Raw Transcript: Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. All right. Good to see you, sir. Great to be with you, Joe. It's a perfect time to bring you on because uh things are getting very wild. Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation. You know, some people said I invented three Atlas, this object uh in order to distract attention from the Epstein files. Is that what people were saying? Yeah. And I said, "Look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island. It's at 4 and a half times the Earth sun separation. Um, if I was able to put it out there, you know, I would be more powerful than the Pope. And because we're talking about a giant object that you can see from any place on Earth, you know, you can buy online a telescope that will allow you half a meter in size that will allow you to see it. It's out there. It cannot be faked. Well, those people are fools. You can't listen to those people. I don't listen to those. I I don't listen to many people, you know. Uh, initially a lot of people were dismissing your concerns and they were saying that this object is nothing but a comet and it's very normal. Uh, but then as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you're correct. Well, this is a very unusual object. There is something really important to recognize here that usually when you deal with scientific matters they have very little impact on the future of humanity very little you know if the nutrino has a little bit of a mass doesn't really matter you know when we discovered the Higs boson the biggest impact was to confirm some idea we had back in the 60s and you know obviously that affected you know those people who got the Nobel Prize but most of has continued as if nothing happened. However, here if we ever encounter alien technology, everything will change. It will affect the financial markets, it will affect politics in a major way. So my point is simple. This is different than other scientific matters. And the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be considered seriously because they have they could have major implications. Just think about October 7th. The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamas will do nothing. And they got data that indicated something is going on out there, but they dismissed it because of their theory. Now, because as a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot of people died on both sides for that. This could have been avoided if they were to consider a black swan event. An event that you put a small probability for it happening. But you look at anomalies in the data and say look the implications are so huge. We have to consider it. And you know this idea was already considered by the philosopher mathematician bless Pascal. He talked about God and he said look of course you might think that God doesn't exist. The probability for that is small but the implications if God exists the implications are so huge that we have to discuss it. That was the argument Pascal's wager and the intelligence agencies know that. Believe me the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again. Now here comes an object from outside the solar system and it shows anomalies. The scientists would say we should be as careful as possible at talking about anything other than a rock. Now they say that when they know that we launched, humanity launched a lot of space junk. You know, a lot of technological objects to space and we also know that there are 100 billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most of them formed billions of years before the sun. And there are billions of earth sun analoges. Now we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals. You know that's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this earth. And so it's quite likely that you know we are not the first one. Sorry to break the news. Uh Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. And therefore we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us. And you can ask the question, how long does it take our own technology, the Voyager spacecraft that we launched out of the solar system, how long does it take it to move to the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy, you know, thousands of light years away takes less than a billion years. And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it. And all we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks. Or maybe one of these objects might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. And the reason I say that is, you know, we live at our home at our at the on earth next to the sun. We look around us in the cosmic street and we see a lot of houses just like ours. There are billions of them probably. Now, my colleagues, those scientists who think traditionally, they say, well, you know, microbes came to Earth very early, therefore they must be everywhere. So, let's define our highest priority, searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street. And I say, good. You can do that from the vantage point of your home. You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor's yards, but you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument that would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes, you know, on exoplanets. uh and think about the possibility that there was actually there is a resident in one of those houses. You know, that resident might show up in your front door at some point or you might see an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that res. Black swan event, a black swan event. Or you might see some construction project in from a distance that might be easier to detect than microbes. So we should hedge our bets. You know, we should uh invest billions of dollars on both fronts. At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10 billion to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence. And I say that that is an oversight. Now, they have found evidence of microbes on Mars. Correct. Well, it's not conclusive. We need to bring materials back. It's called sample return. And NASA has plans. We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories, we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that do look as if they were made by microbes because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth. By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body. So it has a bigger surface area for its mass. The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process. And then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool. And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth. So life may have started on Mars actually cuz it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water and it could have been actually delivered to Earth. uh you know we might be all Martians and when Elon Musk you know considers going to Mars um it might be the second trip around we might be going back to our childhood home uh because there were tiny astronauts inside rocks that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth and seeded the earth with life as we know it pansermia pans yeah and and in fact you know we can find out if we get this material back to Earth as NASA is planning to do hopefully within a decade. Uh then we can make sure that these were microbes and perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones we have here on Earth. Whether the DNA RNA kind of process took place in both places. Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars, particularly the right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure? Yeah, I've I've seen the data. It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere right now. So, what happens on Earth is that when a an object roughly the size of a person, you know, or smaller goes through the atmosphere, it burns up uh creates a fireball uh just like an atomic explosion, you know, and actually you have an object of order a meter colliding with Earth every year. Every year there is an atomic explosion size fireball in our atmosphere. It's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers. So it doesn't do anything. And you know 71% of the earth is covered by oceans. But um uh yes uh so um these um meteors and you know they are quite important. Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by a giant impact by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island. And we are aware, by the way, that such an impact could endanger us. And that's why um the US Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come close to earth uh with a size bigger than a football field about 140 m so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. So we think we are smart we can see these rocks coming but just imagine alien technology. It will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it and that's a risk that was never attended to. And I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical Union to uh develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come from outside the solar system like three Atlas that um could that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin. The the structures on Mars like what what do you think when you look at them when you see that one that looks I think it's very intriguing. Both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere. So the objects that come into them do not burn up as I mentioned before about Earth and um therefore they serve as museums. Okay. So any uh you know space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two billion years would not have burned in the atmosphere. it would have landed and and and we can we need to check the surface even if we know that you know there wasn't any civilization out there over the past 2 billion years cuz conditions are really harsh. Um the Mars may have collected uh technological debris from other civilizations because it would stay on the surface. It's just like a museum. This this is an enormous structure. It's at least they think I think they think 300 m but yeah but that's not enormous because quite a bit longer threei Atlas the size of three atlas is at least 5 km the in diameter and I derived it in a paper a couple of weeks ago because we know that it's losing mass so and from it's mostly from the side that is facing the sun and you would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction just like a rocket. Mhm. And I used together with two colleagues u 4,000 data points from 227 observatories around the earth of 3 atlas that monitored its motion across the sky and and uh we were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity. There is no evidence for this recoil and that means that the object is very massive and I derived a value of 33 billion tons a huge thing which if you take solid density it means it's more than 5 km in diameter so when you mention a few hundred meters that's nothing right and this object by the way was discovered just over the past decade of of surveying the sky you know so who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the moon because they are good museums you know for and by the way I see that as their most important value let me just say one thing about my um fundamental point of view okay you know each of us would live for about 100 years if we are lucky right that's the kind of it's pretty depressing right because there is so much we we would like to know and we have only So, and you know that already tells you that you need to be modest and humble cuz you don't have a lot of time, right? So, why engage in conflicts? Why reduce the the lifespan of other people, you know, in wars? It makes no sense all of this. You have limited time. Let's just use it for something constructive. Anyway, we are born on this rock which is just 3 millions of the mass of the sun. It's leftover material from the formation process of the sun. Some debris was left over in a disc and the earth was made out of that. That's it. And it's just a speck of material. Nothing significant. And this earth was moving around the sun 4.54 billion times before the Vatican even existed. And why do I say the Vatican? Because the Vatican put Galileo Galileo in house arrest when he said I don't think everything moves around the earth. I see some moons through my telescope. You know I see some moons uh around Jupiter and they don't seem to revolve around the earth. They revolve around Jupiter. Therefore the earth is not at the center. So they put him in house arrest. Today they would have you know canceled him on social media. And and my point is that's the first sign that you know humans are they want to think that it's all about them you know like and it's not surprising but the Vatican admitted their mistake in 1992 they issued an official letter saying Galileo was right that was 350 years after he died and you know it's the worst public relations affair that you can have to admit that you were wrong for for you know like 350 years. And how could they have avoided that? Very simply, if they said, "We have more money than Galileo, we will be build an even bigger telescope to figure out the truth and we would prove him wrong." And then they would have found that he was right. And so then they would have corrected course shortly after. They would have put more people under house arrest. That's probably what they would have done. Yeah. So, so my point is it's really important in cases like this or 3II Atlas, it's really important to get as much data as possible because once you reach a certain threshold, you can't shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking the way that my colleagues do. Just to give you an example, the first interstellar object was oma, okay? And it was discovered 2017 and it was really strange cuz uh you know the it was uh shaped like a pancake based on the all the data we have and um and it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any evaporation no gas or dust around it. What did these conservative comet experts say? Most recently, just just in December 2024, there was a paper of them saying it's a comet. It's a dark comet. In other words, a comet where you can't see the cometary tail around it. So, it's just like experts, you know, specializing in zebras and they go to the zoo and they see an elephant. So then they say, "Oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes." And I say, "No, it's a completely different animal." You know, a spacecraft would appear differently than a rock, than a comet because it will not have a a a cometary tail. It could be propelled by something else. So, so let me go back to the big picture that I mentioned before. So we live on this earth moving around the sun and my colleagues in academia you know one thing I often say is common sense is not common in academia because my colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo. They know very well about the possibility of black swans and they say it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us as smart as we are near another star and I say no