Why Oumuamua May Have Been The First Sign of Intelligent Life with Dr. Avi Loeb

in science fiction there has always been the tendency to envision the first detection of an alien civilization as something very clear and clean cut but in reality that's probably not how it will actually go and will be far more ambiguous than perhaps we would like this has already been the case in some sense every potential detection we've seen has been ambiguous from the wow signal to the new blc1 signal they look technological and may fit the bill for a true alien radio signal but unless they repeat and can be verified they remain ambiguous and unproven forever this is also the case for the first interstellar object umomua which my guest hypothesizes may have been technology of alien origin passing through the solar system but this is not settled with most of the scientific community skeptical and the debate goes on and it could be that we may never know and remains an open mystery forever but the discussion does need to be had and not just for scientific reasons and answering the are we alone question it's also a matter of this planet's security that we even saw uma is because it passed not that distantly from earth and its existence suggests that there is a large population of strangely behaving objects passing through the solar system at any given time literally in our own backyard because of that all potential explanations should be seriously considered you have fallen into event horizon with john michael gaudier [Music] in today's episode john is joined by professor avi loeb avery loeb is the frank b byrd junior professor of science at harvard university chair of harvard's department of astronomy founding director of harvard's black hole initiative and director of the institute for theory and computation within the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics he also chairs the advisory committee for the breakthrough starshot initiative serves as the science theory director for all initiatives of the breakthrough prize foundation as well as chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the national academies he is the author of four books and over 700 scientific papers he is an elected fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences the american physical society and the international academy of astronautics in 2012 time selected loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space ivy loeb welcome back to the program thanks for having me uh av you have written a book that is sure to make waves um that covers not only the topic of a mumma and the very real possibility that it may have been a piece of artificial technology alien technology but also indictments of of why we can't openly talk about things like alien trash in the solar system and then the biases that are present in that now where does this start this this bias within academia that it's never aliens and it's never going to be aliens yeah i find it rather unfortunate for a variety of reasons first of all i don't think it's more speculative than many of the things that are being done right now in in theoretical physics in particular take for example the study of dark matter we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is and there are several suggestions and hundreds of millions of dollars were invested already in trying to build experiments that will search for those particles we haven't found it yet and nobody complains it's part of the mainstream in the case of dark matter we don't know what we are looking for it could be very different types of entities it could be black holes that we can't see from the early universe it could be elementary particles or it could be that gravity is modified in a way that we haven't yet imagined and all of these are viable now in the case of the search for intelligent life elsewhere because we apparently cannot find it here if you open the morning newspaper you're probably disappointed in terms of that you know we know that about half of all the sun-like stars have an earth earth-sized planet in the habitable zone where it can sustain liquid water on its surface and have the chemistry of life as we know it and so and that we know from the kepler satellite data it's just a paper that appeared a month ago and if the earth the earth sun system is so common and you roll the dice billions of times within the milky way galaxy alone yeah what's the chance that we are special and unique i mean it's quite likely that if you have the same conditions you get similar outcomes and we should search for it that's all now this is not speculative imagining that under similar circumstances you get the same outcome should be mainstream that makes no sense whatsoever for us to be skeptical about it to put it outside the mainstream to just search for microbial life primitive life let me give you another context for this there was an announcement of potentially a signature of life phosphine in the cloud deck of venus that was announced in september uh 2020 and uh shortly afterwards the mainstream of the astronomy community suggested that you know this may not be a signature of life even if it's there and actually maybe it's not there and i asked myself the same mainstream community is trying to advocate for big missions to search for microbial life the signatures of oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of exoplanets and at the same time is shying away from any techno signatures now if we find oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet would that be really evidence for light if you doubt that phosphine is then oxygen can be produced by many natural processes and the only way for us to actually be sure that we found evidence for life is if we find for example cfcs these are the molecules produced by coolants and refrigeration systems and industries on earth that cannot be produced naturally the cfcs the the deplete the ozone layer and if we find evidence for cfcs these molecules that would clearly indicate an industrial civilization and therefore life and so to me for the same cost of these missions why not talk about cfcs rather than oxygen i mean it's not as if we have to invest more money it's just being more open-minded and searching at the same time that we search for oxygen in the atmospheres of planets search for industrial pollution so the way i see it is that there is this narrow-mindedness and conservatism in the astronomy community that prevents the search for intelligent life from entering the mainstream and you may ask yourself how dare the astronomy community how dare the scientists shy away from this question when the public is extremely excited about it and science is funded by the public so if astronomers have the tools to answer this question they have telescopes they have funding for future experiments and telescopes how dare they say let's not do it or let's look the other way when there is some evidence now it's interesting that you mentioned the the venus detection of phosphine gas in regards to cfcs and looking for cfcs is a techno signature now not only could it be industrial pollution but it's also a very very very good greenhouse gas those gases that group and you could terraform a planet with them so if you saw a very very clear obvious marker of cfcs in a planet that might not be inside the optimal habitable zone of uh of the star that it's around you've just found terraformers and you have just found aliens doing something that we can only just dream of and that's the beauty of a techno signature is that it if you find one it isn't just answering the are we alone question it's what are they doing you know what what is this exactly i i should hide emphasize that aside from the question of are we alone to which i i'm quite confident we will find an answer no we are not alone because we are not special we have to be a little bit more modest you know more humble my daughters when they were young they thought the world centers on them and then as they went out to the street they found other kids and they got a better perspective and so we as a civilization behaving like that and arguing oh yeah maybe we are alone is immature you know and obviously the way to mature is to find evidence and i should say that once we find evidence which i'm quite confident and could happen in our lifetime then the question is are we the smartest kid on the block and and if you you know read the new the morning newspaper you realize we are probably not because we keep investing a lot of effort in either killing each other fighting with each other we are not cooperating and that's a sign of intelligence that you you you work together and and help each other and instead we are wasting a lot of resources you know in fights among nations and so forth and people you know people dies the results and so forth that's not a sign of intelligence and so i believe you know that we are probably not the smartest kid on the block based on the way we behave we are not the sharpest cookies in the jar you know and as they say and we can learn from those other cookies in the jar and perhaps we will learn an important lesson by looking at the sky you know that's that's a learning experience and i hope that by you know seeing for example how other civilizations uh were extinguished perished on their host planet as a result of going into nuclear wars or destroying the climate or doing something inappropriate by seeing evidence for that we will learn a lesson to get our act together and behave better i call that space archaeology you know just like we dig into the ground we can dig into space and find evidence for dead civilizations and that would teach us important lessons and we may have just sort of scratched to that surface with um now your new book extraterrestrial the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth when does it come out it comes out on january 26 2021 and it will be published in more than 20 countries worldwide as i as i mentioned earlier the book covers several bases and one of these bases of course is the bias against oh how what would you say free thinking um ultra thought something like that within academia especially in regards to alien civilizations yeah i would i would think that academia would learn from lessons of the past you know and for example galileo you know he said no you know it doesn't look like i don't think that everything moves around the earth i mean it's again this human-centric view that everything centers on us you know that we are important we are unique we are at the center of things and galileo you know it all started with the copernican revolution and galileo said you know i just look through my telescope and you will see that you know it makes more sense that we are not at the center of of the solar system you know and the philosophers at the time said no we know the truth you know we know the answer without looking through a telescope he was put in house arrest but the earth continued to move around the sun it didn't change anything so my point is you know we can be stubborn we can shy away from anomalies we can put people in house arrest will that change anything what do we accomplish by that that