Identifying the Unidentified, UFOs with Avi Loeb

when dealing with a highly advanced alien civilization far ahead of you in technology you are at an automatic disadvantage you are not only inferior in technology but also biology and very likely intelligence you are an aunt to it living in an anthill something to be studied at best but little else when that civilization enters your star system you lose your ant hill and become an aunt living in an ant farm the alien presence may not exterminate you as we sometimes do with ants that end up in the wrong places but it still holds all of the cards whether its intentions are good or bad you then live in one of the scariest solutions to the fermi paradox the zoo hypothesis recent years have shown an uptick in uap activity at least an apparent one regardless of your conclusions on what these unidentified flying objects might be one thing is clear we need to identify them both on the basis of national security and what earthly adversaries could be doing but also to determine if we do or do not live in the zoo hypothesis my guest today is determined to do just that he proposes that we conduct a legitimate scientific inquiry into the uap phenomena and start identifying the unidentified you have fallen into event horizon with john michael gautier [Music] in today's episode john is joined by avery loeb avery loeb is the former chair of the astronomy department at harvard university founding director of harvard's black hole initiative and director of the institute for theory and computation at the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics he also chairs the board on physics and astronomy at the national academies and the advisory board for the breakthrough starshot project he is a member of the president's council of advisors on science and technology loeb is the best-selling author of extraterrestrial the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth dr ivy loeb welcome back to the program thanks for having me now doctor we have had space in the news in the pop culture in a rather odd way as of late the uap ufo phenomenon where purportedly the us government and navy ships and are seeing something you know pilots seeing something and a government report is due out later this month that indications say they they're going to say that they don't know what they are they are unidentified which these objects have been reported for many decades and we still don't know what they are after 70 or more years in fact i think as i recall you were a successor of an early scientific researcher in the field donald menzel at harvard but we still don't know anything more than we did during his day how are we going to identify the unidentified yes so the big news of this report would be the statement that these real objects because the first thing you would worry about that there may be smudges on the cameras or illusions of the pilots or some malfunction of the instruments being used and if the report states that these are real objects that's a very important statement because then it means that there could be several interpretations only several only three one is that these objects belong to another nation that are human made and of course that's a serious national security concern so the fact that the report is being released implies to me that they are not made by other nations because otherwise the government would keep the information classified and act accordingly national security interests would forbid releasing the information because you want to know how to protect the country and you don't want to know your adversaries what you know so the fact that the government releases information and says these are real objects means to me that they are not likely to belong to other nations okay so that that possibility can be crossed off for the kind of objects that will be discussed in the report okay of course it's it could be a mixed bag there could be many more unidentified objects some with mundane explanations but it's enough i should say that one of them comes from an extraterrestrial origin to trigger huge interest about the implications so we don't need more than one that is extraterrestrial to start discussing it extensively so there are a few some that are real and they probably do not belong to other nations and the reason for that may be that they behave in a way that does not match the limits of our technology so we pretty much know what the limits of our technology because in the us we know what these limits are and then if there were technologies far more advanced in other countries we would see signatures of them either in the consumer market or in the battlefield those countries would use the technologies they developed to gain advantage relative to other nations and so we we have a good sense of roughly speaking what the limits are of our technologies everywhere on the globe and if these objects behave differently there are two possibilities that remain on the table one is that there are natural objects that somehow nature makes objects that behave this way and we have to figure it out the second is that they are extraterrestrial they originated from another civilization that is capable of manufacturing technologies far far more advanced than we can fully understand right now sort of like the impression that the caveman would get when faced with a cell phone you know the caveman would initially say oh maybe it's a natural rock but then and just shiny but then the caveman would start pressing the buttons and realize that no it's something else so we might be facing something like that or these objects are natural and of course the way to figure it out is straightforward once you get to that point the objects move from the realm of government because they are not a national security risk to the realm of science where you can use open data so instead of relying on classified information from the past that obviously the government doesn't want us to see in full because it was derived from sensors that are classified the government doesn't want the adversaries to know about all the sensors that we have so forget about it let's just collect new data from the same geographical locations by placing deploying the best cameras we have access to right now which are far better than used in the past and the audio sensors and just deploy them in the same locations and collect data just like in a scientific experiment and this data will be open because the sky is not classified you can look at