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Jan. 26, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:14:32
Edition 329 - Water Crisis & Space Update

World-famous Harvard Space Professor Avi Loeb. Also news of a water crisis in one of earth'sbiggest cities...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
And you join me here in London with the sun shining.
We have a day that is a lot like springtime here, which is a little bizarre because it is January, but very welcome, I have to say.
You know that I don't do winter.
A few days ago, we had torrential, unending rain here.
And then a couple of weeks ago, we had a bit of a freeze, but really wacky weather.
And this is all the more ironic, the fact that we've had so much rain here.
If I look out of my window, there are still puddles of rain from two days ago.
It is ironic because there is a city on this planet that is facing the unthinkable, a modern, sophisticated city that many people have visited and many people know, including me, that is facing running out of water by April this year.
And it's a story that hasn't really been covered too well, I don't think, by the Northern Hemisphere mainstream media.
The city is Cape Town, a beautiful city that I've been to a number of times.
And because of a combination of circumstances, political incompetence, a little bit of corruption and climate change as well, that city has a real and serious issue that it's facing now.
And unless there is some kind of miracle, and there is no sign of one at the moment, then the water will get incredibly low, a trickle, by around about April.
We're going to hear from a man that I recorded here.
His name is Anthony Turton.
He's a water expert in South Africa.
And we'll hear the full story from him.
This appeared on my radio show, but I recorded it here.
And then the next item we'll hear is a conversation with our old friend, Professor RV Loeb, the space professor, I guess you could call him, from Harvard University in the US, who's been very kind to come on again.
And I'm very, very grateful to him because he's always so articulate and so interesting on these topics and bang up to date and bang on the money.
So two things that I think are well worth hearing on this edition of The Unexplained.
The first one is about South Africa's water crisis.
And it could be something that one day will apply to a lot of other cities.
We don't know.
And that's one of the reasons why it's worth hearing and taking on board, even if the mainstream media is not talking about it that much.
After all, it's not a game show or a reality TV show or anything like that, so the media is not going to be quite so interested, but it should be.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I won't be doing shout-outs on this edition.
I'll save those for a future edition.
But thank you to people like Sharon in Canada for the email that I got from her today.
Sharon, thank you very much indeed.
It's really nice to hear from you, and I'm glad that you enjoy the show.
But lots of good email coming in recently.
If you want to connect with me, you can do it by going to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Very keen to hear from you, by the way, if you've had problems getting this show.
There are some people telling me that they haven't been able to get hold of the show and have been surprised that I've carried on producing it because they haven't been finding it.
So if you have any problems at all, let myself or Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot know about that so we're aware.
I think most of you are getting the shows, but I want the world to get this show, if possible.
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Let's get to the first of the guests then, Anthony Turton, water expert in South Africa.
And we're going to talk about the developing water crisis in the wonderful city of Cape Town.
I am a professor at the Center for Environmental Management at the University of Free State.
But in my career development, I was formerly an intelligence officer with the South African Secret Service.
And in fact, I established the Environmental Security Division within the Secret Service that looks specifically at water as a national security risk.
Which indeed, I think a lot of people don't actually get that fact, but it is.
It is a vital utility.
And if you start having issues of control with your water supply, then you've got major problems that could spread out.
I know we're going to talk about those issues.
That's an amazing body of expertise that you've got, Anthony.
Look, I think a lot of the media up here in the United Kingdom have not really bothered very much with the story of what is happening to the water supply in Cape Town.
The Americans have taken more interest in this story than we have in Britain, which is surprising.
Explain to us here what it is that looks likely to happen if something miraculous is not done pretty quick.
Well, Cape Town is a, I would call it a significant city globally.
When I say significant, it sounds a bit arrogant, but I think Cape Town is one of the top two tourist destinations in South Africa.
It is the epicenter of a vast tourism industry.
People come from all over the world to experience the sea and the mountains and beautiful climate down Cape Town.
And the reality is that it's the first significant city in the world that is literally going to run out of water in the next 90 days for a number of complicated reasons.
So it's a story of global significance because part of it is the whole story about adaptation to climate change.
Right.
And I think this is going to be a big shocker for a lot of people because, like I say, a lot of the media up here, some of the heavier newspapers in the UK have bothered with this.
And I think the BBC reported something about it.
But the story has yet to make a full impact up here.
Maybe I can help that tonight.
But, you know, we have to just ponder a little on those words for a few seconds, that one of the biggest and most important cities in the world, and a place, as you rightly say, that people flock to because it's absolutely beautiful, but also a place that generates food and flowers and wine for the world, is staring down the barrel of running out of water.
It is an astonishing thing to reflect on.
If we think of it historically, think of medieval Europe where villages were centered around a well where people would spend inordinate hours of the day just drawing water and gossiping and exchanging things at the town square.
That's where we're going to.
And unfortunately, because none of us have had the privilege Of living in medieval times, we don't have a frame of reference against which we can measure our performance.
So, consequently, what is happening is literally it is beyond the cognitive ability of anyone to actually understand what it means to literally have a city of that magnitude run out of water.
In my past as an intelligence officer, we ran certain models and scenarios looking at these global environmental catastrophes, etc.
And of course, one of them was this whole thing about migration flows, which the whole Brexit debate is based on today.
In the case of Brexit, it's clearly not about water or not about environmental issues, but it's about refugees.
And what happens literally when day zero hits Cape Town, the entire city becomes some kind of refugee camp.
But unfortunately, they don't have the facilities that refugees would normally live on because the volume of water that each person is expected to live on is less than what would be provided in a United Nations refugee camp.
And just to give you about one example.
If this was Britain, the first thing people would be doing would be saying, what is the government doing about this?
But the problem has been lately from what we've been seeing in our media here is that your government is very much preoccupied with issues to do with your president and possible corruption allegations surrounding this man and his ability to remain in office, which is not looking very great at the moment.
So it seems that your politicians may have taken their eye off the ball.
Well, not only have our politicians taken their eye, the eye off the ball, they've actually put their hand in the cookie jar and they've been plundering the state.
So we now have a series of criminal investigations where literally billions, billions of South African rand have been plundered and stolen.
And that's part of the problem because all of the infrastructure projects that have been initiated under the presidency of Jacob Zuma have all been predicated on the assumption that there's a feeding trough that's been created.
