December 30, 2025 • 17 mins
George Noory and theoretical physicist Avi Loeb explore his research into interstellar objects like the mysterious 3I Atlas comet and what he thinks it could be, if there is any proof it might be a space probe or abandoned alien spaceship, and if there is any threat to Earth from the object.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George noriy with
Abby in love with us Abby. What took us so
long to discover three I.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Atlas, Well, it wasn't too long.
Speaker 4 (00:16):
It was at a distance of five times the Earth
and separation, so it's basically up to our survey telescope
to find it. And that was a small telescope half
a meter in size, called the Atlas in Chile the
discovery because it was relatively bright, and then other observers
(00:36):
found the three Atlas in their images a few months
earlier actually, But we are basically limited by the fact
that the brightness of an object that reflects the sunlight
declines inversely with the distance to the fourth power.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
So when the object is fir, it's extremely deep.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
And now we have the Ruben Observatory in Chile that
started operations in June this year, and it should be
far more sensitive than the Atlas telescope, and we hope
to find a new interstellar object every few months with
the Rubin Observatory, so that will be in the southern sky.
(01:22):
It has a camera of three point two gigapixels, a
thousand times more pixels than your cell phone camera. And
also it covers the southern sky every four nights. We
need a similar twin telescope in the northern hemisphere so
that we can cover the entire sky. We don't have
(01:43):
it at the moment, but that's the best path forward
to basically identify interstellar objects by their high speed.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
They are supposed to be moving.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Faster than the speed necessary to escape from the gravitational
pool of the Sun, so it's easy to find them
based on their speed. And in the case of three Atlas,
it was also coming from the direction of the center
of the Milky Way galaxy. That's the Sagittarius region in
the sky, and it's very crowded in stars, and that
(02:16):
was another reason why it wasn't identified earlier. But in principle,
you know, we can see such objects even to greater distance,
and of course there are many more of them that
we should spot as we go farther with bigger telescopes
like the Rubin Observatory.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
With the universe is teeming with extraterrestrial intelligent life, and
I believe it is, it would not be unusual to
have some kind of space problem coming through the Solar system.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
It.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Yeah, so first I should mention that Voyager our own spacecraft.
You know they're making currently there are the distance of
about one hundred times the Earth Sun separation, and it
will take about It will reach the outskirts of the
Oar cloud at one hundred thousand times they are Sun
(03:09):
separation in twenty eight thousand years, given its speech, so
it will take twenty eight thousand years, and by the
year thirty thousand CE it will leave the Solar System
at last.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
You know where I define the Solar.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
System as the region in space where we find objects
that are bound by gravity to the Sun. That's the
Solar System. So it will in the year thirty thousand
it will get there. By the way, three iatlets will
get there to the edge of the Solar System in
eight thousand years, so by the year ten thousand, just
(03:47):
to show you how much faster it is than Voyager,
but even Voyager with the nineteen seventies technology will reach
the opposite side of the milky galaxy in less than
a billion years. I did the calculation, and that means,
you know, since most stars are billions of years older
(04:10):
than the Sun, the Sun is a late comer. It
only formed in the last one third of cosmic history,
exactly one third. Because the age of the Sun is
four point six billionaires, the age of the universe is
thirteen point eight billionaires, three times larger. So the Sun
is a late comer. Most stars from billions of fears
(04:31):
before the Sun. And if a civilization like ours formed
around these other older stars, they had plenty of time.
You know, it takes less than a billionaires with the
nineteen seventies technologies of voyager to cross the Milky Way galaxy,
so that means they could have arrived at us. And
the only question is you know how much traffic there
is of technological objects, And we don't know that, And
(04:54):
I say the best way to find out is by
looking up, looking at the sky and figuring out how
many interested.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Objects are out there. And you know.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Whether among all the rocks that arrive from other planetary
systems there are some tennis balls that were thrown by neighbors.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Have you speculated on what you think three i at
lists might be.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, obviously you know it could. It could be a comet.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Just because it sheds gas and dust, although it has
all these anomalies that I mentioned, But in approaching a
blind date of interstellar proportions, you know, you don't know
what's on.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
The other side.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
And my advice to people who go on blind dates is,
instead of having an opinion very quickly, just just observe
the other side.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Don't rush into conclusions.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
That's the best approach for blind dates, especially when dealing
with something that comes from from another star.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
You know, we just who knows what it is.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
And so I'm at this point just trying to analyze
the data and you know, figure out how unusual it is.
