, they can detect us. | ||
| And, of course, it will take a while for them to respond, but we already shouted into this room of strangers without being careful. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that is a sign of not being intelligent, by the way. | ||
| Well, I don't know if it's a sign of not being intelligent. | ||
| It's a sign of not understanding the ramifications of what you've created or the actions. | ||
| Yeah, but we may suffer the consequences decades from now. | ||
| Or we may get a visit from the anthropologists of the space. | ||
| I mean, that's what I would hope, that something would come down here that understands what we're going through, that has probably gone through a very similar path. | ||
| I know that there's different cakes and there's different ingredients for cakes, but at the end of the day, they're all cakes. | ||
| And we can go, oh, that's a cheesecake. | ||
| There's a carrot cake. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I would imagine that something that's so intelligent, it can come here from another planet, probably understands the variables, the possibilities of life. | ||
| But look at the Americas. | ||
| When the Europeans came over, you would have expected the Europeans to behave better. | ||
| Well, they didn't know anything about diseases, first of all. | ||
| That's what killed 90% of the people. | ||
| I know, but still, it's not obvious that a visit is to your benefit. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Well, in that case, it's actually been proven by history that every single time a civilization has been visited by a far more advanced civilization, it's been disastrous for the original civilization that gets visited. | ||
| Whether it's the Americas or, I mean, you can go throughout time. | ||
| This has always been the case in history. | ||
| With the Aztecs, it happened with everybody. | ||
| But my message is simple. | ||
| If you close your eyes and you refuse to admit the possibility that they are out there, You might be surprised one day, right? | ||
| You might be really surprised. | ||
| Do you pay much attention to science fiction? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's some pretty good visitation movies. | ||
| I don't enjoy most of the literature on science fiction, most of the films, because they violate the laws of physics. | ||
| So when I see something that doesn't make sense according to what I know about physics, I cannot enjoy it because, you know, I stop there and I say, well, forget about the storyline. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What movies have violated the laws of physics to you? | ||
| Most of them. | ||
| But the ones I really liked are Gravity, The Martian. | ||
| They violated, but not in a very blunt way. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| They didn't beat you over the head with stupidity. | ||
| No, there were some aspects of the storyline that didn't make any sense, like hopping from one satellite to another. | ||
| You know, that's very difficult to do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Yeah, there's a bunch of it. | ||
| Neil deGrasse Tyson went into detail about all the problems with gravity that he found. | ||
| There was a movie that was made by the guy who made Ex Machina. | ||
| It was his follow-up movie that was about extraterrestrial life that was pretty interesting. | ||
| It was really bizarre. | ||
| And the way it was done... | ||
| There was a couple little hokey moments in it, but I thought it was really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I think I saw it and I liked it. | ||
| When I saw it, I was like, that might be what we're looking at. | ||
| We might be looking at life that we can't recognize. | ||
| There might be something that when it visits us, we don't even know what to look at. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe, yes. | ||
| The good thing about science fiction is that it explores possibilities that we haven't imagined before. | ||
| And in that sense, you know, it broadens our view. | ||
| So I think it's a good exercise for us to imagine things we've never thought about. | ||
| But when they violate the laws of physics, I have a problem with that. | ||
| Oh, I can completely understand. | ||
| Have you paid much attention to various UFO encounters that have been reported by people? | ||
| Have you ever looked into those? | ||
| Well, I read some of the stories and I'll tell you what my concern was that, you know, 50 years ago we had some cameras and some recording devices that were not very sophisticated. | ||
| Now they're much better. | ||
| So if 50 years ago we saw fuzzy images of saucers and things like that, by now, with modern cameras, you should get very crisp images of the same things. | ||
| We don't have them. | ||
| So I'm worried that these were artifacts of the instruments that were used back then. | ||
| What I would like to do instead is have a scientific study of the reports that are recent. | ||
| Go to those sites, the ocean, where the Nimitz was, and try to examine this. | ||
| Now, the reason it's important is because there is also a national security element here, which means that perhaps other nations have technologies that we don't know about. | ||
| So we better find out. | ||
| So if there are things that we don't understand, we better find out what they are. | ||
| Well, that's absolutely true. | ||
| Like, if there is something that can do what Commander David Fravor experienced, but it's not extraterrestrial, it's actually from China or from Russia, that puts them at a significant advantage, a crazy advantage. | ||
| We can't even imagine something that's that sophisticated. | ||
| But they don't believe that's the case. | ||
| They think our understanding of physics is pretty universal, right, in terms of, like, the highest intellects in various continents, right? | ||
