July 2, 2025 • 19 mins
George Noory and professor Avi Loeb explore his efforts to search for possible extraterrestrial objects coming from outside our solar system, new space telescopes to aid in the research, and if humans will have to develop plans to move off Earth and avoid disasters that might have destroyed life on Mars.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Avi Lobe with Us, professor of science at Harvard University
as well as an author his books that are called
Extraterrestrial the First Sign of Intelligent Life beyond Earth. His
latest is Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our
Future and the Stars. He received a PhD in physics
from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of
(00:26):
twenty four. Writes on a wide range of topics including
black holes, the first stars, and the search for extraterrestrial
life in the future of the universe. Avi, welcome back,
Thanks for having me, and by the way, I want
to congratulate you and thank you those of us who
have been in the search for UFOs and extraterrestrial life
(00:46):
for you so many years. Appreciate people who like you
truly understand and do good research and work.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
So thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
On behalf of everybody who wants to get these answers.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Thank you and hopefully will have good clues in the
coming years.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
To twenty seventeen, you came out with the story of
an object called the Mura Moura. Tell us about that.
That's one of the most unique interstellar objects I've ever
heard about.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yeah, that's what attracted me to the subject.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
It was the first object that astronomers recognized from outside
the Solar System. It was moving faster than the escape
speed from the Solar System, and therefore it originated outside
the Solar System, and all the astronomers thought it must
be a comet or an asteroid, the familiar objects rocks
(01:39):
that we found in the Solar System.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
But then it didn't look like a comet. There was
no cometary tale, so people said, well, maybe.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
It's an asteroid, just a rock without any eyes on it,
so there is no evaporation. But then it was realized
that the object is being pushed away from the Sun
by some mysterious force. It wasn't clear what's pushing it
because there was no evaporation, so the rocket effect was
not effective. So then it was not an asteroid because
(02:12):
you don't get such a push without the evaporation usually
for a natural rock. And so the question was what
was it? And also as it was tumbling every eight hours,
the amount of sunlight that was reflected from it changed
by a factor of ten, and that meant that it
has a very extreme shape. The best fit to the
(02:35):
variation of light was that of a pancake shaped object,
a flat object, not cigar shaped like some artists illustrated.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
We couldn't get an image.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Of it because it was only the size of a
football field. I say only because the distance that it
was at was a fraction of the distance to the Sun.
So no tell scope that we have can resolve an
object that is about one hundred meters across a fraction
of the Earth's Sun separation. It's orders of magnitude too
(03:10):
small for us to resolve it.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Of course, if.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
We could send a spacecraft that would come close to it,
we could take a photograph of it, but that was
not possible at the time, and it was very mysterious,
anomalous in many different ways. It also was nearly at
rest in the frame of the Milky Way galaxy when
the Solar System bumped into it, sort of like a
(03:36):
buy lying at rest on the surface of the ocean,
and the Solar System like a giant ship bumping into it.
So you know, it was all very strange, and I
suggested that it maybe just pushed by reflecting sunlight. You know,
the sun itself, the light from the Sun is pushing it,
just like wind pushes a sail on a boat, you know,
(04:00):
and it turns out, you know, in retrospect. Now, just
this year, you know, I learned about a whole class
of objects that are called the empty trash bag objects.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
These are objects that are seen near the Earth.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
And they are thought to be broken pieces of satellites
that are just pushed by reflecting sunlight and they are
moving around in very strange ways. And there is also
another object that was found by the same telescope in
Hawaii that discovered this first interstellar object. By the way,
(04:37):
the object was named which means a scout in the
Hawaiian language. And the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another
object that was pushed, definitely pushed by reflecting sunlight. And
within a month or so the astronomers realized that was
in September twenty twenty, they realized that this one is
(04:59):
actually a rock boost, an upper stage of a mission
to reach the Moon that was launched.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
By NASA in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And you know, there are many objects that are space
trash that resulted after Sputnik. You know, all the space
missions that the Soviets and the US launched to space,
Some of these objects are out there. And there was
a claim just six months ago that there are dark comets,
(05:29):
that Mua was a dark comet, because those comet experts
wrote a paper in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, and they said, you know, there
is a population of dark comets that we see. By
dark comments, they mean that there is no evidence for
(05:49):
a comma, There is no cometary tail.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
What you see is an object.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
That exhibits a little bit of acceleration in addition to
And it turns out now we I'm writing a paper
about this with a collaborator that shows that most of
these dark comets that the comet experts wrote a paper about,
most of them are you know, space treasure relics of
(06:17):
missions that were launched by the Soviets and the US
over the past fifty years or six years. So that
actually they just shut themselves in the foot because by
claiming that could have been a dark comet, you know,
a comet where the tail is not visible, and us
(06:37):
finding that these dark comets that they found afterwards are
actually human made. You know that they basically demonstrated that
tom might have been also technologically manufactured.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And the question is who produced it?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Big deal? Absolutely? Now where is there?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
More? And more?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Now?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Ab well, it's very far. It's beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
And the point is that it's very faint. You know,
it's millions of times fainted than it was when it
came close to Earth. Because you know, as an object
goes away farther from the Sun, it gets dimmer inversely
(07:22):
with distance to the fourth so it very quickly it
becomes extremely dim. We can't really see it. We cannot
launch a spacecraft that would chase it because it's moving
fast and we don't know exactly where it is.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
So our best hope is.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Actually to look for another object of the same class,
and that would be a sibling from Amu MUA's family.
