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19: Disclosure Team - Avi Loeb
391 Plays3 years ago
The goal of the Galileo Project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research. This project is complementary to traditional SETI, in that it searches for physical objects, and not electromagnetic signals, associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment.
As well as being the head of the Galileo Project, Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard Astronomy Department
Director, Institute for Theory and Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Founding Director, Black Hole Initiative (BHI), Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Galileo Project website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galil...
Support the Galileo Project: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galil...
Disclosure Team Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/disclosure_...
Disclosure Team Twitter: https://twitter.com/disclosureteam_
DISCLAIMER:
FAIR USE NOTICE: This video MAY contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Disclosure Team distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment, and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107.
Intro music:
• Track Title:Yearning
• Available at: https://youtu.be/j-UlkEjDAOA
• Beat by Chris Hayes Music
As well as being the head of the Galileo Project, Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard Astronomy Department
Director, Institute for Theory and Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Founding Director, Black Hole Initiative (BHI), Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Galileo Project website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galil...
Support the Galileo Project: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galil...
Disclosure Team Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/disclosure_...
Disclosure Team Twitter: https://twitter.com/disclosureteam_
DISCLAIMER:
FAIR USE NOTICE: This video MAY contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Disclosure Team distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment, and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107.
Intro music:
• Track Title:Yearning
• Available at: https://youtu.be/j-UlkEjDAOA
• Beat by Chris Hayes Music
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Audience Engagement
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the anomalous podcast network, multiple voices, one phenomenon. Hey guys, how's it going? Welcome back to the YouTube channel.
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm just waiting for Avi to join me. I actually made it a slight mistake and I'll hold my hands up to it. I didn't realize that daylight savings had changed two days ago in New York and so
00:00:39
Speaker
I got a message from Avi an hour ago saying I'm waiting on the stream yard. So I ran up to my office, spoke to him and he graciously said, no problem, I'll come back in an hour. So he's due due any moment. So, yeah, before we start, though, I'll just say thank you to everybody watching live on YouTube, anybody watching this late today on YouTube. Thank you so much. And thank you to anybody listening to this on the anomalous podcast network. I really appreciate it.
00:01:08
Speaker
For anybody that is here live, if you could just keep the chat room mature and let's not get into any arguments or anything, which I'm sure won't happen. If you do have a question that you'd like me to possibly ask at the end of the interview for Avi, if you could leave that in capital letters, that should help me see it. I've got so much going on in front of me. That would be great. So yeah, I see some questions already coming in.
00:01:34
Speaker
And yeah, I'll make a note of them, but they may actually conflict with some of the ones that I've already got. So that's cool.
Avi Loeb's Introduction and Achievements
00:01:41
Speaker
Let's see who we got here. Hey guys, Lara, Joss, Arno, Arunar, Andre, Kay Alexander, Benji, my brother. Thank you. Thank you guys for all being here. Anonymous Rex, UAP experiences, Steph,
00:01:58
Speaker
Thank you so much, guys. What else can we talk about until Professor gets here? Yorne, how's it going? For anybody that's not aware, I recently made a trip to Colombia to film a documentary series called Phenomenology. You can now go and subscribe to the YouTube channel. We have a trailer up. We have a rough cuts video up already as well. The season starts on May the 1st. So that'll be episode one.
00:02:26
Speaker
So yeah, I'm really excited for everybody to see what we did out there. It's going to be great. I really hope you enjoy it. Benji, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. That's very, very kind. Well, guys, my guest is here. So I'm just going to give him an introduction and then we'll bring him on and get this show on the road.
00:02:52
Speaker
So Avilo is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and best-selling author. He received a PhD in physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24. He led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
00:03:15
Speaker
He's written eight books on a wide range of topics, including Black Hole's The First Stars, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, and The Future of the Universe. He is the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and also serves as the head of the Galileo Project. He had been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy and the founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative.
00:03:41
Speaker
He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the International Academy of Astronautics. He is a former member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology at the White House, former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academics,
00:04:00
Speaker
sorry, National Academies, and a current member of the Advisory Board for Einstein visualized the impossible of the Hebrew University. He also chairs the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative and serves as the Science Theory Director for all initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2012, Time Magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space.
Galileo Project and UAP Research
00:04:23
Speaker
And in 2020, he was selected among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade.
00:04:30
Speaker
Please welcome Abby Loeb. Abby, how are you? I'm doing great. Nice to see you, Benny. I have to apologize for the mistake I made earlier with regards to the time zone difference. Oh, no. Time is relative according to Einstein. Thank you so much. So I appreciate you being here. It really means a lot to me. It's good to see you. So I try not to keep you too long, so we'll jump straight into it.
