November 23, 2025 • 29 mins
Newt talks with Professor Avi Loeb about the latest news on 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object discovered passing through our solar system. Loeb highlights its unusual characteristics and the possibility of it being a technological artifact rather than a natural object. He emphasizes the importance of scientific curiosity and the need for academia to embrace risk-taking and exploration beyond conventional boundaries. He advocates for a broader search for intelligent life in the universe, suggesting that the discovery of alien technology could significantly alter human priorities and investments in space exploration. Their conversation also touches on the cultural and institutional challenges within the scientific community, urging a shift towards a more open-minded and exploratory approach to science. He concludes with a reflection on the potential of science to inspire and engage the public, particularly the younger generation. Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. He serves as Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and also heads the Galileo Project. His blog about 3I/ATLAS is avi-loeb.medium.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World, the United States Congress
passed legislation called the Georgie Brown Junior Near Earth Object
Survey Act of two thousand and five, which mandated the
NASA find and track ninety percent of the near Earth
objects called NEOs of course larger than one hundred and
(00:25):
forty meters by twenty twenty. As a result of that legislation,
we're now starting to look at the skies more closely
and with better technology, and as my guest today has said,
we're now pursuing one of the most exciting questions in science.
Are we alone here to discuss the recent discovery of
(00:48):
three I atlas? I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Professor Ave Lobe. He is the Frank B. Bear Junior
Professor of Science at Harvard University, is director of the
Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics, and also heads the Galileo Project. As you
(01:11):
can imagine, we're going to have a lot to talk about.
His articles about THREEI Atlas can be found at Avidashlobe
dot medium dot com. Ave welcome and thank you for
(01:44):
joining me on this world.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's my great privilege to speak with you, nuth.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
There are a lot of things I want to ask
you about, but obviously we have to start with THREEI atlas.
Let's talk about what happened after Congress passed the legislation
asking that we track near Earth objects. What does that
actually led to as a practical film?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Right, So the story starts sixty six million years ago
and a giant asteroid the size of Manhattan Island hit
the Earth, and we learned the lesson. We think that
we are more intelligent than these animals were that were
looking down and dominating their environment, but then they were
completely diminished from the surface of Earth. And so Congress
(02:28):
wanted NASA to find ninety percent of all objects bigger
than a football field one hundred and forty meters, and
for that purpose, there were two survey telescopes constructed. The
first one is pan Stars in Hawaii that monitored the
near Earth objects as big as a football field or bigger,
and they found a significant fraction of those that might
(02:49):
come close to Earth, but they didn't fulfill the congressional task.
And then most recently, the National Science Foundation the Department
of Energy funded the Rubin Observator in Chile that we'll
get closer to completing this task. But there was also
a small telescope called Atlas that was placed in Chile
monitoring the sky for near Earth asteroids. And we are
(03:12):
making progress. But what we are trying to find our
rocks from the solo sism from the construction project of
the planets. These are like lego pieces building blocks that
were left behind, and they are moving around in our vicinity,
and every now and then one of them hits the
Earth and becomes a meteor. It creates a fireball. Once
a year there is an atomic explosion in our atmosphere
(03:34):
with proportions similar to the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy output,
and it happens high up in the atmosphere about fifty
kilometers altitude, and so we don't really worry about it.
Not much damage is caused on the ground. But these
are objects of all the size of a person. But
we want to find bigger ones that could cause a
lot of damage if they impact the Earth, and that
(03:56):
was the goal. Now in the process of monitoring the sky,
should say, there was, for example, on January second, a
near Earth asteroid that was cataloged by the Minor Planet Center.
Then a day later they realized, oh, wait a minute,
this one moves along the path of the Tesla roads
to the car that was launched by SpaceX. So then they said, no, no,
we will remove that from the catalog. It's actually not
(04:19):
a rock, it's a car, and there is a big
lesson to be learned. The only reason they identified it
as technological and not natural and natural object is because
we knew that SpaceX launched this object in twenty eighteen. However,
just imagine someone more accomplished than ill Unmusk in the
Milky Way Galaxy over the past thirteen point eight billion years,
(04:42):
you know, the one hundred billion stars like the Sun,
and it's quite possible that near one of them, you know,
there was a civilization that was more accomplished than we are.
And so we should be aware of the possibility that
there might be a visitor to our backyard from outside
the Solar System. And that's the message I'm trying to
convey and just to summarize in one sentence. My way
(05:06):
of thinking about science is that it's an opportunity for
us to learn something new, and for that we need
the humility to learn the foundation of science. The humility
to learn. However, what you find in academia these days
is the arrogance of expertise. Comet experts will say that
anything in the sky is a comet or an asteroid.
(05:27):
They will refuse to include in their training data set
technological objects.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I was a trigern I first rate. You're talking about
this because all too often scientists think that they're sort
of like mandarins were in Confusion China. They are the
holders of covetive knowledge as opposed to the real scientists,
who are the explorers trying to understand what they don't
currently understand exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And on top of that, there is the whole concept
of tenure in academia, which was meant to encourage people
to take risks. So I met with a group of
twenty students and they ask me, why isn't there more
risk taking projects in science? And I explained that, you know,
most scientists are worried about their ego. They would like
(06:14):
to get honors, awards, recognition, They show off, and they
take very little risks in order not to be wrong.
