Avi Loeb a Professor of astrophysics at Harvard University, and was the longest serving Chair of their Astrophysics department. TIME magazine named him as one of the 25 most influential people in space, and among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade. He is currently ranked number 3 in publication record and impact of research among all astronomers worldwide.
We discuss:
The likelihood that there is advanced alien life in our galaxy
The possibility that we may have already discovered extraterrestrial technology
The ability of our scientific institutions to deal with novel and speculative topics
Artificial intelligence and future technologies
Elon Musk’s space Tesla…
… and other topics.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript below. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.
Avi’s links
Essays « READ SOME!
Books: Extraterrestrial; Interstellar
Timestamps
Timestamps are for the video episode.
00:00 Will we discover extraterrestrial technology?
05:20 How likely is the existence of alien life?
25:00 Why is the scientific community so divided?
35:00 Can our scientific institutions deal with highly speculative topics?
44:00 Why is there so much scepticism about the possibility of alien technology?
52:30 What evidence should we be looking for?
58:00 What if we look but find nothing?
1:02:00 Are we ready?
1:05:00 How would the world change if we discovered alien technology?
1:12:00 Future technology and AI avatars
1:22:30 Where to find more of Avi’s work?
Introduction: Taking Aliens Seriously
The search for extraterrestrial life is not a new endeavour for our species. For thousands of years, humans have been gazing up at the stars and wondering whether there is life out there, and what that life might look like. But it’s only in recent times that science has given us tools to start answering this question using evidence and data.
As I discussed in my conversation with Professor Sara Seager, historically the question of whether we are alone in this universe has been a largely philosophical one. But today this question can be tackled head-on with the tools of modern science. We are now able to see further into space than ever before, probing depths that even a century ago would have seemed practically impossible, and we can detect and analyse a staggering number of signals with increasingly impressive precision.
Much of the progress that we’ve made suggests that the emergence of life in the universe should be much more common than we once thought. I give several examples of this in the introduction to my conversation with Sara Seager, and those examples are by no means exhaustive.
In fact, we’ve progressed to a point where the majority of people believe that alien life does exist. For example, polls by Pew Research have found that close to two-thirds of American adults believe that there is intelligent life beyond Earth. This is greater than the number of Americans who believe in the Biblical God, which is astounding given the history of these two ideas in the public consciousness. I should mention, though, that around 90% of Americans still claim to believe in some form of higher power or spiritual force, which is higher than the number who believe in aliens.
In any case, there seems to be some degree of cognitive dissonance at work when it comes to discussions about extraterrestrial life, because despite a majority of people believing in its existence, claims of new evidence for this life tend to be met with what I see as an unbalanced degree of scepticism, even in the scientific community. Perhaps especially in the scientific community.
There are, of course, those people who are not nearly sceptical enough - those who, for example, believe that grainy photographs of blurry smudges in the sky are compelling evidence that we’re being visited by alien spacecraft. But this is not the type of unbalanced scepticism that I’m talking about. What concerns me is that many people, leading scientists among them, are so sceptical about potential evidence for extraterrestrial life, that their default position is to be closed to new possibilities. This can hinder the progress of science.
My guest today, Professor Avi Loeb, has been at the centre of a fairly high-profile example of this. A few years ago, Avi gained widespread attention when he put forward a hypothesis that a very peculiar interstellar object known as 'Oumuamua, which we detected passing through our solar system in 2017, just might be an artificial object of extraterrestrial origin. You can read about the story in Avi’s book, Extraterrestrial, and in his original peer-reviewed paper on the topic. I’ll link both in the episode notes.
Avi’s hypothesis was met with a relatively extreme degree of resistance by the scientific community. Many people seemed to take the position that the hypothesis could be discarded by default, without the need for further investigation.
It’s this level of scepticism within the scientific community that is unbalanced. Avi is a respected and credentialed astrophysicist who has made enormous contributions to his field, and on that basis alone his ideas are worth considering openly. But more than this, his hypothesis was made within the context of most people believing that intelligent alien life does in fact exist, and in which we’ve proven that it’s possible, and probably not uncommon, to launch technological objects into space. In fact, the ‘Oumuamua controversy began just months after Elon Musk launched his Tesla Roadster into orbit around the Sun as part of the Falcon Heavy test flight.
And so this conversation is one that encourages scientific openness and curiosity. Historically, some of the most world-changing paradigm shifts have been the result of taking these kinds of ideas seriously and then rigorously testing them against the evidence.
Transcript & Easter Eggs
This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.
[00:00:00] Matt Geleta: I am here with Avi Loeb. Avi, thanks for joining me.
[00:00:02] Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure.
[00:00:04] Matt Geleta: Avi, a few weeks ago, uh, you gave a TED talk about the search for alien life. And at the end of your talk, Chris Anderson came up on stage and stood beside you. And he asked you a very simple yes or no question. if You think, within the next 10 years, we'll have discovered truly convincing evidence that extraterrestrial life exists.
And with very little hesitation, you said yes. Why this answer?
[00:00:31] Avi Loeb: Oh, um, the reason is simple. We haven't really dedicated the major effort to search in the right way. I mean, we were waiting for radio signals for 70 years, starting with uh, Frank Drake's, um, uh, Osmo project. Um, and that followed on, Cocconi and Morrison's paper in nature that suggested that since we are Using radio communication, perhaps we should listen to others.
And, that was very human centric point of view in the sense that it was, you know, last century, 70 years ago when we just started communicating with radio waves. Now we're doing much better with other technologies. And, uh, moreover, it's it's a very passive approach where you say, let me just wait for someone to call me.
And we all know that that's not a good method to find a partner uh, because nobody may realize that we are lonely. Or they may be hooked to their digital screens and not search for us. And, we better be proactive. And there is another way, which is, uh, looking for any objects in our backyard that accumulated over time, uh, space trash.
The trash is our treasure. And this is an approach that was only pioneered over the past decade. Uh, The first interstellar objects, objects from outside the solar system, were discovered only over the past 10 years for a good reason. We just didn't have a survey telescope. Astronomers didn't use survey telescopes that are powerful enough to detect such objects.
And, then the U. S. government did not use, a, an array of satellites that can, um, look for meteors from interstellar space, systematically. And so now we have those instruments. We know of at least, three such interstellar objects, and it's a new frontier, maybe among the rocks that we find. From other stars, there would be some technological objects.
And since I'm heavily engaged in searching for those, I'm optimistic that, you know, it's a road that was not taken. And uh, when you take a new road, there is a chance of finding low hanging fruit because nobody picked it up. And that's why I'm optimistic. I should also mention, um, sort of a background anecdote here because, um, uh, when they invited me to give the TED talk, they kept telling me every few weeks that I should practice.
They said, practice, practice, practice. And I was very busy. I avoided the, uh, any practice tests that they offered. And, uh, then I got there and they kept saying, you should practice. Practice and rehearse. And, uh, only then you'll be able to, you know, because it's a very unusual experience being on stage with the lights on and so forth and speaking in a way that approaches the entire audience.
And so anyway, I did not listen to that. And then, um, the night before, because of the time difference from Boston, Massachusetts, where I reside, um, I thought it's actually 4 AM and I usually jog at sunrise, but it was actually 1 AM. And. Basically, I didn't sleep that night because I went to bed at around 10 or 11 p.
m. So I slept a few hours. But then, since I was awake, I decided to write up my presentation. So I wrote an essay. which I usually post it on medium. com and I had it fresh in my head. So I went on stage and since I didn't sleep much, I was very relaxed, uh, and I simply delivered My message straight from the heart and, uh, the audience, uh, you know, laughed at all the jokes There was standing ovations from the people in the room in the auditorium, but also online.