00:04:56
Speaker
So basically we're mainly to talk about the Galileo project. It's been probably getting on for around a year now since you announced it and you've built this strong research team advisory board and a large affiliate group featuring many professionals and scientists. But during this first almost year, have the conversations in the halls of Harvard and elsewhere, have you felt the stigma and taboo lift at all surrounding this topic?
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, a bit, I should say. First of all, by now we have more than 100 scientists engaged in the Galileo project. It was announced only eight months ago or so, seven months ago. And actually we are planning in the summer, it was announced at the end of July 2021, so exactly a year.
00:05:49
Speaker
later we are planning to have the first in-person meeting of the Galileo project and actually by then we hope to have the first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory and have some data and some analysis of our artificial intelligence algorithms
00:06:10
Speaker
just to demonstrate that we can take a video of the sky in different wavelengths, infrared, visible light, radio, and also audio. So basically make a movie of the sky and analyze it so that once we are happy with this telescope system, we can make copies of it and put it in different locations. And I really hope that this first in-person meeting where we will demonstrate the fact that the telescope works,
00:06:36
Speaker
that that would provide a brainstorming session where all my members of the Galileo project will think ahead about the next phase and starting to collect data because it's all about getting evidence. You see that the thing that defines the Galileo project is that we're not giving up on exotic explanations. The scientific community
00:07:00
Speaker
basically attempts to interpret anything seen on the sky as being natural without considering other options and we are allowing other options to be possible. It's not as if we have a prejudice or
00:07:15
Speaker
you know, wishful thinking or anything. It's just that we are willing to follow the data. Let the telescopes guide us. Because that's the lesson that we learned from Galileo Galilei four centuries ago. He was telling the philosophers, look through my telescope. And they said, no, we know that the sun moves around the earth. There is no point in doing that. And
00:07:37
Speaker
Not only that, they didn't want others to listen to this first scientist of modern science and they put him in house arrest. And today they would have cancelled him on social media. So we learned an important lesson.
00:07:52
Speaker
that nowadays when we launch a rocket or a spacecraft that we want it to reach Mars, for example, we don't pay attention to the ideas of these philosophers. They would have gotten it wrong because they thought that Mars moves around the Earth. So reality is whatever it is, irrespective of how popular it is.
00:08:15
Speaker
and to find the
Scientific Approach and Methodology
00:08:16
Speaker
reality that we live in, the actual reality, not the metaverse when you put goggles on your head and you imagine something else, but the actual reality that we all share to learn about it with all its pimples. It's just like people prefer to put makeup on reality so that we don't see the things that are not so pleasant for us that we are not at the center of the universe. That's not so pleasant. We would rather be at the center
00:08:40
Speaker
We would rather be the only intelligent species that ever existed since the Big Bang. But let's give up on that presumption. Let's just look at...
00:08:52
Speaker
the universe the way it is without makeup, just using our telescopes. That's the lesson we learned from Galileo because sometimes the evidence is not flattering to us and we better know it so that we can accommodate to whatever the reality is. And I love reality the way it is. I don't need it to have makeup. I don't need it to please my wishes. I just want to see the way it is. I'm in love with it the way it is. And when you are in love with
00:09:20
Speaker
something or someone, you want to learn everything about it. So if there is a smarter kid on our blog, so be it, let's learn about it or her or it.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Now, the early plans and the processes that you were going to implement were looking at objects out in interstellar space and also things a lot closer to home. So let's just talk about the things that are a bit further afield. With the equipment that you plan on using to look out outwards, is this new equipment that is being created specifically for the project?
00:09:57
Speaker
Yes, so astronomers look at the sky all the time, right, but they're focusing on distant sources of light. And if a bird flies above the telescope, they simply ignore it.
00:10:10
Speaker
If they see a drone, they ignore it. So anything moving close to the telescope is being ignored. Also, only recently, over the past decade, we built a telescope that can survey the sky and detect an object the size of a football field.
00:10:28
Speaker
It's the Panstar's survey telescope. And it indeed discovered an object the size of a football field that came from outside the solar system. But that object didn't look like the typical rock that we see within the solar system. It didn't look like a comet. It did not evaporate. It did not produce a cometary tail. And it didn't look like an asteroid in the sense that it was pushed away from the sun without any
00:10:53
Speaker
rocket effect without evaporation. So it looked strange. And by the way, NASA never launched a football field size spacecraft. So there might be many more
00:11:09
Speaker
smaller objects that might some of which might be artificial may not be rocks and so the point is only over the past decade there was a survey telescope that could see based on the reflected sunlight objects of a size of a woodblock field so we might be missing a lot of them and they might be passing fast so so
00:11:30
Speaker
But also close to Earth, it's military personnel that reported these unidentified objects. And they were not really equipped with scientific instrumentation. And astronomers were not looking close to us. Of course, people were monitoring meteors. These are rocks falling from the sky and burning up in the atmosphere. But they are extremely rare and much rarer than the frequency of those unidentified objects that the military was reporting about.
