Transcripts For CSPAN2 Avi 20240706

Of a life of Frederick Douglass written in 1845 it describes his childhood years on Eastern Shore of maryland, his time as a slave in baltimore and his escape north. Our guest is a historian and author. Watch books that shaped america weeknights at nine eastern on cspan or go to cspan. Org books that shaped america to view the series and learn more about each book featured. Abraham avi loeb is a franklin baird junior professor of science at Harvard University, the longestserving chair of Harvard Department of astronomy, the founding director of Harvard Black hole initiative, director of the institute for theory and computation, itc, within the Harvard Smithsonian center for astrophysics. He also heads the galileoeo project, chairs the Advisory Committee for the breakthrough star shot initiative, and is former chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the national academy. Author of eight books booe than 1000 scientific papers, he is elected fellow of the American Academy of arts and sciences, the american physical society, and the International Academy of astronautics. In 2012, times selected him as one of the 25 most influential people in space. His latest book, interstellar the search for extraterrestrial life our future in theri star is available for purchase from our partner bookseller politics and prose. If you use link in the chat box which is also available on our website you will be able to purchase the book with 10 discount. Just make sure you useco the coe special ten when checking out. Now please join me in welcoming to the smithsonian associates, are below. Avi loeb. Thank you, mary beth it is a privilege to join you. And i wouldli like to show some slides and i will be delighted to answer any questions you have after the presentation. So indeed my book just came out, and the title of the book turned out to be a conclusion of a scientific paper that ihe wrote that i will describe that was the focus of the summer of 2023 for me, which was a very exhausting experience of trying to get to evidence related to an object that came from outside the solar system. The bottom line is its interstellar. And i wrote of course the book before we knew the results, and in general, the book addresses the fundamental aspects of finding evidence for technological objects near earth that were manufactured by a partner civilization out there. And just like in life, finding a partner will change the meaning of our life. And so let me start with a few words about the Galileo Project. Thats a scientific project that i am leading at Harvard University of scientists interested in systematic study in search of technological gadgets that arrived to the solar system from far away, not from earth. And what we already excuse me . I dont think youve actually shared your screen. Oh, really . Yeah. Okay. Lets make sure that it works this time. Can you see it now . Perfect. Just god ahead and make it full screen and were good to go. Okay. Thank you very much. This is the cover of my book, and then this is a picture, a team photo of the Galileo Project. And then what you see here is the design of the first observatory that is already operational at Harvard University, and basically monitors the sky 24 7 for any objects that look unusual. There are reportsts of military personnel and intelligence agencies that the sensors of the u. S. Government record every now and then anomalous objects in the sky that may not be of human origin and definitely not natural. So we want to get to the bottom of the nature of these objects by a a systematic study. Its not anecdote. Its not a pilot and a fighter jet noticing something unusual by being in the right place at the right time. This is a survey of the entire sky all the time someone vantage point. But then what we are planning on making copies of this observatory andin placing them n many geographical locations. And what you see here are the units that make up the observatory. They included the infrared cameras that look at the entire sky all the time and detect heat from objects, even at nighttime when the sun is not illuminating them. We also have an optical band, a chemist that w looks at the ente sky, and we have a passive radar that is detecting the reflection of radio wavesio from radio stations off any object in the sky. And we, in addition, have an acoustic system that detects sound waves from objects in the sky. All of our sensors are passive, intentionally, because we dont want to affect any human made objects in the sky by absorbing them. And we also have an instrument that measures the weather. And let me just show you a short video that describes the various instruments. Welcome to an overview of the Galileo Project Development Site codenamed collision run for our instrumentation suite consist of the wide field and narrow field sesectors. Widefield sensors are used for target selection and tracking. Narrow fields gather highresolution data. Our main instrument is a hemispherical array of eight infrared cameras. Next to it is the outer core, a secondary highresolution optical camera. Ly together these incidents continues to monitor and track objects in the sky analyzing them in realtime for potential anomaly activity. This is a miss, artistic monitor system designed to detect and record acoustic signature across the interest on it audible and ultrasonic manse. Amos houses an antenna for logging aircraft transponder data. Allowing us to quickly separate known from unknown object. Here we have sky watch a multi static radar system designed to track and multiple object sometimes measuring object positions and kinematics. And pacman is Environmental Monitoring system for measuring local weather conditions. Senses include an anemometer come a temperature and pressure sensors, a particle counter eight floodgate magnetometer. Next up inspector radio spectrum analyzer with a wideband and information radio and microwave. Beacon is truly are only narrow field instrument. Beacon is a highresolution handheld is in camera capable of 40 times optical zoom. Our instruments collect a wide range of data all of which is that you are computing enclosure housed beneath an outdoor instrument. Here, data is processed and analyzed in realtime. Objects detected and tracked by the widefield instruments are localized in 3d space and analyze for unusual characteristics. Selected targets are then fed ts the beacon for followup observation. Io finally, dated his record and upload it to the cloud. These combined systems comprise the currentnt version of the observatory class system with many refinements competitions and upgrade scheduled for nearterm implementation at pigeon run. So the important point to realize is the sky is not classified and, therefore, we dont need to wait for the