the sky where you know as much as you want and we will analyze the data scientifically and i'm very much willing to lead such an experiment that will clear up the fog you know it's very unhealthy the situation where the government makes some statements that are inconclusive and then the scientific community dismisses the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin and then the public is left to speculate that's not a healthy situation let's collect more data scientifically and clear up the fog you have written extensively along with others about techno signatures and one techno signature is some kind of a physical artifact in the solar system and indeed um this would introduce something interesting into this mix because if you have such artifacts in the solar system and you have an active one it could print out probes and they could probe the atmosphere of earth and people might see them and voila you have ufos therefore we do actually have a plausible way within science for these things to actually be alien craft do you agree with that yeah there is definitely a possibility we just have to keep in mind that we have been broadcasting radio waves for more than a century so these signals that we sent out into space reached more than 100 light years by now and if there is any civilization with the radio telescopes of the type that we have they may know about us already and then the question is how quickly will they respond and you know it will take them a million years to reach us if they use chemical rockets of the type that we used like voyager or new horizons but they might use faster propulsion methods or they may have decided a long time ago you know a billion years ago that they want to examine the habitable zones around sun like stars and they send probes to each and every interesting target including the sun which has the earth near it and and these probes are routinely monitoring what's going on here and tran you know relaying the information back so that is a possibility and if they thought about it a long time ago they definitely had the opportunity to send those probes even at low speeds even at the characteristic speeds of of stars and chemical rockets they would make it across the galaxy in relatively short time and compared to the age of the of the sun for example so um it's quite possible that we are being visited or where visited i mean it's not excluded by any physical principle and the best way to figure it out is by not having a prejudice you know if we say we know the answer in advance without collecting data then we are fooling ourselves we are just like the philosophers that refuse to look through galileo's telescope because they knew that the sun moves around the earth and galileo who looked through his telescope realized that's probably not the case and of course what they are accomplished these these philosophers is maintaining their ignorance you know we can close down the curtains on our windows and say we don't have neighbors but the existence of neighbors does not depend on whether we look through the windows or not and therefore it's the obligation of scientists to be open-minded to look through the windows to check if we have neighbors without a prejudice one thing piqued my interest particularly about what you said is a threat to national security so could an alien civilization being present in our own star system wouldn't that automatically be a question of national security or are you just looking at something so powerful that you couldn't respond with any means well it's not a matter of national security it may be a matter of international security because it's not one particular nation that is at risk here it's the entire human species potentially and whether it's at risk or not depends on the intent of the senders of of those objects and we don't know what the intent was and and by the way even if it looks peaceful and quite innocent just keep in mind the story about the trojan horse that looked innocent and led to quite severe consequences so what appears innocent and not so harmful might end up being quite a significant risk so we should keep that always in mind and we have no evidence or no way of figuring out the intent without getting more data and i think the key is not to have a prejudice to collect as much evidence as possible and move this subject from the government to the scientific sector and it's not a trivial matter i should say because well first of all the data was classified for national security reasons and that's why the process was delayed but moreover there is a huge resistance within the scientific community of discussing it there is a taboo on discussing it and you know i wrote the the recent book extraterrestrial it received the huge reception from the general public became a bestseller instantly but the scientific community still has a hard time discussing it openly the possibility that perhaps the first interstellar object we have seen on muammua was a technological relic and i just say let's put it on the table because it looked so weird didn't look like a comet or an asteroid that we have seen before nevertheless there is a huge resistance and very strong emotional response of scientists to this possibility whereas people are willing to discuss options for the nature of dark matter that are highly speculative we have no evidence for them nevertheless they don't feel threatened by the dark matter being something highly speculative but they are feeling a strong emotional connection to the possibility that we might not be the smartest kid on the block that threatens the ego of every human it's just like you know my daughters when they were young and we brought them to the kindergarten they had a psychological shock on the first day in kindergarten because they finally for the first time realize that there are kids that might be smarter than they are and they would have preferred to stay at home and maintain the illusion that they are the smartest in in the whole world but the reality is different than whether you ignore it or not doesn't really matter john you've been inside for 154 days and haven't seen another human in 200 days have you forgotten how to socialize what that can't be right bring up a recording of the last time i saw another person playback starting hey you turkey your possum owes me for all these parts okay you can stop that yep it's been a while i know the solution today sponsor hunt a killer a 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use