we remain ignorant and what i'm surprised by is that the scientific community has this taboo on discussing these issues and shies away from anomalies and you know we have very good evidence that most of the discoveries in science came from anomalies things that we haven't expected it's a learning experience we see things that we haven't thought about before so why not be open-minded why bully anything that looks different why stick to alter it just makes no sense to me what do you think causes this where does this where does the disconnect because most scientists as children they don't start out this way right where is where does the disconnect happen i think what unfortunately you know i wrote for example an article in the harvard gazette encouraging i was asked what is the thing that you would like to change about the world and i said i would like my colleagues to behave more like kids that's that's the thing i would like to change because kids are honest straightforward they experiment you know they have ideas and then they check them and very often they fail but they learn from this experience there is nothing to be ashamed of it's part of the learning experience you know einstein was wrong three times in the 1930s he wrote three papers that are completely wrong he thought the nature of quantum mechanics cannot be er action at a distance it makes no sense uh he thought that black holes don't exist he thought that gravitational waves don't exist and then in 2015 we found gravitational waves as evidence for black holes we have experiments that confront quantum mechanics in a way that einstein did not anticipate but it's part of a learning experience even einstein you know the person that is regarded as the smartest of the past century even he made mistakes and it's nothing to be ashamed about because we are learning new things about reality by having a dialogue with nature the only way not to learn is to close yourself off and you ask me why are people doing that the answer is simple they are more interested in promoting their self-esteem in in promoting their image in gaining awards gaining status and if you take risks if you allow yourself to be wrong then you might stumble here and there and you are not optimizing your chances of getting an award or getting into a honorable society or being highly praised by your colleagues and i i claim that all of these rewards are nothing like the reward of understanding nature better you know who cares about whether another person thinks highly of me i mean that is irrelevant who who cares about whether the philosopher at the time thought highly of galileo people remember galileo not these philosophers why because he said the right things and so in retrospect what matters is what reality what nature is rather than what people think it is the number of likes on twitter do not matter so unfortunately what happens in academia is people are driven by trying to promote their image and therefore they are shying away from making mistakes they also try to create echo chambers where whatever they advocated for early on in their career is being repeated by their students and postdocs so that they get get a bigger echo and have a higher chance of getting awards you know as a result those young people are very afraid of saying anything to the contrary because then their prospects for getting jobs will not be great now there is another layer that comes into the the search for intelligent life and that is the public is extremely interested there is a whole literature on science fiction and it feels as if you are degrading yourself if you are in the ivory tower of academia if you were to talk about things that are otherwise the subject of discussion of people that do not have the expertise of of being a physicist a scientist and so forth and so and it opens a lot of possibilities and so as a result a lot of my colleagues prefer to maintain the image of being part of an elite and you know that is a self-inflicted wound because then the public that views academia as an elite and i don't think that's appropriate because i think the scientific inquiry you know it's just science is a way of life it's not really a job uh you know if i have a leak in my in the faucet or or as i see something bad going in in the pipe when i try to fix it i operate just like a scientist i try to figure out what the evidence is what what what can i draw from that and how can i fix the problem you know and it's a way of life science is thinking about reality in a way that is based on evidence trying to figure out how to act and if you accept it as a way of life then it's not an occupation of the elite it's trying to figure out reality you know and and scientists should not be those that are elevated to a high social status they should be every person you know that has the evidence could conclude the same thing and so i find this really unfortunate that that there is this disconnect between the interest of the public in exploring this particular subject for example and the reaction of the scientific community not only not to to address this subject but to bully and you know say ridicule anyone you know that tries to address this subject because what happens then the young people do not enter this research field as a result you don't have high quality scientists working on it and then all these people that stop that bully whoever works on this say look there is not much interesting stuff going on there on the other hand there is a lot of interesting stuff going on on dark matter on string theory now we have no clue whether string theory is correct it could be a complete pipe dream you know we they for 50 years they haven't made a prediction that was tested we have no clue about super symmetry i mean in fact the test of super symmetry indicated that at least the early versions of it are ruled out by the large hadron collider there is no evidence for the types of dark matter that were advocated for decades for which people got awards there is no evidence for all these speculative extra dimensions you know all these speculative things and yet the they are part of the mainstream just because they are not accessible to the public extra dimensions involve sophisticated math so you know all these mathematical gymnastics still keeps the academia elevated relative to the public you know who cares about mathematical gymnastics the question is do extra dimensions exist let's check it experimentally if there is no evidence for it then this is much more speculative than the existence of intelligent life for which we have evidence we find it here on earth right so if the conditions are replicated why don't we search elsewhere where the conditions are replicated so i find this situation right now as completely unhealthy and inappropriate and i'm i'm trying to to correct it now it's one thing that uh you mentioned that that is interesting einstein was wrong but when einstein was right general relativity there were still people that said he was wrong as a matter of fact there was an entire book with a bunch of signatures on it all saying you're wrong even though it was a an obviously testable theory actually you know einstein was asked about this book that was written about the theory of relativity and the book uh had all these people contributing to it or signing on it saying that his theory must be wrong and he said why do you need 30 some people to make the case you know if they had a good argument then you know a single individual could have made the argument and that's it you know a kid could make the argument you don't need authority of 30 people to make the case that the theory is wrong just you know a good argument advocated by a kid could be sufficient and so the mistake that people make is authority matters you know and that was the case also in galileo's days authority matters authorities does not matter and that's what galileo said you know it's even a single individual that has the correct you know evidence and the correct argument could be telling the truth rather than the authority i mean this is we're not talking politics here it's science you know we're trying to figure out what reality is about and the question is who is telling the truth and the only way to find out is by collecting evidence and if you don't allow yourself to collect evidence if you don't allow yourself to find wonderful things you will never discover them this happens a lot because you also mention in the book about exoplanets and how the study of exoplanets was set back 40 years because of an incorrect consensus could you tell us about that yeah so otto struve who was an astronomer highly respectable he wrote in 1952 a paper saying you know perhaps we should search for a massive planet like jupiter very close in to a star because if it's close enough then the star will move back and forth in a way that we can measure and that would indicate that the planet exists around the star at the time people didn't know whether planets exist around stars and so for 40 years time allocation committees on major telescopes refused to give time observing time to search for such planets because the argument was we know that jupiter in the solar system is highly removed from the sun and gives it a very little tuck back and forth and it would be very difficult to detect that and we understand why jupiter is so far away it has to do with the water ice forming at some distance from the sun and then jupiter ended up with you know a core made of a rock but then dressed up with hydrogen and helium so we know where it formed and all planetary systems should behave the same way because there is some underlying physics that we understand and then about 40 years later by chance some astronomers were able to look search for a hot jupiter a jupiter that is close into a planet to a star and and found evidence for it and the nobel prize was awarded last year for the discovery of michelle mayor and didier culottes and then the lesson of this is i mean you may argue okay science makes its discoveries anyway in this case it did make it my point is it's an inefficient process and it was delayed by 40 years and 40 years is a significant amount of time now in this case it happened but imagine all these other cases where it didn't happen i'm sure there are many cases where the mainstream community was arguing against even checking something and it was never done as a result and we missed an opportunity for a discovery so for every case you know when i find an ant in in the kitchen i get alarmed because one end indicates that there must be many more that i haven't seen and so when i see a case like that of hot jupiters barely being discovered four years later i know for sure that there are numerous cases where ideas were suppressed and as a result were missed opportunities and you know it's just a pity it's just a pity that we are not the scientific process is not as efficient because of prejudice it's not as if the telescope time was not available people used it to search for binary stars for example but not for a planet close to a star you know why why would we do something that is rather boring then allocate let's say even 10 of the telescope