And by now it's out for about 10 days. And the video of the presentation, it garnered 800, 000 views already. So I think it was very well received. Um, and, um, Perhaps my lesson is that instead of, uh, preparing for it like a show, one would one better prepare the content that would touch the minds and hearts of, of, of, of the audience.
That's my
lesson.
[00:05:02] Matt Geleta: Fantastic. I mean, it certainly did. I enjoyed, I enjoyed, um, watching it and, uh, many of the other interviews that you've done and, and what you've written. And I will link to several of them. Um, there was something very interesting about your answer, though, because, So you answered, yes, uh, we will find evidence of advanced alien species.
Um, and it was all about the sort of the search, the fact that we need to search, but you, but you almost presumed the answer that this exists. I think many Yes, that's, that's a very
[00:05:34] Avi Loeb: good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an excellent point. Um, and you know, um, obviously it flatters our ego to think that we are unique and special. And over the history of science, um, we, uh, initially thought that we are at the center of the universe and there is, uh, everything is built around us.
And, uh, you can interpret that in two ways. One, that we are quite arrogant in the way we think about the world. Uh, it's all about us. Another approach is to say we are ignorant. Uh, so all the information we get is, from our immediate environment. So therefore, you know, we think that we are at the center and the second interpretation is actually what explains the way my daughters behaved at a young age.
They thought that they're at the center of the world and that's because their experience was confined to home and we paid a lot of attention to them. But on the first day at the kindergarten, they had a psychological shock and they matured. And so my sense is that, uh, we will mature once we realize that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe.
And, um, because right now, if you ask people in academia, they will tell you that it's an extraordinary claim to suggest that we are, uh, that we have partners like us, intelligent out there. And it requires extraordinary evidence. I think it's the other way around. I think um, All evidence shows that we are not really at the pinnacle of creation that in fact there is a lot of room for improvement And if you just read the news every day and We are engaged in conflicts.
We in destructive measures. We spend 2. 4 trillion on military budgets Instead of cooperating and working the way Science advocates by, you know, it's an infinite some game. And, the more we know the better our life would be in the future. And we know that from the past century of science and technology, and we don't learn the lesson that two wars right now about, the zero sum games, the territories that the two sides want to have.
And if you just think about it, you know, the earth is a residue from the formation of the sun. It's a tiny, tiny. Piece of rock. And for us to just look down and ignore the vast real estate that is out there, you know, it's really, it's really pretentious, uh, and it's foolish. And there are, you know, hundreds of billions of stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
And we now know that a fair fraction of them, maybe a quarter have a planet the size of the earth, roughly the same separation. So why should we think that we are unique? I think the, you know, the, the The default assumption should be that things like us should exist. Um, now the argument is that, well, uh, intelligence arrive arose on earth in the last bit of of, of the earth history, only in the last few million years.
And primitive life microbes existed since the beginning Uh, recently, there was a paper dating Luca, the last universal common ancestor. The if you trace back in time, all biological life on earth, including humans, whales, bacteria, everything, there is a common ancestor. And it was possible to date when it started.
It's 4. 2 billion years ago. Um, you know, very close to the time when the earth cooled to allow the chemistry of life as we know it in liquid water. And so that means that Primitive life is probably very common because the Earth had it as soon as it cooled. And probably Mars had it even earlier because it cooled before the Earth.
And perhaps life on Earth came from rocks that were brought to Earth from Mars. because that was a period where rocks were exchanged much more vigorously. There was a heavy bombardment at the time, so we might all be Martians. And if you think about Elon Musk wanting to go back to Mars, it's actually going back to our childhood home, potentially, if life started on Mars.
But at any event, the point is that, um, you might argue that intelligence is Rare because it only appeared in the last bit of the history of earth one part in 10, 000 But the thing to keep in mind is to find intelligent intelligent life or technological signatures might be much easier actually because You know, if I go to the Pacific Ocean and I find an interstellar object that is artificial in origin, think of it as Elon Musk's, car, the Tesla Roadster car that was launched as a dummy payload to space in 2018.
And I'm just saying maybe he is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur. Since the big bang 13. 8 billion years ago Maybe there are others that launched cars and if one of them collides with earth and interstellar car We might find the engine in the ocean or it might be something better than a car It might be you know a sophisticated gadget uh, that just stopped functioning and then collided with space trash and if I find that You know, it will be clear evidence that it's not human made And, it's artificial because it has buttons on it.
The only questions would be whether we should press a button. Um, and, um, uh, on the other hand, if you look for molecular signatures of bacteria or some primitive life forms, on an exoplanet around another star, you know, you might look for oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, water molecules. But these could all be produced by.
geological or chemical processes that have nothing to do with life. Just to give an example, there was. A paper in nature, um, recently that, uh, suggested that, uh, um, that there are, uh, deep in the ocean, uh, on the ocean floor when there is not much sunlight. So photosynthesis is not possible. Um, there seem to be a mechanism for making, uh, oxygen that is based on, uh, uh, uh, electricity and a potential, electric potential difference across the the surface. And, uh, you know, that that is electrolysis. It's called a That's breaking water molecules to their constituent oxygen and hydrogen just by having an electric, uh, potential drop. And, if nature can make oxygen this way without life, Then, if we find oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet, and by the way, it will cost us more than a 10 billion to do that, to build an observatory looking for oxygen in a planet that transits the face of Mars.
It's host star.
So my point is, even if we find it, it would not be conclusive. But if we find a technological signature, it will be conclusive. And moreover, even if one civilization across the entire galaxy produced a star, replicating probe, a probe that has a 3D printer and, um, you know, uh, has an artificial intelligence that goes places and reproduces itself just like a dandelion seed.
You know, the flower sends seeds in the wind and they uh, Spread and, and, and recreate the flower from the DNA, from the genetic information that is in the, in the seeds. And so nature does it all the time. You can imagine a technological gadget that is self reproducing. And if that is being launched, even by one civilization at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, within a billion years, it can make its way and fill up the entire Milky Way galaxy.
So all I'm saying is it takes one. Such civilization to fill up the entire volume with those self replicating probes very quickly And I just uh, i'm about to submit a paper um On monday in a couple of days that would um, That calculates You know, where will Voyager be billions of years from now? It turns out that within 2 billion years, Voyager will be on the other side of the galaxy, compared to the sun. And, um, then it will come back to the vicinity of the sun in 4 billion years before the sun becomes a red giant, by the way, which will take 7. 6 billion years. So at any event, all of this is to say that, you know, most stars formed billions of years before the sun There was. Uh, the star formation history of the Milky Way was calibrated, the measured, and, there was a burst of star formation 10 billion years ago.
Now if you imagine a civilization like ours forming around the sun, like star that was made 10 billion years ago instead of 4. 6 billion years ago, you know, there was plenty of time for that civilization to send the chemical rockets that would arrive to the solar system, even if they were launched from the opposite side of the milky Way disk. And so what that tells you is that there is a good chance that we might find some, uh, traces of uh, other civilizations. And I call that space archaeology. basically uh, looking for, or you can call it space astro archaeology, uh, looking for traces of um, civilizations that existed before us, just as we do here on earth.
uh, except it's in space where time is measured in billions of years.
