Ep 95 | Harvard Astronomer Makes Humble Case for Alien Life | Avi Loeb | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Today's podcast is going to be a roller coaster ride, I think.

It's with the author of the new book called Extraterrestrial.

And on the surface, it is about, and I can't pronounce this right, I mean, I can't pronounce most things right,

Amuamua.

That is

some sort of something that was in space that

came flying by us

in 2017.

And at first, it was like a comet, then it was an asteroid, then they didn't know what it was.

Well,

it defied physics.

It moved in ways it shouldn't have moved.

And there is one guy who says, I think we need to really seriously consider that either our physics are wrong or this is signs of extraterrestrial life.

Now he's getting hammered for it.

But I just want to explain before he comes on who he is.

He is Avi Loeb.

He is the professor of science at Harvard University, received his PhD in physics from Hebrew University at the age of 24.

He led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative.

and subsequently a longtime member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

He's written eight books, over 800 pages on a wide range of topics, including Black Holes, The First Stars, and The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and the Future of the Universe.

He's been the longest-serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Institute, and director for the Institute for Theory and Computation

within the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

You getting the idea this guy is

not a crackpot?

He serves as the chair of the board on physics and astronomy for the national

academies

and is the elected fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of

Astronautics.

He is also a former member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and this goes on.

He's not a kook, even though you will see that

this story

of did we actually just find evidence of extraterrestrial life

is more about what we're all going through right now.

A lack of humility,

an unwillingness to be wrong, and the lack of using

all of the tools that science has always used.

We're back to the days of Galileo.

It's a fascinating interview with Avi Loeb.

Avi,

I can't tell you how excited I am to have you on the podcast.

I've been waiting for your book to come out.

I read it this week,

and

I think people will be surprised if they think they're going to get a book about little green men.

It is really a very important book that is about the two things that I think we're missing right now, and that is the scientific theory and humility.

Right.

Isn't it?

I agree.

Yeah.

And when you talk about Amua Mua, am I saying that right?

O Muamua.

Muamua.

Amuamua.

When you're talking about that, I want to preface this with:

it's my understanding that you are not saying this is definitely what this is.

You're saying

we have to have this discussion because either we're wrong about physics or we're wrong about

this

you know, asteroid

is it?

Yeah, well, first of all, I wanted to thank you for having me.

And indeed, you know, as an astronomer, the biggest lesson I've learned by studying the sky is a sense of modesty.

You know, the story starts from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle that suggested that we are at the center of the universe and that there are spheres around us.

And for a thousand years, people

believed what he said and you know it's flattering to our ego to think that we are central you know that we are unique and special at the special at a privileged location and that's why people tend to to believe that notion

but then Copernicus and Galileo figured out that the earth moves around the sun and that that was really a shock to many people and in fact at first the philosophers didn't want to look through Galileo's telescope and they put him in a house arrest.

But reality doesn't go away if you ignore it.

And eventually we figured out that we are moving around the Sun and the Sun moves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of a trillion galaxies in the observable volume of the universe.

So we're clearly not at the center of the physical universe.

And then, you know, many people still maintain the notion that we are special and unique.

and that there is no life out there except here on Earth.

And I say to those that they should learn a lesson from my daughters.

You know, when they were infant,

they tended to think that they have qualities that nobody else shares and they are special and unique, and everything centers on them.

But when they left to the kindergarten, they met other kids and realized, got a better perspective about reality.

And for our civilization to mature, we have to find evidence for others.

But that requires us to look.

And the problem is, a lot of scientists put blinders.

They basically say there is a taboo on discussing this possibility of finding technological signatures for other civilizations.

And as a result, they discourage young scientists from entering this search, and they don't fund the search as part of the mainstream in astronomy.

And it's sort of like stepping on the grass and then saying, look, it doesn't grow.

And I think

it stems from the arrogance that a lot of people have about us being privileged and unique and special.

And I think that a dose of modesty

is needed in order to bring us back to reality, so to speak.

And it's really unfortunate, but this is one of the messages in my book.

So

we have so much to cover.

I think your book is so universal,

even though the part of what happened in 2017 is phenomenal, and we're going to get to that in a minute.

But your message right now is so universal because I think what you're experiencing in science is happening everywhere.

I don't know if it says we're approaching the singularity or if there is something that

happens periodically

everything changes, but we are on the verge of a great leap, and everything seems to be decaying.

And

I feel as though it is like those who have been the guardians at the gate are just not going to let anybody in, but they don't understand the castle walls are coming down.

They're coming down.

Exactly.

I completely agree with you.

Right now, the way I see it is the mainstream

community in astronomy in particular, but also in science,

is exactly at the opposite side of where it's supposed to be.

It's not a small nuance that I'm talking about.

It's the fact that in theoretical physics, for example, you find mainstream scientists, you know, hundreds of them or thousands,

working on concepts that have no

test

and no verification through experiments.

These are extra dimensions, you know, the multiverse,

string theory, and they don't feel bad about it.

In fact, there are philosophers supporting them.

And they are very happy to do that because they do intellectual gymnastics and they are never tested.

They never put skin in the game.

But physics is all about putting skin in the game.

You want to make predictions that one can test.

And you know, Einstein was wrong three times in the last decade of his career just because he was working at the frontier.

And you know, when you work on the frontier, you never know if you are right or wrong.

