Aliens Are Real, Says Harvard Astronomer

in october of 2017 a strange visitor was spotted in our solar system it was unlike anything ever observed from earth called by the hawaiian name umuamua this object continues to baffle scientists for one its brightness varied greatly every eight hours suggesting that it was shaped either like a very long cigar or else a massive pancake space telescopes did not detect any heat or gases coming off the object so to this day no one can say for sure why it deviated from its expected trajectory and actually sped up as it was moving away from the sun for harvard professor avi loeb the most logical explanation is also the most controversial he believes umuamua was made by aliens [Music] i am very thrilled to be speaking with avi love he is the frank b bard jr professor of science at harvard university and also the author of a new book extraterrestrial um thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me so i you know extraterrestrial focuses on the first interstellar object that we've ever detected in our solar system called umuamua i remember when this was discovered it was so exciting uh back in october 2017 it was you know short-lived it kind of went out of the solar system fairly quickly but it was just you know totally unprecedented and the more we learned about it the more weird this object seemed to be so if it has an alien origin if it is an artificial piece of technology what type of technology do you think it most likely is well we we don't really know because we we don't have enough evidence perhaps it's a one point in a grid of objects that are similar to it that are placed in interstellar space for navigation purposes to your coordinates when you're moving through interstellar space that's one possibility another one is that it's a relay station for communication instead of sending a very powerful signal just like we do on earth you can transmit the signal from one station to another and this is one of the stations along the way another possibility is that it's a pro i find it hard to believe that anyone is spying on us because it took this object then more than 10 000 years to cross the solar system and 10 000 years ago we weren't that interesting i would argue that even now we're not that interesting perhaps in the future will be more interesting the other most likely option is that it's just space trash you know we sent out voyager 1 voyager 2 new horizons in a billion years they will become trash they will not function anymore and most objects in space are probably billions of years old i wonder if you could talk a little bit about why we weren't able to get a little bit more high resolution imagery you mentioned it would be ideal of course to be able to launch a camera or i mean if next time this happens maybe launch a probe of some kind that could interact with such a object but what were we studying umu with and why did it give us kind of just a very brief sketch of these properties the key in doing science is to get as much evidence as possible because it can guide you and sometimes nature's imagination is greater than ours so as scientists we really want the most data possible and the worst one can do as a scientist is to say i know the answer in advance i don't need any evidence that was true of the day in the days of galileo when the philosophers knew that the the sun moves around the earth and they didn't want to look through galileo's telescope and by that they maintained their ignorance and and they put galileo in house arrest the earth continued to move around the sun as galileo was arguing reality doesn't care whether we ignore it or not and so we really want as much evidence as possible and not to rely on prejudice not to say it's never aliens it's always rocks because that would resemble a caveman that is used to playing rock with rocks and when presented with a cell phone would argue that the cell phone is just a shiny rock we don't want to be that caveman in his new book extraterrestrial professor loeb takes a confrontational stance with his fellow astrophysicists he accuses them of being too narrow-minded to consider the theory that umuamua is an object designed and built by another intelligent form of life in the cosmos i should mention an anecdote that there was a seminar at harvard about and when i left the room with a colleague of mine that worked on solar system rocks for decades that colleague said umuah is so weird i wish it never existed [Music] which to me was appalling because actually the fun in doing science you know just as i still want to maintain my childhood curiosity in doing science so the biggest fun is actually in finding something new in getting something that doesn't quite line up with what you expected that that's the experience that makes science worth doing uh it's you know it's not to glorify ourself to show is science is not a sandbox in which we demonstrate that we are smart which is pretty much what most of my colleagues are using science for uh in order to get honors and awards and they line up with whatever other people say so that people on selection committees will choose them give them support and so forth that's not what science is about it's not about the number of likes on twitter about you know getting support from from our colleagues it's about uh understanding nature coming back to your question about the muammar itself it was just a few hundred feet or 100 200 meters in size and at the distance that it was at a fraction of the earth sun separation uh even our best telescopes cannot resolve it so we couldn't really say what it looks like other than it's a dot of light with a variable brightness because the object is tumbling and reflecting sunlight with a varying area projected on the sky and we could model that and infer that it's most likely flat but beyond that we don't know anything what has been the counter argument from your colleagues who believe it has a natural origin how do what do they think that it is that would uh satisfy all of the kind of odd characteristics you've described here one suggestion was it's a hydrogen iceberg frozen hydrogen so that when it evaporates you don't see the hydrogen it's transparent you still get cometary activity the only problem is well first we haven't seen hydrogen icebergs before we don't know if it's possible to produce them in molecular clouds but the biggest