That's exactly the wrong approach, because then the chance of
a discovery is reduced If you follow the beaten path
and do not deviate from it. It might take much
longer before you find the truth. And I recommend it
to the students when they follow their career. They should
(06:38):
also remember that when they go to the beach, they
see all these seashells, and the ones that are relatively
new have their colors. However, those that rubbed against other
seashells lost their colors, and so if they want a
life worth living, they should actually maintain their colors and
not rub against each other. It's a message that is
(06:59):
not popular kademia, but I'm trying to do the best
I can, and I actually show it by example, and
of course I get attacked, but at least I feel
that I'm following my passion this way.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
I want to go back to something who said in
passing early on. When you look at the map of
the area around the Ucatan peninsula, you can see the
shape of the comet which hit, which was so enormous
that for at least three or four years. The secondary
effects the change in the atmosphere, the scale of the
(07:34):
wind which was caused by it, and the heat of
that wind. I mean the dinosaurs which have been absolutely
dominant for a variety of reasons. We're unable to survive
the transition, although one branch of dinosaurs, which we call birds,
did survive. Mammals who are often small and in burrows,
did survive, and so you see life begin again. But
(07:58):
the Smithsonian once said play on this, and they had
a display sign. They had a dinosaur sort of looking
up and a comment coming in and it said, one
very bad day.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
The one thing to keep in mind, nobody would mourn
if humanity perishes on this planet. There must have been
a lot like us. And if you ask where is everybody,
like Enrico Fermias, I would argue most of them are dead.
You know, most civilizations that lived over the past billions
of years died. And the question is which civilization will
(08:30):
be remembered in the long term. If we want to
leave an imprint, if we want to be somehow documented
in the history books of the Milky Way Galaxy over
the next few billionaires, the only way to do that
is to venture into space, and not to stay on
this planet for a variety of reasons. Because there might
be a meteor impact, like we just discussed, there might
(08:53):
be some self inflicted wounds. We see how geopolitics may
be unstable and there might be a global war. Eventually
the sun will brighten and make the Earth a desert,
just like Mars. One way or another, we need to
move away from a single point where a catastrophe can
wipe us out. That's the galactic version of Darwin's natural selection.
(09:14):
The fittest survives, and therefore we might learn a lesson
from other civilizations. If we find them arriving to our backyard,
we would know what is the right tactics for us
to use. But you know, my view is there will
not be a big shift. I mean, we are investing
two point four trillion dollars a year in military budgets worldwide.
(09:35):
The biggest shift I can imagine is if we uncover
some alien technology near Earth and then we realize there
is a new threat and therefore we should allocate let's
say a fraction of a trillion dollars a year to
space exploration, and in that case we will be the
infrastructure of a warning alert system away from Earth. And
(09:57):
if we put a trillion dollars a year to space exploration,
I think we can do a lot. In fact, my
view is that just going to the Moon or Mars
is very narrow minded. You know, Mars is a desert.
It's much worse than the rock that we currently inhabit.
It makes much more sense to build a habitat a
space platform that can accommodate humans for long journeys and
(10:20):
with a trillion dollars a year. If you put the
best architects, the best technologies, the best scientists on this task,
it's sort of a mega Manhattan project. But for space exploration,
we might actually be able by the end of this
century to build the infrastructure for humans to live comfortably
beyond the Earth. So my hope is, you know, if
(10:41):
we discover an object that is technological in origin, not
human made, then it will change everything, not only in
the sense of us going to space, but also changing
priorities on Earth. You know, it just doesn't make sense
for us to invest so much resources in trying to
either kill other people or protect ourselves from being killed
(11:03):
by other people. Like we are all in the same
bold and we better corperate.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
That's a view I think that both Elon Musk and
Jeff Bezos have this sense it you've got to get
off the planet to have some stability in the long run.
(11:36):
Let me take you back to it recently has made
you even more famous, and that is this particular discovery
of three I atlas. What are the characteristics that make
this questionable as opposed to just being automatically labeled as
a natural object.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well, as soon as it was discovered on July first,
I realized it's very big. It was bright discovered by
a telescope that is just half a meter in diameter,
and I calculated if the brightness stems from a reflection
of sunlight from a surface of an object, it should
be twenty kilometers in diameter, as big as Manhattan Island.
(12:17):
And that's pretty big. That's as big as the asteroid
that killed the dinosaurs, and such objects are extremely rare.
There are many more small ones than big ones. And
it's more than a million times more massive than the
first interstellar objects. So I was wondering, how is that
possible that the third object would be a million times
more massive than the first object? And I calculated that
(12:39):
there isn't enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver
such a big package to our backyard over a decade.
You would expect it once per ten thousand years or longer.
In fact, I wrote this paper while going on vacation
for the fourth of July, and I told my wife
I need some free time to write it. She was
(13:01):
very accommodating. The other possibility is that, you know, maybe
it was targeting the inner Solar system. It's not drawn
out of the reservoir of random rocks, and so that
means the trajectory was designed by some intelligence. And I
had it in a final sentence in my paper, which
the editor of the journal refused to publish. He said,
(13:22):
you must remove this last sentence, and the rebel I am.
I removed the senses, but then I wrote a whole
paper just about the technological option, because I don't think
that in the modern time we should allow censorship of ideas.
It doesn't make any sense. And this editor went to
speak with the New York Post and said that this
is nonsense, and I thought it's completely inappropriate. And at
(13:45):
any event, this object turns out to also follow the
plane of the planets around the Sun with a chance
of one in five hundred. It's within five degrees of
the so called the ecliptic plane. And again that suggests
some kind of a record ones trans mission, because it
basically allows the NASA Observatory. So NASA had a press
(14:05):
conference just a couple of days ago, and they were
talking about how easy it is to observe three I
atlas with many of their assets in space, including orbiters
of Mars, rovers on Mars, and all kinds of other missions.
