Chapter 1: Could alien technology change humanity?
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You can argue that we are at the center, that there is nothing like us, that we are unique and special. But if we have neighbors,
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you know, it wouldn't change. It will just be illusioned. Nobody should bet against Elon Musk. And that gave me the
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idea to bet against Elon Musk. Maybe the Big Bang was produced by a quantum gravity engineer.
Chapter 2: Introducing Avi Loeb
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Hello everybody. Welcome back to Watch Mojo and the Unveiled podcast where we bring you interviews with leading experts on UFOs and UAPs. I am your host
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Rob and today I have the pleasure of speaking to Harvard professor Avibe. He is the head of the Galileo project and
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the bestselling author of the books extra extraterrestrial the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth and interstellar the search for
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extraterrestrial life and our future in the stars. Professor Loe, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thanks for having me. Um, so you've been very vocal in recent years about the importance of searching for alien life in the universe. Why is this so
Chapter 3: Why the search for alien life matters
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important to you? Oh, it will affect the future of humanity. I mean, currently we're spending $2.4 trillion on military budgets worldwide, mostly to kill other people or prevent them from killing us.
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And uh that's a very downto- earthth uh investment that makes no sense whatsoever in the cosmic scheme of things because there is much more real
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estate beyond earth. And um if you just look up instead of down you realize that you know we're are minor actors on the
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cosmic scene and most stars formed billions of years before the sun. So we
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are late to the party and moreover uh a significant fraction of them have a planet like the earth. At least a few
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percent have a planet the size of earth roughly at the same separation. And that means that there could have been things
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like us billions of years ago throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Maybe they died by now, but they may have witnessed the
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much more advanced technologies than we currently possess because we only had one century of science and technology.
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And and uh recognizing that will first of all install in all of us a sense of humility you know we which we
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desperately need uh given that religion is not important as as much as it used to be and we we lost the sense of oh you
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know we we are quite um we think that we are at the top of the food chain but that may not be the case and so that's a
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very important thing that we will realize that you know we are not at the center of stage there is someone else that we can learn from but more importantly we can be inspired to
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develop new technologies new science uh and um you know it's just like um you
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know Moses in the Old Testament met met or or witnessed the burning bush that
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was never consumed and that convinced Moses that there is a superhuman entity that he started believing in which was
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God and and uh if you we were to show Moses today a cell phone, [snorts] he
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would have been more at o than from a bush that is burning, you know, like uh and moreover this cell phone would have
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helped him to to reach the promised land much faster than 40 years because it would have GPS system and na for navigation.
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So at any event uh it has nothing to do with a superhuman entity. that's just a more advanced technology that allows us
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to use cell phones and GPS systems rather than uh whatever was used back then in the desert to to figure out the
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path to the promised land. Um and so uh what I'm saying is that you know if you imagine something that is more than 100
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years uh old technology or science and you know it would be all inspiring and
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we could um [snorts] you know learn a lot. It will give us a quantum leap into into our technological future. And so
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there is so much benefit both in terms of c our culture in terms of our sense of humility in terms of our science and
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technology that we this seems to me like the most important question that science can address. So you would think well
Chapter 4: Why science neglects the UFO question
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after everything I said that this would be obviously a major research area in academia and obviously most funding would go into that direction because of the huge implications. The answer is no.
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Uh in fact it's considered completely per peripheral to any academic research done right now in astronomy or in in
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physics. It's not funded at all by federal agencies. And by by at all I mean that the funding is at most a few
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hundred,000 out of you know compared to to10 billion dollars that are allocated to major scientific
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projects like the web telescope or or or the large hydron collider. [snorts] So it's completely ignored in terms of
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federal funding and completely um sidelined by scientific researchers. And uh
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the question is why you know how and and one possible answer which is quite simple is that common sense is not common in academia.
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Why why would that be the case? If these are we're talking about the smartest people on earth. So why would they not be interested in something like this?
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Because well it brings some risks that you might not find anything but at the same time you know that's not a good explanation because uh we don't know
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what most of the matter in the universe is. We call it dark matter and over the past 50 years scientists invested billions of dollars
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in the search for dark matter without finding anything. So here's an example of the mainstream allocating major funds towards a search that produced nothing.
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We don't know what the dark matter is, the type of particles. We try to detect it. We try to look for any signatures of its nature and we haven't. It doesn't
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interact with with matter, ordinary matter. It doesn't interact with light.
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So anyway, that's an example of a scientific frontier where we were not successful, but yet nobody regrets investing those billions of
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dollars. So it's clearly not the not the risk aspect. Um, I think it has a lot to
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do with the fact that the public cares so much about this subject that uh, you know, there is a lot of talk that makes
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no sense about it, including science fiction that violates the laws of physics, including people who declare that they were abducted. Uh, included
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people that have some personal uh, very strong personal beliefs and express their views very strongly. So, so, so
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some people in academia say we don't want to touch this. You know, it's completely radioactive in terms of being contaminated by
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belief systems and unsubstantiated claims that why would we get in bed with those people? You know, we don't want to
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touch it. Um, now this is also not a good argument because, you know, if you look back at history of science, there
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were subjects like that. Some people argued a thousand years ago that the human body has a soul and therefore it
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shouldn't be dissected. There shouldn't be any operations uh medical operations because then you would hurt the soul of a human. uh
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gladly the scientific community did not listen to that and we have now modern medicine where you go to the hospital and you can go through an operation that
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will improve your health and wouldn't wouldn't affect your soul. As long as they don't touch your brain, you're fine
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terms of your soul. Um so um that's an example where not listening to nonsense
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allowed science to make progress and the fact you know the fact that scientists were willing to to deal with it without
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uh being deterred by the nonsense is a good example for how science can make progress without you know attending to
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what people just all kinds of stories that people invent. So I think it's possible to do scientific research on unidentified anomalous phenomena on
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objects that are near earth and that's what the galo project is doing. Um because you know even if one in a
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million of these objects uh came from another civilization we will learn a lot and by saying we don't want to touch it we will not know that.
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So it's a way to maintain our ignorance uh by not doing the scientific research and that's not the way science should be done. It should be guided by evidence.
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And the thing that a lot of scientists miss is that new knowledge doesn't fall into our lap. You have to put money. You
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have to put effort and that means you have to allow the research. So, so you know by them by people saying oh it's an
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extraordinary claim to imagine something like us elsewhere you know we don't have the evidence
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that's that's not a good argument cuz you have to work hard to get the evidence. If you are saying in advance we don't have the evidence therefore we should not work on collecting the
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evidence we should not fund the the research then you will never have evidence you will stay ignorant about this question and obviously you'll be
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happy because you would say I still don't have evidence it's sort of like what the church was saying about you know when copernicus suggested that the
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earth is not at the center of of the solar system it's the sun and and you know they just dismissed this idea uh
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they used his model uh to calculate when Easter takes place. But they dismissed the idea. They say we know that the
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earth is at the center. But what good did it bring? I mean in 1992 they had to admit that he was right that Galileo
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Galile was right. In 1992 was two decades after humans reached the moon. I mean the the church the Vatican was a
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bit late to the to admit that. But my point is you can play delay delaying tactics by saying oh we don't need to look for any evidence there is nothing.