You take some risks and you make mistakes.

But if your intention is to demonstrate that you are smart, then you will escape from any attempt to test your ideas.

And you will just do mathematical gymnastic to demonstrate that you are smart.

And then you can get awards recognition if your community of people is not really geared towards explaining reality.

And that's what happens right now in physics, which is really surprising to me.

While at the same time, you know, a question like, are we alone?

Are there technological civilizations aside from ours?

Are we the smartest kid on the block?

You know, these kinds of questions that inspire the public.

And by the way, the public supports science.

Funding for science comes from the public.

These questions excite the public, yet scientists put a taboo on discussing these questions and using their telescopes, their instruments to explore this question.

And

As you said in your book, Galileo,

when he was at trial, he couldn't get anyone to even look through the telescope.

He would say, it's right here.

You just have to look.

And they wouldn't even look through the telescope.

That's right.

Because it would violate, I mean, it would take them out of their comfort zone.

But Galileo's experience, I mean, he was put in house arrest.

And what that did is basically maintain the ignorance of those philosophers.

Right.

But it didn't change anything.

Other than that,

the experience of Giordano Bruno was much worse.

So actually, there is a student at the Harvard English Department that was inspired by my book to write a PhD thesis on the theme of my book.

And she invited me a couple of months ago to her

PhD exam.

And one of the examiners asked her, Do you know why Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake?

And she said, Well, he was an obnoxious guy, he irritated a lot of people, which is, of course, true.

But the professor corrected her and said, No, the main reason was that he argued that other stars are just like the sun, and they might have a planet like the earth on which life may exist.

And the church at the time found it offensive because it implies that if that life had sinned you needed copies of Christ to visit those planets and save the life there and that was unacceptable so they burned the guy so my point is

the fate of Galileo was actually not as bad as Giordano Bruno and there is a long history to people resisting correct the notion that we are not alone that we might not be the smartest kid on the block.

And my point is that by ignoring this possibility, we are simply keeping ourselves ignorant.

It doesn't change the reality.

They may be out there, and we could learn from them, by the way.

We could learn lessons

from other civilizations.

In the book, and then I want to turn to what happened in 2017.

In the book,

you compare the

universe to grains of sand.

Can you give that

analogy?

Right.

So actually as of a few months ago

there was a paper analyzing the latest data from the Kepler satellite that implies that a substantial fraction, about half of all the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet the size of the Earth roughly at the same separation.

And what that says is that the conditions we find on Earth could be replicated in all of these Earth-Sun systems.

There are billions of them within the Milky Way galaxy alone.

And if you repeat the same circumstances, you might get similar outcomes.

You might get things just like us.

And then there are a trillion galaxies like the Milky Way in the observable volume of the universe.

So altogether, the number of planets like the Earth on which things like us may exist is more than the number of grains of sand on all beaches on Earth.

And if you think about all the kings and emperors that were extremely arrogant in conquering a piece of land on Earth, that is equivalent to an ant that hugs a single grain of sand on the endscape of a huge beach.

It's not very impressive.

So, how can anyone be arrogant?

I mean, not only just in terms of the vast size of the universe and the number of planets like ours, but also in terms of the fact that we live for such a short time, you know, and you know, we should

just focus on the substance, right?

Not pretend that we are powerful and so forth, and just try to figure out the world.

You know, that is what a kid does.

And something bad happens when these kids turn into adults.

They start worrying about their ego, start promoting their image.

When they get tenure in academia, they create those echo chambers of students and postdocs that make their voice louder so that they can get prizes and awards.

It's not really about us.

Science is about a dialogue with nature.

And sometimes nature is more imaginative.

We should be open-minded.

If we see anomalies like Omuamua was, we should consider the possibility that we need to revise our notion.

Maybe it is space trash, some technological equipment.

Why?

put a taboo on such a possibility.

Why avoid discussing it?

Why ridicule that when all evidence is that this object is nothing like we have seen before?

Okay, so let's start here.

By the way, you are so right.

As I'm listening to your book, I keep thinking of

the Christian idea of Jesus saying, come to me as a child.

And

I spent a lot of time pondering that.

And a child asks the same question over and over and over again, and that is why?

And if we aren't, when we stop asking why, we're in trouble.

Exactly.

No, I completely agree with this notion.

You know, the Harvard Gazette, which is the pravda of Harvard University, the official newspaper of Harvard University, they asked me for

they asked me what is the one thing you would like to change about the world, which is a big question.

And my answer was, I would like my colleagues in academia to behave more like kids, just along the the lines that you just mentioned

uh because kids you know are more about exploring the world and they are more humble you know they're not connected so much to promoting themselves to to their egos and they are willing to take risks make mistakes they realize that they have to learn okay

I think we have a lot to learn.

What we know is just an island in an ocean of ignorance, you know, and why should we pretend that we know a lot?

Why should we pretend that we are powerful?

I see no other

honest point of view than being modest.

I really find it strange to see my colleagues claiming that they know the answer before they actually check it.

Yeah, once we

wrote just recently that the only thing I'm certain of now in my life is that I'm not certain of anything.

And

the minute we become certain on things, we're in trouble.

Let's go back to 2017 and

describe what

the observatory picked up in Hawaii and named it

basically the English equivalent of, if I'm not mistaken, the visitor, right?

A scout, yes.

Yeah, a scout.