[00:15:35] Matt Geleta: yeah, I guess, um, you know, what you're touching on there, uh, different, different Ideas of kind of search strategies for looking for life out there and, and I guess the selection of the most likely strategy depends a lot on the sort of background assumptions of what the nature of that life might be. Uh, and I'm interested to know if there is any sort of consensus view among astrophysicists today.
about what that might look like. Um, and if not, what is driving the difference? So why would that, what is the difference in world views between astrophysicists, such that there could be such disagreement on how to search for life?
[00:16:15] Avi Loeb: um, well, first, let me say, if you go on a date here on earth, then it's very likely that the person you meet will share a DNA that is resembles yours. You know that the person would have two eyes, two ears. um, but, um, when you deal with an encounter with life from another star, all bets are off because. It could be life as we don't know it.
Even within the solar system on Titan, you know, the only other object other than the earth that has liquids on its surface, it's a third of the surface temperature of the earth relative to absolute zero 90 degrees. And it has liquid methane and ethane. And really my desire, my wish is to go fishing on Titan.
It's a moon of Saturn. Uh, why do I want to go fishing? If I catch a fish, I will not eat it. For sure, it's a health hazard. You know, something that swims in methane and ethane is not good for your your, your health. But, um, but it would show us that life as we don't know it could exist. And, you know, it could be something really weird.
And I would argue the same about intelligence. You know, intelligence may not be, um, uh, unique and understandable for us. Uh, people often argue that mathematics and science speak a language that is universal, but I would not be that confident. And therefore I think it would be really difficult for us to anticipate what we might find.
my approach in terms of looking for objects is basically to be open minded, not to assume anything and just look for something that is not familiar. Okay. So if we find objects in the sky, that are not human made and are not nature natural, Uh, and they look technological, then I just want to know what they look like because I don't want to assume anything.
I just want to find something not familiar. to me. Okay, so that's the approach I take without assuming anything now with respect to the, the, the, the search that most of the astronomy community takes. It's a search for, uh, bio signatures or molecular fingerprints that may be indicative of life. primitive life on exoplanets in the atmospheres of exoplanets that that the transit the face of their star so that we can see the absorption fingerprints of various molecules in the atmospheres of those planets and You know that that is the definition of the next Big observatory the the habitable world observatory that is currently the favorite observatory.
Uh, It was recommended in the Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics issued by the National Academies in the U.
S. And, um, such an observatory right now is estimated to cost, by NASA, to cost about, 11 billion. dollars. My point is before we invest 11 billion dollars in looking for oxygen, where as I said before might not necessarily imply life, we should invest, you know, tens of millions of dollars to study interstellar objects.
That was not done. And, um, this is such a small fraction of, of the cost that it's worth doing first, because perhaps this approach of looking for objects, you know, among all the interstellar rocks, there might be some space trash and. The reason I'm saying that is because out of the three objects that we identified over the past decade, uh, there were the interstellar meteor I am one from 2000 and 14.
Um, more more, um, much bigger object about 100 m in size, was not a meteor, did not collide with earth, but was noticed based on the reflection of sunlight from it.
Um, in 2000 And, 17. and then the third one was a comet called Borisov in 2000 and 19. Out of these three, the only one that is familiar is Borisov. It's just a comment. but, the meteor was of unusual material strength because it disintegrated only in the lower atmosphere where the stress was higher than, on any other meteorite.
And So the the, the stress exerted by the friction on air was unprecedented Uh, before the object disintegrated, which suggests that it's, it may have had an unusual material strength. And it also was faster than 95 percent of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun. So that's, I am one from 2014. And then a more, more, uh, had a weird shape, uh, the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours.
And it was also pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without any cometary evaporation. So there was no rocket effect acting on it. And finally, uh, Borisov indeed looked like, um, a comet that is familiar. And so my colleagues. Well, my colleagues made two statements. One of them, who is an expert on solar system objects, after there was a colloquium at the, At Harvard, at the Institute for Theory and Computation, for which I serve as director.
Um, it was about Oumuamua, uh, around 2018. And, uh, when we left the room, the, my colleague said, Oumuamua is so weird, I wish it never existed. And, you know, to me, that's the wrong attitude. If you are really driven by curiosity, you really should be excited when something doesn't fit your past narrative because nature is trying to teach you something new, you know, and, um, and so the other thing is, um, obviously there were many papers written about Oumuamua trying to explain it as a rock of a type that we've never seen before and, um, You know, I said, well, maybe it's pushed by reflecting sunlight, in which case it would be very thin and, and that's something that nature doesn't make.
And maybe a, a surface layer of an object, a broken piece of a Dyson sphere. And so, um, I think until we have more data, we can't really tell. And of course, the lesson from that is let's find more of the, of the same. And, And in a year, there will be a new telescope in Chile called the Rubin Observatory that could potentially discover an Oumuamua like object, you know, every few months.
And, um, I, I'm really eager to, to get more data on any object that looks as, as uh, unusual as, as Oumuamua was. And then when, when Borisov showed up, people said, well, this one looks natural. And I said, of course. And they said, well, doesn't it convince you that Oumuamua is natural? And my answer was that, you know, if you go down the street and you see A weird person, and after that you see a normal person, it doesn't make the weird person normal.
[00:23:39] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's really fascinating. I want to dig into, uh, the hypotheses around these. mysterious, uh, interstellar objects and, um, you know, what it is about them that, that makes us think that they might be technological. Um, I guess one of the, the key, um, background things that needs to be true in order to take the, one of these hypotheses seriously is some sort of background belief on, um, how likely it is that such technology would exist and would, um, uh, would come into our solar system, for example.
Um, and there seems to be a fairly stark divide here in views, um, uh, because, you know, reading the history of Oumuamua, for example, Um, the things you've written, things that have been written about your papers. Um, I would say it's nothing short of vitriol, actually. Um, there is some very, uh, stark disagreement.
Um, and I find that very, very curious because, um, we all do come to this question with basically the same information. Uh, you know, astrophysics community has the same information about, uh, how, uh, Uh, interstellar objects work, um, uh, and yet the conclusions that are drawn do tend to differ, uh, quite starkly or the openness to these strange hypotheses, hypotheses do tend to differ quite starkly.
What's at the, what's at the heart of this?
[00:25:05] Avi Loeb: the, well, if, if we had conclusive data, if we had good enough data, we could tell if it's an unusual Like, to give you an example, some of the mainstream scientists advocated, Oh, it's a rock made of pure hydrogen. We've never seen an object made of pure hydrogen. Why should that be the mainstream view?
Why? Just because they don't want to consider the possibility of a technological object. Okay, that's the only reason. Because we have never seen, we don't know if hydrogen icebergs are made in the first place. So I said, okay, forget about it. Let's assume that they are made. They would not survive the journey.
So we, I wrote a paper with uh a colleague, Tim Huang, where we show that an iceberg made of hydrogen would not survive the journey. And the authors of that suggestion said, yes, right. So Okay. So maybe it was. A water iceberg that was turned into a hydrogen outer layer. And then we showed they made a mistake in the energy equation and they did not respond to that. At first they said our papers need to be refereed before they respond to that. And then when our paper was published, they didn't respond to that. And the strange thing is also that reporters reported about their paper. But when we show that it's wrong, they did not report about that. And I asked the editors of Scientific America and they said we don't want to confuse our readers. Now I ask you, is it more confusing to report the truth than if you don't want to confuse the readers with details about why an argument may be wrong? Then what are, how can you get credibility as a science journalist? You need to present all the information we have so if they made a mistake in the energy equation They should either address it and by the way, the mistake is a factor of a million I'm not talking about factor for the unity and then there was a suggestion.