| Yeah, these looked like very peculiar maneuvers that they reported about. | ||
| And all I say is that we should use scientific instruments to record it again with much better data and examine this. | ||
| Yeah, but who would fund something like this? | ||
| You know, if you have a monster in front of you, I want to look at it straight in the eyes and figure out what it's about. | ||
| Other people say, ah, there is no monster, forget about it. | ||
| Well, I mean, who would fund something like this? | ||
| This is the real problem. | ||
| If the government funds it, then they could deem what gets released, what the public can handle, what they can't handle, and whether or not there's a military application. | ||
| Well, the same funding agencies that fund scientific research, open scientific research, can allocate a small fraction of their funds. | ||
| This should not be very expensive. | ||
| You don't think it would be very expensive? | ||
| No, because we study the environment in many different ways, you know. | ||
| And you just deploy a set of instruments with sensors in the geographical locations of where the reports were. | ||
| And you put the best sensors you have and systematically study the region and figure out what's going on. | ||
| The thing is, you would have to get the approval of the military. | ||
| Like if you wanted to go to where the Nimitz is, you wanted to go to any of these offshore areas that are in international waters, you would have to get some sort of approval. | ||
| Sure, but why wouldn't they give it? | ||
| I mean, in principle, if they want to figure out what the reports are about. | ||
| I don't know if they do want to figure it out. | ||
| The way Commander Fravor explained the experiences they were having off the coast of San Diego, he said they were basically just at a loss for words, didn't understand what these things were, but had been experiencing them on multiple occasions, and had just shrugged their shoulders and said, let's just not talk about this. | ||
| No, but imagine you have a medical condition that you cannot understand. | ||
| Wouldn't you want the medical community to address it and figure out what it is? | ||
| You have some disease or something. | ||
| So the same thing here. | ||
| Something that you cannot explain is happening, and you want to figure it out. | ||
| So I say, look at it straight in the eyes. | ||
| Figure out what it is. | ||
| Just collect more data the way science does. | ||
| And it's not a major investment of funds. | ||
| So what disciplines would you draw from? | ||
| Let's pretend that President Biden says, Avi, I like what you're saying. | ||
| Let's make this happen. | ||
| Who do you bring in? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Would you bring in biologists? | ||
| Do you bring in physicists? | ||
| Just physicists? | ||
| Yeah, because physics is a unifying theme. | ||
| Anything obeys the laws of physics, right? | ||
| So physicists work with measurement devices, instruments that can record the data. | ||
| Now, if the data shows something that is biological, then you need the biologist to interpret it. | ||
| But most likely it will be physical objects doing something or artifacts or natural phenomena, you know, something. | ||
| You just figure out. | ||
| You collect more data. | ||
| You figure it out. | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| You know, the good thing about science is... | ||
| It allows you, without prejudice, to try and figure out. | ||
| Just as I was mentioning, with a plumber, you know, I have a problem with my faucet, with my pipe. | ||
| You know, I bring in a plumber, we start to put diagnostics, figure out where it's coming from. | ||
| So, science is a way of life. | ||
| It's not an occupation of the elite, and there is no taboo on checking something. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| Everyone should be engaged in an open mind, figuring out what it is. | ||
| Just like we do in the dark ages, some people had a problem dissecting bodies, human bodies. | ||
| They said that the body has a soul attached to it. | ||
| There are some magical properties that we should not interpret. | ||
| Imagine modern medicine not allowing to dissect bodies. | ||
| How would we ever arrive at the health, all the advantages in medicine and health care and so forth that we have right now? | ||
| So the way that science makes progress is relying on evidence, collecting evidence without fear. | ||
| Why should we be fearful? | ||
| You know, let's just figure out what it is. | ||
| If we care about it, obviously the public cares about it. | ||
| Obviously the public pays taxes. | ||
| So, we should pay attention to what the public wants. | ||
| I think the public would definitely want it. | ||
| But my question is also, how would you implement it? | ||
| Like, if you're dealing with these things that are very unique experiences. | ||
| Like, say, if we only have one or two legitimate unique experiences like this. | ||
| First, we isolate those cases. | ||
| But you also have to deal with the fact that this thing is flying at this insane rate of speed. | ||
| You'd have to try to find it. | ||
| But again, the Copernican principle would say that the fact that they were noticed at one time in one place cannot be extremely rare. | ||
| If they were noticed during that time in that region, there are more of them. | ||
| Why do you say that, though? | ||
| Because otherwise it will require a privileged circumstance. | ||
| But it could be a privileged circumstance if it was an exploratory mission. | ||
| Like if someone goes to a place in the world and visits an uncontacted tribe, that uncontacted tribe is uncontacted, meaning no one has visited them. | ||
| So that time that they go there is a very unique time. | ||
