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Avi Loeb is an extraordinary and delightful physicist who is focused on some of the greatest philosophical and scientific questions of our time. He is a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligent civilizations that could be out there in the universe. He’s a professor at Harvard and a bestselling author. I recently read one of his books, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which I loved. And apparently a movie is being made about Avi’s work.
Today, we talk about the three interstellar objects that have been discovered, but mostly about Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS. Avi explains his theories about what these objects could be, and what it means for us humans.
We talk about why it’s likely that other civilizations exist, and why Avi is optimistic about meeting them…And really…why he feels it is so imperative for our own civilization that we do find, connect with, and learn from life elsewhere.
After my conversation with Avi, I’ll share a bit more about his story, and a passage that I love from Extraterrestrial. But first, here’s Avi. I think this will go down as one of my favorite conversations.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
Hello? Hello.
AVI:
Good to see you.
ELISE:
Good to see you too. I’m very excited about this.
AVI:
And your cat? I can see the cat.
ELISE:
I have four cats.
AVI:
Oh, four of them. I see. Will I see all of them or just one? Oh, here’s another one.
ELISE:
There are three in the room. I’m sure we’ll get another wait. You can see there’s a third.
AVI:
That would make our conversation much more interesting,
ELISE:
Right? Where did these cats come from? Mars?
AVI:
Well, there is a famous puzzle within quantum mechanics about shredding us cat. You may know that.
ELISE:
Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Schrodinger’s cat. Perfect. I had them summoned for this specific reason. I’m very excited to talk to you. This is not the typical fair on this show. As you’ll see, you’re going to test the bounds of my scientific vocabulary and knowledge, but we’ll thrill you to know that my 12-year-old son, who is a science fanatic was like, who are you interviewing? When I asked him if he knew about Atlas three and he was like, I have questions. So I have a question for Max for later.
AVI:
Okay. That’s be wonderful. And you’ll probably stretch my knowledge on things that you’re an expert on.
ELISE:
Oh, well, we’ll see. So I read Extraterrestrial and I loved it. It’s beautiful. I loved reading about your childhood and your intent to become a philosopher and how ultimately you kind of are right. You’re engaged with the deepest and most profound questions of anyone. Is that fair?
AVI:
Yeah. Well, science is a privilege to stay curious, and unfortunately, most scientists do not take full advantage of it. That’s because they get attached to their ego,
ELISE:
And
AVI:
It’s an opportunity to learn about nature and to ask deep questions and be able to answer them. That’s the main difference from just pure philosophy where you ask questions but you don’t make much progress. You don’t get feedback about whether your ideas are right or not. And the beauty of science is that there is an independent jury out there, which is test your ideas against nature. And the experiments guide us, and very often we realize that we don’t have the imagination that nature has. And so that keeps us modest. Except when people become arrogant, they don’t listen to nature, they are fully engaged in their own echo chamber, and they keep using the same narrative. They don’t explore things that they regard outside the box that go beyond the beaten path that they’ve been following. And that’s why science very often gets stagnated with all the ideas that do not apply to nature.
And very often within the mainstream of science, you do see ideas that everyone believes in that are proven wrong. And just a couple of weeks ago, there were two experiments that were looking for a sterile neutrino that’s a ghost particle that was suspected to exist based on some anomalies of previous experiments and wasn’t found. We invested in both experiments, $90 million. Everyone believed that that’s a very good idea, and we didn’t find it. Similarly, a new symmetry of nature called the super symmetry was sick within the large hydro colitis at cern. And after the investment of 10 billion in this particle collider, we haven’t found it in the natural parameter space that everyone expected. And for decades since I started doing physics that was believed to be a cornerstone. I mean something that definitely exists and in fact, theories were built on that foundation and we didn’t find it. So being a part of the mainstream is not a guarantee for success. And very often people by chance find ideas that end up being outside the mainstream to start with. But describe nature, the biggest example of us not being prepared is quantum mechanics. And Einstein resisted the fact that it describes reality in a very different way, and he was wrong.
ELISE:
Yeah, I heard in a conversation with you where you were saying it was like seven or nine teams have won noble prizes, disproving Einstein, right?
AVI:
Right. Yeah. Disproving him. I mean, that’s part of a learning experience when you are wrong. But nevertheless, if you come up with ideas that encourage others to test them, then that’s a great privilege. You learn something in the process and we shouldn’t hold it against science and for being wrong. In fact, he motivated people to check and figure out that he was wrong. And then we learn something new. And when people are afraid of being wrong, that’s when you end up with those echo chambers where we don’t find anything. And I just don’t understand why people have sort of resistance to the idea that I’m trying to promote, which is let’s check around if there is something like us or better than us. That’s an idea that you get from watching people on dates dating, because very often the advice that you would give them is aim high, not aim low.