Oh, no, it's actually a Nitrogen iceberg chipped off planet like Pluto and we wrote a paper showing that there is not enough Solid nitrogen in the Milky Way galaxy to make a large enough population of those Okay. So of course you can insist that you are representing the mainstream and talk about objects that do not exist.
But why should that be more credible than a possibility that is not ruled out, that it's. technological in origin simply because it's so weird. It's not that I was dreaming of a technological object out of no evidence. whatsoever. I mean, there is evidence that this object is different than the rocks that we are familiar with. Okay. So to me, it sounds like common sense that this should, this possibility should be entertained. But what happens in academia very often is that because the stakes are low, unlike in politics, where it's life and death situations sometimes, because the stakes are low, you can have mobs that do not share, that do not follow common sense. They will just insist, because they were experts on rocks, that it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. And I say the same will happen if The Tesla Roadster car would collide with earth, you know, and appear as a meteor. They would say it's a red rock of a type that we've never seen before. So at which point would you say, okay, well, you know, these people are not reasonable.
Once you have material evidence or very clear data that indicates that they're wrong, and that takes time and effort. Now, many of those have opinions. You know, people have strong opinions. I don't mind that they have strong opinions, but they should not ridicule the alternative if it's just a matter of opinion. And they do ridicule the alternative, but you look at the history of science and you see that many of the truths that are held very dearly as such, were ridiculed and that includes dark matter, you know, there were people very strongly opposing it and claiming that that's Ridiculous to consider that there is matter other than the one we know in the universe that it makes 85 percent of the matter content of the universe Um, you know the the idea of um, uh, Plate tectonics came from a very long history.
It Took 40 years before the scientific community accepted the idea that the Africa was connected to, you know, Australia and to the Americas. We could have had an in-person, uh, conversation, you know, at the, in the same room. Uh, I could have driven to your place if we lived 250 million years ago because New Zealand, Australia were all part of Africa.
And when that was proposed by Alfred Wagoner in uh, 1910, uh, it was argued that he is not an expert, and doesn't know what he's talking about, and that's ridiculous. And he died in the 1930s, Thing, you know, with the entire scientific community ridiculing his idea until 20 years later. It was realized that the vegetation in Africa and and South America match.
along the shorelines that the geological record indicates they were all part of the same supercontinent, okay? And there are many such examples, even meteors, you know. Um, there were, people thought that before 1803 that rocks cannot fall from the sky. I mean, we see rocks around us. How can a rock fall from the sky?
That's ridiculous. Until there was a meteor shower in Liege, France, that a lot of people saw. And then it became the consensus. And now what you find is people arguing that rocks can only come from the solar system, or at least there is no evidence for interstellar objects, colliding with earth, which is, you know, we can talk about it because I went on an expedition a year ago.
to the Pacific Ocean to look for the materials from a meteor for which the data was obtained by U. S. government satellites from the light generated by the fireball of this meteor. And they measured the speed of it, and it was definitely unbound To the sun and moreover was moving faster than most stars in the vicinity of this of the sun.
So, so at any event, these situations happen over and over again. And my point is, you know, let's be open minded and um, let's approach the universe with the curiosity of a kid rather than pretending that we know the answers in advance and What that means is that you need to engage in the hard work of collecting evidence and it's a lot of work It requires money And it requires time, but it's much easier to sit on your chair and say, I'm an expert on the subject.
And how dare someone else say something that violates what we already know. And I know what I'm talking about and then ridicule the person and say bad things about the person, not about the substance, you know, that is bad practice. That is not science. And then there is. Another group of people that was not there, you know, 50 years ago, but now is very vocal.
That's people that blog on social media. There are some science journalists, and some of them claim that they are astrophysicists. You know, they are, they are scientists, but you check their CV, their resume, and they haven't published a single scientific paper over the past decade. So then you ask yourself, how is it possible that, you know, a book critic that never wrote a book.
Over the past decade would claim to protect, the profession of writing books and argue against writers who actually write books right now. So I'm actually doing science. You know, it's a lot of work, and I get critics that do nothing, and they just appear to make comments in the media. And the visibility that they get is because of my hard work, but they go negative about it, but without doing anything and it's just bad practice.
And I regard those activities as anti science because science is supposed to be guided by evidence. And if evidence does not fall into our lap, new knowledge does not fall into our lap. You know, um, we had to invest 10 billion dollars in the large Hadron collider to discover the Higgs boson. We had to invest. 10 billion dollars in the Webb telescope to find the first galaxies.
my expedition cost one and a half million dollars. The next one was, will be six and a half million dollars. You know, it's really a lot of work to coordinate an ocean expedition, and collect materials from a depth of one and a half to two kilometers across the region that is 11 kilometers in size, which is what we did.
And after we put all this effort and brought back material, it took us nine months to analyze it, but it didn't prevent people who didn't do anything, who didn't have access to the materials to make statements, express opinions. So, you know, I think if you are guided by evidence, you should be always excited.
You know, we are finding something that perhaps represents new knowledge, because that's the whole purpose of science and let's be guided by evidence rather than by opinions.
[00:34:58] Matt Geleta: I mean, all of this, um, all of this really draws up the question of the function of our scientific institutions more generally and their ability to deal with, um, highly speculative topics. Uh, and, you know, as
[00:35:13] Avi Loeb: Well, it's not that because if you look at other areas, let me give you two examples. one is dark matter, you know, uh, for 50 years there were searches for dark matter and you might say, Oh, well, that's mainstream. Of course. We know that there is dark matter. Yeah. But what is the nature of dark matter?
So the popular view was that it's weakly interacting massive particles, and perhaps they represent the new symmetry of nature, supersymmetry. You know, we invested billions of dollars looking for weakly interacting massive particles in laboratory experiments. Most recently, in the Large Hadron Collider, we were looking for supersymmetry, we haven't found it. So you say, well, was that a speculation? It's not defined as a speculation because the mainstream adopted it. We spent billions of dollars, we didn't find it. So in retrospect, was it a speculation? Of course, because it wasn't found. How can something not be found if it's not a speculation, right? So in retrospect, it was a speculation.
So then you need to ask, why was it embraced by the mainstream? This particular speculation, Because people thought it makes sense because of its mathematical features, because things sort of, came together in some way, but it didn't end up describing reality, which is really the goal of physics. Okay.
So whether you choose the option of dark matter being weakly interacting, massive particles that are representing supersymmetry or not is a matter of taste. So then you have to ask, is this more speculative, uh, to consider the possibility that interstellar objects, which look anomalous might be technological.
Is it more, uh, heretic and controversial than considering the dark matter to be of something that it's not. And, um, you know, it's not just this option. It's the option of axioms. It's the option of a lot. There are lots of examples. There are lots of. uh, wrong ideas in the context of the search for dark matter.
We still don't know after 50 years of doing, experimental work, we still don't know what, what it is. Okay? And, um, think about even a worse example than that. Consider string theory. That's, a, a, a, an approach to unifying quantum mechanics and gravity. It's mathematical gymnastics because it was never demonstrated by quantum mechanics. by any experimental data to be the correct approach. In fact, it doesn't even make a prediction that is unique. There are many possibilities and within our lifetime, there is no experiment that anyone conceived that would test the ideas. Of string theory, or let's put it this way. One experiment was looking for supersymmetry with some people regarded this the foundation for, for, for string theory.
It was not found. So the answer is, Oh, well, let's just wait. Maybe the next experiment we'll find it, but it was not found. And then, uh, extra dimensions is another facet of string theory. We don't have any clue that extra dimensions exist, but yet it is the mainstream for 50 years. of theoretical particle physics and the brightest minds are working on it and they don't have any, you know, they don't feel that they're speculating because everyone is doing it and they give each other awards and honors.