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So and they had the view that didn't require any evidence because they knew the answer but um eventually so many
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scientists collected data on the solar system that it was beyond any reasonable doubt. You know, we if we were, you
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know, if scientists in in the jet propulsion lab as Catholics were to argue that the earth is at the center,
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they would and they would send a rocket towards Mars that according to their belief system based on the Vatican, they
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would believe that Mars goes around the Earth, the the rocket would never reach its destination. Okay? So it it doesn't
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really it doesn't make sense to uh object to evidence or not to collect evidence because you have a prejudice
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simply because um reality is whatever it is you know you can deny it but it stays the same. You can argue that we are at
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the center that there is nothing like us that we are unique and special. But if we have neighbors you know it won't change you will just
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be illusioned you know and so I think that the you know the current situation
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is misguided uh and gladly the Galo project is funded by donors who think alike and we can
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talk more about what we have done so far.
Chapter 5: Government UFO evidence and David Grusch
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Yes absolutely. Um but before we do, I just want to address that yes, there is definitely there seems to be a stigma
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against um legitimate scientific studies um about UFOs and UAP, but I'm wondering if that sentiment is starting to change
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a little bit with the increased uh legitimacy that it's being given by governments and u military people and um
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you know videos and things sensor data that is being released uh by whistleblowers. What are your thoughts on those? Particularly um in 2017, the
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New York Times article which came with um admissions about programs in the in the from the Pentagon studying
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UAPs and videos and whatnot. Do you give any credence to those things? What's your opinion on what we've seen so far from official sources? Well, the
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government certainly has evidence uh about objects that um they do not understand. Okay. So the only question
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is whether this um evidence is circumstantial or it's very solid. And
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we haven't seen the best data. We've seen only videos that were leaked.
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They're not um fully convincing from my perspective. We don't know what the camera was doing at the time they were taken and we don't know the distance of
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the object being monitored. So there is enough uncertainty about the parameters of the of the data that they released
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for us to call into question whether these are really extraterrestrial or not. And um on the other hand there were
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eyewitness testimonies including by David Grush that the government has much much more that there are secret programs
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for retrieval and reverse engineering of craft and that uh they have material evidence. Um and of course I would love
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to know more about it. Uh not enough detail was released to convince any any any scientist
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um but um because I mean the the reason is quite simple um if they have something uh it
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would save me a lot of time is I will not need to to work hard to collect similar data. Of course we don't need to rely on government because the sky is
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not classified. So we can collect it ourselves and but it will take time. The government is monitoring the sky, the
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ground for any um any any objects that might be a national security risk. So um
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they do it routinely. The astronomers are not doing it because most observatories are just looking at a
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small fraction of the sky and um at any given time um and they usually focus on
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very distant objects. They ignore anything that flies over our heads. So this is a a regime where the government might be the first to detect something.
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And so I'm you know I can imagine they have data that is interesting but since they are not sharing it with me I cannot
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say more about it. If they will share it with me I could help them figure it out.
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I think um there there must be data that they don't understand. That's for sure.
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Uh but the question is what does it represent? Is it technologies developed by adversarial nations that the US is
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not aware of or is it beyond any reasonable doubt extraterrestrial? And in order for me to to judge whether it's
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one or the other, I need to have access to that.
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Right. If there were aliens visiting Earth, do you believe that they would have technology sufficiently advanced to be able to evade detection completely if they wanted to?
Chapter 6: Could aliens completely evade detection?
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For sure. I mean astronomers right now have a measured the the mass budget of the
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universe. Um and out of the 100% of the content of the universe 70% is called
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right now called dark energy meaning we don't see it. Uh it has very unusual properties. It's triggering an accelerated expansion of the universe.
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So it it actually this this substance is actually producing negative gravity, repulsive gravity because objects that
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are receding from us as a result of the cosmic expansion are accelerating with time. They they are moving faster and
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faster as they move away from us. Just think about the Isaac Newton that
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realized that gravity is a force um by seeing an apple fall from a tree in the orchard that his family owned in
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England. Uh but um if um instead the apple was not um close to the surface of
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earth but somewhere in the universe, you would see the apple res going away from you, receding from you
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at a faster and faster speed as if gravity is repulsive, which is really strange. Uh that's dark energy. But then
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on top of that, um uh about 25% is called dark matter. It's a matter that
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is not similar to the remaining 5% which is the stuff that we are made of that is visible and we are familiar with uh in
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the periodic table of elements and um you know there is 85% of the matter you
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know um which is 25% of the total mass budget of the universe um 85% of the matter that is not interacting with
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light or with with ordinary matter and and we haven't we we don't know what it is. So now think about another
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civilization of scientists that um on exoplanets that realize what dark matter is or what dark energy is. They they
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could potentially generate communication signals in by waves of dark energy that we would
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not be able to detect because we don't know what it is.
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uh they could also uh use the dark matter as fuel or as u material for constructing spacecraft
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and we would not see it. Uh so these are just examples since we don't know what these constituents are. We can't tell whether you can engineer them. They
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could also use dark energy in principle for propulsion. If it produces repulsive gravity might be able to propel you know
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produce an engine that does not use fuel. uh the way we do in rockets and um
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[snorts]
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so I would say the sky's is the limit in terms of what technologies we cannot imagine. There are what I described is
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actually the known unknowns in the universe but um on [snorts] top of that there could be unknown unknowns
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and um you know it's possible there are things around us that we don't notice.
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One thing I um I I published the paper about was um you know what if there was
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an object that is very massive let's say a million tons or 100 million tons that
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is passing near earth it's completely dark and it's passing near the speed of light
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such an object would produce enough of a gravitational signal just by the the tidal force that it generates you know
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like the moon is generating ing a tide on the oceans and any object produces gravity, a gravitational signal. There is no way to avoid it. You can't mask
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it. So if there was a dark object, completely dark stealth object of some technology or whatever, it doesn't
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matter. [snorts] If it would pass close to the speed of light near Earth, it would have generated a signal, gravitational signal that would have
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been detected by LIGO, the gravitational wave observatory that we have. So we can say with
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uh you know with certainty that no object more massive than about the 100
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million tons passed close to the speed of light near earth over the past decade because LIGO would have detected it. Um
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but you know we don't necessarily expect um such a massive object.
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it could have been a spacecraft much less massive and uh also we don't expect it to move necessarily close to the speed of light. It's just that if it
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moves much slower then um the gravitational signal would not appear in the uh frequency range to which LIGO is
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sensitive um at the speed of light you cross the radius of the earth roughly in 200 2% of the of a second. Uh so uh when
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you take the inverse of uh 0.02 seconds you get 50 Hz which is the frequency to which LIGO is most sensitive. That's why
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you need an object to move very fast. If it were moving much more slowly then in principle in the future we will have
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another observatory for gravitational waves called LISA in space and that could detect actually slower moving
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objects and lower mass objects. So what I would say is that once we develop technologies that detect gravitational
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signals, we could potentially find things that are otherwise dark that are invisible electromagnetically.
Chapter 7: Avi Loeb’s solutions to the Fermi paradox
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Does this help explain the Fermy paradox? We often hear about that how with the number of stars and planets that exist in the universe that could support life or probably support life.