That's right, a scout.

Omumua.

Yeah, Omuomua means a scout or a messenger from far away.

And this is the very first object that was discovered near Earth that came from outside the solar system.

First question.

First question is the reason we don't have to be able to.

Wait, wait, wait.

Why

there should be

interstellar space junk

floating everywhere?

Why is this the first one we've ever found?

Oh, because we didn't have survey telescopes.

Okay.

Telescopes that look all across the sky, not just in a small region of the sky, that are that sensitive.

So we could have never found such an object.

You really need now Panstars, the telescope on Maui, Mount Haleakala, which actually, as it turns out, I visited in

July 2017, just a few months before Oumuomua was discovered.

Back then, nobody knew about it, about Omuomua.

So that telescope was constructed because Congress

tasked NASA to find 90% of all the objects bigger than 140 meters that will come close to Earth.

And the reason is, you know, we know that the dinosaurs were killed by a big rock, roughly the length of Manhattan Island.

And the dinosaurs just saw this rock coming towards them.

got bigger and bigger on the sky and the fun stopped when it hit the ground.

And we have astronomers to warn us about such things.

And that's why Congress wanted astronomers to to come up with a list of all or at least 90 percent of all near-earth objects and so pan stars started doing that and so

this was this people thought at first that this was a comet

and right and you started to say wait a minute wait a minute uh i don't think it is why

yes so first of all everyone record by the way, the facts that I tell you are

scientific facts.

Nobody would dispute them.

It's just that many people ignore them.

They want to continue business as usual.

I should tell you that I went to a seminar about Omuamua at Harvard, and then when I left the room together with a colleague of mine who worked on rocks within the solar system, he said, this object is so weird, I wish it never existed.

And, you know, I was appalled by that because as a scientist, you should accept whatever nature gives you.

And in fact, if you see an anomaly, something that doesn't quite line up with what you expected, you should be happy because it's nature's way of telling you that your ideas have to be revised.

That's the spirit of a learning experience.

The future is not necessarily the same as the past because you are learning something new.

So, anyway, what was new about Omuomua that is different from comets or asteroids is the fact, in difference from comets, it didn't show any cometary tail.

There was no gas coming off it.

So a comet is a rock covered with ice, and when it gets close to the sun, the ice evaporates and creates this tail of gas and dust behind it, which reflects light, and you can see it as a beautiful cometary tail.

There was nothing like that in the case of Umuamua.

We would have seen it for sure.

And the Spitzer Space Telescope looked very deeply behind it, couldn't see anything.

So there was no cometary tail.

Then people said, Okay, it's not a comet.

So maybe it's just a rock.

But the problem with that idea is that it exhibited an extra push away from the Sun, which is usually attributed to the evaporation of gas because you get this rocket effect that gives the object an extra push, but there was no cometary tail.

And so the question is, what gave it the extra push?

And that is one weird fact about it.

Another one is as it was tumbling, spinning every eight hours, the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of ten.

And that means the area on the sky that it occupies changed by a factor of ten.

And think about a piece of paper that is razor-thin tumbling in the wind.

A change by a factor of ten is a lot because it's unlikely to be exactly edge-on.

And it means that projected on the sky, it is at least 10 times longer than it is wide.

And the best fit to the variation in the light reflected from it was

a flat object, pancake-like, not a cigar-shaped object the way it was depicted in a famous cartoon.

And so, you have a pancake-shaped object that shows an excess acceleration, and the only way I could explain it is it's from reflected sunlight.

And actually, the force

declined with increasing distance, just like you expect from reflected sunlight, inversely with distance squared.

And so,

maybe it's an artificial object, because it needs to be very thin, like a sail, in order for it to be pushed by reflecting sunlight.

And you know, a sail on a boat is

pushing the boat forward by reflecting air, wind.

And you can imagine a light sail.

This is a technology that we are currently developing for space exploration.

And the advantage of it is that the spacecraft doesn't need to carry the fuel with it.

Wow.

Okay, so

one more thing I should say.

In September 2020, there was another object discovered that showed an excess push away from the Sun and no cometary tail.

And it was given the astronomical name 2020 SO.

And then the astronomers realized that it was a rocket booster from a 1966 mission called Lunar Lander Surveyor 2.

And the rocket booster was hollow and thin, and that's why it exhibited this extra push.

So my point is, we can tell the difference between a rock

and a thin object.

based on the way they behave.

There is no cometary tail and you get an extra push in the case of a thin object.

And therefore, in the case of the rocket booster, we know that we produced it.

In the case of Oumuamua, we don't know who made it.

So when you were describing the surface in the book,

I saw like a

mirror-like or metallic, a smooth kind of surface.

Would that have been what it looked like?

Because we never really could see close enough, right?

Right.

We could not get an image.

Of course, a photograph is worth a thousand words.

If we we had a photograph, everyone would agree whether it's a rock or artificial, right?

The problem is that it was discovered on its way away from us.

So it's sort of like having a guest for dinner and realizing that this guest is interesting only when

the guest leaves through the front door into the dark street.

But the point is that in the future, you know, within a few years, we will be able to see many more of the same.

Because there would be the Vera Rubin Observatory, much more sensitive than Pan-STARS, that will survey the sky.

And it could find one per month.

And when we find one that approaches us, we could potentially send out a spacecraft that will take a close-up photo of it.