00:11:57
Speaker
So there is a need to build new observing systems. And what we are constructing is new in the sense that we will have cameras that monitor the entire sky, not just a small portion of the sky, the way usually astronomy is done, but the entire sky all the time in both infrared
00:12:20
Speaker
and visible light. The infrared is important because if you have a warm object at night, you can still see it from the emission. But during daytime, you can see the reflection of sunlight from anything. And so we have both and also radio waves. And we also will have a magnetometer and the audio system. And then altogether, it's a new system, even though the components
00:12:47
Speaker
can be bought off the shelf. It's just putting it together and also equipping it with the computing system that can do the identification of what we see in the sky in terms of is it an object that we recognize, like a drone or a bird. In those cases, even though it sounds interesting to some people, zoologists are interested in birds,
00:13:11
Speaker
I would be glad to transfer any high resolution image of a bird to zoologists. For us, it's not so interesting. We just want to identify whether what we're seeing is something known. And if we see a drone that says made in China, made in Russia, then of course there are people in Washington DC that are very interested. We'd be glad to transfer that data to them. For us, it's boring, I should say. Now, it's possible that everything we would see
00:13:39
Speaker
will end up in these categories, either natural, bird, lightning, meteor, all kinds of natural phenomena, or human-made objects, including satellites, including
00:13:55
Speaker
airplanes, drones, anything that, or a balloon, weather balloon or whatever, if it ends up being just these two categories, you know, so be it, it's also an important service that the Galileo project
00:14:11
Speaker
is making because at least the government is puzzled by some of the things that the military personnel saw. And the government has, I would assume, excellent data because they have to monitor the sky. So if the government is puzzled and we just explain it in terms of known things, I think it's an important service that the scientific community needs to make rather than ridicule and say everything is natural. And if there is something else,
00:14:40
Speaker
that is not from this earth, that is not a rock, not a natural thing, then let's see what it is. I mean, we shouldn't make any assumptions if it behaves in ways that cannot be replicated by our technologies, if it looks very different.
00:14:57
Speaker
the natural objects because it has screws and bolts on it and some buttons that you can in principle press. Let's figure out what it is. You know, I'm just like, at that point I would be like a kid in a candy store. I would like to press any button that they see.
00:15:12
Speaker
That's great. And would any of these objects that you mentioned, if it did come down to genuinely being something anomalous, has that been, have you got systems in place that are utilizing artificial intelligence to, you know, to brush away all the things that we know? And then what is the actual analysis process like before you can finally confirm that it's a genuine anomaly? Yes, exactly. That is our approach would be the approach that Sherlock Holmes adopted, you know, the fictional detective.
00:15:42
Speaker
He basically said that you put all possibilities on the table and then you rule them out by the evidence, okay? And whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth. Now it's possible that what will remain will be something that we are familiar with, okay? That's possible. Everything we look at will appear to be either natural or human-made. It's a possibility. But what I'm saying is at least the government
00:16:11
Speaker
currently is puzzled, so we will help them figure it out. And the head of NASA, Bill Nelson, was saying back when the director of national intelligence, Avery Haines, delivered the report to Congress about seven, eight months ago, he was saying
00:16:28
Speaker
that scientists should engage and figure out what these things are. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are using the scientific method, which was pioneered by Galileo. So if he were alive today, I would have made him a honorary member of the Galileo project. And are you having conversations with people like Bill Nelson or other members of NASA? You know, are you engaging with them and liaising with them with regards to helping with the project at all?
00:16:55
Speaker
Well, at the moment, we are not engaged with any government organization. Part of this is because we don't want to analyze classified data because that would limit our ability to share freely what we know with other scientists. So at the moment, there are no collaborations.
00:17:21
Speaker
But we should see if anything else comes along. For example, there would be this new office in government that will start operations in June 2022 signed into law by President Biden. And it's possible they would declassify some data. And we will be really interested in looking at that.