time for something that is risky so my point is simple let's allocate a fraction of the resources for risky propositions because we never know what we might find and the same is true about anomalies if we see anomalies we should not brush them under the the carpet under the rug of conservatism we should not say oh no no we haven't seen anything forget about it nothing was business as usual we should not do that we should be honest rather than raise dust and claim that we don't see anything which is very often the case you know so the mainstream advocates often raise some dust and say we don't know this we don't know that there is a lot of uncertainty we don't see anything instead of raising dust and saying we don't see anything just let the dust settle and admit when an anomaly is a real anomaly and and let's explore it what's the big problem you know like maybe there is something that we haven't expected you use a wonderful quote from heraclitus of ephesus in the book if you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it now my question for you is um set aside do you think it's possible that in the last 100 years of seti and every other radio astronomy everything that we might have actually detected alien civilizations and missed them because of bias quite possibly i can give you an example gravitational lensing that's the effect associated with the deflection of light by the force of gravity in the astrophysical journal which is the most prestigious journal in the united states that publishes papers in astrophysics in the astrophysical journal you can find papers dating back decades that showed images of clusters of galaxies where you can see those arcs that you expect from gravitational lensing of a background galaxy so that there is a source of light behind the cluster and the cluster lenses the light by the force of gravity and as a result you get those arcs which are distortions of the images stretching of the images of the background galaxies that are being length so if you look at the astrophysical journal you find those images with the arcs in them and nobody said anything about those arcs people just you know said oh maybe it's an artifact i don't know what it is this is not part of the paper you know let's move on business as usual and then at the beginning of the 1980s the subject of gravitational lensing got more popular it was originally discussed by people like einstein and zwiki you know many decades earlier but it was not part of the mainstream so people just dismissed it and then at some point in the early 1980s it became popular and then people went back and said oh yeah you can actually get those arcs from gravitational lensing nowadays people use those arcs to measure the masses the mass inside of clusters of galaxies and it's a well agreed upon procedure it's part of the mainstream today so you ask yourself the evidence was there all along why didn't people interpret it correctly and the answer is it was not popular you know if someone would have suggest and actually people suggested that swiki talked about gravitational lensing in clusters so but people just ignored it ignored him he was not liked by many people he talked about the dark matter he was talking in a way that didn't appeal to people nowadays he would get very few tweets you know he would get actually bullying on twitter because he was not popular tweety but he advocated dark matter he advocated gravitational lensing so what he was not popular nobody paid attention to him and then decades later this subject became both subjects dark matter and gravitational lensing became the highlights of astronomical research so people say oh yeah zwicky talked about it but at the time they could dismiss him completely and he was not considered you know he was considered a wild card so to speak and then what i what i'm trying to say is that the evidence could be there and we are ignoring it because people simply say business as usual people declare it publicly businesses forget about it just let's move on it's easy to do that because if you try to deviate from that line from the the i would say the pravda line you know the official line of the party if you are trying to say something different you are risking future job opportunities because those people that write pravda the you know the the the newspaper that advocates the parties line those people are the ones in selection committees but then you think about it we're talking about science not about politics right so and science makes progress by looking at evidence and science is supposed to be based on independent thinking but it's not and that's unfortunate and you know i'm speaking to you as chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the national academies as a former the longest-serving chair of the astronomy department at harvard as a member of the president's council of advisors on science and technology as the chair of the breakthrough starshot initiative you know i have a lot of formal as the director of the black hole initiative and the director of the institute for theory and computation you know i have a lot of leadership uh roles and i'm supposed to be part of the mainstream i'm supposed to line up with whatever everyone says but i refuse to do that because i still am genuinely interested in what nature is about and i haven't changed much since i was a kid you know i'm i'm really curious about these things and i care less about what other people say now we have to take a break but when we come back we will get into um which may very possibly have been a piece or is a piece of alien technology which you detail very succinctly in your book extraterrestrial the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth by dr avilo will be back in a moment and we're back with dr avilope now doctor this book's main subject has been something that's been floating around and discussed within astrobiology for a long time but since it was discovered anyway but if you look outside of your book it's an open question nobody seems to want to even address it now we just they seem happy to just let it sit there as having been something that we don't know you know an anomaly and it's gone and we'll never know anything more about it but i think that that is unfair because a lot of data was taken on it and that data points in a very strange direction this was not a normal object in fact it was impossibly abnormal you could say i suppose what is it about a muammua sets it apart from anything else right well it's uh the experience is very similar to going on a beach and looking at seashells that they were swept ashore and and usually they are beautiful you know each of them is different and they were naturally produced but every now and then when you walk on a beach you find the plastic bottle that was produced artificially and you know when we have looked at the sky in the past we saw mostly rocks icy rocks in the case of comets and when there is ice coating the surface then it can sublimate and evaporate when the object gets close to the sun and you see a cometary tail as a result so we've seen comets and we have seen just pure rocks asteroids and from the solar system that were part of the debris made during the formation process of the planets and the the sun and then um was the very first object that we discovered in the vicinity of the earth that came from outside the solar system so immediately astronomers conjectured that it must be either an asteroid or a comet because that's what we have seen in the solar system sort of like a caveman you know that works with rocks said all his life and suddenly sees a cell phone and thinks that it must be another rock so it's completely natural if your experience is with rocks to think that um was either a comet or an asteroid the problem is that when we started to collect data it looked like it has a very extreme shape unlike all the rocks that we have seen before it changed its brightness by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling around and that indicates that the area that it covers on the sky changes by a factor of 10 because all we see is reflected sunlight and the amount of sunlight tells us about the area projected on the sky and imagine even a razor thin piece of paper you never see it exactly edge on so if the paper tumbles around and you see variations by a factor of 10 in the area that the paper projects it means that indeed you have a very extreme geometry for the object it's at least 10 times longer than it is wide if not much more that was the first indication that something is weird about this object we have seen factors of three or so for solar system objects before but then in addition this object exhibited a push away from the sun and usually such a push can be provided by evaporation of isis on the surface of a rock so you know if it's a comet what you would see is a cometary tail but there was no cometary tail around this object and the spitzer space telescope looked very deeply and couldn't detect any heat coming from this object or any carbon-based molecules either dust or carbon-based molecules nothing of the type that we have seen in commentary tales before so to a very high level of confidence one can conclude that there is it doesn't have a tale that characterizes comments so what pushed it then and then it looked like this object started from a very special frame of reference so this is the frame of reference that is associated by with the galaxy sort of the galactic parking lot when you average over the motions of all the stars in the in the environment of in our local environment you get the so-called local standard of rest and this object was at rest in that frame only one in 500 stars is so much at rest as this object um was we just bumped into it like a ship that is bumping against a buoy on the surface of an ocean and the question is why is it so rare you know if this is the first object we encounter why only one in 500 stars have this type of velocity you know being at rest in the local frame of reference it's sort of like a car parked in a public parking lot obviously you cannot tell where this car came from if it was moving from you would see its trajectory coming from another garage they would say oh that belongs to that person perhaps but this object was sort of in the local standard of rest so we cannot tell which star it came from and in fact very few stars have that those kinds of velocities and then we didn't really expect to find an object like that because a decade ago i wrote a paper with colleagues ed turner and amaya moore martin where we showed that if you imagine other planetary systems being just like the solar system and ejecting rocks the way the solar system did you wouldn't expect to discover this object you need an abundance of objects that is a hundred to a hundred million times bigger than expected in order to get one of them detected like um was so we didn't expect pan stars to find anything of that size a hundred meters or so and yet we found it so something is strange about its abundance that you need much more stuff if you assume that it comes from a population of random objects that move on random trajectories and then