So, when you said it was like a sail, and it was catching solar light winds,

is there anything naturally occurring that would do that that we know of?

No,

so that's exactly the point.

If you imagine a thin object like a sail that is being pushed by reflection of light,

there is no natural process that would produce it.

However, so in the subsequent years, after my paper came out with my postdoc, Shmuel Biali, various people tried to explain the strange properties of Omuamua

from a natural origin.

And they always discussed something that we have never seen before.

Like, for example, a hydrogen iceberg, a frozen hydrogen, a chunk size of a football field of frozen hydrogen.

And then when the hydrogen evaporates, just like in the case of a comet, you don't see it because hydrogen is transparent.

The problem with that idea is that a chunk of frozen hydrogen would evaporate very quickly along the journey.

We showed that in a paper.

that followed up on this suggestion.

So it won't really survive in interstellar space

because of the absorption of starlight.

And then there was another proposal.

Maybe it's a collection of dust particles, like a dust bunny, that is 100% less dense than air.

So you have this cloud of dust reflecting sunlight and getting pushed.

Again, it's hard to imagine how something that is 100 times less dense than air would survive the journey.

So this example just illustrates to you that people that try to really explain the facts encountered difficulties and came up with scenarios that involve something that we have never seen before.

And these scenarios appear to me less plausible than a light sail.

And so, you know, I don't see why there should be an objection to putting that possibility on the table, an artificial origin.

And unfortunately, many of my colleagues prefer not to discuss this possibility at all.

Okay, so

there was another problem with it.

Our infrared,

as it was leaving the area of the sun, it should have heated up, which would, you know, if you had hydrogen,

you know, a hydrogen block, and as it got close to the sun, it would make that turn into gas, which would help it propel itself.

But it would also be smaller.

on the other side of the sun because it would have expelled some of that stuff.

There was no tail.

We believe it was the same size.

And our infrared showed that there was no increase in heat.

Right?

That close to the sun?

How odd is that?

Yes, so

we know the temperature that its surface should have gotten to because we know the trajectory.

So if you know how close it gets to the sun, you know how hot the surface of this object must be.

And then we can expect how much heat we would detect depending on its size.

The bigger it is, the more heat we get.

So the Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any heat coming off it.

And as a result, you can set an upper limit on its size.

It has to be smaller than something so that we would not detect the heat.

And that, on the other hand, implies that it must be relatively shiny because we see a certain amount of reflected sunlight.

So if the size is small and you see a certain amount of reflected sunlight, it means that it's more shiny than if it were bigger, you know.

And it looks like this object was on the shiny end of all the comets or asteroids that we have seen.

So it's more than average, shinier.

And, you know, there were other anomalies about Omuomua.

It came, for example, from a very special frame,

which is called the local standard of rest, which is sort of like the galactic public parking lot.

You know, that's the frame that you get to when you average over the motion of all the stars near the Sun.

So there is

sort of a rest frame locally,

and this object was at rest in it.

And only one in 500 stars is so much at rest.

The stars are moving relative to that frame.

And so, in fact, the Sun is moving, and that's the origin of our relative speed

relative to Oumuomua.

Oumuomua was just like a buoy sitting on the surface of the ocean and the solar system, like a giant ship, bumped into it.

So it wasn't moving, because I looked the speed up and it's the fastest object I think we have seen at 85,000 miles an hour.

But it was at rest and we were moving?

Yes.

We were moving.

Now that begs the question of why it's in that special frame of reference.

And, you know, one possibility is that there is a grid, a population of such objects that is used for navigation,

like road posts sitting out there, and we just bumped into one of them.

Another possibility is that it's a relay station for communication, so that you don't need to send a very powerful beam

communicating across large distances.

There are these relay stations, or you know, it could be just a junk, space junk,

some

surface layer of a spaceship that was torn apart and is just floating out there.

One thing is clear: that we cannot associate this object with any particular star in our neighborhood, because all these stars are moving around, and this object is at rest.

So, it's just finding a car in a public parking lot.

You cannot associate the car with a particular house from where it came from

because it's sitting at rest.

But the closest star to us, or the closest solar system to us, is 25,000 light-years away, right?

No, the closest star to us is four and a quarter light-years away.

Four and a quarter later.

So Proxima Centauri.

It takes light four years to get there.

So they are

right now.

They are getting the results of the 2016 elections.

Okay, and that's at the speed of light.

Boy, they're in for an interesting four years.

Exactly.

So how old do you think if this is space junk,

how old would it have to be at the minimum?

At the minimum, tens of thousands of years, if not millions of years, because

to cross the solar system, you know, the Oort cloud, the periphery of the solar system, all the way to us would take this object more than 10,000 years.

And that means that it started its journey a long time ago.

You know, we were not very interesting 10,000 years ago as a human species.

So I find it hard to believe that this object is spying on us.

Most likely, it is just like, you know, going to the beach.

Most of the time you find seashells and rocks that are naturally produced.

But every now and then you

find a plastic bottle and that indicates that there is a civilization out there that produced it.

So I think of it more as a space junk or space trash.

It could be equipment that is not functional anymore.

Simply, you know, we launched Voyager 1, Voyager 2, New Horizons.

Within thousands of years from now, they will not be functional and they will be just space junk.

And the only question is, how many such things were launched by other civilizations?