| Now, we're talking about on one planet. | ||
| But if something comes from another planet and visits us with the same spirit of trying to find things and visit things, but it's only done it once, It could be a unique experience. | ||
| It could be, but the chances for that would be small because what is the chance that the pilots would be at the right place at the right time and that they would be the target? | ||
| You know, I think... | ||
| I don't necessarily think they were the target. | ||
| So, then it should come again. | ||
| Yeah, in that particular case, in the Nimitz case, I think, yeah, you're right. | ||
| Okay, so you're speaking about a situation similar to what, you know... | ||
| Again, I go back to religion, but in the Old Testament, Abraham... | ||
| Heard a voice that told him, the voice of God, that told him to sacrifice his son, the only son he had. | ||
| He was about to sacrifice his son, Abraham. | ||
| But imagine that he had a cell phone with a voice memo app. | ||
| He would press that app and record the voice of God. | ||
| That would convince everyone, all humanity, that God exists. | ||
| He didn't have that app. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, obviously, you can make up stories. | ||
| You know, anyone can say anything. | ||
| But if we have the instrumentation to record the data in a precise manner, you know, that's the best we can do. | ||
| So, I agree with you. | ||
| It's possible that Abraham indeed witnessed God, and since then, God never spoke. | ||
| Only once. | ||
| Then we have no choice, either to believe the story of Abraham or not. | ||
| But if God speaks again, now we have these apps. | ||
| We can record it. | ||
| That's a funny way of looking at it. | ||
| I think that makes a lot of sense, but it's a very funny way of looking at it. | ||
| Look, all I'm saying is common sense. | ||
| The only thing I'm surprised by is that other people didn't say it already. | ||
| When you get into the real spectacular hypothesis or theories about extraterrestrial life, one of the more spectacular ones is interdimensional travel. | ||
| And that these are interdimensional beings that visit us using some completely different understanding of how the universe works. | ||
| Have you ever thought about these or looked into these? | ||
| Okay, so I can speak only from the point of view of a scientist. | ||
| And space and time in physics are currently described by Einstein's theory of gravity. | ||
| As of now, we don't know how to move faster than light between two points in space. | ||
| But there are ideas about a wormhole, for example, connecting. | ||
| We don't know if there are other dimensions. | ||
| People talk about them, but we have no clue. | ||
| So I would say, if I had to summarize the scientific literature, which is quite extensive on these issues, I would say that as of now, we have no clear idea whether this is possible. | ||
| We are limited in our knowledge. | ||
| It may be possible, what you're saying, but... | ||
| I wouldn't, you know, at this point in time as a scientist, I wouldn't consider it as a possibility that is likely. | ||
| Because we have no clue. | ||
| And this is based on... | ||
| So your interpretations of quantum physics when they're discussing dimensions and that this is basically just theoretical. | ||
| This is completely theoretical. | ||
| At the moment... | ||
| You know, I can explain that. | ||
| At the moment, they're working, actually, in a space-time that is called anti-deceiter space, which is not shared by us. | ||
| This is not the space-time that we work in, you know, that we inhabit. | ||
| But the reason they work there is because they can solve the mathematics in that space. | ||
| It's sort of like looking for your keys under the lamppost. | ||
| You can find them under the lamp, but they may not be there. | ||
| So there is a whole community of People that do mathematical gymnastics in a space-time that is not represented in reality. | ||
| And they talk about extra dimensions and give each other awards and feel very smart about themselves. | ||
| But I say, look, let's be realistic here, you know, until you demonstrate that what you're doing is connected to reality, until you find experimental evidence. | ||
| This is not physics. | ||
| What is it then? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's mathematics. | |
| It's mathematical gymnastics. | ||
| Now, there are philosophers, I should say, some philosophers that support them. | ||
| They say, if a bunch of physicists agree on an idea for a decade... | ||
| It must be right, because they agreed that it's a good idea. | ||
| I say it's not up to them to agree on. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people agreed that the sun moves around the earth, but it was not necessarily reality. | ||
| So, you know, when you have a big enough group of people, they can agree on something and feel comfortable. | ||
| That's how cults work. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But you don't expect that in science. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But it is kind of cultish. | ||
| And that's one of the criticisms that I've heard about people in quantum mechanics and quantum physics that when people talk about it, they say, God, it sounds kind of cultish. | ||
| Well, there is quantum physics which is rooted in experiments, you know, solid state physics. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What we are talking about is quantum gravity. | ||
| The unification of quantum mechanics and gravity that is called string theory or extra dimensions. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Yes, so quantum physics has aspects that connect directly to experiments and they are very well documented and part of the standard practice of physics. | ||
