Avi Loeb on UFOs and if they're Alien in Origin

this episode is a follow-up to our main release with avi loeb since our first interview with avi the u.s government has released a new report on ufos otherwise now known as uaps this report is titled preliminary assessment unidentified aerial phenomena and so as with our first episode with avi we explored amoa moa whether or not that might be alien in origin we wanted to get him back on the podcast to explore this report ufos or uaps whether or not they might be alien in origin and what this all has to do with the future of humanity and so with that i'm happy to introduce this bonus content with avi loeb the office of the director of national intelligence has released a preliminary assessment on unidentified aerial phenomena which is a new word that they're using for for ufo so now it's it's uap so can you summarize the the contents of this report and explain why the report is significant the most important statement made in the report is that some of the objects that were detected uh are probably real and that is based on the fact that they were detected in multiple instruments using radar systems or infrared cameras or optical visual cameras or several military personnel seeing the same thing doing the same thing at the same time and so that is a very significant statement because the immediate suspicion is that unusual phenomena occur when you have a smudge on your camera when you're there is malfunction of some instruments and the fact that there is corroborating evidence among different instruments implies that it must be something real happening um so that's the first significant statement and then there were 144 incidents documented but it was also mentioned that there is a stigma on reporting and because there is a taboo on discussing extraterrestrial technologies and as a result only a small minority of all events were reported but nevertheless the navy established in march 2019 a procedure for reporting which was not available prior to that and the air force followed on that in december 2020 so it's all very recent that um there is this procedure or formal a path through which reports can be obtained and of course that helps in the sense that it provides a psychological uh support system for those that want to report about unusual things they have witnessed and prior to that they had to dare to speak uh given the stigma and so um the second issue is of course uh we have objects if some of them are real and and by the way we only saw a small fraction of the evidence uh most of it is classified and the reason is that the government owns sensors that were used to to obtain this evidence and uh these sensors are being used to monitor the sky and therefore our national security importance and we don't want to release information about the quality of the sensors to our adversaries to other nations and so the data itself is being classified because the instruments are classified but nevertheless one can think of several possible interpretations of these real objects uh and i should say that cia directors like brennan and woolsey and former president barack obama spoke about these events as serious matters so that to me it all implies that we need to consider them seriously and so there are several possible interpretations one of course is that they are human-made and some other nation uh produced them but the some of the objects behaved in ways that supersede our technologies the limits of the technologies we have in the us and uh we have some intelligence in what other nations are doing and moreover if there was another nation with far better technologies they would find themselves in the consumer market because there would be a huge financial benefit to using them or we would see some evidence for them in the in the battlefield and at the moment we have a pretty good idea i would argue that as to what other nations are doing technologically speaking so so if there are real objects behaving in ways that exceed the human technologies then the question is what could it be and there are two possibilities uh either it's these are natural phenomena that occur in the atmosphere that we did not expect or they are of extraterrestrial origin some other technological civilization produce these objects and deploy them here and uh of course both of these possibilities are exciting because we learn something new so the message i take from this report is that the evidence is sufficiently intriguing for the subject to move away from the talking points of politicians national security advisers military personnel that were really not trained as scientists it should move into the realm of science where we use state-of-the-art equipment such as cameras installed on wide field telescopes that scan the sky and these are telescopes you can buy off the shelf and you can position them in similar geographical locations and monitor the sky with open data and analyze the data using the best computers we have in a completely transparent way like a scientific experiment and so that's what we should do next and instead what i see is that a lot of scientists just ridicule the significance of of the report or say that business as usual that there is no need to attend to its statements and i think it's an opportunity for science to actually clarify this matter and clear up the fog and this is definitely a question that is of great interest to the public what is the nature of these unidentified objects or phenomena are they natural in origin or maybe extraterrestrial and i'm very much willing to address this with my research group given proper funding for it let's stick here with this with this first point right so um i actually heard neil degrasse tyson on um on msnbc just before we started talking and he was mentioning that he thought that there could have been hardware or software artifacts that could have been generating these um like generating artifacts on these systems and i i think your first point very clearly refutes that because you have multiple different systems plus eyewitness