The Universal Engine - Cosmic Mysteries and Intelligence Beyond Earth

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Reports of unidentified flying octor, unidentified verial phonomic today dicot.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Weapons being tested by our own or foreign government.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
The American people are becoming most interested and for many instances,
very alarmed by the UFO stories. So why do you
suppose that all of this has been kept from the
world exploring our past, our future, and the mysteries of
our universe?

Speaker 4 (00:27):
Where do they come from?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Why can't you explain that everybody in mythology is screaming
or disclosure?

Speaker 5 (00:32):
The future is now. This is Micah Hanks.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
From the high mountains of Appalachia and a bunker below ground.
Welcome one and all. It is the Micah Hanks Program.
Glad as always to be getting into gear as we
go into pursuit of the anomalous in our existence and
taking a universal perspective on all that really on everything
this week, and of course joining you wherever you may

(00:57):
be listening on demand by a podcasting apps. Where always
good to be here with you. Another weekend. By the way,
on my end of things of insane travel, as I
flew out to the West Coast, stayed out there in
beautiful Los Angeles for long enough to do a bit
of work, grab dinner with my dear friends John and Amanda,
and then head back over here to the high Country

(01:19):
and get here in time for a very chilly evening.
And it's intriguing to me because everywhere I have been
while traveling in recent days, whether it's talking with uber
drivers or catching up with friends, or talking with film crews,
or just people I see on the streets or in restaurants,
there's one thing everybody seems to be talking about. Everywhere
I go, everybody is saying, man, we are having the

(01:41):
strangest weather here this year. Oh you're from Ashville, North Carolina,
mister Hanks, well you know you arrived at a weird time.
The weather's been really weird right here. And then insert
name of city wherever I've been here in the last
couple of weeks, to which I always respond, well, remember
who you're talking to and where I'm from, or if
you don't know, I'm from Nashville, North Carolina, where we had,

(02:02):
of course all hell breaking loose last September with Hurricane Helene.
So really, it seems that everywhere everybody is talking about
how strange the weather is. It was unusually warm, they said.
While I was in Los Angeles. I could tell that,
of course, once I arrived at the Burbank Hollywood Airport,
stepped off of the plane and out of the airport,

(02:22):
and it was indeed unusually warm, even for Los Angeles
in August. Get back to the Appalachian Mountains a couple
of days later, and I hadn't brought a jacket along, thinking,
of course I wouldn't need one. Got off the plane
last night and it was chili. Woke up this morning,
I was freezing. It was in the fifties last night
in August. This is truly strange stuff. And on that note,

(02:47):
there's a whole lot more about our world that goes
beyond just strange weather. The whole universe, I can assure you,
is far stranger than most people realize. In fact, I'll
hoose a question right here at the outset. What if
everything essentially that you thought you knew about our world,
our universe, about reality was not what it seemed to be.

(03:12):
What if our universe was far stranger than you could
ever have imagined. This week, we're gonna look at exactly
why the universe is so strange, just how mysterious it is,
how many unresolved questions scientists really are still grappling with
and of course, before we wrap things up by the
end of the program, yes, we're going to go even

(03:34):
deeper into the questions about what if there are other
intelligences out there, and if they exist, what that really
means for humans? Is that necessarily a good thing? Is
it better? In other words, that we don't confirm whether
or not we are alone in the universe, or in fact,
whether our universe is the only one of its kind.

(03:57):
All of these great questions and many others await you,
dear listeners, So welcome a board, And I think we're
about due now for an update on one of the
great mysteries that's captivating the public's imagination right now. That
involves the mysterious interstellar object three Eye Atlas. That's another
question A lot of people have been asking me when

(04:18):
I go traveling places. People who know me, they say, now, listen,
I've got a question. I read in the news the
other day that there might be an alien invasion forthcoming,
So mikel you'd be the guy to know. Should we
be worried. They're of course talking about what NASA has
dubbed three Eye Atlas, the third known interstellar objects to
have ever entered our Solar System. Now, look, obviously there

(04:42):
have been a lot of these. Okay, this is not
something that just suddenly started happening. There have been a
lot of interstellar objects that come drifting through our Solar system,
but we weren't armed with the kind of telescopes you
needed to be able to see those back in the day,
or even in instances where we did have those kinds
of technologies, we might have occasionally seen some weird stuff
out there and we didn't know what it was. But

(05:04):
with our current observational capabilities, we are armed here on
Earth today with observatories that are strong enough that they
can not only detect extremely deep space objects, but they
can also tell, based on the direction that they are flying,
the speed at which they travel, and other characteristics they exhibit,
whether they are likely to have originated from somewhere outside

(05:25):
our Solar system. And so, sure enough, three I Atlas
is one of these objects. It's moving really fast, it
seems to be exhibiting characteristics that show it's not gravitationally
bound to the Sun. That's significant, of course, because that
means it's not a space object that's been drifting around
out there in our Solar System, being influenced by the
gravity exerted by objects in our Solar system since time immemorial.

(05:49):
Now this thing seems to have been coming in from
deep space, entered our Solar system. It's moving quick, and therefore,
as it entered it was moving independently of the gravitational
exertion of plant and of course our host star, the
Sun at the center of our Solar system. But of
course as it makes its way through the Solar system, yes,
it's going to be influenced by the gravity of all

(06:09):
these objects, and then it's going to slingshot its way
right back out of the Solar System and continue its
mysterious adventures back out into deep space and on into
the ever after. So later this year, when it gets
really close, we hope to get an even better look
at this object. But there are already some really high
profile NAS emissions that are observing and collecting some really

(06:30):
compelling data about three Eye atlasts. The first of these
is NASA's sphere Axe mission, and the American Space Agency
announced the other day that sphere Axe observations of three
I Atlas reveal that the object is extremely rich in
carbon dioxide specifically, and I wrote about this, by the
way the other day in an article there at the Debrieth.