| The way I see it is just like this oath that medical doctors take. | ||
| They take an oath that represents their profession. | ||
| I think that physicists should take an oath that I call the Galilean oath, whereby an idea that you propose should be testable. | ||
| One idea, at least, that you work on should be testable by experiments during your life. | ||
| You should put some skin in the game. | ||
| You can't just say, oh, my theory will explain anything, irrespective of what is being found. | ||
| There are such theories that physicists brag about because they say, irrespective of what the experiment will show, the theory will be valid. | ||
| It's like not putting any skin in the game, you know? | ||
| And I find that inappropriate. | ||
| So there is a student at Harvard, a graduate student, in the English department, And she was inspired by my book, which didn't appear yet, but she knows about it, to do a PhD on that theme that I explore. | ||
| And she invited me to the PhD exam, the first exam. | ||
| And there was an examiner in the room who asked her, do you know why Giordano Bruno was burnt on the stake? | ||
| And she said that he was obnoxious and irritated a lot of people and he corrected her. | ||
| No, it was because he imagined that life exists on other planets. | ||
| And the moral of this is that we should not, that we should, we can have testable predictions of theologies that can be tested experimentally, you know. we can have testable predictions of theologies that can be Another example is there are Christians and Jews. | ||
| The Christians believe that the Messiah arrived already. | ||
| And it will come back again. | ||
| The Jews argue that the Messiah hasn't arrived, but will arrive in the future. | ||
| So both sides agree that the Messiah will arrive in the future. | ||
| Let's just wait and see when the Messiah arrives. | ||
| Ask the Messiah, did you visit us before? | ||
| And then we can figure it out. | ||
| So that's another test of theology. | ||
| But the quantum physics that you are critical of... | ||
| Is it possible that some of that could become significant in the future? | ||
| That a lot of this crazy mathematics and what you call mental gymnastics that one day will be applicable to some new science? | ||
| That would be wonderful, but the problem is that the culture that works on this subject is not... | ||
| I'm not feeling even the obligation to come up with testable predictions. | ||
| It's not willing to put skin in the game. | ||
| It's not willing to say, okay, if you do the experiment and you find this, then this theory would be proven wrong. | ||
| I mean, I can give you an example. | ||
| There was a seminar at the Black Hole Initiative That mentioned an implication of string theory to cosmology, to the study of the universe. | ||
| And I said, oh, this is great. | ||
| So if we do the experiment and we find the cosmic microwave background to show something, would that rule out string theory? | ||
| And the speaker said, no, it will just rule out my conjecture about this relation. | ||
| String theory will always be right. | ||
| So to me, that's not putting skin in the game. | ||
| And string theory is almost entirely theoretical. | ||
| It's entirely theoretical. | ||
| Not almost. | ||
| It's entirely theoretical, trying to unify gravity with quantum mechanics, but it didn't make a testable prediction as of yet. | ||
| And that's the issue. | ||
| Are you intrigued at all about ancient depictions of what some people interpret as extraterrestrial vehicles or flying saucers, whether it's Ezekiel's story in the Old Testament or some of the other, the Vinmanas and the Hindu scriptures? | ||
| Well, we're back to the story of Abraham. | ||
| If there was a recording device that could give us The picture, I would examine it and say something more conclusive about it. | ||
| But the lack of evidence doesn't allow us to say anything. | ||
| So stories appear everywhere. | ||
| There was also a recent story about an Israeli claiming, Eshed, claiming that there is a federation of aliens out there. | ||
|
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What was that about? | |
| Yeah, I say, you know, Anyone can say anything they want. | ||
| You know, it's a free country, but the duty of a reporter, a journalist, is to ask for evidence, right? | ||
| So if this guy would produce a document, would show a document that I think? | ||
| You know, there is a place for such people, right? | ||
| So my point is, the duty of a reporter is to check the evidence. | ||
| And that's also the duty of a scientist. | ||
| That's a real problem with journalism today, right? | ||
| Is this clickbait is very attractive because that's how they make money. | ||
| They make money off of people clicking on fantastic stories. | ||
| That's a very fantastic story. | ||
| And it actually is not... | ||
| It's not profitable for them to research it if they really want to try to verify those claims. | ||
| It's unfortunate because it adds noise to the system. | ||
| There are lots of possibilities. | ||
| Reality is just one. | ||
| And if you hear all these possibilities all the time, then you don't know what's real and what's not. | ||
| And that's true of politics as well, right? | ||
| What was this guy's claim? | ||
| He claimed that they're waiting for us to get our shit together, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Isn't that the idea behind it? | ||
| Yeah, and that President Trump knows about him. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| I think if Trump knew about it, he'd tell everybody. | ||
| I don't think he can keep his mouth shut. | ||
| Maybe we have to wait until January 20th until he gets out of office. | ||
| But do you think this guy have a motivation for saying this? | ||
| I mean, what is his position in the military? | ||