there was no heat detected from it so then it means that it must be rather small because otherwise we would detect the heat coming off it we know the trajectory we know what surface what surface temperature it had when it passed close to the sun yet we haven't seen the heat it means that it's rather small and it's quite shiny you know at the upper end of the reflectance of objects that we find usually and so it's a shiny small object that is most likely actually flattened a pancake like geometry because when you try to model the light curve the at the 90 percent confidence level sergey mashchenko that wrote a paper about it in 2019 argued that it should be flattened a flattened geometry not a cigar shape like was depicted in all these uh in the popular media so it's a flattened object that has an extreme geometry that is very long compared to its width and then it's shiny and relatively small and so what is it and what is the extra push that it received and so we suggested in a paper with my post doc schmuel bialy that perhaps it's a light sail that was pushed by sunlight and if so then it must be artificial and therefore must have been produced by another civilization and so that's what we published in a scientific paper in the astrophysical journal and of course people immediately responded within the scientific community with ridicule saying oh no that cannot be the case with no evidence and there was even a nature review paper saying it is natural period now they didn't really provide any good arguments why is it natural and why the all these anomalies that i described can be explained all together in a natural way each of them is a very small likelihood and when you multiply small probabilities one after another you get that the chance of getting all of them is really small so how can the mainstream argue business as usual that to me is a puzzle and they just made that statement for political reasons you know just to say this is it and so that people will move their attention away from this object to some other things and not even consider the anomalies now i should say that despite this claim business as usual by a group of people that wrote a review paper in nature there were some people in the mainstream that said okay well let's forget about this claim let's try to understand the properties of and try to explain them in a natural way so so one suggestion was oh maybe it's a hydrogen iceberg something that we have never seen before an iceberg made just of hydrogen so that you will not get a commentary tale of the type that we we usually imagine the problem with that and we showed it in a paper with theme huang we wrote a paper showing that over the journey of such an object from a birth site which let's say is a molecular cloud or a planetary system over the journey such an iceberg would be evaporated very quickly and we have never seen a hydrogen iceberg before so we argued it's not it's unlikely to be the case because it wouldn't survive the journey then some other mainstream people suggested oh maybe it's a fragment from the disruption of a bigger object that passed close to a star the problem with that is usually these fragments are elongated fragments caused by tidal disruption of an object are elongated and most likely umuamua was flattened moreover the chance of being passing close to a star is very you know the chance is very small and most you know most of the time you don't pass close to a star so there should be many more objects and why would the first one come from a rare event where an object passed close to a star you know that that's surprised and then there was another suggestion maybe it's a dust bunny you know just of the type that you find in the house in a household it's uh it's so porous that it has a density a hundred times less than the density of air and then the sunlight can push on it and then you would get the extra push from that the problem with a dust bunny is that it's very fragile and again it probably wouldn't survive the journey so this just illustrates to you that you know people that took those anomalies seriously had to go a very large distance to explain them you know with very with things that we have never seen before we have never seen dust bunnies in space we've never seen hydrogen icebergs in space so trying to suggest those things indicates how difficult it is to explain the phenomena that we have seen yet the rest of the mainstream says oh business is usual forget about it it's a natural making such statements serve no good purpose you have to address each anomaly and say how specifically how do you get to explain it is this a likely process does it produce enough objects at the abundance that is needed and you know the people that attempted to do that went into things that we have never seen before okay that's legitimate so why not consider also an artificial origin as one of those explanations and then how can we make progress very simply let's monitor the sky and find another object so with umuah we realized that it's unusual only after it was receding away from us and then it was too late because we couldn't really chase it it was moving too fast for any rocket that we developed but if instead of detecting it on the 19th of october 2017 we would have detected it in july 2017 and by the way incidentally that's the time when i visited mountain mount haleakala in in hawaii in maui where the pan stars observatory that discovered was is so if um was discovered when i at the time that i was visiting that place then we would see it coming towards us at that time and we could have designed a mission to meet it halfway and take a photograph of it but we discovered it only when it was receding away from us and it was too late for us to chase it so this was an unexpected visitor that came for dinner and then left out the front door into the dark night and only then we realized oh it's very special we should get more data about it so instead let's wait for the next visitor because presumably it's not the only one if it's the first one that looks so strange then it there must be more the next one we find let's get a photograph of it let's have a mission to chase it but if you say business as usual you would never even check others if they are unusual enough i should say that there was a second interstellar object discovered called borisov it was discovered by gennady borisov a russian amateur astronomer that by chance found it and that one looked just like a comet a regular comet so people came to me and said oh you see this second object it looks like a comet so doesn't it convince you that um was natural and i said look when i met my wife on the first date i thought that she's special and the fact that i met a lot of people afterwards didn't change my opinion about my wife it has nothing to do with it she's still special i'm married to her so the fact that you find other objects that look natural doesn't mean that umuamua was natural and if you find a plastic bottle on the beach and you find a lot of seashells that look natural around it it doesn't mean that the plastic bottle is from the same origin as those seashells now let me ask you this you you mentioned shiny is that consistent with something like mylar metal or foil we don't know what it's consistent with because we didn't collect enough data about you know their their reflectance as a function of wavelength of this object so in principle you could infer the composition if you have good enough data but here is the problem if your prejudice is that it's a rock you won't be even interested in collecting such data because you would say okay we have a lot of objects that we have seen before that appear reddish sort of like this one by the way the outer solar system beyond the kuiper belt so the kuiper belt is at 100 times the earth the sun separation and that's roughly when where the solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium and beyond that there is the earth cloud made of icy rocks left over presumably from the formation event of the solar system and those old cloud rocks icy rocks they are the most loosely bound to the sun so if you imagine the solar system losing objects most likely they would come from the old cloud when there is a passing star it could rip some of these objects apart from the solar system but these objects are exposed to the same environment as interstellar objects objects that are unbound to the solar system like um was we knew that it's unbound to the sun because it was moving too fast and so it cannot be bound to the sun and it went you know in another direction also unbound to the sun and so these interstellar objects are exposed to the interstellar medium of the milky way galaxy but the same is true for the orc cloud objects because they are not protected by the solar wind the solar wind is stopped much closer to the sun and at 100 times the earth's sun separation the old cloud goes to 100 000 times the earth sun separation so there is a vast space of icy rocks bound to the sun that are exposed to the same environment as interstellar objects and in principle they should have the same surface damage as interstellar objects so if we see an interstellar object that doesn't look like those odd cloud objects that would be a good indication that perhaps it's made of something different which seems to be the case for umuah now the local standard rest that you mentioned as you said that erases any data on where it came from so if an alien civilization wanted to send a probe through our solar system but keep their origin secret that's exactly what they would do they would just leave it in the middle of the road for the car to run over right yes i mean they might not even intend us to to intend it to be to get close to the center of the of of the solar system you can imagine a network of such objects being placed as relay stations for communication you know that there is no need to communicate by sending a signal across the galaxy because then you need much more power you can just have relay stations either for communication or for navigation sort of like signposts spaced throughout the interstellar medium you can have those and the natural pla system or frame of reference to put them in is the local standard of rest where they are not associated with any individual star they're sort of sitting there as signposts or there could be such objects that are intended to dive in to the habitable region of planetary systems and maybe that's another possible interpretation i don't know what the interpretation is but the only way to find out is by collecting data on other anomalous objects and so my point is really simple i don't necessarily say that for i know for sure that um was artificially made but i say let's it looks strange for the first object that we have found it looks like a plastic bottle let's keep our eyes open for for another one that may look strange and then take a photograph of it investigate it get as much evidence as possible why why have prejudice before we examine what reality is like it also seems strange that um not only for being such an unusual object and the first interstellar object we unequivocally saw but also that it