u. S. Government to declassify information about the sky. We can do a systematic study of the sky and use computers to tell us ifg theres anything unusual. These are Machine Learning algorithms that can identify birds, airplanes, drones, balloons, i tell us if theres anything else out there. And, of course, the u. S. Government is mostly interested in anything that is a National Security threat. For as far as science is concerned, anything that says made in china is boring. What we want to see is even one objectct out of 1000 a thot may be from outside of this earth. Is there Something Like that . And we are planning to expand the current observatory to a bigger system that will include the data from satellites, will include cameras from different locations that allow us to triangulate and figure out the distance of objects in the sky. So this is work work in pr. And we are also identifying places in the United States not near any sensitive strategic site, but anywhere where there were rorts of unidentified anomalous phenomena. And a currently, we arelanning another obsertory in colorado. We have funding for a few more, but we are seeking additional funding to expand the system to about 100 observatories, that would be very helpful. And, of course, we complement the work of government in the sense that were happypy to share any data that shows human made objects with washington d. C. , if theres interest. There is satellite data that we are currently analyzing that was obtained by planet labs. Its public data, and wish to see if there any unusual objects by looking at them from above, not just from below. So altogether we have a plan for the future with different phases. Phases. Phase one is where we are rig now, and we plan to expand the system with more components. Some of which could be relatively cheap so that would allow us also mobile observatory. And we wrote about eight scientific papers about the observatory, and everything is public, our data will be open. We do not hide anything, and were happy to discuss it. Thats the way science is done. Now, my interest as an astronomer in the subject started with the discovery act in october 2017 by a telescope in hawaii that detected an object near earth this telescope was a survey telescope of the sky initiated as a result of a congressional decision to monitor the sky for any object larger than the size of a football field, which reflects enough light from the sun for us to see it. Small objects cannot be seen with existing telescopes, and this pan starts observatory was constructed in hawaii, started looking around and found this object in 2017 silva because he came close to earth. It was a size of of a football field. It was not bound to the sun by gravity. It came from outside the solar system based on its high speed, and it was given the name or more and more, which means the scout in the hawaiian language. Now, for me, it was a surprise, very intriguing discovery, because a decade earlier i predicted there should be any rocks discovered by panstarrs from other stars arriving the other stars arriving to the solar system, based on what we know about the solar system and the subject implies theres a much Larger Population than i expected so making a mistake in science is very important because it basically tells you as a scientist that the recent nature is sending us interstellar objects. This object appeared weirder and weirder as we got more data on it, its shape appeared to be that of a pancake, flat shaped based on the reflection of sunlight from it as it was tumbling and this was by various astronomers that its most likely flat. Moreover, there was another team that realized that its actually being pushed away from the sun by some Mysterious Force without seeing any cometary tail, nothing to give it a kick as a result of the rocket effect. That implied that its an unusual object not the like an asteroid because it was pushed away from the sun by some force and asteroids are just rocks that have no function and its not a comet because we havent seen any tail of gas or dust around it, and the space telescope looked deeply around it and couldnt find anything. So, my suggestion was, maybe its the reflection of sunlight thats pushing it and for that, the object had to be very thin, and in nature, it doesnt make thin objects so i suggested, maybe it was the outer layer of the technological gadget or a broken piece of some mega structure, constructed by technological civilization that makes up for some space trash passing near earth. Actually, three years later, there was another object found by the same telescope and it was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight, no cometary tail and ended up being a rocket booster launch. Here you have it, the properties associated with it original rated for another object. As a result of it being thin and made of stainless steel, that object, we know, is technological because we made it. The question is, who made it, and a couple of years after that, after it was discovered, i was interviewed on the radio about it and about the meteor found over the bering sea, just a couple of weeks earlier and i looked at the web and found a catalog from nasa of meteors and it included velocity information. So i told my students at the time, i said why dont we check if any of the fastest moving meteors may have originated from outside the solar system because i was intrigued by the existence of it. And this one was detected by u. S. Government satellites, and it was discovered in january, 2014, almost a decade ago and nobody paid attention to it until would he realized that its speed implies that it came from outside the solar system. There was an object in this catalog that came from outside the solar system and moving at 60 kilometers per second outside, not that it was bound to the sun, but it was moving faster than 95 of all stars in the vicinity of the sun relative to the socalled local standard of the milky way great lakes crossingy than almost all galaxy. And faster than 95 of the stars and maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere of the earth. And from that we concluded that it had material strength, higher than all space rocks from the solar system that were identified from nasa over the past decade, 272 of them. So i decided to lead an expedition to search for any leftover material from the explosion of this meteor because it could have been a voyagerlike meteor, just imagine the spacecraft voyager that we launched that will exit the solar system within 10,000 years that will leave the outskirts of the solar system and will not be functional and could collide with a planet like earth, and show up as a meteor, unusual strength because of the stainless steel and it benefitted from artificial propulsion and we decided