And the political power has been derived from the politics of patronage.
And therefore, power is derived from an individual that decides who can feed at the trough and how long they can feed at the trough for.
All right.
So a lot of this means, Anthony, that crucial things that should have been done.
And I know that for years you've had problems with ESCOM, your power provider, not having the infrastructure to supply a stable power connection to a lot of people.
You know, you've had power cuts there.
So all of this means that vital things have not been invested in.
So when you've got a bit of a problem with the weather, I presume there have been droughts down there in Cape Town, there isn't...
You haven't built ways to be able to get water from other places when the water starts to get a bit thin.
Well, there are two parts to that question.
So let me deal with them briefly.
The one part of the question is the fact that we've known about this in the scientific community since 2002.
We've known that the Berg River water management area will run into deficit.
We've known about that and other parts of the country as well.
So that is, it's not as though it's unknown, but the scientific community has generally been muted or silenced as a result of it.
The second thing is the energy debacle.
And as we sit here right now, the new president of the African National Congress is about to get on an aeroplane and go to Davos.
And there's speculation in the media right now that by the time he gets back from Davos, ESCOM, the National Energy Agency, might no longer be financially solvent.
So while we're talking about a water crisis as a major crisis, there's a parallel track to this, and that is the possible collapse of the national energy grid.
So we are actually talking a failed state scenario here.
That is astonishing to consider.
Let's just focus on the water for a while, because I think a lot of us here who are used to just turning on the tap and out comes clean water 24-7, you know, a lot of us are going to be astonished about this.
You talked about the possible causes.
You said they are complex.
Is there a way of boiling them down into a way that I could into a message that I could understand?
Well, I think to simplify this as best I can, in part it is a constitutional crisis because when we became a democracy in 1994, all water that used to be in private ownership was nationalized and put in the hands of the state.
And that assumes now that the state would have the capacity to manage that water and allocate all of the licenses.
So the constitution dictates that all bulk water infrastructure must be done by the national government, which is controlled by the African National Congress.
And the case of the Western Cape, provincial and municipal government, which by constitutional law is not responsible for bulk infrastructure.
They are only responsible for reticulating water within the city limits themselves and managing wastewater.
So suddenly they are now expected to do this, but to make it worse, the city politics or the city government is controlled by the opposition democratic alliance.
So you actually have this cleavage between the African National Congress and the DA, where if you're skeptical or if you're cynical, you'll say that the one has starved the other, literally to try and bring it to its knees.
Now that's a skeptical view or a cynical view of the world, but that is certainly part of the story that is thundering around here.
Bottom line is that the central government has not provided infrastructure.
And if you zoom out from Cape Town, it's not only the Western Cape, which is a DA-controlled area.
We're also talking in the very near future, Port Elizabeth, Nelson Mandela Bay, East London, possibly even Durban is going to be in exactly the same situation.
And those are all ANC controlled areas.
So I'm not sure to what extent it's been this ANC DA thing, but it's absolutely a national crisis of unprecedented proportion.
Okay, so this is a place where politics and South African politics is complex for people up here to understand, but it's a place where politics and the climate have conspired to create what is a crisis.
How do you think this is going to play out?
Presumably the taps won't be allowed to run dry.
How can that happen?
Well, you see, when you say that it won't be allowed dry, you're now assuming that there's someone in authority that can actually say or make a rule that says, thou shalt not run dry.
The fact of the matter is, when the dam is dry, the dam is dry.
That's just the way It is okay.
So at the moment, there's a close monitoring taking place on the levels of the dams.
When the levels of the dams get to 16%, the water at that point in time is almost no longer fit for consumption for various reasons.
And at that point in time, the city will switch off the taps and it will then go into emergency shutdown measures where water will only be provided to specific areas.
And in fact, everyone will now have to go with their 25-litre container and they will have to go and stay in queues.
We're going back to medieval times.
We're going back to the well in the town center once again.
And presumably, the vital parts of your infrastructure will be safeguarded as much as possible.
When you drive from the airport in Cape Town and you're driving down towards the city, you pass Hotoskua Hospital.
I'm pronouncing that terribly badly.
But one of the most famous hospitals in the world.
Presumably, they'll try and get water to that, won't they?
Well, here the analogue is a place called Murchison Hospital at Port Shepston in KwaZila Natal.
Now, Murchison Hospital has had water intermittently for the last 18 months, where medical doctors are unable to scrub between procedures for precisely the same reason, but in this case it's in the municipality called Ugu.
And Ugu, by virtue of the fact that it's just a low-profile place, has not made the media at all.
So while day zero is going to happen in Cape Town in April this year, day zero happened in Ugu 18 months ago, and we've already seen exactly what happens in Murchison Hospital.
That is what's going to happen in Khrutiskir Hospital.
And the answer to this then for Cape Town, I mean, I suspect, is the population of Cape Town in the millions?
South Africa's population, I think, is about 30 million.
I would assume Cape Town, what, 4 million, 3 million people?
Yep, Cape Town's about 4 million.
The total South African population is about 50 million, of which 10% are illegal.
Okay, of course, you have to bear in mind that people are streaming across your borders from countries that have problems like the Democratic Republic of Congo constantly and swelling the numbers, which is going to make this worse.
If day zero happens in Cape Town, and you sound very pessimistic, it sounds like it will, that is going to have security implications, isn't it?
Because people are going to start fighting for water.
You know, the other day there was a very strange thing that happened.
Somebody complained on one of the Facebook groups that they'd had a break-in into their housing complex.
And what was strange about this break-in, because we have break-ins every single day in South Africa, but what is strange about this particular break-in was someone broke into a house and didn't steal anything, but they came and had a shower.
So I then said, well, this is the kind of precursor of what's going to happen.
You go to strange behavior that is not part of our normal cognitive framework.
We can't sort of rationalize about it now, but it's totally rational when you don't have water.
Are the security services, the army in particular, being put on standby?
It's a horrible thing to contemplate, but I guess they are.
Well, there is part of the undercurrent, there's a growing undercurrent of fear and distrust because there's been a Cold War between the ruling African National Congress and the local Democratic Alliance.
This has been exacerbated by Bell Pottinger.
You're probably aware of the Bell Pottinger drama playing out in UK where propaganda was developed that heightened tensions, racial tensions in the country.