| He used to occupy an important leadership position, but I'm not sure what happened to him, and I don't know him personally, and I would just dismiss it and move on. | ||
| If he had a reason for saying what he said, he should have produced the evidence. | ||
| And I think at the late stage of his life, something may have gone wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, that is the real problem, right? | ||
| When people get older and they start believing things that might not necessarily be true. | ||
| But the story is so compelling, right? | ||
| That's the other problem. | ||
| Is it someone telling you that the aliens are waiting for us to get it together? | ||
| Like, oh, good. | ||
| I'm glad. | ||
| I knew. | ||
| I had a feeling they were out there. | ||
| Yeah, but it's just like dating someone and expecting someone to return love to you when they're not really interested in you. | ||
| So it doesn't matter how much you wish it if it's not real. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But there's so much, again, the appeal of those stories. | ||
| It's so profitable. | ||
| Because so many people are interested in something really... | ||
| Especially now, while they realize, like, oh my god, our government is ridiculous. | ||
| The people that are in charge... | ||
| I mean, one of them is literally a reality show contestant or host who's possibly... | ||
| A sociopath who was running the planet, or running at least this country, they would hope that there's going to be some sort of intervention by some hugely intelligent species from another planet. | ||
| That they're going to come down here and they're going to go, listen, listen, listen. | ||
| Enough. | ||
| Enough already. | ||
| But this is crap. | ||
| And the point is, you know, it's just like junk food. | ||
| It tastes good, but it's bad for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is crap because it's bad for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that all of the, like when you see the, have you ever seen the Go Fast video, the FLIR video of where these fighter pilots are tracking this thing? | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| Moving at incredible rates of speed, it doesn't exhibit any heat signature, no obvious method of propulsion. | ||
| When you see things like that, do you look at that as saying, well, this is something that seems to be legitimate evidence? | ||
| Well, it's partial evidence. | ||
| We want more. | ||
| So, you know, it looks very interesting. | ||
| The question is, what is it? | ||
| You know, and I'm just advocating that we collect more data on things like that. | ||
| Not ignore it, not dismiss it. | ||
| Because it's reported by credible people using credible instruments. | ||
| Something is going on. | ||
| Is it the fault of the instruments? | ||
| Is it the fault of the person? | ||
| Is it some natural phenomenon? | ||
| Let's figure it out. | ||
| So the point of the matter is we can figure it out. | ||
| It's not magical. | ||
| It's not something that is beyond our control. | ||
| You know, we can invest enough in this question and solve it. | ||
| Let's do it! | ||
|
unidentified
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What's the problem? | |
| Sometimes these compelling conversations and sometimes books like yours and the statements that you've made about that object, like it could inspire people to take action. | ||
| And if someone did I would collect reputable scientists with state-of-the-art instrumentation. | ||
| And put it together, deploy it where necessary, based on the most credible reports. | ||
| And collect data. | ||
| And then write scientific papers about it. | ||
| Just the same way that we do with any other anomaly that we find in the cosmos. | ||
| And there is no difference. | ||
| We should be guided by evidence and not by our prejudice. | ||
| That's the message that comes through from all... | ||
| The history of science, that on many occasions we were putting blinders, saying something doesn't exist, we ended up being wrong. | ||
| The only way to educate ourselves, to be modest enough to admit that we don't know everything, is by collecting evidence, a dialogue with nature. | ||
| Let's listen to nature, see what it tells us, and then say what this thing is. | ||
| Rather than... | ||
| You know, sitting in an ivory tower and saying, no, no, no, this is taboo, we shouldn't even consider it. | ||
| So you would have physicists, and how many physicists do you think that you would actually try to put together? | ||
| It depends on the scale of the experiment that we want to do, but I would need more than a dozen. | ||
| A dozen? | ||
| Yeah, and the appropriate instrumentation. | ||
| It may not be very expensive, actually. | ||
| Do you think that it would be possible to do something like this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And do you think that there's a dozen physicists that you would have in mind that would be qualified for this? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Just like there are dozens of physicists working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. | ||
| Now, if you have this bullying going on so that young talent, you know, there are young people that are extremely interested in these questions, but if they're afraid about their job opportunities, afraid of speaking out, afraid of being engaged in this, then obviously And there is no funding for this, then obviously there will be no results. | ||
| And the situation will continue to be the same way. | ||
| Now, it's just the way that science was suppressed in the Middle Ages. | ||
| You know, people just didn't look for a revision in the way they look at the world around them. | ||
| And they put Galileo in house arrest. | ||
| So, of course, it maintained the views at the time. | ||