passed relatively close to earth almost as though it if it say let's tell ourselves a story that was an alien probe it did what an alien probe would do it would see this interesting planet and pass relatively close by to it right right now you might argue okay otherwise we wouldn't notice it because we rely on reflected sunlight sunlight that reflects off the surface of this object and if it's if if it passes too far away we won't see it but we will never know of course what the the the reason is that it passed so close to us yeah as um left it accelerated very famously which got a lot of media media attention but the idea of something accelerating isn't unusual in and of itself comets can do that outgassing and things like that rocket effect but this one did it very smoothly and without very much evidence of what exactly was going on there what uh what is the best way to characterize umumu's exit from the solar system yeah so interestingly the amount of push that it received if you wanted to account for it by the evaporation of water ice let's say on the surface of the comet you would need to evaporate about 10 of the entire mass of the comet in order to give it the push that was detected so it's a substantial fraction of the mass of the object that needs to get evaporated it's not a small amount and we haven't seen any evidence and so that's point number one then the other thing is that the push was very smooth with distance from the sun and it it it changed the extra force changed roughly as inversely with the distance squared and if it was water ice it it doesn't follow an inverse square low because there is a certain distance from the sun where water doesn't sublimate doesn't you know evaporate anymore and so suddenly you stop having this push so there should be sort of a step and there was no step like that in the evolution of the orbit of um it was a very smooth push uh inversely scaling inversely with the distance squared uh from the sun and that's what you expect from uh sunlight pushing on a light sail uh i should say there was in september 2020 there was another object discovered this one was bound to the sun actually it followed an orbit very similar to the orbit of the earth and it was given the name 2020 so by the minor planet the center so it was thought that maybe it's uh an asteroid or something an object that was trapped in an orbit similar to the orbit of the earth around the sun and then this object exhibited a trajectory that showed evidence for a push by sunlight and it didn't have a cometary tail so the same qualities of but then the astronomers integrated the trajectory back in time and found that it intercepts the earth in 1966 and then they went to the history books and found that in 1966 there was a mission to to for a lunar uh [Music] lander that failed and the rocket booster of that mission was launched into space and so very likely this is the lost rocket booster and it it's a hollow a relatively thin piece of metal and that's why it exhibited the extra push from the sunlight so here is an artificial object that we identified in the sky as having no cometary tail as exhibiting a push from sunlight and we concluded that it's artificially made we made it so to me that's a confirmation of the fact that you can identify artificial objects by the way they behave and it's again strange to me that nobody pointed out oh yes this is a rocket booster from 1966 that we produced it behaved in a way that looks similar to umuamua even though it's bound to the sun in the sense of showing the extra push from sunlight and we know that it should have done so because it had a large surface to mass ratio so it was a very thin structure that we produced so doesn't that give you some confidence in the idea that we can identify objects based on the fact that they don't have a commentary tale and they show an extras push from satellite we can identify them as being artificial so perhaps that argues that um is artificial nobody made this point and once again you know business as usual now i am going to get one question for sure from the public and i'm gonna get it many times so i must ask it if umua is artificial technology and shows clear indications that it may be should we take the ufo phenomenon more seriously and actually try to figure out once and for all is it real or isn't it what do you think yes so my view on ufos which are objects that are flying close to the surface of earth that are unidentified and there are reports about it about such objects by pilots there was a recent release of ev you know reports by pilots and other soldiers and my view on these is that they are unlikely to be associated with alien civilizations and the reason is simple the evidence for ufos was always on the borderline of being uh credible it was never up to the scrutiny of scientific evidence so it's always like based on fuzzy images on some strange behavior and my point is that our technologies develop where it evolved significantly over the past 50 years so something that looked fuzzy 50 years ago with the present-day cameras should be crisp clear you know we should be able to tell that they are out there yet the evidence is always marginal to me this indicates that there are probably artifacts of the instruments that we use because this would always exist we would see something that looks strange just because our instruments for detecting those things misbehave and um that's that's my i so let me explain my premise my point is i don't think we are sufficiently interesting to distant advanced civilizations i think most likely we are just like ants on a pavement you know on a sidewalk and when you when you are a pedestrian walking on a sidewalk you don't pay special attention to every ant that is under your feet you know these are primitive forms of life that are not noteworthy you know they are not they don't merit special privileges or attention and i think that we are not special i mean it's sort of like those people that dream that a prince on a white horse will show up one day and pick them up you know like we as a civilization dream that maybe were so important that they would come and visit us and and and you know and but i don't think we are i think we are a very common form of life probably not the most intelligent there are civilizations that are maybe a billion years more intel more advanced than we are and technologically and their technologies would look like magic to us and given that we are not special unique or we are still relatively primitive you know there are many things like us throughout the milky way galaxy so why pay special attention to us you know i i don't think they will come and visit us anytime soon and they haven't done so in the past so i'm quite skeptical that we married an answer to fermi's paradox i think fermi was showing arrogance in saying where are they where is everybody you know if you hold the party and nobody shows up you can say where is everybody and obviously the reason nobody showed up as you at your party is because you're not very interesting you know why would they show up i mean why would they care about you you are assuming that you are so important that they must come and visit you if they exist out there but they can have their own parties they can be in fact if they are so advanced they would isolate themselves in a cocoon you know they will build their own habitat i call it social distancing at a cosmic scale you know it's now with a pandemic we have our own social distancing but you can imagine a very advanced civilization closing itself off because it doesn't want to lower its quality of life it has its own habitat it enjoys everything it needs so if you have such a cocoon that closes off an advanced civilization and they don't care about communicating with anyone else the question is will we ever find about them about them and my answer is potentially yes because they they have to throw trash out you know that's the second law of thermodynamics trash must be produced if they are using energy and you know it's sort of like investigative journalists that go into the trash cans of celebrities in hollywood trying to find out the gossip about their private life we could examine the trash thrown out by those advanced civilizations and learn something about what goes on in their cocoons but it's not at all clear that they would come after us and then show their existence on earth and i think the evidence is clearly not up to the scrutiny of scientific evidence there is a clear difference between umuah because there you know telescopes that are used by the scientific community the the discovered those anomalies it was not a matter of you know a pilot just seeing something unusual and we have to take another break and when we come back we will get deeply into the budding field of astronomical archaeology studying alien objects in space that may be passing through all the time or even landing on earth in the form of meteorites i am joined today by dr avi loeb author of extraterrestrial the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth we'll be back in a moment and we're back with avi loeb now doctor breakthrough starshot now we can get a laser driven light cell to proxima centauri very quickly it seems to me couldn't we use the same technology to catch up to umua yes in principle we can but we don't have the technology as of yet we just started the doing the research for the elements of this technology namely how to create a powerful laser beam and how to create a light sail that is lightweight and yet sturdy and also how to communicate with such a light cell we we only started to explore these technology frontiers over the past few years so it will take us some time to reach the goal of building the infrastructure needed for such a scheme but if we had it today then of course we could have chased umuamua by now it's a little too late because as umua recedes from the sun it gets fainter and it gets fainter like inversely with the distance to the fourth power because the amount of sunlight intercepted by the object scales us inversely with the distance squared and then as it gets farther from us we get another factor of one over distance squared for the flux that we receive and so all together it gets dimmer and dimmer inversely with distance to the fourth power and that's an extremely strong dependence because it means that relative to the time when it was nearest to us it's now a mill bite at this time it's a million times fainter than it was back then as a result of reflected sunlight so if you ever send a mission to chase it we don't know exactly where it went to the precision needed you would need to equip this spaceship with a big enough telescope that would detect the reflected sunlight a very faint object that's almost impossible at this point in time so we should maybe focus our attention on the next object that would look unusual like um and meet it halfway when it's approaching us rather than chase it and that would be a way of learning from a photograph much more about its origin now say we do see another um something with these weird characteristics can we do something so simple as fire a laser at it and try to