So there's actually talk at the moment of some kind of state of emergency and there's growing fear of people in Cape Town on the streets because they believe that a state of emergency is some kind of some kind of sinister undercurrent to it.
Now I'm not sure that I don't bind to the sinister stuff but certainly this is what people are starting to feel.
You know the bottom line is that this is the moment where I think we need a Churchill.
This is the moment where we need someone to say we'll fight them on the beaches and we will never surrender.
And unfortunately neither of the political parties have got leadership of sufficient credibility or stature that's actually stepped up to the plate.
So people by and large are actually left to pretty much fend for themselves and this is part of the problem.
Now presumably people who've got wherewithal and money are starting to find ways of finding their own water sources, maybe drilling down for wells, that kind of thing, maybe finding ways to store water on their property.
That is always going to happen when you've got some people with more money than others.
But the rest of the population are not going to be fortunate enough to do that.
And that is going to create even more tension if this is allowed to happen.
Well, the global literature on water scarcity tells us in one sentence that when water scarcity becomes a pertinent factor, two things happen.
The first thing that happens is that it heightens the evenly distributed between the haves and the have-nots.
And the second thing that happens is that it magnifies or amplifies underlying tensions in society.
So at the moment there's a drilling bonanza in the Western Cape.
There are hundreds of ball drilling rigs, drilling literally tens of balls per day.
And this has just been declared by the national government to be illegal because under emergency circumstances, they're all drilling into the same resource.
And they cannot have a situation where the rich can now squander what is a national resource.
The National Water Act of 1998, in any event, has nationalized the resource so the government does control it.
Whether the government has the ability to literally control every bar, one doesn't know.
This comes down to a capacity issue.
But this is very much an undercurrent that's coming to the surface.
It also happens to be a big beer brewery down there that gets all of its water from groundwater.
And there has already been a lot of tension around that site because that brewery has made some of its water available to the public.
And people have been collecting more water than they legally allowed to carry away.
And there have been some squabbles and some fighting has broken out there already.
This is a terrible situation and a situation that is not solvable unless, of course, there is a massive deluge pretty quick.
And there's no great sign of that.
I mean, you're in high summer there at the moment, and that's hot in Cape Town.
I know the place well.
That can be very, very hot.
So what on earth is going to be done?
This needs, as you say, somebody to step up to the plate and do something churchillian.
But they need to have done it yesterday.
Yes, I've just put out a piece.
As a scientist, I'm very concerned about the fact that people listen to what I say, and I don't in any way want to drive panic or give any misinformation.
But I think as a scientist, one has to be responsible as well.
And when you know that things are potentially going to cause harm to human beings, I think you have to make your voice heard.
So I put out a piece last week in the Cape Messenger that actually suggested that we are coming in for a bumpy landing and we now need to assume the brace position because in reality, nothing that can be done now is going to make a significant enough impact on the water situation between now and day zero.
May I just also add, just for your listeners' insight, one of the unique things about the Western Cape is that it's one of the six winter rainfall areas in the world.
So it's the same as Southern California, the same as parts of Chile, the same as Western Australia and Southern Australia, and of course the same as the Mediterranean area.
So the winter rainfall areas are all under the similar kind of distress.
In the case of the Western Cape or Cape Town area, it's a winter rainfall area.
So the first possible rains that are going to fall are normally maybe in May, but typically in June.
So one has to literally batten down the hatches until the first rains fall, hopefully before May.
And that's why day Zera is so critical, because the water is set to run out in the middle of April.
But that whole area of the Western Cape is a fantastic area.
I know the area from Cape Town itself, which I know very well, and all the way out to beautiful Arniston, which is basically the point where two oceans meet.
It's a fabulous, fabulous area.
It depends on tourism and depends on food and wine exports.
What on earth is going to happen to those trades?
Well, I was on a panel discussion on one of our national TV stations the day before yesterday, and there was a spokesperson from Agri-SA, the Agricultural Interest Group, and they are fairly wiped out already in the Western Cape.
Something like 45% of the total national export from South Africa comes from the Western Cape.
So we're talking about a substantial economic impact at national level.
You must also appreciate that the agricultural industry, by virtue of the fact that it's in a winter rainfall area, has to store the water because the growing season is in summer.
So without storage capacity, you've effectively wiped out your agriculture.
And a lot of agriculture is high-value wine, and it takes typically seven years for a vine to come to maturity.
So if you wipe out your vineyard right now, then you've got a seven-year crisis going forward.
But the more important thing is that the agricultural sector employs thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.
And once again, once those people are unable to receive a salary, this is what happens now when you start getting that migration that starts kicking in as a direct result of a crisis of this nature.
And this is what I would like to think the emergency planners have planned in, in their planning.
But by all indications, I don't think they have because they've only got 200 water points across the city.
And they haven't really thought through how, for example, elderly people, people in wheelchairs, maybe small children, this kind of thing, how these people can physically carry 25 litres of water, where they can park their motor cars, because we don't have public transport, of course, in South Africa of the same sophistication as you have in the UK.
So most people are going to have to drive to the water point, and then where are they going to park their motor cars?
So there are many, many unintended consequences or unthought-through details that I think are going to become apparent as this story breaks.
This story is the very, very early phase of the news cycle in this particular one.
Killing material.
Anthony Turton will follow that story.
And let's hope the mainstream media does a little bit more about it because it deserves to have coverage that it hasn't been getting.
A situation in South Africa that could be a metaphor for other things that may be about to happen in other places.
We don't know.
But we'll follow the situation.
Next, we're going to talk with Professor R. V. Loeb from Harvard University, a wonderful man who talks so well about space.
I caught up with him a few days ago on my radio show, and here's that conversation.
So tell me about you, because I was reading your biography today, and you literally started life on a farm and ended up where you are now.
That's correct.
I grew up on a farm, and I used to collect eggs every afternoon.
And in the weekends, I would go to the hills and read philosophy books.
I was mostly interested in the big picture, even though my daily life, my daily routine was in the farm.
And I always dreamt of spending my life addressing philosophy questions, the most fundamental questions we have.
But then circumstances led me to astrophysics and I was offered a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for five years and I took it.
Under one condition, they asked me to study astronomy.
And then I was eventually offered tenure at Harvard.
And at that point, I realized it's too late to go back to philosophy, even though it was my true love.