If you are dating, you should find something that is better than you are a partner that is better than you are. And instead what you find the astronomy community doing is searching for microbes. Just think about going on a date with a microbe. It’s so boring. I mean, you would feel still superior. And it’s great for our ego to realize that we are the smartest so far, but it’s not a great idea for us. If we do find a more intelligent species near another star, it will provide us with a role model. It could make us better. We would realize because it arrived to our backyard, that we can arrive to their backyard that we have a lot to hope for. And I think it would change our priorities for the better because right now we are focused on what happens on the surface of this tiny rock. The earth that we were born on and looking up would expand our horizons. And so this is a trivial idea. It’s not very complicated. Every person understands it, but for some reason it’s considered heresy to even imagine something better than us.
ELISE:
I feel like there are two things happening, right? Fear of being wrong or being shown to be a fool. Ego protection in what you’re describing or sort of an inflexibility around taking guesses and being wrong. But then there’s, and you write about this seti and the way that this entire part of science is treated as a conspiracy theory slash joke slash absurd, right?
AVI:
How
ELISE:
Did that happen?
AVI:
Yeah, it’s really strange because just think about the following example. The astronomy community decided as a main priority, major priority to search for microbes through the chemical fingerprints in the atmospheres of exoplanets. Distant planets might have oxygen methane in their atmosphere that will be like a marker biological marker for microbes tive life. But at the same time, the same instrument can search for industrial pollution. Okay? You can look for those molecules that are industries, produce and pollute the atmosphere of earth. And in fact, you can look for them on steroids. Maybe there is another civilization that is trying to change the climate on purpose. If their planet is too far from their star, it might be very cold that they might want to warm it up. Global warming is not necessarily a bad thing if you are situated too far from your star and just searching for industrial pollution is no different than searching for oxygen or methane.
And if you have a large enough abundance of those larger molecules, so you might think, okay, well let’s use the same instrument for both purposes and let’s consider both targets the same priority. But no, you rarely hear about industrial pollution as a target for spectroscopy of exoplanet. You always hear about just the fingerprints of microbes, and it’s more of a mindset problem rather than anything substantive. And Fermi the physicist asked in 1950, where is everybody? And since then, the mentality, the mindset of the scientific community was to dismiss the possibility of ex extraterrestrial intelligence because we don’t see it immediately next to us. But this is a question where is everybody a question that every lonely person asks? And what you tell a lonely person is you need to be proactive, you need to search for it, and otherwise you won’t find a partner out there.
And by the way, finding a partner in interstellar space in the universe would change our perception of the universe because right now it’s a cold and lonely place, the full of matter and radiation, that’s the way it’s described in textbooks. But if there is any intelligent being out there, we would feel some connection to it that there would be an emotional connection to the universe. Not only change our plans for the immediate future, it’ll change the way we perceive of our cosmic neighborhood. And it’s really ridiculous to imagine that we are at the top of the food chain because there are a hundred billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And then you have about a trillion galaxies like it in the observable volume of the universe. But it’s not only that, but we know that about 10% of the stars have a planet the size of the earth, roughly the same separation from the sun.
And moreover, most of these stars formed billions of years before the sun. The sun is a late comer. So there was plenty of time for civilizations to develop to be much more sophisticated than we are. Those civilizations must have had more than one century of modern science and technology, and let’s just be open-minded and invest funds in the search. After all, we don’t know what most of the matter in the universities, we call it dark matter. So we invest billions of dollars over a decade searching for it. We haven’t found it, but how can we regard the possibility that there is a residence similar to ours in one of the houses on the cosmic streets as speculative? Because we exist. If you ask scientists, they would tell you, oh, we came from a soup of chemicals. It’s not as if there was someone that chose the earth as very special.
We came from a soup of chemicals, and a soup of chemicals must exist in 10 billion other planets with similar conditions to the earth. So how exceptional could we be? If you look at the news every day, it’s not at all clear that we are intelligent in the first place and that we are exceptional. And so I think it’s arrogance. I think it’s also the fact that in the public there is a huge interest in the subject, and there are lots of people with opinions that are not substantiated about this subject. So many scientists just shy away from dealing with it as if it’s a radioactive kind of subject. But I find it to be the most important subject that will change not only science in the future, but will change also the course of human history because we would change our priorities. It would be the biggest realization, bigger than realizing that we’re not at the center of the universe. So given the public’s interest and the fact that the public fund science, it’s a no brainer that this should be funded as part of the mainstream in.
