- 6 weeks ago
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00:00Dr. Avi Loeb, can you hear us okay?
00:03Yes, I can. Thanks for having me.
00:05Thank you, sir. Awesome.
00:06Well, hey, if we can get into a little bit, what's the latest on 3i Atlas since our last discussion?
00:14There are lots of developments over the past week.
00:17It passed perihelion, meaning closest approach to the sun, on October 29th.
00:23That's when this object 3i Atlas was within a distance of 203 million kilometers from the sun.
00:31It received about 770 watts of solar irradiation power per square meter.
00:40So that's the point in its path where it gets heated the most.
00:46And indeed, there was a detection of it getting quite bright, much brighter than before, by a factor of five or so, by various solar observatories that looked at it,
00:59even though it was hidden from view from Earth, because the Earth was on the opposite side of the sun when it was closest to the sun.
01:08Maybe for a good reason. It's not clear whether it's natural or technological.
01:13But at any event, these observatories noticed that it became bluer than the sun, which is quite unusual,
01:21because usually comets shed the dust that makes them red, or they have a surface temperature that is much cooler than the surface temperature of the sun,
01:31and therefore they appear redder than the sun.
01:33Nevertheless, 3i Atlas became bluer than the sun, which is surprising.
01:38But most interestingly, there was a deviation from the trajectory that it should have taken if its path was shaped by gravity alone.
01:49So there was some non-gravitational acceleration that it exhibited.
01:53If it's a natural comet, that is a consequence of it getting evaporated.
01:57And I did a simple calculation that showed that it must have lost at least a tenth of its mass in that process in order to get the reported level of acceleration.
02:11And that is a substantial fraction of its mass.
02:14It's most likely even 20%.
02:16That's just a lower limit.
02:18And that means that if it's a natural comet, there should be a very massive cloud of gas around it.
02:27And we are starting to get now new images of 3i Atlas.
02:33And if it were a familiar comet with the characteristics of a comet where it sheds dust and gas,
02:41that dust and gas should have been swept backwards away from the sun by the solar radiation and the solar wind.
02:51However, those images that were just released today, they don't show a cometary tail.
02:57They just show a blob of light, a fuzz of light around it, the way we saw when it was far away from the sun.
03:07And so the question is, what is this object?
03:09Why is it behaving so differently than solar system comets?
03:14I put in my latest essay, just for comparison, the image from the same telescope that observed it today.
03:21Two days ago, it looked at a solar system comet named Lemon.
03:25And for Lemon, you can easily see a beautiful cometary tail pointing away from the sun.
03:34In the case of 3i Atlas, nothing of that nature.
03:38And so it's still anomalous in some ways.
03:43And before, the anomalies that captured my interest were that it appeared to be big,
03:51at least a million times more massive than the first interstellar object from outside the solar system.
03:57And moreover, it was going in the plane of the planets around the sun.
04:03So perhaps that trajectory was designed by some intelligence.
04:09That was my thinking.
04:10And since then, we noticed that, you know, it sheds a lot of nickel, but very little iron, which is unusual, anomalous.
04:19And the only other place where we find that is in industrial production of nickel alloys.
04:23So maybe that's a technological signature.
04:26And, you know, it showed unusual polarization.
04:29It came from the same direction as the wow signal that was discovered in 1977, a radio signal that is still enigmatic.
04:38We don't know what the source is, but they were within nine degrees of each other.
04:43And the question is, were they related?
04:45Was this signal related to 3i Atlas in any way?
04:49So there are lots of anomalies.
04:50I listed about 10 of them by now, but we still don't know.
04:57I mean, my point is that it should just make us curious.
05:01And in the coming weeks, we should be able to figure out the nature of the object because it will get closest to Earth on December 19th.
05:09That's six days before Christmas.
05:11And my hope is that we will not receive an unwanted gift for Christmas, for the holidays,
05:17because the last thing we want is for it to send the probes to planets like the Earth.
05:24I know, like Kim Kardashian, that has gotten some some traction.
05:29Professor has commented on this.
05:31You have also briefed members of Congress, too.
05:36And, you know, I'm just kind of curious, like when you're briefing them.
05:41And frankly, some of them are not big believers in science.
05:48And so what are you telling them?
05:52And what is their reaction to what you're telling them?
05:57And also, it is my understanding, too, that no rocket from Earth is fast enough to reach this thing.
06:07So, I mean, are we screwed?