But then I realized something quite thrilling, that in fact the arranged marriage to astronomy was a marriage to the woman I really love.
And in fact, there are philosophical questions that we are addressing on a daily basis in astronomy.
And these are the ones that I prefer to focus on.
For example, how did the universe start?
Or are we alone?
And what would happen if we establish contact with another civilization?
How would it change our perception on reality?
Do you think that we're getting nearer and have got nearer in this last year or so to answering that question about whether we're alone or not?
It seems that we're discovering more, for example, about Mars, but maybe the answer, as it's Increasingly looked over the last year.
The answer to that question is perhaps a little less likely to be found on Mars and maybe found somewhere else now.
Well, the biggest news over the past couple of decades is that there are many habitable planets out there.
A quarter of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet just at the right distance to have liquid water on its surface.
And so that implies that there are lots of opportunities for life to develop.
As to the question of whether intelligent life exists, we don't know, but the way to address it is by searching the sky for signals for alien civilizations.
And it's sort of like looking at the mirror.
You're looking for something that sounds familiar, that is artificial in origin, that cannot be explained as a natural process.
And our imagination is limited by what we see in the mirror.
So 50 years ago, our imagination was limited to radio communication, because that's the technology that we developed around the Second World War, that could, in principle, transmit signals across galactic distances.
And so the first searches were for radio signals.
But now we realize that, in fact, you know, there is much more to technology beyond radio communication.
We could search for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of other planets by examining the composition of those atmospheres.
We could search for beacons of light that are used for, for example, for propelling spacecrafts.
This is the technology that we are just starting to develop here on Earth.
For example, in the context of the project Starshot that is currently funded.
We can search for artifacts on the surfaces of planets, and that includes photovoltaic cells that may reflect the starlight differently than the bare rock on the planet's surface.
And so there are lots of ways that we can imagine now.
For example, a civilization that sits on a planet that faces the star always with the same side.
These are called tidally locked planets.
And these are all the habitable planets around stars that are much less massive than the Sun.
These are called dwarf stars.
For example, the nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, and it has about 12% of the mass of the Sun.
And there is a planet that is in the habitable zone around that star that was discovered about a year ago.
And that planet faces the star always with the same side.
So there is a permanent night side and a permanent day side.
And in between them, there is a permanent sunset strip where the real estate value is probably the highest.
And you might think that if there is a civilization on such a planet, it would try to extract power from the permanent day side and transfer it to the permanent night side.
Otherwise, as my daughter told me, she is 12 years old, she said, otherwise she would like to have on such a planet two houses, one in which she sleeps at night and the other one in which she goes back during the day.
And so if you want to make the conditions more suitable for life on both sides, you might want to, for example, cover the surface of the day side with photovoltaic cells, extract stellar light energy from there, and transfer it via electricity to the other side.
So either light it up, the permanent night side, or warm it up so that it's more suitable for life.
But we're assuming, aren't we, Avi, that they, if there are a they there, were there to be a civilization on this particular planet or one like it, they would think as we think.
They would be as we are.
You are right.
So in fact, I just wrote an article, an essay that I published in Scientific American a couple of weeks ago that asks the fundamental question, are alien civilizations technologically advanced?
And as the physicist Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody?
You know, we discover numerous habitable planets around other stars in the Milky Way, including Proxima Centauri that I just mentioned, the nearest star.
And one cannot help but wonder why have we not detected evidence for an advanced civilization as of yet.
And one possible solution that I suggested is that perhaps exoplanet politics explains Fermi's paradox, that in fact human history allows us to imagine the possibility that our civilization could have remained dominated by the mindset of the Middle Ages under a different political scenario and until now.
And such a scenario is imaginable definitely over a time scale of thousands of years.
We don't know if it could prevail over millions or billions of years, but perhaps we were very lucky to mature as a technological civilization.
And then if that's true, then when we search other planets, we will find on the surfaces of other planets other relic, either relics of advanced civilizations that destroyed themselves by self-inflicted catastrophes, like for example climate change or nuclear, biological or chemical wars, or we would find living civilizations that are technologically primitive.
So it's quite possible that the reason we don't see a signal is simply because technological civilizations like our own are short-lived.
You know, they destroy themselves.
So there are Three facets then to this.
For people who say, you know, it's ridiculous we're getting so much information out now.
Surely we need to have discovered something by this point.
Otherwise, we're wasting our money.
Actually, it's more complicated than most people believe because not only have you got to find the right planet, the right star, you've also got to find it at the correct point in the development of anybody who might be living there.
If you get it at the wrong time, then they will be pre-industrial and they won't leave a large footprint.
If you get it when they're all finished and they've destroyed themselves, they develop themselves to the point some people are saying we're getting there now, then there will be no sign either.
You have to get, see them at their optimal development.
Exactly.
And in principle, they might also keep a low-key technological profile if they are very advanced just to sustain their biosphere, you know, maintaining a lifestyle reminiscent of Henry Thoreau on Walden Pond.
And they would basically not modify much their environment under these circumstances.
So the only way to find out if those are the circumstances is to actually visit the surfaces of other planets and travel there.
I mean, most astronomers think conservatively that we can build bigger telescopes and search the sky for signals because that's less expensive, but it may not give us the full picture.
We might need to go and visit those planets.
And we can do that, you know, over a period of billion years.
We can visit a lot of billions of planetary systems and do what I call astrosociology or astro-anthropology, trying to figure out what are the societies that exist out there.
Are they, for example, faith-based or are they technological?
If they're faith-based cultures instead of advanced civilizations that have infrastructure from where we can learn about our own technological development, even that would be fascinating because we could explore the diversity of galactic interpretations for the concept of God, for example.
It would be fascinating to see the statistics, you know, of how many civilizations believe in what type of God depending on their host star, depending on their environment, and so forth.
Is it possible we may actually be living, and I never thought I would be asking you this question, but as we wrap up this segment, it is a good one to ask you.
Is it possible that we may be living in something that's not real, in somebody else's experiment, within a hologram or within, I don't know, I'm trying to hark back to the lyrics of that famous Noel Harrison song, Windmills of Your Mind, within a circle, in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel.
In other words, is it possible that what we're seeing out there is not quite what we think it is?
Is that worth even considering?
It is possible, but I don't believe in conspiracies.