And

we might find, every now and then, we might find one of them.

So are you following the the revelations from the pentagon in the last few years um because of our technology i i mean i i've read and i've i've read i've talked to the people at the pentagon and i keep asking them wait a minute wait a minute wait wait a minute you're saying you have pieces or or fragments of something that is otherworldly

um

what does that even mean

And to me, over the last four years, I know it's been crazy, but this is the biggest news story of all of mankind, if these things are true.

Right.

I mean, this general question of

finding evidence for other technological civilizations is

the biggest question that we have.

It will change everything.

It will change our perspective about our place in the universe, our aspirations for space.

It will have a huge impact on our culture and on our society.

With respect to the Pentagon papers, and by the way, they're supposed to release everything they know about UFOs as part of the COVID bill in six months or so.

So

on that, we have to see exactly what...

I'm not talking about Project Blue Book and all of that stuff.

I'm talking about the new evidence that we have have now that we can track.

And we tracked objects that were seemingly tracking us

for, I think, three weeks.

And we had it on several different systems.

You know, I think our technology has changed.

So

we can spot these things.

But it's no longer seemingly the story of, you know, I was out in the farm and I got an anal probe from this this guy.

I mean, this is different.

Right.

Well, you know, I think, first of all, it's of interest to the government because, you know, some of the reports could indicate technologies that other nations have that could be a threat to national security.

So you want to understand

what they mean.

Okay.

And

well, I've talked to the guys, I talked to the guys that are actually running that for the government and now are outside, and they said

that that's exactly why they started.

They wanted to know who had this technology.

And they said the technology is just so far ahead, they just don't think anyone

you would, your society would be different if you had this technology.

It would have affected everything.

So, they don't think that it's coming from here.

You know, I had a similar discussion with Joe Rogan in a podcast a week and a half ago.

And

my take on these reports is that

with relatively modest funding, one can deploy scientific instruments at those sites and

do a careful job at monitoring what is going on there.

And rather than rely on eyewitness testimony or, I mean, science is about reproducing results, okay, about arranging for better and better instruments to get more reliable evidence for us.

And it could be open to the public.

There is no reason for it to be classified.

And if there is a public funding source for doing such an experiment, putting those instruments out there.

And after we discussed it, there was a grassroots initiative by some people to raise the funds to do such an experiment.

You know, I'm very much in favor of checking, you know, scientifically what is behind this.

If we don't find anything, then we know that there is nothing to think about.

But, you know, it reminds me of the biblical story in the Old Testament.

There is this story about Abraham that heard the voice of God.

And that voice told him to sacrifice his only son, right, Isaac.

And suppose Abraham had a voice memo up.

on his cell phone.

He could have pressed the button and recorded the voice of God.

and nobody would doubt that he heard the voice of God.

But he didn't have a cell phone back then, and so we have to decide if we believe the story or not.

And scientifically speaking, we have no proof that this story is right.

So, my point is: if you have scientific instruments, you don't need to believe stories, you can just deploy them, record what is happening.

If you hear the voice of God,

you can convince everyone that it really happened.

I'm a big science geek, and I know just enough to have everything wrong.

But

I've been fascinated with the singularity.

I remember in my

30s, I was fascinated by black holes and baby universes by Stephen Hawking.

And

his description of

our universe as being just one soap bubble in a collection of soap bubbles, and you can't go between any of these universes, which makes you even feel smaller than you do if you understand the size of this universe.

Yeah, I actually have a variant on this, which is, you know, we don't know what happened before the Big Bang.

There is a point in time when everything that we see started.

Right.

Okay.

And, you know, by the way, it matches more or less the idea that that is in the first chapter of the Bible, that the Old Testament, that there was a beginning in time.

But the question is, what was there before?

You know, where did it come from?

What is first cause?

And,

you know, I thought about an interesting possibility.

You know, so right now we have Einstein's theory of gravity and we have quantum mechanics.

These are two pillars of modern physics that are not unified.

We don't have quantum gravity.

And therefore, we cannot go back in time beyond the Big Bang.

So the Big Bang is simply the breakdown of Einstein's theory of gravity.

And we know why, because it doesn't incorporate quantum mechanics.

So suppose we had a theory of quantum gravity that we can trust.

Then, in principle, we could contemplate the conditions under which we will create a universe in the laboratory.

by irritating the vacuum.

In principle, it's possible.

And if that is the case, perhaps the umbilical cord of our universe was in the laboratory of another civilization that created our universe, and that's where the Big Bang came from.

And then, when we understand that, we will create another baby universe.

So, it's just like in family, human families, you have a baby that has a baby, that has a baby, and that may explain how the universe came to exist.

I

actually

agree with you, even

for me, at least theologically, I agree with that.

With quantum computing now,

are we going to be able to answer some of those questions?

What is quantum computing?

First of all, does quantum computing...

the fact that it can exist, does that verify quantum mechanics

and like a parallel universe at all?

Does that that verify any of these things?

And

will it be able to answer some of these questions that have been on man's mind forever?

Well, so quantum computing is taking advantage of quantum mechanics.

The fact that

quantum mechanics is very weird.

We are used to the fact that if you have a billiard ball, it sits at a given location and you can measure its position and its speed, and you know what their values are if you have a good a precise enough measurement but in quantum mechanics you can't really measure everything at the same time and everything is probabilistic and

it's only on observ it's only on observation that you can no wait you can measure it until you observe it right and then you can't measure

you have a probability so each for example you can measure the position of an electron but you can't measure its speed exactly at the same time.