06:09Well, let me answer your first question first.
06:13So I'm talking with them about science because, you know, that is the best way for us to gain new knowledge.
06:21We should pay attention to evidence, to data that is collected by instruments.
06:27Because, you know, if we believe stories that people tell us, they're all over the place.
06:32And, you know, when there is a car accident, different people give you different reports.
06:37You can't believe what people are telling you, stories and so forth.
06:42And the best path forward is actually collecting data with instruments.
06:46That's the scientific method.
06:48And then whatever the data shows must be the truth.
06:52You know, once you have enough data, it's like a detective story.
06:55And, you know, when the Vatican refused to look through Galileo's telescope, that was a big mistake because they had to correct that mistake in 1992 and they admitted that he was right.
07:07So ignoring data is not a good practice because, you know, whether we move around the sun or the sun moves around the earth, it's not up to people to tell us.
07:18It's whatever is out there and we should collect data.
07:21And the earth moved around the sun 4.5 billion times before the Vatican even existed.
07:26So just denying that is not a good practice.
07:28You want to check the data and figure out what is really the case.
07:31If we have a neighbor or not, that doesn't depend on what is the popular view on social media.
07:37It really, the neighborhood exists irrespective of what people say.
07:42So we just need to attend today.
07:44So I basically try to explain what we know and what the anomalies are.
07:49And I must say I'm very impressed by, for example, Representative Anna Paulina Luna.
07:55She's very curious and willing to help science forward.
07:59And she just today, she met with officials of NASA and promised that the latest highest resolution image obtained by the high rise camera from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would eventually be shared with the public.
08:17And it's just a bureaucratic matter that it was not shared over the past month because of the government shutdown.
08:23And she's doing the best to promote the scientific method, as far as I can tell.
08:29So I can say that my experience so far with the members of Congress was very positive.
08:34And I resonate with their curiosity.
08:39And, you know, and they recognize the fact that getting better data is the best path for us to figure out things.
08:49Now to answer your last question.
08:53You can ask.
08:53Last question, yes.
08:55Just to answer the last question.
08:57Indeed, the rocket...
08:58Are we screwed?
09:00That's the question.
09:01It's a great question.
09:02Yes.
09:02If we are visited by a technological civilization that has developed higher, better technologies than we possess.
09:11For example, this object, 3 Atlas, is moving three times faster than our fastest rocket.
09:16And, you know, it's 50 times bigger in size than the Starship rocket.
09:22So, obviously, we can't cope with that.
09:24And, yes, we are screwed if it's technological.
09:28But, you know, if we survive any such encounter, it should fill us with a sense of humility with the fact that we do have siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations.
09:37And they are more accomplished than we are, but that should inspire us to do better, not to feel jealous about them.
09:44And, hopefully, we will not encounter a serial killer on their side.
09:48That's my hope on this blind date, you know.
09:52Wow.
09:52Wow.
09:53Yes, we're screwed.
09:54Hopefully it stops, right?
09:56Like, hopefully it...
09:57I don't know.
09:58I mean, the best thing to hope for is that it's just an icy rock that happened to be, just by coincidence, flying in the plane of the planets around the sun that happens to be big by chance.
10:16That shows all these anomalies because it was made in a natural environment that is very different than what we are familiar with.
10:24You know, that would be the best.
10:26And then it would just pass by and nothing will happen.
10:29But we always have to contemplate a low probability that an interstellar object might be technological because the implications are huge.
10:38And, you know, that's always done by the intelligence agencies.
10:42They consider low likelihood events, for example, in the context of terrorist attacks or things like that, even though they never materialized most of these events, they have to have a contingency plan, a protocol to attend to the data if it looks anomalous, just to make sure.
10:58We had covered the DART mission.
11:01And so, you know, that was involving the...
11:04Was it the asteroid that was coming our way?
11:07Yes.
11:07And so it was the asteroid that was coming our way and there was a really fascinating mission and...
11:14Slammed into it.
11:15And right.
11:15And I believe it was led by NASA at the time.
11:18Yes.
11:19It wasn't too long ago.
11:20And it was, I mean, it was like way to go.
11:24I mean, it was like perfect.
11:25NASA led the mission and they ended up shooting something at the asteroid that was coming towards Earth.
11:31It worked.
11:32It was a successful mission.
11:33So is that maybe potentially possible?
11:37I don't know.