And often, you know, people that have these complicated models of the world end up in institutions that are not realistic.
And, you know, so in this context, another possible explanation for Fermi's paradox is that, you know, we can see already the seeds for that in our own technology right now.
People can get addicted to virtual reality.
We can imagine machines that satisfy the needs of people to the point where they will not be connected to the reality.
They will be connected to a machine that provides them with a virtual reality.
And you know, the addiction to cell phones is the beginning of that.
But you can imagine something more sophisticated in the future where people will just connect to a machine and feel happy and that will be it.
It's sort of like getting addicted to drugs, except that in this case it's electronic.
And the question is whether the society should protect itself from that.
It's possible that very advanced aliens are just hooked to virtual reality machines and they're not communicating with us because of that.
You know, that's a possibility.
But I would find it unlikely that what we see is a sort of an experiment by some other civilization because it's too complex and I just prefer not to believe in conspiracies.
That's my personal taste.
And yet we've had decades of reports of so-called aliens intervening at important moments or intervening to, for example, stop nuclear missiles from functioning for a while to demonstrate power.
The word on the street is that maybe we are being supervised or at least we're being observed.
We are being, what was that word that Richard Burton used in War of the Worlds, the intro, scrutinized, like creatures in a Petri dish.
My guess is most of these instances can be explained by human incompetence.
And the one thing to notice about, for example, reports on UFOs, unidentified flying objects, is that they're always marginal, they're never conclusive.
And thinking about how technology, the detection technology evolved over the decades, you know, we now have much better tools to detect evidence for unidentified flying objects.
You know, we have better instruments.
Nevertheless, all these reports are always marginal.
They're always just barely clear that what you're seeing is indeed something unexplainable.
And so that to me implies that either the aliens are modifying their behavior so that they are always at the cutting edge of our technology.
They're always just at the margins of being detected.
So they will remain so near yet so far away.
Yes, which I find unlikely.
Or that these are just false signals or perhaps defense-related things that we just don't know about or that other countries are doing.
So it might make sense for agencies dedicated to protecting or defending a country to make sure that there is nothing hostile from other countries associated with these instances.
But I don't believe there is, as of yet, any credible evidence for an alien civilization.
Just to, Avi, to end this little discussion that we had before we took some commercials about extraterrestrials, aliens, and all the rest of it, what did you make, if anything, of the enormous flap in the press, and apparently there's going to be more in America in a month or two,
about this secret research program that ran for, I think, five years at a cost of $20 million, which is a drop in the research bucket, really, designed to identify specific threats and entities that might be out there.
And the testimony of two pilots that were given within this, saying that we saw something that moved at such a tremendous speed, we don't have that capability.
Just as a man of space and a man of thought, what did you make of that?
Yeah, I do think that it makes sense to consider these reports in the context of national defense, in the sense of trying to make sure that they are not related to any hostility or hostile behavior of other countries that are trying to spy on the United States or do something.
And in that regard, you know, it's useful to look at the evidence and decide.
But in terms of things that violate the laws of physics, I would find it extremely unlikely because we have so many laboratory experiments and other evidence from astronomy that the laws of physics are satisfied to exquisite precision and there is no deviation as of yet in controlled environments where we know what's going on for any deviation from those laws.
So I would put at a very low priority an examination of something that violates the laws of physics, for example.
That leads us to the thought that possibly someone somewhere, for reasons of their own, for subterfuge of some kind, might have the capability of implanting thoughts and impressions within the minds of people like those pilots, so that they believe they've seen something like that.
But in fact, what they've encountered is something perhaps very secret, and some kind of backstory to do with it is projected onto them.
I mean, look, this is all in the realms of speculation, but, you know, my guess is as good as anybody else's.
Well, it could be a mirage.
It could, you know, sometimes you see something that is not really an object moving, but it's actually an image that is scanning across the sky because of some other reason.
And, you know, you can move a laser beam, for example, across the sky, and it would look as if it moves faster than light, but it will not.
And there are all kinds of things you can do that are not real.
And it could be that it's one of them, or it could be that this was just, you know, something that appears on the sky, but is not a real object.
It's like an illusion.
And there is no reason to speculate because all of these reports were about one-time events that could not be verified.
So extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And so far we don't have that.
I've got a lot of claims and a lot of videos on YouTube, but very little, as you say, evidence.
Let me take you on to some things that have appeared in the media recently.
I know that did, but this is something that was reported much around Christmas.
This is that asteroid, Umu Amua, I think is how you say it.
I still struggle with that.
In the news today has been a team of scientists led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner are scanning this bizarre space object dubbed Uma Amua for signs of alien technology.
Astronomers are baffled, apparently, by its peculiar 1,300-foot long, 260-foot-wide appearance.
The first interstellar object to enter our solar system.
In other words, the first thing from way out there to appear.
And people were saying all sorts of things about this.
They were saying that it might house aliens.
It might be completely different in a whole variety of ways.
What do we know about this?
And why are people like, for example, Stephen Hawking, so interested in it?
Well, I should take the blame for that.
Because when I first heard about it.
Oh, I love the way you say it.
Can you say that again for me?
Well, that's the way the natives say it.
It's actually in Hawaiian.
It means a messenger from far away.
And this is the first object that was discovered to come from outside the solar system that passes so close to Earth.
It's unbound to the Sun.
It moves too fast to be bound to the Sun.
So it's on its first passage and it will then fly out of the solar system.
But it takes it a while because it moves roughly at the speed of a planet.
So it takes years, many years for it to cross the solar system.
So that means that if we see one such object, there are many more already within the solar system on its way to us or on its way out because it takes them hundreds or thousands of years to cross the entire solar system.
So at this point in time, they must be already there if we saw one of them and it's a common object.
Now the strange thing about this object is that it's unlike any other object we've seen in the solar system.
Its long axis is 10 times longer than its short axis.
So it's 10 times longer than it is wide.
And the most elongated object we've seen before, the most elongated asteroid, was roughly 1 to 3 axis ratio.
This one is 1 to 10, or even more.
And we haven't imaged it, but that already alerted me to how peculiar it is that the very first object is so elongated.
And so, in addition, we didn't expect to see such an object.
I wrote a paper about five years ago predicting how many interstellar objects should we see, and it was off by almost a million.
So, these objects apparently are a million times more abundant than we thought before.