reports all corroborating the same thing exactly so it's confusing to me why he would he why he would say that well because uh he is trying to maximize the number of likes he has on twitter and doubting the reality of these reports appears to be popular among people in academia among scientists among some people in the public and so he's driven by that my point is an intelligent culture is driven or actually is following the the guiding principles of science and those are sharing evidence-based knowledge what neil degrasse tyson is doing is not sharing evidence-based knowledge but rather dismissing evidence and my point is this evidence that is being reported in washington dc uh is intriguing enough yeah to motivate us to collect more evidence rather than ignore it so obviously you know uh if you look at the history of science we often make discoveries when we find anomalies things that do not line up with what we expected and the best example is quantum mechanics that was discovered a century ago nobody expected it it was forced upon us by experiments and actually albert einstein at the time resisted one of its fundamental facets uh entanglement or or what he called spooky action at a distance that a quantum system uh knows about its different parts even if they are separated by a large distance such that light signals cannot propagate over the time of the experiment and he argued that this is cannot be the case and wrote a paper about it it's uh but with his post docs it's called the einstein podolski rosen experiment the experiment was done and demonstrated that he was wrong and even a century later you know we are still debating the meaning of quantum mechanics so it's sort of like a bond stuck in the throat of physicists but nevertheless we we know that quantum mechanics holds and applies to reality uh and in fact the reason the two of us are conversing is because of our understanding of quantum mechanics that the fact that we can use it in in all the instruments that we use for example the speaker that the two of us are using and the internet and the uh computers we are using all of these use principles of quantum mechanics that were discovered over the years over the century and my point is that the very often when you do experiments you know that there is uh there are situations where you don't you get something you don't expect and that's part of the learning experience and we should respect deviations from our expectations because they carve a new path to new understanding new learning about reality and about nature rather than ridiculing it rather than always thinking that what we will find will match what we expected and so if the government among all comes along with reports about unusual phenomena you know the government is very conservative very often you would expect the scientific community to embrace that as an exciting topic to investigate because the government is saying something let's figure out what is it about let's clarify the nature of these phenomena that appear anomalous rather than saying business as usual i don't believe it it could be a malfunction of the instrument so if it is a malfunction of the instrument why did many instruments show the same thing why did many pilots show the same thing and i should clarify that in the courtroom if you have two eyewitness testimonies that corroborate each other you can put people in jail as a result so we believe people in in the legal system and somehow when it comes to pilots you know who are very serious people that serve our country then neil degrasse tyson dismisses their testimony and uh so my point is not that we must believe it but rather that we then it's intriguing enough for us to collect more data and evidence and let's not express any judgment until we collect that evidence and you know if we the only scene we can make is basically ignore uh the reports and and do business as usual which is pretty much what he is preaching for and my point is no instead we should invest funds at a new experiment or experiments that will shed more light on the nature of these objects so the the the second point that you you made earlier was that the government was establishing a a framework and system for receiving reports about ufos so part of this and part of this document is it true to say then that there is also a confirmation that the government does not know what these are and that they are not a secret u.s project yeah they stated it explicitly in the report they said that the the data is not good enough the evidence is not good enough to figure out the nature of these objects so we don't know what they are and by the way you won't expect military personnel or politicians to figure out the nature of anomalous objects because they were not trained as scientists so when you go to a shoemaker you wouldn't expect the shoemaker to make you to bake you a cake uh they are not you know these are not people that were trained to analyze data of this type or to collect new data such that the uh nature of these objects will be figured out that is what scientists are supposed to do and that's why i'm advocating for moving this subject away from washington dc into an open discussion in the scientific community where we'll collect open data analyze it in a transparent way not with government-owned sensors and or computers and and then it will be all clear you know it's it will be a transparent process uh we don't need to rely on washington dc to tell us what appears in our sky the sky is unclassified in most locations you know we can look up anytime we want and so we should do it so so with your third point um there's this consideration that people are more likely to try and give a conventional explanation of uaps as coming from other countries like russia or china and you were explaining that there are heavy commercial incentives for example that if you had this kind of technology it could for example revolutionize your economy and you wouldn't just be using it to [Music] pester u.s navy pilots off the coast right like it could be used for for