accelerate it ourselves and characterize it that way yeah that's an excellent idea that's one possibility yes it would tell us you know whether indeed it responds to light like a light sail whether indeed the origin of its push is the sunlight reflected off it just like the wind reflects off the sail on a sailboat so we can check whether that's indeed the origin of the extra push by shining on him rather than visiting it i should say that in general the light cell technology is a powerful way of exploring the milky way galaxy you can imagine parking a lot of flight sales around the star that is about to explode the massive star that will go supernova let's say in a million years so you can put a lot of light cells around it and then the explosion of the star will create so much light that it could push these light sails close to the speed of light and they would surf on the light coming from the supernovae just like surface uh like uh surfers on the on the beaches of hawaii surfing on a giant wave and in this case a wave of light coming off from the explosion of a star supernova and so you can imagine of a natural way of actually accelerating light cells based on a very bright source of light like an exploding star that could send off a lot of the light sales at a speed that we wish that we can accomplish with the starshot initiative and i should say that we are just the beginning of developing our technologies if you have a civilization that was around for a thousand years technologically speaking or a million years or or a billion years for them it would be trivial to to get to this point this is the very beginning of astro archaeology or you could say another branch of astro geology because you get two things here it is possible in principle that with interstellar objects passing to the solar system that occasionally a sizable one might land on earth as a meteorite and it's possible it's possible that it could be an artificial one a piece of alien technology landing on earth what would that look like i mean what what would we just find a piece of titanium or something like that that just wouldn't be possible in nature what would we see so it really depends on the size of the object the object needs to be larger than a person in order to survive in the atmosphere otherwise it burns up as it goes to the atmosphere it would look just like a meteor and most meteors are not examined very closely when they pass through the atmosphere most most meter-sized meteors are you know are not studied in great detail and some of these burn ups may represent the burn up of an artificial object we haven't noticed it of course if the object is big enough then it could the core of the object can survive the passage to the atmosphere and it would land most of the time it would land on the at the bottom of the ocean every now and then it would land on on some uh surface of of the earth that we can examine and then of course we could look for artificial objects most of the time most of the objects in the solar system are not interstellar they are associated with those asteroids or rocks that were left behind from the formation of the solar system and most of the time we would find natural sources like those seashells that i mentioned before but but perhaps every now and then there might be an artificial object and another place that is even better for us to search on is the moon because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere so nothing burns up the moon is sort of like a museum that collects everything that comes its way and there is not much geological activity on earth if something hit the earth more than 100 million years ago then by now geological activity would turn it around and it would be mixed with the inner layers of the earth but in on the moon there is no geological activity and at best it can be buried 10 meters deep not much more than that depending on the impact and then in principle we can look at those scars that the moons the moon has from impacts of objects and search inside of them inside those craters search for perhaps a rare artificial object that was collected by the moon now of course these are not objects that can navigate or try to avoid impacts these are objects that were sent out and then either became defunct they're not operational anymore or or the debris from objects that were left in space uh after a long time and you know it would be really interesting to examine the surface of the moon and and mars i should say for collections of such objects and and then once again this was not done and we should be open-minded about it it's sort of like a fishing net where you collect fish and you might collect also plastic bottles in it and of course i should say that the solar system also has interstellar objects that were trapped by jupiter and the sun they act as a fishing net every now and then an object an interstellar object comes close enough to jupiter so that it gets deflected and trapped inside the solar system and we can find such objects there are already some candidate objects we wrote a paper about that with amir siraj my student and then you know in principle you don't need to wait for an um object to come through you can go to these objects that look peculiar in the sense that their orbits are inclined relative to the orbits of the planets and then presumably they they were trapped from interstellar space and you can examine them so one can design missions to objects that were trapped by the solar system and it pays to note here too that there is another aspect of this imagine the value of searching the moon or searching our own meteorite collections here on earth trying to identify which meteorites might be of interstellar origin because all of a sudden you have a sample of an entirely separate planet-forming region the solar nebula and you can look at things like what are the phosphorus con concentrations in this meteorite what you know because we know that there you know with an astrobiology there's a problem called the phosphorus problem and that it might be scarce in some areas and that might uh preclude life well we can look at these these interstellar objects and say how much phosphorus is in that you know and see if that really holds true yes i should say that was so we went to a public data set of uh near-earth objects and including meteors and then and and looked at the data with my student amir siraj and we did find one object whose orbit indicates that it was unbound to the sun and so we pointed this out in a paper that we wrote a couple of years ago saying perhaps this meteor that was identified in the catalog perhaps it's the very first the interstellar object because it was discovered a couple of years before um was discovered and i was very disappointed by the response of the again the the scientific community because this meteor was discovered by sensors that are used for national security for the defense of the country against the ballistic missiles for example and and of course this is classified information so they put out just the data on this this and other objects without giving official error bars you know how uncertain are the measurements but presumably these measurements are very accurate and we actually received the information that they are quite accurate but the referees of the paper said oh we don't trust these numbers that came from classified information therefore the paper should not be published and we tried to publish it but we were blocked by the mainstream of people that work on on meteors because they didn't want this to be announced as the first interstellar meteor they had a problem with that and they basically argued that they don't trust the government they don't trust the error bars even though if you think about it the measurements need to be extremely accurate because you know if they were as uncertain as their freeze were arguing a ballistic missile that was supposed to hit new york city would hit boston you know it you can't have sensors that are so inaccurate and therefore you know i have complete trust that these measurements were quite accurate and that this was most likely an interstellar meteor but we were not allowed to publish this paper any data on how big it might have been was it sort of just a dust grain or could it have been something more substantial this was a substantial uh you know meter size object that was uh definitely detected the only question is whether it's a trajectory was measured precisely enough to be confident that it came from outside the solar system and we checked with people behind the fence the national security defense and were told that the error budget would not allow it to be bound to the sun but the referees the reviewers of the paper refused to publish it and then i was disappointed by that and i should say i was pointing this out in a scientific american article that i'm disappointed by this response and then the referees complained about my disappointment now that the referees know me by name i don't know who they are and it just shows you the imbalance in power they can reject the paper based on just the assertion that they don't trust the error bars coming from you know the national laboratories i don't know who these referees are i just point this out in a scientific american essay and they complain about me pointing this out and you know once again it shows you how unhealthy the the atmosphere how acidic the atmosphere is to innovation and one must i mean yes you may not trust the government's error bars but a lot of them trust the government's money as far as funding thanks again and i have to admit i am i am delighted to hear that the powers that be in national security can tell the difference easily between a nuclear weapon and a meteorite entering the earth's atmosphere at least that's reassuring now this idea of of collection points at jupiter this offers a pristine way to look at it you know they don't have to pass through the atmosphere these interstellar objects they don't need to burn up or acquire fusion crust we can just go look at them how difficult is it to get out to those collection points that jupiter deposits material in and i know that there are two as i recall two candidates for burned out comets that may have originally been of interstellar origin so what do we do to go out there and take a look at those oh it's just it has to be defined as a space mission just the way we visit the pluto or visit other objects in the source it has to be defined as a as a goal to go near these objects and study them and depending on the size of the mission again if we had the star shot we could have sent a spacecraft that is equipped just with a camera in the direction of these objects so actually it would be nice if future space missions would be cheaper because you send a very small payload like a cubesat or something smaller that doesn't cost much but you send it more frequently rather than have a decade-long mission design phase and so forth you can send those cheap probes whenever you need it to multiple targets it would be nice if we operated that way and then we can look at target of targets of interest like those objects and it wouldn't be