Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhU-yzauNWE
[Laughter] [Music] hello thanks for having me my pleasure uh i i'm very good friends with your friend lex friedman and uh he highly recommends you as well oh thank you you know he asked me about social media and i told him i have no footprint on social media he said why and i said i promised my wife when i married her not to have any account and he said i should get married [Laughter] yeah he reads accounts he read and he says he doesn't but then he does he reads like comments and stuff and then he gets mad at things people say it's kind of funny you see i save the time i don't even read what other people say good and i don't care how many likes i have that's the other thing that's wonderful that's a freedom yeah it's underrated freedom yeah uh you came on my radar when uh you were discussing uh a muammu that's the right thing which is an object that we detected in space that you believe could possibly have been extraterrestrial in origin meaning from some sort of a civilization right yeah why did you did what please explain to people what a muammar is why it's so extraordinary and why you think it's possible that it came from some other intelligent civilization right so i'm a scientist and i basically follow the evidence just like sherlock holmes trying to find solutions it's a detective story you have some anomalies some things that don't quite match what you expected and you're trying to find an explanation and the thing about omua moa is that it was discovered on october 19 2017 a little more than three years ago and it was the very first object that visited our vicinity in the solar system from outside the solar system it moved too fast to be bound to the sun very first object that we have found coming to us from interstellar space from other places
and at first astronomers said oh yeah it's probably just like the objects we had in our solar system all the rocks that we have seen before we've seen comets and asteroids so a comet is a rock that is covered with ice water ice so when it gets close to the sun the surface gets warmed up and the ice turns into vapor gas and you see this beautiful cometary tail behind it that's what a comet is an asteroid is just rock without much ice on it actually the first person to explain what comets are uh was at harvard the university that i am affiliated with and the the story goes that i mean it was fred whipple that he went to harvard square and saw all the slush during the winter day you know and came up with the idea that it's just icy rock or rc i see rocks or you know rocky ice uh and that's what a comet is and the comets come to us from the periphery of the solar system and you know astronomers said okay other stars may have them as well and you know since they are loosely bound if they are in the periphery they can be easily ripped apart from their host star and some of them will fly in our direction we will see them so they said o mua mua is probably a comet the only problem is there wasn't any cometary tale so you look for a duck but it doesn't look like a duck you know so then the question is what is it and so people say okay it's just a rock without any ice on it then the problem was that it exhibited an extra push away from the sun and usually you get it from the rocket effect that when when you make the cometary tail uh it pushes the object in the opposite direction just like a jet plane a jet plane works by throwing gas out and that's pushing you forward so a comet has an extra push when it evaporates but there was no commentary there so why did it show an extra push that was the key question
in my mind at which point i started thinking maybe it's not a comet and not an asteroid something else you know and the other strange thing about it it it changes its brightness by a factor of 10 or more and the brightness of the object the light that we see is simply reflected sunlight so just think about it think about a piece of paper razor thin piece of paper tumbling in the wind and changing the area that we can see the projected area of that piece of paper by a factor of 10 as we look at it that's exactly what we inferred from this object spinning around every eight hours but changing its brightness by a factor of 10 meaning that the area projected on the sky that we see that reflects sunlight changed by a factor of 10 so that means it has an extreme geometry most likely flat if you try to interpret the light that it reflected over as it was tumbling around and so a flat object about the size of a football field that has an extra push if it were a comet it needed to lose about a tenth of its uh weight so a lot of evaporation you can't just say oh it's a little bit of evaporation and therefore that's why we don't see it it should have lost a tenth of its weight you know if we go on a diet and lose a tenth of our weight that's that's a big chunk of of mass right so this object didn't lose that because we didn't see it and the speed of space telescope looked very deeply behind it to see if there are any traces of dust or gas didn't see anything so then you know just like sherlock holmes i was trying to think together with a postdoc of mine shmuel what could explain it and the only thing that came to mind is reflecting sunlight so the object itself is being pushed by the sunlight reflecting off its surface and you know that would agree with everything we know about the object but in order for it to work the object
needs to be very thin like a sail you know the sail on a boat so a sail is pushed by a wind but you can also push an object a thin object by light and that is called the light sail and we are actually using this technology now developing it for space exploration the big advantage is you don't need to carry the fuel with the spacecraft you just reflect light off it and it's being pushed now a science fiction movie that did something like that i think it was called sunlight quite possibly i should mention an anecdote in september just a few months ago in september 2020 there was another object that showed an extra push no commentary tale and then astronomers so astronomers gave it the name 2020 so okay september 2020 and then they extrapolated back in time and found that it came from earth actually and then they looked at the history books and show and saw that indeed there was a rocket booster from a lunar lander that was kicked into space and this is the object now why did it uh show this push because it's a hollow it's a very thin structure so here is an example where we can tell it's artificial and we know that we made it but omua mua could not have been made by us because it was passing near us just for a few months very quickly faster than any rocket that we can launch that's why we couldn't really chase it when it was receding away from us and it came from outside the solar system so you know i just do one plus one equal to i say okay it looks very peculiar maybe it belongs to another civilization i just put it in a scientific paper i didn't think you know we didn't have any press release then it went viral the public got extremely interested and the thing that really surprised me is that my colleagues were pushing back they were very upset that this possibility was even mentioned you know we had a
seminar a lecture about this object at harvard and if a colleague of mine after the lecture said this object is really weird i wish it never existed now to me you know that i was really appointed by this how can you say something like that you should you should be happy about whatever nature gives you you know you learn something new if if something doesn't look right it actually teaches us oh it's a learning experience we learned that we have to revise the way we think about reality you know that's a good thing that's not a bad you shouldn't always be in your comfort zone and think that the future will be the same as the past so i actually see it as a blessing you know i can't imagine why anybody would be upset that it exists like i wish it didn't exist that's kind of hilarious because it takes you away from your comfort zone you know i know but it's if you're studying the heavens you're studying the cosmos what is the ultimate thing that you could find another civilization or a piece of something another civilization that's exactly my point but if you go back in time let me give you okay two examples uh galileo galilei said i think the earth moves around the sun but at the time philosophers knew for sure that the sun moves around the earth you see it moving in the sky it was consistent with the religious beliefs everything so they said we don't want to look through your telescope to change our view we will put you in house arrest now what did they achieve by that and by the way i'm in house arrest but it's because of the pandemic not because so what did they achieve by that they maintained their ignorance and the earth continued to move around the sun you know reality is the one thing that never goes away irrespective whether you ignore it you can ignore it now there is another example there is a student a student at harvard that as a result of my book on this
subject that is about to come out in in a week or so she she was inspired to do her phd by you know on the theme of my book so she invited me to a thesis exam just a couple of months ago and one of the examiners a professor asked her do you know why giordano bruno an italian guy was burnt at the stake and she said well he was an obnoxious guy he irritated a lot of people which is true you know he was an object but the professor corrected her and said no it was because he said that other stars are just like the sun you know there are stars like the sun and they have planets like the earth around them and there may be life on those planets and that was offensive to the church because if there is life there and it had sinned you know then christ should have visited those planets to save them to save the life life forms and you know you need multi copies of christ to to visit those planets and that was unacceptable so they burned the guy so you see that you know throughout history people are not really open-minded about the sky the heavens as you said well they're not open-minded when it comes to saying something that could make you an outcast or that could align you with an outcast or open you to ridicule people don't like being ridiculed and i would imagine that i know the things you've experienced well wonderful for you yeah i go look uh what i care about is you know i i operate by the same theme that basketball coaches tell their team uh they the team players they say keep your eyes on the ball not on the audience i really don't care what other people think i just follow the evidence now it may well be that i'm wrong that this is really an unusual object that is of natural origin
and by the way some of the mainstream astronomers tried to explain it but they always came up with an explanation that is the first object of its type that we have ever seen so all i'm saying is if it's if it's nothing that we have seen before why not contemplate also the possibility that it's artificially made you know why is that so offensive to to people and besides you know science is about evidence so let's look for other objects and not always assume that we know that the answer in advance you know if if you took a caveman and showed the caveman a cellphone a modern sinful the caveman would think that it's a rock just a shiny rock and i can understand the response of my colleagues but on the other hand i would expect them to be more open-minded that that's the whole purpose of science is to it's a learning experience we should be humble we should be modest we shouldn't assume that we always know the answer in advance and we shouldn't worry about our image it's not about us it's about finding what the heavens are you know now the pushback that you've received is there pushback on your interpretation of the evidence is is there pushback on the evidence itself like what is the pushback is it just the possibility that it's extraterrestrial just the possibility bothers people and they say you know we shouldn't even discuss it there is a taboo on it now some of these people that are very vocal about it you know some of them i think of as just like this congressman that for many years was making anti-gay statements and then in march 2020 he confessed that he's gay you know so i believe that some of them deep inside are really intrigued by this possibility and they speak out in a way that is against it but are would you know they will jump as soon as the evidence becomes undisputable to me it's just a
possibility that we should entertain because it affects the way we behave in the future you know we if we search for other objects of the same we might find even more conclusive evidence if we don't uh look for unexpected things we will never discover them you know if we put blinders on our eyes so all i'm saying is it's a reasonable possibility for this reasonable interpretation for the evidence we have for this object which is unusual very because all the natural interpretations also assume something that we have never seen before so i say okay so let's consider the possibility of a message in a bottle you know when you walk on the beach and you see most of the time seashells or rocks that were naturally produced every now and then you encounter a plastic bottle that was artificially made and perhaps omuamua was the first plastic bottle you know that carries some message for us and that would change our perception about our place in the universe you know we are not alone also i don't think that we are the smartest kid on the block if you ask me uh i think that we are probably quite typical because half of the stars like the sun have a planet the size of the earth roughly at the same distance that could have liquid water on the surface and the chemistry of life as we know it now you open a recipe book for cakes you can see that you can make very different cakes out of the same ingredients you know depending on how you mix them you can take flour sugar i mean so you get very different outcomes what's the chance that if you took the soup of chemicals that existed on earth and put them together in some random fashion to get the life as we know it that you got the best cake possible what's the the chance is minuscule i think we are sort of
typical like ants on a sidewalk you know we are not really special that's why nobody is interested in us you know it's very arrogant to say we are unique we are special the aliens are coming to haunt us they don't care about us we are just like ants on the sidewalk you know and at the same time we might learn from them you know so if we uh approach this from a modest perspective that we are not really the sharpest cookie in the jar then by looking at the sky we may learn something about more advanced technologies that we can bring here for example you know suppose we see a technology that we didn't even dream about it would be a better investment of our time to learn about it than to go to wall street or to silicon valley instead of us developing it over hundreds of years you know suddenly you see something that you know we can use here well let me push back on a couple of these things first of all i i don't think if people do believe that there are that there is alien life i don't think they necessarily think that we are the best of of life in the cosmos i think most people agree there's room for improvement when it comes to the human race but we are clearly the most advanced animal that we're aware of okay we're aware of that we can prove it but we're not smart look at the newspaper but we're but we're not perfect but we're far more i don't even the word intelligent is a rough word right it's we're definitely more intelligent than a lot of other animals that we can observe but what we can do that is interesting is we can radically change and manipulate our environment and i think it's preposterous to think that that wouldn't be interesting to another species now if you're thinking of something that's infinitely more advanced than us millions and millions of years more advanced than us they probably won't be impressed with us