And the reason for that is simple. This object is
flying in the plane of the planets, and it actually
(14:28):
comes very close to some planets like Mars, Venus, Jupiter.
It avoids the Earth, by the way, so they should
be extremely grateful if this is a natural object. It's
just a miracle that it's first so big that it's
very bright. I calculate that's a chance of less than
one in a thousand for it to be that bright.
And then in addition to that, it's also in the
(14:50):
plane where all of our space assets are, and that's
a chance of less than one in one hundred. It's
altogether less than one in one hundred thousand just considering
these two anomalies. On top of that, it's shedding nickel
with very little iron. NASA in the press conference showed
the best image we have from closest when it came
closest to Mars, the high rise come around both the
(15:12):
Mars reconnaissance ORBITA was able to get a snapshot of it,
and it looks as if there is a glow flight
preceding it instead of trailing it. And it's not in
the direction of the sun. It doesn't look like a
cometary tail. It's in the direction of motion, as if
there is a beam of light or a beam of
particles illuminating the path ahead of the object. If it
(15:36):
were technological, of course that makes sense because it wants
to avoid any damage from impact by micro meteorites or
some objects along the path. But if it's natural, it
remains to be explained. And my approach to it is,
let's collect more evidence, because it's a blind date of
interstellar proportion, and in a blind date you better observe
(15:59):
the other side before having an opinion.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Now, as I understand, we don't yet have the technology
which would have allowed us to intercept this, even with
robots on the way. I'm just to figure out what
the hell's going on. We're still probably least a generation
away from that kind of capability.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
There is a caveat to that, because this object is
moving in the plane, it will come closest to Jupiter
on March sixteenth, twenty twenty six, and two months ago
I wrote a paper saying, if we could just use
the fuel on the Juno spacecraft that is orbiting Jupiter,
it may actually be able to intercept to get very
(16:38):
close to this object. And the following day after I
submitted my paper, I had a phone call from Representative
Anna Paulina Luna, who wanted an update about Free Atlas,
and I told her about this opportunity to use Juno,
and very graciously she wrote a letter to the Acting
Administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, and encourage NASA to look
into that. Turns out now that the Juno spacecraft doesn't
(17:02):
have enough fuel. They used most of their fuel, but
if it had the original amount of fuel that it
started with, it could have actually even collided with three
I at last, because there was enough lead time. So
the point is that if you know about an object
early enough, you don't need to maneuver in order to
intercept it by a lot. And then what we need
(17:24):
is some fleet of spacecraft that is ready for the
next interestellar object in case they can maneuver ahead of
time and just be in the right place at the
right time, get a closeup photograph or even crash into it,
or give us much more information about it.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
You raise a question which I think we're on the
same page. We notice what mathematically is the likelihood that
we're alone in the entire universe, and it just seems
to me it's almost impossible, right.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I think it's arrogant of us to believe that we
are not only alone, but the top of the food chain.
We are definitely not at the top of the food
chain in the Milky Way galaxy. But I can understand
where the notion in academia comes from. And so we
as a civilization, including academia, have not matured yet. Because
(18:33):
right now, the highest priority in the decatal Survey of
astronomy and astrophysics in the United States is to invest
more than ten billion dollars in the next two decades
in search for microbes on other planets. And it's just
like seeing a lot of houses similar to your own house.
(18:55):
There are lots of Earth's sun analogs, maybe tens of
billions of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone, And
then we see a lot of houses on our street
that look like ours, and we say, okay, well, we
have plenty of microbes in our home. Therefore, let's search
for microps in the houses next to us. And for
that you need to build a huge instrument that caused
(19:16):
a lot of money to search for microps in the
neighbor's yard. And it's not easy. But if there is
a resident in one of these houses, the resident might
show up at our front door, or might throw a
tennis ball that we find in our backyard, or might
have a construction project that we can see from a distance.
So my point is we should hedge our beds. Of course,
(19:37):
we can search for microbs. However, we should also at
the same time invest billions of dollars in the search
for technological civilizations, and the benefit would be far greater
than finding microps because we can learn from them. We
might learn about new technologies, new science. It will inspire
us to go to space, and it will change our
focus from conflicts on this rock that we all in
(20:00):
habit to think more broadly about the future of the
human species.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
I remember correct, it's kind of on a voluntary basis,
but a long period of trying to listen for radio waves,
et cetera. That's really been I think a worldwide project
but I think they haven't yet found any radio waves
that they're confident they can identify.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And that is like waiting for a phone call. It's
a different approach. And you might be on a street
where there residents, but nobody may call you either because
the technologies you are using are not suited to the
way they are transmitting their signals. Maybe we are using
radio communication that is a very ancient technology and they
(20:41):
have something much better to communicate, or they behave like
as if they live in a dark forest. You know,
that is called the dark forest hypothesis. They're worried about predators,
so they don't make a sound and they listen. And
over the past century, we've been transmitting radio waves without
any concern. So everyone within one hundred light years from
(21:05):
Earth knows about us, and they monitor what we are doing,
and perhaps they will come to visit us as soon
as we pose a threat to them. Just waiting to
listen to a radio signal is not necessarily the right approach,
and my point is we should try something else, because
Einstein said, you know, if you keep trying the same
thing hoping for a different result, then you're not necessarily
(21:28):
very smart.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
You're clearly very enthusiastic about science and very enthusiastic about knowledge.