ELISE:
Yeah, and I mean, you write about maybe not the favors that Hollywood has done or the popular imagination has done in terms of little green men or alien civilizations and intent on eating and destroying us, et cetera. But there are also, I want to talk about UA and Atlas Ria, but did you like the movie Arrival?
AVI:
Oh, yeah, that was my favorite, in fact.
ELISE:
Oh, it’s so good. Oh,
AVI:
One of the producer of this movie is actually now completing a Netflix documentary about my work, and I cannot wait the movie before he approached me. So yeah, that’s Dan Levine. So I really love that movie because it has another insight, which is when we need to communicate with an alien species, women are much better for that purpose mean, if you remember, there is a woman scientist because women are much better at communication. There is no doubt about it.
ELISE:
She’s a linguist, and the way that we hold words and interpret words is dramatically different in different contexts,
AVI:
Right? But I agree that the imagination of Hollywood script writers is quite limited compared to what we might find in terms of exter, and that’s what makes this blind date particularly thrilling. We might be surprised for the better. I mean, it might be a meeting with a friendly neighbor. That’s one possibility. I mean, when you go on a blind date, you never know, or it could be a serial killer. And in the last six months or so, I realized that fear from a potential threat gets much more attention. By the way, when you tell them that there is a potential threat, they are willing to invest all their time just thinking about it. Whereas if you say, well, it might be just a technological gadget passing by, they won’t really care as much. And so even though my belief I’m an optimist, I think that we are most likely to benefit from such an encounter than to suffer from it. I realize that getting policymakers or the public to act on it, to invest in the search and to respond to whatever we find is much more likely in case of a threat.
ELISE:
Yeah. Can I ask you maybe a basic question, but this is one of my son’s questions and I definitely couldn’t answer it. And it was in the context of Atlas three and the idea that it’s an alloy, that it has way more nickel than iron. Is that correct? Right. Yes. And he was wondering, is it possible that it’s an element that we have never seen and do not have in this solar system, or do we understand all the fundamental building blocks everywhere?
AVI:
Oh, well, there could be elements that we don’t recognize because we know that about 84% of all matter in the universe is of a substance that we don’t recognize. So this substance could be a hidden element that includes some combination of quarks, for example, that we don’t find here on earth. And it needs to be a substance that does not interact with light because we cannot see it with telescopes. And that’s why we call it dark matter. So there definitely could be a substance that is not in the periodic table that we use, which is based on the materials that we encountered in the solar system. But given the periodic table that we know about, we can search for the spectral fingerprints of elements that we know about, and that’s what we usually do in astronomy. So we use a spectral graph that looks at, breaks the light into its different colors and looks for the fingerprints of different elements in it.
And from that, we found a much more nickel than iron in the material that was shed by three I atlas. And the only other place where we found that was in nickel alloys that are produced in our industries. That’s the only other place, because usually in nature, nickel and iron are produced by exploding stars, and they are mixed together, and they have comparable amounts in all astrophysical objects that we’ve looked at so far, including in the solar system. So this object is unusual, and the way we do it in our industries is by separating the iron through a process called carbonyl pathway. It’s a chemical process that separates the iron, takes it out, and that allows us to make alloy that are stronger that we use in aerospace applications, for example. And the papers that reported about having nickel with very little iron around three atlas, they said, well, maybe the same process operates in nature. We’ve never seen it before, but they said perhaps the carbon pathway is also operating in the case of three atlas. Maybe it does. We’ve never seen it before.
ELISE:
Got it. Okay. Good question, max. All right. So there are three objects that are interstellar, right? The second was definitely a meteor or a comet, correct?
AVI:
Yes.
ELISE:
Yeah. And then the first UA that really put you on the map, right? You were the one that was like friends, I’m sorry, but this is defying all of our attempts to put this in a box of what we know.
AVI:
That was the first one that was reported by a telescope in Hawaii called pan stars. And omu is the name that was given to it. It means in the Hawaiian language a scout. It was the first object roughly the size of a football field. We knew that it came from outside the solar system because it was moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun. And then from the beginning, from the start, it was clear that its brightness changes by a factor of 10 as it rotates, as it tumbles. And that is extremely unusual. It means that it’s basically reflecting sunlight. So just think about the surface area, the effective area of the object changing by a factor of 10 as it’s stumbling. That means the object has an extreme shape, and most likely based on the analysis of that, it was most likely flat.