And actually we have a good chance of finding such
siblings because we have a new telescope, a new survey
telescope that is much better than the one in Hawaii
(08:00):
pant Stars, the new one that was just inaugurated a
week ago.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
It's called the Rubin, the Very Sea Rubin.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Observatory in Chile, and it's using a camera that has
three point two giga pixels, a thousand times more than
the number of pixels on your cellphone. And this camera
will serve at the southern sky every four nights, and
we'll do that for ten years, and we're likely to
(08:33):
find you know, tens of objects like with it. And
I'm just looking forward to that data, you know, I
have together with my post doc, we developed machine learning
software that would identify interstellar objects like in the Rubin
(08:54):
Observatory data set, and we we will then of course
look at any kind of the date object, not only
with ground based telescopes that would give us information similar
to that that we had on a memoir, but also
with the web telescope that we now have, because the
web telescope is you know, a million miles away from Earth,
(09:18):
and looking at an object from the advantage point of
the web telescope and from Earth, you know, it's just
like having two eyes. It allows you to assess the
distance to the object because you see it from different directions,
and that would pinpoint the trajectory of the object very precisely,
so we would know if it has any propulsion.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
A future object.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
And Moreover, the web telescope can detect the heat from
the object, the radiation emitted by the object in the infrared,
because it's a telescope that is primarily detecting infrared radiation, and.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
That itself would allow us to figure.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Out the area of the object, the temperature of the object,
and as it's stumbling, we can actually map its structure,
its shape in three dimensions very accurately. So we will
know much more. We will know things that we don't
know about MUMO. We'll also know their albito, the reflection
(10:25):
coefficient of sunlight, because we will detect the actual radiation
that the object emits and figure out its surface area
and so altogether, you know, I think we will know
much more about the next analog and I very much
look forward to that. That could happen in the coming year.
(10:45):
Exact that will be Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
How are you how do you believe in extraterrestrial life?
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 4 (10:52):
Oh, I think it's very likely to be the case
because in the Milky Way galaxy, you know, there are
one hundred billion stars like the Sun, okay, and so
just think of it as if we are seeing many
houses in our cosmic street. Okay, because we know about
(11:12):
the Earth Sun system, and we know that, you know,
very likely, based on all the data that was collected
over the past decade or two, we know that of
the order of tens of percent of those stars have
a planet like the Earth roughly the same separation, and
(11:32):
at the very least a few percent of those stars.
And so that means that there are billions of Earth
Sun analogs. And so think about the street that you
reside on, when there you see billions of houses just
like yours. Okay, And then my colleagues, you know, the
(11:52):
mainstream in the astronomy community, says, oh, we don't know
if any of these houses has any residents, and I say, well,
it's you know, it's quite unlikely that they don't, because
you know, I don't think that we humans are the
pinnacle of creation, you know, I think we just came
along as a result of circumstances on this rock, the Earth,
(12:17):
that we were born on. And if you have billions
of other rocks with similar conditions, it's very likely you know,
that you had similar beings out there. Now if you ask,
for example, on Earth, you know, where is everybody you
know that like that is the question that Enrico Fermi
asked about exrateracors. Where is everybody? You know, most of
the people that ever lived on Earth over the past
(12:39):
few million years.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
They're dead.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
By now, there were about one hundred billion people who
ever lived on Earth, and right now there.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Are eight billion living.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Okay, so the rest ninety two billion people they died,
they're gone. And so most civilizations that ever existed in
the Milky Way galaxy they're probably dead, you know. So say,
you know, the number of people that lived on Earth
is roughly the number of stars in the Milky Way
Galaxy by coincidence, one hundred billion, and most of them
(13:15):
are dead.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
So it's quite likely.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
That most of the civilizations like ours died by now.