but we have we take biologists go to the jungle to study bugs i mean we have people that spend a large portion of life looking for strange little mammals that live in the in the forest but think about it our technology is evolving on a three-year time scale so you know we it's a century old the technologies we have so think what it would be a hundred years from now a thousand years from now a million years from now a billion years i believe that an advanced technological civilization probably builds a cocoon around itself is not really interested in establishing contact with lesser civilizations like ours why wouldn't it be because we are you know not first of all the only thing that can happen as a result of interaction with us is that they will downgrade their lifestyle you know the quality of life so the only way for us to learn about them is from the trash they throw out you know just like uh investigative journalists looking through the the trash of celebrities in hollywood you know to find out what what are they doing and but i don't think they will care much about us i do let me offer you up another possibility what if they have recognized that all life regardless of the ingredients in the cake and how they're put together that all life seeks innovation and seeks to advance and that this is a constant throughout the universe that things go from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms to interstellar travelers and that they continue along this path as long as they don't fall into a few possible scenarios that could lead to ultimate destruction like nuclear war like climate change like all the things that we're in but that's the point i think advanced civilizations are probably short i mean like ours are short-lived because of stupidity now look for example the concept of racism you know that's not
new you know that was the the nazi regime okay in the second world war and racism is still around us what is it based on that somehow the color of the skin of a person you know makes a difference as to what's essentially tribalism right because if it's not the color of the skin then it's the origin of the religion but it's stupidity it makes no sense if you look at the genetic making of humans you know the color of the skin is completely superfluous so the fact that humans always want to feel superior relative to each other they fight each other most of our money time and energy look at the newspaper most of our effort is in fighting each other that is not a sign of intelligence a sign of intelligence is working together dedicating all the resources that we have towards a better future such that we can benefit from it so how can we waste all these risks you know just to give an example in my book i talk about winston churchill winston church 1939 wrote an essay about the fact that there could be life around other in on other planets around other stars and we should search for it now he didn't have a chance to publish it because he became prime minister and then had to fight the the second world war against the nazi regime so much money was wasted in that war if that money was allocated to the search for extraterrestrial life the way the churchill envisioned it before the war we might have we might have known the answer by now and what i'm saying is this is just an example for how non-intelligent we are we are not working together towards a better future we are fighting each other and that's the answer to your question that we might not live very long but you're saying this as you work at harvard and as you're writing books on extraterrestrial objects right i don't necessarily agree with you i think there are massive problems with people but i think we are far better than the human beings that lived 2 000 years ago in that
regard and i think that we will probably be looking back on this day and age and mocking how stupid we are when we are more advanced two thousand i really hope so and that's what i'm trying we're moving in that direction well that's what i'm trying to promote but i'm not necessarily i think as optimistic as you are i think our cake is still in the oven let's hope so i really want that future but you know i'm doing my best but you can see from the pushback yes to which i don't have access because i i'm not you know i don't have an account on the social congratulations again for that i think that's i i think we're moving i think there's conflict but i think for whatever reason the way human beings operate we oftentimes need conflict in order to make improvements right we need a yin and yang we needed a given a poll if we don't have that we get we get complacent why can't we understand the the best path forward without you know it's just like using a gps system and it says recalculating every time we have a crisis recalculating so we recalculate our next move based on all the mistakes we've made why can't we be smart in the first place i think we have biological limitations that are based on our ancestry and our ancestry is filled with tribalism and chaos and we're primates i mean that's that's part of the problem and i think that our issue with racism is the same issue that we have when we have religious discrimination or cultural discrimination it's tribalism i agree and we are you know we're just it's wired into our dna now my problem is why couldn't science given that you know there are billions of earth sun systems within just the milky way galaxy and then a trillion galaxies like the milky way in the observable volume of the universe you know why can't the mainstream of astronomy simply say conservatively you know just assuming the most conservative not
speculative assumption conservatively we are at the middle of the road you know kind of life uh it's very likely that we're not unique and special and let's just look for evidence you know search for it why should that there be a taboo on discussing this subject that makes no sense for example astronomers are now thinking contemplating new telescopes of the future that will cost billions of dollars to taxpayers okay that would search for oxygen in the atmospheres of other planets around other stars because oxygen could be indicative of life microbial life i say it will never be conclusive such a search even if it costs billions of dollars because the earth for two billion years the first two billion years of the earth history didn't have much oxygen it's in its atmosphere there were microbes but the oxygen level was quite low and then it suddenly rose after two billion years half of its life so not finding oxygen doesn't mean there is no life and then if you find oxygen it can be produced by many natural processes like breaking water molecules or other things so it will never be conclusive how can you make a conclusive statement if you find industrial pollution in the same atmosphere you just search for cfcs these are the molecules produced by refrigerating systems by industries if you find evidence for that there is no way that nature can make these very complex molecules naturally so i say to the mainstream of astronomy use the same instruments and motivate them by this question of can we detect industrial pollution and i wrote a paper about and the thing is the public is extremely interested in this question and the public funds science so how can the scientific community shy away from a question that it can address with existing technology you know when the public is very
interested in that how can there be a taboo on this question that's the thing that really puzzles me now you know i wasn't working in this area until the last five years or so i was working in studying black holes studying the universe and i came across a number of ideas that led me in into this rabbit hole into this subject now i'm about to publish this book at a popular level but also a textbook six months later that describes all the signs that we have related to the search for life outside earth far from earth and i'm just amazed that it's not part of the mainstream you know it's really surprising to me and i think it's inappropriate because you look at physics theoretical physic there are lots of speculative ideas in it like people talk about extra dimensions the multiverse you know super symmetry super string theory all of these have no evidence to their credit you know there is no experimental test not even thought about you know like in the next decade the next two decades but these ideas are part of the mainstream so you see physicists giving each other awards and doing intellectual gymnastics you know just demonstrating that they're smart and to me that's an unhealthy situation in physics you know you can do it in mathematics where it's completely detached from any application to reality but in physics we are supposed to describe reality and yet you have this intellect so it's as if the physics community some parts of it decided that the most important task is to demonstrate that you're smart and that is really strange to me because you know we're supposed to understand nature not show that we are smart you know einstein made three three big mistakes at the end of his career in the 1930s he argued that black
holes don't exist gravitational waves don't exist and quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at the distance you know he argued all these three things at the end of his career when he was the most experienced you know and he was wrong we have experimental data that shows that he was wrong on all three and what is the lesson from that even the smartest person you know that was last century in physics can be wrong if he works on the frontier because you never know exactly where the truth lies okay you have to take risks and if people want to just demonstrate that they are smart it's better not to take risks and how do you not take risks if you work on ideas that will never be tested against data against evidence so if you work on super string theory or on extra dimensions or on the multiverse you can do intellectual gymnastics and impress your colleagues that you're smart and you will get jobs you will get recognition you will get awards if that's your goal that's a completely legitimate framework but i see it as a violation of our commitment as physicists to understand nature you know it's not really about us physics is a dialogue with nature you listen to nature you see what the experiments are telling you and you learn and perhaps you are wrong you take risks it's not about your image it's not getting more likes on twitter so that's why i don't really care what my colleagues say if this object looked unusual i just talked about it the way i would talk about any other anomaly and people were asking you know why isn't he backing down well i will back down as soon as there is evidence you know if i saw a photograph showing that it's a rock or if i saw some other objects like it that we definitely have clear evidence that they are naturally produced then i will give up on it like and i'm not afraid of being wrong you know
that's that's part of any work on the frontiers this is my thoughts on the the quantum physics aspect of this i think there's not enough people that understand what they're doing to criticize them so there's no social pressure the difference between that and the concept of exploring extraterrestrial life is extraterrestrial life is inexorably connected to nonsense it's an actually collected it's connected to crazy people they think that they're talking to aliens they're channeling people but i have to answer i have an answer to that okay suppose there was a whole literature on covet 19 that is completely fictitious you know like people were saying crazy things about kobe 19 that make no sense whatsoever and there was a well you can find them yeah suppose there were there were books about it there were films about it now would that mean that scientists reputable scientists should not work on a vaccine for no no no no but who cares if there are people that say nonsense you don't care you ignore them covet 19 is a real thing and you could prove it in a lab quickly instantly i mean it's it's universally acknowledged as being a real thing right the problem with extraterrestrial life is there's no evidence that it's real well but if you step on the grass and you say look it doesn't grow then obviously because you're stepping on it so if you bully anyone that works on the subject then young people don't enter into this research field if you don't fund it at all you dry it up then there will not be discoveries i step on the grass and it doesn't grow therefore there is no point in continuing to wait for it you know to grow i agree with you no i i think it's a i think it's a side effect of our social interactions and i think a lot of professors a lot of people in academia they come from you know maybe a so more socially awkward environment they come from
a a lot of people that get into teaching a lot of people that get into being professors they weren't like the class king they weren't like the most popular person and social interactions with them uh you know maybe they were bullied maybe that like dr carl hart who's an academic was on a couple days ago was actually talking about this very subject and that a lot of academics they uh they see they try to undermine other people's work and they they do so in kind of a bullying fashion yeah because it's all about the ego you see i was asked by the harvard gazette the harvard university gazette which is the pravda of harvard you know this official newspaper they asked me uh what is the one thing you would like to change about the world you know a very big question yeah so i wrote an essay i said i want my colleagues to behave more like kids because as a kid i remember that you know i was mostly curious about the world i i would not be afraid of making mistakes i wasn't worried about my ego or my something really strange uh happens to those kids that take risks and are not worried about themselves so much uh something bad happens to them when they become tenured professors in academia tenure is supposed to give you the freedom to explore you know directions that might may turn out to be wrong you know that's what einstein demonstrated at the end of his career so you would expect people to take advantage of that but instead once professors become tenured for life meaning that there is no risk to their job they are starting to pursue honors and rewards status recognition yeah they are afraid of making mistakes they build these echo chambers where they have students and postdocs repeating their mantras so that their voice will sound louder so that they will get even more recognition
now i say this you know the scientific inquiry is not about us it's about the dialogue with nature trying to figure out what nature is it's not about elevating our status our image you know we will all die in several decades so you know it's really not that now you know actually lex friedman was asking me avi you know so much what do you think is the meaning of life and i told him look um i don't i think we just exist you know any meaning that we assign now uh will go away in a billion years because the sun will boil off the oceans on earth there will be no life on earth you know all of these things that we call meaning they are really temporary in the big big we should just enjoy the process just like eating good food you know i would not mention another example uh you know doing these like eating good food you enjoy the process so learning about the world figuring out what the world is is very enjoyable you know i i if i realize something nobody else did and understand something that nobody else did it gives me pleasure so just the process of doing that that gives me meaning because i enjoy it you know so you should live your life in a way that you enjoy it if you like good food that's good enough you know you can live your life just eating you know that's what animals do yes yeah right uh can have sex you can do all kinds but if you want a deeper sort of satisfaction i think understanding the world is what humans are capable of doing and and that's really a deeper level of of enjoying life so to speak well there's a lot of examples of professors going out on a limb being incorrect and then being punished being ridiculed losing their status in the community or even being correct but not having the support of your peers who turn on you and turn against you and then it turns out ultimately they were correct but there's very little there's very little repercussions for