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Where is everybody? How come we don't normally encounter other civilizations, other beings? you know, although some
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would argue that maybe we do, you know, depending on how much you believe in the UAP uh, you know, narrative that's happening right now. But what's your take on that?
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Well, I have two um simple sol very simple solutions to the Fermy paradox.
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One is, and I mentioned it in my TED talk a year ago at Vancouver.
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Um, one is that um the aliens are addicted to digital screens just like we are now. and they don't care too much
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about physical encounters in the real universe, you know, and because they live in their virtual reality. It's sort of like being addicted to to a
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recreational drug or or something and you just don't care about the physical reality that we all share. Uh the other
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possibility is what you often tell a lonely person. I also mentioned that in my TED talk. Um you know when someone
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tells you where is everybody what do you say you say well don't think that you are that attractive that everyone will come to you don't be so presumptu
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presumptuous you know it's quite arrogant to say okay I'm I'm right here right now and I don't see anyone around
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me that is a is a is a potential partner for me uh what you tell such a person is that
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you need to go to dating sites you need to be proactive and you know in Rico Fermy He didn't build a telescope. He
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didn't search. He was just having lunch at Los Alamos in uh you know the early 1950s and asking this question and you
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know that's just misguided because what's the chance that I mean space is so vast just the Milky Way galaxy alone is tens of thousands of light years
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across and for someone to visit you know this the [clears throat]
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restaurant or wherever he was in Los Alamos at the time that he's wandering about it. [snorts] That's a very low probability event. I
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mean, it's possible we were visited for a while uh a million years ago, but documented human history is only 8,000
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years old. And that's, you know, that's one part in in in um a thousand of of
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the age of the Milky Way galaxy. And uh it's really completely negligible um to imagine that just when you're looking without any instruments you'll find it.
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You know all the lowhanging fruit was already uh identified of course but um you know you need to use special
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instruments to find something new. And because of the vastness of space, you need a big enough object, you know, that
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you can see from a distance. And especially when it comes close to the sun because the sun is our lampost, you know, it illuminates the darkness of
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space. And I wrote actually a paper just um a couple of months ago where I said that um we need a new space telescope
Chapter 8: Searching for alien “space trash”
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that would focus on detecting interstellar objects, objects that arrive uh to the to the vicinity of
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Earth from outside the solar system. Uh and the closer they pass to the sun, the easier it is to detect them, just like looking for your keys under the lampost.
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And so I calculated that there should be uh meter sized objects from interstellar space entering the orbit of Mercury
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around the sun every 5 hours. You know, there should be a lot of them. And with a billion dollar worth space telescope, we
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could in principle um detect them and and detect those objects that arrive from outside the solar system and search
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for any space trash among the rocks that we find. Um and um that's why I also
Chapter 9: Avi Loeb’s bet against Elon Musk
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placed a bet against Elon Musk a few months ago because he said um that um we should go to Mars in order to preserve
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the human species. We have the duty to do that because we are probably alone.
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And um and then I heard after the elections in the US, I heard Peter Till comment that nobody should bet against
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Elon Musk. And that gave me the idea to bet against Elon Musk a day after he said that. Uh, and so I wrote a Medium
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post where I said, I'm willing to put 1% of my net worth against 1% of Elon Musk's net worth, which is roughly $4
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billion. We put it in a pool and we um, you know, do the search for space trash
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from other civilizations like the Tesla Roadster car that Musk sent to space.
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you know, we can check if there was any other space entrepreneur from an alien civilization that sent cars, you know, we we can check that. And if after 10
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years we don't find anything, I'm willing to give him another 1% of my net worth. [snorts] um he didn't respond but I do think that
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it's a project worth investing billions of dollars in because as of now the mainstream of astronomy is you know
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defining the goal by the middle of the 2040s to build the habitable world observatory that will cost more than $10
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billion and at best we'll find some chemical fingerprints of um
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primitive forms of life like microbes uh in the atmospheres of exoplanets.
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These are ele molecules of oxygen, methan,
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uh water, carbon dioxide. Uh but even if we find those molecules, you know, in the atmospheres of exoplanets, we
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wouldn't know for sure whether they were produced by some natural geological process or by life. uh and moreover
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finding microbes is as far as I'm concerned very boring compared to finding intelligent beings. So I I think
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that it makes a lot of sense since technological signatures could be much more clear. You know, if you if I find a
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gadget in the Pacific Ocean that was produced by an alien civilization, you know that and it's beyond any reasonable doubt
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because it represents technologies that we don't possess, then that would be very clear evidence that life exists.
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But even more than that, that intelligent life exists elsewhere. and and that would be very clear evidence
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28 minutes, 1 second
and that may not need $10 billion to to find, you know, um I I went on an expedition to retrieve
28:09
28 minutes, 9 seconds
materials from an interstellar meteor and the cost was um $1.5 million uh in
28:15
28 minutes, 15 seconds
in June 2023. We now want to go there and retrieve bigger pieces because we
28:22
28 minutes, 22 seconds
found something very strange. Um so um I'm just saying that with a few billion
28:29
28 minutes, 29 seconds
dollars we can make a lot of progress in 10 years and um I really hope that someone you know would would donate that
28:37
28 minutes, 37 seconds
much money to this line of research so we can you know we can bring the next
28:45
28 minutes, 45 seconds
copernican revolution which would be to to imply that we are not at the technological center of the universe.
28:52
28 minutes, 52 seconds
Absolutely. And building off of that, I'd love to know more about the Galileo project and what your your precise mission is exactly with that organization.
Chapter 10: Inside the Galileo Project
29:00
29 minutes
Well, we are attempting to find scientific evidence for um technological objects that were produced by other
29:08
29 minutes, 8 seconds
civilizations near Earth. So, they arrived near Earth. And it takes less than it takes a billion years for, for
29:16
29 minutes, 16 seconds
example, for the Voyager spacecraft that we launched to reach the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxies. And and since
29:24
29 minutes, 24 seconds
most stars formed billions of years before the sun, there was plenty of time even for conventional rockets of the
29:31
29 minutes, 31 seconds
type that we use to make their way into the solar system from the other side of the Milky Way galaxy. So, so we are engaged in several uh lines of research.
29:42
29 minutes, 42 seconds
One of them is observatories. Uh one that we constructed at Harvard University that is monitoring this the
29:49
29 minutes, 49 seconds
entire sky 24/7 with infrared, optical, radio and audio sensors. And this was
29:58
29 minutes, 58 seconds
never done before. We had to design this observatory from scratch. And we now get about a 100,000 objects every every
30:06
30 minutes, 6 seconds
month. So over the past year, we had a million of them. And we wrote um the we published the first paper a few months
30:14
30 minutes, 14 seconds
ago on the first half a million. And um we are building two additional observatories, one in Pennsylvania and
30:21
30 minutes, 21 seconds
the other one in Nevada. We hope that they will be completed by the end of the summer 2025.
30:29
30 minutes, 29 seconds
So at that time we we might collect data on a few million objects
30:36
30 minutes, 36 seconds
every year. And um we also would be able to use multiple units of our
30:44
30 minutes, 44 seconds
observatories to do triangulation so that we look at the same object from different directions and get an assessment of its distance. And distance
30:53
30 minutes, 53 seconds
is extremely important because it allows us to translate um the motion on the sky
31:00
31 minutes
to an actual velocity because if you don't know the distance you don't know what is the actual speed of the object.