code jmg for 20 of your first box again make sure to use code jmg for a 20 discount do you have what it takes to hunt a killer oh i do indeed i absolutely do hey you turkey i'm here for the game turkey what go to hunterkiller.com forward slash event horizon and use code jmg for 20 of your first box now on on a related subject because this this would eventually become relevant if one of these things were of alien origin that is communications with it medi messaging extraterrestrial intelligence what are your views on that should we do it or should we really try to play it safe especially if the aliens are close well when you walk in the wilderness you better be quiet because you never know whether there are predators out there and so i would adapt the same strategy here and first of all try to figure out the most i can about anyone else in space and as a the best approach would be for us to learn as much as possible about these objects or other objects or signals that we get and try to interpret them and as you say it's a challenge to figure out what the meaning behind them is it's it was a challenge with the trojan horse and it's even more of a challenge when you have a conversation if you get a signal because then it's similar to alan turing's challenge of decoding the enigma called during the second world war that was a major challenge and then he eventually figured it out and the same applies to any language that you don't fully understand and moreover we are used to communicating using for example sound waves as we speak to each other it's possible that the means of communication are quite different for creatures that were born on a planet that had no connection to earth that developed technologies that are far removed from what we develop and that's why it's a fishing expedition you know we can't forecast what kind of a fish we will get it could be a fish that we've never seen before which brings up earth because of the just enormous diversity in in bioforms on this planet from fish all the way to birds to humans all communicating differently so just earth alone creates an issue there as far as communications gets much worse with an alien that has no connection to you at all yeah just to give you an example you know most stars are smaller than the sun the sun is not a typical star so most of them are dwarf stars and for example the nearest star to us is proxima centauri it's 12 percent of the mass of the sun has roughly half the surface temperature of the sun so it emits mostly infrared light and if there are any creatures on the habitable planet near it the proxima b they must have infrared eyes very different from the eyes that we have so i asked students in my class the freshman seminar if they know of any creatures on earth that have infrared eyes and one of them found they googled it and found a shrimp that has infrared eyes and they look like ping-pong balls connected with chords to the head of the shrimp it did look like an alien to me but it's still you know a creature we find here on earth and who knows how these things look like elsewhere and this is just a matter of vision that we are talking about but think about intelligent creatures that develop a language of their own how different they could be from us or i mean even even in science i mean there's no guarantee that they would choose base 10 mathematics or something like that so they may have a different interpretation right definitely and you know we are born into this world like actors put on a stage and the one thing we notice after studying the universe is the stage is huge we are not at the center of it like the ancient greek philosopher aristotle argued and people believed him for a thousand years because it flattered their ego to believe that we are the center of the world so we know that the stage is like 10 to the power 26 times bigger than the size of our body it's huge and the other thing we know is that the play was going on for 13.8 billion years much well much before we came to exist and clearly the play is not about us but what we can do is find other actors and ask them whether they have a better sense of what the play is about perhaps they will have insights that we currently don't have now motivations of an alien civilization to actually come here the bottom line really is that our solar system has is made of the same stuff that the entire galaxy's made out of so there's they don't need gold they they're going to have that closer they don't need water water is just ridiculously common so there seems to me to only be one reason to come here and that would be life on earth this interesting exoplanet if we found something that looked like earth we would do everything we could to study it so might that be the basic motivation for an alien civilization to come here and it's worth noting too that this planet has shown a bio signature essentially for a very very long time far longer than a techno signature right so do you think that would be the reason that they would come here well that's one possibility but also you know if it's possible they planted them some forms of life here on earth and they want to see what comes out of those seeds we don't know what their intent or motivation is but my guess is we are not dealing with living creatures that come and visit us or or collecting necessarily the data it could be you know we are developing now artificial intelligence and within a century it may overtake our ability as you know biological creatures and and just think about robots tiny robots that can self-replicate and produce other robots of the same type and they can survive for billions of years unlike biological creatures and you know i'm not it's hard to tell what the the agenda what what the long-term goal of these robots is but you can we can i can imagine equipment that has its own life that is very long and has its own agenda of visiting stars and figuring out things about stars and manipulating what happens on habitable planets in ways that we cannot now comprehend but i think instead of speculating let's just be spectators let's observe and try to see what what these things are and if they exist and rather than guessing ahead of time because maybe as we collect more data more evidence it will become clear actually looking for them now you've mentioned cameras and and looking at them looking from that way but people are going to say in the comments what about radar because sometimes these things are reported to appear you know on radar so it would seem