Could it be just a natural object or is there
a need for something else? And in general, you know,
I'm also the head of the Galileo project, where we
(06:21):
are looking at unidentified anormalous phenomena near Earth, and I
take the same approach. I don't want to guess what
we might see, what kind of anomal is Let's just
look for outliers, objects that are not familiar, you know,
that are not an airplane, satellite, drown, helicopter, or a bird.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
You know, things that we know exist.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
And if there is an outlier, something that behaves differently,
we just want to check it and learn about it.
And you know, the best way of doing science is
like a learning experience, being humble, not assuming we know
the answer in advance. This goes against the common practice
of science by my colleagues, which is to show that
(07:12):
they are experts, to show that they know the answers
before they have all the data. And so my fundamental point,
you know, this is basically the motto that I'm advocating,
is that the foundation of science is the humility to learn.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
It's not the arrogance of expertise.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Why would this object have anomalies? Don't you think all
commets should act the same?
Speaker 4 (07:37):
Yeah, they should, and in fact we did so. There
were three interstellar objects. The second one was definitely a
comet of the type that we're familiar with. It was
discovered by Gennadi Borisov, an amateur astronomer from Ukraine, and
so it's called Borisov and it did behave just like
(07:58):
a comet, nothing unusual about it. So we expect the
most interestellar objects to be like that, to be comets,
because the easiest way to dislodge an object from the
Solar System is for the objects that are far out
in the Solar System in the oor cloud these are
(08:20):
icy rocks. We see them as comets when they come
close to the Sun. Long period comets come from the
outskirts of the of the o cloud. That's how we
know it exists. And so these are icy rocks, and
it's easy to kick them out of the Solar system
because they're very loosely bound to the Sun. They move
at speeds that are, you know, about one hundred times
(08:43):
smaller than the speed of the of the Earth going
around the Sun, you know, So they are extremely slow
and very weakly bound to the Sun, and a passing
start can easily kick them out. And there are lots
of stars passing by. And so if you imagine a
population of the most abundant objects in the interstellar space
(09:06):
out there, and it would be objects that are kicked
out of Oort clouds around other stars, and they would
all be comets. You would expect them to behave like
the comets we find in our old cloud. However, both
the first interstell are object, you know, and three atlas
(09:26):
are different. They have anomalies and in particular, was definitely
not a comet of the type that we're familiar with,
because there was no gas or dust around it. Even
when we looked very deeply with the Spits of space telescope,
we couldn't find any trace of carbon based molecules. And
you might say, okay, so what do the experts say?
(09:47):
So the comet experts say it's a dark comet. Orm
is a dark comet, and by that they mean that
it's a comet. But you can't see the signatures of
a comet. In other words, there is a tale, but
you can't see it. And to me it reminds me
of I mean that is I'm not exaggerating here. That
(10:08):
is the mainstream view of and the way I feel
about it is like the kid in Hans Christian Andersen's
tale who said the emperor has no clothes. The adults
in the room are saying, no, no, no, the emperor has closed.
You just can't see it. So this object is a comet.
(10:29):
You just can't see it. It is dressed up in
the veil of dust, or not dust, but in a
veil of gas that you can't see that is transparent.