So this adds to the mystery of this thing, because it is sort of cigar-shaped when most things that come past us are not.
It comes from somewhere where things haven't heretofore been noticed or observed by us.
They may well have come our way, but we now have the technology to see them.
So, there is enormous, great sense of mystery about this thing.
That's right.
And that led me to write an email to Yuri Milner, alerting him to the existence of this object.
There were a number of reports about it, about its properties.
And I told Yuri that I'll be glad to speak with him about it because I was supposed to visit Palo Alto a few days later.
And he invited me for a discussion of an hour or so, in which I presented all the evidence that we have about this object.
We don't have an image, but it looks quite peculiar.
And so Yuri said, why don't we observe, check whether it has any radio transmission?
Because it does look like a probe.
It does sound like a probe, a very elongated object that comes from interstellar space.
And so it looks very similar to the kind of design we had for the project Starshot.
That's a project to send a probe to another star system.
And in order to minimize its friction with the surrounding medium, with the interstellar medium, we thought of a design that looks like a needle, like a cigar.
Well, like a javelin, isn't it?
That's why a javelin is such an effective thing, and that's why those throwers of javelins at the Olympics look so accomplished when they throw that thing, because it is aerodynamically shaped.
So that begs another question.
You know, javelins are aerodynamically shaped.
The clue is in the word.
You know, they're shaped to fly through our air like that.
But why would something, how would something, evolve in that shape to transit through space?
What would have created that?
Well, that's an interesting question.
And if you think about natural processes, I was trying to come up with a reasonable scenario.
It's not easy to come up with something that produces needle-shaped objects.
So we both agreed with Yuri that it might be helpful to just check if there is any radio transmission.
And there is an initiative from the Breakthrough Foundation called Breakthrough Listen, which is intended to search for signals from alien civilizations, mostly in the radio, using, for example, the Greenbank telescope or the Parkes telescope in Australia.
And so we decided that it would be a good idea to use the Greenbank telescope in Virginia to search for any possible radio signal.
And indeed, a few days later it was used and we were able to put a limit down to a level of a tenth of the power transmitted by a single cell phone.
So given that this object is, you know, roughly at the distance of Jupiter, you know, radio telescopes are so powerful that we could have detected transmission that is one tenth, ten times smaller than a single cell phone, and we haven't detected that.
Which is astonishing.
So that indicates to us either this is a dead piece of rock, or if there is anything that is what we might term an extraterrestrial on board, it is using technology that we can't detect.
Well, probably, probably it's not, you know, it's just rock.
But the lesson is that since there are many more such objects that will pass in the future, now that we are aware of their existence, next time an object like that comes near the Earth, we should either take a photo or learn more about it.
And, you know, this object moves too fast for us to chase it with existing rockets.
It's moving faster than all the probes that NASA launched in the past.
So we can't really catch up with it.
But with future technology, like the one developed by the Starshot project, we might be able to send a probe that will reach it and take some photographs and perhaps we'll learn some more about it.
And look, I'm not a scientist, but it would seem to me that these things are perhaps as interesting for themselves as they are for what they represent.
In other words, what might an object like this have been through?
What might it have passed through that we don't yet understand?
So it's what it brings.
It's almost like the luggage, the baggage it brings with it.
That's right.
And you can think of it as a small spacecraft that traveled through space for billions of years, potentially.
And, you know, one way to travel through space is to build our own spacecraft.
But another one is to put something, you know, like a camera on an object like that.
If we can only reach it and plant something on it, eventually it will leave the solar system.
However, you know, objects that move at this speed takes them 100,000 years to get to the nearest star.
So, you know, it's a long journey, but they eventually make it.
If we want to reach the nearest star within our lifetime, we need a probe that moves at a fraction of the speed of light, at about a fifth of the speed of light.
That's what we are trying to do with Starshot.
And where are we at with Starshot now?
Well, at the moment we are studying the technology and the next five years will be dedicated for that.
And the first, the critical technology is the laser technology because the goal is to push a lightweight probe that weighs roughly a gram with a very powerful laser beam.
And the most essential ingredient of this scheme, laser propulsion, is the laser itself.
And so we are just in the process of establishing partnership with a number of experimental teams that will demonstrate the laser technology.
We start to do that.
The goal is to invest about $100 million over the next five years to figure out if we can build the strong, powerful laser that will push a lightweight sail.
Theoretically, then.
And how big would this sail be?
It will be in size, a few meters in diameter, but then in weight it will be just one gram or so, a few grams.
And how would you get that thing out of our atmosphere?
Presumably you'd have to launch it on a rocket and then deploy it in space, is that right?
There will be a mother ship that will carry those in its belly and just release them when they are in the right place so that the laser can shoot at them.
And we have technology so refined that a laser can pinpoint something that is moving away from Earth at speed.
It can actually continue to target and hit this thing over vast distances.
That boggles the mind.
Well, it just needs to do it for a few minutes because this thing moves, will eventually move at a fifth of the speed of light.
So the launch distance is five times the distance to the moon, but it takes only a few minutes for such an object to traverse that distance.
And so the laser needs to be on for a few minutes and provide a power that is similar to the power necessary for liftoff of the space shuttle.
So it's roughly the same amount of energy, the same amount of time that was used for liftoff of the space shuttle.
So because there is no resistance to speak of up there, you can give this thing a push, a hell of a push, and a great speed of a push, and it will continue on for a very, very, very, very long way, just on the basis of that one laser push.
That is astonishing.
Right.
There is not much stuff out there in the interstellar space, so it will not be stopped by friction.
It will continue along its path.
But the bad news is that you cannot really decelerate it.
You cannot break so that it would land on the surface of another planet.
If you want to land on the surface of another planet, you need to launch a spacecraft that is based on rocket propulsion, just like the slow spacecraft that we are launching now.
That could slow down close to a planet and land on it.
The issue with this laser propulsion is that you need, in order to slow it down, you need a similar laser system on the surface of the target planet, and we don't have that.
That's, well, so how far can you track it for then?
If it's only a gram in weight, how can you fit on board a transmitter that will send you signals back?
How can it let you know where it is?
Well, communication is one of the critical issues, but we did some early calculations that indicate that it's possible.
It's possible to communicate with it.
However, we will not be able to maneuver or to give it instructions where to turn.