(06:51):
But the combined spectral features based on NASA's sphere AX
and also other observations to reveal that the object is
producing a very bright carbon dioxide pocket around it, otherwise
known to astronomers as a coma that extends close to
three arc minutes across. Now, this carbon dioxide gas emission

(07:15):
is consistent in many ways with what you'd expect from
you guessed it a comet, but that doesn't necessarily mean
that it is your typical comet. If anything, some of
the things that we are seeing with three I Atlas
are really making it very different from most comets. Specifically,
they say that the preliminary upper limits on water and

(07:37):
carbon monoxide output that such an object would be expected
to produce seems to mean that the brightness right now
currently being exhibited by three EYE Atlas probably comes from
the surrounding dust cloud rather than the core of the comet.
In fact, that very observation inspired OVI Lobe recently to
ask whether the object is producing its own light. It

(07:58):
seems more likely that it is simply the albedo the
reflectiveness of the dust cloud that it's producing, and so
based on the current data, what we think is that
three Eye Atlas is probably a carbon rich comet. The
current outgassing of this strange dust cloud it's producing is
on the front side, which is a little weird for
a comet. Kind of think of it like a comet,

(08:20):
but its tail is extending forward as opposed to backward.
But again, to me, that's not all that strange if
you think about it in terms of the idea that
whatever is all over the exterior of that space object,
all the dust, all the ice, all the carbon dioxide
that's getting baked off of it as it enters our
solar system and starts getting struck by sunlight. Yeah, the

(08:42):
sun is warming that side of the comet. And so
the tail that we normally associate with trailing behind a
comet when we see them in astronomical photographs, No, that
trail is actually more like a cloud that's reaching out
in front of the comet as it moves at very
high speed through space. But the sphere x observations are
by no means the only ones, because just a couple

(09:03):
of days later we got another exciting update that's right.
The James Web Space Telescope now has also spotted this
very unusual interstellar comet with its powerful eye. And thanks
to recent observations made by the James Webspace Telescopes Near
infrared spectrograph instrument, we have obtained additional data about three

(09:25):
I Atlas. And I would say that these sphere X
and James Web observations are maybe some of the most
significant because what they really have shown. Both of these
observational data sets have led to the publication of scientific publications,
some of them still undergoing peer review, but the data
is out there now, and what they all appear to
be showing is that there is this what some call
an unusual abundance of carbon dioxide. Some are also saying

(09:50):
that there are traces of water carbon monoxide, also some
sulfur compounds, a bit of water ice, and a whole
lot of dust of course that we keep hearing about.
But there are a lot of things where obser irving
in the new data about three I Atlas. And here's
why that's important. Yes, three I Atlas, without question is
behaving very strangely. We could effectively call it anomalous. But

(10:14):
I think it's important to also point out that the
fact that this comet is unlike any that we've really
ever seen doesn't necessarily mean that it is therefore aliens.
I mean, technically it is an alien comet because it
came from interstellar space, it's not from our Solar system.
But I'm not saying it's aliens in terms of it
being of technological origin. Now, my colleague, doctor Avi lobe

(10:37):
He has posited that idea. He has continued to champion
that question of whether we should consider its possible technological origins.
I happen to side with the majority of most other
scientists on this though again, the observations by the web
telescope showing the water, the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide,

(10:57):
sulfur compounds, water, ice, and all this that seems to
be showing things that are consistent with a comet, even
despite the weirdness that this one exhibits. But considering that
this one's been out there in deep space, probably hasn't
flown close to any stars recently, and therefore it's probably
accumulated a bunch of stuff while passing through space without

(11:20):
having had an opportunity to bake some of that off
as a result of close proximity to sunlight or starlight
as it were. Yeah, those things, to me offer a
pretty good explanation for why three I Atlas would be
behaving strangely. It's not from around here, and therefore it's
going to look and behave a little different at least
at first. But ultimately, what this offers us is an

(11:43):
opportunity to study something that is behaving dynamically different from
the kinds of objects that have been gravitationally bound to
other objects in our Solar system since time immemorial, and
which have been making the rounds out there, occasionally passing
close enough to the Sun to burn off some of
their material for e yes. Of course, three I Atlas

(12:03):
is behaving a little differently, and the more data we
collect about it, in my opinion, the more all that
seems to really strongly point to the idea that not
only is this a comet, but it is really behaving
in a lot of ways exactly how you might expect
a deep space interstellar comet would behave after a long
walk in the interstellar winter as it comes inside to

(12:25):
warm itself by our stellar fireplace, so to speak. So
I still find it fascinating, and the more of these
kinds of objects that we spot in the future, and
the more that we study them and we learn, the
greater our understanding of these weird behaviors. The things that
cause three eye atlas to be anomalous for the moment
will be understood. But this is just one example of

(12:47):
one of the really weird things we see in our universe.
You know, recently we also had detection of the brightest
known fast radio burst. We've detected the brightest one that
we've seen out there, but we don't know exactly what
it is that causes called fast radio bursts. There are
theories about everything from objects passing in front of stars
that cause strange bursting activity to the idea that these

(13:08):
are high powered emissions being produced only by certain kinds
of stars. Meanwhile, we also have astronomers detecting evidence of
matter that might evolve into dark energy, according to one
new study. Ryan Whalen, by the way, wrote about this
for us there at the debrief. And despite the fact
that this is now a possibility, we still don't know
exactly what dark energy is. We can't even see it.

(13:31):
And so when we come back here in a second,
I want to take a step back from the idea
about the questions of whether we are alone in the universe.
We'll get back around to that concept before the end
of the hour, but for the here and now, I
would like to go in the direction of black holes,
dark energy, questions about our universe, the great mysteries that
continue to evade scientists. How much do we really know

(13:55):
about reality as we know it? Do we really know
reality so well? And what if everything we've fault we
knew wasn't quite what it seemed. We're going to dive
deeply into the greatest mysteries of cosmology when we come
back here in a moment on the Micah Hanks Program.