problem is they would evaporate very quickly along their journey by absorbing starlight this is not a viable proposal because such enough such objects would evaporate the the size scale of another proposal was a dust bunny no the kind of thing you find in the household except the size of a football field [Music] a collection of dust particles a hundred times less dense than air so it's porous enough that the reflection of sunlight will push it because it has a large area for its weight [Music] the problem with that is imagine a cloud that is a hundred times less dense than air so less dense than the steam coming off a boiling pot by a factor of a hundred and then imagine that the the size of a football field and tumbling over eight hours and going through interstellar space for millions of years i have a hard time believing that such a thing would survive the journey that it would be a stable enough structure to hold on to itself so when people say in the mainstream they say i don't care about the details it's probably natural and just ask the experts well we ask the experts that's the idea these are the ideas they came up with it's always associated with someone something that we have never seen before and i say if it's nothing that we have seen before why not contemplate an artificial origin at least it should be put on the table however the mainstream community says no it should not be discussed this is ridiculous we should not even consider that possibility and when you don't consider possibilities you will never discover them it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and given the significance of discovering relics of another civilization that would indicate that we are not the smartest kid on the block you know i think it's it's our obligation to entertain these possibilities in his book professor loeb challenges us to accept what he calls umuemua's wager the idea of this wager is that instead of just dismissing it as a weird space rock science is better served by accepting his theory that umuamua is a piece of alien technology that visited our solar system even if we can't prove it right now by acting like it's true we will be better prepared to study other interstellar objects that enter the solar system what are some of the broader implications of taking umu as wager because i did think that was a very interesting part of the book and um you know beyond just the fact that it has relevance to this object how do you think taking that wager affects the entire search for an extraterrestrial intelligence after decades of studying astronomy the one message i very frequently get from the sky is stay modest because you know we sit on a planet that is one of 10 to the power 20 habitable planets within the observable volume of the universe it's more than number of grains of sand on all beaches on earth we live only for 100 years which is one part in 100 million of the age of the universe you know how can we be arrogant that's really ridiculous and why should we have the ambition to feel superior relative to other people you know the faults of human history racism i mean it's completely ridiculous in the big scheme of things you know judging a person by the color of their skin i mean humans are clearly not showing intelligence you know that's one reason i i look for intelligence in the sky because i don't find it here on earth that's also another reason to search for alien civilizations because we can first we can learn from them if they are more advanced than we are we can get answers to questions for which we we don't have an answer right now and that would save us time we can also learn about technologies that would take us a million years to develop they already developed them so it might feel like cheating in in an exam looking over the shoulder of this next to you but if you save a million years in doing so it's worth it and the other thing is that we might find the civilizations that are dead and we can figure out why and get our act together so that we don't share the same fate so it's sort of a history lesson as well almost like a uh alien archaeology kind of thing that's what i first thought of with umuemua and your your hypothesis on it is that if this is a relic of a long dead civilization that's um very sad but also has its own instruction as well exactly and then you know we looked for radio signals from space for many decades and that is equivalent to speaking on the phone you need the counterpart to be alive to have a conversation but if you find them a letter in the mail if usps is very slow the person who sent the letter might not be alive anymore and that offers a great advantage in the sense that you can go back in time so when we get the trash in space from a civilization that existed billions of years ago they don't need to be alive at the time we find it and we basically sum up over the entire history of the milky way galaxy in terms of realizations most stars form before the sun the sun is a relatively late hammer so we might find evidence for those old civilizations that exist that are not around anymore by simply checking every object that enters into our backyard from outside the solar system you know we don't need to make the journey the object made that journey for us over a long period of time and we just need to search our backyard for all these relics for all these things that do not quite look like a comet or an asteroid for all those things that make my colleagues say i wish they never existed you

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Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020, the space show, extraterrestrial, MOTHERBOARD, aliens, alien technology, UFOs, extraterrestrial technology, interstellar, interstellar space, alien, avi loeb, astronomy, harvard, harvard astronomer, Oumuamua, science, alien life, space, outer space, space travel, professor avi loeb, hydrogen iceberg, frozen hydrogen, alien history

Id: wScC8Hqtmcg

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/scottastic]

While I believe it was just an asteroid, I would absolutely not be surprised at all if it ends of being some sort of recon mission or observation craft.

[u/Incredulouslaughter]

100% is a rou or gsv.

Please don't be a badly cloaked Affront Ship....

[u/ddollarsign]

I wish they'd hurry up and find more of whatever 'Oumuamua was, so we can learn more about it.