So it will need to be on a ballistic orbit that is targeting whatever we want to reach, the planet or the star that we want to reach, when it will be there.
And so the advantage of this technology is that one can launch a lot of spacecraft, not just one, because each of them is relatively cheap.
It will be hundreds of dollars per such a spacecraft.
And even if one misses the target, we can launch a lot of them such that it wouldn't be an issue.
So it's almost like a child going to a boating lake, as we call them here.
And, you know, the child's father or mother making the child, or the child doing itself, a folded paper boat.
And you push the boat out and off it floats to wherever it will go.
Of course, the boat will be stopped by the perimeters of whichever boating lake it is.
It'll be either near or far.
But this is a little paper boat that you push and it keeps on going.
That's right.
Another way to think of it is like you're sending a bottle that has something on it, like a message.
But the thing is, if we saw something like that aiming at us, we would know that perhaps there is an alien civilization out there curious about our existence.
The thing is...
And I'm like a sort of child here wanting to ask another question, another question.
But if we see evidence of one of these things being slowed down by something, then that in itself will be proof that there is something out there or someone out there to do the slowing down.
Right.
The thing is that this kind of spacecraft that I was describing for Starshot is too small for us to detect.
The Wamuamua that we discussed before, Muamua, it has a scale of hundreds of meters.
And so that was barely detected by our best telescopes that survey the sky right now.
And so there might be a lot of flying objects out there that we haven't detected.
And, you know, at some point when we build big enough telescopes, we might reach a threshold where we can see those signals and suddenly we would see that we're flooded with artifacts, with signals that are artificial, and that we are not alone.
We would figure this out.
The situation is similar to the LIGO experiment that for decades was trying to detect gravitational waves.
It didn't detect anything, and people were criticizing the project.
But once it reached a threshold where the signal was stronger than the sensitivity of the instrument, so in other words, they developed a sensitive enough instrument, suddenly they started detecting signal after signal, and they got the Nobel Prize in Physics for that.
And so the point to recognize is that once you reach a sensitivity threshold, you might see a lot of signals.
And before that, you don't see anything.
We were talking about the Starshot project.
And just to wrap this up, we got to the point where we were saying that as our telescopes get more and more sensitive, and I presume Moore's law applies to telescopes for looking at space just as it does with everything else.
So there is almost exponential growth of the sensitivity and ability of these things.
We are going to reach a point at which things that we couldn't have possibly detected before that will be of interest to us, we will be able to see.
Effectively, that's it, isn't it?
Yes.
We've had a question in.
I don't know who it's from, but thank you very much for emailing this question in.
About something called EM drive.
Presumably, I think I've heard something about this.
This is a method of propulsion, yeah?
Yes, it's called the electromagnetic propulsion.
And the idea is that perhaps when you arrange for a special type of cavity, you can push something to a high speed, sort of like a thruster, using the electromagnetic fields inside the cavity.
And it's a controversial scheme for accelerating to high speeds.
The plausibility of these thrusters that have no propellant is controversial.
And there are some claims that perhaps people see evidence that it's feasible and arguments that it's not.
At this point, I would put it in the category of designs that still have to be demonstrated in order to be taken seriously.
You know, there are lots of interesting advanced schemes for propulsion, including, you know, some people suggested matter antimatter, annihilation, as a method of converting rest mass into energy and propelling a spacecraft.
People suggested fusion.
The problem is we need to demonstrate fusion reactors first for energy-related consumption before we use them for space propulsion.
So there are lots of other schemes that were discussed, and so far none is demonstrated to be feasible.
Right.
I'm just being told by Cass, my producer here, that the EM.
Cass is always good at looking for these things.
The EM drive was designed by a Brit, RV, Roger Scheuer, apparently is the guy's name.
Now I realize why I heard about this.
My space friend Richard C. Hoagland is very keen on this research.
So it's a British guy who's doing the research on the EM drive.
Right.
So we're looking at all sorts of ways to propel ourselves out into space.
And because technology proceeds and develops at a rapid rate, it doesn't just go in a straight line.
It goes almost exponentially.
We can expect, within our lifetimes, Arvi, we can expect a lot of excitement, even within this year of 2018.
What do you think that we can expect to come out during this year?
What are we looking for?
We are looking for, of course, more planets that are habitable and then possibly evidence for life on them.
And I should say I'm a little bit disappointed that the mainstream of astronomy is engaged in searching for primitive life, for example, in the form of the composition of the atmosphere of a planet.
And the search for intelligent life is outside the mainstream.
It's considered speculative.
However, one should realize that the signals from intelligent life can travel across much greater distances, because if they are much more powerful, you can see a source much farther away.
And so the search volume could be far greater than the feeble signals that come from primitive life.
And to me, it's a mystery as to why, you know, the sociology of the field is such that the search for intelligent life is not considered part of the search for life more generally.
I actually just submitted a book proposal to work on a book that includes the search for life, describes it in all of its forms, both primitive and intelligent.
Of course, if there is intelligent life out there, we think of ourselves, sometimes I doubt it, we think ourselves as intelligent and we're looking.
So if there is intelligent life somewhere out there, then it should be looking for us.
Well, it depends how advanced it is because we may appear just like very primitive life to them.
It may well be that our level of sophistication is rather low and they just disregard us as some low level of life because we haven't yet really advanced enough in our technology.
So we think of ourselves as being so damn cool with all the stuff that we're doing, but in somebody else's book and chart, we don't even exist, really.
We're not that important.
We've only just discovered fire.
Yes, that's right.
Or even less than that.
Because think about it, we've been working on the latest technology over the past century, but the age of this is one part in 10 million or 100 million or even 1,000 million of the age of the sun.
So, you know, we are really at the beginning of our technological development.
And it's quite possible that, you know, the future will bring things we cannot imagine that would appear magical to us right now.
And that's why we are failing to detect those signals.
And perhaps as we harmonize with technology, perhaps as we become more and more robotic and ultimately maybe assimilated, to use a Star Trek term, into the robot world, perhaps we can actually create a whole new generation.
I'm only just having this thought now.
My God, I'm excelling myself tonight.
We could create a whole new generation of robot explorers who feel and think and behave as we do, but will go on forever.
And they will be equipped to be able to go out further and endure conditions that we couldn't endure.