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Speaker 1 (15:10):
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Speaker 3 (16:37):
From the moment humans first looked skyward, the night has
been more than a backdrop. It's been a puzzle, alive
with mysteries that challenge our understanding and fuel our imagination.
We live in a universe shaped by forces and phenomena
that are at once deeply familiar and profoundly alien, and

(16:57):
the more we learn, the clearer it becomes that we
stand at the edge of an unfinished story. Physicists tell
us we live in four dimensions, three of space and
one of time, Yet whispers of hidden dimensions persist. Gravity,
the weakest of all forces, might be leaking into realms

(17:19):
just beyond our perception. The smoothness of the cosmic microwave background,
the universe's oldest light, suggests a dramatic inflationary episode at
its birth. But what caused that sudden expansion and why
did it end? We know two that matter fills the universe,
tho it should not have survived the early seconds after

(17:41):
the Big Bang. For every particle of matter, an equal
particle of antimatter should have existed. Yet somehow the scales
tipped ever so slightly. That tiny asymmetry one particle in
a billion gave us stars, galaxies, and life itself. But
how and why that imbalance occurred remains unknown. The galaxies

(18:06):
we now see spun into existence from the invisible scaffolding
of cold dark matter, a substance that neither emits nor
reflects light, yet dominates the architecture of the cosmos. It
binds galaxies, threads filaments across the cosmic web, and guides
the distribution of ordinary matter. And surrounding all of this

(18:28):
is something stranger still, dark energy, the nameless pressure that
pushes the universe apart faster and faster, as if repelled
by its own vastness. Welcome back. Even the ordinary matter
we think that we understand has its secrets. Baryons, protons, neutrons, electrons,

(18:52):
and the like should be plentiful in galaxies, but instead
most seem to reside in tenuous halos and intergalactic filaments,
faint reservoirs we can barely even trace. We find ourselves
in a cosmos where the very substance of existence is
it once all around us and largely invisible. And so

(19:13):
we turn inevitably to the question of destiny. Will entropy
drain the universe into a cold, silent expanse a big
freeze where all energy is essentially spent. Could dark energy
grow so strong it tears Adams apart in a big rip?
Or might the universe collapse back upon itself, only to
be born again. Each scenario is possible, and each reminds

(19:36):
us that our present is a fleeting moment and a
story written on timescales far beyond our own. But then again,
the question of what drives us also comes to mind.
What causes us, in other words, to seek these answers.
I don't think it's just curiosity, although curiosity does burn
bright in the long tradition of science. Now, I think

(19:57):
it's the recognition that these mysteries are somehow a part
of us. The imbalance of matter and antimatter gave us form.
Dark matter shape the galaxies that cradle our stars. The
fate of the cosmos itself is bound to the destiny
of everything we know. And so in searching for answers

(20:17):
to the greatest mysteries of cosmology, we're not only exploring
the universe. We're actually exploring ourselves and our own place
in the great unfolding that is our universe. And that's
why this week I wanted to go deeply in search
of some answers to some of the greatest mysteries about
our universe. Because as intriguing as mysterious anomalous phenomena in

(20:43):
our atmosphere is the mysteries of nature and the things
that happen here on planet Earth. The further we go
out there, the more mysterious things become. We can't even
really understand exactly what it is that's holding the universe together.
I mean, we've got ideas, we've got what, again are
effectively very well informed, mathematically consistent placeholders. But a lot

(21:08):
of these realities that we observe and accept as part
of our cosmology are things that remain quite literally unseen.
And then we go beyond our known universe, and we
asked the question of well, could there be other universes.
What about other dimensions in time and space? This, of

(21:28):
course a topic that has recently come up in conversations
that lawmakers have had, believe it or not, And I reference,
of course, a conversation between Representative Anna Paulina Luna and
podcaster Joe Rogan. Where can we have a representative from
Washington saying that there are people who have marched in
there and spoken to congressmen and women and said that

(21:48):
they believe that they have observed what they characterize as
inter dimensional phenomena, and that some of the mysterious phenomena
that the government is now tracking could have its origins
in other dimensions. Now, admittedly, that is a pretty hefty
pill to have to swallow, and I have my own
personal skepticism about necessarily concluding, based on strange observations, that

(22:11):
we are dealing with interdimensional phenomena. But let's be clear,
the idea that there could be other dimensions is not
a fringe idea or one that is unworthy of exploration.
As far as the dimensions that we know, we essentially
have four. We have the three spatial dimensions and then
one time dimension. Our everyday reality is four dimensional. In

(22:33):
other words, there's length, there's width, there's height, but there's
also time. General relativity works beautifully in this four D
framework and helps us describe gravity as not so much
a force but a curvature of space time. You've probably
seen examples of this where someone takes a rubber sheet
and they place a large object like a bowling ball

(22:54):
on that, and it of course depresses the sheet, but
eventually the rubber reaches the extent which it can expand,
and it holds the bowling ball in place. But of
course there is a curved area around the bowling ball.
You can think of gravity as a similar function of
our universe, a warpage of space time around large objects,
really around any object. But again, the larger that you get,

(23:17):
especially out there in space, the more you're going to
work the space around you. And therefore, if you were
to place a tiny little marble at one end of
that curving rubber membrane on its way down toward the
base of the bowling ball, you can predict what that
marble's going to do. It's not going to fly off
into the atmosphere, unless, of course, you strike the rubber
really hard and you throw the marble noo in our

(23:38):
example here, you place it gently near the top of
the curve, the marble rolls down and meets the bowling ball,
and that's essentially what happens when we have meteorites being
pulled into Earth's atmosphere and then they fall toward the Earth.
But there are other theories about other dimensions. Physicists have
long considered the possibility of additional dimensions beyond the four
that we know, and the reasons come from atempts to