How did you get into all this when you were
a kid? What drew you into this?
Speaker 2 (21:40):
I grew up on a farm. Haven't changed much if
you ask people who knew me. Back then, I was
collecting eggs every afternoon, but then on weekends I would
drive a tractor to the hills of the village and
read philosophy books. I was interested in the most fundamental
questions about our existence, so I wanted to pursue philosophy.
But then I grew up in Israel, and there is
an obligatory military service at age eighteen, so I preferred
(22:05):
to go to a program. I was recruited to a
program that allowed me to pursue science. For me, it
was the closest approximation to philosophy. I can still ask
big questions. And around that time President Rigan had the
Strategic Defense Initiative and General Abramson visited Israel. He was
the head of SDI, the Star Wars Initiative, and I
(22:26):
presented to him a project that was the first one
to be funded, the first international project to be funded
by SDI that I led, along with an experimentalist, and
that brought me to Washington because we were funded at
a few million dollars a year back then. And in
one of the visits, I visited Princeton and they offered
me a five year fellowship under one condition that I
(22:49):
switched to astrophysics. And so it was just like an
offer from the Godfather that I couldn't decline because it's
a very prestigious institution, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
where Einstein was faculty a few DECs earlier. Eventually I
was offered a faculty position at Havard and they tenured
me again with a low probability. And at that point
I realized that even though it was an arranged marriage,
(23:11):
I'm married to my true love because I can pursue
fundamental questions using the scientific metal.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
That's actually a great story. I'm curious if somebody who
was listening to us today, I'm curious, what advice would
you give to them if they were eighteen twenty years
old about going into science.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So my advice is, of course, you need to dance
to the tunes of selection committees to get tenure in academia.
So for a limited period of time. Do that, but
never pretend to be the adult in the room. Always
maintain your childhood curiosity. And when you get tenure, innovate.
Take risks. Because you know, we live for such a
(23:51):
short time. What's the point of doing what everyone else
is doing? There is really not much to that. There
is an opportunity to do that. It's not very common,
but it's possible and it's a lot of fun. Now.
Of course, there will always be people who push back,
but who cares about people. I don't have any footprint
on social media. I'm not trying to get the likes.
(24:13):
That is not my ambition. It's so much fun to
figure out nature and pursue science. And the biggest reward
I got in recent weeks is to get emails, for example,
from a former US Air Force pilot who said, because
of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist, and
a woman said, my son now wants a telescope for
(24:34):
the holidays as a gift. I get dozens of those emails.
For me to inspire the public to pursue science is
extremely important because science right now has a very low
status in the public's eyes. It's the occupation of the elite,
and I'm trying to show that it's work in progress.
We can make mistakes, but I'm showing how the process
(24:55):
is done by not having a prejudice, by trying to
follow the evidence detective. It's the work of a detective,
and the public loves that. And in addition, the possibility
that we might not be alone in the universe, we
might have an intelligent neighbor. You know, that's also very
appealing to the public. So to me, that's a way
to elevate the image of science in the public's eyes,
(25:16):
and that's very appropriate. We should do that because the
public funds science. It's actually the most amazing tool that
our society has to make progress. It's really unfortunate that
academia betrayed the fundamental curiosity that leads science. For I
see the path of how to do that. You need
to start from a sense of humility, not being the
(25:39):
arrogantas and expert saying we know the answer in advance,
but actually saying let's figure it out. And that's a
point of view that was not really echoed in the
NASA press conference. They were saying, it's a comet, we
know what it is. Three I atlas, it just came
from a different environment. Well, how do you know that? Like,
why not say? There are lots of we don't fully
(26:01):
understand and we hope to figure them out with more data.
And it's an amazing opportunity for us to learn more
about what lies outside the solar system, like give a
different approach to doing science and the public would be
fascinated by. And of course there is also the issue
of funding of science in Washington, DC, and I do
believe that if we were to approach it from a
(26:23):
point of view that satisfies the curiosity of the public
and helps future technologies, then we should be able to
get more funding to science in Washington as well. And
I would be delighted to discuss it with anyone related
to the White House.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
One reasons I really want to do this interview with
you is because you have raised some questions which if
you're a young person, someddenly gets your brain working totally
outside the normal memorize what we've already learned, and gets
you into being curious about what we haven't learned. And
in a sense, science at its best is about the
(26:58):
next thing we're going to learn, not the last thing
we memorized. I think you do that very well. You know,
I want to thank you for joining me. This is
one of the things I most wanted to do this far.
It's sort of my thanksgiving President. I guess to myself,
it's a very exciting time to be paying attention to
the skies and to what we're discovering. I do want
to remind our listeners that your articles can be found
(27:21):
at alvedosh Lobe dot medium dot com. You've really done
a lot, I think to help science and a lot
to help America in thinking about things beyond our planet
and in fact, things beyond our solar system. It's a
great honor to me to have you as a guest today.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Thank you so much. And my mantra is always that
the best is yet to come. You know. I had
a lot of file cabinets in my office that I
threw away because the most accomplished sculptor in the US,
Greg Wyatt, decided to donate two sculptures, bronze sculptures of
Galilogalile and fifty one on watercolors. So I just removed
(28:02):
the past from my office and it's now a mini museum.