00:17:43
Speaker
The other thing I should say is I was told by a number of members of the Galileo project that they're really thrilled to be engaged in collecting new data because you know for many years they were interested in the subject but they didn't have this
00:18:03
Speaker
community
Interstellar Objects and Future Missions
00:18:04
Speaker
of people that are like-minded. And by announcing the Galileo project, I basically allowed this group of people to speak freely. And if you think about it, that's an elementary right, an elementary ingredient of the scientific process. So by ridiculing the subject and stigmatizing it,
00:18:25
Speaker
you know, the scientific community is basically taking it out of the scientific process. Now think about the dark matter. We don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. And people suggested over the past 40, 50 years that there may be this type of particle, maybe another type of particle, is the dark matter. We don't know what it is. And they were sort of suggesting various possibilities. And I came from that community. You know, I worked
00:18:54
Speaker
on cosmology throughout the first couple of few decades of my career and that was pretty much the mentality. It was completely legitimate to speculate or suggest the possibilities for the dark matter since we don't know what it is and it can motivate experiments and over the past 40 years there were experiments funded that
00:19:16
Speaker
billions of dollars altogether. The latest is the Large Hadron Collider that cost $10 billion and was looking for super symmetric particles that could potentially make the dark, the lightest among them could make the dark matter. We haven't found it.
00:19:31
Speaker
So think about if some people within the scientific community would say, well, supersymmetry was not found yet, and therefore they would ridicule that idea. They would say not only that it doesn't make much sense since we haven't seen any sign of supersymmetry, but anyone that engages with that
00:19:52
Speaker
is a crackpot or should be stigmatized. This should not be even studied because we have no extraordinary evidence for supersymmetry, therefore supersymmetric particles cannot make the dark matter, therefore we should not invest any funds in the search for supersymmetric particles.
00:20:09
Speaker
What would we then do? We would not build the Large Hadron Collider. We would not search for the most popular supersymmetric model for the dark matter. And as a result, we would not know if it is
00:20:25
Speaker
that particle or maybe something else. But instead, we engaged in the search. We didn't find it. So we learned something. Now, in retrospect, was it a waste of money? Should we have avoided it because there was no extraordinary evidence for super science? The answer is no. That's the scientific process. That's the way things should be done.
00:20:46
Speaker
So you know in the case of unidentified objects or objects like Oumuamua that did not look like the rocks we are used to, what's the problem in allowing for the possibility that we might find a plastic bottle one day from another civilization? I mean after all we sent spacecraft to space and it's not such a
00:21:05
Speaker
speculation to imagine someone else doing it a billion years ago because a lot of stars formed billions of years before the sun and they have planets like the earth around them so just imagine us elsewhere a billion years ago that's all and sending spacecraft and so that's not a great speculation i would argue that it's more down to earth so to speak compared to
00:21:28
Speaker
the suggestion that dark matter is a supersymmetric particle. Nevertheless, it's stigmatized, ridiculed, and people claim it's extraordinary of us to even consider that. And I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. If we had billions of dollars dedicated to the search for equipment from other civilizations in space over 40 years, and we would not find anything,
00:21:57
Speaker
then we would be exactly at the same point as the search for supersymmetric particles, the dark meta. Okay, we would be at the same point where we are now in the context of the dark meta search. So why should the search for equipment from other civilizations be ridiculed in advance? This is not the scientific method.
00:22:18
Speaker
No, not at all. Now you mentioned in there, Amur Amur. One thing that I really wanted to ask was, in the time that Amur Amur was visible through the telescopes, did you do
00:22:29
Speaker
all the analysis that you wanted to do in the time it was there or did it disappear before you had the chance to do all the studies? Definitely disappear before we had the chance because there were unusual anomalies about the Oumuomo, things that did not conform with objects we've seen before.
00:22:50
Speaker
I mean, the first was that it changed its brightness by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling. And that's unusual. It meant that it has an extreme shape. Usually we see variations but up to a factor of three from asteroids. And also that it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force, even though it didn't have a cometary tail.
00:23:15
Speaker
Now this last bit of anomaly was reported about eight months after the object was discovered and so it was reported in June 2018 and by January 2018, about five months earlier, the object was already too faint for us
00:23:36
Speaker
to see with our telescopes. So by the time we realized that it's so unusual, it was too late. It's sort of like going on a date and realizing the person you went out with is really remarkable and interesting only after that person left. And then you have to
00:23:54
Speaker
find another person like that one. And so the problem with Oumuamua by now, it's millions of times fainter than it was close to us. And it's simply because an object gets fainter inversely with distance to the fourth power.