(24:00):
unify forces of nature. A lot of this goes back
to the nineteen twenties, when we have what's known as
the Kaluza Kline theory, which proposed that an extra dimension,
a fifth one, could help unify the two mysteries of
electromagnetism and gravity. And despite the fact that we were
able to describe gravity pretty well with simple examples like
the one I gave you, it's still very mysterious, and

(24:22):
so trying to unify it with things like electromagnetism gave
rise to the idea of there having to be another dimension,
or at least that the existence of one could explain
some of these phenomena. This was mathematically elegant, but the
extra dimension had to be curled up or compactified, and
therefore it made it so small we wouldn't even be
able to notice it. Then, by the late twentieth century

(24:44):
we began to have more familiar ideas of alternate dimensions,
and this brings us to string theory, which really requires
about ten dimensions, maybe eleven if we're talking about m theory.
But these extra spatial dimensions are thought to be yet
again compactified at what physicists call the Plank scale, an
unimaginably small scale yet again, so we can't directly observe

(25:06):
these other dimensions. Then we have the idea of the
brain world model, which suggests that our forty universe is
like a brain, but not the br ai n in
your head, no, a br ane, a brain floating on
a higher dimensional bulk. In these models, ordinary matter and
forces are trapped on this brain, but gravity can leak

(25:28):
into extra dimensions, and that, yet again, could explain why
gravity is so much weaker than electromagnetism or the nuclear forces.
Now that may seem counterintuitive, of course, because when you
think of gravity pulling meteorites toward Earth and the devastation
they can potentially cause you don't really think of gravity
as being a weak force, but it is actually weaker

(25:49):
than electromagnetism or the nuclear forces. And this, in fact
is where the idea that gravitons in a fifth dimension
comes into play, because gravitons describe a hypothetical quat bottom
particle or variety of particles that would carry the gravitational force,
much like photons are known by physicists to carry electromagnetism.

(26:09):
But here's why it's all significant, because if gravitons exist
and they can move into higher dimensions, then some of
gravity's strength would bleed out of our universe hypothetically speaking,
so to us, gravity would appear weak because it's diluted
across you guessed it, extra dimensions, and that leakiness of
gravity is essentially the idea that there's only a thin

(26:31):
separation between our observable four D world, at least as
we know it, and other dimensions where gravitons might go
and wander. But again, we also might ask the question, well,
if there could be other dimensions, I mean, what about
a multiverse? How multidimensional is the universe? Anybody out there
who is a fan of the Marvel comics universe, and

(26:51):
the films that have been based on those characters are
familiar with the Marvel multiverse idea, where they get into
this concept that there might be other universes or a
multiplicity of universes, and that sometimes characters from one universe
or variants of one character from another universe can make
their way over into another universe, and then of course

(27:11):
all hell breaks loose. So the conservative answer in terms
of how multidimensional our universe might actually be is we
know it's at least four D, right, We've got the
three space in the one time dimension, but if we
add the string or m theory view, there could be
up to ten or eleven dimensions, most of them hidden.
But if we get over into speculative cosmology, some models

(27:33):
do go further with dozens of other dimensions, or even
the idea that there could be infinite dimensions, especially in
a multiverse or holographic framework. You may have heard this
idea of a holographic universe. There was a book written
by Michael Talbot about that a few decades ago, which
examined the possibility that our universe effectively functions like a hologram.

(27:55):
But moving away from the hypothetical and into the experimental angle.
So far, we haven't directly detected gravitons and therefore we
don't really have that physical basis for a lot of
these ideas. But not to worry, particle colliders like the
famous large Hadron collider at Cerne, and also astrophysical observations
of black holes, these enigmatic gravity waves that we only

(28:15):
detected a few years ago and other things are now
being used to test for evidence of extra dimensions. And
so if energy seems to disappear in high energy collisions
where they smash particles together in a great big tube,
I mean that could be a sign that gravitons are
escaping into you guessed it, other dimensions. But sticking with
our own universe here for a moment, Arguably one of

(28:38):
the biggest questions, the most vexing problems that physicists have
ever tried to deal with, is how in the heck
did our universe begin? What was the starting point of
our universe? The universes we know it began about thirteen
point eight billion years ago, and we know that it
was in an extremely hot and dense state at the
time of what many physicists were to as the Big Bang,

(29:01):
although again that is not a unanimous conclusion among physicists
that the universe began with a great big bang. In fact,
the very man who gave that concept its name, Fred Hoyle,
did not believe that there was a single Big Bang.
But we do know that there is evidence that supports
the idea that the universe expanded and cooled over time,

(29:22):
giving rise to the formation of particles and then atoms
and then entire stars and galaxies. That on any clear
night you can go out there and you can see
the light from those stars across great distances through space,
which is really quite mind numbing if you actually stop
and think about what you're looking at when you're looking
at the night sky. Most people never do think. How

(29:42):
many people live in urban areas where there's enough light
pollution from city light that they have never actually seen
the Milky Way, simply because they've never been in a
place where the sky is dark enough that they can
actually perceive it. Living here in beautiful land of the
sky Asheville, North Carolina, I've seen the Milky Way on
many occasions, and I love sitting out there on the
back porch with my telescope and looking at stars, planets,

(30:05):
the occasional nebula and other things. And of course, just
peering at the sky with my naked eye, I can
see meteorites streaming through the atmosphere from time to time.
But these are all things that many people have never
even seen because they aren't under the ideal kind of
conditions needed to be able to look. And even those
who have seen these things often don't stop and consider
the immensity of what they're looking at. But thanks to

(30:28):
astronomers who spend a lot of time over the last
several centuries looking at the night sky and teasing out details,
we do know that the cosmic microwave background, which was
first discovered back in nineteen sixty five, represents the afterglow
as physicists would like in it to what is perceived
as having been a big bang event. But there is