And it's considered the mainstream and anyone that makes uh, calculations in the context of shrinking uses it as a sandbox for doing intellectual gymnastics, mathematical gymnastics to demonstrate that they are smart. Okay, so that itself is an important purpose, but is really the purpose of physics to demonstrate that we are smart or to find out what nature is.
And, you know, it doesn't require much mathematical sophistication to look at an object and say it's technological in origin and it's not human made. I don't need extra dimensions for that, but that would be regarded as an extraordinary claim. Whereas the fact that we live in extra dimensions, sure, be my guest.
And then you think about it, that's for 50 years. mainstream. Uh, and I had um, breakfast with a string theorist and I asked him, what's your most important scientific paper? And he said, it's a paper about supersymmetry. And that's one of the leaders of string theory. And I said, well, but you know, it was not found by the large Hadron collider.
So how can you regard it as your most important paper? After all, physics is about describing reality. And he said, well, we just have to wait. The next accelerator might find it. And that reminded me of the religious orthodox community in Crown Heights, New York City, where, you know, it's the Jewish community and I'm Jewish, but I can mention that then, you know, they believe that their rabbi will become the messiah after he dies and the rabbi died.
and didn't come back as the Messiah. So that was a data point, just like we didn't find supersymmetry. So what did the community say in response to this data point? They said, we just have to wait. Now that is understandable in the realm of religion, faith, but is it very different from a string theorist just saying, let's just wait another a hundred years, another 200 years, another millennium, maybe then we'll have some evidence.
So when you ask me about mainstream in academia, you know, it's not, it doesn't resist speculation. That's not true. I just gave you an example of a theory that not only speculates, but there is no, in the horizon of our lifespan, there is no experiment that would test it and they don't need it to be proud of the, of the work they're doing.
So if that exists, Why aren't we embracing the search for things like us on planets that look like the earth? I mean to me it sounds like common sense doesn't it?
[00:41:56] Matt Geleta: yeah, I guess, um, you, you do, you do face the chicken and egg problem though of needing to invest a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of effort, uh, into accumulating. the evidence that supports these hypotheses. Um, but then also needing to have some conviction that you're going to find something useful before investing the time and energy and effort.
[00:42:16] Avi Loeb: Well, but why why would you invest 50 years in In searching for extra dimensions.
[00:42:22] Matt Geleta: Oh, I think the, the string, this, this, the string theory question, I think has a, it's a whole different kettle of fish. Um, but
[00:42:30] Avi Loeb: Well, it's not just string theory why weakly interacting massive particles is a dark matter There are other people who work on primordial black holes as a dark matter, you know people make speculations and then stick with them for decades But they would not argue that it's not worthwhile, whereas in the context of searching for things like us, they would argue that it's, uh, that it's, um, controversial.
And just the search for the evidence. I'm not talking about the idea by itself. Now, why would that happen? I mean, the public clearly has a different view because the public, you know, there are more people who believe that we are not alone, that there is an intelligent species out there than the number of people who believe in the biblical God.
And very often, uh, committees that allocates funds for science argue we shouldn't take on a risky project because We might be wasting taxpayers money. And I say, did you ever ask the taxpayers what they want their money to be spent on? Because if you did, they will tell you that they are much more curious about whether we have a partner in interstellar space than the question of what the dark matter is made of
[00:43:50] Matt Geleta: yeah, it's, um, it's interesting because I think there has been a shift in the public perception and understanding Uh, or just, I would just say the, the, the base assumption of.
what is out there in the universe, I mean even in the last 20 years, um, there has been a stark shift where I think the default assumption now is that we are almost certainly not alone, um, and but yet there is this dissonance because I think that belief is true and that belief is also held by scientists, but then there is also a very stark resistance to, uh, an extraterrestrial hypothesis that explains anything that we do see.
And to, to me those, those two views do seem very much in tension.
[00:44:33] Avi Loeb: Well, um, the situation is that you have critics or skeptics and believers and they polarize the discussion just the way it's in politics. You see the far left and the far right. uh, Making unreasonable statements and helping each other to survive. So the extremes actually uh, dominate the scene. And so what happens is you have within the public people who know the answer.
They don't need the scientific evidence. But they know that we are visited some claim that they were abducted and all kinds of ridiculous claims And then of course the scientists say, you know, we don't want to sleep in the same bed as those people So we don't want to work on this subject But I say that's not the right approach because a thousand years ago There were people claiming that the human body has a soul And that it should not be dissected because you can hurt the soul of a person if you open the body.
And imagine if scientists were to attend to this notion, they would never develop modern medicine the way it is now, that saved lives of many people. So what is the lesson to be learned? That we should not abide by how ridiculous some of the ideas are on the subject that we are studying. We should study it by collecting new evidence that will guide us for the answer.
And that has been true throughout science. That's what we should do. And if there are people making, you know, crazy statements on either side, uh, they should be simply ignored because going in the middle uh, of the road, you know, is the most common sensical thing to do. Follow the evidence. But it's the least popular populated path.
So when people say artificial intelligence will help science. Innovate. I say you have to be careful about that because you train AI systems, like the large language models on what people do, and most people are taking extreme views or taking, making, statements based on opinion, not based on evidence, so if you train AI systems on the way people operate, and that includes in academia and in science, you will never take the middle ground, which is the most sensible thing to do because it's.
It's the least populated. Most of the time you have an opinion. People have an opinion. A biological brain is driven by jealousy or doesn't want anything new to be said about, you know, the field of an expert. Uh, it's driven by competition for limited resources. And it's driven by tribalism. If there is a group of people that you can relate to and all of them say the same thing, you feel stronger.
And then you just want to cancel the people in the other tribe. And so all of these motivations end up being, you know, very, um, toxic and, and, and the destructive for the progress. of scientific knowledge. And I find that to be unfortunate because, you know, basically, you lock the mainstream in a direction that may be, that may end up not being the most productive one.
Uh, you should let many flowers bloom.
[00:48:07] Matt Geleta: But isn't, isn't the issue that we're talking about here with, um, sort of scientific consensus and where the community focuses, Almost the opposite of, of what you said about, um, you know, extreme views proliferating. So, for example, you, you mentioned if we were to leverage large language models to help scientific progress, it's going to be trained on extreme views.
Um, but at the same time, we've said that there is sort of like this inertia in the scientific community to stick with what's known. Are these two views in tension? Isn't the issue that we're talking
[00:48:45] Avi Loeb: no,
no, no. so so, so what I mean by extreme views is that people stick to what we already know and have extreme views on, on new knowledge on innovation. They have, they basically, um, step on any flower that rises above the grass level. They don't want something new. Like if an, if there is an expert on meteors, uh, that expert would prefer to assume that every object coming from the sky is a rock from the solar system and that you need extraordinary evidence to demonstrate something else, just the way that before 1803, nothing, no rock could have come from the sky.
So the idea is that by extreme views, I mean, basically resisting evidence that violates past knowledge. That's an extreme view, in my opinion. If you have evidence that implies something different than what you were expecting, it's an opportunity to learn. Now, of course, you could have false alarms. You could have, and the only way to find out that it's a false alarm is by collecting more evidence.
So you should be thrilled if something completely unexpected comes your way, and then you should be motivated to look for more evidence. In order to firm up the conclusion and if it ends up being nothing if Oumuamua Ends up being an object from a new class of you know, hydrogen icebergs So be it we learn something new But you should not assume that what you knew in the past must be the case and that's really The way that you know based on my experience in science for many decades Is the most it's the most common response that you get to a new idea Yeah. Now, the other thing is I worked in cosmology, you know, studying the universe where the dark matter is not known.