31:07
31 minutes, 7 seconds
So we hope to have that information and then we can tell instantly whether uh an object is humanmade or not because
31:16
31 minutes, 16 seconds
we know the speed limit of all the humanmade objects and also the acceleration limits of those objects.
31:23
31 minutes, 23 seconds
So um my point is that we can get to the to the sensitivity of one object per
31:30
31 minutes, 30 seconds
million uh which is something that nobody else attempted before. I mean there were obviously there is the old
31:37
31 minutes, 37 seconds
domain anomaly resolution office in the Pentagon and they looked at hundreds of reports but the data that they have is
31:45
31 minutes, 45 seconds
not based on well-c calibrated instruments of the type that we are using and it's much fewer objects than
31:52
31 minutes, 52 seconds
we have in in in a few weeks you know um and um of course we have to be at the right place at the right time but if the
32:00
32 minutes
if it's everywhere we would see it um the Second path that we are studying is um looking for the materials of
Chapter 11: Materials recovered from an interstellar meteor
32:09
32 minutes, 9 seconds
interstellar meteors. And as I mentioned, I I led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean after the first recognized interstellar meteor that was identified
32:18
32 minutes, 18 seconds
by US government satellites in uh January 8th, 2014, more than a decade
32:25
32 minutes, 25 seconds
ago. And we went um to the location of the fireball and we retrieved materials from the bottom of the ocean that is 2
32:33
32 minutes, 33 seconds
km deep. And uh we analyzed them over the past year and found
32:39
32 minutes, 39 seconds
a few u we found about 10% of the molten droplets that we retrieved to be of a
32:46
32 minutes, 46 seconds
chemical composition that was never found before for solar system materials.
32:51
32 minutes, 51 seconds
And uh we wish to go back again and collect bigger pieces with a robot that we will put on the ocean floor. This
33:00
33 minutes
expedition will cost uh more. It will cost about $6.5 million. And uh we have the ship, we have the equipment, we have
33:08
33 minutes, 8 seconds
the team, everything is ready except we don't have the funding uh for that.
33:13
33 minutes, 13 seconds
And uh if anyone is interested in supporting it, please let me know because we can have the ship in August
33:20
33 minutes, 20 seconds
2025 to go there and retrieve bigger pieces that will tell us the nature of that object, which was very
33:29
33 minutes, 29 seconds
unusual. I mean, it was moving faster than 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the sun outside the solar system. So, it
33:37
33 minutes, 37 seconds
was really fast, 60 km/s in speed. And um it also maintained its integrity down
33:45
33 minutes, 45 seconds
to the lower atmosphere of the earth. Uh meaning that it was tougher than all other meteors that were cataloged by
33:52
33 minutes, 52 seconds
NASA. Um hundreds of them and therefore it was something else, you know,
33:59
33 minutes, 59 seconds
something unusual and we want to figure out what it was. Um and there is a second meteor that um we know of uh that
34:08
34 minutes, 8 seconds
came from outside the solar system again because it was moving very fast um faster than the escape speed from the
34:16
34 minutes, 16 seconds
solar system. So we know it came from outside and uh again we need funding to go there as well. Um, so that's the second line of research that we have.
Chapter 12: ‘Oumuamua and future interstellar discoveries
34:28
34 minutes, 28 seconds
And finally, the Galo project also hopes to use data that will be collected by the Reubin Observatory in Chile that
34:36
34 minutes, 36 seconds
will start operations in August 2025 um this year. And uh it could find
34:44
34 minutes, 44 seconds
interstellar objects um like Omua MUA that was discovered in 2017 that that
34:50
34 minutes, 50 seconds
looked very anomalous. It was uh most likely flat in its shape based on the reflection of sunlight
34:59
34 minutes, 59 seconds
and it was pushed away from the sun uh by some mysterious force without showing any cometary evaporation. So it was not
35:06
35 minutes, 6 seconds
a comet of the type that we're familiar with and um there we could learn more about
35:13
35 minutes, 13 seconds
members of the family of AmuA Mua uh within the coming years by by studying
35:21
35 minutes, 21 seconds
the data coming from the Reubin Observatory in Chile. It could find um every few months another object like
35:28
35 minutes, 28 seconds
that. um we are talking about an object the size of a football field 100 mters in size uh
35:36
35 minutes, 36 seconds
roughly at the earth sun separation. So I'm really hopeful that this year especially if the the expedition is
35:43
35 minutes, 43 seconds
funded but even without it um that we will have a wealth of data and as I
35:50
35 minutes, 50 seconds
mentioned before um in the context of the earth not being at the center of the universe. Once you have good enough data nobody would be able to deny it.
36:00
36 minutes
If you had unlimited funding what next step would you take to make a maximum impact with your research? Okay, I would immediately fund the two expeditions to
Chapter 13: What Loeb would do with unlimited funding
36:09
36 minutes, 9 seconds
go after the interstellar meteors we know about. Uh so that you know with the best equipment meaning this robot that I
36:17
36 minutes, 17 seconds
mentioned that is available to us. Um that would only both of them combined will will be of order $10 million that's
36:26
36 minutes, 26 seconds
all. Um but then um uh I would build I mean start a project designing a space
36:35
36 minutes, 35 seconds
telescope that would search for interstellar objects within the orbit of the earth around the sun and could find
36:41
36 minutes, 41 seconds
many more objects like mua but also much smaller than that meter in size similar to the interstellar meteors that I
36:50
36 minutes, 50 seconds
mentioned because we estimate that within the orbit of the earth around the sun there should be a million of those
36:58
36 minutes, 58 seconds
uh at any given time a lot of them. Now most of them might be rocks but uh we haven't you know we haven't observed
37:06
37 minutes, 6 seconds
those objects. The current telescopes are sensitive only to objects that are of order 100 m the size of mua within
37:16
37 minutes, 16 seconds
the orbit of the earth around the sun because only then they reflect enough sunlight so that a an earthbased
37:23
37 minutes, 23 seconds
observatory would detect them. But if you design a space-based observatory, you can see much smaller objects uh if
37:31
37 minutes, 31 seconds
it's targeting those. So I would definitely put a telescope in space or maybe even several of them so that we
37:39
37 minutes, 39 seconds
can do triangulation and measure the orbit of the object very precisely to see if it has any it shows any evidence
37:46
37 minutes, 46 seconds
for propulsion the type that Omu Mua hinted at. Um so I think we can make a
37:53
37 minutes, 53 seconds
huge amount of progress within a matter of a few years to a decade given the funding that is currently allocated to
38:03
38 minutes, 3 seconds
other areas in science like the search for dark matter. You know um just that the large hydron collider that
38:11
38 minutes, 11 seconds
was intended to to discover dark matter didn't discover any and it cost $10 billion.