to me that would be a really straightforward way to try to determine if this phenomenon is atmospheric or if it was actually a solid object yeah definitely and i think the government does have radar data on some of the objects and that's what makes them appear real because they were detected in multiple instruments radars infrared cameras and visible light cameras and and then pilots that saw them many different pilots at the same time so that gives confidence they are real objects and presumably there there might be some satellite data on the bigger objects but my point is that a physicist looking at these objects would approach them differently than military personnel because if if i were to examine these objects and try to collect more data on them or evidence what i would look for for example is if an object moves faster than the speed of sound in air there should be a sonic boom a shockwave generated just the same way that the supersonic plane produces a sonic boom and there might be signatures of that either in the images or the infrared the signature of the object because it will heat up i would like to see the byproducts of the motion not just to see the motion being supersonic but to see the evidence that indeed this supersonic motion results in the standard phenomena that we are familiar with because any physical object of some cross section moving faster than sound in air will produce a shock wave we want to see that and then when it goes through water there should be a splash that will tell us something about the size of the object that the properties of the so in principle with scientific data that is sufficiently rich you can learn much more than just saying oh there is something that looks like a tick tock or something that looks like this and that which is pretty much what the pilots were talking about so instead of qualitative discussions i would like to have quantitative discussions that from the point of view of scientists and for that you need first scientists to be engaged involved in the process so i'm volunteering to be part of the discussion and as long as the people that have the data would appoint an appropriate committee or or forum that that can analyze existing data or to collect new data that they will be open to the public one thing that seems to have changed with this whole thing is that it used to be you never knew where the ufo was going to show up it was just spotted by by people and then we would hear anecdotes about it now they seem to cluster around navy ships and they seem to do it a lot that would seem to me to provide a natural point to start of knowing where to look right well so there could be two possible natural reasons for this clustering that you point out one is if it were another nation trying to spy on military facilities you would naturally find those objects near the military facilities okay another possible explanation is these are the regions that where the sensors that monitor the sky are concentrated you just don't have such sensors in disneyland right or in new york city and that's why we don't see as many weird objects there i mean people may use their cell phones to take photographs but they do not monitor the sky in the same way that the military sensors do and so you naturally find the evidence around military constellations because that's where the sky is being monitored very frequently and these are the two simple explanations otherwise you might say oh maybe that implies a certain intent if indeed you monitor other regions geographical locations and you don't find such unusual phenomena and you find them only around nuclear reactors around military facilities then it means something about the intent of those objects and that's where it gets scary why would an alien civilization be taking account of our nuclear capabilities not sure i want to think about that one too much now the so in principle the the way to start would just simply pick a suitable area set up sensors and it doesn't have to be anywhere special just wherever convenient and just monitor the skies for x amount of time and gain a sample essentially right and if you don't see that then you need to stick it on a navy ship basically right yeah and and you know someone may ask oh we are monitoring the sky with astronomical facilities we have telescopes looking at the sky but i should clarify that even survey telescopes that are monitoring the sky and looking for transients things that change over time and there are some facilities one of them is pan stars that monitor the sky and discovered the first interstellar object it's located in hawaii this telescope and there will be a successor to it which will be much more sensitive called the vera rubin observatory that will start its operation in a couple of years in chile so one thing to understand is these astronomical facilities these telescopes focusing on very distant sources of light and if there is something moving in our atmosphere very quickly above our head they are not designed uh to look for those i mean these might be interpreted as satellites moving through the image or some some other things or maybe an airplane or i mean so if you see something like that the astronomers would ignore it but if you do a survey which is focused nearby objects as should be in the case of unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial phenomena then you are targeting a completely different data set and that's my proposal and with that we have to take a break i'm joined today by dr avi loeb author of extraterrestrial and many many many recent essays on scientific american we'll be back in a minute to talk more about ufos and we're back with avilobe now doctor the scientist that discovers evidence of an alien civilization which could come from the uap phenomenon we don't know is probably going to win a nobel prize given that why do you think there has been such a taboo against the subject that's been ingrained for many years now in science well it's a high risk high reward proposition but frankly the nobel prize is not worth much in the big scheme of things if you think about it it's awarded by humans to humans for figuring out something that we never realized before and even though for us it would be a big revelation in terms of the ocean of knowledge that there is out there it may be a very trivial fact uh you know that other civilizations know about much more so i mean we have our science developed over the past century and we should realize that it's just an island