really significant economical reasons and so it seems like that also counts as evidence against it being conventional in origin or like a secret government project what is your perspective on that yes um and it will not only find its place in the consumer market but also in the battlefield and we have a sense of what other nations are doing because the us has its own intelligence and we pretty much know what the status of their science and technology is so it's not as if we are completely in the dark here and i would argue that if the us government reports about these objects there is good evidence that they are not made by those other nations because if our intelligence would tell us that there were potentially made by other nations then we would try to develop the same technologies ourselves uh and another way to put it is if a scientific inquiry into the nature of these objects allows us to get a high resolution photograph of one of them and then we see the label made in china or made in the ussr on it made in russia then we would realize that there was a major failure of national intelligence and that would be a very important conclusion of course that would have implications for our national security but i doubt that this is the case because we have some knowledge of what other nations are doing and then the data would not have been released this way in this kind of a report if there was suspicion that these objects are human-made so the report makes clear then that it's not u.s technology and there are also reasons that count against it being for example russian or chinese technology because the incentives are aligned for them to just deploy it already and use it in the public sector so before we get into more specifics about about thinking about whether or not these are human or extraterrestrial in origin i'm curious if you could explain a bit more of the flight and capability characteristics of these uaps and ufos and what what you feel are the most significant reports of them in their activity well i didn't have direct access to to the data especially not the the classified one and i would very much want to see the full data set before expressing an opinion but at least some of the videos that were shown indicated motions that cannot be reproduced by the kind of crafts that we own but the the what i would like to know is whether when the object moves faster than the speed of sound for example in air whether it produces a sonic boom a shock wave that we see for example when jets do the same because that would be an indication that indeed there is a physical object that is compressing air as it moves around or if it moves through water i want to see the splash of water and from that i can infer some physical properties and of course i would like to have a very high resolution image of the object so that i can see if it has screws if it if there is something written on it um either made in china or made on planet x either messages would be of great importance so what i'm really after is access to the best data that we have and obviously it will not be released from the government because the best data is probably classified but i would like to collect it uh through using scientific instrumentation which by the way could be far better uh than the instruments that were uh on airplanes that the pilots were using or on navy ships because these were designed to be in combat situations and they were not the optimal for analyzing such objects and we can do much better if we choose our scientific instruments carefully and design the experiment in a way that would reproduce the results with a much higher fidelity of the data there's there's so much about this that is uh similar to omoamoa in terms of their being you know just barely and like the imaging is not quite enough to really know what it is and then there being lots of interesting evidence that counts for for extraterrestrial in in origin is is that a perspective you share well yes i wrote a scientific american article where i said you know one thing we know about omoamo is that it probably had a flat shape pancake-like and also if it's push away from the sun was a result of reflecting sunlight it must have been quite thin and the size of a football field and in that case you know i thought maybe it serves as a light sail but potentially it could also be a receiver uh intended to detect information or signals uh from probes that were sprinkled on planets in the habitable zone around the sun so if for example the uap are probes transmitting signals then the passage of such a receiver near earth was meant to obtain that information and and omua moa for example was tumbling every eight hours was looking in all directions in principle for such signals so that could be one interpretation that it was thin not because it was a light cell but it because it served a different purpose and in september 2020 we saw another object that also exhibited an excess push away from the sun by reflecting sunlight and had no cometary tail it was given the name 2020so and it was a rocket booster from a 1966 mission had thin walls uh for a completely different purpose not not having anything to do with with it being a light sail so i would argue that perhaps a moomoo had these weird properties because it served a different purpose and that's why you know we should both try to get a better image of an object like omomoa and of the unidentified objects we find closer to earth and in both cases a high resolution photograph is better than a thousand words in my case better than 66 000 was the number of words in my book yeah it's the the in both cases a little bit better instrumentation would have seemingly made a huge difference so let's um let's pivot into again this area of conventional explanations and so we talked a little bit earlier about one conventional explanation being that this is some kind of you know advanced secret military technology of china or or russia that's used for probing our aerial defenses and the the argument that counts against that again was that there