that and there's a thing that happens with people and ideas where they get scared to take on something that could easily make them look ridiculous and the best example of that is extraterrestrial life yeah that is it's so easy to get ridiculed for believing in it it's like bigfoot and then extraterrestrial life i want to change that i say this is a subject the scientific community can address with scientific tools okay with telescopes let's discuss it the public is interested you know let's forget about the past and look for a better future right and my point is there are many examples for unborn babies you know in science where people were ridiculed and ideas were never pursued or delayed you know for example looking for planets around other stars you know that was something something that was suggested in 1952 by an astronomer called otto struve who said if you take jupiter the planet jupiter put it close to the sun then it will move the sun back and forth a lot and you could tell if there is a close in jupiter near other stars by looking at their motion or looking as it occurs the star comes in front of it transits in front he suggested that 1952 for four decades astronomers ignored that why because they said we know that jupiter in our solar system is far away and we understand why it's far away and therefore we shouldn't waste our time even looking for something like that then in 1995 a couple of astronomers found a hot jupiter jupiter close to a star and they got the nobel prize a couple of years ago for that so my point is this is an example of a baby that was eventually born so people would say oh yeah science works you see eventually it was found my point is it took four decades in those four decades you know we could have done a lot to advance science and the other thing is i say okay this baby
was born but there might have been other babies that were not born you know ideas that were put forward and were scrutinized for no good reason just because people are close-minded and you know the strange thing for me is i see a lot of innovation in the commercial sector you see uh you know jeff bezos elon musk you know apple uh google uh they have parts of their companies that is that are doing uh blue sky research you know things that are not applied start it all started with ibm and before that and then in academia i see a lot of conservatism much less innovation as in the commercials now the commercial sector is after making a profit you would expect academia to be even more open-minded but it's not and to me that has to that must change is this something that you had as an idea before publishing this this oh yeah these thoughts about extraterrestrial life and did that accentuate it for you yeah yeah i didn't expect the response that i received it doesn't bother me um you know in my uh i have a 800 more than 800 papers that i published and eight books in in in all of these i talk about anomalies you know over the years i talked about anomalies in other contexts you know like in the early universe and and when i mentioned speculative ideas in other contexts there was no pushback you know it it it wasn't threatening to anyone it wasn't but something about the subject of extraterrestrial life bothers people and frankly you know i'm just like a kid i try to be as close as possible to the way i was at a young age i'm just doing it innocently working on this subject the same way i work on other subjects and i get this response that now the only reason the two of us are speaking you know and i get a lot of media attention is because my colleagues are not behaving the same way if everyone would accept you know i think it's common sense what is common sense to me
if everyone would accept it i would be no different than the person next to me you wouldn't speak you wouldn't be speaking to me sure i would no i still would be i would love starting you know i grew up on a farm by the way i'm not a typical astronomer that's oh yeah you were explaining that did you grow up in israel is that right yeah i grew up in israel on a farm i used to collect eggs every afternoon and drive a tractor to the hills and and read primarily philosophy books that's what i was interested in the big questions but then you know i had to serve in the military and then i had two two options either to run in the fields with a machine gun you know uh which i did partly or to uh do intellectual work you know and i could do that if i were to work in physics so i said okay i'll i'll do the physics and i was recruited to a special program that allowed me to finish my phd at age 24 and then i worked on not on astronomy but then i visited i actually led the first project that was funded by the star wars initiative of ronald reagan back in the 80s the first international project so general abramson came to visit israel and we presented the project to him i was the theorist leading that project and he liked it a lot so it was the first project to be funded outside the us related to sdi the star wars initiative so that brought me to visit washington uh quite often because we were funded by the u.s and in one of the visits i went to princeton because i heard that you know albert einstein was at the institute for advanced study and i wanted to see the place and so you know someone introduced me to john bakal who was an astrophysicist there uh working mostly on the sun for his career i didn't know how the sun shines when i met him uh eventually he invited me for a month-long visit and then offered me a five-year
fellowship and at that point i said okay i have this offer i cannot decline it i'll go into astrophysics so i switched into astrophysics i had to learn the vocabulary and then a position came at harvard junior faculty and nobody wanted it there was someone else that was offered it he turned it down because the chance of getting tenure that harvard were very small at the time and i took it because i can i could always go back to the farm you know that was a plan b for me and maybe even better plan because you know i enjoy nature and but then they promoted me to tenure in three years and i became the chair of the department a decade and a half later so i was the longest-serving chair between 2011 and 2020. so that three terms um so you know i'm in a way part of should be regarded as part of the establishment because i was the chair of the harvard astronomy department for nine years three terms and i also chaired the board on physics and astronomy of the national academies and i was a member of president's council of advisers of science and technology in washington and um you know i i'm also chair of the starshot initiative of the break room foundation i have a lot of leadership and i'm the director of the institute for theory and computation at harvard and the founding director of the black hole initiative which is a center just focusing on black holes so i have all these leadership positions but fundamentally i'm just like a kid you know i i don't care about these labels all i care you know i try to keep my eyes on the ball now to go back to umua um the you you were saying that it was moving at a speed that uh was inconsistent with something that's being thrown from the sun and that it moved faster than any rocket that we can shoot out
how fast was it moving uh it was it was moving at uh when it went close to us uh over 50 kilometers per second which is you know think about it well of order 30 miles per second second not hour yeah uh so very fast now um by the time we spotted it it was already moving away from us so it's just like seeing a guest for dinner and then noticing that the guest is weird once it left through the front door into the dark street so you can't by now you know as as it moved out by now it's extremely faint it's a million times fainter than it was when it was close to us what is the normal speed of a comet uh it's um at least twice slower so all the comets and asteroids we have seen before are bound to the sun and so they come from the outer part of the solar system they are sinking on an orbit that almost goes towards the sun but not quiet and so they pass near us some of them most of them are moving far away from us so we don't see any cometary tail and they basically because they are bound to the sun they are not moving as fast as an object that came from outside that is falling near and we could tell that it is an interstellar object that was the first thing noticed we didn't expect it because i wrote a paper about the 12 years earlier saying that this telescope in hawaii that discovered and that's why it has this name by the way because it's it means a scout in the hawaiian language a messenger from far away it was discovered by a telescope called pan stars on mount haleakala in maui in hawaii we actually visited that observatory in july 2017 with my family we were on vacation in maui but back then they didn't spot umumua when it was approaching us at that time they spotted it only when in october that year when it was receding away if we would have known about it when it was approaching us
you know we could have in principle sent a cubesat a satellite with a camera that would meet it halfway and take a photograph not only that we didn't spot it approaching us but we also didn't suspect that it's something special now there was a second object that came later called borisov it's called after um a russian amateur astronomer gennady borisov uh that discovered it by chance and it looked just like a comet a typical comet with a cometary tail also came from interstellar space just what we expected so then people came to me and said okay you see this one is a comet it's interstellar as well doesn't it convince you that um was also natural in origin and i said you know when when i went to the first date with my wife i thought that she's special and unique the fact that i met a lot of women since then didn't change that opinion i still think that she's special so the fact that we saw borisov like a typical regular usual comment after we saw muammar that didn't look like a com doesn't change my opinion about somebody they were just hastily looking to dismiss your observations without well it was not mild but they were trying to make the case that it's also natural so you know the community as a whole there was a group of astronomers that came together and said it is natural it is unusual but it's probably natural they just said that and it reminded me of a story about the in 19 at the in the early 1930s there was a group like of 30 physicists that decided to write a book showing that einstein's theory of relativity is wrong so when einstein was asked about it he said you know why do we need 30 physicists to write such a book you know one of them would be enough you know if he makes a good argument
that would show that my theory is wrong so a kid can make a good argument and show that something is wrong you don't need a group the only reason you need a group of people is if the if there is sort of a herd you know just like in africa if you have a group of lions coming together then they feel much more strong you know and and so so it's just a sign of authority they want to establish authority my point about muammar is you don't need a group of you know of astronomers to come together and say that it's natural i just want them to look at the evidence and explain it i i appreciate that now the the speed in which it was traveling you you said that it's uh twice as fast at least as as the average comment have there been other things that have been observed that are as fast as it no this was the first object that we saw coming from outside the solar system so it was the fastest at the place where we saw it the fastest ever because all the other objects were bound to the sun and by the way there is this uh principle that is called the copernican principle that says we are never at the privileged time or space you know copernicus was arguing that we are not at the center of the universe we're not at the center of the world and you can generalize it and say also that we are never at a special time okay so if we saw this object over a period of a few years that the survey of panstas was going on in the region that of the earth's orbit around the sun that means that there are many more out there you know you can't you can't just be lucky that over a few years you see the only object that passes in our vicinity over billions of years you know that makes no sense so there will be many more that we will find in the future if we just look and in three years there would be another telescope much more sensitive than pan
stars called the vera rubin observatory that could see one such object every month you know the only thing that complicates the picture is that elon musk wants to launch all these spacex all these communication satellites and you know they would they reflect sunlight so when they go in the dark sky they they appear uh on the telescope images so we have to know where they are and subtract them off but that's all now um this object you you also deemed when you when you were talking about its reflective surface that there's something about it that is much more reflective i believe you said ten times more reflective than the average than the typical yeah it's um okay so how did we get that um the spitzer space telescope was trying to detect heat coming off the object because we know how close it came to the sun and we know what temperature it was heated to okay so the amount of heat that we can detect from it just depends on its size if it's very big and it's hot we would easily detect the heat and this is about the size of a football field so then yeah so it's less than a football field so from the fact that the speed's especially hub didn't see any heat coming off it you can put an upper limb you can say the size is smaller than something okay roughly the size of a football field and then you can infer how much reflect reflectance it should have so that you see as much light as much sunlight coming off it as we saw and it's at the shiny end of the objects that we have seen before i mean it's not completely unprecedented there are objects that are as shiny as this one but it's not you know one of the dark objects you know like middle of the road kind of objects it's at the shiny end and so that in in your mind like what what is similar in terms of the what you would expect
from something that's this reflective that's that shiny uh so what we've seen before are asteroids and comets that a small fraction of which are as shiny none of them has uh is ten times longer than it is wide so this objective yeah roughly and the the comets that they show as much push as this object exhibited they have very clear cometary tails so i say you know okay suppose it it represents 10 of the objects that show one anomalous property and then 10 of the objects that show another anomalous property and then 10 of the objects that show another anomaly you multiply all these probabilities you get a very small likelihood of getting such an object and this is the first that we have seen you know so it should be typical so how come the very first interstellar object or maybe one out of two if you include borisov how come it's so unusual relative to the objects we've seen in the sources so my point is let's collect more evidence in the future let's be open-minded why assume that we know the answer in advance what is so problematic in discussing i don't think it's a speculation that there are other civilizations out there maybe they're dead because they kill themselves you know they produced the means for their own destruction they didn't take care of the climate they didn't they they fought each other through nuclear wars me you know maybe they they are dead by now but just like we find evidence for dead civilizations on earth you know by digging into the ground doing archaeology you know the mayan civilization is not around anymore but we can find evidence for it from the things that they left behind we can do the same thing in space space archaeology we can look for relics from dead civilizations and one one type of relics are those the space junk you know the things that they threw out that we can find visiting