And this is the folklore of the of the mainstreamer
right now, about which I find ridiculous. How can you
argue that this is more reasonable than to say no,
it's not a comet. And the reason they suggest that
(10:53):
is because the object was pushed away from the sun
by some mysterious force.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
And the way you get it for.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Comets is by the I'm shedding gas and dust and
that introduces the rocket effect. But we didn't see any
gas or dust around on Muhmha. I suggested that it's
just the sunlight that is pushing it, and for that
it needed to be very thin. And in fact, the
same telescope that discovered Mumua in twenty seventeen, three years later,
(11:22):
it found another object that was pushed by reflecting sunlight,
definitely pushed by that, and it was identified as twenty
twenty s O. That was the label they gave to
this object. And a few months later they measured the
spectrum of the object and found that it's made mostly
of stainless steel and it's actually a rocket booster that
(11:42):
was launched by NASA in nineteen sixty six. So it
was definitely technologically it exhibited the same behaviors of Muhamoa,
and that was my claim all along. But nobody, you know,
makes the connection.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Hobby, Will these objects come back into our solar system
or they gone.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Yeah, well they are gone in the sense that they
derive from outside. So they move at a speed that
is above the escape speed from the Solar System, and
so they pass through and then they go out.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
And of course the only caveat to that is if
they have.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
An engine, they could return, I mean, they can become bound.
But so far, you know, we haven't seen evidence for
an engine in any of them.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
What would be the most compelling argument that would state
that this could be from an extraterrestrial source? Three Iye Atlas.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Yeah, well, if it does a very strange maneuver, for example,
near Jupiter, because you know, Jupiter could be the target
because it's the biggest planet in the Solar System, and
probably three Atlas started its journey billions of years ago,
so if it is technological, it would make sense for
it to pay attention to Jupiter, for the senders to
(13:06):
pay attention to Jupiter, because the Earth you know, was
not particularly interesting billions of years ago, you know, and
it was just a swamp, you know, with all kinds
of primitive forms of life, and we just came to
exist as a technological civilization, you know, just recently, and
technology is only one hundred years old here and the
(13:27):
modern technology that we use and the humanity as a
whole just emerged a few million years ago, which is
one percent of the age of the Earth, you know,
the most recent part of its history, and so whoever
comes to visit does not necessarily have us in mind.
You know, we might feel as if we arrived late
(13:50):
to the party, the cosmic party, and nobody wants to
dance with us because of that, nobody thought about us
in the first place. So if it does a maneuver
when it comes close to Jupiter on March sixteen, twenty
twenty six, you know, that would be an interesting thing
to watch for.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Or if it deploys some many.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Gadgets near Jupiter, that obviously something we can look for.
But other than that, I would argue if we find
out that the anti tailed jet, for example, is you know,
a technological origin coming from a thruster, because it's moving
much faster than we expect from the sublimation of pockets
(14:29):
of ice on the surface of a rock. That would
be a technological signature if we detect any signal coming
from it. You know, there were attempts to look at
it in the radio band, and then they put limits.
They looked at it on two particular or a few
particular dates and didn't see any transmission. But it may
(14:51):
not be radio transmission. Maybe something else that constitutes a signal.
That of course would be a technological signature. Also, if
we see artificial lights or heat that is emitted by
it beyond the amount of energy that it gets from
the sun, you know that that would indicate maybe an engine.
(15:11):
So I'm waiting to see a clear signature. We haven't
seen any as of now. We just have the anomalies,
the unusual facts about it that are not natural, you know,
for the comets we know about.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Could it be an object of spaceship that is just dead,
that has just died out.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yes, it could be.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Another possibility one can imagine is that you can hitch
hike on an object that looks like a natural comet
or asteroid, and in the inside you can have you
can deploy some technological gadgets. You know, in principle, it
could be like a Trosian horse that nobody would suspect
(15:53):
as being a threat to humanity. By the way, in July,
just five months ago, I define a new scale that
is now called the lobe scale. For interstellar objects, where
a rank of zero means that it's a natural object
and a rank of ten means that it's definitely technological
and it could potentially be a threat to humanity. And
(16:19):
originally I ranked three atlases four, which is similar to
the rank I gave Ama, But of course I will
update that once we have all the data. It could
the rank could go down to maybe two if it
looks like it's you know, likely to be natural, or
(16:40):
may go up if it goes about about five. We
need to do something about it. And I think in general,
you know, this is something to contemplate for the future.