So just think about a piece of paper tumbling in the wind, and it’s very unlikely to see it edge on. And a factor of 10 in the amount of area that you see in front of you is huge for the variation is the piece of paper tumbles. So that was the first unusual fact about it, that it was most likely flat and an extreme shape, but in addition, it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force, and there was no evidence for dust or gas around it. We used the spit or space telescope to look very deeply around it didn’t find any traces of carbon-based molecules very unlike three I atlas where we do see molecules around it of virus types. So what was causing its push, I mean it’s not the rocket effect from evaporating gases should have been something else. And I suggested that the object is just very thin and it’s being pushed by reflecting sunlight because the behavior of the acceleration was as you expect from the reflection of sunlight, it declined roughly inversely with distance squared from the sun.
So nature doesn’t make very thin object like that. And I suggested it might be artificial in origin. In fact, we are using a new technology called light sails where you make a membrane so that it will be pushed by reflecting sunlight or by reflecting a laser. And it’s sort of like a sail, except it’s not being pushed by the wind by air, but it’s being pushed by light. And it could also be some surface layer of a technological object that was torn apart or a broken piece of a mega structure like a Dyson sphere around the star that was broken off. And you might find a lot of those in interstitial space. But at any event, it was very anomalous, unusual. So I said, this could be technological. And at first my proposal received very positive responses from the referee of the paper. It was accepted for publication within a few days, but as soon as the media attention was directed at it, and I was invited on C Nnn to discuss excerpts from my paper with Michael Sm, and I’ve never seen that on CNN, an excerpt from a scientific paper. He asked me to explain it and so forth. It received a huge amount of attention. And then my colleagues started pushing back and basically trying to discredit this idea and even attacking me personally. And for that, I usually tell my students that the strongest force in academia is jealousy, because I cannot explain it any other way. I mean, why would the public interest discredit my proposal? I mean, just before that it was acceptable by everyone.
ELISE:
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I wrote a whole book where envy is one of the primary polls. So I have a lot of thoughts about envy and the way that when we feel triggered by something that we want, particularly if we can’t diagnose it, our instinct is to sort of swat it down.
AVI:
But the point is, is that this is not about me. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s about a very important question that everyone should be curious about.
And just the fact that my colleagues are pushing back, that makes me more visible. Otherwise, if everyone would agree, yes, it’s an interesting possibility and we will explore it with more data. For now, we don’t have enough data and we should get more data in the future on an object like Umwa, if everyone would say that nobody would pay attention to me and I would be happy. I wouldn’t feel any need to speak at length on podcasts or interviews, but they say, no, this should not be tolerated. How dare you speak about. And the criticism comes from even science communicators like Neil Degra Tyson or Brian Cox, because they’re not doing science. They haven’t written a single scientific paper over the past decade. They just report about work that other scientists are doing, and they want to go in the direction where the wind blows. So they want to be liked.
And so they just repeat the mantras that were said by the mainstream. And so if the scientific community is criticizing this, they would criticize it as well. They’re just a mirror of whatever they see around them, and they have a lot of visibility. And so they are trying to convince the public not to pay attention to those things, but instead of being curious and why is it so bad to just ask the questions, collect as much data as possible to address it, and with it just disappeared. So we can’t really get more data on it, but we should keep this on the table for future objects.
ELISE:
And then three i Atlas is massive and moving even faster,
AVI:
Moving three times faster relative to the sun. And also its trajectory is aligned to within five degrees with the orbital plane of the planets around the sun, the ecliptic plane. So that to me triggered my interest because the chance of that happening at random is one in 500. And so why would the third object be aligned with a plane of the planets around the sun unless it was targeting that plane. So it can go on a reconnaissance mission close to planets. If you think that it’s a rock, an iceberg, then it’s a great opportunity to learn more about inter objects because it’s a gift that we can monitor it up until now for about half a year, and we have a few more months to monitor it simply because it’s passing near observatories that we constructed within the solar system near the planet. And there are hundreds of observatories on earth. And then there are all these spacecraft space missions that are looking at it. It was passing, for example, close to two spacecraft that are headed towards Jupiter. One is called the juice, and the other one is Europa Clipper. And so it came close to them in November, and it’ll get closest to Jupiter on March 16th, 2026. Those spacecraft constructed by humans will get to Jupiter in 2030 and 2031. This just shows you how much faster it is. It’ll get there within a couple of months, but it’ll take them another four years to get there.
ELISE:
And you write an amazing medium where you’re keeping the public updated as you publish and post. And most of it to be fair, goes way over my head. But you have sort of this list of anomalous characteristics of three I Atlas, which includes the fact that it has this alloy, which we haven’t seen at this point in nature, and that it’s comet tail, what’s happening with its tail, it’s going in the wrong direction.