our solar system so why not check for it now everything you've said is very rational it makes perfect sense what are the arguments against this like when your colleagues disagree with you what fuel do they possibly have ex for example they say it's never aliens it's never early never until the aliens come what do they think about things like commander david fravor's interpretations of the experience that he had uh off of the coast of san diego where something moved from 60 000 plus feet above sea level to one in a second on that i would say on on a you have unidentified flying objects i think the scientific community should invest some effort at you know examining these reports basically you can deploy a whole set of instruments in the ocean where the nimitz says uh you know yes carrier was and search for objects similar to what was to the reports and then do a scientific study of this rather than dismissing it and moving on to work on extra dimensions you know i given that the public is so curious about these issues i just find it inappropriate not to listen to the by the way i don't think of science as an occupation of the elite it's not something that is supposed to elevate you to a higher status you know when a plumber comes to my home to fix a problem with the toilet with the with the pipe you know i help the plumber and we figure out what the problem is based on all the clues that so this is my way of life i i think about a problem in the sink or in the toilet just like i think about a problem in physics you know trying to apply common sense look at all the evidence the clues and figure out what's going on and i don't think i think anyone even without professional education should be able to follow what the scientists are doing but my friend my colleagues argue you know we should be quiet as long as we are not sure about the
interpretation you know once we decide that we have the right answer we come out to the public and tell the public what it is because otherwise nobody would believe us that there is global warming for example my point is exactly the opposite i say nobody would believe you if you don't show expose the process by which you arrive at the conclusion so most of science is not finalized you know most of the scientific process does not have enough evidence we don't know exactly what's going on so we're trying to collect clues evidence and that's part of the process it's a learning experience sometimes we make mistakes it's completely human to make me you know we should show the public that it's okay the public will understand that you know the public will understand that because you know it's part of our experience and then when scientists have enough evidence to conclude something the public will believe it now because they see how the process goes that as you collect enough evidence eventually it's clear instead of forcing scientists to be quiet until the last moment and then they look like teachers in a class coming out with a press announcement of some result and you know every now and then those press conferences end up being wrong so the their quarrel with you is that they think that your your assumption that it's alien in nature is incorrect or hasty no what is there we shouldn't discuss it because this isn't discussed we shouldn't discuss it because the alien interpretation could be contemplated you know in many other occasions but i say you know this is not a typical situation we have the first object from interstellar space it looks strange go for it you know let's collect more evidence the public is interested so what's the
problem i don't see any problem with discussing this possibility putting it on the table and looking for more evidence why would there be a taboo on this subject what is their interpretation of the evidence what what is th when they when you lay out all the things you said about the shape of this object the speed of it where it's coming from all these variables that are very unusual yeah so they say each of them is indeed unusual but probably there is a natural explanation and then they say it's within my comfort zone to just ignore it let's forget about it it's not true the first ever interstellar object moving twice as fast as any comet we've ever observed with no tail with a shiny reflective surface that has an extremely unusual shape that's 10 times longer than it is wide and they just want to ignore it yeah that seems silly and it's flat most likely flat according to us yeah i mean so look i i i'm telling you that uh frankly i you know i i don't benefit from this uh exchange with my colleagues on the contrary i'm sure that you know behind my back they're saying bad things but the way i see it is when i served in the military you know and i i did some uh training yes in the paratroopers and so forth there was this saying that sometimes a soldier has to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can pass across and the the way i see it is that i'm trying to create an atmosphere an intellectual atmosphere that would be uh more open-minded that would allow younger people to have a better future you know and discuss these subjects to me i i also think that it's just inappropriate unhealthy for science to speculate about extra dimensions about all these things while avoiding even the discussion on technological signatures they're not
the same people though right not the same you're saying science in this gigantic blanket but there is this kind of physicists and astronomers it's not the same but but think about it the mainstream uh i mean and the astronomers are completely fine with the discussion on extra dimension the multiverse they don't complain about it so and and you know they feel the discipline right it yeah it doesn't threaten them uh in any way i think there is something about extraterrestrial life that is so important for us yes that they prefer just like my colleague said i wish it never existed but it's kind of crazy for someone who is an astronomer to not want there to be evidence of extraterrestrial life or at least extraterrestrial civilization some some discarded piece of a civilization hurling through our galaxy and that's what you believe right you don't think it's actually a ship you think it's some sort of an object that's like artificial i don't know what it is it could be just a surface but there's something about the way it was moving yeah it was pushed by sunlight in my my view just like this humbling though it was tumbling so it probably was not functional you know it could be a piece of a surface layer of of a spaceship that was ripped apart you know it's something that now let me mention a few examples that my colleagues suggested so those mainstream astronomers that try to explain the observed properties of an example for an explanation that is natural was that it's a dust bunny you know the kind of thing you find in a household the collection of dust particles that's bunny you know you find in the corner but the size of a football field and a hundred times less dense than air that is pushed by
sunlight very porous that was an explanation um of a natural origin why would it be so reflective they didn't uh discuss that then there was another suggestion that it's frozen hydrogen like a hydrogen iceberg and that evaporates but hydrogen is transparent so you can't see the cometary tail the problem with that is we showed in a scientific paper that it would not survive the journey because hydrogen can easily get evaporated by starlight impacting on its surface so you know these are the kinds of ideas that were and then there was another idea that maybe it's a piece of an object that was shredded by a star when it passed close to a star but the problem with that is usually you get shrapnel or pieces that are elongated from such a disruption whereas this object was most likely flat according to the analysis of the light curve so you know these are the ideas of the mainstream astronomers that try to explain it as a natural origin now this object the way it's detected you you can't see a clear image of it no you can't because it's too small from the distance it had from earth you know our telescopes are not big enough to resolve it so how do we detect it what are we detecting we detect the reflected light from it the sunlight that bounces off its surface we can see it so you know it's a it's just reflecting some light and we see it as a point source but if we were to discover it when it was approaching us we could have sent a camera that would come close to it and take a photograph but there's no so there's no images of it that anyone can look at no so when the the machine when the observatory is detecting it they are detecting it as data as a point source of light a source of light that cannot be resolved you know like there it is that's what
that's what they're seeing yes so the thing that is circled is omua muah and all these other dots that you see are trails of stars now um was moving in the sky very fast but if we focus on it then the stars are moving relative to it and that's why you see from you know a sequence of snapshots you see this these trailing trails of stars you know now is there anyone who agrees with you well the people that i worked with yes would have been are there other astronomers that have stepped out with you and said i think he's got some really good not stepped out but you know behind the scenes one of the reasons i wrote it up is because um you know people that i respect told me that they think this is really unusual the behind the scenes people yes they don't want to step out in public that's right isn't that un unusual yeah but i don't not even unusual it's just sad it is sad the entire situation is sad well it's not that sad because you know a lot of people are discussing it because of the fact you have the courage to talk about it openly right yeah i mean it's not stat it's not sad it's just it it sort of just explains the state of modern academia and that it's filled with human beings and human beings are flawed and there's some really typical psychological traits that uh people that you know might be a little socially awkward display but by the way the public is different yes very different i get a very different response we're dumb and we depend on people i wouldn't say stories like this i would turn it around i would say that you are open-minded and you are uh you know you're you're much more forward-looking yes i think the public is more forward-looking when it comes to extraterrestrial life but also less informed you know they they believe things they maybe shouldn't believe it's
it's a complex very bizarre issue but my point is unless you look you will never discover those things that you have convictions about yes so if the scientific community shies away from this subject obviously there will be no news and the public is starved yeah the reason i get this attention is the public is starved really wants to know more about it the scientific community has the ability to to explore it but they shy away from it so i'm sitting in between you know in this very awkward strange situation i told my wife you know when this story broke out i said look this is i just cannot believe this that it's so obvious that the scientific community needs to explore it because the public fund science and its common sense you know i just apply common sense to it and yet my colleagues do not agree with me you know i cannot believe this well i believe it also i think it's also part of the thing that they didn't come to the same conclusion even if your data and your interpretation of the data makes sense to them if they didn't come to that conclusion on their own and you are also in the same field as them they might want to just diminish yes findings yes there is this tendency as well uh that stems from jealousy to the attention and so forth but the way i see it and frankly it's not about me and it's not about the public media attention so far it's about are we alone yes and are we the smartest kid on the block uh you know or not and the only way to find out is by collecting evidence yeah so let's look for more objects of the same and that's all i'm trying to advocate let me let's be modest not say that we know the answer in advance because that would resemble those philosophers that put galileo in house arrest let's be open mind and the good news is that science can address this question now you know so it's an opportunity
that i just cannot believe that my colleagues are not taking advantage of because public is exciting public fun science you know one plus one equal to let's get the public engaged behind this to fund future astronomical research in at a much higher level than is currently funded no instead the scientist said no no thank you we don't you know we don't need this gift we don't want to deal with it now this uh much more powerful observatory that you're saying comes online in three years where is that going to be located in chile chile is that the vlt no well there is a vlt there in chile as well yeah that's already up this is called the vera rubin observatory it's even more potent than the vlt oh it's a different instrument it's a telescope that will survey the sky the vlt is focusing on a small region of the sky this is a survey telescope that would look through the sky now the purpose of pan stars or this telescope you know was originally defined by congress that said uh astronomers should find all the objects that are endangering life on earth you know all the killer asteroids that could wipe us out because the dinosaurs were killed by a giant stone you know a rock the size of a big city like manhattan you know uh tens of kilometers in size and it must have been an amazing sight to be a you know a dinosaur back then because you see this rock coming at you and then boom and you're gone uh they didn't have astronomy right the dinosaurs didn't have science so they couldn't really forecast this risk coming at them we have science so we can at least alert ourselves to that danger and perhaps deflect nudge those killer asteroids that are heading our way and you know there are various ways to nudge them off you can evaporate part of their surface just give them a little kick so that they miss the earth but first
you need to find them so that's why pan stars was funded and it's one of the goals of the vera rubin observatory to identify all these objects that are endangering but in the process of doing that you know um was discovered um so when this new one goes uh online in chile will they be looking specifically for the same kinds of things that no so science you you know you just survey the sky you don't need to know what you are expecting to find so it's just a blanket see an object that's moving fast and then if you see that it looks weird just like um you can follow up on it and how much more potent will this one be oh it will be much more sensitive and it will detect an umer-like object roughly once per month here it is right here yeah the telescope will produce the deepest widest image of the universe 27 foot mirror the width of uh a singles tennis court 3200 megapixel camera that'll be on the new samsung galaxy phone each image the size of 40 full moons what yeah it's a survey of the sky there's an amazing billion stars you know the biggest challenge with this observatory will be the huge amount of data that it will produce we cannot store so much data and it says there are 20 terabytes of data every night yeah wow it's amazing that's insane up to 10 million alerts a thousand pairs of exposures so the only risk i should say to this survey comes from the communication satellites these constellations that you know at the tens of thousands that spacex is planning to put in space and uh at first they were not really aware yeah of their risk but then the astronomers told them look you are contaminating our images and so now they're thinking about coating those communication satellites so that they are dark enough they don't reflect as much sunlight we're trying to work together with them but obviously they have a commercial uh incentive to put these things they do