I wrote a white paper to the United Nations where
I recommended the establishing a body, committee or organization that
(17:01):
would monitor future interstellar objects decide what rank they have
on the lobe scale, so you know, if they have
the signatures of a potential risk, we need to do
something about it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to cooastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George noriy with
Abby in love with us Abby. What took us so
long to discover three I.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Atlas, Well, it wasn't too long.
Speaker 4 (00:16):
It was at a distance of five times the Earth
and separation, so it's basically up to our survey telescope
to find it. And that was a small telescope half
a meter in size, called the Atlas in Chile the
discovery because it was relatively bright, and then other observers
(00:36):
found the three Atlas in their images a few months
earlier actually, But we are basically limited by the fact
that the brightness of an object that reflects the sunlight
declines inversely with the distance to the fourth power.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
So when the object is fir, it's extremely deep.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
And now we have the Ruben Observatory in Chile that
started operations in June this year, and it should be
far more sensitive than the Atlas telescope, and we hope
to find a new interstellar object every few months with
the Rubin Observatory, so that will be in the southern sky.
(01:22):
It has a camera of three point two gigapixels, a
thousand times more pixels than your cell phone camera. And
also it covers the southern sky every four nights. We
need a similar twin telescope in the northern hemisphere so
that we can cover the entire sky. We don't have
(01:43):
it at the moment, but that's the best path forward
to basically identify interstellar objects by their high speed.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
They are supposed to be moving.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Faster than the speed necessary to escape from the gravitational
pool of the Sun, so it's easy to find them
based on their speed. And in the case of three Atlas,
it was also coming from the direction of the center
of the Milky Way galaxy. That's the Sagittarius region in
the sky, and it's very crowded in stars, and that
(02:16):
was another reason why it wasn't identified earlier. But in principle,
you know, we can see such objects even to greater distance,
and of course there are many more of them that
we should spot as we go farther with bigger telescopes
like the Rubin Observatory.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
With the universe is teeming with extraterrestrial intelligent life, and
I believe it is, it would not be unusual to
have some kind of space problem coming through the Solar system.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
It.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Yeah, so first I should mention that Voyager our own spacecraft.
You know they're making currently there are the distance of
about one hundred times the Earth Sun separation, and it
will take about It will reach the outskirts of the
Oar cloud at one hundred thousand times they are Sun
(03:09):
separation in twenty eight thousand years, given its speech, so
it will take twenty eight thousand years, and by the
year thirty thousand CE it will leave the Solar System
at last.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
You know where I define the Solar.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
System as the region in space where we find objects
that are bound by gravity to the Sun. That's the
Solar System. So it will in the year thirty thousand
it will get there. By the way, three iatlets will
get there to the edge of the Solar System in
eight thousand years, so by the year ten thousand, just
(03:47):
to show you how much faster it is than Voyager,
but even Voyager with the nineteen seventies technology will reach
the opposite side of the milky galaxy in less than
a billion years. I did the calculation, and that means,
you know, since most stars are billions of years older
(04:10):
than the Sun, the Sun is a late comer. It
only formed in the last one third of cosmic history,
exactly one third. Because the age of the Sun is
four point six billionaires, the age of the universe is
thirteen point eight billionaires, three times larger. So the Sun
is a late comer. Most stars from billions of fears
(04:31):
before the Sun. And if a civilization like ours formed
around these other older stars, they had plenty of time.
You know, it takes less than a billionaires with the
nineteen seventies technologies of voyager to cross the Milky Way galaxy,
so that means they could have arrived at us. And
the only question is you know how much traffic there
is of technological objects, And we don't know that, And
(04:54):
I say the best way to find out is by
looking up, looking at the sky and figuring out how
many interested.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Objects are out there. And you know.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Whether among all the rocks that arrive from other planetary
systems there are some tennis balls that were thrown by neighbors.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Have you speculated on what you think three i at
lists might be.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, obviously you know it could. It could be a comet.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Just because it sheds gas and dust, although it has
all these anomalies that I mentioned, But in approaching a
blind date of interstellar proportions, you know, you don't know
what's on.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
The other side.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
And my advice to people who go on blind dates is,
instead of having an opinion very quickly, just just observe
the other side.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Don't rush into conclusions.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
That's the best approach for blind dates, especially when dealing
with something that comes from from another star.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
You know, we just who knows what it is.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
And so I'm at this point just trying to analyze
the data and you know, figure out how unusual it is.