too expensive right now we don't have such a framework that allows us to send missions to distant objects at a relatively low cost so it would be nice i should say that currently there is another aspect to this entire question that we were discussing and that is what do we do with our own things here on earth i mean currently all our eggs are in one basket everything that we hold precious to us is on earth and if something catastrophic happens on earth like for example a big rock hits the earth and kills kills us just like it killed the dinosaurs you know the dinosaurs didn't have astronomy they didn't have telescopes they couldn't protect themselves they just saw this giant rock coming in it must have been a beautiful sight you know coming in and boom and they die we potentially could deflect dangerous rocks heading our way but you can imagine other catastrophes including the climate and so forth within the next century or so and then then you know if we perish there will be nothing left so it makes sense for us to spread our eggs not to have them in one basket and for that purpose we can send missions to various places and put things that we care about in other locations and then you know it's sort of like i wrote a scientific american article about it it's sort of like nork's arc the biblical story of noah responding to the great flood the risk from the great flood he put animals he built an ark and by the way this arc had dimensions very similar to umua roughly 100 meters in length and 15 meters in width and so forth so it's it's all spelled out anyway he built an ark and he according to the legend he put animals in it and and and they survived the flood and that's why life continued on earth so similar to noak's ark you can imagine norak's spaceship creating a vehicle that preserves life beyond earth so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket now you don't need to build a huge gigantic spaceship for that so that it can accommodate elephants whales birds and so forth you don't need to do what knock did now with modern science you just need to know the dna of everything that you hold precious you know all these animals you need to have an artificial intelligence computer system that stores all the dna information and you have to have the machinery maybe a 3d printer that is able to use raw materials that it finds on another planet in producing live synthetic life so we need to understand how to make synthetic life we don't know it yet but we might within the next decades and understand how to do it and then you don't need to carry these animals in a nook spaceship it could be just a cubesat that has this computer and a 3d printer and then it makes those animals or at least the dna associated with these animals makes it on another planet and and that that sounds much more attractive because you know for us to live in space it will not be easy it's a very hazardous environment there are cosmic rays and so forth so a much more elegant way is to send out a piece of of technology that would reproduce what we care about on earth elsewhere flip that around an alien civilization could do the same thing and send their genetic information out into the galaxy which opens up the possibility of humanity at some point in the future finding alien genetic material that could be reconstituted into an alien or 3d printed as you said meaning that this is one way the human species for better or worse this could easily turn into a nightmare but could actually see an alien yeah i should say that you know although it it's most likely that we came from a chemical soup on the surface of the earth you know that some chemicals came together and made life as we know it and us as the end products of that process it's also possible that we were planted on earth and that's called panspermia from another place and that doesn't solve the the question of the origins of life you still need to produce it somewhere else but it it it helps in spreading it away you know in many locations if you may manage to make it in one place then you can plant the seeds in many other places it's possible you know that we originated in a laboratory somewhere that our ancestry leads to a laboratory of an another civilization and you know finding our roots would be to trace them back to that laboratory now i should say if you if you go along this path there are papers in the scientific literature talking about the possibility of producing a universe in the laboratory something like the big bang you know in principle if you irritate the vacuum enough the vacuum you know a whole universe might pop out from the vacuum and people discussed it in papers in the literature we don't know exactly how to do it but in principle it's possible and that would solve the origin of the big bang what was there before the big bang because perhaps our umbilical cord leads to a laboratory of another civilization that created our universe at some point in time so the big bang came out from an experiment in another laboratory and you know the nice thing about this idea is that our universe is now producing technological civilizations like ours and at some point in the future technological civilizations like ours may produce baby universes so you can have this the sequence of baby universes born out of existing universes one after the other that could perhaps explain why the universe had a beginning in time according to the big bang theory but even if you give up on this rather exotic idea it's possible that life started in another laboratory or that we would produce synthetic life i would say within the coming decades that's quite likely that that we will be able to produce synthetic life in the laboratory this idea of creating universes in the laboratory could you imprint a message and i'm sort of hearkening to roger penrose here could you imprint a message some way on to that universe so that any inhabitants in it say you fine-tuned it say you you you looked at the anthropic principle and recreated it with your universe could you leave a message for the people in there should they ever arise i think that the most natural message is if they are intelligent enough they will figure out that in fact it's possible to make a universe in the laboratory so they would make it themselves and then understand when where their universe came from so the message is that everything we see would point to the possibility that the big bang started from an artificial process and you know currently we are lacking a theory of quantum gravity a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and einstein's gravity and if we had such a theory we could extrapolate beyond the big bang we could have asked the question is it possible for our universe to start out of nothing you know out of the vacuum we are not sophisticated enough yet to have a theory of quantum gravity that is trustworthy that can make predictions you know there are contenders for such theory like string theory or other quantum loop gravity and other theories but at the moment they haven't made the predictions that give us confidence that we are on the right track but if at some point in the future we'll be able to have a good working theory of quantum gravity we might be able to figure out that the message is actually in the details of our universe that you we would figure out that such universe can be created artificially and then we will realize that our umbilical cord leads to another laboratory now let's let's just take it let's take a a sort of a thought experiment a fun look at one weird aspect of the universe the axis of evil problem where the cosmic microwave background radiation appears to in some way correlate with the plane of the solar system this should not be those two things are not related yet observationally it seems to be there it's a little bit colder on you know one hemisphere than the other in the cmp so should we take that seriously and ask questions like could that be a message or could that be you know did did the creator sign the painting with that or is it just very likely not to be the case yeah again just like the ufo reports this puts a lot of emphasis on us being in a special st status you know that we we are important therefore the message was intended for us believe in the soul system now the the copernican principle you know that's the the principle that asserts that that humans are not privileged observers in the universe that we are not special that's my starting point you know out of modesty i call it cosmic modesty we should not pretend that we are privileged observers we are at a typical place at the typical time you know under typical circumstances in the universe that's my working hypothesis we find life on earth we find many other earth like planets that have similar conditions life like ours is there quite likely that's my working hypothesis we are not privileged we are not special we have a solar system you know that doesn't have anything to do with the micro background that came from very early cosmic times you know it just so happened that that happens that the solar system is oriented in a way that lines up with a cold spot who cares you know so i would just say it's in my in my book it's uh better to be modest and humble and not to pretend that we play a special role and things are really aimed to send us specifically a message because we are not special you know we are not unique and our solar system is one out of so many others that are oriented in random directions so why would the message be just for our solar system so i suggest let's just be more humble and modest and assume that we are not we're nothing special and then explore the universe from that starting point that seemed to work for cosmology you know the study of the universe we found you know of course the ancient bricks aristotle said oh the earth is at the center of the universe and everything else moves around it in spheres you know and then copernicus realized no and of course we now have the idea that you know the the sun is out of one out of billions of other stars that look just like it the earth sun system is very common half of the sun like stars have a planet like the earth at the same distance you know that nothing is special about us and then we are all in the milky way galaxy but there are billions tens of billions of galaxies just like the milky way many other places and on very large scales the universe is nearly uniform so really we are not at the center of anything the many things like what we see around us that exist elsewhere we are not privileged okay so we know that based on data for the physical universe yet we don't know it for the biological universe or for the technological universe i suggest let's maintain the same principle you know it worked for the physical universe i think that we are probably not special in terms of biological creatures and technological creatures so let's assume that we are not privileged and then from this starting point explore if we were to believe that we are special we might not explore and that's what the mainstream is doing right now and that's unfortunate and we have to take another break i'm joined today by avilobe