to have an expedition to the pacific ocean. I managed to get one and a half Million Dollars from a private donation and established a team that went there. So, let me show you a photo album of this from this expi expedition of a ship, the star, the something of the song that you will hear. So this trip took place between the 14th and the 28th of june this year and i will show the findings in a few slides, but first, let me explain the motivation. So we realized this was the first object discovered actually from outside the solar system because it was found 2014, almost four years before. It was roughly half a meter in size and we wrote a paper about it and reviewers of the paper rejected it. They said we dont believe the data from the u. S. Government. At the time i was sharing the physics and astronomies of the National Academies and i expressed my frustration at one of the dinners we had in washington and some people approached me and said that they will be glad to help, and actually a person from the white house contacted the u. S. Space command and it took three years. The Government Works slowly just to make sure there is no Important Information being released here, and in march, 2022, the u. S. Space command issued the letter that you see on the left, sent it to nasa and this memo basically said that they confirm that this meteor was interstellar in origin, came from outside the solar system and 99. 99 confident. And so, at that point, we resubmitted a paper for publication in the physical journal and it was accepted. And in addition, the u. S. Government released the light curve of the fireball which allowed us to figure out the properties of the objects. And the objects exploded about 70 miles away from the island in papau new guinea. And we timed when they occurred 1 10 of a second from each other and probably meant that the objects broke up to three major pieces, each of them associated with a flare and the explosion took ple about 17 kilometers above the ocean surface, so it was really low in the atmosphere. And the pressure exerted on the surface of the object was much larger than all other meteors. All others were subjected to lower pressure before they disintegrated and we concluded that this object was even tougher than ion meteorites in that population, so that was again, an unusual property of this object and we were able to pinpoint the location of the meteor path by using data from a seismometer on the island, that recorded the sonic boom, the explosion sound wave and then just like in the case of the thunder, the sound arrived with some delay because the speed of sound is much lower than the speed of light and from the delay, we were able to infer the distance to the fireball from the seismometer so that narrowed down the path of the meteor. You can see it on the plot on the right side, the box that is shown of. 1 degree, by. 1 degree is the box of the department of defense for the location of this fireball, but using the seismometer data we narrowed down the path of the meteor to the blue and red. The red is simply the intersection of the strip with the department of defense arrow box. And the seismometer and fixed data, the sound data from the explosion. So this is the team of 28 people on the deck of the ship and what you see behind the team is what is called the aframe that we had the cable go from the ship to a sled that we designed, that included magnets on both sides. The sled was lower to the ocean floor which was more than a mile deep and this cable that connected it to the ship went through this aframe, through one of the hooks there and the cable went to out three miles and we tried to skim the ocean floor and collect any magneticarticles that came from the surfacef the meteor when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball. So the surface was melted by that heat and drops of material rained down and settled on the ocean floor. We used magnets assuming that the material includes iron. And so, here is a montage of several photos. You can see the sled in the top middle image and also o the right side as we were pulling it out of the ocean and it had magnets on both sid that collected magnetic particl you can see in a minute. At the bottom left and mile, the filming crew that joined us on this expedition, there were 50 of them that wanted to be there and i selected one and they one of i joked every morning at sunrise and in one of th mornings they came over and theyaid that they want to filme and the asked me to go re times longer than usual, it was about nine miles. And the director said, avi it looks like yourerunning. Are you running away from something or towards something . And i said, both. Im running away from some of my colleagues who have very strongpinions without seeking evidence and im running towards the higher intelligence in interstellar space. So, here is the sled and you see the magnets on it. They were screwed in the holes. Rubber that covered the sled. And then in the middle bottom image, you can see that we used actually suction, basically airbased suction device that allowed us to cle all the materials that were on the magnets. And basically a cleaner that we used. And then we also scraped the magnets making sure there was nothing left on him in the next run. All the together 26 times back and forth across the region of interest and here you can see a short video showing the sled as it was skimming the ocean floor. Basically, like mowing the lawn. And its mostly muck down there. There is some rocks from volcanic activity and most of the material that the sled collected was, indeed, a volcanic ash. Basically black powder of tiny particles that have nothing to do with a meteor, but we collected them. And of course, there are some rocks that we went over, as you will see in a few seconds. This video was taken during the time of the sled down on the bottom of the ocean, but we didnt get the video feed in realtime. We analyzed the video after every run that we made, that was no cable allowing us to see where we are so it was really a very charging task to find those millimeter sized molten droplets from the meteor. So, we went through 26 runs, as you can see here, the box in red is the department of defense error box around the fireball. The strip in orange is the one that we identified from the seismometer as the likely path of the meteor and you can see a lot of runs around that, but also, we had some control regions that we went to, as you can see at the bottom of this image and there is another one far at the top. Because we wanted to see the bag backgrounds that we compare against even if we find fragments from the meteor, we want to make sure that theyre not background fragments that existed everywhere. So, here is an example for these molten droplets. Whiches basically