Could it be just a natural object or is there
a need for something else? And in general, you know,
I'm also the head of the Galileo project, where we
(06:21):
are looking at unidentified anormalous phenomena near Earth, and I
take the same approach. I don't want to guess what
we might see, what kind of anomal is Let's just
look for outliers, objects that are not familiar, you know,
that are not an airplane, satellite, drown, helicopter, or a bird.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
You know, things that we know exist.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
And if there is an outlier, something that behaves differently,
we just want to check it and learn about it.
And you know, the best way of doing science is
like a learning experience, being humble, not assuming we know
the answer in advance. This goes against the common practice
of science by my colleagues, which is to show that
(07:12):
they are experts, to show that they know the answers
before they have all the data. And so my fundamental point,
you know, this is basically the motto that I'm advocating,
is that the foundation of science is the humility to learn.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
It's not the arrogance of expertise.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Why would this object have anomalies? Don't you think all
commets should act the same?
Speaker 4 (07:37):
Yeah, they should, and in fact we did so. There
were three interstellar objects. The second one was definitely a
comet of the type that we're familiar with. It was
discovered by Gennadi Borisov, an amateur astronomer from Ukraine, and
so it's called Borisov and it did behave just like
(07:58):
a comet, nothing unusual about it. So we expect the
most interestellar objects to be like that, to be comets,
because the easiest way to dislodge an object from the
Solar System is for the objects that are far out
in the Solar System in the oor cloud these are
(08:20):
icy rocks. We see them as comets when they come
close to the Sun. Long period comets come from the
outskirts of the of the o cloud. That's how we
know it exists. And so these are icy rocks, and
it's easy to kick them out of the Solar system
because they're very loosely bound to the Sun. They move
at speeds that are, you know, about one hundred times
(08:43):
smaller than the speed of the of the Earth going
around the Sun, you know, So they are extremely slow
and very weakly bound to the Sun, and a passing
start can easily kick them out. And there are lots
of stars passing by. And so if you imagine a
population of the most abundant objects in the interstellar space
(09:06):
out there, and it would be objects that are kicked
out of Oort clouds around other stars, and they would
all be comets. You would expect them to behave like
the comets we find in our old cloud. However, both
the first interstell are object, you know, and three atlas
(09:26):
are different. They have anomalies and in particular, was definitely
not a comet of the type that we're familiar with,
because there was no gas or dust around it. Even
when we looked very deeply with the Spits of space telescope,
we couldn't find any trace of carbon based molecules. And
you might say, okay, so what do the experts say?
(09:47):
So the comet experts say it's a dark comet. Orm
is a dark comet, and by that they mean that
it's a comet. But you can't see the signatures of
a comet. In other words, there is a tale, but
you can't see it. And to me it reminds me
of I mean that is I'm not exaggerating here. That
(10:08):
is the mainstream view of and the way I feel
about it is like the kid in Hans Christian Andersen's
tale who said the emperor has no clothes. The adults
in the room are saying, no, no, no, the emperor has closed.
You just can't see it. So this object is a comet.
(10:29):
You just can't see it. It is dressed up in
the veil of dust, or not dust, but in a
veil of gas that you can't see that is transparent.