but what if it puts us in danger like what if we don't see asteroids because they want to get you know well let's party until the end they want to get internet access in antarctica it just seems a little silly i mean it's great but i don't know if it's the only way to get internet access i just think like the more things we have in the sky the more things we can't get out of the sky the problem with the space junk is like there's no real tenable plan to take that stuff out and true and that's why i think we should event we will eventually have to leave earth because of junk yeah because of all the you know self-inflicted wounds but the way i see it was also like you know the printing press of gutenberg that once it was established it produced many copies of the bible and before that there were very few copies and each of them was extremely precious but after the printing press by gutenberg there were many copies so if one of them got damaged you wouldn't worry too much so i think that we should produce what we have here on earth you know currently all our eggs are in one basket on earth but if we spread them in space in other places like going to mars going to the stars then if something bad happens on earth it wouldn't be it wouldn't be that bad you know it will be one copy out of many and you might ask how can we do that how can we avoid so you know there is this story in the bible in the old testament about noah it's called knox arc he was worried about the great flood that will that will come and wanted to preserve uh animals so he built an ark and by the way the dimensions of the ark are mentioned explicitly in the bible and they are very similar to the dimensions of but by coincidence anyway so he put the animals on it and saved them now what is the moral of this how can we preserve life that we have on earth by sending out a spaceship so you might
think oh if we build a big enough spaceship we can put whales we can put elephants we can put birds on it that's not the smart thing thing to do you can just take a small spacecraft the cubesat put a very advanced computer system on it with artificial intelligence and a 3d printer and you load to the computer system the dna information of all the animals that you want to reproduce somewhere else and then you produce them synthetically in other places using the raw materials that are on other planets so you just send this spacecraft i call it nox spaceship you send it to those places and you produce what you want out of the raw materials wouldn't you think that if some civilization got that advanced that they wouldn't be satisfied with the design that we currently experience like the design of the animals the design of the people wouldn't wouldn't they want to make that better yes make people that can breathe underwater yes make people that don't get cancer right and i think maybe the ultimate you know we are evolving you know we started just like animals and we are getting better but eventually it may be silicon based things yeah that will be the future well that's the speculation that people have when they look at the archetypal alien right with the large head and no genitals that what that is is some sort of uh an advanced version of intelligent life like that life as life becomes sort of uh immersed in the world of technology it becomes they have these symbiotic relationships where their parts get replaced by artificial parts which we see now yeah with people we see artificial limbs and artificial yeah yeah and i think you know any form of life even biological life that we find on another planet we will be shocked when we see it yeah for example the nearest star to us
is called proxima centauri now it's not like the sun it's much smaller 12 percent of the mass of the sun and it's much fainter but it has a planet close enough so that life can be on the planet the planet has a permanent day side it's facing the star because it's so close to the star 20 times closer than the earth is from the sun that planet proxima b is facing the star with the same side so there is a permanent day side like the moon yes exactly like the moon and a permanent night side and the paranoid day side is warmer than the permanent night side that's what we think now my daughters said that you know the real estate value would be highest in between the days and night side because you will have a permanent sunset strip there and you know if you want the home that would be a perfect vacation place you know kind of but if you think about the animals that may exist on the day side and on the night side they would be very different and also the ones on the day side since the star is uh much colder than the sun by a factor of two or so it's cooler like 3000 degrees instead of almost 6 000 degrees for the sun um then they that most of the light emitted by the star is infrared so these animals would have infrared eyes not like our eyes detect sunlight that's what we have but on that planet proxima be the closest planet habitable planet to the solar system you need infrared eyes to survive so these animals would be something very different they will have infrared eyes i don't know how they would look i think even if we find evidence for biological life it would be shocking to us not to speak about you know technological instrumentation you know if they're much more advanced than we are it would look like magic to us you know an approximation to god it will do things that are really crazy for us yeah so when you think about uh taking a
3d printer and and genetic material and recreating life on other planets i mean it sounds crazy to say today but no crazier than a cell phone would be if you put it in the hands of someone who lives that's right the first century well you know it's not it's not completely crazy because there is a colleague of mine a nobel laureate at harvard jack shostak has a laboratory in which he's very optimistic that he will produce synthetic life meaning starting from building blocks chemical building and making a living cell that sounds like a horror movie doesn't it no why you okay because it gets out of hand like some guy decides i'm gonna make something i'm gonna make a giant wolverine well you have to trust that guy yeah you know i don't trust anybody like that i don't trust anybody with new life just yeah but you can't prevent it it's just like you know the exploration of the atom that led to eventually nuclear weapons you know you can't stop science no you can't so i think it will happen in the next few decades that we will be able to create synthetic life did you have uh an interest in extraterrestrial life before this has it changed at all no so i can tell you uh maybe a decade ago i you know i was working on detecting uh radio waves from hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe from early cosmic times and astronomers built observatories to test the calculations that i've worked on and then one of the problems was that radio stations tv stations would introduce interference to these observatories because they operate at the same frequencies so i said oh wait if we are producing interference can't we use these telescopes to also look for to eavesdrop on other civilizations uh you know i love lucy radio transmissions you know with the same instruments uh so that was my first paper on the
subject then i was in abu dhabi i was invited to give a talk in abu dhabi even though i'm israeli you know i'm also american so it was fine i went there and then the tour guide showed us around also went to dubai and then he was bragging he said you know these lights at night he was showing us around they can be seen from the moon so then that inspired me to consider the possibility of us seeing artificial lights from a distance so with a colleague of mine ed turner we asked how far away can the hubble space telescope see the city of tokyo and we found that on pluto if there was a city like tokyo on pluto we would be able to detect it with the hubble space test that was my second paper on this subject wow uh but that you know there is no city like tokyo on pluto well that would also assume that you know what's interesting is the type of light that you were talking about being infrared light on this small planet like it would be really interesting if a civilization figured out a way to avoid light pollution because i think light pollution is one of the biggest impediments to us understanding our position in the universe because we don't see the universe anymore unless you sense god unless you send the space or unless you go to the telescope yeah yeah i mean well you can go to the middle of the wilderness and look up on a dark night right and you can see everything and it's it's stunning you know it is stunning i went to the keck observatory in hawaii once uh during a dark moon or you know when there's no moon on the sky and it was amazing you could see everything you see the full milky way by the way i'm i'm a theorist you know i i work mostly with ideas so we visited australia i was invited for a month we went to tasmania and there are no city lights in tasmania and there was no internet
connectivity so i was forced i couldn't check my email i was forced to go out at night and look at the sky yeah and suddenly i see the milky way in its full glory you know and and the andromeda galaxy things that i've talked about through my scientific papers out there it's amazing yeah you know in particle physics you talk about the higgs boson you talk about park you never see them i mean here in astronomy we're talking about real things out there and light pollution prevents us from seeing them on every day yeah if you go to the big island right they have those diffused lights in their uh their street lights it's a different kind of lighting it doesn't interfere with the light right that you you can see from the sky so that it doesn't screw up the observatory but when when you do manage to see the heavens for the way they are it's one of the most spectacular things you could see and the the fact that it's that we're blind to it in most of the western world because of the civilization that we've created that's all light based there's lights everywhere and it's just it's it's it's i think it's responsible for our detachment or our there's a lack of wonderment that comes with the universe that's because it's just dark that's what the henry thoreau you know he yeah he was he wrote about the fact that the modern uh you know technological life prevents us from seeing nature you know and he went to the walden pond and and wrote about it and he was right just following what you said and you know what the thing that astronomy is sending us is a very clear message that most of us miss the message to me is very simple be modest you have to be modest yeah when you see how big the universe is you know if you are an emperor or a king and you conquer a small piece of land on earth you know a lot of alpha males
white alpha males were extremely proud you know i conquered this piece of land on earth they were even if they conquered the entire earth you know they were not more significant than a single ant hugging a grain of sand a single grain of sand in the landscape of a huge beach it's not very impressive how can you ever be proud of yourself given this big landscape and moreover you know that the uh scissors in rome used to have a person next to them whenever they would win a battle that person his duty was to to whisper in their ears you are mortal remember that you live a short amount of time you know and that's very sobering you know we are a small component of the universe we're also living for such a short time you know and i realized it when both my parents passed away over the past few years and i said to myself the hell with it you know forget about all these nonsense let's just you know just like in in gun with the wind you know i said to myself i don't give a damn about what other people say you know just uh let's just focus on substance okay and not pay attention so much to ourselves you know we're not that significant not assume that we are unique and alone in the universe let's just you know find out the answer i think the public and i i think even you could tell me whether the scientific community agrees with this but i think people are more apt to believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life today than ever and i think part of that has to do with some of the stories that have been published like in the new york times in 2017 and then accounts from people of experiences with unidentified flying objects like commander david fravors and some other people that are very reputable people that also are fighter pilots and people that understand what they're looking at and then
are using not just their eyesight but they're also exp explaining that this thing jammed their radar it moved at an impossible speed it was tracked with equipment these uh these revelations i think have led people to relax some of their skepticism me personally i could say from my own personal experience i i i never denied the idea that alien life is possible but i did deny i i just had extreme skepticism at the people that proclaimed that they had experiences because i know people love to be special and they love to be special without putting in a whole lot of work and one of the best ways you could be special about without putting in a whole lot of work is to have a special experience that only you get to have whether the aliens chose you or the angels chose you or you know whatever it is those people are you should always be very skeptical of people claim to be special without having put in any work because it's just a part of human psychology they want people want to stand out and one of the best ways to stand out is to claim special abilities like psychic talents or i'm a channeler these people are all full of right we all know it but with with extraterrestrial life there's this other component and that component is the vastness of the universe the fermi paradox the fact that there's you know hundreds of billions of galaxies hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy and we we just have no idea right we literally have no idea and we do know their planets out there but actually yeah exactly that last bit that you mentioned is the thing that is important news for me as a scientist the fact that you know people used to say we don't know how many earth sun systems exist similar to ours
and by now it looks like it's pretty typical you know and that's again the copernican principles coming back to you saying not only that you are not at the center of the universe but what you find around you is extremely common you know half of the sun like stars have an earth-like planet yes you know so how dare you it says to you in the face how dare you think that you are special yeah and yet yet a major portion of the scientific community says oh you know technological life that sounds like a speculation but it exists right here well that's what the fermi paradox was right if there's all this possibility of life where is it well so first of all it may be all around in the sense that the signal is faint you know you need to reach a threshold in the so maybe there are lots of signals humming in the background but we haven't yet developed the sensitivity to to to detect them and an example for that is gravitational waves you know these are ripples in space and time just like ripples on the surface of a pond according to einstein's theory of gravity space and time are not rigid you can actually perturb them you can create ripples and for example when two black holes collide they generate ripples and these are called gravitational waves and the ligo experiment was designed to detect those waves and at first the astronomy community was very much opposed when i was uh at the beginning of of my career i heard a lot of senior people saying let's not even try to detect gravitational waves there is no hope for that forget about it and we don't even know if they exist you know and uh there were a few administrators at the national science foundation that decided this is a worthy cause and there was a leader of the experimental effort ray wise that was pushing for it and
he got the nobel prize together with two other people and eventually it was funded and in 2015 the instrument was sensitive enough to detect the first signal and it was a booming signal and then after that we have tens of events over the subsequent years that were detected so it opened up a flood of signals showing in the detector and it only was a matter of reaching the threshold sensitivity you know so this i say the same thing it's very you know the signals may be very subtle it's very difficult to detect a spacecraft for example because it sends very little power you know in your direction so i don't know what the signal is of a technological civilization but once we reach a sensitivity we will find we might find the universe humming you know the galaxy humming with living you know or there is another possibility that most of them are dead by now but we can still do archaeology and find evidence for them because that would help us uh avoid the mistakes they made and try not to share their fate you know not destroy ourselves have you spent much time thinking about the various kinds of technology that these different civilizations in the universe could possibly have created meaning they might have a completely different atmosphere a completely different understanding of gravity a completely different combination of elements on their planet right and that our perception or our contemplation of what could be possible is really just based on what we've already observed and experiences which is such a small portion of the universe that's right now what what we can imagine is based on our experience you know and when you go on a date uh you look at the mirror and you imagine the other person you know being you know genetically similar to you or and that's not a bad assumption