00:24:12
Speaker
relative to the sun and so these objects get really faint quickly as they move away and we need to catch them when they are passing near us and in fact we want to rendezvous with the next Oumuamua. It's sort of like planning on dating the next Oumuamua
00:24:30
Speaker
And it's a very expensive date, I should tell you, because if we, I mean, the best way to figure out its nature would be to send a camera very close to it so we can get a high resolution image of it. I mean, we could also learn more about it with the James Webb Space Telescope from a distance. Yeah. And by the way, the James Webb Space Telescope is much better than the Hubble Space Telescope that we had when we looked at Oumuamua, because
00:24:59
Speaker
the JWST is at the Lagrange point, L2, which is quite far from Earth. And if we look
Funding and Public Engagement
00:25:09
Speaker
at the next Oumuamua from Earth and from JWST, we are looking at it from two different directions, significantly different directions.
00:25:17
Speaker
The Hubble Space Telescope was very close to Earth, so it was almost the same viewing angle. But if you look at an object from different directions, you can track its motion in three dimensions extremely well, because you are seeing it from two directions. So you can cross reference the observations and figure out the trajectory in three dimensions to a high precision. That would give us a very good sense about whether it's being pushed
00:25:44
Speaker
by something other than evaporation. And moreover, you can observe it with a much bigger telescope because JWST is three times bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope, so 10 times the collecting area, also looking at the infrared, so it can potentially see the emission from the object, can figure out its temperature,
00:26:04
Speaker
And maybe the reflectance, take a spectrum of it, so figure out the composition of the surface. A lot of things that even without coming close to the object, you can figure out. So that's the advantage of having JWST. And the other advantage we have is that instead of pan stars, the telescope that discovered Oumuamua, there will be another survey telescope called the Vera Rubin Observatory that will be much more sensitive. Bigger telescope.
00:26:34
Speaker
and therefore much more sensitive that will start operations in about a year and a half, and then we'll be able to find many more objects like more and more at larger distances. So if we see an object like that coming towards us, we can send a spacecraft equipped with a camera that will run the VUIT along its path.
00:26:53
Speaker
And you need to come as close as 1,000 kilometers to such an object in order to get a high resolution image. And that's possible. Now, that is part of the Galileo project. So aside from looking at unidentified objects close to Earth, we are also engaged in designing a mission that will rendezvous with the next Oumuamua. And such a mission is quite expensive.
00:27:18
Speaker
half a billion dollars at least. And so it's a very expensive date. Just think about it going on a date. This is an expensive date. So you have to make sure that the object you are rendezvousing with is worth the money because you don't want to go there and see a rock. That would be disappointing.
00:27:42
Speaker
It would be interesting to examine the rock, but we've seen a lot of rocks before. So for example, Osiris Rex, this mission that landed on the asteroid Bennu, took a high resolution image off the surface. It looked like a rock with pebbles and stuff on it. It's sort of like dirt. And it collected some of this dirt. It will bring it back to Earth within a year.
00:28:08
Speaker
But that's not as thrilling as landing on a spacecraft, you know, like figuring out this spacecraft has a label. The label says made on exoplanet Y and there are some buttons on it. Maybe we can navigate it. So anyway, so we want to be sure that the object we are rendezvousing with is unusual, at least looking like a Momoa.
00:28:31
Speaker
and then send that mission. And so we are planning that mission, but also we have to prepare for finding such objects. So designing the software that will identify Oumuamua-like objects from the pipeline of data that comes from the Vera Rubin Observatory.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, well, hypothetically speaking, if tomorrow, maybe one of the telescopes in Chile or Hawaii suddenly alerted you that they've spotted an object that's coming in that's similar and you're not ready or prepared to roll out all the equipment yet, do you have things in place to get there? Do you have connections with NASA where you can say, can we utilize the James Webb and turn it and look for this thing? What would you do if it happens tomorrow?
00:29:17
Speaker
Oh, definitely use all the telescopes available. And given that my book was published a year ago and there was a huge amount of interest, both in the public but also in the scientific community, a lot of people trying to push back. I would imagine that every telescope would look at this object, OK? Just because the scientists would like to prove that it's a hydrogen iceberg or a nitrogen iceberg or a cloud of dust particles if it's not
00:29:47
Speaker
artificial, and that's perfectly fine. I'm all for it. If we discover that this object is a rock of a type that we've never seen before, like was suggested by the mainstream, then we learn something new. We learn that there are nurseries that make objects that the solar system doesn't, or at least we didn't see in the solar system, okay? And so we will learn something new no matter what. And I
Transparency and Collaboration
00:30:11
Speaker
hope that
00:30:12
Speaker
in trying to just prove that it's natural, but of a type that we've never seen before, the scientists will collect so much data that we will definitely have a better clue about the nature of that object, as long as it doesn't look like a comet, a regular comet, you know, because the second interstellar object that was discovered was Borisov and that war, that looked like a comet. So scientists came to me and said,
00:30:38
Speaker
Well, this second one looks like a regular comet. So doesn't it convince you that Oumuamua was natural? And I said, well, if you go on the beach and you see a plastic bottle and then you see a rock, it doesn't make the plastic bottle a rock. And on the contrary, the fact that Borisov looked so close to a regular comet makes Oumuamua unusual. I should say, here is an interesting scoop for you.