AVI:
Yeah, it’s like, well, it comes out that the most prominent feature that comes from it is a jet that is pointing at the sun. And usually what we see is that the dust and gas being shed by a comet are being pushed away from the sun. The dust is pushed by the solar radiation, the light coming from the sun, and the gas is pushed by the solar wind. And that’s why we see tails behind comets. That’s what gives them disappearance, that they have a commentary tail. However, in the case of three Atlas, the most prominent jet is pointed at the sun, sort of seeing an animal come to your backyard and everyone says it’s a street cat. But then you point out that the tail is coming from its forehead, it is in the opposite direction. So it could still be natural, but we need to explain it.
And in fact, I just published or posted a paper yesterday about the fact that the earth would be aligned in between exactly in between three atlas and the sun on January 22nd this year. And this alignment is to within 0.69 degrees extremely well, fine tuned so to speak, but it’ll allow us an opportunity to basically look down the anti tail, this jet pointed at the sun. It’ll be pointed at us at that point, and we will see three atlas very bright at that time because we would see it’s sort of like a full moon situation where it’s illuminated by the sun in full. There are no shadows. When you see a half moon, it’s because part of the moon is shadowing the other part, sort of like a day night situation on earth. When people talk about eclipses and they get excited about it, they say, we have it every 24 hours.
The earth is blocking sunlight. Why should I be excited when another body blocks sunlight? We see it every day from the earth. So in the case where you have an opposition where the object is sort of on the opposite side of the sun relative to us, that will allow us to see it in full glory, so to speak. It’ll be illuminated by sunlight. That will happen on January 22nd. It should be wonderful to watch, and hopefully observers will get us good data at that point. But another paper that I’m about to submit tomorrow for publication talks about the fact that the jet structure around the three atlas appears to be wobbling, and that is probably because of rotation. Just think about a lighthouse that has a beam of light that is basically moving around along a cone as a result of the rotation of the lighthouse.
And so the same happens if you have an object that the jet, if the jet is not aligned with the rotation axis, then it’ll basically wobble in the sky. You would see it moving. And we looked at the Hubble space telescope images that were obtained between November 30th and December 27th, and there were many of them, 17 of them, and they were showing this wobble with a period of 7.2 hours. So it looks like the object is rotating every 7.2 hours. We also monitored the brightness variations with a telescope on earth and saw that it has the same periodicity of about 7.14 hours. So this is the period of the rotation presumably. And we find that the rotation axis is roughly speaking, pointed at the sun as well, which is another coincidence why, I mean, this rotation axis was set very far from the sun. So why would it be roughly pointing at the sun? It’s one of these anomalies of three atlas.
ELISE:
So I know one of the interstellar objects that we’ve seen is a meteor comet. So is it safe to assume that our objects went interstellar, that they would, the way that you described it in the book, it seems they’re not supposed to go interstellar, that they’re contained in our universe, but how hard is it or what’s the chances of us getting things out?
AVI:
So the outer boundary of the solar system is called the old cloud, and it’s basically a collection of bodies that were thrown out of wherever they formed by Jupiter, and they fill up a very big sphere around the sun that is stretching out to a hundred thousand times the earth sun separation. So that’s the edge of the solar system where you still find, you can find bodies bound to the sun and they’re very weakly bound. They move around the sun with a speed that is maybe a hundred times smaller or even more than a hundred times slower than the earth moving around the sun. Okay? So you have those objects there, and every now and then one of them comes close to the sun. We see it as a long period comet because these are icy bodies. They’re far out and they’re covered with water, ice.
And so they are the origin of long period comet. And when another star passes by, in fact, the OR cloud extends roughly at half the distance to the nearest star. So basically, if you imagine the nearest star having an OR cloud, the two or clouds are touching each other. And it means that every now and then a star passes through the OR cloud and dislodges just gives a gravitational kick to or cloud objects, and they would leave the solar system. And so there should be a lot of exchange of objects from the outskirts of the solar system with the outskirts of other stars. Perhaps some of the objects, significant fraction of the objects in the OR cloud were donated to us from another star. I mean, that’s quite likely. And so you have interstellar objects that are sort of moving in between stars, but probably they’re feeding the population of weekly or loosely bound objects to stars like the or cloud to the sun.
And the point is you would expect that process of losing objects from the outskirts of or clouds to be the dominant process of feeding the interstellar population of objects. And so you would expect comets, I see objects to be very common in interal space, and you would expect them to move roughly at the speed of their parent star. They were just dislodged from it at a very small speed. Instead, what we found is something that looks different. First UA didn’t have any commentary evaporation around it, so it was not a comet of the type that we’re familiar with. And so it’s not clear where it came from. And in the case of Ria Atlas, it’s actually moving quite fast. So you might argue maybe it originated from a fast moving star that is possible. Old stars are moving relatively fast, but we don’t know that for a fact.
