Avi Loeb explains his bold claim that Oumuamua, the first detected interstellar object in 2017—a flat, football-field-sized "cigar" with 10x brightness shifts—may be artificial, defying natural explanations like frozen hydrogen or dust bunnies. The Vera Rubin Observatory’s monthly scans could reveal similar objects, but 20TB of nightly data strains storage limits. Loeb critiques scientific conservatism, comparing it to Galileo’s persecution, while advocating for evidence-based UFO research, like David Fravor’s reports. His upcoming book Extraterrestrial (Jan 26) pushes for unity if alien tech is confirmed, arguing humanity’s insignificance could end territorial conflicts. Rogan backs his mission: test theories empirically or risk dismissing reality itself. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.