because we all share the same heritage you know as humans but when you meet another life from a completely different planet that had nothing to do with earth for the first time there is a chance that it would look nothing like we are familiar with right very diff as you say the conditions are different you know the cake that was baked out of the same chemical soup ended up looking very different you know it's a chocolate cake not a cheesecake it's something very different and when a chocolate cake mix mitzvah cheesecake you know it wouldn't really figure out what's going on there you know it's also possible right that they can have a different kind of environment that doesn't lend itself to the sort of territorial behavior that we have it's quite possible like uh other intelligent life like uh orcas for instance they don't go to war with other orcas that's right you know they're speaking very intelligent speaking about that i was asked to participate in a debate about whether the space race between the us and china is bad or good for humanity it was organized by ibm and bloomberg news and all three debaters the other debaters were talking about the military risks that space poses if you put satellites or things that hover above the earth it's a military threat and therefore we should reach uh international agreements so that we don't explore space too much and i was just puzzled by this because you know we live on a two-dimensional surface of the earth and of course there are risks from things hovering above the surface but space is all about going in the third dimension far away from earth so if you go to mars or you go to the stars as you know we are contemplating in the starship project there is no military threat to earth from doing that uh it's very narrow-minded to think that
space is all about military threats you know there is also interest from the commercial sector uh you know elon musk jeff bezos to go to mars and you know that would benefit the global economy the way i think of space exploration as i think of science in general it's a unifier you know nations can come together in exploring space in doing science like we learned from covet 19 you know rather than always think think territorially as we are used from the primate phase as you mentioned we should come together and science is the best vehicle to bring people together because again it's not about ourself it's about trying to figure out nature and nature is shared by all of us space can be shared by all of us so it's not about one a nation capturing a piece of land or getting ahead of other nations it's about all of us working together i agree with you but you also know that the way most nations think about military superiority they think about technological superiority they think about having the ability to do something that these other nations can't do and that would put you at some sort of a tactical strategical advantage like having some sort of a satellite with nuclear weapons that's hovering above a city like that they could do things like this that we can't do yet or that having the ability to go to mars and and return before any other nation would would would show that they have extreme technological superiority they can actually go to other planets i agree with you but why can't we work as one team so if we find for example evidence for another civilization don't you think that would give us a sense that we are part of the same team because now there is another team out there that was the old ronald reagan speech exactly and i agree with ron yeah i do too i i think uh yeah i think that would open up our eyes and it would it would be
uh very humbling in fact yeah so here is another advantage to working on this subject how do you think people would handle like undeniable extraterrestrial visitation like if there was a mother ship that hovered over the white house you know uh and just you know sent some sort of a message that we had to interpret and made some sort of a very clear demonstration of its presence well if it if it says take us to your leader we have to say wait until january 20th even then but um really uh the issue i think the smart thing to do is listen if you get into a room full of strangers you don't want to speak out very loudly because one of them may smash you of course yeah so if they show up we should listen yes yeah but let's listen and figure out what to do it's also the problem we all have these countries they're run by different people in different styles we have different philosophies and we have very different political climates and different parts of the world where some people can't speak up some people are completely under the thumb of their their own government and their military and it would it would be really weird to see if they're if it's possible for human beings to have a sort of a universal reaction to superior intelligence oh no i think it it's very naive to expect humans to behave the same way i mean different people different nations will and i don't think there is a protocol because the united nations never thought about designing a protocol for dealing with a situation like that you know and many people say oh let's not think about it because we have problems that are much more serious here on earth and to them i say what oscar wilde used to say he said we are all in the gutters but some of us are looking at the stars um don't you think that's a fitting it's very fitting
the idea that we have uh bigger problems is kind of hilarious too because if they came down here and they decided to do whatever they wanted that would be our biggest problem i mean if you have something that's capable of interstellar travel with a giant ship that has you know millions of little aliens on it that just decide to take over that's our biggest problem i agree anything that can travel here easily from another planet that's our biggest pro or our it's maybe problem is the wrong word that's something that demands our attention but you know we we were careless for a century because we transmitted radio waves by the way the the brightest transmissions that we produced were anti-ballistic missiles radars you know we produce very bright emission in the radio wave and it's now progressed to a distance of about a hundred light years so there is this bubble of radio waves that we produced and if they have if there is any civilization with radio telescopes similar to what we have they can detect us yeah and of course it will take a while for them to respond but we already already shouted into this room of strangers without being careful yes yes that is a sign of not being intelligent by the way well i don't know if it's a sign of not being intelligence inside of not understanding the ramifications of what you've created or the actions yeah but we may be we may suffer the consequences or we may get a visit from you know the anthropologists of the space uh-huh you know i mean that's what i would hope that something would come down here that understands what we're going through that uh has probably gone through a very similar path that if there is like i know that there's different cakes and there's different ingredients for cakes but they're at the end of the day they're all cakes and we can go oh that's a cheesecake there's a carrot kick i get it like i would imagine that something that's so intelligent it can come here
from another planet probably understands the variables yeah but look at the possibilities of life but look at the americas when the europeans came over you would have expected the europeans to behave better well they didn't know anything about diseases first of all but they killed 90 of the people i know but still it's not obvious that a visit is to your benefit that's true that's true well then in that case it's actually been proven by history that every single time a civilization has been visited by a far more advanced civilization it's been disastrous for the original civilization that gets visited whether it's the americas or uh i mean you can go throughout time this is this has always been the case in history when they you know with the aztecs it it happened with everybody but my message is simple if if you close your eyes and you refuse to admit the possibility that they are out there you might be surprised one day right you might be really surprised um do you pay much attention to science fiction do you watch no you know there's uh good yeah visitation movies uh i don't enjoy most of the literature on science fiction most of the films because they violate the laws of physics so when i see something that doesn't make sense according to what i know about physics i cannot enjoy it because you know i stop there and i say well forget about the storyline it's it doesn't make any sense i understand yeah um what movies have violated the laws of physics to you most of them uh but the ones i really liked are gravity the martian they violated but not in a very blunt way so right they didn't beat you over the head with stupidity no there were some aspects of the storyline that didn't make any sense like hopping from one satellite to another you know that's
very difficult to do right yeah there's a bunch of it neil degrasse tyson went into detail about all the problems with gravity that he found there was a movie that was made by the guy who made x machina it was his uh follow-up movie that was about extraterrestrial life that was pretty interesting it was really bizarre and the the way it was done there was a couple little hokey moments in it but i thought it was really interesting i think i saw it and i liked it yeah i mean that when i saw it i was like that might be what we're looking like we might be looking at life that we don't even we can't recognize like that there might be something that when it visits us we we don't even know what to look at right maybe yes the good thing about science fiction is that it explores possibilities that we haven't imagined before and in that sense you know it broadens our view so i think it's a good exercise for us to imagine things we've never thought about but when they validate the laws of physics i have a problem with that i can completely understand have you paid much attention to um various ufo encounters that have been reported by people have you ever looked into those well i i read some of the stories uh and my i'll tell you what my concern was that uh you know 50 years ago we had some cameras and some recording devices that were not very sophisticated now they are much better so if 50 years ago we saw fuzzy images of saucers and things like that by now with modern cameras you should get very crisp images of the same things we don't have them so i'm worried that you know it was these were artifacts of the instruments that were used back then uh what i would like to do instead is have a scientific study of the reports that are recent you know and
go to those sites the ocean where the nimitz was and uh and and try to examine this now the reason it's important is because there is also a national security element here which means that perhaps other nations have technologies that we don't know about so we better find out so if there are things that we don't understand we better find out what they are well that's absolutely true like if if there is something that can do what commander david fravor experienced but it's not extraterrestrial actually it's actually from china or from russia that puts them at a significant advantage a crazy advantage that we we can't even imagine something that's that sophisticated and but they don't believe that's the case they think that our understanding of physics is pretty universal right in terms of like the highest intellects in in various continents right yeah these looked like very peculiar maneuvers that they reported about and all i say is that we should use scientific instruments to record it again with much better data and examine this yeah why not look at something you know if you have a monster in front of you i want to start to look at it straight at the eyes and figure out what it's about yeah other people say ah there is no monster forget about it [Laughter] well i mean who would fund something like this this is the real problem like if the government funds it then they could deem what gets released what the public can handle what they can't handle and whether or not there's a military application you know that doubt well the same funding the same funding agencies that fund scientific research open scientific research can allocate a small fraction of their funds this should not be very expensive you don't think it would be very expensive no because we studied the environment in many different ways you know and um you just deploy a set of instruments
with sensors in the geographical locations of where the reports were and you put the best sensors you have and systematically study the the region and figure out what what's going on the thing is you would have to get the approval of the military like if you wanted to go to where the nimitz is you wanted to go to any of these offshore areas that are in international waters you would have to get some sort of approval sure but why wouldn't they give it i mean in principle if they want to figure out what the reports are about i don't know if they do want to figure it out what the way commander fravor explained the experiences that they were having off the coast of san diego he said they were basically just at a loss for words didn't understand what these things were but had been experiencing them on multiple occasions and it just sort of like shrugged their shoulders and said just let's just not talk about this no but imagine you have a medical condition that you cannot understand you know and wouldn't you want the medical community to address it and figure out what it is you have some disease or something so the same thing here something you that you cannot explain is happening right and you want to figure it out so i say look at it straight in the eyes figure out what it is just collect more data the way science does and it's not a major investment of funds you know so what uh what disciplines would you draw from if you like let's let's pretend that uh president biden says uh avi i like what you're saying let's let's make this happen okay uh who do you bring in what do you do like when you bring in biologists do you bring in physicists just physicists yeah because physics is a unifying theme you know you can anything uh obeys the laws of physics right so physicists work with measurement devices instruments that can record the data now if the data shows something that is
biological then you need the biologist to interpret it but most likely it will be physical objects doing something or artifacts or natural phenomena you know something you just figure out you collect more data you figure it out what's the problem you know the good thing about science is it allows you without prejudice to try and figure out just as i was mentioning with a plumber you know i have a problem with my faucet with my pipe you know i bring any plumbers we start to put diagnostics figure out where it's coming from and so science is a way of life it's not an occupation of their lead and there is no taboo on checking something it makes no sense everyone should be engaged in an open mind figuring out what it is what's just like we do it in you know in the dark ages some people had a problem dissecting bodies you know human bodies they said that the body has a soul attached to it there are some magical properties that we should not inter imagine modern medicine you know not allowing to dissect bodies how would we ever arrive at the health you know all the advantages in medicine and health care and so forth that we have right now so the way that science makes progress is relying on evidence collecting evidence without fear why should we be fearful you know let's just figure out what it is if we care about it obviously the public cares about it obviously the public pays taxes so we should pay attention to what the public wants i think the public would definitely want it but my question is also how would you implement it like if you uh you're dealing with these things that are very unique experiences like say if we only have one or two legitimate unique experiences like this first we isolate those cases but you also have to deal with the fact that this thing is flying in this insane rate of speed you'd have to try to find it but again the copernican principle would say