(30:48):
a problem with the cosmic microwave background, and you're going
to find as we make our way through these cosmic
mysteries that all too often nothing is really very perfect.
There's always a little wrinkle somewhere here and there, And
our wrinkle with the cosmic microwave background is that it's
just too smooth. In other words, no matter which direction
you look, it's nearly the same temperature. Why is that

(31:09):
an issue? Well, primarily in the early universe, different regions
should have been too far apart to exchange information or energy,
and this gives rise to what astrophysicists call the horizon problem.
Another issue back in the nineteen eighties has to do
with inflation, the idea of a sudden exponential expansion of
the universe in the first tiny fraction of a second

(31:30):
right after the Big Bang. During this inflation, regions that
were once close together, like we were just discussing, got
stretched across the observable universe, and that should explain why
the cosmic microwave background looks so dang smooth. Everything was
in contact before inflation stretched it apart. This inflation theory
also helps to explain the universe's flat geometry. In other words,

(31:52):
space isn't curled since inflation. If indeed this theory holds true,
and there is some evidence that it does, Inflation essentially
iron the universe flat, and going beyond that, the tiny
quantum fluctuations during inflation got magnified into the density variations
that later formed galaxies. But really, the big question we
have about all this is what caused that inflation. This

(32:14):
is where things as far as inflation get really mysterious,
because there are several ideas, none as you can imagine,
have been proven. One involves the idea of a hypothetical
scalar field that filled the universe, whose energy drove the
rapid expansion, and as that field decayed, it released energy,
reheating the universe and leading to the standard Big Bang expansion. Problem,
of course, is there's no direct evidence that such a

(32:36):
field has ever been found. Other ideas include quantum gravity effects,
and yes, coming back to the multiverse idea, the idea
of there being eternal inflation. In other words, it might
not be a one time event, but a continuous process,
and some regions might stop inflating and become bubble universes,
Hours being one of those in fact, while inflation continues elsewhere.

(32:59):
And this ties into idea is about multiverses, although again
it's highly speculative, and there are other ideas too that
include alternatives to inflation, since, just like the question of
the Big Bang itself, not all physicists are necessarily sold
on the idea that inflation best explains all these issues.
But when we come back We're going to look at
the question of within our own universe, what's actually out there,

(33:21):
what fills the universe, and of course, could intelligent life
be somewhere out there too. These are other questions await
when we return right here on the Micah Hanks Program.

Speaker 7 (33:38):
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Speaker 3 (35:07):
Exploring the greatest mysteries of our universe, at least the
ones known to scientists. No doubt there are many others
out there yet to be discovered, which is always so exciting.
You know what else is exciting is the idea of
getting not only this podcast each week, but additional supplementary
podcasts as an ex subscriber. It's just seven dollars a month,

(35:31):
and of course that gets you not only this show,
but the additional content on your own RSS feed and
all of that ad free. It's the complete ad free experience.
You can find that over at micah hanks dot com
forward slash X. Not to be confused with the social
media side of the same name, by the way, which
actually had a different name early on, but it changed.

(35:51):
I've actually been referring to the X podcasts as such
for quite a while. But as we get back into
this discussion about the greatest mysteries of the universe, there's
one that really many who don't follow cosmology and astrophysics
may not necessarily think about. It's a simple question, why
does matter fill the universe? Again, this is kind of

(36:13):
like the night sky enigma. People don't really often think
about what they're looking at when they observe the stars.
And again with present company accepted. As I know many
of you out there are stargazers and astronomy buffs like
I am. I always cherish the fact that so many
of my listeners and I have so much in common
when it comes to these things. But I mean the
average person who might look at the night sky and

(36:34):
who wouldn't be drawn maybe to listening to a podcast
and exploring questions like UAP, I mean, they're not probably
going to be sitting around all day thinking about, well,
why does matter fill the universe? And this comes down
to a few issues that include, for instance, the symmetry problem.
According to the standard model of particle physics, the Big
Bang that we were talking about in the last segment

(36:55):
should have produced equal amounts of matter but also andy
no matter particles again like protons and electrons that make
up everything and andy matter made of you guessed it,
anti protons, positrons, et cetera. They are believed to annihilate
each other on contact and produce pure energy in the

(37:15):
form of photons. We would call that light. But therein
lies the mystery, because if the universe started symmetric then
everything should, in theory have been annihilated, leaving behind only light.
In other words, there shouldn't be galaxies, there shouldn't be stars, folks,
there shouldn't be us. And yet here we are in
a universe filled with matter. Now we know anti matter exists,

(37:40):
but only in what appeared to be trace amounts. So
the question is, well, what happened? How come all the
stuff that would become star stuff that effectively we are
made of in the wording of the late great Carl Sagan?
How come that wasn't all destroyed very early in the universe?
How do we get this far in the first place?
See what I'm talking about? Great mystery right there. Physicists

(38:00):
think that in the very early stages of the universe
a process known as barriogenesis tipped the balances slightly in
favor of matter, and hence here we are. But to
make that happen, there would have had to be several
conditions to be met. First, baryon numbers processes that can
change the number of buryons would be a factor. Also,

(38:21):
laws of physics that must treat matter and antimatter slightly differently,
in other words, known as C and CP violation, and
then also the universe must have been in a rapidly
changing non equilibrium state. Those are some of the conditions
that would had to have been met. Now, about that
CP violation that I talked about, there is some evidence
for asymmetry, that's what we're talking about, and we have

(38:44):
observed this asymmetry CP violation in certain particle decays. But
the amount that's been observed is way too small to
explain the overwhelming dominance of matter over antimatter. So why
did the matter when in this great cosmic battle? I
had a lot of ideas about this too. What is
what astrophysicists call leptogenesis That essentially involves heavy, unstable neutrinos

(39:08):
in the early universe and their decays produced more leptons
than what are called anti leptons. As you're seeing, there
are a lot of normal particles as we might call them,
and then their anti particle variants. But through these interactions,
the leptons and the anti leptons essentially created the excess
of baryons. This is a popular idea because this one