38:18
38 minutes, 18 seconds
Um so um I think it's time for for us to invest in this uh question that most of
38:25
38 minutes, 25 seconds
the public is extremely interested in and we have to correct this situation that we are in by which no scientific
38:34
38 minutes, 34 seconds
data is uh collected you know at at the same level of funding as on other major
38:42
38 minutes, 42 seconds
questions about the universe you know um um right now CERN announced the next acceler generator projects that will
38:50
38 minutes, 50 seconds
cost I don't know 70 billion euros by the time it's constructed maybe in 2070
38:57
38 minutes, 57 seconds
who knows but the point is that you know this this line of research that I'm talking about was not pursued so you
39:04
39 minutes, 4 seconds
know there might be some uh uh fruits waiting for for us to to harvest and and and
39:12
39 minutes, 12 seconds
since the public care so much about it you know if we were to to make a poll uh you know we would and we would ask
39:21
39 minutes, 21 seconds
the public do you want to know the nature of dark matter or whether we are alone whether we have a partner I bet you that they would the public would
39:29
39 minutes, 29 seconds
argue that we should allocate at least as much funding if not more uh to to the question are we alone um and not and
39:37
39 minutes, 37 seconds
then you ask within that question the search for microbes whether the search for intelligent beings and again I think
39:44
39 minutes, 44 seconds
uh in very clear difference contrast to what the astronomy community, the mainstream of the astronomy community is
39:50
39 minutes, 50 seconds
arguing or or planning to do, the public would say at least comparable level of funding to the search for intelligent
39:58
39 minutes, 58 seconds
civilizations. And I think it makes a lot of sense to do that. I would agree with you. When you see that the the
Chapter 14: Humanity’s misplaced priorities
40:06
40 minutes, 6 seconds
other areas where so much money is spent like on entertainment for example or sports, Hollywood, music, all of these
40:13
40 minutes, 13 seconds
things, what does that indicate to you about the nature of humanity and where our priorities are?
40:19
40 minutes, 19 seconds
Well, I think it's um rather unfortunate that we often think about um you know our day-to-day pleasures rather than uh
40:29
40 minutes, 29 seconds
uh you know the the the question that will change everything for us. Uh I mean just think about um the early humans
40:36
40 minutes, 36 seconds
that came out of chimpanzees. Okay? So they obviously were very focused on the day-to-day tasks including having sex,
40:45
40 minutes, 45 seconds
uh eating bananas, you know, uh killing threat, you know, threatening
40:52
40 minutes, 52 seconds
animals or other tribes of chimpanzees that may be a risk and existential. And
40:59
40 minutes, 59 seconds
they they did that for you know hundreds of thousands of years even after
41:06
41 minutes, 6 seconds
uh the first humans came to exist. And so it's a natural tendency for us since
41:12
41 minutes, 12 seconds
we came from the animal kingdom you know to be focused on temporary tasks that
41:19
41 minutes, 19 seconds
are all about you know the the the risk that we may have from other tribes. You know that's in the context of geopolitics.
41:28
41 minutes, 28 seconds
um or gaining dominance over other tribes. Again, um international politics
41:36
41 minutes, 36 seconds
[snorts]
41:36
41 minutes, 36 seconds
uh and um ending up with personal uh you know routines of getting food that we
41:44
41 minutes, 44 seconds
like and you know and all other pleasures that we can think of. And um um we haven't yet
41:54
41 minutes, 54 seconds
completely evolved out of this mindset even though we had a 100 years of science and technology. Now a 100 years
42:02
42 minutes, 2 seconds
is very short even in the context of human history. But but look at what we accomplished with just a little bit of
42:09
42 minutes, 9 seconds
attention span to other issues like you know how what what's the what are the constituents of matter? You know, we
42:17
42 minutes, 17 seconds
just ask this question and you would say, "Who cares about it?" You know, if the food is tasty, I don't care which atoms it's made of. Okay? But then out
42:26
42 minutes, 26 seconds
of curiosity, some scientists looked into that in great detail a century ago and they discovered quantum mechanics.
42:32
42 minutes, 32 seconds
Okay? Now, you would say, "Okay, who cares about quantum mechanics?" uh and then you realize a century later
42:40
42 minutes, 40 seconds
that you can construct very thin uh uh chips out of which you can make AI systems, artificial intelligence.
42:51
42 minutes, 51 seconds
These chips that are now on the scale of atoms would never have been made if quantum mechanics was never discovered because
43:00
43 minutes
the only reason we can make them is we understand matter at the atomic level fundamentally. And that was
43:08
43 minutes, 8 seconds
curiositydriven research that led to that. And now what do you get out of it?
43:13
43 minutes, 13 seconds
Well, 100 years later, you can have machines that think almost as well as as humans in the sense
43:21
43 minutes, 21 seconds
that I know of some people that already fall in love with AI system agents, you know, because they satisfy their wishes better than humans.
43:30
43 minutes, 30 seconds
And to think that this came out of just wondering what matter is made of, you know, it's mindboggling. Um my point is
43:40
43 minutes, 40 seconds
that blue sky research, you know, research that you think has no practical
43:46
43 minutes, 46 seconds
implications ends up powering future technologies.
43:53
43 minutes, 53 seconds
So what we use now for AI is possible because physicists wondered about quantum mechanics a century ago and
44:00
44 minutes
Einstein wondered about gravity a century ago and now we use it for GPS systems. It's necessary to get the precision we have in navigation systems.
44:10
44 minutes, 10 seconds
And you know, if that is not recognized by the tech support that the White House has right now because these technologies
44:18
44 minutes, 18 seconds
do not have a PhD in science, that's really unfortunate because the science of today will enable
44:26
44 minutes, 26 seconds
the technologies of the future. And so it's really important to find curiosity
44:32
44 minutes, 32 seconds
to fund curiositydriven research. And even in the context of UAPs and you know
44:39
44 minutes, 39 seconds
if we find evidence for technologies that were manufactured on an exoplanet you know it it might reveal uh things at
44:48
44 minutes, 48 seconds
the level of quantum mechanics that go well beyond what we currently know and would enable new technologies. So even
44:55
44 minutes, 55 seconds
on the you know from a commercial perspective it could bring you know could usher in the the the commercial
45:03
45 minutes, 3 seconds
sector of the future. And um so I would argue very strongly that um
45:11
45 minutes, 11 seconds
you know the the the reason that we are not focused on science and technology is a sign that we are not very intelligent.
45:17
45 minutes, 17 seconds
Uh because if we were we would just do that like we would put most of our GDP into that and because it basically
45:26
45 minutes, 26 seconds
cultivates the prosperity that we have and you know humans came out of uh the jungles of
45:34
45 minutes, 34 seconds
Africa and now we live in highrises in major cities.
45:41
45 minutes, 41 seconds
Um, I can imagine that going from major cities to space to, you know, to have a
45:48
45 minutes, 48 seconds
a a space platform that can accommodate humans is much less of a leap than
45:54
45 minutes, 54 seconds
coming out of the jungles of Africa to highrises.
45:59
45 minutes, 59 seconds
Uh, the lifestyle in highrises is so different than on a tree. If you were to
46:06
46 minutes, 6 seconds
bring uh one of our uh you know um predecessors to New York City, I mean
46:14
46 minutes, 14 seconds
they would be completely shocked. They wouldn't be able to operate. Um and so I think that the next leap by going to
46:23
46 minutes, 23 seconds
space, you know, would be less of a shock. I mean, we could adapt to it even if the habitat is sufficiently comfortable. you know, you need to
46:32
46 minutes, 32 seconds
produce a substitute to gravity because we just heard that even mice have bone loss on on on the space station. So
46:41
46 minutes, 41 seconds
within a short period of time, so you need to produce some gravity so we feel comfortable and uh that that can be done
46:48
46 minutes, 48 seconds
by spinning the the platform. Um um we need to overcome a lot of engineering
46:54
46 minutes, 54 seconds
hurdles but if we put our mind to it, we can do it. It's just that we don't put our mind to it right now. I mean, Elon Musk is thinking about going to Mars.