And I told my administrator you know, I'm focused on
the future. I don't care about what happened in the past,
and let's make the future better. And that's my approach.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, thank you very very much for spending your time
with us.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
My pleasure and honor.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Thank you to my guest professor Avi Lobe. News World
is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producers Guernsey Sloan, our researchers Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show's created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to team
at Gingish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newts World,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate
(28:46):
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Join me on
substat at gingrish three sixty dot net. I'm new Gingrich.
This is new tool.
On this episode of News World, the United States Congress
passed legislation called the Georgie Brown Junior Near Earth Object
Survey Act of two thousand and five, which mandated the
NASA find and track ninety percent of the near Earth
objects called NEOs of course larger than one hundred and
(00:25):
forty meters by twenty twenty. As a result of that legislation,
we're now starting to look at the skies more closely
and with better technology, and as my guest today has said,
we're now pursuing one of the most exciting questions in science.
Are we alone here to discuss the recent discovery of
(00:48):
three I atlas? I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Professor Ave Lobe. He is the Frank B. Bear Junior
Professor of Science at Harvard University, is director of the
Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics, and also heads the Galileo Project. As you
(01:11):
can imagine, we're going to have a lot to talk about.
His articles about THREEI Atlas can be found at Avidashlobe
dot medium dot com. Ave welcome and thank you for
(01:44):
joining me on this world.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's my great privilege to speak with you, nuth.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
There are a lot of things I want to ask
you about, but obviously we have to start with THREEI atlas.
Let's talk about what happened after Congress passed the legislation
asking that we track near Earth objects. What does that
actually led to as a practical film?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Right, So the story starts sixty six million years ago
and a giant asteroid the size of Manhattan Island hit
the Earth, and we learned the lesson. We think that
we are more intelligent than these animals were that were
looking down and dominating their environment, but then they were
completely diminished from the surface of Earth. And so Congress
(02:28):
wanted NASA to find ninety percent of all objects bigger
than a football field one hundred and forty meters, and
for that purpose, there were two survey telescopes constructed. The
first one is pan Stars in Hawaii that monitored the
near Earth objects as big as a football field or bigger,
and they found a significant fraction of those that might
(02:49):
come close to Earth, but they didn't fulfill the congressional task.
And then most recently, the National Science Foundation the Department
of Energy funded the Rubin Observator in Chile that we'll
get closer to completing this task. But there was also
a small telescope called Atlas that was placed in Chile
monitoring the sky for near Earth asteroids. And we are
(03:12):
making progress. But what we are trying to find our
rocks from the solo sism from the construction project of
the planets. These are like lego pieces building blocks that
were left behind, and they are moving around in our vicinity,
and every now and then one of them hits the
Earth and becomes a meteor. It creates a fireball. Once
a year there is an atomic explosion in our atmosphere
(03:34):
with proportions similar to the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy output,
and it happens high up in the atmosphere about fifty
kilometers altitude, and so we don't really worry about it.
Not much damage is caused on the ground. But these
are objects of all the size of a person. But
we want to find bigger ones that could cause a
lot of damage if they impact the Earth, and that
(03:56):
was the goal. Now in the process of monitoring the sky,
should say, there was, for example, on January second, a
near Earth asteroid that was cataloged by the Minor Planet Center.
Then a day later they realized, oh, wait a minute,
this one moves along the path of the Tesla roads
to the car that was launched by SpaceX. So then they said, no, no,
we will remove that from the catalog. It's actually not
(04:19):
a rock, it's a car, and there is a big
lesson to be learned. The only reason they identified it
as technological and not natural and natural object is because
we knew that SpaceX launched this object in twenty eighteen. However,
just imagine someone more accomplished than ill Unmusk in the
Milky Way Galaxy over the past thirteen point eight billion years,
(04:42):
you know, the one hundred billion stars like the Sun,
and it's quite possible that near one of them, you know,
there was a civilization that was more accomplished than we are.
And so we should be aware of the possibility that
there might be a visitor to our backyard from outside
the Solar System. And that's the message I'm trying to
convey and just to summarize in one sentence. My way
(05:06):
of thinking about science is that it's an opportunity for
us to learn something new, and for that we need
the humility to learn the foundation of science. The humility
to learn. However, what you find in academia these days
is the arrogance of expertise. Comet experts will say that
anything in the sky is a comet or an asteroid.
(05:27):
They will refuse to include in their training data set
technological objects.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I was a trigern I first rate. You're talking about
this because all too often scientists think that they're sort
of like mandarins were in Confusion China. They are the
holders of covetive knowledge as opposed to the real scientists,
who are the explorers trying to understand what they don't
currently understand exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And on top of that, there is the whole concept
of tenure in academia, which was meant to encourage people
to take risks. So I met with a group of
twenty students and they ask me, why isn't there more
risk taking projects in science? And I explained that, you know,
most scientists are worried about their ego. They would like
(06:14):
to get honors, awards, recognition, They show off, and they
take very little risks in order not to be wrong.