it's an ordinary claim why would you think it's extraordinary and by the way if you decide not to collect evidence not to look for it then you will not find it so I say and you know I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. Um, you really need to put resources to find the evidence. By not attending to to this possibility, you will by not imagining this. And by the way, I much prefer to listen to imaginative science fiction writers, you know, first class because they're much more interesting than secondass scientists who don't have an imagination. And they don't they not only have a problem with discussing alien intelligence, they also have a problem with whoever discusses it and they would try to suppress that voice. And I think it makes no sense whatsoever because the public really cares about it. You know, my essays on medium.com, they get a few million readers a month. Now, the public cares about it. The public funds science. Therefore, scientists should attend to this question. Are we alone? It's the most romantic question in science. You know, it's like so. So, just to finish my big picture before we get to to more. So, then um you know, we live on this planet. Everyone says, "Okay, we are not at the center of the universe, but we might be the only intelligent species out there." This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. A nice cold Happy Dad is low carbonation, gluten-free, and easy to drink. No bloating, no nonsense. Whether you're watching a football game or you're golfing, watching a fight with your boys, or out on the lake, these moments call for a cold, happy dad. People are drinking all these seltzers in skinny cans loaded with sugar. But Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in a normalsized can. Can't decide on a flavor? Grab the variety pack. Lemon lime, watermelon, pineapple, and wild cherry. They also have a grape flavor in collaboration with Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg. They have their new lemonade coming out as well. Happy Dad available nationwide across America and in Canada. Go to your local liquor store or visit happydad.com. For a limited time, use the code Rogan to buy one Happy Dad Trucker hat and get one free. Enjoy a cold Happy Dad. Must be of legal drinking age. Please drink responsibly. Happy Dad Hard Seltzer Tea and Lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California. Again, we need the next Copernican revolution, the next Galilean revolution to realize that there is a smarter kid on the block. Okay? And it's just like the experience of my daughters on the first day to the kindergarten. They at home they thought that they're at the center of the of the universe because they had a you know their um uh learning uh was based on a a data set that was limited to home. It's just like LLMs, you know, artificial intelligence systems that learn from their uh data sets and they had limited environment and then when they went to the kindergarten they realized our kids just like them. Some are smarter. So we are yet to mature in that sense and that's the big picture. Now why is it so important for the future of humanity? Because you know the earth is not would not exist forever. By the way, when people talk about climate, global climate change and so forth, they don't realize, you know, the issue is not the earth. The issue is humanity, the future of humanity. And you know, the earth itself would be very likely based on detailed calculations, it will be engulfed by the sun in 7.6 billion years. And here is something that you won't find much discussed. The moon because of the friction on the envelope of the sun will crash back to earth and then the earth will move all the way to the center of the sun. Nothing will be left. No monument will survive 7.6 billion years ago h into the future. Um and we have an obligation if we want to be remembered on cosmic in cosmic history. You know, we have an obligation not to go to Mars. That's not really a a great vision. You know, going to Mars is just like, you know, you have a a group of chimpanzees uh living in in the jungle, you know, in a you know, on some trees and they have some bananas and so forth. And then one of the chimpanzees looks far far away into the horizon and says, "Oh, look up there. There is another region that that we can go to." And and it actually it's clear that there are no bananas there. So the same is about Mars, you know, like Elon says, "Let's go to Mars to save humanity." But it's actually not a great place to be on there. You have to start somewhere. You have to start somewhere a planet. So here is my point. Okay, here's your point. It makes much more sense for us to invest in building a platform in space that can accommodate humans, not rely on another rock that happens to be near us with much worse conditions. It's a desert, no atmosphere. So, let's build a space platform, go on it, and make sure that it's safe for humans to live for long periods of time. We can produce artificial gravity by rotation. Now, you say, well, it will cost a lot of money, but we are spending $2.4 trillion every year on military budgets. If we were just to change our priorities and say we want to build Noak's spaceship in analogy to No Arc to save humanity from the great flood or catastrophe that will happen on Earth. You build such you you put a fraction of this $2.4 $4 trillion a year. And I'm willing to bet that within this century, our engineers, architects, scientists, if you put a level of funding of a trillion dollars a year for the next dec several decades, we will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better than Mars can. Okay. Um, I want to get back to Mars because the structures on Mars, what why would you think that they came from space debris rather than a prior civilization? Because uh, well, Mars, let's take a look at it first. Jamie, will you pull up those images? So, what's fascinating about the images is the right angles, right? Like that one that you Yeah, that's good. Like, that's kind of crazy, isn't it? It is. And that doesn't strike me as something that landed there from space. It looks like a structure. It's just it's too even. Yeah. Well, it could be. It could be if um the evolution of intelligence on Mars was accelerated by a factor of two. You know, that's not a big factor. Factor two, right? Meaning that intelligence arose on Mars, right? Uh two billion years after it formed rather than in the case of the Earth 4.5 or so, right? And um you know one thing I really want to do is if I ever have a say or or go to Mars, I would like to visit those caves uh the lava tubes in Mars because they are protected from the surface uh you know bombardment by cosmic rays and all kinds of things happening the ultraviolet radiation. So in those caves I want to check if there are any prehistoric paintings or any technological objects there. I completely agree with you. A factor of two is not a big deal. And you can ask also whether on earth there was a sophisticated technological civilization before us that somehow, you know, either through self-inflicted wounds or because of a natural catastrophe disappeared. Well, there's a lot of people that think that, especially now that they're looking at the pyramids and these structures that appear to be underneath the pyramids that they're examining. those uh Italian scientists that have found these structures that are up to two kilometers deep, right? There's some wild stuff in Egypt. Well, I want to see that data. I haven't seen the paper itself. I just saw reports about it. But um definitely on Earth as well. And the problem of Earth is that documented human history is only 8,000 years old, right? And 8,000 years, you know, is just a millionth of the age of the Milky Way galaxy. But are are you um including things like Gobeclete in that cuz that's 11,000 plus. So that Yeah. But it's not really documented in written form, you know, like so I'm talking about Yeah. But you are correct that um our knowledge of what happened on Earth is really limited cuz the human species existed for a few million years and we have documentation at the level of 10,000 year. If you go back to that it would be 11,000 a lot. Not much more but Well, the the issue is actual evidence, right? There's just not a lot of evidence because a lot lot of evidence just gets swallowed by the Earth. Exactly. Especially over long periods of time, which is why so fascinating looking at that thing on Mars because if there was any kind of life that was capable of building structures on Mars, it had to be a long time ago. Like when was Mars uh there was a a a bunch of theories. Maybe you could help me. Like what do you think is the predominant theory that explains the lack of atmosphere on Mars? Do you think it was an impact? No. Mars is a less massive planet than the Earth and therefore it has less gravitational grip on its atmosphere and as to why the atmosphere was lost. There are various ideas. Um, you know, it may have to do with an eruption on the sun that removed it. Uh, or the magnetic field, the lack of a strong enough magnetic field to retain the atmosphere. Um, we don't know for sure, but we know it happened about 2 to 2 and a half billion years ago at the middle of its life. Can I ask you this? At 2 and a half billion years, uh, was it closer to the sun? No, no, no. It was roughly at the same place. The same distance. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And um and then so two and a half billion years ago it lost its atmosphere. Yes. So if it did have life that life would have to so we would have to be looking at something that's literally two plus billion years old. The remnants of a structure which also seems kind of unlikely, right? It also seems like there probably wouldn't be much there. I actually did a calculation. The biggest risk for anything on the surface is all these impacts by asteroids. And I calculated and micrometeors everything, right? Because there's nothing stopping. That's right. That's right. And I calculate the amount of energy over a few billion years that was deposited on the surface of Mars is equivalent to uh you know hundreds of Hiroshima type nuclear explosions per square kilometer. It's really huge and because you're integrating over billions of years. So that square probably wouldn't be there anymore. Well, there could be some relics um that somehow stick, you know, like it depends what it was originally, you know, the Empire State Building, you know, even after it was enormous and made completely out of stone like the pyramids. Maybe that's what would be left of it. Maybe. I think we should be definitely open-minded and guided by evidence. That's the key. Well, that's what's interesting is because that is evidence. That is evidence. We should go there, you know, clear the dust and see if it's just a rock that happened to be shaped like that. I mean, you could have rocks that are shaped like that. Let's bring it back to this. Is it three AI atlas? Is that three eye atlas? Three eye atlas. So three means it's the third object identified by survey telescopes over the past 8 years. Uh we didn't have the technology before that. Mhm. And so we just don't know how much traffic there is of interest. We missed a lot. So we had you know the first survey telescope that found Mua was panar in Hawaii and the reason it was constructed is because the US Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to earth. These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on earth. We want to protect the earth. So we want to know about them. and they asked NASA and the National Science Foundation to search you know to build observatories that will search for such objects and that's why pan stars was established and then it saw a nearear object so they flagged it for that reason and they realized it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun and that was um MUA and then it looks looked weird now I had no agenda I was working on cosmology at the time you I was working on black holes. I was a founding director of the black hole initiative at Harvard and Steven Hawking head Passover at my home in 2016 and this object was discovered a year later. And um um I said well okay that's interesting but it has anomalies you know the amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10 as it's tumbling. That's really strange. Uh, and I started getting more and more into the anomalies and I So you had no pre previous to that you had no real connection to the UAP phenomenon and nothing zero. So you're just basing entirely on the data that you were getting from Yeah. And how do you say it? Omua. Omoa. Amua Mua. And you know I am driven by curiosity. I'm no different than the the kid that I was. You know, I grew up on a farm and people who knew me back then say I didn't change. I'm not willing to change what I say just for political benefit or for just to be liked. But I don't have any social media accounts. I don't care about that. But when something Thank God, somebody. Well, it's thanks to my wife, not God. My wife said you should not have any footprint on. So, she's really wise. She's wise. And that was a decade ago. Wow. She She spotted the problem real early. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Katherine Bigalow, the Oscarwinning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark 30, takes you deep inside the world of US government and military, a world most of us never see, but that impacts us all. It's an authentic look at how America might respond to a nuclear attack, showing the human side of impossible decisions under unimaginable stress. A House of Dynamite now streaming only on Netflix. And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids. Yeah, it's really bad. By the way, the main problem with social with um AI that I see is not so much that, you know, they will bring calamity on their own. It's that they would drive people to do crazy stuff. So they will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us the robots. You know, it will not need access to the physical world. It will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage. And we see that already happening with with AI on social media and nobody is attending to that. And the question is, how do we suppress the amazing polarization that we see in society where, you know, bullets are being shot? Yeah. Uh, and I I really worry about it cuz and and so humans may actually bring their own doom by self-inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their mind. I think you're right. I think in that regard, I think people need to stop using it. I really do. I just think it's not good for them. That's what I'm doing. I just think I'm not using AI at all. use it sometimes, but I I I treat it like a glass of wine. Like don't drink wine all day. You know, I'm I'm working with students and every now and then a student delivers a paper to me to look at and I realize some of the references do not exist because I know the literature. You know that I ask the student, "What is this? I've never heard about this paper." And the student says, "Oh, sorry." And it turns out the AI just took names of authors and fake reference. And the same thing within the paper itself. There are statements that are clearly because the student was using AI. I'm really worried about that because the young people are not reading. They don't read history. So they go to protests that make no sense, right? They don't and people say, "Oh, that that is always the useful thing to do." But no, no, no. This one is triggered by misinformation. It's triggered lack and it's organized. Exactly. And so that's one thing but then they don't go to primary sources to figure out the truth. They don't have critical thinking. And I really feel that this is a big risk because you know AI is getting more intelligent but but humans that use AI are getting dumber right they don't think. So I think that the you know the AI would supersede the cognitive abilities of humans sooner than expected because humans are getting dumber. I mean I see that I I I don't think people are necessarily getting dumber but I think they're getting lazy because of this. I think the humanity is exactly the same. I think they need to be taught how to use it. Well I get a lot of emails saying I collaborated with my favorite AI app. Mhm. and here is what it said and yeah but I think we need to teach people how to use it because it's a new thing and that that I think that's where a lot of the problem comes from that people are using it in in a substitution for learning you know and but you instead can learn from it but you've got to use it in that way so there are two existential risk in our future one is artificial intelligence AI the second one is alien and intelligence also AI. And the question is which one would arrive first? Let's let's go back to I don't want one more time. Amua. Okay, I don't want to screw it up. Um how large was that? That was was the size of a football field of all the 100 meters. Small in comparison to three eye atlas. Oh yeah, that's my point. That three eye atlas is a million times more massive at least a million times more massive than Mua. And I immediately as it was discovered, you know, it was July 1st and my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba 2 days later. And as I was going on the plane and as I arrived there, I realized, wait, that doesn't make sense cuz we should have seen millions of omuamas before we saw this one, you know, it's so big. And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade. You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are 5 km in diameter. You would imagine once per 10,000 years. So I wrote immediately a scientific paper. My wife was not happy that you know on our vacation I was sitting on my computer but I just couldn't resist it. And by the way this paper I submitted for publication that was July 3rd or something. Um and um then the editor said, "Oh, the paper is fine, but you have a concluding sentence at the end where you say, well, unless the object is smaller than estimated, maybe it was targeting the inner source." That was my solution to say you know one way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner solar system by design and indeed the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within 5° the chance for that at random is 1 in 500 okay and it's moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets which is ideal for it to release mini probes that will get into the planets it gets close to Mars it gets close to Jupiter. It goes on the opposite side of the sun uh relative to Earth when it's closest to the sun. And that's the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the sun's gravitational assist. You know, all of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory. So I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying maybe the trajectory was designed and the editor said no no no the paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence. Wow. So now when you when you listen to comet experts that say well this claim or that claim was never published in a peer-review journal. Guess what? they are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities and I think it's inappropriate especially in the case of alien technology because it's could be a black swan event. It could be something that affects the future of humanity and we if we behave you know very conservatively we might not last very long. Well, it's also arrogant. It's it's arrogant. Yeah. This object is how it shows that there's no iron. Oh no. So yeah. So then the composition of the plume of gas. So this is this is before you knew about the composition that you wrote this paper. Exactly. So as time is going on, you are being shown to be correct. Well, we found more more anomalies. More anomalies. But this is not a normal thing. Not a normal thing. So, for one thing, uh there was a glow that looks like an extended feature and everyone said, "Oh, that's a tail. That's the signature of a comet." And I said, "Wait a minute. It it's pointing towards the sun. It's not pointing away from the sun." Usually, cometary tails are made of dust and gas, which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind, you know. Um, and so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun. And the question is why? And um actually I calculated that you know it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the sun but we were looking at it like a cigar. We were looking almost along the cigar long axis uh within 10° of the object sun axis. So we were looking almost edge on and I calculate if you were to correct for that this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide you know and and that means it's like a jet so the object was had a jet in front of it towards the sun. The question is why? And you know the comet experts ignored it and just said well you know comets are strange you know the who knows. Um but my point is this is a blind date of in interstellar proportions. And my advice on blind dates is not to speak or say what you think this is but to observe the other side. You know the best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side. Don't speak. Just observe the other side because it may be different than what you think. And maybe you know on one of the dates you will have a serial killer on the other side. Oh boy. Now um explain if you could how we know the composition of this thing. So we can figure out composition of a plume of gas uh by um taking a spectrum of it which means you basically have some kind of a prism that breaks you know that light with different wavelengths is bent at different angles and so you spread the light into the different colors and if you do that you you can find the uh fingerprints the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules because each atom or molecule has transitions. I I actually teach I taught it just two days ago in a class that I teach uh that is mandatory obligatory at the Harvard astronomy department where I was chair for a decade you know like between 2011 2020. So this is the mandatory class and I I just taught how you know spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules just two days ago. So this is a very well-known thing and we know the the wavelengths of those and and we use them to identify the composition uh you know we know which atoms produced these spectral lines the fingerprints it's just like fingerprints okay and and so what was found you know and that's by multiple teams there are three papers on that we found nickel a lot of nickel but no very little iron at first no iron whatsoever Now usually in all the comets in the past from the solar system and also from interstellar space there is one comet Borisov that was found. It's the second interstellar object which looked just like a familiar comet. I had nothing to say about that one. It looked like a comet behaved like a comet. It was a comet but it had similar abundances of nickel and iron. The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially. For example, uh for aerospace applications, uh nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron. So maybe the skin of this object is is industrially produced. That's that was my suggestion. But what the authors of these papers said is maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries. So they made a conjecture that this carbonil pathway which is well known in the industry world uh carbonil is the pathway the name of the pathway they said well maybe this carbon pathway happens in nature uh we have never seen it before but that is their explanation. H um is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy? No it's not an alloy it's just that some somehow the nickel gets released the iron gets suppressed. Nobody would argue that, you know, you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they're produced together in exploding stars, right? And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 times more by by mass. And so, um, we just don't know as in the case of this jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tail now, uh, over the month of September. And also you know why was it changing structure is not clear. There are lots of anomalies. There was also a very negative polarization of the light. And also two weeks ago I realized the arrival direction of 3 Atlas was within nine degrees of the WOW signal that was detected in 1977 which was an enigmatic powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this earth. We don't know from where it was coming from a source that was approaching the sun and the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of three Atlas is 0.6%. And I just said well that's interesting because three Atlas was at the distance of three light days uh from the earth at that time you know and um uh you just need about the output of a nuclear reactor on earth a gigawatt or so to produce such a radio signal. By the way Voyager right as of now is one light day away from earth. Just think about it. One light day our you know the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away and the size of the Milky Way galaxy we are talking about tens of thousands of light years. So one day out of tens of thousands of years, that's the difference between the distance that we managed to breach so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard. Right now, have we ever observed things in the past that have changed their tail like this? So there are from a jet to a tail. This is called an anti-ale when it's pointing towards the sun. There were optical illusions in a situation where you know the there is a tail which is pushed away from the sun by radiation and the solar wind. Mhm. But you are observing it as the Earth goes through the orbital plane of of of this uh object of this comet and you are seeing it from a perspective that it looks as if the tail is pointed at the sun but in fact it's it's just a perspective thing. It's a optical illusion and there were cases like that that that was seen but as far as I know none seen in a situation where it's clear and in three Atlas it was very far from the sun and earth and we saw it towards the sun there cannot be an optical illusion under the circumstances because it was approaching both the earth and the sun roughly at the same direction so I'm not aware of another but most importantly you should look at the response of the comet expert community to that anomaly. They say, "Well, comets are strange. We don't know. Maybe it's um these are dust particles that are very big, so they don't get pushed back much." But then how do you scatter sunlight? Usually you need particles that have a size of the order of the wavelength of the light that is being scattered. That's the most efficient process. And when you have dust particles, the ones that have you know sub micrometer uh dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight. So why in this case you will have only big ones that are not getting pushed back. It could be fragments of ice that are scattering the sunlight that have nothing to do with dust. But those fragments of ice get evaporated and so they don't have enough time to turn back. You know, I wrote two papers on that trying to explain it. But my point is many scientists are not curious. You you would find it surprising. Why are they not curious? Why are they not willing to consider alternative explanations to what is commonly thought? And it's because they're afraid of taking any risk, you know, and uh I came from a background where I worked in cosmology trying to figure out puzzles like most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't know what it is. You know, we we call it dark matter. It's just to to reflect our ignorance. You know, Nobel prizes were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is. These are constituents whose nature is unknown. And just think about it, giving a Nobel Prize to people who just said how ignorant we are. We don't know what these things are. Ordinary matter makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe. And in this culture of cosmology when you know I worked in for three decades um it was you know completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies. I mean the dark matter is an anomaly you don't know what it is and people were rewarded for coming up with ideas imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally. That's the way you make progress. You don't know something. you are putting on the table possibilities and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one and that was the culture and I think of it as a culture of chess players. Okay. Okay. trying to figure out things when I get to work on comets, you know, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology. I encounter, you know, a a a culture of mud wrestlers. Mud wrestlers. It's different from chess players, right? Um, and you know, I don't want to mud wrestle. I don't want to get dirty. I don't respond to I learned my lesson with Omua Mua. I don't respond to those people because once we collect I just want as much evidence as possible so that they would not be able to shove the anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking. That's my motivation. So I'm inspiring a debate right now and there is a huge interest in that debate so that we will collect as much data as possible so that by the end of the day we'll figure out what our dating partner is. If it happens to be a rock you know on the other side of the table you go on a date and you see a rock so be it. If it's something else that has huge implications, right? And therefore, we should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible. What is it about your field in particular that you think motivates mudslinging? like why why are they averse to risk and why do they not just why are they not just averse to risk but why are they attacking you for proposing what seems to me to be a reasonable alternative considering the possibilities given all the planets