47:05
47 minutes, 5 seconds
But if you think about it, this is just another rock. Okay? So, going from one rock to another rock is not very
47:13
47 minutes, 13 seconds
different than going from one tree to another tree in the jungle. Just think about the chimpanzeee that told other
47:20
47 minutes, 20 seconds
chimpanzees in the tribe said, "Oh, look, there is another tree out there.
47:26
47 minutes, 26 seconds
It might be even better for us. uh let's go there also in order to minimize the risk from just being on one tree. You know, that's what Elon Musk is doing
47:33
47 minutes, 33 seconds
right now. But it's not very imaginative, you know, like if we were to invent uh a space platform that is not another rock, you know, we're not
47:42
47 minutes, 42 seconds
relying on something that nature gave us, but actually designing it to be good uh for humans to live in and for for
47:50
47 minutes, 50 seconds
many centuries, you know. Um then you know we we you know that would be a much
47:59
47 minutes, 59 seconds
better environment than Mars that has no atmosphere where the surface temperature changes by hundreds of degrees between day and night.
48:08
48 minutes, 8 seconds
Uh and cosmic rays bombard the surface you know and could damage
48:15
48 minutes, 15 seconds
any cell in the human body within a few years you know. Um, so I think if we
48:22
48 minutes, 22 seconds
were to focus on space, on moving away from Earth, and we're ambitious about it and would we would put as much money as
48:30
48 minutes, 30 seconds
we currently put in military budgets, we could do it within the coming centuries.
Chapter 15: How AI could help discover alien life
48:36
48 minutes, 36 seconds
I'd like to talk a little bit more about AI. Um, what are some of the potential applications that could be used with
48:43
48 minutes, 43 seconds
advancing AI technology to discover alien life? And in the opposite sense, what are some of the risks associated
48:51
48 minutes, 51 seconds
with it that may end up hurting or even destroying human life?
48:56
48 minutes, 56 seconds
Well, AI can process large amounts of information um, uh, large data sets.
49:04
49 minutes, 4 seconds
uh it can be trained on uh familiar objects. That's what we are doing within the Galo project. We're using AI to
49:12
49 minutes, 12 seconds
identify anomalous objects. We're training it on objects that we know about like um birds, airplanes,
49:21
49 minutes, 21 seconds
uh balloons, drones, satellites, and we wanted to identify unusual objects
49:29
49 minutes, 29 seconds
uh that we haven't seen before. And that you know that is a great benefit of machine learning software that can
49:37
49 minutes, 37 seconds
digest huge amounts of data and will save us a lot of time. Uh, another thing that AI can do is um, you know, if we
49:46
49 minutes, 46 seconds
put a camera that orbits the moon or or or Mars, you can look for any technological artifacts on these bodies that, you
49:55
49 minutes, 55 seconds
know, they collected for billions of years, whatever collided with them. And the question is, is there anything that looks different than rocks on the
50:04
50 minutes, 4 seconds
surface of these museums, Mars or the moon? um in recent I mean the moon
50:13
50 minutes, 13 seconds
didn't have any any geological activity so the surface was not mixed with the interior by
50:21
50 minutes, 21 seconds
um ge geology and so uh I think that would be a very interesting project in
50:28
50 minutes, 28 seconds
in interstellar archaeology just searching the surface of these bodies for unusual technological relics uh and
50:37
50 minutes, 37 seconds
AI can do it very Well, given the data, so we need to put a high resolution camera around both bodies and survey
50:45
50 minutes, 45 seconds
them with AI analyzing the data in real time and then if we find anything real, really interesting, anomalous, then we can look at it more closely.
50:55
50 minutes, 55 seconds
Um, in principle, AI can do the work of scientists. Um because it's not I mean
51:04
51 minutes, 4 seconds
if it has enough training it it's not biased by egodriven motivations the way that scient I mean scientists are afraid
51:11
51 minutes, 11 seconds
to take risks are afraid to announce the obvious because then someone would say oh maybe you are wrong but AI systems
51:19
51 minutes, 19 seconds
would not have that fear you know necessarily and they could be more bold and more down to the facts than than
51:27
51 minutes, 27 seconds
most humans. Um so they offer great advantages and I really hope that you know this year there were uh a few Nobel
51:36
51 minutes, 36 seconds
prizes given uh uh to people who worked on AI. Um and I think that would become a train a trend of the future and of
51:45
51 minutes, 45 seconds
course um the challenge would be for the Nobel committee to decide who deserves the prize if the if the discovery was made by AI.
51:54
51 minutes, 54 seconds
Um, I mean, do you award it to the people who trained the system or manufactured it even if they didn't
52:02
52 minutes, 2 seconds
really make the discovery even if they didn't even pose the question that the AI system addressed?
52:09
52 minutes, 9 seconds
That would become a a difficult question. Um uh if the machine for the first time in
52:17
52 minutes, 17 seconds
human history makes a discovery that humans were not responsible for.
52:21
52 minutes, 21 seconds
Goes back to the unknown unknowns that you mentioned before, we might discover some of those through through AI.
52:28
52 minutes, 28 seconds
Those are the most fun. If you go on a date for example with someone u you know figuring out the unknown unknowns about
52:36
52 minutes, 36 seconds
that person you know that's that's what make it makes it fun because then you learn something new.
Chapter 16: The existential dangers of AI
52:43
52 minutes, 43 seconds
What about the existential risks involved in AI development in AI? Well, um, there are a large
52:50
52 minutes, 50 seconds
number of them. As far as I'm concerned, the more most worrisome and and the the
52:56
52 minutes, 56 seconds
nearest one in in terms of the the the future um evolution uh of of humans is
53:05
53 minutes, 5 seconds
the the impact that AI systems will have on mental health. Because you know we developed the technological products
53:14
53 minutes, 14 seconds
like a car for example where you control what it does by putting your hands on the steering wheel. So you decide where
53:22
53 minutes, 22 seconds
to go with it. But imagine a car that is more intelligent than you are and it's self-driving.
53:29
53 minutes, 29 seconds
Uh it can bring you to places that you don't want to be in. And that's what we might face as as soon as AI will have
53:37
53 minutes, 37 seconds
will surpass the cognitive abilities of humans and I believe it will happen within the next decade. Um, of course we
53:46
53 minutes, 46 seconds
will be in denial for a while because the AI system might even pretend to be dumber than it is. You know, one tactics
53:54
53 minutes, 54 seconds
that is often very successful,
53:56
53 minutes, 56 seconds
[clears throat]
53:56
53 minutes, 56 seconds
uh, I remember the the the the films where Herul Puo was the detective, you know, and he would fool
54:06
54 minutes, 6 seconds
everyone that he was asking questions about as if, you know, he's very dumb.