of knowledge in an ocean of ignorance and there is so much we don't know we don't even know what most of the matter in the universe is we don't know what was there before the big bang we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that works and there are lots of things that we don't even know how to ask and so i would pretty much say that we should be modest and getting the nobel prize is really not very significant in the big scheme of things it's true that such a revelation would be more significant than the discovery that the earth moves around the sun because it has huge implications you know it would change the way we view our place in the universe you know if if we are not the smartest kid on the block there is something we can learn from others and it would change our religious beliefs it would change the way the international relations we have because we are all part of the human species and they are out there and they are different and it would change a lot of things and there is no bigger scientific question now at the same time because it's such a high reward discovery there is a huge amount of skepticism among scientists because some of them are reluctant to move away from their comfort zone from things they already know and anything that they see is interpreted in terms of what we already know so that's conservatism at the same time there is huge interest from the public and you know some of the statements made about ufos are not substantiated by any scientific facts and so the scientists say we don't want any part of it because there is some nonsense being said out there but just think about the human body there were people saying that it has a soul about them a thousand years ago and just imagine if scientists would say we don't want to do any anatomy because the human body may have a soul and it's a controversial subject where would modern medicine be i think scientists have an obligation to address controversial subjects and shed some light on them clear up the fog if there are there is evidence and serious people find or document evidence for unidentified objects and they are not human-made because otherwise they would be national security threat then scientists should get into the picture and clarify their nature and this is as important and much more important than finding out the nature of dark matter and it has to be said here too that an inquiry into this of the type that you're proposing has other benefits what if these are some sort of atmospheric phenomenon a natural phenomenon that we were unaware of until now and such a an effort would collect data on atmospheric phenomena that could be mistaken for ufos so you would see the mirages of venus and all that sort of thing so you could actually start to characterize how common those kinds of phenomena are as well right yeah so we will learn something new no matter what because it's something we didn't expect and so it's a win-win proposition if you see something anomalous something strange actually it's it's a great thing you shouldn't feel that it shakes you out of your comfort zone it's a an opportunity to learn something new which which is all that motivates science to make new discoveries and you know nobody expected quantum mechanics a century ago it was brought upon us by experiments that we did not anticipate and we learn new things science is a learning experience and we should have this childhood curiosity in us as scientists rather than assume that we know already the answers in advance be open-minded you know when a kid looks at an object the kid turns it around and you think that the kid is playing with it but in fact the kid is trying to learn about it an adult looking at the object would look at it from one direction and say oh i pretty much know what's on the other side i don't want to spend the effort and therefore nothing unusual will be found if you are not willing to find wonderful things you will never discover them now in regards to the numbers if they're hypothetically let's say you find something and it is a we're able to determine that it's of alien origin having an alien civilization present in your own atmosphere that close would tend to suggest that alien civilizations are extremely common correct not necessarily because over a billion years you can pretty much fill up the milky way galaxy with probes if they are intentional you don't just send them randomly in different directions you target the habitable zones around stars and then you don't need as many props as if you were to send them randomly if if they hone on on this particular region around stars where life may exist then and they can self-replicate you could pretty much fill up the galaxy around send a probe to almost every star and learn about the whereabouts of of life there and even monitor what is happening in real time and for that you just need one very advanced civilization that was able to spread out just think about the europeans that sent ships initially for commercial reasons to let's say africa to find to get commodities but then ended up finding the new world in the americas and we now have jeff bezos and elon musk for commercial reasons advertising space exploration but but they may send up ships into space and that will eventually end up discovering new worlds and in in much the same way so you start the journey with some motivation but if you get equipment that is self-sufficient and can reproduce itself then you can pretty much fill up the galaxy in a billion years now we'll come back to that but we have something big on the horizon regarding this subject the report that is mandated to come out i believe on june 25th what do you expect from the report and do you expect a lot of it's not going to be very interesting and that most of the good stuff will be classified yeah i think um the data that will be released will be just the tip of the iceberg and the reason is simple the data was collected by sensors that are classified we don't want our adversaries other nations to know the array of sensors we have and the kind of data that we get routinely by monitoring our sky and at the same time some people have access to that data and when i hear high-level officials like former president obama or former cia directors john brennan and john woolsey speaking about these as real objects when they had access to the classified data that lends confidence that we have this iceberg of which we just see the tip that supports the notion that these are real objects because