metallic marbles that we were able to find after filtering the black powderhe volcanic ash, and putting the rest of the material under a microscope on the ship. And when the first oneas d discovered, i was called tohe room, as the chief scientists and i basically hugged the person who fnd it. I was thrilled because you know, for six days we were looking for these and we didnt find them for the first six days, and i wrote an essay titled, where are the i wrote 43 diary ror detailing what is happening on the sp and there were millions of people around the world following this expedition. Those dia posts were translated to spanish and i received a huge number of emails thanking me how science is done, collecting daa evidence, and where its from. And the marbles, one with the arrow point and in the pictures you can see, many more small ones, here is one on the left. And when we looked at those, these molten droplets through the microscope, they look beautiful. Obviously, when we found the firs one, i was thrilled because i realized when i find an ant in the kitchen, it means there are many more ants out there and sure enough, we found 50 spheres on the ship and when my daughter saw this image, she asd if she can have one of them on a necklace and i tried to explain, these are millimeter in size, we cant thread them, theyre the size of a grain of sand. But they look beautiful and then we put them in vials so here you see the delivery room where delivered those babies and instead of beds we used vials so youre looking at a 50 of these found on the ship and put them in the white box, on the left, you can see on a rainy night, the person who funded the expedition is the one in the middle. Just to my right in the black rain coat. His name is josh parkinson. And you can see the filming crew basically documenting this work. It was hard work. I didnt sleep for more than three hours at a time because these runs were coming back in the middle of the night at some unexpected hours. So i basically slept in the Conference Room and they would call me every time the sled came back so i participated in all of the runs and making sure that we get to collect all the materials. And then as we arrived, i mean, we used the private jet of the funder to get there and come back, but i didnt want to carry the materials in my suitcase from the fear that they might be lost in customs, and so, i shipped it i shipped them in this suitcase that you see here in black with fed ex, and they arrived a few days later to my home. And i realized a few days of delay are not too muchiven that this material too probably billions of years to travel to earth. So few days extra are not a big deal. And then i took this material to the laboratory of my colleague at harvard, stein jacobson, who has you can see it here. You can see on the left my summer intern, sophie, who at first arrived just to shadow me and document the project. She wants to become a science journalist, but then at some point she said, maybe i can help in doing the science and i said, that would be fantastic so i arranged for her a microscope with tweezers and then we found 50 spheres on the ship. She found more than 600. So altogether we have over 700, and i gave her the title, hunter. In a matter of a couple of week she increased the reservoir by more than a factor of 10. And thats very helpful for us. The person you see on the other side is stein jacobson that is a highly regarded, very conservative, i should say, and very trustworthy geo chemist and i chose to work with him because i could trust anything he does. Hes not biased one way or another. So what you see here are from sophies findings and here are some images that we obtained as soon as we landed in san fransco, we had a stop at the university of california berkley and thehave in the Nuclear Engineering departnt, they have an eelectron microscope, canning microscope that looked inside one of these. You see what we found and that was amazing that we found smaller spheres inside the bigger spheres, sort of like Russian Dolls so we found spheres inside spheres and they were embedded on a matrix of a background of structure. They sort of look like eggs. And the way to understand that is that the small spheres solidified early because they were smaller, and then there were engulfed with molten iron that glued them together. And here you see some more, small spheres inside the bigger sphere. Now the other thing i did upon arrival to Harvard University was to ask my postdoc to make a map of the field of them across the region. So what she did is we knew how many were found in each run, from sophies findings and laura just signed a yield to each run and divided the number of retrieved spheres by the amount of mass of background materials, volcanic ash that was in each run which we documented. So she gave a weight to each run and then made a map of each of the region, and each of the pixels in the map is roughly about a mile in size. And then what you see are in purple oops. Is a very low yield of the background far away from the meteor path and thats the purple color and then the yellow implies twice as many spheres per retrieved mass. So, in this we see roughly three hot spots in this heat map where there was the yield that was doubled, presumably, because of this meteor, because these three yellow regions are close to the meteor path and far away, we ended up with the standard background yield so that gave us assurance that we were at the right spot and having three hot spots, three yellow regions, may reflect the three flares that were observed from the fireball. And there were several runs that went through these yellow regions. For example, run number four, run 14 and run 13. And in these runs we started the composition and found some unusual type that was never seen before, never reported in the scientific literature and not found anywhere else except near the meteor path. So here are some images of spheres. This one looks like a soccer ball and this one looks like a merger of three spheres together and they solidified before having a chance to become a spherical droplet altogether as a result of the merger. This one was fairly big sphere found in one of these three runs that passed through a yellow region. So we wanted to examine it first. And so, stein put this material from the spheres in the mass spectrometer. This is what he found. He said ive never seen anything like it before. We must give it a new name. So what you see in this diagram is abundance, the amount, the fraction contribution to the weight of this from different elements in the periodic table, which you see at the bottom. You see the different elements going all the way from lithium up to uranium and the number one standard abundance of solar system material. So, anything associated