author of extraterrestrial the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth and when we come back we will talk about a mysterious signal that was recently picked up coming from the direction of proxima centauri back in a moment now dr loeb project starshot the target is the nearest star to earth proxima centauri now we have recently seti an aesthetic experiment has recently identified an interesting signal that appears to emanate from that area now it's best to caveat before we go into this this this story was leaked and the data is not out there for us to you know look at but what does that change does that change the timetable of starshot does it suddenly become the most important thing we could do is send uh microprobes to proxima centauri to see what this is yes so this signal that is called the breakthrough lesson candidate 1 blc1 is the first signal that could not be ruled out as human made on earth and looks suspicious coming from the direction of proxima centauri but it could still be human-made for example there could be some oscillator that is producing emission at a very narrow frequency band of only a few hertz centered on 980 megahertz that is drifting slightly over time that is artificially made by humans and then we just haven't identified it and it's coming into the side lobes of the telescope that could be the case perhaps it's the most likely interpretation so we still have some work ahead to figure it out and of course one way is to use a different telescope in the southern hemisphere a different radio telescope and look at the direction of proxima centauri presumably the environment will not pick up the same contamination from another location on earth and that would be a clean way if the source repeats a clean way of identifying that indeed it's coming from the sky from proxima centauri and moreover we know that there is a habitable planet around the proxima centauri an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone where liquid water could allow the chemistry of life as we know it on the surface of the planet it's called proxima b and it's 20 times closer to proxima centauri than the earth is from the sun that's the distance at which the surface temperature of the planet is similar to that of earth simply because the star is a dwarf star it's 12 percent of the mass of the sun it's much fainter so you need to get closer to the furnace in order to maintain the same temperature and obviously the first thought that comes to mind is perhaps there is a civilization on proxima b and it transmits at this frequency that we detected as soon as the news report came came out on december 18 2020 i was able to immediately calculate the expected drift in the frequency of the signal as a result of the acceleration of proxima b around its star we know how much acceleration proxima b has around proxima centauri because we infer the existence of proxima b from the reflex motion of proxima centauri so we see the star moving back and forth with a period of 11 days and from that we infer that there is a planet pulling it back and forth with that period and we see how much it moves back and forth so we can infer how much the planet is accelerating back and forth just momentum conservation so we know for sure how much acceleration the planet should exhibit over time and given that acceleration i calculated that the drift in the transmitter frequency would be much more than reported i was not part of the discovery team i was not aware of this discovery but just thanks to the excellent reporting both in the guardian and later in scientific american i was able to infer that it cannot be a transmitter on the surface of proxima b and now the question is you know it could still be a transmitter somewhere in that direction that has nothing to do with proxima b and one may wonder whether it's at all plausible for a radio signal to originate from the nearest star to us so once again i advocate the copernican principle which says that we are not privileged we are not privileged observers there is nothing special about the present time now we know that on earth radio technology started about a century ago and earth existed four and a half billion years before that so we know that the window of time over which we were transmitting radio waves is a tiny fraction of the age of the earth and if we say okay we are not living at a special time then the chance of another star emitting in radio waves near us is extremely small and we quantify this argument in a paper with my student amir siraj basically making the point that the copernican principle implies that there is an extremely small probability that the nearest star to the sun is emitting in the radio right now so that we can pick up the signal and i should say there is one caveat to this conclusion the caveat is unless technological advances here on earth are correlated with those in proxima centauri and you might say why would they be correlated well one interesting point about proxima centauri is that you know stars come and go to the vicinity of the sun and proxima centauri came to our vicinity at about the same time that homo sapiens came to exist on earth so is it just a mere coincidence or was it perhaps the result of intelligent life being planted in both places at the same time that's the only caveat that i can see if there was a correlation between the two stars otherwise i would argue it's very likely that this signal that was detected blc1 was made by humans here on earth and it's a one-time thing just like the wow signal that we haven't identified but it must be something you know in australia near the parks telescope some oscillator cell phone micro evolve and whatever that produce the signal then doesn't produce it anymore it's also worth noting that there is a sort of suspicious aspect of this signal it the frequency is very close to just a a number you know instead of so that that seems to and it's within the variation of what a bad oscillator might produce off from the target you know transmission uh frequencies so this sort of looks suspiciously like interference of some type yeah yeah because the unit of hurts will not be common to us in another civilization it's based on the definition of a second and the definition a second was defined by humans in a completely arbitrary way you know you can measure time differently and define your unit of time differently than a second so if it's an exact integer in hertz or in inverse seconds you know for another civilization it will not be an exact integer and why would they uh produce radiation exactly at that frequency that that's a good point yes it's interesting that you you mentioned the idea of correlation if intelligence may have been somehow kicked off on both star systems at about the same time that's interesting um but that also requires some measure of co-development doesn't it because we may have had radio 2000 years ago if the roman empire had been a little bit different in its technological uh arc so and the question is how long will radio technology survive into the future i mean we are in the first you know after the first century of its existence if we live for a thousand years you know our our culture exists for a thousand years into the future then maybe it's not so unlikely if you have it mismatched by a thousand years but you're right that's a good point i should say there are other ways to search for a technological civilization or proxima b and i wrote papers about it one you know proxima b is 20 times closer to the star than we are from the sun and as a result it's expected to be tidally locked it it faces the star with the same side at all times as its orbit as it orbits the star so there is a permanent dayside and a permanent night side and by the way my daughters argue that the sunset test strip which is a permanent sunset strip between the two sides would have the highest real estate value because you can have vacations there on that planet if there is a civilization but anyway putting that aside you can imagine that technological civilization would try to put the photovoltaic cells on the permanent day side in order to produce electricity that would warm up then the cold night side permanent winter site so to speak and then also illuminated and in that case we could search for the reflectance of those photovoltaic cells if they cover a significant fraction of the landscape of the planet we would see some very unusual reflectance of the starlight from the surface of the planet which we can examine with future telescopes but in addition we could find evidence for artificial illumination of the dark side it will not be completely dark and that would indicate that it perhaps is illuminated it's easier to detect that if for example our hypothetical neighbors use led lamps light emitting diodes that emit in a narrow band because that is easier to detect with for example the james webb space telescope that will be launched next year so there are ways to infer the existence of technology on our nearest neighbors habitable planet and that are different from a radio signal so in other words if they have photovoltaic cells sitting on the surface of their planet their planet essentially becomes shiny just like exactly shiny but also one feature of photovoltaic cells is they reflect much more at the wavelengths that are longer than some threshold because they use light just like plants do you know plants have the red edge where they use use up ultraviolet light but they don't need to use red light and so they reflect uh red light infrared light and they're extremely bright in reflectance in the infrared we don't have infrared eyes but if we had we would see plants glowing in infrared even though they absorb a lot of the ultraviolet and obviously you know the infrared photons are considered as trash for the plants i mean they can't do photochemistry with them so they they just reflect them they don't need them they use the optical and ultraviolet photons and and photovoltaic cells have a similar feature except the spectral edge is not the same as plants as vegetation and so we can look for a change and abrupt change in the reflectance of the surface of proxima b and that would be indicative of photovoltaic cells all right doctor we are out of time thanks once again for joining us yet again and i hope we can do it again in the future same here 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 gautier 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 what [Music] you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 744,535

Rating: 4.7868595 out of 5

Keywords: avi loeb, event horizon, John Michael godlier, asmr, godlier, avi Loeb oumuamua, first sign of intelligent life, Harvard, ufo, alien, extraterrestrial astronomy, astrophysics, interstellar, blc1, avi loeb book, avi loeb interview

Id: D24E4F90HTo

Length: 106min 27sec (6387 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Patrickstarho]

I feel like I’m too retarded to understand the physics behind this but I find it interesting he said the scientific community will always rule out aliens. So most scientists operate under this bias. I can understand it tho because space is crazy