And so, yeah, to answer your question, there is a lot of exchange of objects between stars and that interstellar objects are not bound to any star. They were removed from their parent, from their host star. Most of them we would expect to be comets when they come close to the sun, the ice on their surface would evaporate. But there are anomalies in the case of three Atlas, the geometric anomalies, the fact that it lies in the plane of the planets, the fact that it rotates in the direction of the sun, roughly speaking a nickel with very little iron, all kinds of anomalies. And we need to explain them. I’m not arguing that the object is, I mean, from the beginning I said it’s most likely a natural object, but we have to always worry about a black swan event, a low probability event that is technological that could pose a threat to society. And the intelligence agencies are dealing with such black swan events all the time.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and so many of the questions, I guess you would even call them, or potential theories too, of this idea of is it a buoy? Is it an ancient artifact from a civilization that existed billions of years ago that’s made its way into our solar system? Is it not manned? There’s so many interesting questions, right?
AVI:
My guess is that, well, it’s unlikely for biological creatures to get a ride on an object that visits us from intel space because the journey is very long. It’s billions of years usually, and at least at those speeds. I mean, if you have a spacecraft moving close to the speed of light, the journey could be tens of thousands of years, still quite long, but not as long through the Milky Way galaxy. But the point is that we can already imagine that we can equip a spacecraft that goes to intercellular space with its own brain, artificial intelligence, because it cannot wait for guidance from the sender. We can guide equipment that we send to Mars or to the moon because they are very close to us, but if the time it takes any signal at the speed of light to cross the milkyway galaxy, if it takes it 30,000 years, then the gadget will not wait for guidance.
It has to decide what to do. It’s sort of like having your kids far away. They will not consult with you on any decision because they need to make up their mind. And for that purpose, we want to have an artificial intelligence as its brain so that it’ll be autonomous. It’s a very different architecture than the kind of probes that we send to Mars or the moon. So far we’ve never sent a spacecraft with artificial intelligence on it, but it’ll be necessary. And I think if we find an interstellar object that is behaving intelligently, most likely it’s not biology, but technology that guides it.
ELISE:
Yeah, it’s so interesting to me that you get this much pushback for asking these questions about a giant object hurdling around the sun. Do people ask you about all of the UAP events that have happened in history and that happen here on earth where people either are convinced that they see craft or see figures? It’s interesting that that’s not, we’re talking about really complex astro physics.
AVI:
I mean, that’s part of the noise about this subject. You have a lot of people claiming things that are not substantiated and are not credible. They’re not supported by scientific evidence that there are also claims that the US government has in its possession information, data materials, perhaps even biologics, belonging to an extraterrestrial intelligence. I haven’t seen it. And it’s very easy to have all kinds of theories that do not necessarily have support from data. So I’ve never witnessed it. I don’t know what to believe and I will believe it when I see it. So the approach of being a scientist is you should be doubtful and critical of ideas that are not necessarily supported by data, and obviously you should seek the data to test them. And so I’m not ignoring those reports. I’m just saying let’s say construct observatories that look at the sky and search for unusual objects.
And this is the goal of the Galileo project that I’m leading. We built three observatories that were inspired by the reports coming from the director of National Intelligence that submitted those reports to Congress and basically admitted the intelligence agencies are not doing their job. They’re supposed to know what flies in the sky they get in the 2026 budget for the Department of War. There will be a trillion dollars. And question is, why aren’t you your job? And so it’s a serious matter for national security, but I’m addressing it from a scientific perspective. I say, we can look at the sky. Nobody can prevent us from doing so. That’s what astronomers do. And let’s see if there are any unusual objects in the sky. If we find only human-made objects, I’m happy for the Pentagon to use our devices and our software for national security purposes. So the knowledge that we gather will not be lost. But if it ends up being something from beyond this earth, it’ll be the biggest discovery that science ever made.