with rocks that condensed out of the early solar system called conri, and represented on this diagram, and amid the yellow path in the region had a berylium in weight relative to solar system materials. And this is 500 times more and uranium thats 600 times more than solar system materials. So, we called this composition belau, berylium, uranium, and lan. And you see it much more than other materials. One can make the same plot, but now its volatility of elements, in other word elements on the right side of this diagram can be lost easily by evaporation, a a result of it heating up the material and some elements evaporate much more quickly than others, so, we lose them and indeed, as we plot the abundance pattern, its a function of volatilitity, we see that elements that are volatile were indeed lost and that confirms that this spear sphere, they seem to have the same abundance pattern implying indeed they came from a single event and this must have been an air birth, a fireball, an explosion that got rid of the volatile elements. They have abundance less than the solar system materials because they were lost in e explosion. So where did this abundance pattern, where could it have originated . Well, one possibility is that the its definitely not from earth, the moon or mars because it doesnt resemble those abundances that we find there in those environments. It most likely came from outside the solarsystem, but it could be natural in origin and we mention in our paper that just came out a couple of weeks ago that indeed, it could have been a planet that had a magma ocean. Lava, a molten lava planet and the earth started this way. It was bombarded early on in its history by big objects that collided with earth, during the heavy bombardment and the moon formed out of one of these collisions, so, the earth started as a molten lava planet and the moon was also an ocean magma, and mars started this way as well. Except that the composition that we see now on the surface of these objects does not resemble these spheres. Nevertheless, the earth has an iron core and some elents have affinity to iron, so they sink during the molten lava phase and they leave behind other elements that we find and hunt in the abundance pattern. So, its possible that the origin of this object was a molten lava planet around the star far away, outside the solar system. Thats one natural origin for it. But its also possible that these elements were enhanced for technological region because one of the scientists said to me that after we posted the paper that theyre used in semiconductors and substraight and uranium we know used for Energy Production in nuclear fissure. And berylium as a result of impact of cosmic rays because its made by heavier nucli and the solar system protected by cosmic rays by the heliosphere. And we also looked at isotopes of iron 57 relative to iron 56 and all solar system rocks are in a small region of these parameters of space and they were far from this region, so, that indicated that were not looking at material that came from earth, definitely not. The qn remains whether this object was nat in origin or technological and the way to figure it out is obviously by finding bigger pieces. And the the existence of an enhanced abundance of berylium or lithium may be a flag that can be used in the future to identify interstellar objects. So, if, for example, there are samples of meteorite in the Smithsonian Museum or in private collections, one can check their composition and exine them to fige out if they have the abundance pattern or enhancementf berylium that could indicate interstellar space. And t other thing one can doo, just like having a recipe for a cake, we now know the contribution of vario elements to the makeup of these objects, so we can try and mix them together in the laboratory, just like making a cake when you know the ingredients so that is another thing that can be done to check if the mix ends up, the mixture ends up having a high material strength thats infearedor this meteor. So im very curious as to etr these objects came from a natural origin or a technological origin in any case, its the first time that scientists put their hands and analyze materials from a large object in this case, more than haver a meter in size, bigger than a basketball, that came from outside the solar system. So, its historic, no matte what. If we accept the u. S. Space command data that indeed the speed of this object implied that it originated outde the solar system, thats interstellar, now, we have an indepeentvidence for its interstellar origin from its composition and we can even if its not in the origin, we can learn about an vironment thats very different from the solar system that it originated from and since it was the first interstellarbject ever discered from 2014, it must be a very abundant type of object, not a rare type o object. So altogether, i wanted to emphasize that this interstellar expedition was risky. The re many potential points, for example, early on after i annoued that the government confirmed the object, i announced the exdion and the cost of the mission was one and a half Million Dollars and obviously i wasnt sure tt i will be able to have that funding. Obviously, standardunding agencies would never fund a risky project like that bau th have selectionommittees that are populated by conservative mainstream ieists and so gladly, a few mohs after announcghis mission, i receid an email arranging for a zoom call with the fnder that said that you have the money. That was just the beginning. And then it wasnt guaranteed that i will be able to recruit qualified expedition engineers and navigators and we had the fortune of joining us, of these, the best people in the world joining us that have a lot of experience in Ocean Expeditions and each and every one of them was crucial to the success of the mission. One thing that i learned is that we are all in the same boat. We were there. And the people the members of the team contribed selflessly to the success of th mission and that serves as a metaphor to earth, which i the boat that we all share, humans, and we better wk with each other rather than engage in conflict. You knowe spend 2 trillion a year on military budgets and i character calculated if we paid attention to the words of john lno, imagine all the People Living in peace, and contritehe amount of money to Space Exploration within this century thate would be able t send a cubesat to every star in the Milky Way Galaxy ather civilization could have done that if they just had priorities more intelligent than the one we have right now engaging in conflicts. If theyecided theres much more real estate out there in interstellar space, they could ve reached us in less than a lln years, the time to taso traverse the Milky