That's exactly the wrong approach, because then the chance of
a discovery is reduced If you follow the beaten path
and do not deviate from it. It might take much
longer before you find the truth. And I recommend it
to the students when they follow their career. They should
(06:38):
also remember that when they go to the beach, they
see all these seashells, and the ones that are relatively
new have their colors. However, those that rubbed against other
seashells lost their colors, and so if they want a
life worth living, they should actually maintain their colors and
not rub against each other. It's a message that is
(06:59):
not popular kademia, but I'm trying to do the best
I can, and I actually show it by example, and
of course I get attacked, but at least I feel
that I'm following my passion this way.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
I want to go back to something who said in
passing early on. When you look at the map of
the area around the Ucatan peninsula, you can see the
shape of the comet which hit, which was so enormous
that for at least three or four years. The secondary
effects the change in the atmosphere, the scale of the
(07:34):
wind which was caused by it, and the heat of
that wind. I mean the dinosaurs which have been absolutely
dominant for a variety of reasons. We're unable to survive
the transition, although one branch of dinosaurs, which we call birds,
did survive. Mammals who are often small and in burrows,
did survive, and so you see life begin again. But
(07:58):
the Smithsonian once said play on this, and they had
a display sign. They had a dinosaur sort of looking
up and a comment coming in and it said, one
very bad day.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
The one thing to keep in mind, nobody would mourn
if humanity perishes on this planet. There must have been
a lot like us. And if you ask where is everybody,
like Enrico Fermias, I would argue most of them are dead.
You know, most civilizations that lived over the past billions
of years died. And the question is which civilization will
(08:30):
be remembered in the long term. If we want to
leave an imprint, if we want to be somehow documented
in the history books of the Milky Way Galaxy over
the next few billionaires, the only way to do that
is to venture into space, and not to stay on
this planet for a variety of reasons. Because there might
be a meteor impact, like we just discussed, there might
(08:53):
be some self inflicted wounds. We see how geopolitics may
be unstable and there might be a global war. Eventually
the sun will brighten and make the Earth a desert,
just like Mars. One way or another, we need to
move away from a single point where a catastrophe can
wipe us out. That's the galactic version of Darwin's natural selection.
(09:14):
The fittest survives, and therefore we might learn a lesson
from other civilizations. If we find them arriving to our backyard,
we would know what is the right tactics for us
to use. But you know, my view is there will
not be a big shift. I mean, we are investing
two point four trillion dollars a year in military budgets worldwide.
(09:35):
The biggest shift I can imagine is if we uncover
some alien technology near Earth and then we realize there
is a new threat and therefore we should allocate let's
say a fraction of a trillion dollars a year to
space exploration, and in that case we will be the
infrastructure of a warning alert system away from Earth. And
(09:57):
if we put a trillion dollars a year to space exploration,
I think we can do a lot. In fact, my
view is that just going to the Moon or Mars
is very narrow minded. You know, Mars is a desert.
It's much worse than the rock that we currently inhabit.
It makes much more sense to build a habitat a
space platform that can accommodate humans for long journeys and
(10:20):
with a trillion dollars a year. If you put the
best architects, the best technologies, the best scientists on this task,
it's sort of a mega Manhattan project. But for space exploration,
we might actually be able by the end of this
century to build the infrastructure for humans to live comfortably
beyond the Earth. So my hope is, you know, if
(10:41):
we discover an object that is technological in origin, not
human made, then it will change everything, not only in
the sense of us going to space, but also changing
priorities on Earth. You know, it just doesn't make sense
for us to invest so much resources in trying to
either kill other people or protect ourselves from being killed
(11:03):
by other people. Like we are all in the same
bold and we better corperate.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
That's a view I think that both Elon Musk and
Jeff Bezos have this sense it you've got to get
off the planet to have some stability in the long run.
(11:36):
Let me take you back to it recently has made
you even more famous, and that is this particular discovery
of three I atlas. What are the characteristics that make
this questionable as opposed to just being automatically labeled as
a natural object.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well, as soon as it was discovered on July first,
I realized it's very big. It was bright discovered by
a telescope that is just half a meter in diameter,
and I calculated if the brightness stems from a reflection
of sunlight from a surface of an object, it should
be twenty kilometers in diameter, as big as Manhattan Island.
(12:17):
And that's pretty big. That's as big as the asteroid
that killed the dinosaurs, and such objects are extremely rare.
There are many more small ones than big ones. And
it's more than a million times more massive than the
first interstellar objects. So I was wondering, how is that
possible that the third object would be a million times
more massive than the first object? And I calculated that
(12:39):
there isn't enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver
such a big package to our backyard over a decade.
You would expect it once per ten thousand years or longer.
In fact, I wrote this paper while going on vacation
for the fourth of July, and I told my wife
I need some free time to write it. She was
(13:01):
very accommodating. The other possibility is that, you know, maybe
it was targeting the inner Solar system. It's not drawn
out of the reservoir of random rocks, and so that
means the trajectory was designed by some intelligence. And I
had it in a final sentence in my paper, which
the editor of the journal refused to publish. He said,
(13:22):
you must remove this last sentence, and the rebel I am.
I removed the senses, but then I wrote a whole
paper just about the technological option, because I don't think
that in the modern time we should allow censorship of ideas.
It doesn't make any sense. And this editor went to
speak with the New York Post and said that this
is nonsense, and I thought it's completely inappropriate. And at
(13:45):
any event, this object turns out to also follow the
plane of the planets around the Sun with a chance
of one in five hundred. It's within five degrees of
the so called the ecliptic plane. And again that suggests
some kind of a record ones trans mission, because it
basically allows the NASA Observatory. So NASA had a press
(14:05):
conference just a couple of days ago, and they were
talking about how easy it is to observe three I
atlas with many of their assets in space, including orbiters
of Mars, rovers on Mars, and all kinds of other missions.
And the reason for that is simple. This object is
flying in the plane of the planets, and it actually
(14:28):
comes very close to some planets like Mars, Venus, Jupiter.