because these politicians or administrators are are serious people you know they would not express themselves in this way so that's what lends credibility to the notion that we we have much more data than is revealed to the public and and the the objects might be real and i think that is the most important statement that these are real objects and at the same time not probably not human made because they maneuver in ways that far supersede our technology now it's possible that another nation developed things that are far ahead of us but that would be a major intelligence problem because we haven't figured out that they are doing it and so i would guess that we pretty much know what other nations are doing and therefore these cannot be human made and if that's the case uh as we discussed before we will learn something new whether they are made by nature or whether they are extraterrestrial and to me that's very exciting and i'm very interested in finding out more about these objects well i think i think most of the public would echo that i think there's there's been huge interest in the ufo phenomenon among just the general population even though very little among science but now seems to be the time to sort of merge the two and get to the bottom of it finally you know and be able to say okay we know what the unidentified flying objects are and as you said it very well almost likely that it will be a mixed bag but maybe one of those options is an alien civilization yeah it's enough to have one object we don't need more than one that we identify as extraterrestrial and i discussed one object that is a candidate which is omua mua in my book extraterrestrial but of course among the uap there could be one or more and then they of course are closer to us and we should therefore monitor them more closely and i i think it's about time now that this subject would move out of the classified data set of the government into the open data set of scientists so let's move it from government to science and i think then everything will be transparent the public will be able to know what we know there wouldn't be any issues with sensors that are classified and therefore data are not being available because we will use cameras that you can buy in stores you know and and the scientists will just collect data and release it and analyze it in a transparent way just the way scientific experiments are done i think that's the healthy approach to this subject one also wonders what you could do with satellites i would imagine in that classified dataset there's probably satellite footage of these things so given that could a public satellite be you know just a cubesat or something be put in orbit and put to use trying to spot these things from low earth orbit potentially yes but it needs to be equipped with a big enough lens a big enough telescope so that it can resolve objects that are rather small from a great distance and obviously there are spy satellites of that type that are you know getting footage of buildings and even perhaps humans or vehicles that are the size of these objects that are talked about so that is definitely possible technologically but you need to invest if you want to do it in a non-military context you need the investment of funds in satellites that will monitor the ground usually astronomers are looking up not down and so this would be a scientific experiment that is quite different from what astronomers are used to you will take a telescope and point it down rather than up but you know given what you're looking for you have a you can cover a lot of ground with with a satellite oh definitely yeah yeah now what do you think the likelihood is of this actually having an alien origin that just just one ufo being of alien origin does that seem likely to you that that that you know that it could be or does it do you think it's highly unlikely but we have to check it out anyway well it's definitely possible we know that about half of the sun-like stars have a planet roughly the size of the earth at roughly the same separation we know it from the kepler satellite data and then that means that not only that we we are not at the center of the universe but also what we find in our backyard is very common the earth sun system there are tens of billions like them in the milky way galaxy alone and most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun so if they hosted the technological civilization that predated us by billions of years they these technological civilizations had plenty of time to send probes that will visit a planetary system like the solar system and could replicate themselves and and visit us and you know it's not completely outrageous to think that even the unusual interstellar object that we discovered in 2017 was on a reconnaissance mission that was trying to collect data from probes that already existed in our vicinity and perhaps said there was a predecessor to that object that distributed those probes ahead of time and we just didn't detect it because it visited us before the pan stars survey looked at the sky and you know decades ago and if these probes are around and they collect data and every now and then with there might be a receiver that is passing by and perhaps that's why omoamwa had a very flat shape and thin shape it was a receiver rather than a light sail or something else so you know everything is possible but the way to make progress is to collect more data this brings up another thing you've done work on so say we find the one ufo that's of alien origin then we get to ask ourselves where are they from and one possibility is that they are from a nearby exoplanet such as proxima b which means we should turn our telescopes and look for evidence of technology right well it's quite unlikely that they come from the nearest star because if you just look at earth you know we developed radio technology communication and our technologies over the past century and that's a small fraction of the age of the earth and if you imagine a similar window of opportunity around proxima centauri then that means that it's very unlikely that we are witnessing it right now because it's only one part in a 100 million of the age of the star and so what's the chance that that short window of opportunity is available to us just as this star is passing close to us most likely if we ever catch a star to have technological abilities similar to ours it will be far away and so you need the 100 million stars before you would get one of them to