00:31:08
Speaker
About three years ago, I was interviewed about a meteor that was found close to Kamchatka. And in trying to learn more information about this meteor, I opened up on the internet various websites related to meteors and I realized that there is
00:31:38
Speaker
There is a catalog of meteors and that has data about the speed by which they entered the atmosphere. Okay, so meteors are just usually there are a rock, you know, that enters the atmosphere and burns up.
00:31:52
Speaker
And you see the light. So you basically are using the atmosphere as the detector of an object. It's very different from looking at the reflected sunlight. So for the reflected sunlight, as I said, you can only see right now objects as big as a football field within the orbit of the Earth around the sun, unless they come extremely close.
00:32:13
Speaker
But with an object that burns in the atmosphere, it creates its own light. There is a fireball. So you can see objects the size of a person, no problem. And that was this meteor. But then there is a catalog. And so I approached as soon after the interview was over. It was a radio interview. I approached my student, undergraduate student, and I said, why don't you check this catalog?
00:32:41
Speaker
and then, you know, and figure out whether the fastest meteors that were identified, any of them, if you go back in time, you can figure out whether they came from outside the solar system. If they moved fast enough, they cannot be bound to the Sun, okay? So he went to the first object that was the fastest, turned out that this one
00:33:04
Speaker
was just a head-on collision with Earth. So it wasn't moving really fast relative to the Sun. It was just moving opposite to the Earth. So the Earth collided with it at the high speed, relative speed. Then he went to the second object. And for that, he found definitely it came from outside the solar system. It was moving at 40 kilometers per second, far away from the Sun.
00:33:34
Speaker
and my student Amir Siraj and myself, we wrote immediately a paper that we submitted for publication within a few days saying actually this is a meteor from 2014, the second on the list from 2014, January 2014. So it's almost four years before Oumuamua was discovered and it seems to be of interstellar origin. So we said here is an object, the first interstellar meteor
00:34:01
Speaker
And by the way, interstellar dust was detected on Earth before. I mean, tiny particles. This is just a human-sized object, so it's beer.
00:34:10
Speaker
And if you think about CubeSats or there are many more CubeSats that NASA or objects the size of a person that NASA launched to space, then the big spacecraft, right? So you expect objects like that to be much more common than a more like object, even if they're artificial, you expect. So at any event, we don't know the nature of this meteor. So we submitted the paper just saying,
00:34:37
Speaker
the first interstellar meteor. And the referees, the reviewers of the paper said no, this paper should be rejected not published because
00:34:47
Speaker
the data in that catalog was government owned, it was government data and the error bars were not reported because the government doesn't want to provide information about how good the sensors that the government is using are. So we said, look, you don't trust the government, but the government needs to know whether a ballistic missile gets to Boston or New York City. So they really have very good instrumentation.
00:35:14
Speaker
But the referee said, no way, I don't believe the government, the government could be wrong and therefore the paper should not be published. So then I approached some people that tried to help us from behind the fence, so to speak. And it took many years, but I just heard recently that indeed there is
00:35:42
Speaker
hopefully a document about to be sent to us that will definitely state that this object was interstellar. So, well, there are two things to take from this story. First of all, Momo is not the first, okay? We have interstellar meteors that we can look for. And the advantage of that is if anything remains from the meteor that lands on the ground, you know, we can put our hands on it. So it's possible most of the interstellar objects would be rocks,
00:36:12
Speaker
But it's also possible that every once in a while, one of the interstellar objects will not be a rock. And that's great because we don't need to send anything to space. Space sends things to us. And it could be even possible to search for whatever debris was left over of that meteor from 2014 near Papua New Guinea. That's where it entered the ocean.
00:36:38
Speaker
At any event, the second lesson to learn is how conservative the scientific community is because the referees were not willing to consider this paper for publication, and you know what would be the harm from such a
00:36:55
Speaker
paper being published. Why would that be so much pushed against? And the only way
Curiosity and Theoretical Physics
00:37:05
Speaker
I can think of it, the reviewers were experts in this field. And they were not part of the discovery of this meteor. And they would try to block it as much as possible because why would someone else get credit
00:37:24
Speaker
for that discovery. Now, by claiming the government does not know what they're doing, that's an easy claim to make because unfortunately a lot of the information is hidden. But in this case, I hope that very soon we'll be able to show publicly that indeed
00:37:45
Speaker
this data was good enough for us to claim that this is an interstellar meteor. So it took a few years in the making to get the government out. That's why I'm not seeking classified data. You know, if the government will release or declassify existing data, that would be fantastic. But otherwise, the process of declassification is so tedious that it's better to get our new data from our new telescope systems because the sky is not classified.