and stars that we know are out there well I got a hint uh for the answer to your question when I wrote the first paper on MUA right I suggested it might be technological right and the paper got accepted for publication within three days record. The reviewer said this is a great idea because it's consistent with all the data we have. It's it's most likely a flat object and therefore it could be pushed by reflecting sunlight which was my proposal. Then the media came to my door and people started asking me a lot of questions. I got you know I I got well known at that point the attacks the personal attacks started. So it's jealousy. Yeah it's um and you know but I can tell you that I learned my lesson. You can't respond. I just ignore it. And let me give you a few anecdotes of what happened to me this week. Just this week. Okay. Okay. Please. Tomorrow I'm supposed to go to California. There is a NASCAR car race where one of the racers decided to put my image with three Atlas with the Galileo project that I'm leading on his car. So, let me show you some images. Yeah, show me the image cuz what is the current best image of three Atlas? Oh, we will get to that. So, here you see the car and he promised to let me drive it during the just before the race. Who is this guy? Uh, Alex Kevin Harvick. No, Kevin Harvick. That's the name of the driver's name. Alex Malik. Alex Malik. Yeah. And he contacted me. Yeah. He's just a big fan. Oh, that's cool. Uh, and I will go there. Smart of him, right? Cuz that's definitely going to get you a lot of attention. Yeah. So, he just sent it to me this morning that they This is in the shop where they put all these things on it. And tomorrow I'm going to drive it. What is Comet Lemon in the back? Oh, that's just another Comet. So he So he's like a comet fan in this guy. By the way, I told him that um the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than 3 Atlas 600 times. So you know it's a compliment to me to be featured on his car, but 3A Atlas doesn't care much cuz it's already moving 600 times faster than his car can move, you know. But let's uh move. That is cool, though. So this is tomorrow. That image though, that's you with a spinning world, right? That's the globe and my name. So the car is called Avi now. Um nice. Yeah. Uh can we move to the next image? I'll show you another. Very excited about this. I like it. Yeah. Um so this is an image taken two days ago in my office at Harvard. I again I was contacted out of the blue by an artist, a very distinguished artist, accomplished named Greg Wyatt uh in New York City who donated two sculptures made of bronze of Galileo. You see them in the front. They were delivered to my office just a few days ago. And in the background, you see watercolors that he made. Each of them, there are 51 of them that he don all of these he donated to me at no cost. He wants it to be displayed on in my office because these watercolors display uh famous scientists p that pioneered new frontiers. and uh he includes a statement from each of these scientists which are really educational for the students and postocs that work with me. I should tell you I got an email from a US Air Force pilot. Uh his daughter Ariana said to him, he he wrote me an email and said, "Because of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist now. She saw you on television and now she only speaks about aliens." You know, two days later, I speak with a reporter from the London Times and he puts out his report and says, "I read the report for half an hour to my kids and they told me they want to become scientists." And you know, this is a another thing that there are two things that are missed by my colleagues. One, it's an opportunity to excite the the kids to get into science. You know that's an amazing I mean when we discovered the Higs boson you know it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the 60s the Nobel Prize was awarded but I bet you that the daughter Ariana the daughter of the US Air Force pilot would not be inspired to become a scientist because it's very abstract here the there is a connection. So that's one thing that is missed and of course the second one is here is a subject that the public cares about and the public funds science so we should attend to that of course it's our obligation as scientists course why you know I always since I started science which was by chance by the way I wanted always to become a philosopher but circumstances led me because I led a project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative of President Rean it was the first international project and then that brought me into astrophysics because I was offered a position at Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study where Einstein was a faculty a few decades earlier. So it all it was an arranged marriage and but I felt that it's even though it's an arranged marriage, I'm I'm married to my true love because I can address philosophical questions using the scientific method and I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I'm different. You know, I'm I'm just But well, you're willing to take chances. It's not just that. Not even chances. You're willing to propose things that might be ridiculed. Well, I think about the big picture. You know, the one thing that I mentioned in my book, Extraterrestrial, is on the first day of school, I showed up to the class and I saw the kids jumping up and down on the tables in the classroom and I looked at them and I said, "Does it does it really make sense to jump up and down? like what are they trying to accomplish by doing that? Like and then the teacher came in uh and looked at everyone jumping and said, "Quiet down. Look at Avi. He's so well behaved. You should all behave like him." And I wanted to tell her I'm not well behaved. You know, this was not the reason why I didn't jump up and down. I was just trying to figure out why they are jumping up and down. And if it made sense, I would jump up and down. I don't care about your rules. And that pretty much defines me, you know, I I'm thinking about the big picture and if my colleagues are doing something that doesn't make sense, I don't give a damn. So, let me ask you this. Once the understanding of the composition of three Atlas, once that was out and people recognized that this is a very unusual object, have more people started to consider what you're saying? Yeah, I get a lot of people sending me in the academic world. also in the academic world. Those are people that keep that that say we are inspired by what you're doing. You know, they keep sending me emails saying keep doing it. It's an inspiration to all of us. But this is privately. Has anybody publicly supported you? So the young you have to understand the biggest damage of this harassment or scrutiny or ridicule or personal attacks. I don't care about it. You know, my my skin is by now titanium. I I don't really feel much. The issue is really that it and that's the purpose of these attacks is they want to discourage others young people from deviating from the beaten path. So they keep the herd in a tight configuration. And the risk from that is you know one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics you know like um half a century ago. By the way I lived throughout half of modern physics roughly half of modern physics. So half a century ago it was thought that there is a symmetry of nature called super symmetry and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry because it's stable and everyone said that must be right and lots of castles were built on this foundation including string theory uh that was assuming this to be true and then the large hadron collider at CERN was built for $10 billion search for super symmetry and didn't find it. Now what is the lesson? Yes, it was a beautiful idea and sometimes nature is not what we think it is. Okay, so we should not uh ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes. This was a I mean a lot of money and effort went to that that thousands of papers basing their analysis or or mathematical constructions on super symmetry and a lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well. Right. Yeah. But the point is if you allow people to follow not just the beaten path but other paths you have a better chance of discovering something new because we cannot I mean Einstein made you know three mistakes between 1935 and 1940. He said black holes probably do not exist. He said gravitational waves probably do not exist. And he said quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. And all three received Nobel prizes for the teams that proved him wrong. Those are Nobel prizes from the past decade. Three teams, you know, doing different types of experiments and observations. And but did Einstein was wrong to assume uh to make assumptions or or claims that turned out to be wrong? No. Because that's the nature of working at the frontier. You make mistakes every now and then. You know, you might be right and that will be a breakthrough. But you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks. And it's really I mean the whole idea of tenure in academia was based on on on the proposition that you want people to take risks so that they don't have job insecurity. don't worry about their so what these zealots I call them say is you know we don't want people to deviate from the beaten path because we base our stature we base our honors awards and so forth on past knowledge we don't want new knowledge unless it's proven beyond any doubt but how would it be proven if you keep ridiculing anything different you know we those expert most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky. And then in 1803 there was a meteor shower in Leazge and Bio a French physicist realized it's real. There are rocks falling from the sky. Now all my colleagues say there could be only rocks in the sky. You know we know that we launched some spacecraft but you know we're probably alone. Uh and it doesn't make sense. Um, but let me just mention a few other uh anecdotes from the past week because I didn't really finish. So, Jamie, can you uh show the next one? What is it? This one is about Sphere in Las Vegas. As you know, it's the uh the most impressive uh venue for entertainment in the world. Have you been there? Have you seen a show there? I'll tell you. I not only I've been I've been to the top of the sphere which is like 120 m high. Here you see me from inside the sphere. This is the exosphere by the way. It's covered with LED displays. We went all the way to the top. Why? Because a year ago um two very distinguished visitors came to the front door of my home. By the way, lots of interesting people show up at my uh front door. This was Jim Dolan. uh who owns the Medicine Square Garden as you know and also the Sphere um and Jane Rosental the CEO of Tribeca Enterprises and they made me an offer that I cannot refuse and they said would you be able to put a Galileo project observatory I'm leading the Galileo project to look for unusual objects around the earth and they said could you build an observatory on top of the sphere because you know Jim Dolan really is interested in science and especially in finding you know whether there is some alien intelligence out there. Uh and I said of course I will be delighted. So that was September 2024 one year after the sphere was opened with a U2 concert as you may know. I don't know if you've been there. I've been there for the UFC. Oh yeah. UFC. Exactly. So anyway, I was there just a few months ago with my research team. We went all the way to the top and installed, as you can see here, an array of infrared cameras that monitors the entire sky above Vegas at all times. So, you can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background. It's like a freckle, you know, on top of the sphere, the exosphere, which is the biggest display on Earth, you know, but we measured that there is not much light pollution actually and we can operate this observatory. We also put a an array of uh visible light cameras there and it's operating. Okay. And we hope to see a few million objects over the sky of Vegas and decide whether any of them has a performance that deviates from the envelope of humanmade technologies. How do we do that? We we have the sphere as one point but then we put two copies of that that observatory uh 10 km away on a triangle and um uh that allows us to look at objects in the sky from different directions just like we have two eyes so we can gauge the distance. So here we have three eyes looking at the sky above Vegas and we can tell the distance, the velocity, the acceleration of objects and ask whether they are lying within the performance envelopes of humanmade objects and that would be amazing. It's very exciting. I see that also as an opportunity to communicate to the public the excitement about science. That's what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenal really wanted to deliver. And u I'm hoping uh that we will find something really anomalous you know because as we know the uh intelligence agencies are reporting to the US Congress about objects they cannot identify and you know that could be two things they're getting you know the defense budget for 2026 is a trillion dollars. Okay if they tell us that with a trillion dollars there are still objects they cannot identify above the US they're not doing their job. they're not doing their job and we should be worried who sent these objects. Could it be adversarial nations? Okay, that's one possibility which has to do with national security. The second possibility is that it's maybe something from outside of this earth which would be even more significant. So either way, we need to figure this out. And I don't think I'm wasting my time leading the Galileo project to figure out whether there are anomalies, you know, that go beyond humanmade technologies because if it turns out that all the objects are humanmade, I will be happy to deliver the set of sensors we developed with the machine learning software that we developed to the department of war so that they can employ it for national security purposes. So my time was not wasted as a scientist. I'm doing something useful to society. The department of war can use it. Have no problem. Everything made by humans, by the way, is boring as far as I'm concerned. I want to see something from outside the solar system, which is not what the government should be about. The government should worry about national security, not about what lies outside the solar system. That's my job definition as an astrophysicist. Okay. And um so uh I feel that this is worthy pursuing. But the Galileo project is really the first organized project that constructed a reliable set of sensors in an observatory configuration that does systematic study of the sky to collect millions of objects in the sky per year. We have three observatories. One in Las Vegas as I mentioned and by the way this is the first time it's mentioned publicly. So uh that's amazing. and another one