ELISE:
I had never thought about that, that you’re unrestricted as you explore space in the way that you don’t necessarily have access to everything here. I also loved your essentially call to think about the moon as a museum full of detritus, things that have hi it over time. And we don’t really know what those objects necessarily are. And also you were talking about if you could architect a Mars mission, you would want them in the lava holes, because I had never thought about this that Mars was habitable billions of years ago. But that would maybe be the, we’re not going to find biologics on the surface of Mars necessarily, but maybe we would find artifacts,
AVI:
Right? And the reason is simple because the surface of Mars was bombarded by asteroids, by rocks. And I did a calculation that within every a hundred meters squared, there were the equivalent of several tens of Hiroshima bomb explosions as a result of the impact of rocks on the surface of Mars. So anything that was on the surface of Mars, let’s say 3 billion years ago, was probably devastated by those impacts. However, we could still find evidence for obviously primitive life, but also potentially intelligent life. For example, if it took half the time that it took on earth for intelligence to appear on Mars, that’s not an unreasonable possibility. Let’s just imagine a factor of two difference between the history of life on Mars and the history of life on earth. And then at some point, maybe 2.5 billion years ago, Mars lost its atmosphere and then it became the desert that it is right now.
And in that case, we should look into the lava tubes that you just mentioned and go into them and see if there are any prehistoric paintings on the walls there, or maybe some traces of technology if someone arrived there over the past a few billion years ago, and it’s still not fully understood how Mars lost its atmosphere, and I hope it’s not a result of technological civilization that didn’t behave very wisely. And obviously the earth will eventually within a billion years, we just have 1 billion years left out of the 4.6 billion years that is the age of the Earth until now. So we just have about 20% left before the sun will brighten up, and they basically boil off all the oceans through a greenhouse effect on the surface of earth. There will be no liquid water left. And then at that point, the earth will become a desert just like Mars.
And obviously the clock is ticking and we have a limited time to leave this planet and go somewhere else, and I hope we will do that. But of course, the risks from geopolitical instabilities from us ruining the planet are far greater on a much shorter timescale. By the way, I’m not worried about earth as much as about humanity. I mean, the earth survived the catastrophes throughout its history, much bigger than we can inflict on it, but it’s really humanity’s future that we should worry about, and it’ll be nice to have a copy of humanity out there in space so that if anything bad happens on this planet, we still are remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy. If we just stay on this planet and invest all of our resources in fighting each other on territorial disputes, on conflicts associated with this rock, who cares?
In the big scheme of things, we’re completely insignificant and we’re no different than microbes on the surface of a planet in the sense that everything will be wiped out. There will be no monument left from us. When the sun will eventually expand and engulf the earth and burn it up in the long term, nothing will be left. So the only way for us to be remembered is by going into space and hopefully another civilization realize that when there must have been a lot of Christ for help from other civilizations when their star evolved, if a star like the sun evolves and eventually by the way, when the sun dies, it’ll become a so-called white dwarf. It’s a relic, a remnant left from the core of the sun. About 60% of the mass of the sun will condense into an object, a very dense sort of like a metallic ball, roughly the size of the earth, and contains 60% of the mass of the sun.
So a very dense material that will be the end result of the sun, a wide dwarf. And we see a lot of white dwarves in the Milky Way galaxy. These are sun-like stars that ended their life already. So it’s just like going to the graveyard and seeing graves of people and you from that realize that your life is limited. There is no doubt about it. And so we see the graveyard of sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy in the form of white dwarves. There are plenty of them numerous. There are maybe tens of billions of white dwarves, the remnants of stars like the sun. And that will be the end of the solar system, so to speak, and the earth will not be around. It’ll join. So first the sun will expand, and as it gets to the position of the earth, it’ll bring the moon crashing back to earth.
The moon was a piece of rock that was chipped off the earth. And when another object, the size of Mars collided with the earth early on, but when the envelope of the sun engulfs both us and the moon, the moon will, as a result of friction on the envelope of the sun, will crash back on Earth. So it’ll come back to us, and then the earth moon combination will sink to the center of the dying sun, and we will just end up inside this wide wharf at the end. So if in the long term, nothing that we worry about right now will matter, it’ll be completely rare. Nobody would mourn the fact that we don’t exist. There will not be a funeral if humanity disappears. It’s our duty to maintain some record of us, if we care about it, if we want to be remembered, all these ambitions that people have of being remembered, it’ll completely disappear. So we need to explore space. And if another civilization did that, that’s a good enough reason for us to look for them.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I love that. Just this idea that we are space explorers. Why would we presume that any other life force wouldn’t also want to explore the limits of their reality and that we would theoretically ideally encounter them?
AVI:
Exactly. And we can learn from them. They were wiser. It’s just like the Darwinian principle of the fittest survives. So there must have been a lot of civilizations that didn’t survive. They just perished. We were not around to hear their prize for help when their star evolved, but that survived, that we can find in our backyard are the ones that we should learn from. Those are the fittest, and we are not at the top of the food chain. We’re most likely in the middle. And let’s just hope that we can learn from them
ELISE:
Well and the fittest, but also cooperation, not only competition. So I think, yeah, it’s time for us to learn to learn again.