And this is the folklore of the of the mainstreamer
right now, about which I find ridiculous. How can you
argue that this is more reasonable than to say no,
it's not a comet. And the reason they suggest that
(10:53):
is because the object was pushed away from the sun
by some mysterious force.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
And the way you get it for.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Comets is by the I'm shedding gas and dust and
that introduces the rocket effect. But we didn't see any
gas or dust around on Muhmha. I suggested that it's
just the sunlight that is pushing it, and for that
it needed to be very thin. And in fact, the
same telescope that discovered Mumua in twenty seventeen, three years later,
(11:22):
it found another object that was pushed by reflecting sunlight,
definitely pushed by that, and it was identified as twenty
twenty s O. That was the label they gave to
this object. And a few months later they measured the
spectrum of the object and found that it's made mostly
of stainless steel and it's actually a rocket booster that
(11:42):
was launched by NASA in nineteen sixty six. So it
was definitely technologically it exhibited the same behaviors of Muhamoa,
and that was my claim all along. But nobody, you know,
makes the connection.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Hobby, Will these objects come back into our solar system
or they gone.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Yeah, well they are gone in the sense that they
derive from outside. So they move at a speed that
is above the escape speed from the Solar System, and
so they pass through and then they go out.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
And of course the only caveat to that is if
they have.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
An engine, they could return, I mean, they can become bound.
But so far, you know, we haven't seen evidence for
an engine in any of them.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
What would be the most compelling argument that would state
that this could be from an extraterrestrial source? Three Iye Atlas.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Yeah, well, if it does a very strange maneuver, for example,
near Jupiter, because you know, Jupiter could be the target
because it's the biggest planet in the Solar System, and
probably three Atlas started its journey billions of years ago,
so if it is technological, it would make sense for
it to pay attention to Jupiter, for the senders to
(13:06):
pay attention to Jupiter, because the Earth you know, was
not particularly interesting billions of years ago, you know, and
it was just a swamp, you know, with all kinds
of primitive forms of life, and we just came to
exist as a technological civilization, you know, just recently, and
technology is only one hundred years old here and the
(13:27):
modern technology that we use and the humanity as a
whole just emerged a few million years ago, which is
one percent of the age of the Earth, you know,
the most recent part of its history, and so whoever
comes to visit does not necessarily have us in mind.
You know, we might feel as if we arrived late
(13:50):
to the party, the cosmic party, and nobody wants to
dance with us because of that, nobody thought about us
in the first place. So if it does a maneuver
when it comes close to Jupiter on March sixteen, twenty
twenty six, you know, that would be an interesting thing
to watch for.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Or if it deploys some many.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Gadgets near Jupiter, that obviously something we can look for.
But other than that, I would argue if we find
out that the anti tailed jet, for example, is you know,
a technological origin coming from a thruster, because it's moving
much faster than we expect from the sublimation of pockets
(14:29):
of ice on the surface of a rock. That would
be a technological signature if we detect any signal coming
from it. You know, there were attempts to look at
it in the radio band, and then they put limits.
They looked at it on two particular or a few
particular dates and didn't see any transmission. But it may
(14:51):
not be radio transmission. Maybe something else that constitutes a signal.
That of course would be a technological signature. Also, if
we see artificial lights or heat that is emitted by
it beyond the amount of energy that it gets from
the sun, you know that that would indicate maybe an engine.
(15:11):
So I'm waiting to see a clear signature. We haven't
seen any as of now. We just have the anomalies,
the unusual facts about it that are not natural, you know,
for the comets we know about.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Could it be an object of spaceship that is just dead,
that has just died out.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yes, it could be.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Another possibility one can imagine is that you can hitch
hike on an object that looks like a natural comet
or asteroid, and in the inside you can have you
can deploy some technological gadgets. You know, in principle, it
could be like a Trosian horse that nobody would suspect
(15:53):
as being a threat to humanity. By the way, in July,
just five months ago, I define a new scale that
is now called the lobe scale. For interstellar objects, where
a rank of zero means that it's a natural object
and a rank of ten means that it's definitely technological
and it could potentially be a threat to humanity. And
(16:19):
originally I ranked three atlases four, which is similar to
the rank I gave Ama, But of course I will
update that once we have all the data. It could
the rank could go down to maybe two if it
looks like it's you know, likely to be natural, or
(16:40):
may go up if it goes about about five. We
need to do something about it. And I think in general,
you know, this is something to contemplate for the future.
I wrote a white paper to the United Nations where
I recommended the establishing a body, committee or organization that
(17:01):
would monitor future interstellar objects decide what rank they have
on the lobe scale, so you know, if they have
the signatures of a potential risk, we need to do
something about it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
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George Noory
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