We know that most of the stars in the Milky
Way Galaxy formed billions of years before the Sun. The
Sun is a late comer. It just formed in the
last one third of cosmic history. Most of the stars
fromed before the Sun by billions of years.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
And actually, you.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Know, the Sun itself will boil off all the oceans
on Earth within one billion years. It will become brighter.
We will have to move somewhere else. Earth will not
be hospitable for life as we know it in one
billion years. So you know, there were plenty of other
civilizations probably that cried for help, you know, said our
(14:01):
star is about to kill us.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
You know, the sun that is the source of life
on Earth.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
We think very fondly about the Sun, but it will
actually kill us. You know, we will have to move
somewhere else, irrespective of what we do.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
You know, people talk about global warming and so it's irrelevant.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
The Sun will boil off all liquid water on Earth
within a billion years.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
That's it.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
So we will have to move somewhere else. And that
happened to other civilizations. And you know, I can imagine
situations where you know, they first of all, all the
wealthy people on those planets started building their own spacecraft
to escape. But then there were you know, bigger projects.
I call them a knock spaceship. You know, it's just
(14:48):
like knocks arc in the biblical story, to protect animals
from the flood, he built an arc and put animals
on it. That's the story. And you can imagine something
like that on a planet that is about to get
burned up by the star. You know, the whoever lives
(15:09):
that would build the giant, giant arc or spacecraft that
would take those beings, many of them, out of the
planet to space. So you know, things like that could
have happened. I have no doubt that we are not
the first ones, and we are not the smartest one.
You know, just look at world politics, you know, look
(15:30):
at what we are doing everywhere around the world. You know,
there must be a smarter student in our class. You know,
there must be a smarter kid in our block. And
I'm looking forward to finding evidence for it.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
What do you think happened to Mars and why didn't
it happen to us?
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Oh, that's an excellent question. So Mars is quite started
quite similar to Earth. It's a smaller body. It's a
smaller rock that happened to be very close to the
orbit of the Earth around the Sun.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
So it had liquid water. We have no doubt about it.
It had.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
We can see the evidence for it having you know, oceans, rivers, lakes.
We see what's left behind, which is a desert, but
we do see evidence for the flowing water that were
on it in the first half of its history about
two to three billion years.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And it could be underneath.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Yeah, there could be some underneath, and we do see
right now ice water ice, evidence for water ice on
the surface of Mars. So what happened, Well, there was
an event or a process that led to the fact
that Mars lost its atmosphere. So in order to have
(16:53):
liquid water, it's not enough to have the right temperature
on the surface of a planet, because if you put
water ice in vacuum, it sublimates, it goes straight into gas.
You can't get liquid water in vacuum. So what you
need is external pressure, and on Earth it's provided by
(17:16):
the atmosphere of the Earth, and Mars had an atmosphere
to start with. It was very similar to Earth, and
then it lost its atmosphere halfway through, you know, a
couple of billion years ago. It lost its atmosphere, became
a desert. All the liquid water evaporated. There was some
(17:37):
ice left, water ice, and probably some is buried underneath
the surface, some ice. But right now it has a
very thin atmosphere, very a little bit of gas left.
And in addition, it obviously is because it doesn't have
(18:01):
an atmosphere, the temperature on the surface changes by hundreds
of degrees between day and night. You know, just think,
I mean, we have deserts on Earth, but the temperature,
and of course if you live in a desert, like
if you live in Las Vegas, you know that the temperature.