are you know military and economic incentives to deploy it more fully especially because the flight characteristics that these objects are expressing are so much greater than anything that america has in terms of the speed and the agility so in so so one theory is that instead of the technology being actual like they actually have the technology that goes that fast and is that agile that this is actually some form of spoofing technology so some kind of way of an adversary training electronic counter measures to simulate or emulate or create the illusion of [Music] what we witnessed uh in in in terms of the us instruments so do you think that such an explanation is is viable i mean it's possible and that's why we need more data but um it's not easy to produce an illusion uh in multiple instruments say both radar uh infrared and optical sensors because uh you know you can probably create an illusion for one one of these sensors uh but then for all of them it would require a great deal of uh ingenuity and then you would need a good reason to do that you know why would the other nations engage in deceiving us in this way uh for 20 years i mean that would look a bit and also we would have probably found something some clue about them trying to do that you know because they would have trained such probes or such objects first uh in their own facilities and we would see some evidence for that so i find it hard to believe i would think it's either some natural phenomena that we haven't yet experienced or suspected or it's this unusual possibility of an extraterrestrial origin uh and either way we will learn something new by exploring it more we should not then have any prejudice we should not dismiss it that would be the worst we can do just dismiss it and ridicule it and as usual because actually you know it's exciting to try and figure out a puzzle that's what the detectives often do and uh i just don't understand the spirit of dismissing it and not looking into it at all so you just mentioned um that you thought that it might have some kind of natural explanation like there are very strange things in nature um i'm not sure if this is for example real or not but there's like there's a wikipedia page for example for ball lightning um and there's also like really weird uh phenomena that you can have in the sky if like the lighting in the sky is just right and where the sun is where you get weird halos and things right um and you know throughout history there are reports of like mass reports of like dancing lights in the sky or or things that might have been collective hallucinations are actually real so um in terms of it being something natural that we understand or being something human made that we're not aware of what to you is the most convincing natural or conventional explanation of these objects uh an explanation that is not extraterrestrial in origin well um if if it's dancing lights it wouldn't produce a radar echo so as i said i don't have access to the data in each and every incident but there are some fundamental uh logic that one can use for each of these data sets and figure out if it could be an illusion uh if not if it must be a real object somehow nature has to produce a real object that behaves this way and until i get my own data and reproduce those um i won't make any statement uh but i'm optimistic that uh you know given the appropriate investment of funds which i'm currently discussing with the private sector funders uh that we can do it and just to give you an example if you wanted to get a high resolution image like a megapixel image of a one meter size object at a distance of a kilometer uh you just need a one meter telescope for that and observing it at optical light and you will be able to see millimeter size features on it like the head of a pin so um in prince i mean people ask why didn't we see it already in iphone images of the sky well the iphone camera is a millimeter or a few millimeters in aperture size and it's too small you can you can't get anything better than a fuzzy image of a very distant object so you really need to have a dedicated experiment and i i think one can do it and i'm happy to engage in that you would also wonder that these things are probably so if they if they were extraterrestrial in origin you would expect that they would be pretty intelligent and that they might understand what our sensor capabilities are um so yeah i think perhaps that might count as evidence um you know for why given that there are billions of camera phones around the planet that there aren't any any good pictures yeah what's effective on that so um if i had to guess i would think of these systems as equipped with artificial intelligence uh we already have systems of artificial intelligence that are capable of uh you know that are capable of um superseding human abilities and within a decade uh they will be more intelligent than people who will be able to learn through machine learning and adapt to changing circumstances and behave very intelligently so in fact i can imagine that if another civilization had a technological development of more than a century more than we did they could have produced systems that are autonomous uh there is it doesn't make any sense to communicate with the sender because the nearest star is four light years away takes four years for a signal to reach even the nearest star and it takes tens of thousands of years to reach the end of the galaxy the milky way and so there is no sense of a piece of equipment communicating with its senders in order to get guidelines as to what to do instead it should be autonomous it has its own intelligence and it could outsmart us we already almost have such systems so in fact we may need to use our own artificial intelligence systems in order to interpret the actions of those artificial intelligence systems so it will resemble the experience of asking our children to interpret the content that we find on the internet because they have better computer skills we need our computers to tell us what their computers are doing and