And, uh, within that intellectual culture, it was encouraged to come up with ideas that are not conventional because, you know, we just don't know what the dark matter is. So maybe experimentalists can rule out this or that possibility. It gives work for people to rule out possibilities. If you come up with those suggestions.
And so when I saw the data on Oumuamua, it intrigued me and I came up with the possibility that maybe it's artificial. And I didn't see anything bad about it. And the paper was accepted for publication within three days. But the minute that the media paid attention to this idea, you know, and this was a paper, the only paper I know from the Astrophysical Journal that was quoted verbatim by, on CNN by, Michael Smirconish.
You know, the minute that there was a lot of attention to this possibility, that this object was weird and possibly technological, my colleagues started pushing back and the more attention the subject got, the more personal they got. And so to me, that indicates very clearly that it has nothing to do with the evidence.
And nothing to do with being open minded. It's just jealousy for the attention.
[00:52:04] Matt Geleta: Yeah. I would like to, I would like to explore that. Um, that sort of like a personal, uh, stage, um, of your, of your career shortly, but maybe just to make it really practical for a second. Um, you know, we've talked about, um, uh, evidence for, um, technologically advanced civilizations. And we opened with that question from Chris Anderson.
Um, maybe let's just make it very practical. What specifically would you be expecting to find in the next 10 years? Um, and, and what do you think we might be able to find that would actually convince a large portion of the scientific community that this is an idea worth taking seriously?
[00:52:43] Avi Loeb: yeah, it's very simple Um, just consider the rubin observatory in chile funded by the national science foundation that will start operation in 2025. It will employ a 3. 2 billion pixel camera And by the way, the secondary mirror of that telescope was just put in place 3. 2 billion pixels is a thousand times more than you have on your cell phone, and it will survey the southern sky every four days.
So based on my calculations, it should discover if if Oumuamua was one object from a population on random trajectories. If it was not intentionally visiting in a very specific orbit, the vicinity of Earth, but there are plenty such objects and they just move on random trajectories, you know, each, then the Rubin Observatory should find one every, every few months.
And that means that we will have plenty, you know, within the coming years. And then we can check if all of them are rocks. Or maybe, you know, if there are extremely unusual objects, we can get more data because now we have the web telescope that could detect the infrared emission from such an object. We didn't have that when Oumuamua showed up.
So we can actually measure the emission, the thermal emission, the heat coming from the object, not just the reflection of sunlight. And that given the distance of the object can tell us the size of the object. We can also pinpoint very precisely by triangulating the location of the object using a telescope on earth.
And the web telescope that is one and a half million kilometers away from Earth. So it's, it's called parallax. You basically have two eyes looking at the object. You can figure out its location extremely precisely. And so if we get a lot of data on the next, Oumuamua or the next weird object, and we realize, It doesn't look like a rock, looks like a piece of metal made of, if we learn about the composition doesn't look like a rock, you know, I think it will be difficult to ignore that and argue that it's a rock, it's a piece of metal that was, produced in molecular cloud the way that the hydrogen iceberg idea was, was, uh, invented.
[00:55:15] Matt Geleta: Like a, like a
[00:55:16] Avi Loeb: Um, and,
um, so that's just an example. And of course, if something collides with earth like this meteor, you know, there is a chance um, that we would find um, the relics of what is left over from the wreckage. And then it's easy to tell if it's human made or not. or technological from another civilization. And then these are examples where, and also even if you look at something in the sky, and you know, I'm leading the Galileo project and we have one functioning observatory.
So this is an observatory looking at the sky all the time in the infrared, optical, radio, audio. Now also ultraviolet and we're analyzing the data with machine learning software and just looking for objects that are not Familiar and so far, you know over the past six months We saw more than half a million objects and all of them look familiar the only reason we built this observatory is because three years ago the Director of national intelligence in the u.
s. And avril haines submitted a report to the u. s. Congress Talking about unidentified anomalous phenomena Objects that the intelligence agencies cannot identify, which means uh, two things. Either they're not doing their job. And these are, you know, uh, objects produced by adversarial nations to spy over the U S uh, or they are extraterrestrial.
Um, So what? we, Obviously there is a lot of crap in the sky that humans make balloons, drones, airplanes. So we want to see if there is anything else. Um, and since then, of course, the, the director of national intelligence submitted two additional reports, and there was a, a new office established in The pentagon to, to look into those reports and but instead of waiting for the government to tell us what lies outside the solar System, you know, that's not their day job Their day job is national security and my day job is to figure out as an astronomer what lies outside the solar system so the sky is not classified and we are looking at it and then We are now writing a number of papers talking about the preliminary results and the fact that we haven't seen anything So once again you have these communities of believers and skeptics And, they, I get attacked from both directions by taking the most sensible thing, um, the most sensible approach, which is to build an observatory and collect the evidence, collect the data and whatever we find, we report, you know, that, and that was not done before in a systematic way like that.
Uh, and, to me again, it's common sense, um, but somehow common sense is not common in academia.
[00:58:08] Matt Geleta: I mean, suppose, suppose we were to go ahead and build this observatory and for many, many years, all we did observe was, was rocks. It was all rocks. And, um, and there was no evidence of, of technology. Um, what would you make of that? Like, you know, at what, at what point does the burden of proof start to sway the view towards, you know, perhaps, you There is no, um, technologically advanced civilization out there.
What, what would it take?
[00:58:37] Avi Loeb: Yeah, I think, if, if, um, within the coming decade, let's say we invest tens of millions of dollars, which is not, uh, you know, there are you know, people, wealthy individuals who are approaching me, routinely, you know, and, are supporting the research. And So suppose we do invest the tens of millions of dollars, which again, to remind you, it's much less than 11 billion dollars in the world.
in the in the habitable world, the observatory that the mainstream wants to invest in. Um, and suppose we do it for a decade and we don't find anything, you know, that that to me would be a strong argument that maybe indeed uh, most of I mean, we can basically put an upper limit on the fraction of objects.
Interstellar objects that are technological. Okay. And, um, you know, I asked this question, uh, a, a person who gave a talk at the conference that I organized. A decade ago about dark matter and the person was speaking about weakly interacting massive particles And I said look you've been searching for decades for weakly interacting massive particles You haven't found any how long will you continue?
You know, you did it for decades. You're now In your late 50s, you know, you have a couple of decades left Then How long will you continue and he said oh the decision is really simple as long as I get funded Now, the thing about it is he continued to be funded, because that's part of the mainstream. but the way I see it is, you know, it's more, it's not a question of money.
It's a more question of the fact that we live for a finite amount of time and, you know, we better make the most out of it. Okay, so to me, this is such a fundamental question that I want to spend a decade checking. But if I don't find anything, I might decide to move on to something else. Just the way I worked on the first stars and galaxies, you know, for the first decade of my academic career.
And I pioneered this subject that is now, you know, the, the main focus of the web telescope. And it was celebrated the white house and, you know, looking for the first stars and galaxies. That's a subject that I pioneered early on in my career. Um, and the same way, in the same way I worked on black holes and, suggested them. imaging them.
And now it's a big game industry of imaging black holes. And, you know, I was the founding director of the black hole initiative at Harvard university that were, the first image of a black hole was obtained. Um, so. I worked on subjects for, of older decade that ended up, you know, producing important science.
And if this one does not, so be it. But until I spend that decade, I'm not convinced. So if I find something, this would be the most important accomplishment, not only of my career, but of science in general, because it would have huge implications for the future of humanity as to whether we, I call it the most romantic question in science.