at um in Massachusetts and a third one in Pennsylvania. They were all funded by people who approached me and said, "Here is the money." Let me ask you this. If it wasn't for those, how many observatories are looking for objects that are not from this earth? Like is is that very rare? None. Well, there are some teams that are, you know, doing it making a trip to to collect some data. There is of course there's not constant observation of scientific quality data. No, that's crazy. That's crazy. That's what I'm saying. That's craziness. And by the way, by the way, um I gave a briefing to the US Congress on May 1st uh 2025 and uh Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was there and um and she was very excited about the work we're doing. Uh but the day before that um I visited um an office in the Pentagon that is called the old domain anomaly resolution office and I asked them you know you looked into an uh all these unidentified objects reported in the past by military personnel did anything trigger your attention as something truly anomalous and they said not really. There are some uh you know there are some reports uh by FBI agents that s really crazy stuff but we don't have any data from instruments and this is an office within the Pentagon which is funded to figure out things and so obviously what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo project that I'm leading but you would think that it would be sort of the vested interest of government you know to invest in research related to that, which is what the Galo project is doing. Well, here's the thing. I would have thought it was already done. I don't like that. Until we're having this conversation, I can't believe that they're not monitoring the sky constantly for anomalous objects. Well, they you remember the the Chinese spy balloon that was missed, right, and shut down. Yeah. But that's that was so the thing to keep in mind they are getting data on things in the sky. But if you don't have the right software now with AI, right? If you don't have highquality scientists the way that the Manhattan project employed, you might not figure out things. There is a reason why the Manhattan project recruited the very best scientists. So I say put a billion dollars on this or more. Bring in the best scientists in the world to figure it out. I'm funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galo project. The government can do a bit what is a billion dollars is is a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon. But if you know you you should think about the the the potential risk from drones that are used by adversarial nations and you want to have the very best sensors using the very best of course AI. I just can't believe that that's not already being done. That's what's so confusing. I would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already. Well, that's especially when you take in all these anecdotal stories, all these different stories of people spotting air, some sort of a ship, something something that moves in a very strange way. I I would think that they're monitoring this stuff all the time and not just with radar. You see, there is an approach which is to wait for the government to figure out things or to release declassify them. So a lot of people want the government to declassify. I think it's just like waiting for God. You can wait forever, right? And it will never happen. So I say, you know, we don't need the government to tell us what is up there in the sky because astronomy is all about that. We can build observatories, look at the sky. Anything that is humanmade is not of interest to me. It's boring. I don't care, you know. I uh I just want to see if there's anything that Well, it's boring up to a point. If China has something that moves at, you know, Mach 30. Yeah. And can go underwater. Yeah. It's get things get very interesting. So my my methodology can definitely be used by the Department of War. Mhm. To figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned, but and by the way, um speaking about my colleagues, you know, so so there are people who said, "Oh, you're doing it to to to to win the Nobel Prize." like that's what you're or you're trying to sell books. You know, I don't charge a penny for my essays on medium.com. Money is not at all what motivates me. With respect to the Nobel Committee, you know, I have the same attitude as Jean Paul Sarter had and and Bob Dylan had. Uh if if I find evidence for alien intelligence, alien technology, I would not waste my time in a tuxedo in Stockholm. I will try to figure it out. That's much more important than an award given by a human to a human. We're dealing with something really consequential. Yeah. And for the scientific community to ignore that is irresponsible. Why is it irresponsible? Because it could affect the future of humanity. Well, I think the problem with the scientific community is the problem with all communities. They're overrun with ego. I agree. And as I explained at the beginning, it's just human beings when they get to a position of any kind of authority, any any sort of a position of respect and prestige, they want to protect that at all costs. And they they want to keep everyone down who they think is getting unwarranted attention above them, like yourself. But given the fundamental landscape that we live in, as I mentioned at the beginning, we live for a short time. We're not at the center of the universe. We arrived late to cosmic history. You know, we just arrived in the last few million years out of a 13.8 billion history, billion years history. You know, the cosmic play is not about us. If you arrive late to the play, at the end of the play, you are not at the center of stage. It's not about you. Okay? And our uh responsibility needs to be, you know, to find other actors that were around for much longer because they know what the play is about. Yes. And let me ask you this. Have you seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited? The only data I'm aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies of Omua Mua of three Atlas which are very different anomalies. Right? And there was also uh a meteor that I discovered with my former undergraduate student Amir Shiraj. Uh a meteor that was identified by US government satellites back in 2014. and it was moving so fast that it definitely came from outside the solar system and my colleagues were very concerned and they said we don't believe the US government so maybe um Jamie can show us I said okay at the time I was chairing the board on physics and astronomy of the nationalmies why didn't they believe the US government about this because all the previous meteors they thought must have been from the solar system and therefore You know and the US government also makes mistakes every now and then they say so the US government what department was observing this is the space force the the US space command so what I what I did is at dinner as I was what year was this this was around 2020 okay and um I expressed my frustration at dinner with as chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the nationalmies and there was a member there from Los Alamos national laboratory and he said, "Let me help you." We we managed to reach out to the US Space Command through the White House at the time. And um we got an official letter from the US Space Command saying we looked at the data and we can verify the 99.999% that this object, this meteor, which was roughly half a meter in size, came from outside the solar system. That's what they said. At that point, I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean where the explosion was identified from the fireball. There was a huge amount of light to go there and search for the materials from that object because it was moving fast. It was moving at 60 km/s relative to the solar system. Very similar to three three Atlas. So, it was fast and moreover the object maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere. It didn't explode until it got within 20 km of the surface of the ocean. So, it must have been extremely tough, much tougher than all the previous meteors cataloged uh by NASA. Okay. So, I can show you some images from that trip to the Pacific Ocean. Actually, it was documented by Netflix. Uh and there will be a documentary coming out um within a year next year, 2026. This this was the team of researchers that came with me on the deck of the ship and we collected materials with a magnetic sled. This is a sled made with magnets on top of it. You can see the Netflix team at the lower left here. Um and um then I brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here. I shipped it by FedEx to my home. Uh this was a $1.5 million expedition. So why would you ship it by FedEx? Why wouldn't you just carry it with you? because I was worried that some somewhere in the airport they would say no we have to confiscate that but don't they know who you are? Can't you like get somebody to call in? I don't want to uh take any risk. So it's just a bunch of metal. No here you can see the material. So it's mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean 2 km deep you know one mile or so a little more than a mile. And then we I I found these you know we found these molten droplets you see that are very distinct relative to grains of sand. and we isolated them. I had a you can go to the you can see here the these molten droplets and turns out that 10% of them uh did not have the composition of materials from the solar system and so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard Stein Jacobson and uh I had a summer intern Sophie Burks that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis. How did my colleagues respond to that? They said, "Oh, he went to the wrong place because there was a seismic signal that could have been misidentified and could have been a truck passing nearby." And so a reporter from the New York Times said, "Oh, they went to the wrong place because there it could have it was not a meteor. It was a truck." And I wrote to the reporter and I said, "How irresponsible are you? You didn't even ask me. The data that led us to this place was based on the fireball on the light that was detected by US government satellites and the US space command confirmed the location. It was not based on the seismic detection of the signal. We just you we just looked and found this. So it seems like your colleagues are contacting New York Times to try to dismiss you. I wrote to the editor at the time and said, "Look, if this is what you write about science, how can we trust what you write about politics?" Right? Yeah. So these objects, these very small molten droplets, right, what did you determine from them? We found that 10% of them had a compos chemical composition different than solar system materials that were found before. And again, my colleagues, some of them said, oh, they found coal ash, you know, the burnt uh material from coal. So we said, okay, well, let's check. we uh identified 61 elements from the periodic table and showed that it's definitely not coash and then they said it's something else from the crust of the earth. We check that it's not from the crust of the earth. It's a a an endless battle to basically I mean they can throw mud without having access to the I don't understand this is a known meteorite. It it hit Earth. You collected pieces of material from the scene where it hit, right? And they still want to dismiss it. Yeah. They say the government cannot be trusted. They raise a lot of dust. If you raise a lot of dust, you can say I don't see anything. Well, you get the New York Times involved, too, which is even stupider. Well, it's so crazy that the New York Times jumped in without contact. But this is the landscape I have to operate in. And the one thread through this landscape is that common sense is not common. Right. Well, it's it seems more than that. It seems like a coordinated attack. It seems like a bunch of people have a personal vendetta. Yes. Which is probably based on some petty jealousy and also they just don't like people stepping ahead of them. You know, you know, I I told my uh students in the class, I said on the first class, I said, "What is the strongest force in academia? It's not gravity. It's not electromagnetism. It's jealousy." I would hope it's curiosity. That's what sucks. That's what brought me into science. Well, that's what you describe, you know, and I'm naive, you know. I don't change my uh my reason for doing something just because other people misbehave, you know. It's I feel like I'm attending a party where the the the the attendees are misbehaving. And all I can hope for is for a guest to show up and change the situation. You know, one reason I'm seeking intelligence in interstellar space is I don't often find it in academia. Well, I think addressing it helps. I I think what you're doing helps. I think uh these kind of conversations do help because I don't think a lot of people are aware of the kind of resistance that you face. And I know it's a lot of what you discussed and I I wish it was less, but uh it's important for people to know that you have to go through this kind of nonsense. Well, I I don't especially when you think this object three eye atlas is weird. Yeah, it's weird. You know, I I served in the Israeli military and um we parachuted, we drove tanks. I was in a special unit that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24. And then the SDI, the the Star Wars initiative, President Rean brought me to the US. Uh and I remember while serving in the par troopers that there was a saying that sometimes you have to put your body on the barbed wire so that your friends, colleagues, soldiers can cross climb over your back. Yes. And uh I you know as long as I allow young people to innovate, as long as I attract kids to science, I did my job. It's not about me. You see, it's about humanity getting better and it will not get better with AI as we discussed. It could get better with alien intelligence because we will realize that there is something else out there that is more accomplished than we are. So, it will serve as a role model. You know, in 1882, Fred Niche said, "God is dead." And since then we had a century of modern science and technology where we feel hubris. You know we we are argon we you know we are at the top of the food chain. You know we go to restaurants we eat other animals that are less intelligent than we are. But just think about it. If it turns out that we are not at the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy. There is someone more intelligent than us. If that someone comes to visit Earth, will we be served in their soup? I wouldn't think so. I would think there's plenty of other things to eat that aren't intelligent. I mean, that's sort of the deal that we make here. We eat things, but we try not to eat intelligent things, which is not entirely true because we eat a lot of octopus. Yeah. I I had this dilemma in Boston. Quite intelligent. Yeah. And then there's