00:38:13
Speaker
No, absolutely. And then you don't have anybody else to answer to either, which would be great. I mean, this is one aspect of it, but another is, suppose you know something that is classified and you're not speaking about it, but then you discover something similar using the telescope systems, then you have a conflict because, you know, someone could argue that the reason you interpreted that new thing
00:38:42
Speaker
as this or that is based on what you already knew that looked similar to this or that. So there is also that part that you're not, it's complicated because you're now entangled in some prior knowledge that you're not supposed to talk about. So it's much simpler if you act like a kid. A kid doesn't care. Adults always have a baggage.
00:39:10
Speaker
I'm trying to maintain my childhood approach as much as possible, not have a baggage. I think a lot of people should follow suit and try that out themselves, me included. Now, in that conversation part there, you mentioned sensor systems and the government and that. Now, one thing that we know about, or I say we know, we assume or we hypothesize when it comes to UAP, is that they can manipulate gravity.
00:39:39
Speaker
is there any way that you will be implementing any systems that will monitor sort of gravity waves or anything like that to see if there are any objects, you know, visible in that respect? Yeah, so first I should explain the perspective I'm coming from, I'm a physicist, you know, and the laws of physics that we use routinely in physics work exceptionally well, okay, in the sense that
00:40:06
Speaker
to find deviations from the laws of physics that we routinely use wins you a Nobel Prize, even if the deviation is tiny. And a lot of people are working really hard to see any slight hint of a deviation, it's called an anomaly, relative to the established laws of quantum mechanics and gravity that we all know. So,
00:40:29
Speaker
If we find any evidence for a deviation from the known laws of physics, that would be of much bigger impact because it would affect the universe at large, because the laws of physics apply everywhere. They don't just apply to UAP. So if a UAP shows a deviation from the laws of physics,
00:40:51
Speaker
it's dramatic because it means that anywhere in the universe you can deviate in the same way, okay? So that I would argue is only, you know, if we cannot explain what we see in terms of the known laws of physics and that should be left out of the first approach to any phenomena we see. So if you see something really weird, you need to understand is it malfunction of the instruments, okay? Is it an optical illusion?
00:41:21
Speaker
There could be lots of possibilities. And only once you rule them out, you should even consider the possibility of, because that would be of much grander scope. So we should be careful before we get there to make sure that we exhausted all other possibilities.
00:41:37
Speaker
Now, with respect to gravity waves, I should say, again, I'm speaking about what we know from the rest of experimental physics. To detect gravity waves, the LIGO experiment had to build very sensitive detectors that can detect a tiny, tiny deviation
00:42:00
Speaker
across a distance of, let's say, five kilometers or so, the deviation is smaller than the size of the nucleus of an atom. It's tiny. And that was produced by that kind of a deviation that won them the Nobel Prize. They detected it in 2015.
00:42:23
Speaker
That was
Concluding Thoughts and Future Directions
00:42:24
Speaker
produced by the collision of two black holes at the edge of the universe and black holes represent the most extreme structures of space and time in the sense that, you know, when you get into a black hole, you cannot get out of it. It's sort of like the ultimate prison. Space and time confine you and you're doomed
00:42:45
Speaker
be torn apart when you fall to the center of the black hole. I once described it because I was invited to the kindergarten where my daughters were and they asked me to speak about black holes and of course my wife said it's your duty to your daughters to speak in front of the class about it so I started speaking about what happens to an astronaut when
00:43:08
Speaker
astronaut falls into a black hole and at some point the teacher stopped me and said please don't describe it in more details because the kids have nightmares. So because you know the human body basically gets torn apart there is no escape from that. So imagine those extremes
00:43:28
Speaker
structures of space, curved space and time that collide, they create a storm of space and time near them, like every, like if you had a clock, you would see the clock, you know, changing, the dial changes by all the unity, like it shows one time and then
00:43:47
Speaker
a completely different time later on and so the rate by which time is ticking is changing by all the unity relative to an observer far away close to the collision site and that is an extremely powerful change in the curvature of space and time locally and that gets radiated away as gravitational waves okay so it's just like dropping a stone
00:44:10
Speaker
on the surface of a pond. So close to where the stone hit the pond you get large amplitude waves but then they die out as they move away. So we detect it far away, you know, as a tiny deviation. Now
00:44:24
Speaker
you're asking about the UAP producing gravitational waves. Well, to do that, you need it to be sort of like a black hole for us to be able to detect it. It needs to be a huge amount of mass, but we would see actually if it was a huge amount of mass concentrated in a small region.