11:38But you said that whatever this is, the 3i Atlas, is absolutely huge and it is extremely fast right now.
11:46So could that maybe potentially be a possibility?
11:49I don't know.
11:50Well, in principle, yes.
11:53There is a Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter right now.
11:57If it carried all the fuel that it started with, I published a paper showing that it could have intercepted 3i Atlas on March 16, 2026.
12:09Just because of the advance warning, it could have moved to place such that it would cross its path and could have collided with it in the same way the DART mission did.
12:18But unfortunately, Juno used most of its fuel.
12:23So currently, we just don't have a spacecraft that can do that.
12:27But in the future, what we can do is if we decide that we want to intercept interstellar objects, either to explore them or to defend Earth, then first of all, we should deploy a set of sensors that alert us to incoming interstellar objects.
12:44And then, of course, we can have a set of interceptors that would meet them.
12:49And as of now, we don't have a NASA spacecraft that is designed for that purpose.
12:56But I think in the future, especially if we recognize that there is a potential threat to Earth,
13:03or we recognize that it's an opportunity to collect a sample of material from such an object.
13:10Because, for example, we can look for the building blocks of life around another star.
13:15So it offers a whole new set of opportunities.
13:19It would take us millions to billions of years to go to another star, retrieve materials and bring it back to Earth.
13:24Here, we have something that made already the journey for millions to billions of years.
13:29So we can take advantage of that because it is in our backyard and it's much less expensive.
13:35We need much less time to bring that sample.
13:38And that is a sample of material from another star far away, thousands of light years away.
13:44So that's an amazing opportunity for the future.
13:47And, of course, if we ever notice a technological object, then we will consider it as defending planet Earth.
13:55In the past, we thought of defending it against rocks, which follow a predictable path.
14:02Technological gadgets can maneuver.
14:04They can have a different intent than we imagined.
14:07So it will be more complicated.
14:08But we will need a defense system to protect us from unwanted visitors in the future
14:15if we ever find that one of these interstellar objects is indeed technological.
14:19Avi, I wanted to ask you also with Congresswoman Luna, who has been really the champion to look at also the topic of unidentified anomalous phenomenon, UAP, instead of UFOs now.
14:34But with the Defense Authorization Act that went in, I believe, in 2022, there was an office arrow that was created, the all-domain anomaly resolution office for whistleblowers in the government that might have information related to UAP and also to government programs.
14:54To be in office where they can investigate those claims and to somehow answer the questions of Congress and be a little more transparent than what we're used to.
15:04I want to ask you, with your involvement with Congresswoman Luna, with also this topic,
15:11Do you feel like we are closer to having the environment where these whistleblowers can come forward and testify and shed some light on really what's going on, what these are that really have been popping up so much in the last decade?
15:28Yes, some of these whistleblowers already came forward in congressional hearings.
15:32In fact, six months ago, I visited Arrow, and I spoke with the leaders of that office in the Pentagon.
15:42And they told me, I asked them, do you have any clear evidence for something extraterrestrial among the objects that were documented by military personnel?
15:52And they said that nothing that we can definitely identify as extraterrestrial.
16:00There were some reports by FBI agents that were not verified by data from instruments.
16:09So at the moment, they didn't really produce any clear evidence for something unusual.
16:16But there are also claims that they are not motivated to reveal that, that this is kept classified.
16:24And I don't know who to believe on that, because I haven't been exposed to any information within government that is of great interest regarding things outside the solar system.
16:39Frankly, if they do have such information and they keep it classified, that's inappropriate, because their jurisdiction is to deal with national security, not with anything outside the solar system.
16:57That's my job description as an astronomer.
16:59So my hope is that if they do have something, eventually they'll get to me or scientists like myself.
17:06But in the meantime, I'm leading the Galileo project.
17:09We have three observatories that are operating right now.
17:12The latest one was constructed in Las Vegas.
17:15I mentioned it on the Joe Rogan show just a week ago.
17:19And we're trying to collect data by looking at the sky and checking if there is anything that is operating beyond the performance envelope of human-made technologies.
17:30And if we don't find anything, so be it.
17:33And I'm happy to provide everything we learned by developing the sensors and the machine learning software to the Department of War so they can use it in order to defend the nation.
17:48So it will not be wasted, this effort, this scientific effort that I'm working on with the Galileo project.
17:56Well, it's a lot to digest.
17:59Lots to take in for your first time talking to Dr. Loeb.
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