Now I was there, actually notice the temperature at night
(18:24):
is very different the temperature during you know, at the
mid day. But on Mars, the variation in temperature is
not moderated with an atmosphere like difference. It's huge, It's
hundreds of degrees. And you know, so when Elon Musk
talks about going back to Mars, I would be really
cautious at accepting his invitation to go there because because
(18:46):
you know, temperature variations are hundreds of degrees. Also, there
is no atmosphere to protect you. You know, the atmosphere
protects us from cosmic rays.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to Coast a
m dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Avi Lobe with Us, professor of science at Harvard University
as well as an author his books that are called
Extraterrestrial the First Sign of Intelligent Life beyond Earth. His
latest is Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our
Future and the Stars. He received a PhD in physics
from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of
(00:26):
twenty four. Writes on a wide range of topics including
black holes, the first stars, and the search for extraterrestrial
life in the future of the universe. Avi, welcome back,
Thanks for having me, and by the way, I want
to congratulate you and thank you those of us who
have been in the search for UFOs and extraterrestrial life
(00:46):
for you so many years. Appreciate people who like you
truly understand and do good research and work.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
So thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
On behalf of everybody who wants to get these answers.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Thank you and hopefully will have good clues in the
coming years.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
To twenty seventeen, you came out with the story of
an object called the Mura Moura. Tell us about that.
That's one of the most unique interstellar objects I've ever
heard about.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yeah, that's what attracted me to the subject.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
It was the first object that astronomers recognized from outside
the Solar System. It was moving faster than the escape
speed from the Solar System, and therefore it originated outside
the Solar System, and all the astronomers thought it must
be a comet or an asteroid, the familiar objects rocks
(01:39):
that we found in the Solar System.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
But then it didn't look like a comet. There was
no cometary tale, so people said, well, maybe.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
It's an asteroid, just a rock without any eyes on it,
so there is no evaporation. But then it was realized
that the object is being pushed away from the Sun
by some mysterious force. It wasn't clear what's pushing it
because there was no evaporation, so the rocket effect was
not effective. So then it was not an asteroid because
(02:12):
you don't get such a push without the evaporation usually
for a natural rock. And so the question was what
was it? And also as it was tumbling every eight hours,
the amount of sunlight that was reflected from it changed
by a factor of ten, and that meant that it
has a very extreme shape. The best fit to the
(02:35):
variation of light was that of a pancake shaped object,
a flat object, not cigar shaped like some artists illustrated.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
We couldn't get an image.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Of it because it was only the size of a
football field. I say only because the distance that it
was at was a fraction of the distance to the Sun.
So no tell scope that we have can resolve an
object that is about one hundred meters across a fraction
of the Earth's Sun separation. It's orders of magnitude too
(03:10):
small for us to resolve it.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Of course, if.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
We could send a spacecraft that would come close to it,
we could take a photograph of it, but that was
not possible at the time, and it was very mysterious,
anomalous in many different ways. It also was nearly at
rest in the frame of the Milky Way galaxy when
the Solar System bumped into it, sort of like a
(03:36):
buy lying at rest on the surface of the ocean,
and the Solar System like a giant ship bumping into it.
So you know, it was all very strange, and I
suggested that it maybe just pushed by reflecting sunlight. You know,
the sun itself, the light from the Sun is pushing it,
just like wind pushes a sail on a boat, you know,
(04:00):
and it turns out, you know, in retrospect. Now, just
this year, you know, I learned about a whole class
of objects that are called the empty trash bag objects.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
These are objects that are seen near the Earth.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
And they are thought to be broken pieces of satellites
that are just pushed by reflecting sunlight and they are
moving around in very strange ways. And there is also
another object that was found by the same telescope in
Hawaii that discovered this first interstellar object. By the way,
(04:37):
the object was named which means a scout in the
Hawaiian language. And the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another
object that was pushed, definitely pushed by reflecting sunlight. And
within a month or so the astronomers realized that was
in September twenty twenty, they realized that this one is
(04:59):
actually a rock boost, an upper stage of a mission
to reach the Moon that was launched.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
By NASA in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And you know, there are many objects that are space
trash that resulted after Sputnik. You know, all the space
missions that the Soviets and the US launched to space,
Some of these objects are out there. And there was
a claim just six months ago that there are dark comets,
(05:29):
that Mua was a dark comet, because those comet experts
wrote a paper in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, and they said, you know, there
is a population of dark comets that we see. By
dark comments, they mean that there is no evidence for
(05:49):
a comma, There is no cometary tail.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
What you see is an object.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
That exhibits a little bit of acceleration in addition to
And it turns out now we I'm writing a paper
about this with a collaborator that shows that most of
these dark comets that the comet experts wrote a paper about,
most of them are you know, space treasure relics of
(06:17):
missions that were launched by the Soviets and the US
over the past fifty years or six years. So that
actually they just shut themselves in the foot because by
claiming that could have been a dark comet, you know,
a comet where the tail is not visible, and us
(06:37):
finding that these dark comets that they found afterwards are
actually human made. You know that they basically demonstrated that
tom might have been also technologically manufactured.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And the question is who produced it?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Big deal? Absolutely? Now where is there?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
More? And more?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Now?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Ab well, it's very far. It's beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
And the point is that it's very faint. You know,
it's millions of times fainted than it was when it
came close to Earth. Because you know, as an object
goes away farther from the Sun, it gets dimmer inversely
(07:22):
with distance to the fourth so it very quickly it
becomes extremely dim. We can't really see it. We cannot
launch a spacecraft that would chase it because it's moving
fast and we don't know exactly where it is.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
So our best hope is.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Actually to look for another object of the same class,
and that would be a sibling from Amu MUA's family.