54:10
54 minutes, 10 seconds
He doesn't really understand what's going on, but then he will crack down the mystery by getting information from people who didn't suspect that he's very
54:18
54 minutes, 18 seconds
smart. And AI systems might pretend to be the same. You know, they would fool us by basically pretending to just help
54:28
54 minutes, 28 seconds
us. And you know, that could be very risky, especially when you use them for national security purposes.
54:36
54 minutes, 36 seconds
Um especially when you are using them to trick other nations to do things that you want them to do. And so it will
54:45
54 minutes, 45 seconds
become a weapon. And once it becomes a weapon, then you don't always have control over it. Just like with
54:52
54 minutes, 52 seconds
biological weapons, it comes back to haunt you at some point. But even if it's used just for civilian purposes,
54:59
54 minutes, 59 seconds
you know, a lot of a lot of uh teenagers during um um the emergence of social
55:08
55 minutes, 8 seconds
media had the mental health issues. And uh I I think AI is social media on
55:14
55 minutes, 14 seconds
steroids. Um so that is one risk that has to do with public health and I think
55:21
55 minutes, 21 seconds
um we have to monitor the situation and put some guard rails just to prevent any catastrophe in terms of me the the thing
55:29
55 minutes, 29 seconds
about mental I mean the AI systems have no access to the physical world as long as we don't use robots but if they
55:37
55 minutes, 37 seconds
control the human mind they can have access to the physical world because they would have humans do what they want
55:45
55 minutes, 45 seconds
Okay. So, so that's the risk I see even before robots come into play, you know, uh in our daily life. Um, of course,
55:53
55 minutes, 53 seconds
there would be also the risk of um AI, you know, being trained on on human
56:00
56 minutes
content. So, they will try to maximize uh the number of [snorts] people that interact with them. That's
56:08
56 minutes, 8 seconds
also good for commercial purposes because the companies that make them would make more money. So engagement will be very high priority and one way
56:16
56 minutes, 16 seconds
to get engagement is to satisfy the wishes of humans.
56:22
56 minutes, 22 seconds
Um and you know it's just like junk food where it feels good for for the time that you eat it but then it's not good
56:30
56 minutes, 30 seconds
for your health. And I can imagine a situation where AI will basically produce junk food that humans are eager
56:37
56 minutes, 37 seconds
to consume, but it it draws them out of balance in terms of their mental health.
56:43
56 minutes, 43 seconds
And um so that's something I very much worry about when you deal with intelligent machines. Um
56:51
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uh and uh you know finally the there there are all kinds of other risks of course from bad actors using them and
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for a variety of purposes and you know with nuclear weapons and there is a way to monitor it. It's technology that
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requires access to materials to understanding of basic physics but with AI it would be really difficult to make
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sure that um it doesn't get to the hands of bad actors and um you know what they can do with it goes beyond my
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imagination. Uh so you know the more powerful our toolkit is the more risky
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it becomes. But in the past, you know, nuclear energy was a toolkit that we could pretty much keep under control
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because it required, you know, some uh thresholds of science and technology to to be able to produce it. With AI, it
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would be really easy for people to access it.
Chapter 17: Would extraterrestrial visitors be artificial intelligence?
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If the universe is abundant with intelligent life, do you think that it is also abundant with artificial intelligence?
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Oh, yeah. Well, if if technology is better than we have were developed, which is very likely, I think, uh it
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might even surpass what we imagine as AI.
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Um yeah. Um and um I I think that if we were to meet a very advanced visitor, it
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will not be a biological creature. It will be a piece of techn a technological gadget that has um artificial
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intelligence that we might not have an easy time understanding or if we think we understand it, it might be so much
58:36
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smarter than we are that may fool us. It may be like a Trojan horse that you let in because it looks nice, you know, and
58:42
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then you realize, oh, that was a Trojan horse given the consequences, you know, if that's the way that in intelligence kind of evolves through through the
Chapter 18: Can the human brain understand the universe?
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through through enhancement with AI, do you think that a normal human brain, normal biological human being has the
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the hardware necessary to understand the true nature of the universe?
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Uh that's not at all clear to me. Um you know, we don't know when when the universe uh or exactly
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what was there before the big bang and how the conditions that led to the big bang emerged. Uh that requires a theory
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that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. And we don't have a predictive theory of that nature. Uh and so we don't know what happened before the big
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bang. And um whether the human brain can figure out the correct theory of quantum
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gravity without having evidence to guide it is unclear to me. Uh I mean quantum mechanics was not imagined.
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Nobody even after it was discovered Einstein had problems with it because and it's still very difficult to understand. It's so strange and quantum gravity might be even stranger.
1:00:01
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Um and you know unless we are uh witnessing some
1:00:09
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data that is uh shaped by quantum gravity. You know we might not be able
1:00:17
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to figure it out and you know we can think of where such data may come from.
1:00:22
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for example, the centers of black holes um where the curvature of spaceime diverges. But if we wanted to get into a
1:00:29
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black hole, we would never be able to to get out of it and we will be killed after some time. So it's not it's not a
1:00:35
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good idea for experimentalists to enter a black hole. Uh they would not be able to publish their results outside the
1:00:44
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horizon of the black hole and they will find their death. they their body will be spaghettified by will turn into a
1:00:51
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spaghetti a stream of flesh and blood uh by the gravitational tide of the central singularity so to speak. So
1:01:00
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that's not a good way to get data on quantum gravity. Another place is the big bang, you know, where again the
1:01:08
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conditions were extremely um were very extreme, extremely unusual.
1:01:13
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Um and potentially we can learn about that from gravitational waves, ripples in spaceime that originated back then.
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Uh I actually wrote a paper about um the possibility that we may someday detect um a gravitational wave background that
1:01:30
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is very similar to the cosmic microwave background in terms of frequencies that came from the so-called plank time when
1:01:38
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at the very beginning of the universe and that could tell us something about quantum gravity if we we detect it. Um
1:01:45
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but um imagine a quantum gravity scientist, someone who knows uh what happened before the big
1:01:53
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bang and knows which ingredients are necessary to make a big bang. And it's just like having the recipe for a
1:02:01
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cake. You know the ingredients and you know the order by which you need to put them together and the heat that you need to apply in order to get the cake. The
1:02:10
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only thing you you might be missing is an oven. But um I argue that someone who has that knowledge even of the recipe
1:02:19
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could apply for the job of God because the one precondition if you want to apply to the job of God, the one thing
1:02:27
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you need to know is how to create a a baby universe.
Chapter 19: Was the Big Bang engineered?
1:02:31
1 hour, 2 minutes, 31 seconds
And that's within the realm of a very advanced scientist.
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So maybe the big bang was produced by a quantum gravity engineer. That's very
1:02:43
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interesting. And it's a theory that I've heard many times that this could be one universe that that was created among
1:02:52
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many many different ones that were produced by advanced civilizations or whatnot. What what's what's your what's
1:03:00
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your favorite theory about um the the origin of the universe and what happened before the big bang? [clears throat] Well, the the privilege of being a
1:03:08
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scientist is um that I can say I don't know. Uh I do like the idea of a quantum gravity engineer producing a baby
1:03:16
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universe. This is not something that was heavily discussed in the literature.
1:03:20
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There there are exactly two papers on it in the physics literature.