Way Galaxy and the important breaking news is that more ars that are likehe sun, they form blions of years before the sun. We know that from thetar formation histo of the universe. Another civilization that preceded us more than a billion years could have sent a package that reached our doorstep by now. And all we nee to do is step tside of our home, and loo around, and check if theres an package wit a postal adess that implies that it was sent from outside the solar system. Which is pretty much what we tried to do in this expedition. So, you ow, i could have gathered this team and but yet, we might not be able to produce a sled that would stay on the ocean floor because of the lift on it fro the cable. In fact on the first day that was theiggest challenge we couldnt get the sled on the ocean floor, it waskiting, it was floating abo the surface and the engee realized that we hav to go with the current and in the oceannd we managed to get it and collected materials after this. We could have not found any magneticsphererules from this because the meteor evaporad altogether or smaller than expected. We were very hawk the meteor was just the rht size it produced enoh for us toind them with a one meter sled going back and forth, 26 times. And then, even if we collected the sphele we might not have found them. Took us six days to reali h to do it collectly and then even if we brought back tho spherules, i was very fortunate to get the attention of ste jacobson who has state of the art spectrometer. He could have told me i have other projects, i dont have time to use the mas sptrometer to your purpose, but he immediately got his team engaged in analysis as soon as we came back. So that lod, of course, t reliable discoveryf the belau spherule that had never be seen before. That compositions unique to this meteor so all i wanted to emphasize in this slide is that ieel very lucky a that thislltrates that taking risks in science and exploring innovative ideas sometimes pays off and that is not highlighted enough. There is a risk averse climate within academia and its clearly demonrad by the fact that before i went there, people approached m and said, why wld you waste your te and money going after this, these spherules, youre not going to find anything. Im n asking you to do anything. You can sit back and relax, im doin t heavy lifting here. We come back, just tell me we r expected you not to find anything. So, then weent there when people are, you know, telling us that there will be nothing forou to find. There were some who said we still dont believe the u. S. Government, this is not intetellar. On the way back, there was a paper publish i the astro physical journal by experts on space rocks,e have a model for stony meteorites, and we have a model, that didnt fit the u. S. Government so in fact the velocity of the object must be tee times smaller than the. S Space Command reported. I should say the u. S. Space command received more funding than nasa. Its the organization thats supposed to report to President Biden if a missile, a Ballistic Missile is being launched from north korea, so suppose they were making eor by factor of threen velocity measurement, that would mean they would warn mexico for a missile headed to washington d. C. These aston astronomers published this, that i was wrong, that its a stony meteorite. At the time they publish it and accepted for publication not only the authors, but the people who refereed the paper agreed. At that time i held in my hand these belau spherules and made of iron. And why would a scientist say the data musbe wrong when an expedition goes out and confirms the location of the meteor and moreover, finds materials from it the answer is, unfortunately, some scientists do not care about the evidence. It doesnt matter if there is evidence. They have an opinion. Now, the next expedition obviously will target bigger pieces because if we find a big piece, we can tell the difference between a rock and a technological gadget. The gadget may have buttons on it. And then the question would be, should we press a button. I asked this question, i raised it to my students in the last class that i taught in the spring, 2023 semester. And half of the class said, no, please dont press any buttons because it would affect all of us. And the other half of the class said oh, its very intriguing, if you find buttons, please do press them we would like to know what would happen. And then, one of the students said, and what would you actually do, professor loeb . And i said, well, ill bring it to a laboratory and analyze it before engaging with it. So, you dont need to be alarmed. But altogether, this was an amazing experience, it demonstrated how innovative science should be done by collecting materials, analyzing them and putting the results in a scientific paper that is now being reviewed. And the implications of finding a technological object from another civilization are discussed in my book, interstellar that just came out last week. And in particular, i believe that it would be a wakeup call for humanity to change priorities and also, perhaps it will give inspiration for us to explore space ourselves and maybe a glimpse at our technological future because any advanced technological civilization that reached our doorstep before we reached their doorstep might be more advanced than we are. The question is whether the government has any information or materials from such object, we dont know. And what i tried to do in this expedition is say, it doesnt really matter, we shouldnt wait for the government to release the data because that would be just like waiting for it, it may not happen. Maybe the government doesnt have any useful data. The point is the sky is not classified. The oceans are not classified. We can use the tools of science to figure the answer ourselves. The government is not for advancing the frontiers of science, its basically concerned with National Security and its the job of scientists like myself to explore the evidence and only over the past decade we knew about interstellar objects so this is a path that was not taken and when you take a path that was not taken, there is a chance that you will pick some lowhanging fruit, which is my hope and my blessing in some sense. Thank you very much and ill be glad to answer any questions. Thank you, avi. And thank you to everyone who has already submitted questions. Feel free to continue to add questions into the q a box on your screen. Well get to as many as we can. So now lets dive in. You mentioned that there could be other interstellar objects within our meteorite collections that have yet to be identified. Has any work begun looking for these objects using your research and findings or any other methods . Well, its early right now. We just posted the