show it if the chance is one in a hundred million so that would argue that that is called the copernican principle basically saying that we don't live at the privileged time copernicus argued that we don't reside or look we are not located at the privileged place and we we're not at the center of the universe and you can generalize it to a privileged time and and that would imply that proxima centauri may not is not likely to have a technological civilization like ours right now but but who knows so the thing about omua moa for example is that it originated in a frame of reference that is called the local standard of rest which is the average of the motions of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun and so none of the nearby stars is at rest in that frame and umuah was at rest only one in 500 stars is so much at rest as sumo was and that means that it didn't originate from any of those stars and um but that's just one object who knows i would very much approach this subject like a fisherman going for a fishing expedition and without any assumptions of what the hook will find the implications of finding a distant alien civilization through seti and finding one in your own star system seems to me to be a little bit different because if you've got distance you also have time say you see some techno signature 1500 light years away it's it's from the past and it's just too far away to reasonably expect this you know communication even but if you got one in your star system you open up direct contact with that alien civilization so if we wanted to establish you know say say it landed and it printed out it 3d printed out an alien that says you know take me to your leader first contact what do you think the prudent way to handle that would be well first to listen rather than speak and see try to interpret the meaning behind the communication signal we get that would be extremely important i should say that the search strategy we had in the past is misguided we looked for radio signals coming from the directions of other stars and this is just like trying to have a phone conversation you need the counterpart to be alive but if you imagine those distant cultures being similar to the cultures we had on earth most of the civilizations or cultures that existed on earth are dead by now but we find evidence for them in archaeological digs through the relics they left behind so much better approach is to do space archaeology search for relics left behind equipment that was sent into space especially self-replicating probes you know that would likely be the dominant kind of objects we will find and and just to remind you you know the electronic equipment is much more durable than biological creatures because it can survive the hazardous environment of space much better and can last for billions of years in principle so my guess is that we will first encounter equipment perhaps it the equipment has artificial intelligence as part of it but it will not be biological so the contact will not be with living creatures uh if i had to guess it would be more with sophisticated very advanced technological equipment which opens up a really sad possibility of having functioning alien equipment collecting data on earth and beaming it back to an extinct alien civilization yeah that is frustrating for us because we want us ourselves to be known famous also on the galactic scale not just in hollywood but on the other hand you know it may be better if those aliens that send the equipment had the negative thoughts about what they want to do with the information it's better that they're not around you know for us so we we first have to figure out the intent of the of the senders before we decide whether it's to our benefit or not to have them in life which could be very beneficial to us there you know i usually and i'll get to this in a bit i usually tend to be a little bit uh negative on first contact scenarios but in this case i mean if you had an alien probe that's been sitting out there collecting data on earth for millions of years it is a gift for you it could come back and say hello first contact here is a record of the entire natural history of your planet it could also tell us what the dark matter is what was there before the big bang how to unify quantum mechanics in gravity for me that would save us a lot of time and you might say each of these bits of information could have won a nobel prize but who cares it might feel like cheating in an exam where you look over the shoulders of a student next to you to figure out the answer but if it saves you a million years you know i'm very much for it and moreover there is no teacher that is grading us right so as students it's beneficial for us to know the answer and save the millionaires in the process that would be absolutely amazing if seti picked up a radio signal and by some miracle was able to able to translate it and it turns out to be a quantum theory of gravity alien civilization telling everybody the answer to the biggest problem in physics yeah but it may not be a radio signal it could be a piece of equipment that we find and just imagine another object like being discovered by pan stars or by the vera rubin observatory in the more distant future and the us being alerted to it a year in advance and as a result we send them a spacecraft equipped with a camera and we take a close-up photograph and and see that it is a technological relic rather than a rock and then we decide to have a mission similar to osiris-rex that landed on the asteroid bennu and collected a sample that will be returned to earth in 2023 so just imagine landing on a piece of equipment and first of all we might read off the label made on planet x and second we might import the technology back to earth that could be worth a lot of money oh yeah if you had a piece of alien technology in your hands then you are automatically ahead of the other nation states right it would feel like holding a cell phone long before it's released to the public and playing with its features now as a scientist say we were able to recover parts of a uap and they were anomalous and there have been reports that this might be the case that lockheed martin according to harry reid or uh bigelow aerospace according to atib i suppose have these materials where do you start in analyzing them and trying to differentiate them from earth materials no i think um a scientist should should look at whatever hardware is being identified and i should say that we have a