It avoids the Earth, by the way, so they should
be extremely grateful if this is a natural object. It's
just a miracle that it's first so big that it's
very bright. I calculate that's a chance of less than
one in a thousand for it to be that bright.
And then in addition to that, it's also in the
(14:50):
plane where all of our space assets are, and that's
a chance of less than one in one hundred. It's
altogether less than one in one hundred thousand just considering
these two anomalies. On top of that, it's shedding nickel
with very little iron. NASA in the press conference showed
the best image we have from closest when it came
closest to Mars, the high rise come around both the
(15:12):
Mars reconnaissance ORBITA was able to get a snapshot of it,
and it looks as if there is a glow flight
preceding it instead of trailing it. And it's not in
the direction of the sun. It doesn't look like a
cometary tail. It's in the direction of motion, as if
there is a beam of light or a beam of
particles illuminating the path ahead of the object. If it
(15:36):
were technological, of course that makes sense because it wants
to avoid any damage from impact by micro meteorites or
some objects along the path. But if it's natural, it
remains to be explained. And my approach to it is,
let's collect more evidence, because it's a blind date of
interstellar proportion, and in a blind date you better observe
(15:59):
the other side before having an opinion.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Now, as I understand, we don't yet have the technology
which would have allowed us to intercept this, even with
robots on the way. I'm just to figure out what
the hell's going on. We're still probably least a generation
away from that kind of capability.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
There is a caveat to that, because this object is
moving in the plane, it will come closest to Jupiter
on March sixteenth, twenty twenty six, and two months ago
I wrote a paper saying, if we could just use
the fuel on the Juno spacecraft that is orbiting Jupiter,
it may actually be able to intercept to get very
(16:38):
close to this object. And the following day after I
submitted my paper, I had a phone call from Representative
Anna Paulina Luna, who wanted an update about Free Atlas,
and I told her about this opportunity to use Juno,
and very graciously she wrote a letter to the Acting
Administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, and encourage NASA to look
into that. Turns out now that the Juno spacecraft doesn't
(17:02):
have enough fuel. They used most of their fuel, but
if it had the original amount of fuel that it
started with, it could have actually even collided with three
I at last, because there was enough lead time. So
the point is that if you know about an object
early enough, you don't need to maneuver in order to
intercept it by a lot. And then what we need
(17:24):
is some fleet of spacecraft that is ready for the
next interestellar object in case they can maneuver ahead of
time and just be in the right place at the
right time, get a closeup photograph or even crash into it,
or give us much more information about it.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
You raise a question which I think we're on the
same page. We notice what mathematically is the likelihood that
we're alone in the entire universe, and it just seems
to me it's almost impossible, right.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I think it's arrogant of us to believe that we
are not only alone, but the top of the food chain.
We are definitely not at the top of the food
chain in the Milky Way galaxy. But I can understand
where the notion in academia comes from. And so we
as a civilization, including academia, have not matured yet. Because
(18:33):
right now, the highest priority in the decatal Survey of
astronomy and astrophysics in the United States is to invest
more than ten billion dollars in the next two decades
in search for microbes on other planets. And it's just
like seeing a lot of houses similar to your own house.
(18:55):
There are lots of Earth's sun analogs, maybe tens of
billions of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone, And
then we see a lot of houses on our street
that look like ours, and we say, okay, well, we
have plenty of microbes in our home. Therefore, let's search
for microps in the houses next to us. And for
that you need to build a huge instrument that caused
(19:16):
a lot of money to search for microps in the
neighbor's yard. And it's not easy. But if there is
a resident in one of these houses, the resident might
show up at our front door, or might throw a
tennis ball that we find in our backyard, or might
have a construction project that we can see from a distance.
So my point is we should hedge our beds. Of course,
(19:37):
we can search for microbs. However, we should also at
the same time invest billions of dollars in the search
for technological civilizations, and the benefit would be far greater
than finding microps because we can learn from them. We
might learn about new technologies, new science. It will inspire
us to go to space, and it will change our
focus from conflicts on this rock that we all in
(20:00):
habit to think more broadly about the future of the
human species.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
I remember correct, it's kind of on a voluntary basis,
but a long period of trying to listen for radio waves,
et cetera. That's really been I think a worldwide project
but I think they haven't yet found any radio waves
that they're confident they can identify.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And that is like waiting for a phone call. It's
a different approach. And you might be on a street
where there residents, but nobody may call you either because
the technologies you are using are not suited to the
way they are transmitting their signals. Maybe we are using
radio communication that is a very ancient technology and they
(20:41):
have something much better to communicate, or they behave like
as if they live in a dark forest. You know,
that is called the dark forest hypothesis. They're worried about predators,
so they don't make a sound and they listen. And
over the past century, we've been transmitting radio waves without
any concern. So everyone within one hundred light years from
(21:05):
Earth knows about us, and they monitor what we are doing,
and perhaps they will come to visit us as soon
as we pose a threat to them. Just waiting to
listen to a radio signal is not necessarily the right approach,
and my point is we should try something else, because
Einstein said, you know, if you keep trying the same
thing hoping for a different result, then you're not necessarily
(21:28):
very smart.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
You're clearly very enthusiastic about science and very enthusiastic about knowledge.
How did you get into all this when you were
a kid? What drew you into this?
Speaker 2 (21:40):
I grew up on a farm. Haven't changed much if
you ask people who knew me. Back then, I was
collecting eggs every afternoon, but then on weekends I would
drive a tractor to the hills of the village and
read philosophy books. I was interested in the most fundamental
questions about our existence, so I wanted to pursue philosophy.