Are we alone?
[01:01:58] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Do you, uh, do you feel we're ready? Do you feel we're ready to, I mean, maybe we will never be ready. Um, but
[01:02:06] Avi Loeb: Oh, I don't care if we're ready. The point is, you know, we were not ready that to be Uh orbiting the sun and the sun orbiting the center of the milky way and the milky way moving in some random directions Relative to the universe at large. We were not ready for that. We thought everything Moves around the earth, but who cares?
Now, of course Nicolaus Copernicus cared, you know, you can see his book behind me on on on my left side Because I was invited by the Polish government Just half a year ago to deliver a keynote lecture in celebration of 550 years to the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus And my lecture was about the next Copernican revolution, meaning that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe.
And Copernicus did not want to rock the boat. By the way, he was a priest. So he wanted to help the church, and the church had a problem. They couldn't get Easter correctly. They always got it off by a few days, and they used the model in which the earth was at the center. So Copernicus realized that if you put the Sun at the center, he can get Easter predicted much more precisely and gave the model to the church. And the church said, thank you very much. We will use your model. But we all know that in reality, this is just a theoretical model. In reality, the earth is at the center and they banned his book. It was a forbidden book until the 19th century.
And on his deathbed, he was presented with the first hard copy of the book. And, you know, he didn't want to rock the boat. 50 years later, Galileo Galilei rocked the boat. He was put in house arrest. And I really connect to Galileo much more than to Copernicus. I actually gave a lecture called Catedra Galiliana in, a school in Normale superior in Pisa where Galileo was.
Um, and, then the reason I connect to, to Galileo more is because, you know, if the boat is heading in the wrong direction, we need to rock it.
[01:04:38] Matt Geleta: Do you, um, suppose you, suppose you rocked the boat and, uh, and we did, um, discover conclusively, um, sort of extraterrestrial technology. How do you think the world would react? What would change? Because like part of me thinks there is such a strong belief there, as we've said, that, um, uh, extraterrestrial life does exist.
Um, and if that's true, almost finding it.
shouldn't actually change that much because the belief is already there. Um, what is your vision for how the world might change?
[01:05:14] Avi Loeb: it really depends on what we find, because there is a chance we would realize that You know, the, the the object that we found represents technologies of the future, uh, simply because that civilization had more than one century of science and technology. You know, we discovered quantum mechanics only a century ago.
I'm 61 years old. I actually lived more, through more than half of modern science. Can you believe that? I, since the time I was born in 1962, 62. Um, so I'm actually 62 years old. I live the half of the history of modern physics, uh, including the, you know, relativity, quantum mechanics, everything we use now for gadgets, building gadgets.
Now imagine another civilization that existed for 1000 years of technology or a million years of technology, science and technology, or maybe even a billion years, uh, they would produce things that we, that represent our future, but we can't really imagine, and we would have some religious, Oh, looking at those things, you know, there is the biblical story of Moses, in the old Testament, looking at the burning bush that was never consumed.
And that convinced Moses that There is a superhuman entity that he called God. Nowadays, you can buy online gadgets that would have been much more impressive than a burning bush that is not consumed. And if Moses were to see them, he would be filled with the same religious. Oh, now it would be towards us.
But we just represent a more advanced technological civilization relative to Moses. That's all. So my point is, it will affect our religion. Just think about another civilization capable of actually solving the puzzle of how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. So they would have a good idea about what happened before the Big Bang.
And they might even have a recipe for how to create a baby universe. Because if you know how our universe started, you might try to create it. In the laboratory, and that's the job description of God. If you were to advertise, the, job description of God, such a civilization could apply for it because you know, if they are able to make a universe, what else, they can make everything else that is in it, including life and everything.
so my point is if we meet. A higher level uh, of a technological civilization. Um, that might look like it does miracles for us. You know, it might bring science and religion together for us. That's a huge. That's a huge impact on the history of humanity, you know? Um, and then the other thing that can happen is, you know, there is the uh, Darwinian principle of the fittest surviving. And, you know, you think about it long term, not just over timescale of years, thousands of years or millions of years, but billions of years. Okay. So what does it mean to be the fittest? Well, in a billion years, the sun will boil off all the oceans on earth. We will not be able to stay on earth.
Like all life as we know, it will be eliminated at that point. And, you know, you can imagine a mass exodus of, Humans and other planets like the earth must have gone through that because their star, you know formed billions of years before the sun and So in that case, you know, um, just Knowing what happened to other civilizations learning from their history figuring out how they managed to survive could be inspiring for us and and we might behave differently and you know at the very elementary level If we realize there is someone else out there, it might unify us because we would feel that we are all on the same boat, the earth.
We are all part of the same team. We will stop killing each other because we depend on each other for the future. And perhaps we will explore space the way they did. And perhaps we, you know, we'll change our priorities. You know, this shock therapy is the only way I can see that prosperity and peace will come to earth.
It's not through singing John Lennon's song. Imagine all the people living in peace you know, that's utopia. It's shock therapy. Once you realize there is another population out there. And we should all work together to survive just like they did, or we have competition with them, or, you know, they pose a threat to us, or whatever.
It will bring people together. And, um, you know, there is this notion in religion of, um, a messiah. Um, and it's usually thought to be someone who lived on Earth, a passenger on this boat that we all occupy. What I'm saying is that it may be Someone from another star that will bring peace and prosperity to earth and that's a huge impact on world politics a huge impact on our aspirations for the future and the way we behave towards each other.
What else? how can science bring a bigger impact than that? So now, you know, the argument is similar to Blaise Pascal, who said, you know, he was a mathematician and he said, well, The, There are two possibilities, either God exists or does not exist. That's what Pascal said. And he said, Well, you can be an atheist and, and say that God doesn't exist.
But if you just imagine the implications, if God exists, you know, then, then you can't ignore that possibility. You cannot just say uh, brush it aside, because if God exists and you made a mistake, the implications would be huge. For your, for yourself. Um, And so I just use this argument in the context of another civilization.
[01:11:55] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's very much an optimistic and an uplifting view of things. Um, I am curious about, you know, as you said, we've had modern science for on the order of a hundred years, which is essentially zero in the context of the scale of the universe. And, um, if we were to encounter an advanced civilization,
um, almost certainly, um, they would be, uh, orders of magnitude more advanced.
It would be very, very unlikely for that not to be true. Um, but that also means that, um, well, firstly, I think we would probably be largely irrelevant to them from an intellectual perspective. Uh, but secondly, We have very little ability to predict. what they might be like and whether they might be, um, whether we might even feature in their cognition, whether they might be hostile towards us.
Uh, what is, what is your view on the case for, um, I guess, optimism for how they would be towards us?
[01:12:58] Avi Loeb: billions of years ago. Okay. We didn't exist. And if they arrive to the solar system, it would be for a completely different reason. And, um, once again, it's this notion that we are important and significant. And if they come here it's because of us. And, you know, when you see a single person who keeps saying, you know, where is everybody the way Enrico Fermi said, and Not without doing anything because Fermi didn't build a telescope, to search for them, you know, you just tell that single person that it's very pretentious to imagine that you're so attractive that everyone will come to you when you want it.
Uh, and in fact, it would be much better for your life. If you wanted to find a partner to leave your home and go to dating sites or at the very least look through your windows and search for, you know, neighbors. Um, And that's the way I think about it, that, you know, we really need to put the effort first before coming to any conclusion or having any opinion on the matter.