that's the way i think about it and these systems could be so intelligent that they do things that are subtle they don't appear and start a conversation with us they are sort of gathering information of interest to them and acting in a way that reflects the blueprint that the guided whoever created them and the question is what is their agenda what is their intent and that will take us a while to figure out we have to see what kind of information they are seeking how do they respond to our actions and eventually we might want to engage with them but the point is many people think of contact as being a very sort of abrupt and the interaction of extraordinary proportion that is impossible to deny but in fact it could be very subtle because they're very intelligent if you look at intelligent humans they're not aggressive they're often thinking about everything they do and and select their actions appropriately they don't get into very violent confrontations often so so let's see what we need to rely on evidence rather than prejudice and the biggest mistake we can make is the mistake made by philosophers during the days of galileo they said we don't want to look through a telescope because we know that the sun moves around the earth we spoke a little bit earlier about uh bayesian reasoning and omoamoa um do you have the same feelings about not having priors about it being at the the uaps being extraterrestrial or human in in origin or is is there a credence that you're you're able to assign to um it being extraterrestrial in origin the situation is even better in the context of uap because they are here not far from us and we can do the experiment uh with a rather modest budget and therefore i think we can resolve this issue with no need to have a prejudice you know often you need the prior if the effort requires extraordinary funds so you have to say okay is it really worth investing those funds but my point is that finding the answer to the nature of uap may cost us much less than we already spent in the search for dark matter we haven't found anything we don't know what the dark matter is we spend hundreds of millions of dollars and at a cost lower than that maybe by an order of magnitude we can try and figure out the nature of uap so given the price tag let's not make any assumptions let's just do it and figure it out if these are extraterrestrial in origin one might expect that they are here for probing or information gathering and so you said there are reports going back 20 years if they are extraterrestrial in origin who knows how long they've been here they could have been you know sent out through nanoscale shots out into the cosmos that land and then grow and replicate on some planet and act as act as scouts so um if this were the case that they were here as as information gathering probes one might wonder why they don't use much more advanced technology so for example why not use nanotechnology that we would have no hope of detecting um they're in one report for example though the pilot explains it like uh following him and they're kind of like uh it comes right in front of him and then it disappears so that disappearing seems a bit more like magic right any sufficiently powerful technology is indistinguishable to magic to a less advanced civilization um but the other characteristics seem maybe like 100 or 200 years away of human technological advancement so what's up with that well yeah so for us to figure out what's going on we need uh date more data and it may well be that there are lots of things happening that we haven't yet realized because they are done in a way that is very subtle that we cannot really detect easily because our technologies are quite limited to the century and a half that we developed them so you're right there may be a hidden reality that we are not aware of but we are seeing traces of things that attract our attention that's why when we see something intriguing we should dig into that you know it could be clues for something that we have never imagined so for example if you were to present a cell phone to a caveman obviously the cell phone would be visible to the caveman and the caveman would think oh it's probably a rock a shiny rock so the the caveman will recognize part of reality that there is an object reflecting light that is a bit more shiny than a typical rock because the caveman is used to playing with rocks but the caveman initially at least will not figure out the features on the cell phone and the fact that he can speak to other people through this rock and that's what will take us a while to be educated about and the question is you know among the things that are happening around us you know which fraction are we aware of as with the correct interpretation and maybe we are not if these uaps or a moammoa itself or some new interstellar object that we were able to find were fairly conclusively shown to be extraterrestrial technology what do you think our response should be it seems like on one hand this would clearly potentially be an existential threat which then makes it relevant to the future of life institute on the other hand it's likely that we could do nothing to counter such a threat like we couldn't even counter humanity probably 50 years from now if we had to defend ourselves against the 50 year old wiser more technologically advanced version of ourself and on cosmological time scales you would expect that you know even a thousand two thousand year lead would be pretty common but also you know indefensible um so there's a sense that also an attack an antagonistic attitude would probably make things worse but also that we couldn't do anything so how would how do you think humanity should react right so um the question of intent is indeed the the next question after you identify an object that appears to be of extraterrestrial technological origin and we should all remember the story about the trojan horse that looked very innocent to the citizens of troy but ended up serving a different purpose and that of course implies that we should collect as much