pretty good sense of which elements are possible within the standard model of physics because elements that are not found in nature are thought to be unstable and it would be a huge revelation if a deviation from the standard model of physics if there were other elements that are stable but we've never encountered and i should say any deviation from the laws of physics even a slight one would be a nobel prize so you know it shouldn't be taken lightly to argue that maybe these deviate from what we know about physics because even a slight deviation and and by the way physicists are searching for slight deviations in accelerators even the muon magnetic moment deviating slightly from what might have been expected and that's still being debated could imply new physics and just to remind you for decades we haven't found new physics in accelerators we pretty much confirmed what we already knew and so uh you know physics is a very mature subject and there is a huge body of data that seems to conform with what we define as the standard model of physics and if we were to find an object behaving differently then it would be big news even as big as finding aliens in the sense that here is something fundamental we missed about nature about the laws of physics and that's more important than aliens because the laws of physics affect the entire universe you know it's not just a local phenomenon it's uh something we missed that is presumably has other implications elsewhere in the universe and and you know that would be dramatic now question regarding that dark matter we still don't know what it is so is it still open that we have found a deviation in gravity oh yeah so there are anomalies there are things that don't match up what we already know but what people say what scientists say again in order to stay in their comfort zone they say okay there is another type of particle we can extend the standard model of physics so that there would be other types of particles and it really depends what are the properties of of that particle but people came up with scenarios where you don't modify the standard model too much you just extend it in a way that would allow other types of particles to exist but they don't have any significant implication for our lives on earth because these particles are very weakly interacting with ordinary matter and they pretty much have only a big influence on on objects like galaxies or clusters of galaxies things that do not really matter in our daily life but of course we have to keep in mind that we wouldn't exist if the dark matter didn't exist because because the the seeds for everything we see around us came from early in the universe and they were carried by the dark matter all the smaller innomoginates in the universe survived in the dark matter sector but did not survive in the ordinary matter sector because it was coupled to the cosmic microwave background and and that smoothed out all the in homogeneity so so in a sense the dark matter is important for our cosmic roots but it's not important for our daily lives today now my last question for you doctor this this time so we seem to have the public interest and the interest of congress and a lot of politicians marco rubio etc to get to the bottom of this what is the first steps that need to be taken to create a proper scientific inquiry into the ufo uap phenomenon i think there should be a scientific forum established that is composed of scientists not the military personnel not politicians not administrators but scientists that approach this subject from a scientific perspective as if they were tasked to design an experiment basically using the instruments that we have at our disposal now to shed more light on this phenomenon and figure it out and of course there would be many scientists that would not participate in this because they think they know the answer but i'm one of those scientists that are very curious and i'll be glad to lead such a forum and collect more evidence and when you collect evidence with instrumentation that is available commercially and just analyze that kind of a data without requesting access to classified data then the process will be completely transparent to the public and i think it's an opportunity to gain the confidence of the public in evidence-based science i mean we saw one incarnation of that through the vaccines that were developed the messenger rna vaccine was a synthetic chemical produced in a laboratory it was not a weakened virus and that shows that understanding the the virus scientific understand understanding of the virus led to a chemical that was produced artificially that basically produced the desired immune response which is a celebration of modern science you know when we understand something we can solve the problem and so right now if when the pentagon report comes out there will be a problem what are these objects and why don't we let science shed more light and answer this question this solve this problem and i think that's the obvious next step and what you need is a relatively modest funding for experiments that will clarify the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena and i'm willing to be engaged in that wholeheartedly all right dr lope thanks again for joining us and everybody should check out dr lope's new book extraterrestrial which goes into the origins of a very very strange object that passes the solar system well that was excellent john [Music] thanks for listening i am futurist and science fiction author wrong channel no it's not thanks for listening i am futurist and science fiction author john michael godier currently hosting event horizon and wondering where anna actually came from one day i had a tablet computer the next i had a boss very disturbing and be sure and that's enough of that youtuber forever like subscribe and hit the bell sell out [Music] you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 223,472

Keywords: UFO, Unidentified Flying Objects, UAP, UFO report, UFO videos, UFO sightings, pentagon report, UFO tic tac, tic tac, Alien, Aliens, alien technology, alien civilizations, ufo sightings, uap navy, David fravor, luis elizondo, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, aatip, bob Lazar, alien interview, ufo interview, ufo documentary, avi Loeb, avi Loeb alien, John Michael godlier, event horizon, podcast, asmr, are aliens here?, are they alien?, galileo project

Id: xU2l7LcdDnU

Length: 64min 53sec (3893 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021