(39:28):
links the problem to new trino physics, which we're still uncovering.
Neutrinos themselves remain very mysterious. If you want good evidence
of that, just go read articles at the debrief dot
org about neutrinos. This is one of my favorite topics
that we write about. In fact, now, that might be
a little dense what we're talking about right there, but
it really brings us to again another theory that's a
pretty popular idea in a common one. You've probably heard

(39:50):
about the notion of grand unified theories, theories that predict
new particles and interactions between them at very high energies,
which could allow avery a number of violations and extra
CP violation which would tip the scales toward matter as
opposed to antimatter. And there are other ideas too, some
of them are pretty exotic. For instance, we come over

(40:13):
to the great mystery of dark matter. Dark matter itself
may be essentially the medium that carries the missing antimatter
in our universe. That's one idea, although some physicists also
speculate that large regions of antimatter might exist really, really
far away from us, and that they could simply be
separated from the matter domains. I guess one way we

(40:35):
might envision that is that somehow, over the course of
the expansion of the universe, the antimatter went one direction,
and that the regular matter stayed closer to the universal core.
That might not be the best way of explaining it,
but in essence it's a way that we might wrap
our heads around the concept that there are large regions
where matter in anti matter are kept apart from one

(40:56):
another because we know they don't get along very well. Obviously,
I said, some of these ideas are pretty exotic, but
the most widely accepted view here is that antimatter was
annihilated with nearly all matter, but a tiny excess amount
of matter managed to survive, the exact amount of about one
part in just a billion. But that tiny access, nonetheless,

(41:16):
is what makes up all of the stars, galaxies, planets,
and even all the life in the universe. But we
look at galaxies, How in the heck did galaxies form?
After the Big Bang? The universe was really hot, It
was nearly uniform, It was a soup of particles. There
were tiny quantum fluctuations that began getting stretched out during

(41:39):
the inflation process we referenced earlier, and they became slightly
denser regions in the cosmic matter distribution as a result.
Gravity thereafter amplified these small ripples. Over time, matter clumped
them together, pulling in more and more material, and these
over densities effectively became the seeds of galaxies as we
know it. Yet again, go check out what we cover

(42:02):
at the debrief todt org. We talk about all this
on almost a daily basis, and there are more than
one type of galaxies. Galaxies aren't just one kind of thing.
I mean, really, they sort of are, but I mean,
just like you have fruit and then you've got apples, oranges, pears, bananas,
you got different types of galaxies too. Elliptical galaxies that
often are the product of mergers between galaxies, and they've

(42:23):
got older stars. They don't have a whole lot of gas.
I guess that's a good thing for all the celestial
objects out there that might live in close proximity to them.
You don't want them to have a whole lot of
gas if they live nearby, right. Spiral galaxies are another type,
like the Milky Way, with ongoing star formation and disc arms.
And then you've got the really weird ones, the irregular
galaxies that are distorted by gravitational interactions. Yet again, we're

(42:46):
talking about the bowling ball on the rubber membrane effect
that can also shape galaxies into some really weird shapes,
and there are astronomers out there who have catalogued weird
shaped galaxies. But the shape and evolution of galaxies depends
a whole lot on the environment in which they exist,
their merger history, and also the properties of the dark

(43:08):
matter halos that accompany them. Now, a fundamental truth that
we have learned in recent years about essentially every large
galaxy is that they've got something at their center, and
that is a super massive black hole. That's right. These
seem to co evolve with their host galaxy too. The
mass of the central black hole essentially correlates very strongly

(43:30):
with the bulge mass of the galaxy in question, and
feedback from these black holes in the form of what
are called jets and winds, helped regulate star formation across
the galaxy. So very well may be the case that
you can't really have a galaxy without a black hole
at its center, and we're finding essentially that virtually every
large galaxy's got one. But now expanding our view outward

(43:53):
and looking at the broader cosmic web on the largest scales,
galaxies are not randomly scaleattered. In fact, they trace what
we call the cosmic web, which describes filaments and clusters
of dark matter and gas that are separated by these
vast voids. Quite literally, if you look at this in
large scale or image representations of how it's supposed to look,

(44:15):
you can see why we call it a cosmic web.
It looks very much like a spider's web, and this
is formed as gravity pulled galaxies along these filaments, shaping
the universe into the large scale structure we see today.
That raises an interesting question. Could it be possible that
the way that things look on the macro scale, the
largest cosmic structures the so called web, also govern or

(44:37):
influence somehow the way things look or behave on the microscale.
In other words, I'm quite literally asking could it be
that the cosmic web resembles a spider web for very
good reasons, that they might be related, that there could
be some kind of a universal coding, and that in
the architecture of the universe and the mathematics that we
can use to describe it, there's a reason why these

(44:59):
sorts of shapes proliferate on the largest and also the
smallest scales. Again, I'm not an astrophysicist, I'm just asking questions.
But then we got that question of dark matter. What
do we mean by dark matter? It's not really dark
and in fact, in the words of the late physicists
Stephen Hawking, black holes ain't so black. Now, when we
talk about dark and black and astrophysical terms, usually we

(45:22):
mean these things do not emit, absorb, or reflect light,
so they are effectively invisible to telescopes that detect electromagnetic radiation.
In the case of black holes, those things are so strong,
the gravity that they exert on surrounding objects is so
great that they can swallow up the light. And hence
the black hole idea is really invisible because we don't

(45:43):
see light that's detectable by telescopes. But we know that
these black holes are out there. We know that dark
matter is out there, or something that we call dark matter,
and that behaves how we expect it to behave exists,
and we know that because of its gravitational effects, we
can see how galaxies rotate, We see how light bends

(46:04):
around galaxy clusters, phenomenon that's incredible and it's known as
gravitational lensing. If you want to see some really cool
examples of that. Go look up Einstein crosses. Google that
and you'll see what I'm talking about. How gravity in
regions throughout the universe can distort the appearance of objects
by the time it makes its way the light to Earth,