paper and the analysis and i should say we onlylized only 57spherules out of the 700 so we plan to go through most of them and get better statistics for the belau, and its a work in progress. This is a new idea that i mentioned looking at catalogs of meteorites and trying to find them and its also finding a needling in a haystack because only one in a thousand meteorites based on the statistics that we calculated should have originated in interstellar space, so only one in a thousand, but i should also say that objects of that size, half a meter to a meter, there must be a lot of them, millions of them within the orbit of the earth, the sun, at anytime. The reason only one of them collides with earth per decade is because the earth has a small crosssectional area so it only collides with a tiny minority of them. But we did the statistics and you need 10 to the part 23 such objects to be produced for every star in the meteor galaxy such that the population of such objects will be big enough for the earth to collide with one much them every decade, every 10 years, and 10 to the 23 objects each of which weighing a ton, implies a total mass of the earth, basically, you need around each star in the galaxy, you need to break an object with the mass of the earth into tiny bits, 10 to the 23 such small, each of them torn and that sounds challenging using a natural process, but im thinking right now about a scenario that might give rise to it, but otherwise, you know, it may be space trash from civilizations that are polluting interstellar space. The metaphor plastics in the ocean, tells you there is some technology that is contaminating the ocean. By 2050 there will be more mass in plastics in the ocean than the mass in fish. So just be careful when you go to a fish restaurant after 2050 because youre likely to eat some plastic. Thank you for that. Are there similar etc extraterrestrial civilization search being performed by other countries. So far the Galileo Project is the only scientific project using instruments to systematically record data in the sky or to using other devices to search for the composition of interstellar meteors. Theres no other project pursuing it scientifically. Organizations that report about either civilians or military personnel seeing unusual objects, so thats eyewitness testimony. I dont believe in using people as detectors because very often when you have a car accident you hear very different reports from those involved and obviously fifa in the womens world cup this summer also agrees that we should use video cameras to decide whether the ball went across the goal post and that was the reason that the u. S. Team was kicked out, so it was based on Data Collected by instruments. They didnt go out to ask the players or the audience what do you think . Was this a goal or not . So, science is based on instruments because they dont have a personality, they dont have ulterior motive. And eyewitness testimony can be helpful guiding us what instruments we should use. They hold in the courtroom, in the legal system, but we also know people that were convicted and later dna testing allowed them to be exonerated. So, so science cannot be based on eyewitness testimonies and hearing that we had in the u. S. House of representatives in july this summer included two pilots that talked about their experience, but that cannot be used for doing science. There was a third person who argued that the u. S. Government has programs for retrieval and reverse engineering of materials that were already collected and he did not witness the evidence, he just heard from 40 people that he spoke with that such programs exist. That is not good enough to believe the story. We want to see the evidence. So for that, we have to wait for the Congress Perhaps to find out whether there is truth to the report that he gave. We dont know it and as a scientist, im not patient. I want to find out the truth myself. Anything that originated from interstellar space has nothing to do with National Security because the journey took millions to billions of years, long before humans came to earth and frankly, the sender doesnt care how we split the land on this tiny rock that we occupy. It is not significant so if we have visitors, you know, they would not have us in mind and its not a matter of National Security, it should be knowledge shared by all humans, the way that science is done. Thank you for that. Speaking to that, a couple of audience members were interested in any connections to seti in california. Could you speak to that . Thats an interesting relationship because for 70 years weve been searching for radio signals. Na was a method that pioneered by frank drake who died a year ago. And very distinguished astronomers like potter were engaged in that research. We didnt see any radio signals from extraterrestrials. The method weve tried for 70 years, its like waiting for a phone call at home. You need a counter path for timing. If they called us a billion years ago, this signal is now a billion light years away, we cannot catch up with it. So you have to be lucky that when youre listening someone else is transmitting so that you can get the signal with appropriate time delay, of course, for its travel. And i think that its like most civilizations that existed in the past may have perished by now. They may have died. Theyre not transmitting signals anymore, a short window to produce radio signals the way that we do. And partly, it could be because they destroy themselves or move onto other technologies for communication and theres no reason for them to reveal their existence out of fear that someone would invade. So, its not clear that they would be visible, easily visible to us this way. However, over the past half a century, we sent five probes to interstellar space, there are voyager one, voyager two, pioneer 10, pie another 11 and horizons and imagine other civilizations that had technology and plenty of time to basically send technological objects to interstellar space. These would be bound by gravity to the milky way and they would collect just like plastics in the ocean and we need to ask our self, you know, many of these may not be functional anymore, they would be like trash and every now and then, one of them would collide with earth. And so, thats the completely different approach. Its just like going out of your home to your back yard and checking if theres any tennis balls by a neighbor or checking your mailbox if theres a package out there. So this method was not studied by the seti community. Thats not too shocking to me because interstellar objects were just found over the past decade. Its okay they havent studied it. What i do find surprising is the hostility that some of the members of the seti community have towards the search for