that the fact that they were noticed at one time in one place cannot be extremely rare if they were noticed during that time in that region there are more of them why do you say that though because otherwise it will require a privileged circumstance you know like but it could be a privileged circumstance if it was an exploratory mission like if someone goes to a place in the world and visits an uncontacted tribe that uncontacted tribe is uncontacted meaning no one has visited them so that time that they go there is a very unique time yes now we're talking about on one planet but if something comes from another planet and visits us with the same spirit of trying to find things and visit things but it's only done at once it could be unique experiences chances for that would be small because what is the chance that the pilots would be at the right place at the right time and that they would be the target you know i think you necessarily think they were the target so then they should come again yeah in in that in that particular case in the the nimitz case i think yeah you're okay so you're speaking about the situation similar to what you know in in the again i go back to religion but in the old testament abraham heard a voice and that told him the voice of god that told him to sacrifice his son the only son he had he was about to sacrifice his son abraham but imagine that he had a cell phone with a voice memo up he would press that app and record the voice of god that would convince everyone all humanity that god exists he didn't have that app right so obviously you can make up stories you know anyone can say anything but if we have the instrumentation to record the data in a precise manner you know that's the best we can do so i agree with you it's possible that david indeed sorry that abraham indeed witnessed god and since then god never spoke only once then we have no choice either to believe
the story of abraham or not but if god speaks again now we have these apps we can record it um that's a funny way of looking at it i think that makes a lot of sense but it's a very funny way of looking at it look all i'm saying is common sense i the only thing i'm surprised by is that other people didn't say it already um there's vince when you get into the real spectacular hypothesis or theories about extraterrestrial life one of the more spectacular ones is inter-dimensional travel and that these are inter-dimensional beings that visit us using some completely different understanding of how the universe works have you ever thought about these or so okay so i can speak only from the point of view of a scientist and space and time in science in physics are currently described by einstein's theory of gravity so as of now we don't know how to move faster than light between two points in space but there are ideas about a wormhole for example connecting we don't know if there are other dimensions people talk about them but we have no clue so i would say if i had to summarize the scientific literature which you know is not it's quite extensive on these issues i would say that as of now we have no clear idea whether this is possible okay we are limited in our knowledge it may be possible what you're saying but i wouldn't you know at this point in time as a scientist i wouldn't consider it as a as a possibility that is likely because we have no clue and this is based on what you so your interpretations of quantum physics when they're discussing dimensions and that these this is basically just theoretical this is completely theoretical at the moment you know i can explain that at the moment they are working actually in a space-time that is called anti-deceiter space which is not shared by us this is not
the space time that we work in you know that that we inhabit but the reason they work there is because they can solve the mathematics in that space it's sort of like looking for your keys under the lamp post you can find them under the lamp but they may not be there so there is a whole community of people that do mathematical gymnastics in a space-time that is not represented in reality uh and they talk about extra dimensions and give each other awards and feel very smart about themselves but i say look let's be realistic here you know uh until you demonstrate that what you're doing is connected to reality until you find experimental evidence this is not physics now what is it then because for someone like me it's mathematics it's mathematical gymnastics now there are philosophers i should say some philosophers that support them they say if a bunch of physicists agree on an idea for a decade it must be right because they agreed that it's it's a good idea i say it's not up to them to agree on i mean a lot of people agreed that the sun moves around the earth but it was not necessarily reality so you know when you have a big enough group of people they can agree on something and feel comfortable their cults work yeah yeah yeah but you you don't expect that in science right but it is kind of cultish and that's one of the criticisms that i've heard about people in quantum mechanics and quantum physics that when people talk about it they say god it sounds cultish well there is quantum physics which is rooted in experiments you know solid state physics right what we are talking about is quantum gravity the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity that is called string theory or extra dimensions yes so quantum physics has aspects that connect directly to experiments and they are very well documented and
you know part of the standard practice of physics you know the way i see it is just like this uh oath that medical doctors take you know they they take an oath that represents their profession i think that physicists should take an oath that i call the galilean oath whereby an idea that you propose should be testable one idea at least that you work on should be testable by experiments during your life you should put some skin in the game you can't just say oh my theory will explain anything irrespective of what what is being found you know there are such theories that uh you know physicists brag about because they say irrespective of what the experiment will show the theory will be valid it's like not putting any skin in the game you know and i find that inappropriate so there is a student at harvard a graduate student in the english department and she was inspired by my book which didn't appear yet but she she knows about it to do a phd on that theme that i explore and she invited me to the phd exam the first exam and there was an examiner in the room uh who asked her do you know why jordano bruno was burnt on the stake and she she said he was obnoxious and irritated a lot of people and right and he corrected her no it was because he imagined that life exists on other planets and the moral of this is that we should uh not that that we should we can have testable predictions of theologies that can be tested experimentally you know and the another example is there are christians and and jews you know the christians believe that the messiah arrived already and it will will come back again the jews argue that the messiah hasn't arrived but will arrive in the future so both sides agree that the messiah will arrive in the future let's just wait and see when the messiah
arrives ask the messiah did you visit us before and then we can figure it out so that's another test of theology but this the quantum physics that you are critical of is it possible that some of that could become significant in the future that a lot of this crazy mathematics and what you call mental gymnastics that one day will be applicable to some new science that would be wonderful but the problem is that the culture that works on this subject is not filling even the obligation to come up with testable predictions it's not willing to put skin in the game uh it's not willing to say okay if you do the experiment and you find this then this theory would be proven wrong i mean i can give an example there was a seminar at the black hole initiative that mentioned an implication of string theory to cosmology to the study of the universe and i said oh this is great so if we do the experiment and we find the cosmic microwave background to show something would that rule out string theory and the speaker said no it will just rule out my conjecture about this relation string theory will always be right so to me that's not putting skin in the game you know string theory is almost entirely theoretical it's entirely theoretical not almost it's entirely theoretical trying to unify gravity with quantum mechanics but it didn't make a testable prediction as of yet and that's the issue are you intrigued at all about ancient depictions of what some people interpret as extraterrestrial vehicles or flying saucers whether it's ezekiel story in the old testament or some of the other the vinmanas and the hindu scriptures well we're back to the story of abraham if there was a recording device that could give us yeah the picture uh it would you know i would examine it and and say something more
conclusive about it but the lack of evidence doesn't allow us to say anything so stories appear everywhere you know there was also uh a recent story about um an israeli claiming ashed claiming that there is a federation of aliens out there and i say that about yeah i say you know anyone can say anything they want you know it's a free country but the duty of a reporter a journalist is to ask for evidence right so if this guy would produce a document would show a document that demonstrate that what he's talking about makes sense then pay attention to him and you know cover the story otherwise there are lots of people that claim that they are napoleon you ask them for their id and you see that oh no they are not napoleon now if they insist you you know that there is a place for such people yeah right so my point is the duty of a reporter is to check the evidence and that's also the duty of a scientist that's a real problem with journalism today right is this clip click bait is uh is it's very attractive because that's how they make money they make money off of people clicking on fantastic stories that's a very fantastic story and it actually is not it's not i mean it's not profitable for them to research it because they really want to if they really really want to try to verify those claims it's unfortunate because it adds noise to the system you know there are lots of possibilities reality is just one and if you hear all these possibilities all the time then you don't know what's real and what's not and that's true of politics as well right what was this guy's claim he claimed that they're waiting for us to get our together right yeah isn't that the idea behind it yeah and that president trump knows about him that's funny yeah i think if trump knew about it he'd tell everybody i
don't think he can keep his mouth shut or maybe we have to wait until january 20th until he gets out of office but do you think um did this guy have a motivation for saying this i mean what is the uh no i think what is his position in the military no he he used to occupy a pub you know an important leadership position but i'm not sure what what happened to him and i don't know him personally and i would just dismiss it and and move on you know like yeah if he had a reason for saying what he said he should have produced the evidence and i think you know at the uh late stage of his life something may have gone wrong [Laughter] well that uh that is a real problem right when people get older and they start believing things that might not necessarily be true right but the story's so compelling right that's that's the other problem is that someone telling you that the aliens are waiting for us to get it together like oh good i'm glad i knew i had a feeling they were they're out there yeah but it's just like you know dating someone expecting that someone to return love to you when they are not really interested in you so it doesn't matter how much you wish it right if it's not real right but there's so much uh again the the appeal of those stories it's so profitable because so many people are interested in something really especially now while they realize like oh my god our government is ridiculous yeah the the people that are in charge i mean one of them is literally a reality show contestant or host who's a possibly a sociopath who was running the planet or running at least this country they would hope that there's going to be some sort of intervention by some hugely intelligent species from another planet that they're going to come down here and they're going to go listen
listen enough enough already but this is crap and the point is you know it's just like junk food it tastes good but it's bad for you right and that is crap because it's bad for you yeah do you think that all of the like when you see the uh uh have you ever seen the go fast video the flair video of uh the where these uh fighter pilots are tracking this thing and it's moving at incredible rates of speed it doesn't exhibit any heat signature no obvious method of propulsion when you see things like that do you do you look at that as saying well this is something that seems to be legitimate evidence well it's partial evidence we we want more so you know it's it looks very interesting the question is what is it you know and i'm just i'm just advocating that we collect more data on things like that not ignore it not dismiss it because it's reported by credible people using credible instruments something is going on is it the fault of the instruments is it the fault of the person is it some natural phenomena let's figure it out so the point of the matter is we can figure it out it's not magical it's not something that is beyond our control you know we can invest enough in this question and solve it let's do it sometimes these compelling conversations and sometimes books like yours yours and the these statements that you've made about that object like it could inspire people to take action and if if someone did uh come to you and said i think you're the perfect guy to sort of put together some sort of a team to actually do what you're describing how would you start something like that i would collect reputable scientists with state-of-the-art instrumentation and put it together deploy it where
necessary based on the most credible reports and collect data and then write scientific papers about it just the same way that we do with any other anomaly that we find in the cosmos you know and there is no difference we should be guided by evidence and not by our prejudice that's the message that comes through from all the history of science that on many occasions we were putting blinders saying something doesn't exist we ended up being wrong the only way to educate ourselves to be modest enough to admit that we don't know everything is by collecting evidence that dialogue with nature let's listen to nature see what it tells us and then say what what this thing is you know rather than you know sitting in an ivory tower and saying no no no this is taboo we shouldn't even consider it so you would have physicists and how many physicists do you think that you would actually treat it depends on the on the scale of the experiment that we want to do but uh i i won't need more than um a dozen a dozen yeah and and and appropriate instrumentation and it may not be very expensive actually do you think that it would be possible to do something like this yes and do you think that there's a dozen physicists that you would have in mind that would be qualified for this definitely just like there are dozens of physicists working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence uh now if you if you have this bullying goal going on so that young talent you know there are young people that are extremely interested in these questions but if they're afraid about their job opportunities right afraid of speaking afraid of and being engaged in this then obviously and there is no funding for this then obviously there will be no results and it will cont the situation will continue to be the same way