If you know the position, you don't know the speed,

or if you know the speed, you don't know.

And also, you can find it in many different places with some probability.

So it's never localized.

And

so it's always in a superposition of states.

There are several states that each particle or each system is at.

And quantum computing is taking advantage of that.

The fact that

let's say you have multiple particles,

they can be in some system that is entangled, it's called, that if you were to measure the properties of one component of that system, it would affect what you can measure for the other.

So quantum computing is taking advantage of that.

And at the moment, I should say it's not yet

at a practical level of being useful, but it's getting there.

And within a few years, it's quite possible that it will get us to do some computations much faster than normal computers.

But

it doesn't shed any light on issues of parallel universe.

I mean,

have you seen what the Fermi Labs just announced right before Christmas about they used string theory and

quantum computing and they they moved or they actually transported digital information from one place to another, and they said that

that is starting to take apart Einstein's theory of

speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, etc.

Do I have that right?

Is that true?

As I mentioned before, Einstein made three mistakes at the end, the last decade of his career, and one of them had to do with spooky action at a distance in quantum mechanics.

What it means is if you have a system, let's say of two particles, and you separate the particles by a large distance,

if this system is,

you know, the two particles know about each other because they were created together and then you separate them, then if you make a measurement of one particle very far away, it affects what you can measure right here immediately.

And it's faster than light.

And so that's what Einstein dubbed as spooky action at a distance.

He didn't believe that it can happen.

So is that happening?

But it does happen.

Now we have experiments.

And

this part of the illustrates it.

Doesn't this go back to what we were talking about before?

There are huge things that are being disproven or called into serious question now, and nobody seems to be talking about it.

Right, right.

I mean, clearly, this spooky action at a distance took Einstein out of his comfort zone, and he was trying to resist it.

And, you know, Einstein was the greatest scientist of the 20th century, and he was wrong.

Now, my point is, this is any anomaly you find through experiments is nature's way of telling you, be humble and be willing to revise your notions about reality.

And so we should learn the lesson from those

historical mistakes that others have made, including Einstein, and in principle, be willing to open our mind to what evidence tells us.

But the problem is that some people do not want to even consider evidence and put skin in the game, make predictions that can be falsified, because that would mean that they were wrong.

So, if they want to maintain an image of not being wrong and being very smart, they will never put any skin into the game.

And at the same time, when there is an anomaly like Omua Mua was, people would just shove it under the rug of conservatism and ignore it and do business as usual rather than discuss it.

You know, the standard thing that people say is

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Now, the word extraordinary is really in the eyes of the beholder.

You know, some people regard, I don't know, a black hole as extraordinary.

Others would say, no, it's just an object, a result of Einstein's theory of gravity.

So the point is, in my mind, what matters is evidence, irrespective whether it's extraordinary or not.

When you see something anomalous, you need to explain it.

And if you put this bar of the evidence being extraordinary, then it gives you legitimacy at ignoring anomalies.

So

the philosophers back in the days of Galileo would say, oh, what Galileo says, it does not provide extraordinary evidence, therefore we can still think that the sun moves around the earth.

And that is an excuse for being lazy.

for ignoring anomalies when they appear.

And my point is that we should be alert.

We should be like kids, you know, that realize something unusual and are trying to figure it out.

You know, who cares about our self-image?

And, you know, we are trying to figure out nature.

And if we are not alone in the universe, that would be amazing.

As you were pointing out, it will change everything for us.

One of the guys

who I read

20, 30 years ago

that I just loved.

And,

you know, as it turns out, he's not accurate, but I just loved it because he thought so differently and everybody rejected him out of hand.

And that's Velikovsky Worlds in Collision.

I loved the way he said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Let's not dismiss this religious stuff as kooky.

Let's see if it matches around the world and then let's try to find a scientific evidence for it.

And

it was so brilliant, but I mean, he was mocked and ridiculed for even suggesting that.

Well, I should first of all tell you that I have no footprint on social media because my wife asked me not to do that when we got married.

And I promised her.

Therefore, I don't really care how many likes I have on Twitter.

And I really think independently.

But more importantly, you know, I don't think there is necessarily a conflict between science and religion because science is about understanding how things work you know it's just like looking at a watch and you want to figure out how the watch works so you open up the case and you start looking inside and you start to figure out what the mechanics and

that's what science is about figuring out how things work now if you are religious

In fact, you would like science to succeed in this endeavor because it increases the awe that you have about the watch,

how delicate and how sophisticated it is.

And science improves your appreciation of reality.

You see all the delicate details.

For me, for example, the fact that the universe is controlled by a set of laws that we discovered here on Earth, and they apply throughout the entire universe.

That's remarkable.

You know, we have laws that we apply in society.

And many people do not obey them.

And when I go every morning to look at my daughter's room, it looks like a mess.

So, how come the universe is so organized?

You know, that's amazing.

So, my point is, physics tries to figure out how things work.

And it seems like they are extremely well organized in terms of natural laws.

And when you figure them out, it will only increase your awe as to how impressive the universe is.

And then you can dress it up, your impression, you can dress it up with your religious beliefs.

And that's a completely separate layer.