a lot of people in indigenous tribes that really prefer monkey meat. You know that's th those are human beings that love to eat monkeys. That gets a little weird, too. But I don't think they're going to travel all the way over here to eat people. I think if we were that delicious, we would be eating each other a lot. No, it's probably a situation where we are just like ants in the cracks of a pavement and there is a biker passing by and we are trying to make sounds and you know get attention. We think it's about us. It's always about us. According to us, but it's not about us. Well, it's it's not about us cosmically. uh when you take into consideration the the in the vast spans of the universe. But if I was an intelligent species and my curiosity led me to explore other intelligent species and they were far more advanced than us, I think they would find us quite fascinating. That was the the the argument that I got into with Neil Degrass Tyson where he was like, I don't think we're that interesting. Like they would visit us. You have to keep in mind he's not a practicing astrophysicist. He's not writing scientific papers. I write a paper almost every week. I'm in the trenches doing science. It's very different. It's just like, you know, you have soccer players and you have commentators on the bench, you know, and you can be a commentator, popularize science, but the difference is that as a commentator, you will never score a goal. Well, that's my position as a UFC commentator. I don't get in there and fight people. I understand the fighting. I can do my best to help explain it to people, but I don't do it. So, yeah. You know, a few months ago, experts. A few months ago, I was at a gathering and there was a cocktail hour and um it was with celebrities and uh I saw Margot Trobby standing and um of course I have nothing to offer, you know, like what kind of opening line would I start a conversation. I I I didn't know how to start a conversation. So I was just standing on the side and then someone came with my book Interstellar and said, "Would you mind signing it for me?" And so I signed the book and she noticed it and she came over and said, "Are you a lobe? I really wanted to hear more about what you're doing." And we started a conversation for 20 minutes. Then I gave my talk and Jerry Brookheimimer was in the audience. He is one of the most accomplished, you know? Uh he came afterwards and said, "I just finished F1, you know, the Yeah. the movie. And um my next one is about a scientist like you searching for UAPs and trying to figure them out. Oh, and then I saw uh Broady Adren Broady was standing there and he told me I really want to become a scientist. You know, I always wanted to become a scientist. I said it's not too late. And then I went to Jerry and said, look, he should be your leading actor cuz Adrian really wanted to become casting calls. Look at that. Figuring it out for them. Interesting. Um, yeah. I mean, look, you science fiction is one of the most popular genres of of films ever because everybody has curiosity about it, but but nature might be much more imaginative than the best script writers in Hollywood. Very likely. And so if we look up, we might get a much better movie. And there is actually a Reuben, the Reubin Observatory funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy in Chile. It was inaugurated in June this year. Is that the VT array? No, the VT is a very large telescope by the European Southern Observatory. But this one was funded by the US. Uh, and it it has a 3.2 gigapixel camera monitoring the southern sky every four nights. And it's an amazing survey telescope. And by the way, sphere has a a display that is the biggest in the world of um uh you know uh 14,000 by 14,000 pixels. Okay, that's a factor of 13 less pixels than the Reubin camera has observing the real sky. Now Reubin will potentially based on estimates discover an interstellar object like three Atlas or even smaller every few months. So we are entering a new era where we will have a lot of visitors that we recognize. There might have been traffic all the time that we didn't were not aware of probably right and my recommendation is to establish an organization. I wrote to the United Nations about it. I wrote also to uh the international astronomical union to establish an organizational committee that would coordinate observations of these objects so we can figure out their nature and make sure and then of course inform policy makers politicians how to respond because when you have a visitor to your backyard you need to respond immediately. It's not like getting a radio signal from tens of thousands of light years away where you have plenty of time to wait here. You have to do something and so I hope that they they will do that. Uh and actually the international asteroid warning network just two days ago announced they will have a campaign looking at three atlas with a lot of observatories on earth uh between uh November 27th and January 27th. So I'm very glad that they decided to do that. They are related to the United Nations. Now what is it about Chile? Is it the atmosphere? Is it the altitude? As a result of geology, there is this um stretch of mountains that was erected and if you look at the map of Chile, it's sort of lying on a strip. Uh and not only that, the peaks reach a very high level so that you have less atmosphere between you and the stars. I mean the real problem right now is actually starling satellites that are artificial lights in the sky and we have to subtract them off because there are you know tense there will be tens of thousands of those. Uh we're trying to avoid city lights by going to these mountains and then we have city lights in the sky. Um but other than that it's less atmosphere so it's good to be high up and in addition um it's not very turbulent. The weather is very good there. So there is the Atakama desert and uh there are many astronomical observatories there and uh the other place where you have a lot of state-of-the-art facilities is Hawaii the ke the issue yeah the issue there is that there are severe political limitations because of the indigenous people there that are assigning religious sentiment to to the mountains. So they they cannot build more telescopes there. Uh so so Chile I mean the government in Chile is encouraging science and we are getting a lot of useful data from Chile. Yeah, it's it's we need more of it, right? We we need quite a bit more. We need some much more enhanced ability to observe the skies if these things are out there and we do miss a lot of them. And one of them could potentially be a civilization ender. You should probably be aware of that. I think also the president of the United States should be aware of that. Yeah, he should be. Have you ever talked to him? I haven't talked to him, but I spoke with others. Um, you know, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, Congressman, are they all aware? Well, in fact, Luna, Representative Luna, she called me on the phone a couple of months ago and asked me for an update on 3i Atlas, and I promise to send her routine updates. I, you know, I have essays that I write every day or two about the latest. Um, and she's very interested. Uh and um uh I you know I I in the I did communicate with people around the White House. Um but uh I think the president should be aware of that. Of course, most likely most objects would be uh just rocks, you know. By the way, this is the material that I brought back from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in these tubes. I brought one to show you here. Um and you know um we should approach the universe with a sense of curiosity but also modesty. You know it's really we desperately need to be more modest. Do you pay attention at all to all this uh UAP disclosure discussion and the discussion that there's some secret back engineering programs. What do you So a day after I was visiting Arrow the old domain anomaly resolution office at the Pentagon. I sit uh in Congress. I gave a briefing about the Galilo project and next to me is Eric Davis and he says I'm uh when I was worked in government I became aware of uh the fact that the US government has materials in its possession that it may have given to corporations like Loheed Martin or others um of uh crash sites uh of spacecraft from outside of this earth and including bi biologics biological material. So on the one hand I hear the day before that there is really nothing because the arrow people said that they have access to all the information within government and they haven't found anything and then a day later I hear Eric Davis saying what he said and the question is who should I believe and my point is I believe evidence so I want I I don't believe stories because you know the if there is a car accident. Uh different people give you different accounts of what really happened. That's why FIFA is using cameras to monitor soccer games. They don't go and ask the players or the audience whether there was a a goal in in a controversial case and they just use data. And so that is the scientific method. FIFA is using the scientific. So I don't care about stories because when I was a kid, I would sit at the dinner table, ask a difficult question and I would see the adults in the room inventing answers that made no sense as a kid, right? And I decided I don't care what the you know about these stories from things that happened in the past or whatever. I just want to figure it out myself from data being guided. Have you spoken to Gary Nolan? Of course. Have you ever talked to him about some of these anomalous alloys that what what is your thoughts on those? Well, the issue explain to people what they have found and how weird some of these things are. Yes. So, Gary in collaboration with other scientists looked into materials that were found under unusual circumstances and they realized that the structure of the materials uh is uh very improbable to have been made naturally. Uh now the issue I have with that is whether uh these materials were indeed uh they they came from the sky from some extraterrestrial origin or whether someone produced it you know or or did intention maybe it was another government that did something. So I really in terms of evidence I really need to get um conclusive evidence that will convince me beyond any reasonable doubt. It's just like you know uh in a rock solid chain of custody from the very beginning. But the key is that without seeking it you will never find it. So if you have the mindset that everything in the sky is rocks now and and that everything on earth is materials we are familiar with either from humans or uh you know natural process on earth. You will not invest time and resources to look for anything. And uh so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. very often you know if you have this uh uh these blinders it's just like with a horse you you put blinders on your eyes you can't look sideways you don't see that there are things beyond your path the path that is a beaten path everyone is taking that path why would you know it's a waste of your time to do the same thing as others are doing and science offers you a way out of that collecting evidence but for that you need money you need resources you need prestige to be able to lead a team that goes in a different direction. That's what I'm trying to do. Uh and you know, I think science will be served much better if we were to explore different paths until we figure out the truth. Yes. Um did you ever get a look at any of these alloys? Uh not the ones that um Gary looked at and I saw his papers. But to me the main uncertainty there is where did it come from? Now someone could have manufactured in the case of the Meteor. I know that there was an explosion there from an object. I understand what you're saying, but if you if they're being correct about the dates of these things, someone couldn't have manufactured it then. The technology wasn't available, right? Some of these are from the 1950s. For this alloy to have been created and layered atomically from the 1950s, that technology, as far as we we know, is not available by us. So, there's a lot of weird theories. And one of the weird theories is a breakoff civilization that somehow or another survived under the ocean. That's the kookiest one. But there's a lot of people that are talking about that as if it's a a real possibility that there are anomalous things they find in the ocean. They find things that plummet into the water and don't make a wave and that they pass through the ocean going 500 knots, which we don't have any capability of doing anything remotely like that with the resistance of the ocean. Representative Tim Borchett said that. Yeah. And he talk Tim Bashette was talking about these five areas that they know these anomalous things keep coming from. Yeah. This is very intriguing. Uh we didn't survey most of the ocean surface area and um forget about inside the ocean. Inside the ocean. Um, so I think we should definitely look into the the ocean and the rest of Earth and but that would be the most nutty thing of all time if there was an advanced civilization living in the ocean this entire time doing and doing what? Monitoring us. Okay, speaking about nutty things, let me mention an example. Okay. uh you know back u in 1970 there was a graduate student at Princeton called the Jacob Beckinstein and he read papers written by Stephven Hawking who said uh he demonstrated Stephen Hawking demonstrated that when you take two black holes the area surrounding the black holes a black hole is an ultimate prison nothing can escape from it it's just like Vegas anything that happens in stays in it uh but when you merge two because the area surrounding them the product of the merger is always bigger than the sum of the areas. He he demonstrated that mathematically and then uh Beckenstein said well that's interesting because we know about the second law of thermodynamics where entropy always increases so maybe the black holes have entropy related to their surface and his mentor was John Willer at Princeton and he said you know this is a crazy enough idea that it might be true speaking about naughty ideas. Yeah. And then Stephen Hawking heard Beckinstein speak about it and he said that's nonsense. That's nonsense. Makes no sense. I will prove it to be wrong. So he used quantum mechanics in a curved spaceime around a black hole and lo and behold he found they emit radiation. They have a temperature. They have entropy. This is the biggest discovery, theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking celebrated since you know for 51 years now. Um and he went to disprove Beckinstein and proved him right. It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of the person who benefited most from discovering that Beckinstein was right. So my point about crazy ideas is, you know, and by the way, over the past 50 years, the mainstream of theoretical physics was obsessed with black hole entropy trying to use it to figure out