physical objects in our back yards. So, it got to the level where some members of the seti community are arguing against any discussion of it being technological, any discussion that this meteor might be interstellar origin. First theyd say the Government Data is not we dont believe it and now, then they said, why would you go there. After i came back they said you didnt find anything there. Its all solar system materials and when i said look at the competition, its different. They said, oh, well, maybe there is some place in the solar system with such a composition is exists. So, for that you need the u. S. Space command to be wrong. For our analysis to be wrong. For there to be a place that we dont know about in the solar system so theyre looking for any possible reason to dismiss, to basically argue that this endeavor of searching for objects near earth of technological oregon is not valuable for science and some of them say its not science and i ask, what could be more than scientific than going out to search for materials, finding materials, analyzing them, but by the best mass spectrometer that the world has to offer and then reporting about the results in a scientific paper, what could be more scientific than that . So i find that response, that reaction, that hostility alarming because this is the community that was searching for extraterrestrial technological signals for a long time and you know, there were people searching for the nature of dark matter. Thats another unsolved puzzle, you know in addition to whether were alone. We dont know what most of the matter in the universe is. 83 of it is substance that weve never seen in the solar system. Okay. And so they are not made of storms, for example. Its a substance that is not ordinary matter. And so we know that, but weve been searching for it and then a group of people was doing experiments looking for supersymmetric particles. Experiments looking for have negative response to another method looking at the same question. I find that surprising and from the beginning i said to them lets Work Together but there were not willing to cooperate on that. And so i decided to establish the Galileo Project and were doing it ourselves and we would be of course delighted to collaborate with certain people on this exploration. Thank you so much for that really deep answer. Sounds like a challenge. I want to end, there are so many Great Questions we could go on and on and on i think but id like to end on this final question that wasur posed by an audience member. Your research is pushing at the front tier of the cosmos. Given the challenges in todays world that you mention in several areas that youve encountered, how do you maintain your optimism and keep a focus on your work . I realizedar after 61 years, thats my age, i realized life is often a selffulfilling prophecy. If you tell yourself that theres nothing to find, youre not searching for it, you would definitely not find it. Okay . If youre an optimist there is a chance that good things will come your way. So because of that its better to be an optimist. Because life is sometimes a selffulfilling prophecy. And with respect to humanitiesar future, i would argue that there is Natural Selection in interstellar space. Only those species that are intelligent enough to recognize how much real estate there is out there, common opportunitis that are out there, that we shouldnt fight over a piece of land as we are right now in europe in ukraine. Because the border between russia and ukraine is not even noticeable from the distance of the moon. You cant really tell f where it is. Makes no sense for us to keep our eyes down we should look up and up bigger aspirations. And that means we should Work Together towards a a prosperos future that will secure humanity in the long run. And that means we should find other places, not just on earth, that we should go to. Its not mars but beyond the system. Im hopeful because imhn proudf our technological kids. Artificial intelligence is now reaching the point where a number of connections in chatgpt five may exceed the number of synapses in human brain. So were creating an alien brain thate could operate autonomous. We have never sent to space and ai system, but in the next decade we might, and that would allow for ai astronauts. So the way i see a future that is bright for humanity, im very proud of our technological kids, and im happy to send ai astronauts that will recreate everything that we care about elsewhere. You could have thought of sending Something Like knox art. I the chapter on that in the book. Knox spaceship. No in the biblical story put all the animals inn an arc to preserve them from the great flood and you might say lets do the same and send a spaceship that we carry all Genetic Information about things we want to preserve and carried them into interstellar space. Thats not a very elegant method. In much better approach is ton have an ai system that is autonomous and is equipped with 3d printers, go somewhere, uses the Raw Materials to recreate what we have here on earth. And nature doesyo it when you lk at the dandelion flower it sends its seeds in the wind and they carried the Genetic Information so that if they land on a fertile ground, they can reproduce the dandelion flower. Im always in admiration of nature. It managed to find solutions to problems that we did not, you know, if we get a scratch, our body heals. But we dont have a car that can heal itself for minor accidents. Nature is amazing, and the human brain is in such a small, is confined to such a small space because the skull has to go out of the birth canal when to give birth to babies. Nevertheless, so many things with only the consumption of 12 watts, which is really nothing compared to the gpt systems that were developing that use rooms full of computers with, you know, megawatts of power. So i all about nature, and my hope is that technological well to reproduce some of the accomplishments of nature by sending those self replicating probes elsewhere that will reproduce will be fine precious on earth. And that will secure our future in the stars. So im an optimist because i think we can accomplish that, and thats you know darwinian selection on a global scale, on a cosmic scale, grander scale that we should aim at. Let the most intelligent species survive. Well, im afraid thats all the time we have for tonight. Thank you, avi, for coming to speak with the audience tonight about your work and for your fasting presentation. Thank you as well to her audience for joining us and for your terrific questions. Weekends on cspan2 on intellectual feast. Every saturday in American History tv documents american americas stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. 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