Because it's not about how things work, it's more about what does that mean.

So, if you look at the watch, what's the purpose of the watch, and why does it exist in the first place?

You can ask those questions which are beyond physics, metaphysics, and they don't overlap with the scientific questions.

So,

in my view, you can separate the two.

So, the only reason there was a conflict was because some people that were theologians tried to also make suggestions for how the world works, you know, and then they were wrong.

And so they should not invade that territory.

That territory is

of the scientific endeavor.

And, you know, the science is doing a pretty good job at figuring out how things work.

I think that it's,

you know, if there is a God,

he's the author of science, he's the author of chemistry, he's the author of mathematics, he'd have to be,

he would agree with all of these things because

it's so precise and he can't violate his own system

if there is a God.

But it doesn't

science.

Science has grown so arrogant.

And when science or theologians grow arrogant, they attack one another, where

one has to be right and the other has to be wrong.

My father used to say...

I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't think so either.

And

by the way, just another point.

I don't think that science is an occupation of the elite.

I don't think that being a scientist puts you on a pedestal.

For me, science is a way of life.

You know,

when

the sewer in my basement gets clogged and I try to solve the problem with a plumber, I apply the same thinking that I do to when I see an anomalous object like Omuomua, I just try to figure it out.

And it's like a detective story, as you were mentioning, and you apply common sense and you put some possibilities on the table.

And, you know, I always think about anything that I encounter the way I do my science.

It's not something, it's not

a status symbol.

It's actually thinking about reality, trying to figure out how it works.

That's why I think it's not in conflict with religion, because you're just trying to figure out how things work.

And then, you know, you can ask why do they exist in the first place and why do they have this configuration, you know, just like you are asking about the watch.

You know, was there a watchmaker and what was the purpose?

But those questions go beyond physics.

And

just putting physics on a pedestal and saying, you know, we don't want to engage with any theology.

And I think it's the wrong view.

And

indeed, it reflects arrogance arrogance because these are completely different facets of human thinking.

Aaron Ross Powell, so let me go back to one of the questions I asked you right at the beginning, and that was, and you agreed with the premise, but I want to go deeper on:

can you give me any

evidence?

Are we

this tension that we're feeling in politics, in

banking,

in every field, everything is changing?

Is that because,

is that unique?

Have there been times where

everything

changed like I think it's going to?

Or is this because we are approaching

some sort of singularity, some sort of

grand unified theory?

What is it that we...

Is this usual

or is this different?

I think it's different in the sense that the technologies that we are developing right now are changing on a few-year timescale.

So they are advancing exponentially on a few year timescales.

And that's why you see this rapid change.

Now, you're asking a different question.

Where does it lead?

And will it continue to evolve that way in a stable fashion?

Or it would lead us to a state that would be

untenable, like a singularity that will change everything for us.

That's not clear because it depends on the response of the political system.

I mean, it's clear if you look at social media, like over the past decade and a half, it clearly changed society.

And whether it changed it for the better or for the worse remains to be seen.

And,

you know, the advance in technology definitely changes our lifestyle.

And I think we need to complement it with a proper sense of ethics and morals.

It's just like the atomic bomb.

When we had the Manhattan Project, we developed new means of destruction, right?

So there was a lot of concern back then that it may destroy humanity, right?

And so you have to supplement that with your set of values and not use nuclear weapons unnecessarily.

And obviously, there is a similar risk with any technology that we develop that could have a big influence on us, such as genetic research,

the understanding of the human genome, you know, that opens up a Pandora box of possibilities of modifying people and, you know, designing people.

And

also, you know, the computer systems, artificial intelligence that enters

any facet of our life, that could, for example, make decisions of life and death about

the medical state of patients.

You know,

an artificial intelligence system could decide whether a person will die or live rather than a doctor, a human.

Correct.

And we have to do that.

Our cars will do that.

To adapt to that, we have to come up with a set of

ethical principles.

And for that, you know, I need our I think our society needs the humanities.

So there is this common

view among scientists that, you know, we carry the torch forward of progress and we don't really need humanity.

The humanities are losing steam, so to speak.

They are

the wave of the past.

I don't think so.

I think they are essential because you really need to decide how to respond to these new technologies in a way that our

civilization will maintain its longevity.

And

there are lots of ethical questions that come up now when we have

new technologies.

So I think, you know, yeah.

No, go ahead.

You think.

Go ahead.

No, so I think humanities have a central role in our future.

And I would, I think, and I actually wrote an essay about that, the humanities of the future.

I think they are as important as the scientists in fostering a better future for us.

I couldn't agree more, but I've talked to a lot of people out at Silicon Valley.

I've talked to Ray Kurzweil a couple couple of times.

You know who Ray is.

And

I've told him this

to his face.

I find him the most fascinating, most inspiring, and the most terrifying man I've ever met.

His view of what can be and what might be is just off the charts exciting.

But his arrogance of,

well, we as humans won't make the mistakes to use this incorrectly,

his cavalier

idea of

eventually be one with the machine so you could download yourself and you'll live forever is terrifying.

Because that's, as I said to him, that's not life,

at least to me.

And it could mirror life, but it's not life.

And

again, I go back to what your book is really about.

The arrogance and the hubris of

science is back to the Tower of Babel days.

I agree with you.

I completely agree with you.

And unfortunately, it doesn't take us in the right direction.