And people might say, Oh, well, we tried to listen for radio waves, but that's once again, like waiting at home for a phone call. It's a very specific approach that is not always giving results because nobody may call you when you're waiting. Uh, and you need to be proactive. Look for, look for objects, for example, that represent others.
Um, and, um, you know, all together, um, I think there is an opportunity for us to do much better because now we have instruments, we have the ability to process huge amounts of data with artificial intelligence. Um, I should say that, yesterday I was contacted by the CEO of, or the founder of a new A.
I. company.
Called the Cicero. And he told me that they produced a replica of me, an AI avatar that was trained on all the interviews that I gave all the essays that I wrote, the books that I wrote, everything out there. There is a lot of material. And, I was very pleased because. You know, in, in, in, when artificial intelligence, was developed, the latest models of, large language models, I was happy because it would save me time and in planning trips in, filling up forms and.
You know, managing my time and so forth. But, uh, then I realized that, um, you know, there are too many requests for interviews on podcasts and, um, and for newspapers and so forth. And if I had an AI avatar that is trained on, on, on my, materials, I could just send it to answer the questions. Uh, in those podcasts and save time and dedicate that, save time to creative work, in science.
And, even though it sounds like a fantasy, I got one step closer yesterday to fulfilling it because now this company generated an AI avatar of me that is capable of answering you know, by voice and or text answering questions in the spirit of the way of my writings and my interviews. And I was very interested to see who else they made replicas off.
And the list that they send me includes 24 people, including, um, including Albert Einstein, including Volodymyr Zelensky, uh, Kamala Harris, uh, Joe Biden, Putin, uh, uh, uh, Trump, um, and, um, uh, Sigmund Freud and, uh, John Kennedy, uh, a lot of, uh, very. uh, Important people. And I was surprised that they included my name there as well.
But, uh, at any event, I sent an email to my, um, research group and said that please interact with this system, with this AI avatar, and tell me if you see any red flags. And, uh, in response, I got, um, a very positive, um, uh, answer from the people who interacted with this AI avatar. And the reason, uh, it touches a nerve for me is because, um, both my parents passed away more than five years ago.
And, uh, I only wish that Cicero, this company existed back then, because if there was a replica of them, I could still inform that the neural network of, um, my latest, the latest developments in my life. And um, we could have obtained the most likely answers that they would have given under these new circumstances.
And, you know, right now, large language models have a number of parameters that are about 500 times. smaller than the number of synapses in the human brain. We have about a quadrillion synapses. These are connections between neurons in the human brain. And, um, the, the best large language models have about 0.
2 percent of that. So no wonder that you see the current, uh, LLMs, uh, hallucinating, making trivial mistakes, inventing references, not really standing up to the, the, the quality of the human brain in some tasks, not in all in some, they are doing very well. Um, and, uh, I, but on the other hand, if you think about Moore's law, the exponential growth in the, computational capabilities of chips um, of given size, uh, within 10 to 20 years, it's very likely that the AI systems will reach the number of parameters as the human brain has.
And at that point, it will be as complex as the human brain. Uh, the, for example, the fruit fly has thousands of neurons and they were all mapped. And, uh, therefore we can create a computer model of the way that the fruit fly thinks. But, um, we tend to think that as humans, you know, we have free will, um, meaning that, you know, I can decide whatever I want, but the only reason the human brain is not predictable is because it's very complex.
It has so many connections, you know, and in systems that have a lot of degrees of freedom, you get chaos. You get, a quantum, uncertainty playing a role. So, and the human brain interacts with an environment that is not fully known, that has a lot of free parameters as well. And so when you put the human brain in an unpredictable environment, you end up with unpredictable, Decisions you might call it free will, but it's still a mechanic.
You know, it's it's it's it's something that we can create with an AI System. That's my point. And so when AI reaches that point, you know, I would like to have my personal touring test of letting my AI Avatar interact with people like yourself in interviews, and you will decide if it's any different than interacting with me.
And if you agree that it's not very different, You know, that will save me a lot of time.
[01:20:42] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, I'm, I'm, I'm convinced that in this present case, I'm still interacting with you, but, um, it, it does, uh, it does open up a A question as we, as we bring to a wrap, you know, suppose we were to send an AI avatar out into space, um, to meet an advanced civilization. Suppose we, we knew where they were and, uh, the best way, obviously we wouldn't send a biological being.
They would probably disintegrate on the way. Um, but so we sent an AI avatar. Which person, um, past or present? Do you think we should send two represent us to this technological species?
[01:21:25] Avi Loeb: you know, it's in the same spirit as my biological daughters. Uh, sometimes I don't fully understand them, but my hope is that they will be better than me. and The same is true about my students. I hope that they will do better than the current people in academia. And, I don't care if it's, um, if it's a technological neural network system, like, uh, large language models or, AI, um, It doesn't matter to me if it's a piece of technology or it's biological. I really hope the future is better than the past. And for me, if we send out something that is the most accomplished neural network system, even if it's not biological and doesn't represent any person, any human on earth, I would be proud of it.
[01:22:23] Matt Geleta: Um, Avi, you've, you've, Uh, you've written prolifically. You've, you've spoken prolifically. You've, you've, uh, produced so many good things in the world. Um, if people do want to follow up and find more of what you're doing, uh, where's the best place for them to go? What should they do?
[01:22:39] Avi Loeb: Uh, if they want to follow updates on my current research, uh, you can subscribe for free, to my essays, Avi loeb@medium.com. Uh, otherwise there are, uh, two popular level books that I published over the past, um, couple of years. Uh, one is, uh, Extraterrestrial and the other one is Interstellar. Um, And uh, I'm now working actually on two new books um, uh, related to the expedition to the Pacific Ocean, Uh, one for adults and the other for young adults, kids, because I want to inspire them to get into science.
Uh, And finally, by the end of 2025, there will be a Netflix documentary about my research. They went with me to the Pacific Ocean and, uh, it should be very exciting to see, the film, and, just, stay tuned for that.
[01:23:38] Matt Geleta: Fantastic. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that one. Um, Avi, before we wrap anything else that you would like to, to share, um, you know, any calls to action for the audience, anyone who, uh, who's been listening and, and wants to, uh, understand more, follow up more, um, any final words?
[01:23:55] Avi Loeb: Yeah, if, if anyone wants to be, for example, a contributor to the Galileo project and, if, the level of donation is high, please contact me and you could potentially be part of the next expedition to the Pacific ocean. Um, we are now, um, Uh, collecting, um, uh, people who might, want to support that, um, uh, expedition.
Um, uh, the cost would be six and a half million dollars and we hope to split it among, uh, uh, six to to 10 people. Um, and we have some interested already. Um, but uh, at the lower level, you, know, even a small donation could help a lot. The Galileo project. and, uh, you know, uh, I'm basically, uh, you know, I was born on a farm and I think like a kid, I have a beginner's mind and I enjoy working with young, uh, uh, People because uh, they don't, uh, uh, they are not attached to their ego and they are not, um, they haven't built echo chambers that amplify their voice.
They are more curious and open minded than the adults in the room. And, uh, so if you're interested in pursuing science, I hope, to see you in the scientific community and potentially collaborate with you. Uh, because it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to, we are supposed to be driven by curiosity.
And so the more of us who are curious and, you know, I have a number of postdoctoral fellows and students that came to me and said that it was their lifelong dream to work on the subjects that I'm working on. So, um, I feel young as a result of working with them.
[01:25:47] Matt Geleta: Beautiful. Um, Avi, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for your work and thank you for joining me today.
[01:25:54] Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me.
Avi Loeb: Space Teslas and Technology from the Unknown