now it's just the way that science was suppressed in the middle ages you know people just didn't look for a revision in the way they look at the world around them and they put galileo in house arrest and so of course it it maintained the views at the time and people were in their comfort zone but i thought that we came out of that hole and by now we are open-minded do you think that having these kind of conversations and you coming out and being public about your struggles with other academics about this can lighten people up helps the environment that's my hope as i said uh you know i i'm doing what i'm doing not expecting anything but i will be pleasantly surprised if the common sense that i'm trying to advocate and by the way you know i was a farm boy i speak just the way i would speak as a kid i don't do any calculations when i was department chair you know one reason that my term was extended twice is because i don't manipulate people i never hide things from people and tell them one thing when the reality is different i tell them what i think now i can be wrong i can make mistakes but what you see is what you get when you deal with me and you know on the one hand it's a weakness because in politics you need to manipulate people very often but it's also a major source of strength because people believe you and follow you and as a department chair i realized that the strength is bigger than the weakness and it worked out it wasn't clear from the beginning it really depend depends on the people that you surround yourself with but my hope is that in science it will be the same way and you know i'm not afraid of suffering the consequences as i said i'm willing to put my body on the barbed wire now if you did do something like this and i'm trying to set this up this is what i'm trying to do right now i'm hoping that people are
listening and i'm hoping that this actually becomes real where would you want to be located so i would first examine all these reports and isolate the most credible ones or one you know the thing that is most striking among them and go there so the most striking one to me is the command of favor okay instant so let's let's imagine or the limits yeah yeah yeah so let's imagine that there's still some activity in that area so we can we can look for that the same type of activity that he reported will be looked for with much superior instruments than the ones that he was using so what kind of instruments would you use to try i have to look at the details of the evidence that he reported but i will choose the instruments the most sensitive right now with our best technologies right now not because he had some instruments that were you know for other purposes not for this so i will for combat yeah so instead i will use the very best instruments that exist right now to look for the kind of signals that he saw so that we are much more sensitive than he was and for us it will be a piece of cake you know like the signal will boom in our instrument if it's there and then collect the data and we can do it over a period of time so that we you know we allow for these signals not to be there all the time and um and then conclude with uh our findings you know and it should be open to the public to the science community to everyone and i don't think it will cost a lot instead of us talking about it forever right yeah now when you're talking about uh what happened off the coast of san diego i think he was several hundred miles at sea right how would you i would send some instruments you know at the same distance from into sea and now you know it's important for national
security as well because perhaps these are espionage related systems that are operating out there we want to know about it so i wouldn't be surprised if the you know if people in behind the fence of national security would be curious about the the findings as well would there be a problem with that though because if they were behind the fence of national security then they wouldn't want these findings to be relayed to the public well it depends who funds the right the work but if the military funds it if the military finds it they they own the data right but if the private sector funds it it's there or or if it's you know a federal agency that is not guided by the the same rules of uh secrecy yeah aren't all of them though when it comes to something oh no it would be deemed top secret like like why would it be dumb no it wouldn't be deemed top secret if everyone can see it so my point is when you look at the sun that cannot be top secret right because everyone can look at the sun right but you're talking about something that's off hundreds of miles off the coast very difficult you need very powerful instrumentation in order to document it but we can look everywhere right but i'm saying what i'm saying is if it's funded by the military no would you have concern that they would not want to release the findings yeah so let's fund it by a more open uh channel you know a channel of interested citizens a channel of interested citizens yeah yeah i mean if the funding is not at a very high level if it's at the level of millions or tens of millions of dollars that can be funded you know that's uh pocket money for for the wealthy would you talk to elon he might be interested yeah i'd be glad to i mean it's really nothing you look at his wealth right now right but and also when you're thinking about the private sector is getting involved in space travel now you know with uh
jeff bezos's company and elon's company and and i'm sure more to come and uh maybe that would be something that look just imagine the pr right power and potential of approving extraterrestrial life so actually in my book i call it omuamua's wager which goes back to blaise pascal he was a philosopher arguing about god he was he he said well as a mathematician there are two possibilities either god exists or not now let's examine the consequences if god exists and you don't do the right thing consequences are much greater so he put a wager that there is a much uh you know bigger implications to one of the possibilities than the other one and that convinced him that you need to take it seriously now i say or the possibility of extraterrestrial life more more generally poses exactly the same type of wager because the consequences of finding evidence would be huge and if it's not a very expensive task to examine it if it's something we can do with existing technology you know it's a missed opportunity not to even consider doing that and to have a taboo and to silence everyone that wants to speak about it that that's that's a mistake how can we do that i agree with you and i also think that the positive benefits for the person who does stick their neck out would be spectacular if you could absolutely prove that there is some evidence of extraterrestrial civilization yes my god you know the uh article that appeared in harrett's newspaper about my work and in the new york post they were each of them separately completely differently separation of a couple of years were the most read online stories in the history of these newspapers really and i had actually article that that was the most on red online story in the history of the post that's what
i was told by my literary agent but i should say that over the past few days i had seven filmmakers and producers from hollywood contact me and i told my literary agent about the book i told my literary agent that if a film ever comes out of it i want brad pitt to play my role [Laughter] does he have to have the accent yeah he knows how to do it did you see the movie contact yes what did you think of that film i thought it's pretty good that was pretty good yeah well i loved it i mean actually by the way carl sagan was in a junior faculty at our department at harvard he was not tenured there so he moved to cornell where he got tenure but he also lived in the same town that i live in and when i bring my clothes to the dry cleaner the dry cleaner says that there is someone his son probably or someone related to his family that brings the clothes to the same dry cleaner sagan uh so royalty but you know he also was not his ideas were predated our current interest and but he was more of a popularizer he he had his program and right now i'm focusing mostly on the science you know that's my main interest but i think this subject is big enough for a lot of people to get to come together and make make the future better than the past well i think it would be just beyond spectacular if your coverage of a muamua and this controversy that's erupted from that that this is just one step in the multiple step process of us understanding that we are not alone i mean if if you like ring the first bell if you you know coming from harvard very respected guy say hey this this is not normal look at this and then people want to deny it but then another thing comes up
and another thing comes up and then who knows yeah i mean it'll be pretty amazing that's what everybody wants right really people really want they want to know they want to know like if we we are alone boy what a mess you know what a mess you know the story about my paper broke out just around the time of the state of the union address by donald trump 2018 and it was more popular than what he said in that on the washington post or whoever reported it and i was asked why do i think that's the case and i i said that people look for uplifting news from the sky because our situation on earth is not very promising well it's certainly problematic we've got a lot of that's going on that's not so fun but uh i think uh i i think we're all hoping that our civilization is going to get better and evidence that it's possible to get past this weird period of of conflict without destroying ourselves it would be great if we saw a civilization that has achieved that and that's what i think we hope for when we think of some intergalactic civilization that comes to visit us but i think also it changes the way we see ourselves uh if we are part of the human species rather than fight on borders feel superior relative to each other based on you know superficial things let's come together build a better future for all of us yeah you know that's a sign of intelligence why not do that like why does that sound weird or strange you know it should be the thing that everyone wants to do i think it's the thing that most people want to do i just think that what you've experienced is this this weird thing that's going on in academia i think you're experiencing this resistance from people that uh you know either they don't want
to look foolish or they're they're upset that you're the one who's come up with this and then they can't argue against it rationally there's no real logical uh reason why what you're saying is incorrect where they could prove it like here this is why they don't have that i think it's very frustrating right well sorry but then you know sometimes you have to revise your views of of nature and you know quantum mechanics is a very good good example you mentioned it before it was forced upon us by experiments and it didn't look it didn't it looked natural to many physicists and in fact einstein thought that it makes no sense and he was saying it has this spooky action at the distance that cannot be real and then experiments show that he was wrong and that we still do not fully understand the the meaning of quantum mechanics can you explain just because you've said it a couple times explain to people that don't know what does that mean by spooky action so in quantum mechanics uh entities objects are described by a wave function so you have a probability of detecting an electron at this point at that point you cannot imagine the electron as being point like particle like a billiard ball which is located a particular place it there is some uncertainty where so it's sort of like a wave it's spread over space okay now what that means is that if you do a measurement of the electron let's say here it affects what you will find very far away because there is a probability distribution of finding it far away and this is probably defining it here and if i measure it here it means that it's not there and this effect is action at a distance and it can be faster than light so in other words you can imagine two experiments done simultan almost simultaneously without any information coming from one experiment to the other trying to measure the electron and if
one of them finds the other one should is not able to find it but how did they know about each other when they were separated by a distance so large that they couldn't transmit a signal this is called spooky action at a distance that information about what is done here is already known there without enough time for the signal to cross that distance that separation what does that tell us about the nature of reality that it's not the way we're used to you know we're used to having a cup of coffee at one place you can't have the cup of coffee at another place that's that's a but in quantum mechanics that's not true your cup of coffee has some probability of actually being there as well so that's something being in superposition right well yeah it's being in a multitude of states many places with different properties potentially and you just assign a probability to finding it here and moreover quantum mechanics says that you can never pin down both the position of an object and its speed its velocity if you want to localize the object extremely well you don't know its speed and if you want to uh measure its speed you don't know where it's located and this is called the heisenberg uncertainty principle there is always uncertainty about reality we are not used to it because big objects have very little quantum uncertainty so that allows us to come to the conclusion that you know you can imagine things being in one place at one time and having a particular level but quantum mechanics says no that's not the case and it's counter-intuitive and einstein had a problem with that but he was wrong and all the experiments are fully consistent with this strange feeling so what i'm saying the reason i brought this up is you have an uneasy feeling when you think about quantum mechanics and a lot of people had an uneasy feeling you know i i'm sure that the friend of mine the colleague that spoke about umuah
would have said about quantum mechanics i wish it was not there you know so okay he can wish but reality is whatever it is irrespective whether we ignore it or not and we have to get used to it right you you check the atm machine you find how much money you have in the bank the fact that you imagine to be as wealthy as elon musk does not make you wealthy you can live happy a happy life imagining that you're elon musk in terms of the wealth but when you go to cash that money you don't have it in your back so what i'm saying is reality is whatever it is irrespective of your imagination and we better get tested by experiments before we you know assume that everything we believe in is true beautiful well thank you very much thank you thank you for being here um your book comes out when 26th of january okay so not too far away what is today the 15th 15th yeah so in about 11 days i will post it on instagram i will let everybody know and uh i appreciate you i appreciate what you're doing and i hope somebody reaches out and actually decides to do this and it takes you up on your word on your work and really puts together some sort of a group of people that can do these kind of experience experiments that you're talking about there it is right there extraterrestrial the first signs of intelligent life beyond earth thank you joe and i'll be glad to be back once we find definitive proof 100 definitely we'll do it thank you appreciate you bye everybody