evidence as possible about the objects that we find at first and see how they behave what kind of information they're seeking uh how do they respond to our actions and ultimately we might want to engage with them but um i should mention that if you look at human history nations that they traded with each other benefited much more than nations that went into war with each other uh and so a truly intelligent species might actually prefer to benefit from the interaction with us rather than kill us or destroy us and then perhaps take advantage of the resources use whatever we are able to provide them with so it's possible that there are initially just spectators trying to figure out uh what are what are the things that they can benefit from and but from our perspective we should obviously be suspicious and careful and we should speak in one voice you know humanity as a whole there should be an international organization perhaps related to the united nations or some other entity that makes decisions about how to interact with whatever we find and we don't want the one nation to respond in a way that would not represent all of humanity because that could endanger all of us and in that the forum that makes decisions about how to respond there should be of course physicists that figure out the physical properties of these these objects and there should be policy makers that uh can think about how you know how best to interact with these these objects so you also mentioned earlier that you were talking with private funders about um potentially coming up with an action plan or a project for getting more evidence and data on these these objects so i guess there's a two-part question here i'm curious if you could explain a little bit about what that project is about and more generally what can the scientific uh non-governmental and amateur hobbyist communities do to help investigate these these phenomena so are there productive ways for citizen scientists and interested listeners to contribute to the efforts to better understand uaps well my hope is to get a high resolution photograph it's a very simple thing to desire uh we're not talking about some deep philosophical questions here if we had a megapixel image an image with a million resolution elements of an object if it has a size of emitter that would mean that each pixel is a millimeter in size the size of the head of a pin you can pretty much see all the details on the object and try and figure out reverse engineer what it's meant to do and whether it's human-made or not so you know even a kid can understand my ambition it's not very complicated just get a megapixel image of such an object that's it they seem common enough that it wouldn't be too difficult if the well the issue is not how common they are but what device you are using to image them because if you use an iphone the aperture on the iphone will give you only a fuzzy image what you need is a meter size telescope collecting the information and resolving uh an object of emitter size at a distance of a kilometer down to a millimeter uh resolution right right i mean that the navy pilots for example have reported seeing them every day for years so if oh yeah if we had such a device then you wouldn't have to wait too long exactly exactly get a really good picture so that's my point um if these are real objects we can resolve them and that's what i want to have a high resolution image that's all and it will not be classified because it's being taken by off-the-shelf instruments uh it the data will be open and here comes the role that can be played by amateurs once the data is available to the public anyone can analyze it nothing is classified about the sky uh we can all look up and if i i get that the high resolution image believe me that everyone will be able to look at it so as we start to to wrap up here um do you have a favorite science fiction book and what is some of your favorite science fiction ideas well my favorite film his arrival and in fact i admired this film long ago but a few months ago the producer of that film had a zoom session with me to tell me how much he liked my book extraterrestrial and i told him i admired your film long before you read my book and the reason i like this film is because it deals with a deep philosophical question of how to communicate with an alien culture and in fact even the medium through which the communication takes place in the film is unusual and you know the the challenge is similar to code breaking sort of like uh the project that alan turing led during the second world war of the enigma trying to figure out to break the code of of the nazis so if you have some signal and you want to figure out the meaning of it uh it's actually a very complex challenge depending on how the information is being encoded and and i think you know the film addresses it in a very genuine and original fashion and i liked it a lot so do you have any last minute thoughts or anything you'd just really like to communicate to the uh the audience and the public about uaps these reports and the need to collect more evidence and data for figuring out what they are my hope is that with a high resolution image we will not only learn more about the nature of uap but change the culture of the discourse on this subject and then i think that such an image would uh convince uh even the skeptics even people that are currently ridiculing it to join the discussion the serious discussion about what all of this means and if there are any private funders or philanthropists listening that are interested in contributing to the project to capture this data how is it best that they get in contact with you well they can just send me an email to aloeb cfa.harvard.edu and i will be delighted to add them to the group of funders that are currently showing interest in it all right thank you very much avi thank you for having me [Music] you

Channel: Future of Life Institute

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Length: 45min 53sec (2753 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021