| And people were in their comfort zone. | ||
| But I thought that we came out of that hole. | ||
| And by now we are open-minded. | ||
| Do you think that having these kind of conversations and you coming out and being public about your struggles with other academics about this can lighten people up? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Do you think it helps the environment? | ||
| That's my hope. | ||
| As I said, I'm doing what I'm doing, not expecting anything, but I will be pleasantly surprised if the common sense that I'm trying to advocate, and by the way, I was a farm boy, I speak just the way I would speak as a kid. | ||
| I don't do any calculations. | ||
| When I was department chair, one reason that my term was extended twice is because I don't manipulate people. | ||
| I never hide things from people and tell them one thing when the reality is different. | ||
| I tell them what I think. | ||
| Now, I can be wrong. | ||
| I can make mistakes. | ||
| But what you see is what you get when you deal with me. | ||
| And, you know, on the one hand, it's a weakness because in politics, you need to manipulate people very often. | ||
| But it's also a major source of strength because people believe you and follow you. | ||
| And as a department chair, I realized that the strength is bigger than the weakness, and it worked out. | ||
| It wasn't clear from the beginning. | ||
| It really depends on the people that you surround yourself with. | ||
| But my hope is that in science, it will be the same way. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not afraid of suffering the consequences, as I said. | ||
| I'm willing to put my body on the barbed wire. | ||
| Now, if you did do something like this, and I'm trying to set this up. | ||
| This is what I'm trying to do right now. | ||
| I'm hoping that people are listening and I'm hoping that this actually becomes real. | ||
| Where would you want to be located? | ||
| So I would first examine all these reports and isolate the most credible ones or one, you know, the thing that is most striking among them. | ||
| And go there. | ||
| So the most striking one to me is the Commander Fravor instance. | ||
| So let's imagine. | ||
| Or the Nimitz. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So let's imagine that there's still some activity in that area. | ||
| So we can look for that. | ||
| The same type of activity that he reported. | ||
| We'll be looked for with much superior instruments than the ones that he was using. | ||
| So what kind of instruments would you use to try? | ||
| I have to look at the details of the evidence that he reported, but I will choose the instruments that are most sensitive right now with our best technologies right now. | ||
| Because he had some instruments that were for other purposes, not for this. | ||
| For combat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So instead, I will use the very best instruments that exist right now To look for the kind of signals that he saw, so that we are much more sensitive than he was, and for us it will be a piece of cake. | ||
| The signal will boom in our instrument, if it's there. | ||
| And then collect the data. | ||
| And we can do it over a period of time so that we allow for these signals not to be there all the time. | ||
| And then conclude with our findings. | ||
| And it should be open to the public, to the science community, to everyone. | ||
| And I don't think it will cost a lot. | ||
| Instead of us talking about it forever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, when you're talking about what happened off the coast of San Diego, I think it was several hundred miles at sea. | ||
| How would you set up out there? | ||
| I would send some instruments at the same distance into sea. | ||
| Now, it's important for national security as well because perhaps these are espionage-related systems. | ||
| Are operating out there and we want to know about it. | ||
| So I wouldn't be surprised if the, you know, if people behind the fence of national security would be curious about the findings as well. | ||
| Would there be a problem with that though? | ||
| Because if they were behind the fence of national security, then they wouldn't want these findings to be relayed to the public. | ||
| Well, it depends who funds the work. | ||
| But if the military funds it? | ||
| If the military funds it, they own the data, right? | ||
| But if the private sector funds it, or if it's a federal agency that is not guided by the same rules of secrecy? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Aren't all of them, though, when it comes to something that would be deemed top secret like UFOs? | ||
| It wouldn't be deemed top secret if everyone can see it. | ||
| So my point is, when you look at the sun, that cannot be top secret, right? | ||
| Because everyone can look at the sun. | ||
| Right, but you're talking about something that's hundreds of miles off the coast, very difficult. | ||
| You need very powerful instrumentation in order to document it. | ||
| But we can look everywhere. | ||
| Right, but what I'm saying is, if it's funded by the military, would you have concern that they would not want to release the findings? | ||
| Yeah, so let's fund it by a more open channel, you know? | ||
| A channel of interested citizens. | ||
| Channel of interested citizens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if the funding is not at a very high level, if it's at the level of millions or tens of millions of dollars, that can be funded. | ||
| That's pocket money for the wealthy. | ||
| Why don't you talk to Elon? | ||
| He might be interested in that. | ||
| Yeah, I'd be glad to. | ||
| I mean, it's really nothing. | ||
| You look at his wealth right now. | ||