AVI:
Well, that’s the motive, the central theme of science. It’s about gaining new knowledge and sharing it and cooperating to find it. It’s not about a zero sum game. It’s about an infinite sum game where if we learn things about the universe, there is no limit to how much we can all be enriched by this knowledge. So we are used to the idea of a zero sum game by having limited resources on earth, but once we leave the earth, it’ll be an infinite sum game where we can only benefit from learning more and more. That’s the main theme of science, scientific exploration. Now, when I said just a week ago, I said to Neil Ferguson on a zoom call with a group of people, I said, can you imagine the future of humanity being better as a result of it, paying more attention to science, which is cooperative?
It’s not engaged in conflicts like political, the geopolitical scene. And he said, no, because science is often supported as a tool for geopolitics. And that’s why the 20th century when we saw the biggest advances in our scientific knowledge, also, we witnessed the biggest mass killings in history. And so his view is that science is supported only for the sake of a political agenda and not for its aspect of cooperation. It’s actually the opposite. I prefer to be an optimist. I prefer that will show our intelligence by cooperating, and science should guide the way because it’s our only way to actually grow and learn more about our environment, about our neighborhood.
ELISE:
Well, everything has its shadow and its light. And so of course, science has its shadow and it can be long and dangerous and deadly, and it also has an incredible amount of light. And so thank you for your work and inspiring us and inspiring people like my son. And I am tuning in from afar.
AVI:
Yeah. Well, my hope tell your son that my hope is that his generation will solve many of the scientific puzzles that my generation failed to solve. And that’s why I enjoy working with young people. They’re wondering, they’re not attached to their ego as much. So my hope is your son will be one of the pioneers of future scientific breakthroughs and just encourage him to do that. That gives me hope that things will get better. I think the best is yet to come. That’s my hope.
ELISE:
Yeah, I’m with you. Well, thank you for your time. I would keep you here forever if I could, but maybe we’ll meet again.
AVI:
Yeah, well, I will be delighted and my best to your cats. I hope they didn’t find it boring.
ELISE:
I really need to reach out to Avi and tell him about spiral dynamics because it’s a real passion for me. But I also think that it explains exactly what he was talking about in the sense of science as a dangerous tool or one of our greatest gifts and his story. I’ve only read Extraterrestrial, which was a New York Times bestseller. He also wrote another big book called Interstellar, which I can’t wait to dig into. And then he publishes on Medium as mentioned, and he just goes straight to the public. They’re difficult to understand unless you understand science in a way that I don’t. But his point is there’s just so much hunger and interest from all of us, and we’re the ones who are supporting science. And so it’s his duty to publish directly. And we didn’t talk that much about his childhood, but he grew up on a farm in Israel.
His mother, I believe she had a PhD in comparative literature. His father was a farmer, and so he grew up wanting to be a philosopher and immersed in the humanities. And I think that there’s this fascinating duality of humanists who are also in science. His path to becoming an astrophysicist at Harvard is wild, and he recounts that story in his book. But essentially he sort of happened through a confluence of factors to visit Princeton. And as a young scientist, a young Israeli scientist, and that’s where Einstein worked. And then he was sort of co-opted or convinced to, he had never studied astrophysics, but he was convinced to sort of join this pioneering team. But I think it’s his mind, his curiosity that is so beautiful. I want to read to you, so this goes to the beginning of our conversation where he was talking about having tenure such as he does at Harvard, and how that is supposed to, the point of tenure is to unlock creativity and give you the job security that you need to make really bold strides.
And that’s what ultimately propels the field forward is big ideas that can be chipped away at collaboratively over time and potentially ruled out, and that he feels at least that the field is going in the opposite direction, becoming tighter, less flexible, less curious, more attached to standard operating procedure. So he writes, “Many researchers stray far from this ideal, especially after they’ve lost their youthful enthusiasm and ascended the career ladder to tenured positions of prominence. Instead of taking advantage of their job security, they create echo chambers of students and postdocs who amplify their scientific influence and reputation. Honor should be merely the makeup on the face of academia, but they too often become an obsession. Popularity contests are outside the scope of honest scientific inquiry. The scientific truth is not dictated by the number of likes on Twitter, but rather by evidence. One of the most difficult lessons to impart to young scientists is that the search for the truth can run counter to the search for consensus.” Woo. All right, friends, thanks for tuning in. This was slightly different, fair, but as he would say, his grappling with sort of the biggest questions that any of us can ask.
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