And actually we have a good chance of finding such
siblings because we have a new telescope, a new survey
telescope that is much better than the one in Hawaii
(08:00):
pant Stars, the new one that was just inaugurated a
week ago.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
It's called the Rubin, the Very Sea Rubin.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Observatory in Chile, and it's using a camera that has
three point two giga pixels, a thousand times more than
the number of pixels on your cellphone. And this camera
will serve at the southern sky every four nights, and
we'll do that for ten years, and we're likely to
(08:33):
find you know, tens of objects like with it. And
I'm just looking forward to that data, you know, I
have together with my post doc, we developed machine learning
software that would identify interstellar objects like in the Rubin
(08:54):
Observatory data set, and we we will then of course
look at any kind of the date object, not only
with ground based telescopes that would give us information similar
to that that we had on a memoir, but also
with the web telescope that we now have, because the
web telescope is you know, a million miles away from Earth,
(09:18):
and looking at an object from the advantage point of
the web telescope and from Earth, you know, it's just
like having two eyes. It allows you to assess the
distance to the object because you see it from different directions,
and that would pinpoint the trajectory of the object very precisely,
so we would know if it has any propulsion.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
A future object.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
And Moreover, the web telescope can detect the heat from
the object, the radiation emitted by the object in the infrared,
because it's a telescope that is primarily detecting infrared radiation, and.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
That itself would allow us to figure.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Out the area of the object, the temperature of the object,
and as it's stumbling, we can actually map its structure,
its shape in three dimensions very accurately. So we will
know much more. We will know things that we don't
know about MUMO. We'll also know their albito, the reflection
(10:25):
coefficient of sunlight, because we will detect the actual radiation
that the object emits and figure out its surface area
and so altogether, you know, I think we will know
much more about the next analog and I very much
look forward to that. That could happen in the coming year.
(10:45):
Exact that will be Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
How are you how do you believe in extraterrestrial life?
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 4 (10:52):
Oh, I think it's very likely to be the case
because in the Milky Way galaxy, you know, there are
one hundred billion stars like the Sun, okay, and so
just think of it as if we are seeing many
houses in our cosmic street. Okay, because we know about
(11:12):
the Earth Sun system, and we know that, you know,
very likely, based on all the data that was collected
over the past decade or two, we know that of
the order of tens of percent of those stars have
a planet like the Earth roughly the same separation, and
(11:32):
at the very least a few percent of those stars.
And so that means that there are billions of Earth
Sun analogs. And so think about the street that you
reside on, when there you see billions of houses just
like yours. Okay, And then my colleagues, you know, the
(11:52):
mainstream in the astronomy community, says, oh, we don't know
if any of these houses has any residents, and I say, well,
it's you know, it's quite unlikely that they don't, because
you know, I don't think that we humans are the
pinnacle of creation, you know, I think we just came
along as a result of circumstances on this rock, the Earth,
(12:17):
that we were born on. And if you have billions
of other rocks with similar conditions, it's very likely you know,
that you had similar beings out there. Now if you ask,
for example, on Earth, you know, where is everybody you
know that like that is the question that Enrico Fermi
asked about exrateracors. Where is everybody? You know, most of
the people that ever lived on Earth over the past
(12:39):
few million years.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
They're dead.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
By now, there were about one hundred billion people who
ever lived on Earth, and right now there.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Are eight billion living.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Okay, so the rest ninety two billion people they died,
they're gone. And so most civilizations that ever existed in
the Milky Way galaxy they're probably dead, you know. So say,
you know, the number of people that lived on Earth
is roughly the number of stars in the Milky Way
Galaxy by coincidence, one hundred billion, and most of them
(13:15):
are dead.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
So it's quite likely.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
That most of the civilizations like ours died by now.