| Right, and also when you're thinking about the private sector is getting involved in space travel now, you know, with Jeff Bezos' company and Elon's company, and I'm sure more to come. | ||
| Maybe that would be something that, look, just imagine the PR power and potential of approving extraterrestrial life. | ||
| So actually, in my book, I call it Oumuamua's Wager, which goes back to Blaise Pascal. | ||
| He was a philosopher arguing about God. | ||
| He said, well, as a mathematician, there are two possibilities, either God exists or not. | ||
| Now, let's examine the consequences. | ||
| If God exists and you don't do the right thing, consequences are much greater. | ||
| So he put a wager that there is a much, you know, bigger implications to one of the possibilities than the other one. | ||
| And that convinced him that you need to take it seriously. | ||
| Now, I say Oumuamua or the possibility of extraterrestrial life more generally is It poses exactly the same type of wager because the consequences of finding evidence would be huge. | ||
| And if it's not a very expensive task to examine it, if it's something we can do with existing technology... | ||
| It's a missed opportunity not to even consider doing that, and to have a taboo, and to silence everyone that wants to speak about it. | ||
| That's a mistake. | ||
| How can we do that? | ||
| I agree with you, and I also think that the positive benefits for the person who does stick their neck out would be spectacular. | ||
| If you could absolutely prove that there is some evidence of extraterrestrial civilization. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, the article that appeared in Haaretz's newspaper about my work and in the New York Post, they were, each of them separately, completely differently, separation of a couple of years, were the most read online stories in the history of these newspapers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The New York Post article? | ||
| That was the most read online story in the history of the Post? | ||
| That's what I was told by my literary agent. | ||
| But I should say that over the past few days, I had seven filmmakers and producers from Hollywood contact me. | ||
| And I told my literary agent about the book. | ||
| I told my literary agent that if a film ever comes out of it, I want Brad Pitt to play my role. | ||
| Does he have to have the accent? | ||
| Yeah, he knows how to do it. | ||
| Did you see the movie Contact? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What did you think of that film? | ||
| I thought it was pretty good. | ||
| That was pretty good. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| By the way, Carl Sagan was a junior faculty at our department at Harvard. | ||
| He was not tenured there, so he moved to Cornell where he got tenured. | ||
| But he also lived in the same town that I live in. | ||
| And when I bring my clothes to the dry cleaner, The dry cleaner says that there is someone, his son probably, or someone related to his family that brings the clothes to the same dry cleaner. | ||
| Sagan. | ||
| Royalty. | ||
| But, you know, he also was not... | ||
| His ideas predated our current interest. | ||
| But he was more of a popularizer. | ||
| He had his program and... | ||
| Right now, I'm focusing mostly on the science. | ||
| That's my main interest. | ||
| But I think this subject is big enough for a lot of people to come together and make the future better than the past. | ||
| Well, I think it would be just beyond spectacular if your coverage of Oumuamua and this controversy that's erupted from that... | ||
| That this is just one step in the multiple step process of us understanding that we are not alone. | ||
| I mean, if you like ring the first bell, if you, you know, coming from Harvard, very respected guy, say, hey, this, this is not normal. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| And then people want to deny it. | ||
| But then another thing comes up and another thing comes up. | ||
| And then who knows? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it would be pretty amazing. | ||
| That's what everybody wants, right? | ||
| What people really want is they want to know. | ||
| They want to know. | ||
| Like, if we are alone, boy, what a mess. | ||
| You know, the story about my paper broke out just around the time of the State of the Union address by Donald Trump, 2018. And it was more popular than what he said on the Washington Post or whoever reported it. | ||
| And I was asked, why do I think that's the case? | ||
| And I said that people look for uplifting news from the sky because our situation on Earth is not very promising. | ||
| Well, it's certainly problematic. | ||
| We've got a lot of shit that's going on that's not so fun. | ||
| But I think we're all hoping that our civilization is going to get better and evidence that it's possible to get past this weird period of conflict without destroying ourselves. | ||
| It would be great if we saw a civilization that has achieved that. | ||
| And that's what I think we hope for when we think of some intergalactic civilization that comes to visit us. | ||
| But I think also it changes the way we see ourselves. | ||
| If we are Part of the human species, rather than fight on borders, feel superior relative to each other based on superficial things. | ||
| Let's come together, build a better future for all of us. | ||
| That's a sign of intelligence. | ||
| Why not do that? | ||
| Why does that sound weird or strange? | ||
| It should be The thing that everyone wants to do. | ||
| I think it's the thing that most people want to do. | ||
| I just think that what you've experienced is this weird thing that's going on in academia. | ||
| I think you're experiencing this resistance from people that either they don't want to look foolish or they're upset that you're the one who's come up with this and then they can't argue against it rationally. | ||