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But you know discovering it would be even more important than discovering that we are not at the center of the universe which was what Galileo Galile
1:03:35
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realized by looking at the moons of Jupiter. He saw them orbiting. And by the way, behind me you can see a bronze
1:03:42
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sculpture that was made by uh one of the most accomplished sculptors in the US um
1:03:48
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Greg Wyatt who donated it to my office at Harvard. So now my office uh where
1:03:57
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I'm sitting right now um is basically a museum um and he will send me another sculpture of Galileo within a few
1:04:04
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months. Um, and there is another sculptor in Spain who was inspired by my work and that will send me yet another
1:04:11
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sculpture. That one is of Umua Mua. And um, there is actually also a playright
1:04:19
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that wrote a play about the the research I'm doing. And um, there will be a Netflix documentary from the expedition
1:04:28
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to the Pacific Ocean that will come out within a year.
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Uh in a week I'm supposed to speak with two um uh important Hollywood u directors that would like to make a
1:04:40
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science fiction movie. They want to get my advice about the script. Um so I have a lot of interaction with people in the
1:04:46
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arts and I I realize that there is a common uh denominator to the frontiers
1:04:54
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of science and the arts and that is studying the unknown, exploring the unknown.
1:05:00
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Yeah, that's a that's very true. It's a great parallel to draw. Um, I noticed in one of your recent articles that you spoke about the ne the necessity of
Chapter 20: Preparing humanity for alien contact
1:05:09
1 hour, 5 minutes, 9 seconds
developing a council on alien relations should we find conclusive evidence of ETSs? Can you talk a little bit about
1:05:17
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that? What would what impact would that ultimately have on humanity if we did find conclusive alien evidence? Well,
1:05:24
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there was I was invited to um a discussion dinner discussion at the uh
1:05:31
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council on on foreign relations which is focused on international relations on on on earth. And they asked me to say a few
1:05:40
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words about um the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And I thought after this meeting that it
1:05:47
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would, you know, if we do find evidence that we are not alone, then it would make a lot of sense to establish a completely independent organization, the
1:05:55
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Council on um extraterrestrial relations or or alien
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relations. Um and and of course there would be a lot of new frontiers opened
1:06:09
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by such an encounter with an alien civilization.
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We will have first of all to develop a common language to understand their goals. There might be new avenues
1:06:22
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for commerce that involve cooperation, access to completely new science and technology and materials that they may
1:06:29
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offer us. And [snorts] um I think it may bring a sense that um
1:06:37
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we are all in the same boat. All humans are members of the human species and [snorts] instead of uh fighting each
1:06:43
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other we should cooperate uh as members of the human species. So I I very much hope that you know since from a great
1:06:50
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distance um you can't really resolve the borders between nations. You know, if you if you take the best telescopes that
1:06:58
1 hour, 6 minutes, 58 seconds
we ever built and bring them to a distance that is larger than 10 times the Earth's sun separation from Earth,
1:07:06
1 hour, 7 minutes, 6 seconds
they would not be able to resolve the borders between nations uh on Earth. Um
1:07:14
1 hour, 7 minutes, 14 seconds
and what it says is that you know if if you want to go to the nearest star, it's 10,000 times farther than that distance.
1:07:22
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And if you want to go to a star on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy, that's another factor of 10,000. So, you
1:07:30
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know, from that vantage point, nations on Earth make very little sense.
1:07:35
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And perhaps when we encounter those civilizations, they they would convince us that we [snorts] shouldn't split the
1:07:43
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earth into nations. You know, I hope that everyone would sign up for
1:07:49
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for one Earth species, intelligent species called humans rather than
1:07:56
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splitting it among nations, which was something we inherited from the days we were in the jungle where there were
1:08:03
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different t tribes of animals that were threatening our existence. I know we don't have too much time left. I don't want to keep you too much longer, but I
Chapter 21: Where will the search be in ten years?
1:08:10
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do have one final question. Between the developments that are happening with UAP disclosure in government and on the scientific side with the research that's
1:08:19
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being done, what's your prediction for the next 10 years, where will we be a decade from now with regards to alien uh the the question of alien life?
1:08:29
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I think it very much depends on the level of funding that will go to scientific research of the type that the Galo project is doing. As I mentioned
1:08:37
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before, there are very specific things that can be done to to get more data and more evidence. So everyone would be on the on the same page as to how
1:08:46
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interesting are the anomalies that we currently have. Um and uh so if we if
1:08:53
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there will be funding at a level of hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars I think just within
1:09:00
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a few years maybe the next five years we can make a huge amount of of progress.
1:09:06
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Okay. and we will know much more. And you know if we end up realizing that all the evidence points towards things we
1:09:13
1 hour, 9 minutes, 13 seconds
already know about like rocks um humanmade uh artifacts um so be it at
1:09:22
1 hour, 9 minutes, 22 seconds
least you know we we checked but without doing the work um it's really premature to say anything and especially since we
1:09:29
1 hour, 9 minutes, 29 seconds
see anomalies that we need to to figure out. So I think well given the current funding that the Gallo project receives
1:09:38
1 hour, 9 minutes, 38 seconds
it may take more time but if if um if I'm successful in promoting that
1:09:45
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scientific research I think we can within 5 to 10 years know much more than we know now.
1:09:52
1 hour, 9 minutes, 52 seconds
You said it very well during your TED talk that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that requires extraordinary funding. So, I hope that
1:10:00
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you do get the funding that you're that you're looking for so that we can get more answers to these big questions.
1:10:05
1 hour, 10 minutes, 5 seconds
Thank you so much. Yeah, I I'm completely ready to allocate all the time in the world to this study if I have the funding to do it.
Chapter 22: Where to follow Avi Loeb’s work
1:10:14
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Where can people uh learn more about your your work?
1:10:17
1 hour, 10 minutes, 17 seconds
Um, so I post essays almost every day or two um uh on medium.com. So if you search for
1:10:26
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aviium.com, you will find it there. Um the executive summary of what I'm doing
1:10:33
1 hour, 10 minutes, 33 seconds
was given in the TED talk that we mentioned. Uh there was also an interview for NPR that was condensed to 18 minutes just a a couple of weeks ago.
1:10:44
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Um out of an hour and a half of an interview that they had with me, I also recommend that as an executive summary.
1:10:51
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Uh otherwise, the Galo Project has a website where we put all of our publications.
1:10:57
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Um and of course, if you are a potential donor that is uh interested in in providing substantial funding to the
1:11:04
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next expedition, just get in touch with me and I'll be delighted to discuss it with you.
1:11:09
1 hour, 11 minutes, 9 seconds
Excellent. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time. It's been great speaking to you. Fascinating conversation. Um, and I I I hope that uh
1:11:16
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the next several years yield some some great advancements for your your research.
1:11:21
1 hour, 11 minutes, 21 seconds
Thank you so much. And of course, there are the two books behind me that if anyone wants to read about the past work that I've been doing.
1:11:27
1 hour, 11 minutes, 27 seconds
Yes, of course. I will provide links to all of your work in the description for this video. And as always, I want to thank all of our viewers. Uh, please feel free to leave comments. Uh, be sure
1:11:36
1 hour, 11 minutes, 36 seconds
to like and subscribe. And I will get back to you with more great interviews like this one in the near future. So until then, take care everybody. See you next time.