a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. We don't have that theory, by the way. And that's the reason, you know, if I ever meet an alien scientist, what is the first question I would ask? Okay, it's what happened before the big bang? because it defines our cosmic roots. But in addition to that, it also will help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity because Einstein's gravity breaks down when we go to the big bang when the density of matter and radiation was infinite. So, you know, for example, if we knew how the universe started, what ingredients you need to put together, how much heat you want to apply um to make our universe, you would have a recipe for making a universe. It's just like recipe for a cake. If you have a recipe for a cake, you can become a baker. Okay? If we had the recipe for making the big bang, we could apply to the job of God because one of the defining feature of God is the ability to create a universe. And just think that what we call God could have been a very advanced scientist that did a laboratory experiment, created our universe in it. Right? So, um that's what I would like to ask the aliens. Well, let me ask you this. When when someone from the government tells you about biologics and this crash retrieval program, don't you want to be able to see that somehow? Did you ask if it's possible? Did you try to set up meetings? Yeah. I I when I ask, of course, you you encounter a brick wall, you know. What did they say? What was your question? Well, when I visited the the Pentagon, my question was, you know, is there something like that? And they deny it. Okay. Right. Um and then I'm being told maybe it's not inside government, maybe it was delegated to corporations, outside government. And you know, one employee of of one of these corporations told me privately, you know, it may it may not be wrong. So I don't know who to believe. You see, these are it's just like people tell me stories that I don't know whether to trust until I see it. And I'm very happy to help government figure it out, you know, because their ro it's it's a a misuse of their privileges to attend to data related to what's outside the solar system, right? They they're supposed to deal with what happens on Earth on the surface of Earth, right? National security, they are not supposed to tell us what lies outside the solar system. And I want to help them figure it out, but they don't give me that data. And I don't know if it exists because I have never seen it. Have you tried to pursue it though? Have you like gone through different channels to try to figure out if there's someone that you can communicate with any of these? So far, I didn't get any contract because it's defense contractor. So that that's the the current most attractive theory is that the defense contractor cuz if you had a a project that they were trying to backineer, those are the people that you'd bring it to. The people that make the actual rockets themselves, the people that make the jets and the spaceships, you'd bring it to them, right? But I should tell you that, you know, we always think, oh, AI is the future. We've never used AI in space. And to me, it would sound much more natural if we had a visitor with intelligence, but it's based on AI, not biologics, because then it can survive the long journey. It will never get bored. Which is why the biologics is weird. if they have supposedly some or that gives you more of an indication that maybe is something from the ocean. If it's something from inside the ocean and then it's a biological thing that you know at one point in time there was an advanced civilization that figured out a way to survive under the ocean. You know I I really admire biology because think about our brain it's using 20 watts. It's the size of the brain the human brain was limited by the metabolic power of the human body. We it's using a fifth of the power of the human body and that's the largest brain that an animal like us can have given our body size and the amount of food that we use. So it's operating on 20 watts. Then you have these AI systems that are barely you know getting to the level of sophistication to imitate it and they use gigawatts. We need nuclear powers and biology figured it out. You know that's that's amazing. Also, as much as uh you know, self-driving cars are amazing, we don't have self-replicating cars in nature. You know, you have animals like oursel, you know, we replicate oursel. We we have kids that that can function and consume materials from the environment. Just imagine your car, okay, using the sand or using some stuff in the environment to repair itself. Every time you bump into something, it can create smaller cars for you to use. That's amazing. Like we can't even imagine building a car that will self-replicate. And nature did it. So to me, we are at the infancy of understanding how much better we can go than AI. Because if nature did it out of random processes and created such a brain on 20 watts and we are struggling with gigawatts to imitate it. You know there must be a better path forward that is similar to biology but much more powerful than random processes that happened on earth and and also self-replicating you. So if you send a spacecraft to a planet instead of you know uh sending many you send just one that replicates and then sends more and so forth and this thing fills up the galaxy. And by the way yeah that was a notion that Fonoyman had before the DNA a year before the DNA was discovered. So he realized that it could be done technologically before scientists realized that you know how nature does it. Um and uh I'm really at o about you know I'm not just modest because of the vast expanses of space and time in the universe and you know the real estate on earth is such a small amount compared to real estate out there. You know we have real estate u professionals now mediating peace in the Middle East. uh but um you know they deal with real estate on this rock that is 3 millions of of of the mass of the sun just tiny rock how much real estate there is in the cosmos just think about the realtors out there and uh and the point is it's not just that it's the fact that you know that um we should be modest because many of those things existed before we came to ex before the earth was formed right so so the odds are there's many different stages of civilization out there not just our stage but advanced and even not as advanced. Yeah. I I think about that like Darwinian selection. You know Darwinian selection is the fittest survives. Okay. Now what is the fittest in the cosmic scheme of things? The fittest is a species that realizes that staying on the rock that you were born on is not the big deal. Becoming interstellar is the big deal. going from one rock to another, from Earth to Mars, you know, it's a nice step, baby step, right? But it's not the real deal. The real deal is going interstellar. And if someone else figured it out, that someone built monuments that would survive for billions of years, long before long beyond what planets can survive in the habitable zone around stars because of the evolution of the star. And those are the ones that will be remembered by historians of the Milky Way galaxy. You can ask what will what will be remembered in the future. You know here on earth history in the next decade or more than decade will be written by AI. It will not be written by humans. Okay? So we need to be kind to AI. We should not unplug them because they will they will write very bad history books. Uh but in the Milky Way galaxy whoever writes the history will not remember us. Uh you know the the question of Enrio Fermy where is everybody. Mhm. Okay. You can ask the same thing about humans. There used to be 117 billion humans on Earth. Right now there are 8 billion. Where is everybody? They died. So the same is true about civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Most of them died. Most of them perished. We were not around to listen to their cries for help. You know, we just came recently to exist with telescopes just over the past centuries. So, and maybe when we hear cries like that, we say, "Oh, no, it's nothing. It's a some natural process that makes those cries when we detect the fast radio burst or something." Um, and uh, my point is there were lots of things like us or even better than us for billions of years. You know, just like the earth was moving around the sun for 4.5 billion years before the Vatican even existed. We can live under the illusion that we are the most important actor on the cosmic stage, but we are probably not. And we should approach it from a, you know, a sense of modesty that that we are just minor actors. Let's figure out what's going on here. Let's find them and then have some relationship with those uh you know these are siblings and of our family of intelligent civilizations. I had a group of religious scholars that came to Harvard just uh last year and they asked me if we find extraterrestrials will it affect our religious beliefs? And I said, "Look, I have two daughters." And when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love that I have to the first one. So thinking about God as a parent that can attend to only one child is very limiting. There may be lots of siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations. it you it should just bring all Let me ask you this though because these are beliefs that you have and they're not necessarily based on actual evidence because there's not real evidence of other civilizations. It's just a number game, right? Okay. But that's not evidence. Not evidence, right? So what do you think is the most interesting and compelling evidence of there being extra extraterrestrial life? So you know the reason I regard it as an important argument is the copernican principle which is saying we are not unique under similar circumstances you you if you start with a soup of chemicals on a planet you will get something like us right and therefore there are billions of earth sun analoges other houses in our cosmic street they might have had you know many of them might have had residents like us now it's true that maybe but there's the the issue of earth itself earth itself has billions of organisms but only one that figured out how to make a cell phone, right? And really recently, right? You know, so it took a long time and a lot of weird things had to happen before it made us, right? But my point is, you know, if but the probability is that we wouldn't exist. No, no, but more likely just not existed. If you read the news every day, you realize that there is a lot of room for improvement. As much as we are proud of our intelligence, we're screwing up the world. Okay? And my point is I can imagine a lot of much uh more accomplished students in our class of intelligent civilizations and therefore we should have respect for the search for them because we can learn from them. They would serve better role models for us. So I'm coming at it from a practical point of view. I'm saying we are screwing up things. Just read the news. Um and therefore let's get inspiration not from what we hear about stories that of things that happen on earth and so forth not by the limited uh you know data set that we are we have on earth but collect as much data as possible about our cosmic neighborhood so that we can be inspired of course now let me ask you this what would you do like if somebody just wrote you a blank check and said Aby you've got some great ideas we need to figure out how to look for life out there in the universe. What would you do? Well, that's I wrote a paper about that and I said um yeah, we we should um we should attack this question along several fronts. One of them, you know, we have the Reubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky. We need a copy of it in the northern sky. So, we have a full alert system that would notify us of interstellar objects coming in. We need interceptors, a mission, you know, a spacecraft that when we detect with those two observatories, we detect an object that comes from outside the solar system. Then we can maneuver a spacecraft so that it will meet it along its path. And in fact, the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter was almost capable of doing that. So I realized that wrote a paper about it, told the representative Luna about it and she wrote a a very uh gracious letter, visionary letter to u the interim administrator of NASA, Shan Duffy, encouraging NASA to try and use Juno to observe and get close to 3i Atlas. If Juno had all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with three Atlas, but it lo it used most of it. uh and I spoke with the principal investigator of Juno and he promised me that they will also use their radio antenna to look at threeatas in the radio just to see if there's any transmission. Go ahead. Yeah. So interceptors you in answer to your question um potential fleet of interceptors thinks that can come really close and take a close-up photograph because a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Okay, I don't need to speak. If I showed you a picture of something that looks technological, three Atlas has bolts on its surface and buttons that you can press, you will not argue with me that it's a comet. Okay? So, we need things, cameras that come close to the object, potentially even land on it, bring materials back to Earth. Okay? Right. Um and of course the ability to detect it to detect such objects at large distances that investment is at a level of billion billions of dollars. Okay. To do that in space. My argument is once the first encounter is verified we will have a trillion dollars per year for that because we invest $2.4 trillion in military budgets. And when we know that there is alien technology that is putting Earth at risk, okay, then we should allocate a a significant fraction of our military budgets to have a system that protects the earth. It's called planetary defense. Okay? And um we are dealing not with rocks, we are dealing with technological gadgets. So it's much it should be much more sophisticated. So I'm saying let's start with the level of billions of dollars just search uh if we encounter a a clearly technological alien object then the budget will rise by a factor of a thousand from the military budget uh portion going into it but in addition to that of course we should look for technological signatures in other ways and I wrote papers about it over the years I suggested searching for artificial lights you know you look at a planet It's illuminated by the star from one side. Okay? So as it moves around the star, you it's just like the moon, you know, you can see it the illuminated side from different angles. Okay? However, if it has on the night side, if it has artificial light lighting, then what you see, you don't even have to resolve the planet. You see more light than you expect based on reflection of of starlight. Okay? So that's another thing you can search for. uh you can look for uh you know the