(46:25):
and when we see a single object, it can look
like four of the same object hanging out there in
a cluster. It would be easy to see how astronomers
at one time might have thought they were looking at
some sort of a structured no giant object out there
in space. No, this is called gravitational lensing. But these
kinds of observations give us clues in terms of the
existence of what we call dark matter. Why do we

(46:47):
call it cold? Well, cold dark matter in this context
kind of means something different, just like dark does. Cold
here means slow moving compared to the speed of light,
especially in the early universe. If dark matter were hut
or fast moving like Neutrino's, it would have smoothed out
small scale structures by zipping around really quickly. And so
cold dark matter, as we called it, allowed matter to

(47:09):
clump early on and thereby seeding the galaxies that we
see out there all throughout the Great cosmic web, but
more mysteries await us in the final segment as we
wrap things up, We'll get into that and much more
here in a moment when we return on the Micah
Hanks program.

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Speaker 3 (49:30):
Are we truly alone in the universe? Despite some compelling
sightings of mysteries in the sky? Many scientists ask the
great question why don't we see more evidence of life
out there? But there's a different question that comes to
mind for me about all this in the absence of

(49:53):
any clear astronomical evidence of other life out there? Sure,
are we really that we want to find alien life
out there? Intelligent aliens?

Speaker 6 (50:07):
No?

Speaker 3 (50:08):
Less, would we actually be better off not knowing? Welcome back?
When it comes to the great mysteries of cosmology, naturally,
we have to ask the questions about those known quantities,
and actually a lot of these things inferred but still
very mysterious, like dark matter and dark energy. But at

(50:29):
the end of the day, can we really imagine a
mystery greater than the question of whether we are alone
in the universe? And since twenty seventeen, with all of
the recognition that the UAP topic has received, naturally, it's
understandable that astrophysicists would remain a bit skeptical about the
idea that UAP could actually be evidence of one of

(50:52):
those long sought cosmic mysteries. Again, perhaps one of the
very greatest ones the resolution to the question of whether
we are alone in the universe. We still are trying
to resolve UAP, and according to the official findings of
the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, they say, right now
there are some weird things in the sky. We don't
know what they are, but there's no clear link to

(51:14):
those things coming from outer space. We don't know what
else they might be or whom else they might belong to.
And this, of course leads to some questions, what if
there is a power here on Earth that possesses highly
advanced capabilities? Is that something we should be worried about?
Because if anybody here on Earth, unbeknownst to the US
intelligence community and the US military, has capabilities the likes

(51:38):
of some of the more captivating UAP encounters and the
descriptions of a craft observed by military officials during those encounters,
that really raises some sobering possibilities. And to me, that
is something that obviously, not just the United States military,
but militaries around the world should be taking very seriously.
But on that outside chance that some of these phenomena

(52:01):
that are observed from time to time actually do represent
something that is truly unexplainable in terms of known technologies
here on Earth. Then we really have to step back
and say, Okay, then what could this potentially mean for humankind?
So let's speculate for a moment. Let's go there. What
if some UAP these advanced capabilities described by the current

(52:25):
director of AERO, who has discussed on a couple of
occasions now, triangular objects about the size of a prius
that have been observed by military and law enforcement officials.
These objects apparently can hover, These objects can take away
at tremendous speed and sometimes produce quite a light show
during their departure. And of course there are other types

(52:45):
of UAP that are seen as well, these mysterious orbs,
descriptions of the so called tic tac shaped objects, descriptions
of flying saucers that frankly have also been a part
of the greater body of UAP sightings going back to
around the time of the end of the Second World War. Now,
although I try to be agnostic at times, some of
these descriptions do seem to represent things that are extremely

(53:08):
difficult to explain outside of the possibility that maybe Earth
is being visited. But on that chance, what would that
really mean for life here on Earth. If indeed we
were being visited, and whomever it is that's visiting us
possesses incredible technological capabilities, what would their motives and intent be?

(53:29):
What brings them here? Are they here studying us? Are
they here to collect resources from Planet Earth? Are they
surveiling this planet because eventually they want to own this planet?
Are they surveiling this planet because at some point in
the past they owned this planet? And if they owned
this planet at some point in the ancient past, what

(53:51):
does that say about the life that exists here? These
kinds of questions, of course, as whimsical as they might seem,
at times, were asked by the likes of Charles fort
early in the last century. What if, in other words,
we are someone else's property? And this, of course raises
some interesting philosophical questions, because to an extent we have
free will. But how free is free will when you

(54:14):
belong to someone or something else? But you also look
at the progression of technology right here on Earth. Right
now we are in an era where we are seeing
increasing advancements almost by the day in artificial intelligence. And
of course, if there is intelligence somewhere else in the
universe of the biological variety like we are. Then if

(54:37):
you think about it, it really seems impossible that they
wouldn't have created artificial intelligence themselves at some point. And
so I've argued in the past, if we ever encounter
evidence of alien life, there's a pretty good chance that
we may encounter their artificial intelligence first. And artificial intelligence

(54:59):
of our own creating is very much a mystery because
right now, although we are moving toward the creation of
ever steadily more intelligent and presumably one day also autonomous,
free thinking, self reflecting, self aware AI, this entire concept
is surrounded in mystery. We don't know when or if

(55:21):
we'll ever actually achieve that stage. But when or if
we actually do, we don't know what the AI will
do to us, how it will behave, whether it will
consider us an ally. The best we can hope for
is to train it to look out for our best interests.
But now, when you introduce the concept of an alien
artificial intelligence, we're no longer dealing with intelligent machines that

(55:43):
have necessarily the best interests of human life in mind.
Now these were designed by an intelligent species that may
not even have our best interests in mind, so we
really don't know what to expect in the event that
we encounter artificial intelligence, unless, of course, it has simply
been designed to try and avoid us. And this brings