So the future of space exploration may not necessarily be with people, but with the nearest thing to people.
Perhaps enhanced people created through robotics.
I don't know whether you ever had that thought, but it's fascinating me, but I only have a small brain.
This makes a lot of sense, and it is definitely A very likely scenario by which biology is only intermediate, that eventually the sophisticated levels of our civilization will be in the form of electronic devices or robots that go out in space.
And that has implications because right now we are thinking about searching the surfaces of planets for evidence for life.
But if in fact it's robots, they might actually go on spacecraft and be out there in interstellar space.
Now, each of these spacecraft doesn't transmit a very powerful signal, and so that's why we can't see them.
But it may well be that interstellar space has a lot of traffic in it, of small objects that are probes or include robots that are quite sophisticated.
And that's really the long-term realization of an industrial civilization like our own, that eventually that will be the survival method for our own civilization.
It will not be DNA-related biology.
It will be more in the form of electronics.
So perhaps harmonizing with technology, which a lot of people are afraid of at the moment, I am, I have to say, is part of our natural evolution.
And we cannot make the discoveries that we need to make until we have cast off the shackles of flesh and blood.
Right.
Another way to think of it is that this future technology of robots and electronics is sort of like a monument that we are building that would last far longer than our personal lives.
And it may be the ultimate monument that would indicate that we existed at some point in the history of the universe.
And that would be the thing that will be left of us eventually, because biology is very sensitive to conditions such as having liquid water and having the right temperature and so forth.
We are too sensitive to conditions.
And why should we limit our future, the longevity of our species, in the hands of biological creatures like our own?
And we might put everything we have, all the knowledge that we have, on things that would last far longer.
And we are in the process of starting to do that, but I agree with you.
I mean, it's quite likely that the future is with that.
But to crack this greatest enigma of all, it seems to me, we have to crack the issue of consciousness.
And we don't still fully understand consciousness, and we're a long way off it.
If we crack what is consciousness, then we can create explorers for the future that are conscious.
And then we become them, they become us, and we're into a whole new cosmic ballgame, it seems to me.
Yes, that's definitely true.
I mean, what we know, you can think about knowledge as an island in a sea of ignorance.
And, you know, we are making progress.
We are increasing the land on this island as we make progress in science.
But there are lots of things we don't know.
And so, you know, that makes it still exciting for younger people to participate in this endeavor of science and technology.
Talk to me about the moon, Arvi.
There was a story around this week that was making great play of the fact that tunnels had been discovered, or certainly what appear to be the openings of tunnels on the moon had been discovered, and possibly these might be usable for us to inhabit at some point.
What was all that excitement about?
Well, the main issue on the moon is whether there is water that would help us possibly inhabit it.
There are newly discovered tunnels that could be a place for us to inhabit that lie under the lunar surface.
And that's related to lava from ancient volcanoes that might have bored miles-long voids beneath the moon's surface.
So the idea being that a volcano below the surface, just like if you go to Hawaii now, which is still active, you can see the magma bubbling up and spitting itself out.
So if there was something like that on the moon, then it would have spat out perhaps some lava and would have left the vent through which that occurred.
Right.
So these are sort of like tubes that maybe, you know, hundreds of meters and they eventually collapsed.
And so...
And the existence of these tubes is sometimes revealed by the presence of what is called a skylight, a place where the root of the tube collapsed and leaving a circular hole.
And we can see sort of a hole that are images of the moon that show like a hundred meter deep pit crater that we see.
You see, we tend to think of the moon as being something that is dead, that is inactive.
And are you saying that may be wrong?
Well, it's not active in the sense of having life on it, but it is active in terms of its surface.
Definitely there are things hitting it all the time, and there used to be lava flowing there.
So, yeah, I mean, the moon itself came from a collision of a large object with the Earth that tore a bit of the Earth out of the surface of the Earth, and that eventually condensed to make the Moon.
And back then, the Moon was very hot, and it was closer to the Earth, and then it slowly spiraled away from the Earth and slowed down, actually, the spin of the Earth.
So the Earth spin was different.
I mean, the duration of a day was different early on.
And just finally, Avi, and look, I've loved this conversation, and so has Cass, my producer.
We are both enthralled by what you said.
And I love the way you pronounce Uma Uma or whatever it is.
You know, is it worth our while, our investment in time and resources going back to the moon?
Because in the last year, there's a very real prospect that we are very definitely going back to the moon in a real and serious fashion.
Is it worth it?
Definitely as a first step towards going to space.
So the moon is the first station that is easiest for us to get to.
And then, of course, Mars would be an interesting target.
And then eventually leaving the solar system and going to a habitable planet around another star.
You know, I've been trying to convince my wealthy friends to buy real estate on Proxima B, the habitable planet next to Proxima Centauri, especially on the sunset strip, where the view must be quite similar to what you see from Hawaii, from Maui.
When I was standing there on the beach this summer, when we went there with my family, I was thinking, what would it be like to see this sunset forever?
If you are on the sunstrip strip of a tidally locked planet around the star-like Proxima Centauri.
So, you know, I think the ultimate future is in space because we will eventually ruin our planet.
I mean, either artificially by producing, changing the climate, or even if we treat it very well, eventually conditions will not be habitable.
Ultimately, you know, within a billion years, the sun will get too hot and it will evaporate all the oceans.
So in other words, Avi, we have to do this.
You know, there is inevitability here.
And you, you know, they say you can't fight City Hall.
This is something that you can't fight.
Avi, thank you so much for talking with me.
I've asked you before and I've forgotten.
Have you got your own website?
Of course.
If you Google my name, Avi Loeb, you'll find it.
Avi, thank you so much.
I'm sure we will talk again and have a marvelous day.
You're most welcome.
Professor Arvi Loeb from Harvard University, a man who explains space matters pretty much better than anybody else I know.
And I love having him on this show.
And I love the fact that he's willing to be part of it because I think what he's doing is absolutely vital in what is pretty much the space age, just like they told us when we were kids.
And thank you very much to Anthony Turton.
We'll watch the Cape Town water crisis.
I think it's something that deserves more reporting up here.
And maybe it'll get some.
Who knows?
We'll keep watching.
Thank you very much for your participation in this show.
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More great guests coming soon.
Possibility of something on Rendlesham Forest next.
We'll see if that happens.
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My name is Howard Hughes.
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