We know that most of the stars in the Milky
Way Galaxy formed billions of years before the Sun. The
Sun is a late comer. It just formed in the
last one third of cosmic history. Most of the stars
fromed before the Sun by billions of years.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
And actually, you.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Know, the Sun itself will boil off all the oceans
on Earth within one billion years. It will become brighter.
We will have to move somewhere else. Earth will not
be hospitable for life as we know it in one
billion years. So you know, there were plenty of other
civilizations probably that cried for help, you know, said our
(14:01):
star is about to kill us.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
You know, the sun that is the source of life
on Earth.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
We think very fondly about the Sun, but it will
actually kill us. You know, we will have to move
somewhere else, irrespective of what we do.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
You know, people talk about global warming and so it's irrelevant.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
The Sun will boil off all liquid water on Earth
within a billion years.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
That's it.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
So we will have to move somewhere else. And that
happened to other civilizations. And you know, I can imagine
situations where you know, they first of all, all the
wealthy people on those planets started building their own spacecraft
to escape. But then there were you know, bigger projects.
I call them a knock spaceship. You know, it's just
(14:48):
like knocks arc in the biblical story, to protect animals
from the flood, he built an arc and put animals
on it. That's the story. And you can imagine something
like that on a planet that is about to get
burned up by the star. You know, the whoever lives
(15:09):
that would build the giant, giant arc or spacecraft that
would take those beings, many of them, out of the
planet to space. So you know, things like that could
have happened. I have no doubt that we are not
the first ones, and we are not the smartest one.
You know, just look at world politics, you know, look
(15:30):
at what we are doing everywhere around the world. You know,
there must be a smarter student in our class. You know,
there must be a smarter kid in our block. And
I'm looking forward to finding evidence for it.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
What do you think happened to Mars and why didn't
it happen to us?
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Oh, that's an excellent question. So Mars is quite started
quite similar to Earth. It's a smaller body. It's a
smaller rock that happened to be very close to the
orbit of the Earth around the Sun.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
So it had liquid water. We have no doubt about it.
It had.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
We can see the evidence for it having you know, oceans, rivers, lakes.
We see what's left behind, which is a desert, but
we do see evidence for the flowing water that were
on it in the first half of its history about
two to three billion years.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And it could be underneath.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Yeah, there could be some underneath, and we do see
right now ice water ice, evidence for water ice on
the surface of Mars. So what happened, Well, there was
an event or a process that led to the fact
that Mars lost its atmosphere. So in order to have
(16:53):
liquid water, it's not enough to have the right temperature
on the surface of a planet, because if you put
water ice in vacuum, it sublimates, it goes straight into gas.
You can't get liquid water in vacuum. So what you
need is external pressure, and on Earth it's provided by
(17:16):
the atmosphere of the Earth, and Mars had an atmosphere
to start with. It was very similar to Earth, and
then it lost its atmosphere halfway through, you know, a
couple of billion years ago. It lost its atmosphere, became
a desert. All the liquid water evaporated. There was some
(17:37):
ice left, water ice, and probably some is buried underneath
the surface, some ice. But right now it has a
very thin atmosphere, very a little bit of gas left.
And in addition, it obviously is because it doesn't have
(18:01):
an atmosphere, the temperature on the surface changes by hundreds
of degrees between day and night. You know, just think,
I mean, we have deserts on Earth, but the temperature,
and of course if you live in a desert, like
if you live in Las Vegas, you know that the temperature.
Now I was there, actually notice the temperature at night
(18:24):
is very different the temperature during you know, at the
mid day. But on Mars, the variation in temperature is
not moderated with an atmosphere like difference. It's huge, It's
hundreds of degrees. And you know, so when Elon Musk
talks about going back to Mars, I would be really
cautious at accepting his invitation to go there because because
(18:46):
you know, temperature variations are hundreds of degrees. Also, there
is no atmosphere to protect you. You know, the atmosphere
protects us from cosmic rays.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
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