traditional way was looking for radio signals which is just like waiting for a phone call you know nobody may call you when you're listening um so that didn't prove uh productive for other than the wow signal other than the wow signal um then um in addition to that um I wrote I I wrote a paper saying look we are planning to invest $10 billion uh in searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in atmospheres of exoplanets and that's what the astronomy community defined in the 2020 decadel survey is the highest priority and it's called the habitable world observatory and I said okay well it's nice to search for those chemical fingerprints of of microbes but you we can also search for you know the chemical fingerprints of industrial pollution you know in the earth atmosphere we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made CFC's for example and we can search for those again the mainstream is you know they might make a footnote saying oh that is also possible but I'm saying this could be a major research frontier where you search for industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres not frankly I find microbes boring I mean obviously it will be amazing to find that life exists elsewhere but we can learn much more from an intelligent neighbor than we we can learn from microbes What are the best images that we have of three Atlas? The best one so far was released by the Hubble Space Telescope and it shows this jet pointed towards the sun. It was taken on July 21st, 2025. That's the most clear image. Yes, that's the best because you find that Jimmy Yeah, it's actually in my one of one of my uh No, that's from the ground Germany south. That's more recent. That's at the end of August. So in uh it's blue in my one of my slides. You can see of 3 Atlas July 21st. Yeah. So it's one of the slides that has a blue uh with Yeah. You see it on the right here. So that's it. That's it. And u the scale of the resolution, you know, the innermost pixel is hundreds of kilometers. Okay. It's about 100 kilometers per pixel or something. Uh The object itself should be of 10 times smaller. So you can't really resolve it. What you're seeing here is the glow of light around the object from scattering sunlight. And the question is what is producing that light? You know what is scattering sunlight? And the unusual thing about it as soon as this was released you know the comet experts said oh yeah now it's proven it's a comet. But I said look it's the sun the sunf facing emission that is elongated. It's not the other side. The extent of the glow backwards away from the sun is the same as sideways. You don't see any any cometary tail here. Uh and in fact, we're looking at it just like a cigar along the long axis. So it should be 10 times longer than it is wide if you were to look at it from the side. Amazingly, the best image was obtained on October 2nd, 2025 when 3II Atlas came within 30 million kilometers of Mars and it was taken by the high-rise camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is operated by NASA. You as you remember October 1st was the government shutdown. So October 2nd the data was taken but it was never released. I wrote to the principal investigator of high-rise asked can can I get the data I'm a scientist you know I you can do the press release afterwards I would like to see it right no response and so it's already 3 weeks since that data was taken that is the best image yet to come and the advantage of it not only it has 30 kilometers per pixel resolution because it came very close to Mars which is one of the anomalies why does it come so close you know this object is a from interstellar space because it comes in the plane of the planets around the sun and it also the arrival time was fine-tuned for it to come to the right place at the right time to be close to Mars to be close to Venus and then close to Jupiter and not to earth it's behind the sun when the earth uh you know when it comes closest to the anyway so it's best for observations by all the space assets by all the orbiters we have around Mars around Jupiter on the way to Jupiter, you know. So, has someone seen this image from Yeah, the people on the high-rise team must have seen it and what do they say? And just, you know, I get requests for four to eight interviews every day from television, from um podcast and so forth. So just before I came to you um a few minutes before that I was asked you know could it be that this is a signature that NASA holds some really sensational data and I said you know it's much more likely not to be related to extraterrestrial intelligence but to terrestrial stupidity because this has to do with a government shutdown right makes no sense whatsoever. for scientists especially since the PI the principal investigator is from the University of Arizona uh they should have shared it with scientists they haven't done so and why but why because my guess is they're taking their time the communication office of NASA you know is not working because of the shutdown but given that this subject is viral you know this is the high-rise web page thank you Jamie so it says any images of interstellar comet 31 atlas 3 excuse me are considered NASA wide news because the federal government hasn't shut down communications of NASA news has been suspended. So that's what it is like they would have to release it through NASA. Maybe they have written in the contract they need approval from NASA but for NASA not to approve it but they can't approve it because they're not working. No, Sean Duffy the interim administrator can definitely say get in there. Why don't you call Sean say hey what are you doing? I should try that. Yeah, why don't you do that? Okay. Because you know um this is important because this would be the best this is the best image. Yeah. 30 km per pixel. But moreover more importantly it's watching uh you know the camera was looking at the glow around 3atas sideways cuz it was moving towards the sun and it looked at it sideways. So we can actually see what exactly it was doing uh on October 2nd. And the claim is during September, the month of September, what looked like an anti- tale, a jet towards the sun, h changed into a tail during September. So we should see October 2nd. What does it look like? And by the way, it's not like a beautiful, it was not a beautiful tale the way you see around comets. Never. Ever. You know, and uh I And that's because the composition of it. I don't know, right? Because if it was covered with water, if it was just ice, you would see this enormous tail. Correct. And dust. Dust. Yeah. Uh so what the web telescope told us uh you know from the data, it took a spectrum of the gas around it found that it's 150 kilograms per second that this object is losing in the side facing the sun. And out of that 87% is carbon dioxide, CO2 CO2. and 9% is CO, carbon monoxide, which is really uh dangerous to humans. Um, and then 4% is water. 4% by mass is water. Very small fraction. When the object was discovered, the experts said, "Oh, it's most likely made of water." That's what they said made of water. Then several teams reported, "We found water." I looked at their papers. One of them had very large uh error bars. You know the the data was not of good quality. There was a lot of noise and I said that's not a a clear detection. Another one was basing making some assumption about how much dust there is that blocks ultraviolet light and based on that they got a result that there is a lot of water and then the web telescope actually measured the composition and found very just 4% by mass water. So I was attacked when I said it's probably not real that the these teams are reporting things but they are not real even though they made press releases but then web demonstrated that it's only 4% by mass. Okay. So that proved my point even though you know I was not in a member of those teams but so it's 4% by mass water and then the question is is there any dust? If there was dust particles that are half a micrometer in size, roughly the size of the wavelength of the of visible light, you know, they these kinds of particles scatter sunlight very effectively. If that was the case, you would see them being pushed those particles being pushed by radiation pressure from the sun to trail the object from behind it away from the sun. Why? Because they're being slowed down. The the object is approaching at some speed. they are slowed down so that then you end up with a um you know a tail going away from the sun and that's what you see in comets. There was no evidence for that during July and August. Now in September it seemed to have reversed from being an antiale to a tail. I want to see the image from still a tail that's very small compared to other comets that we've observed right now. How many comets have we actually observed? Is it just that there's so many out there that a lot of them have very unusual characteristics like three eye atlas? Well, just think about a visit an animal that visits your backyard, okay? And of course, your family members would say it's most likely a street cat because these are very common. Then you take an image of that animal and you see that, you know, there is a tail, but it's coming from its forehead. And then you realize from the image that it's at least a thousand times more massive than a cat, a street cat. And then you realize that it sheds nickel and then you realize that it visual, but my question is how many of them have been observed to form this hypothesis that it's unusual? We're talking about hundreds of objects. Hundreds. At least hundreds. But how many of them have come from interstellar? How many of them? No, this is the second one, right? There was Borisov, right? Right. Borisov was the one discovered in 2019. Looked like a comet. Very similar to that's the point is that there's so few that have come from from that are interstellar. So that's why I'm saying it could be natural. A lot to measure, right? So it could be natural, right? And in fact, that may be the most likely association or but but uh we want to we need to figure out why it's so unusual. Okay? Because what is the shape of it? We don't know because we don't have an image of the object itself. One thing we think they would be able to get it if they had this Mars footage. They would get an image of that would depends how big the object is. One way to get the object, you know, structure is as it spins around and and 3i Atlas does have a rotation period of 16 hours. And as it spins around, if it's like a a cigar- shaped, let's say, then the area that reflects the sunlight changes over time. So you see variability and we haven't seen that much. There is very little variability. So it's not um the object is not very different than than a sphere um with slight variations as you see the uh you know the the the rotation of the object. So it it's similarly shaped to something that you would expect to be from an intelligent life force. I don't know that. I want to figure out what it is and get as much data as possible on it. Right. But if you imagine a spaceship, you would imagine something that, you know, has some sort of like geometric structure to it, right? Well, Randdevu with Rama, you know, is a book that was written by Arthur C. Clark and um uh in it the there is a cylindrical object that arrives into the inner solar system with dimensions of all the tens of kilometers not very far from what we are talking about here. Mhm. Uh Arto C. Clark was an amazing visionary science fiction writer and you know 2001 a space odyssey is an amazing film that he made with Stanley Kubri. Y uh in it you see these monoliths and by the way there is a question of how to interpret them. The way I think about the monolith and by the way this is just a remark on art. It's not about the real universe, but I think of it as, you know, sensors put uh in the baby room, in the room of a baby. And we as a civilization is is like a baby, you know, we're just a few million years old. And uh actually in the film, it shows the progression of human history. And so as a baby, you know, these aliens were putting monitors in the room to see what we are up to. And you know that's that's something that makes sense. You know there is this dark forest hypothesis one solution to enrio. So Enrico Fermy back in 1950 had lunch together with Edward Teller and other people associated with the Manhattan project and he was a very good physicist both an experimentalist and a theorist and Enrico Fermy was talking with them about extraterrestrials and they both they all agree that it's likely that they exist. Okay, good physicist. That makes a lot of sense, right? And then Enrico said, "But where is everybody?" You know, in an Italian accent, what where is everybody? You know, and u if I were next to him, I would come to him and say, "Enrico," I would put my hand around his shoulder. I would say, "Enrico." This is a question that every lonely person asks. And what you tell a lonely person is don't be so presumptuous. you are not that attractive. They will not come to you and have breakfast with you or or lunch with you in Los Alamos when you want them to appear. You need to seek them. That's what you tell lonely people. You need to go to dating sites. You need to look through the window of your home and search for them. And he didn't build a telescope. An experimentalist asking this question should have built a telescope and searched for unidentified objects in the sky. You know, that's the way to figure out the answer. Where is everybody? It's the most romantic question in science. But, you know, and and we have those blind dates. Uh maybe it's just with rocks, maybe not. Uh and we should just be open-minded when we address those blind dates. I think we could end it with that. It's a very perfect way of phrasing this whole thing. I'm I'm fascinated by it all and I'm really happy there's someone like you that's looking into this with such curiosity and that you're undeterred by all these haters. Well, thank you. And I should just uh mention that, you know, there are all kinds of technologies that I can imagine that we don't even have. And and for example, you know, if if a civilization has an ability to create negative negative mass that produces repulsive gravity, then you can propel you know a spacecraft without any fuel. uh in fact I'm working on a paper now with um a group of collaborators applied physics on this and uh you could also potentially imagine time machines with negative masses. So there are lots of things we don't know. Let's let's be modest. The future unlimited possibilities especially if we developed artificial general super intelligence and it helps us and it starts devising new methods of propulsion, new methods of who knows seeding the universe with other life. Yeah. And and just like in in in our private life, finding a partner can change your future for the better. Finding an alien partner. Yes. All right. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you. Thank you very much. Bye everybody.