00:44:41
Speaker
it would actually affect us through Newton's law of gravity. Forget about Einstein's theory of generativity, these waves. You would actually sense the pull from something very concentrated with a lot of energy. The gravitational pull just as a result of Newtonian
00:44:59
Speaker
uh law of gravity you know you would feel it and and newton's law of gravity is the consequence of einstein's equations okay so so they are both consistent with each other so my point is we would notice it just because we would be pulled gravitation long before we would detect the gravitational wave so so according to the standard description of gravity that we see you know throughout the universe we see the universe expanding according to that to einstein's equations
00:45:26
Speaker
According to that, you know, there is no major deviation that we noticed. Tests of Einstein's theory of gravity are all in perfect agreement with his equations. So according to that, you would first feel the effect of Newtonian gravity long before you would feel the effects of gravitational waves. And
00:45:47
Speaker
um therefore I you know we don't need to put LIGO as part of our detector system and also it's a very you know this experiment cost 1.1 billion dollars to the National Science Foundation we don't want you know if we had the billion dollars we make we would make better use of it to look for
00:46:07
Speaker
other kinds of signals. Now, people often talk about modifications of gravity, about extra dimensions. Once again, these are ideas to which we don't have any evidence from existing data. And it's possible. I'm saying we cannot rule it out, and perhaps we should look for that as anomalies. But
00:46:32
Speaker
The first approach should be to interpret whatever we see using the laws of physics, because that's the way science is done. And only when you're pushed with your back to the wall, you can't really explain what you see. Then you should go in that direction. And people invest billions of dollars to figure out any deviations from what we know. The Large Hadron Collider is an example for that. And we don't find very often deviations. It's quite rare.
00:47:00
Speaker
And that's why Nobel Prizes are not easy to get by, you know, you really need to discover something new. So I would say, let's wait and see what the data tells us. Again, I'm not excluding that, but I'm saying it would be of major importance to describing the universe if we ever find it a new, you know, a deviation from what we know in physics.
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah. And now, before we go, is it OK if I just read out some questions that we've had here in the chat? Oh, sure. I think I just thought, if you want to ask quick questions. Yeah, sure. I suppose the main question that I've been getting is, after all of this data is collected and you can say that this is a genuine photograph of something anomalous, when does the public get to see the data or the image? Oh, so the only delay would be caused by us within the Galileo Project trying to make sure that
00:47:51
Speaker
you know, there is no artifact in the data that it's not some malfunction of the instrument to make sure that we trust the data. And that often takes a few months, you know, at most, just to make sure the data, you know, we understand how the data was collected and
00:48:07
Speaker
that there is no bug in the way it was analyzed, then we put out a scientific paper about it and we release it to the public. So it will all be open. The analysis will be transparent. The only delay is because we want to make sure that we are not the crying wolf when it's actually something else.
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah, one final question. Will there be a capability for normal people to donate their sort of CPU processing power to help with analyzing data like they used to do with SETI back in the early days? Well, it's a possibility. For now, the CPU is not an issue for us. It's not like, I mean, we can deal with it with the computer systems that we can purchase. So really the
00:48:53
Speaker
The main challenge is to get enough money that we can build many copies of those telescope systems, you see. And when we estimate, based on the reported rate of UAP, when we estimate how many telescope systems we need, it's
00:49:09
Speaker
it would be good to have tens of millions of dollars just to have enough telescope systems. So $100 million would definitely allow us to get the job done. And by the way, $100 million is not a lot of money for a scientific project, especially dealing with a question that is of so much interest to the public. So my hope is that there would be a wealthy donor that will decide that this is indeed a priority.
00:49:38
Speaker
that the public deserves to know the answer that you know we will definitely do a honest job we will make sure that everything is open and transparent and according to the scientific method and so if there will be a wealthy donor that will be excited and you know I'm working on that then we will get the job done within a few years I mean this will not take long as long as we have the funding
00:50:02
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I really do hope that you find the funding that you need. For anybody that happens to be listening or watching, if you have any millions lying around, there is a link in the description to directly go to the donation page on the Galileo Project website, on the Harvard website. Avi, thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. I won't keep you any longer. To everybody listening and watching, thank you so much for joining us, and I will see you all very soon. So thank you. It was a great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye now.