But then I grew up in Israel, and there is
an obligatory military service at age eighteen, so I preferred
(22:05):
to go to a program. I was recruited to a
program that allowed me to pursue science. For me, it
was the closest approximation to philosophy. I can still ask
big questions. And around that time President Rigan had the
Strategic Defense Initiative and General Abramson visited Israel. He was
the head of SDI, the Star Wars Initiative, and I
(22:26):
presented to him a project that was the first one
to be funded, the first international project to be funded
by SDI that I led, along with an experimentalist, and
that brought me to Washington because we were funded at
a few million dollars a year back then. And in
one of the visits, I visited Princeton and they offered
me a five year fellowship under one condition that I
(22:49):
switched to astrophysics. And so it was just like an
offer from the Godfather that I couldn't decline because it's
a very prestigious institution, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
where Einstein was faculty a few DECs earlier. Eventually I
was offered a faculty position at Havard and they tenured
me again with a low probability. And at that point
I realized that even though it was an arranged marriage,
(23:11):
I'm married to my true love because I can pursue
fundamental questions using the scientific metal.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
That's actually a great story. I'm curious if somebody who
was listening to us today, I'm curious, what advice would
you give to them if they were eighteen twenty years
old about going into science.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So my advice is, of course, you need to dance
to the tunes of selection committees to get tenure in academia.
So for a limited period of time. Do that, but
never pretend to be the adult in the room. Always
maintain your childhood curiosity. And when you get tenure, innovate.
Take risks. Because you know, we live for such a
(23:51):
short time. What's the point of doing what everyone else
is doing? There is really not much to that. There
is an opportunity to do that. It's not very common,
but it's possible and it's a lot of fun. Now.
Of course, there will always be people who push back,
but who cares about people. I don't have any footprint
on social media. I'm not trying to get the likes.
(24:13):
That is not my ambition. It's so much fun to
figure out nature and pursue science. And the biggest reward
I got in recent weeks is to get emails, for example,
from a former US Air Force pilot who said, because
of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist, and
a woman said, my son now wants a telescope for
(24:34):
the holidays as a gift. I get dozens of those emails.
For me to inspire the public to pursue science is
extremely important because science right now has a very low
status in the public's eyes. It's the occupation of the elite,
and I'm trying to show that it's work in progress.
We can make mistakes, but I'm showing how the process
(24:55):
is done by not having a prejudice, by trying to
follow the evidence detective. It's the work of a detective,
and the public loves that. And in addition, the possibility
that we might not be alone in the universe, we
might have an intelligent neighbor. You know, that's also very
appealing to the public. So to me, that's a way
to elevate the image of science in the public's eyes,
(25:16):
and that's very appropriate. We should do that because the
public funds science. It's actually the most amazing tool that
our society has to make progress. It's really unfortunate that
academia betrayed the fundamental curiosity that leads science. For I
see the path of how to do that. You need
to start from a sense of humility, not being the
(25:39):
arrogantas and expert saying we know the answer in advance,
but actually saying let's figure it out. And that's a
point of view that was not really echoed in the
NASA press conference. They were saying, it's a comet, we
know what it is. Three I atlas, it just came
from a different environment. Well, how do you know that? Like,
why not say? There are lots of we don't fully
(26:01):
understand and we hope to figure them out with more data.
And it's an amazing opportunity for us to learn more
about what lies outside the solar system, like give a
different approach to doing science and the public would be
fascinated by. And of course there is also the issue
of funding of science in Washington, DC, and I do
believe that if we were to approach it from a
(26:23):
point of view that satisfies the curiosity of the public
and helps future technologies, then we should be able to
get more funding to science in Washington as well. And
I would be delighted to discuss it with anyone related
to the White House.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
One reasons I really want to do this interview with
you is because you have raised some questions which if
you're a young person, someddenly gets your brain working totally
outside the normal memorize what we've already learned, and gets
you into being curious about what we haven't learned. And
in a sense, science at its best is about the
(26:58):
next thing we're going to learn, not the last thing
we memorized. I think you do that very well. You know,
I want to thank you for joining me. This is
one of the things I most wanted to do this far.
It's sort of my thanksgiving President. I guess to myself,
it's a very exciting time to be paying attention to
the skies and to what we're discovering. I do want
to remind our listeners that your articles can be found
(27:21):
at alvedosh Lobe dot medium dot com. You've really done
a lot, I think to help science and a lot
to help America in thinking about things beyond our planet
and in fact, things beyond our solar system. It's a
great honor to me to have you as a guest today.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Thank you so much. And my mantra is always that
the best is yet to come. You know. I had
a lot of file cabinets in my office that I
threw away because the most accomplished sculptor in the US,
Greg Wyatt, decided to donate two sculptures, bronze sculptures of
Galilogalile and fifty one on watercolors. So I just removed
(28:02):
the past from my office and it's now a mini museum.
And I told my administrator you know, I'm focused on
the future. I don't care about what happened in the past,
and let's make the future better. And that's my approach.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, thank you very very much for spending your time
with us.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
My pleasure and honor.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Thank you to my guest professor Avi Lobe. News World
is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producers Guernsey Sloan, our researchers Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show's created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to team
at Gingish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newts World,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate
(28:46):
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Join me on
substat at gingrish three sixty dot net. I'm new Gingrich.
This is new tool.
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