| There's no real logical The reason why what you're saying is incorrect, where they could prove it, like here, this is why. | ||
| They don't have that. | ||
| I think it's very frustrating. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, sorry, but then, you know, sometimes you have to revise your views of nature. | ||
| And, you know, quantum mechanics is a very good example. | ||
| You mentioned it before. | ||
| It was forced upon us by experiments. | ||
| And it didn't look natural to many physicists. | ||
| And in fact, Einstein thought that it makes no sense. | ||
| And he was saying it has this spooky action at a distance that cannot be real. | ||
| And then experiments showed that he was wrong. | ||
| And that we still do not fully understand the meaning of quantum mechanics. | ||
| Can you explain, just because you've said that a couple times, explain to people that don't know, what does that mean by spooky action at a distance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So in quantum mechanics... | ||
| Entities, objects, are described by a wave function. | ||
| So you have a probability of detecting an electron. | ||
| At this point, at that point, you cannot imagine the electron as being a point-like particle, like a billiard ball, which is located in a particular place. | ||
| There is some uncertainty. | ||
| So it's sort of like a wave. | ||
| It's spread over space, okay? | ||
| Now what that means is that if you do a measurement of the electron, let's say here, it affects what you will find very far away because there is a probability distribution of finding it far away and a probability finding it here. | ||
| And if I measure it here, it means that it's not there. | ||
| And this effect is action at a distance, and it can be faster than light. | ||
| So in other words, you can imagine two experiments done almost simultaneously, without any information coming from one experiment to the other, trying to measure the electron. | ||
| And if one of them finds, the other one is not able to find it. | ||
| But how did they know about each other when they were separated by a distance? | ||
| So large that they couldn't transmit a signal. | ||
| This is called spooky action at a distance, that information about what is done here is already known there without enough time for the signal to cross that distance, that separation. | ||
| What does that tell us about the nature of reality? | ||
| That it's not the way we're used to. | ||
| We're used to having a cup of coffee at one place. | ||
| You can't have the cup of coffee at another place. | ||
| But in quantum mechanics, that's not true. | ||
| Your cup of coffee has some probability of actually being there as well. | ||
| So that's something being in superposition, right? | ||
| Well, yeah, it's being in a multitude of states, many places with different properties, potentially. | ||
| And you just assign a probability to finding it here. | ||
| And moreover, quantum mechanics says that you can never pin down both the position of an object and its speed, its velocity. | ||
| If you want to localize the object extremely well, You don't know its speed. | ||
| And if you want to measure its speed, you don't know where it's located. | ||
| And this is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. | ||
| There is always uncertainty about reality. | ||
| We're not used to it because big objects have very little quantum uncertainty. | ||
| So that allows us to come to the conclusion that, you know, you can imagine things being in one place. | ||
| But quantum mechanics says no, that's not the case. | ||
| And it's counterintuitive, and Einstein had a problem with that, but he was wrong. | ||
| And all the experiments are fully consistent with this strange feeling. | ||
| So what I'm saying, the reason I brought this up is you have an uneasy feeling when you think about quantum mechanics. | ||
| And a lot of people had an uneasy feeling. | ||
| You know, I'm sure that the friend of mine, the colleague that spoke about Oumuamua would have said about quantum mechanics, I wish it was not there, you know? | ||
| So, okay, he can wish, but reality is whatever it is, irrespective of whether we ignore it or not. | ||
| And we have to get used to it, right? | ||
| You check the ATM machine. | ||
| You find how much money you have in the bank. | ||
| The fact that you imagine to be as wealthy as Elon Musk does not make you wealthy. | ||
| You can live a happy life imagining that you're Elon Musk in terms of the wealth. | ||
| But when you go to cash that money, you don't have it in your back of the bank. | ||
| So what I'm saying is reality is whatever it is, irrespective of your imagination. | ||
| And we better get tested by experiments before we, you know, assume that everything we believe in is true. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| Your book comes out when? | ||
| 26th of January. | ||
| Okay, so not too far away. | ||
| What is today? | ||
| The 15th? | ||
| Yeah, so in about 11 days. | ||
| I will post it on Instagram. | ||
| I will let everybody know. | ||
| And I appreciate you. | ||
| I appreciate what you're doing. | ||
| And I hope somebody reaches out and actually decides to do this. | ||
| It's a pleasure. | ||
| And takes you up on your work and really puts together some sort of a group of people that can... | ||
| Do these kind of experiments that you're talking about. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| Extraterrestrial, the first signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. | ||
| Thank you, Joe, and I'll be glad to be back once we find definitive proof. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| We'll do it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate you. |
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