Because

if you look at the history of humans, the biggest mistakes were made out of arrogance.

And

I very much hope that people will hear the message.

Can I change?

Yeah,

can I ask you this?

And this is always such a dangerous road to go down, and

I just want to know the difference in your opinion.

And I asked Ray this:

a lot of the pursuits, when coupled with arrogance,

are the same things that the early eugenicists here in America and elsewhere and Germany?

It's the same pursuit of being able to make the Superman.

What's the difference besides technology that we can now do these things?

What's the difference?

Yeah, no, I think of arrogance just like junk food, you know, like sugar.

It tastes good when you have it, but it's bad for you.

And it brings you to a bad place.

And

if you have a good diet

intellectually, you get a sense of modesty, and then your steps are more measured and are more balanced, and you care about other people.

Arrogance leads you in the direction of dismissing the values of other people.

And

I very much agree with you that

we should not surrender to this tendency.

I mean, people like sweet things, right?

Junk food tastes good.

We should just try to avoid it.

And it requires some effort.

And in the context of science, you know, the thing that bothers me is that

it puts blinders on our eyes because arrogance says we already know the answer before we need to check it.

And that's pretty bad, you know, because

in many cases, it's just like saying, okay, I'm as wealthy as Elon Musk.

You know, I don't need to check it.

It's like being on drugs, right?

But if you really want to cash your money, you think that you are more wealthy than Elon Musk, you go to the ATM machine and you find that you don't have that much money.

And that is equivalent to testing, to putting some skin in the game, to testing your idea.

And without going to the ATM machine,

we may never realize that we are bankrupt.

And so our ideas may be completely off.

Now, for people that sit in a comfortable position, they have income, that they don't need to worry about it, they can believe that our reality is a simulation

and they can believe that we don't need any experimental feedback, we don't need to put any skin in the game.

They can think that.

But to me, it sounds like just like feeling high on drugs and not really testing, not being in contact with reality.

That's the risk that I see in this approach.

Are you hopeful for the future?

Are you pensive about the future?

Where are you?

Knowing what you know and seeing the state of the world and the state of arrogance in the world?

I'm always optimistic in the sense that I never back down, you know, so even in the context of scientific disputes, you you know, if the evidence shows me that I'm wrong, then I will correct myself.

But if it's people that tell me on Twitter that I'm wrong without attending to the evidence, I don't care less.

And

in that sense, you know, it reminds me, I used to be in the military at a young age because in Israel where I grew up, it's obligatory.

And when I was in the paratroopers, there was a saying that a soldier sometimes needs to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can step forward.

And that's the way I see the pain that I have right now with all this pushback.

I see it as a way of allowing the younger generation of tomorrow

to

be able to speak freely on this subject of search for other civilizations.

And I see it as a service.

You know, it's not about me personally.

I see it as a service to those people so that they can overcome this taboo that exists right now.

And also promoting the right ideas of modesty, of being open-minded, of allowing innovation in science.

And at the same time, saying that what most of the community is engaged with is self-indulgence, you know, trying to prove that people are smart, but not really dealing with reality by getting experimental data to test what these ideas are.

And, you know, I don't mind that it's not popular, and obviously, it will not be popular, but

I just hold my.

So, I'm optimistic in the sense that I'm trying to promote a better future.

If I was pessimistic, I would say, the hell with it, it's not worth the fight.

But as to the question of whether I would be successful in promoting these ideas, I don't know.

I'm just trying my best.

I find you a remarkable man

and

somebody that history should remember.

We are entering such

interesting times, to put it mildly.

And those who

may end up being wrong on things, but can passionately, scientifically, logically

make a point and have a different point of view,

those people are hard to find now because it's getting scary for people to stand up.

Well, thank you, Glenn.

But I should say that I came to this point partly because over the past few years both of my parents passed away.

And, you know, at some point I said to myself, you know, the hell with it.

Why pretend to be better than we are?

You know, let's focus on substance.

And sort of like what basketball coaches say to their team members.

They say, keep your eyes on the ball, not on the audience.

Do you think you would be the man you are?

Not just your parents, but 65 members of your family

thought they'd be able to get out of Germany before it was too late, and they didn't.

Do you think you'd be the same man?

No, no, that taught me an important lesson, yes.

And by the way, the Second World War is an excellent example where

the Nazi regime was quite arrogant in saying that they are the superior race.

And

racism by itself makes very little sense because, you know, very often it's related to skin color or very superficial things.

And humanity wasted so much money, energy, effort in fighting the Second World War.

And so many people died.

A lot of Jews, many of my family members.

Really unfortunate.

And Winston, I say that in my book, Winston Churchill in 1939 wrote an essay arguing that we should search for life beyond Earth.

And just around the time when he was about to publish it, he was recruited to be the prime minister in England and didn't have a chance to publish it.

And then spent many years fighting the Nazi regime.

And just imagine if, instead of the Second World War, we would use all these resources to search for life elsewhere, the way Churchill advocated.

Imagine where would we be today?

We would know much more.

Imagine if Wernher von Braun,

his intellect, intellect would have been employed

instead of in the 1960s, in the 1930s and 40s.

It's an honor to talk to you.

Hope we can talk again.

Keep up the fight and let us know what else you find.

Thank you, Glenn.

It was a real pleasure speaking with you.

Thank you.

God bless.

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