(56:04):
us to the idea of stealth probes that might be
carrying out some unknown mission on behalf of an intelligence
from someplace else. In fact, the originating intelligence may be
out of touch with the AI due to the tremendous
astronomical distances that might be involved. I think, for instance,

(56:25):
about the lack of evidence of alien life out there.
We don't find techno signatures, we find very few things
that are convincing biosignatures, and therefore with no evidence that
the universe is teeming with intelligent life. In fact, there's
very little evidence of any life that we have conclusively
found through our gazing at the cosmos. If it's out there,

(56:45):
and I suspect it probably is. But if there is
intelligent life somewhere out there, they must be a considerable
distance away, and unless they have some remarkable technologies, and
perhaps they do, that would be required in fact to
facilitate interstellar travel to be able to dispatch any AI
probes to a place like Earth. So communication might not

(57:08):
be out of the question, but it would certainly be
complicated based on our own experience with deep space connections
using things like the Deep Space Network, which NASA has
used for communications with the most distant spacecraft like the
Voyager probes for the last several decades. So the AI
may either not be able to regularly communicate with those

(57:29):
who created it if such alien AI is indeed here,
and that could account for some UAP sidings, or Another
intriguing possibility, but not an impossible one, is the idea
that whoever created this AI, they are long gone. They
could have created self replicating, artificially intelligent stealth probes which

(57:51):
were designed to proliferate throughout the universe with the acquisition
of material resources as they spread across interstellar space into
various galaxies and then entering solar systems within those galaxies,
maybe eventually making their way to ours. There's a name
for this concept, by the way. It's known as the
von Neumann probe. The idea that artificially intelligent self replicating

(58:14):
probes would be a very logical way that any intelligent
species might try to use robotic probes on their behalf
to colonize and explore the universe. And this brings us
to another really intriguing possibility, because if you think about it,
and more specifically, you think about the behavior described in
many UAP encounters. These things are out there doing their

(58:35):
own thing. Then suddenly, when they show up and we
start trying to track them on radar, they start doing
really strange things. They try to leave the scene. They
may attempt to start jamming our radars. They may attempt
to try and hide themselves, sometimes within clouds, sometimes using
other means. Even during recent interviews that it gave Tim Phillips,

(58:55):
the former deputy director at ARROW, had said that a
lot of these objects appear to try and exhibit stealth capabilities. This,
if you recall, is what led him to conclude these
things are most likely human, because he said, well, why
would aliens try to hide themselves? Again, I could think
of dozens of reasons why aliens might try to hide themselves,
especially when you have humans in the mix. But one

(59:18):
of those reasons might be because they are carrying out
some kind of a mission here on Earth. We don't
know exactly what that is. It could be intelligence gathering,
it could be resource harvesting, it could be a combination
of things. These probes may be engaging in surveillance because
they're trying to monitor the extent to which humans are
aware of their presence, but also monitoring other human activities

(59:39):
that could compromise whatever the mission is that they're undertaking,
and let's say it is to harvest resources. They're obtaining
some kind of materials from the bottom of the oceans,
where we already know that there can be rich abundances
of various kinds of rare metals. It could even be
other resources that are in greater abundance, things like water,
and not surprisingly, in the UFO literature, there are some

(01:00:00):
descriptions of UAP that appear to emerge from the oceans
and enter the oceans. Sometimes they also appear to be
collecting water into the body of their craft, which is
at least suggestive of the idea that these are resources
that for whatever reason, possibly to facilitate or fuel propulsion,
possibly to fuel whoever might be on board these craft,

(01:00:20):
if they are not purely artificial intelligence themselves, probes that
are acting autonomously. If indeed they are crude aircraft and
the crews aboard them are biological, they would need resources,
perhaps even to a greater extent than artificially intelligent probes.
So all these factors taken into consideration, the history of

(01:00:41):
UAP sidings does at times seem to be pretty consistent
with the notion that any advanced intelligence that came here
might try to maintain a low profile in the best
interest of whatever mission it is they're trying to accomplish.
Nothing about UAP seems to suggest that the operators are
very interested in trying to drop down and make contact.

(01:01:04):
And that's one of the huge issues I have with
so many of the suppositions that modern scientists have about
this subject. We know that whatever UAP are, they can't
be aliens, because aliens couldn't get here from wherever they
are out there. And even if they could, why would
they come all that distance and not introduce themselves. These

(01:01:24):
are extremely presumptuous positions that many scientists take, but we
should ask other questions too. Again, if alien AI exists,
is that something that would be observable in our own
solar system? Again, if UAP represent such technologies, they may
be evident right here in our own backyard, And yet

(01:01:45):
they are mysterious enough that scientists do not associate them
with what they actually could be. But here in the
final moments, going beyond simple nuts and bolts AI or
crude alien craft, what if artificial intelligence could all also
give rise to superintelligence. We wonder if that might happen
at some point here on Earth. What if it's already

(01:02:05):
happened someplace else. But if artificial superintelligence wasn't something that
could be exclusive to our universe, We've looked at the
possibility of other dimensions, So what if in other dimensions
artificial superintelligence was seeding the very formation of new universes?

(01:02:25):
In other words, could an extra universal artificial superintelligence be
responsible for creating our own universe? And this, of course
gets us into the mind bending possibility of whether or
not reality as we know it is actually reality as
we perceive it. We perceive our universe as being real, tangible,
and physical, But what if it is in fact a

(01:02:47):
lot more like what we see in the matrix movies,
in which case, any interactions we may have with high strangeness,
UAP phenomena and perhaps other things that are observed may
be less akin to alien visitors or inter dimensional phenomena,
and more like what happens when the operators outside of

(01:03:09):
the matrix intersect with our reality, kind of like Agent
Smith coming and saying hi to neo food for thought,
of course. But that's all for right now. I'll catch
you guys next time, right here on the Michah Hanks Program,
and until then, stay strange out there.