If This Happens Near Jupiter… It Could Be Aliens | Avi Loeb | DSH #1858

It's practically impossible for a natural object to do that.

So if we see new satellites around Jupiter after March 16th,

then it would be a technological signature.

But there could be things parked in the solar system.

And every now and then they send a probe.

The minute we find evidence for alien technology,

I think it will change our priorities.

All right, guys, special episode today.

We got Avi.

There's a lot to discuss with everything going on

in the world right now.

So thanks for joining us virtually today, Avi.

New camera, so I appreciate the high quality.

Well, as long as my answers are as clear as the camera,

I will be happy.

Let's go.

I want to start off right off the rip here with 3i Atlas,

because there's a lot of developments.

I just saw you make a statement about January 22nd.

There'll be good conditions for studying.

Could you give the latest updates with 3i Atlas?

Right, so there are two important dates.

One is the January 22nd.

Indeed, that the Earth will be in between the Sun and 3i Atlas.

And it aligns to within 0.69 degrees with the Earth Sun axis.

That's an amazing alignment that potentially will allow us

to see it much brighter, because it's just like a full moon

situation where the Sun illuminates the object you're looking at.

And you're looking at it from the direction of the Sun.

So in addition, there is another effect

that amplifies the amount of light from dust, for example.

And so January 22nd, we give us an opportunity

to learn much more about the nature of the jet

that we see coming from 3i Atlas towards the Sun.

And it will be pointed at us, at that point.

And it will be interesting to watch out

and see whether we learn something new about the origin

of this jet, the physics behind it.

And then on March 16th, the object 3i Atlas

will come closest to Jupiter.

And that will be exactly the distance

where Jupiter's gravity dominates over the Sun's gravity.

It's called the Healer Radius.

And the question is whether that's significant.

Well, if it is a technological object,

that would be the right distance to release devices

that would become satellites of Jupiter.

For that purpose, the satellites need

to lose the velocity of 3i Atlas relative to Jupiter

so that they become gravitationally bound to Jupiter.

And it's practically impossible for a natural object to do that.

So if we see new satellites around Jupiter after March 16th,

then it would be a technological signature.

But if we don't, most likely this object was natural.

As long as we don't see it maneuvering, doing something

unusual, there were a number

of anomalies of it that triggered my interest.

And the most important among them

was the fact that it's moving in the plane

of the planets around the Sun.

And that's why it comes so close to Jupiter.

That's why it's aligned with the Earth, the Sun axis,

on the January 22nd.

And that alignment within five degrees of the elliptic plane

is highly unlikely, one in 500 chance.

If we were to see hundreds of interstellar objects

before one of them would align with the plane,

I would say it's quite reasonable.

But for the third object to be aligned that well,

it's a subpercent probability.

And you complement that with the fact

that there is this jet from the object

that is oriented in the direction of the Sun.

We've never seen anything like it.

It's stretched along a distance comparable to distance

through the moon from Earth.

So it's a very long jet.

And it's an anti-tail.

It's opposite to the direction of dust and gas

around comets that is away from the Sun.

And moreover, we see that, in fact,

I have a paper that I'm about to publish

where we analyze the images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

There are 17 images that were obtained

between November 30th and December 27th, 2025.

And we measured the orientation of the jet structure

around triathletes, and we saw that it's wobbling

by 20 degrees.

So the situation is similar to the beam coming from a lighthouse.

As the lighthouse rotates, the beam is not aligned

with the rotation axis, so it sweeps along a cone.

That's what happens in the light house.

And so the same is true about an object like triathletes

that is launching a jet.

The jet is wobbling as a result of its rotation.

And we can tell that the rotation period is 7.1 hours.

We also see it in the brightness of the object

that is periodically changing over a period

of about 7.1 hours.

And we can infer the rotation axis just

from the average of the wobbling.

And we find that the rotation axis is within 10 to 20 degrees

aligned with the direction to the Sun.

Wow, at large distance.

So once again, there is this geometric coincidence

that triathletes has a very low probability of having

its rotation axis in the direction of the Sun.

If it was perfectly aligned with the direction

of the Sun at large distances, it would

mean that it has a permanent day side, a permanent night

side as it approaches the Sun.

And then when it receives the two poles

of the rotation axis reverse.

And you get the pole that was previously in the night side

becoming the day side and so forth.

But just this alignment is really puzzling

because at large distances from the Sun,

the object didn't really know about the Sun.

So why would the rotation axis be so aligned?

Why would in the plane of the planets around the Sun,

the plane of the Milky Way galaxy is 60 degrees away

from that plane?

There are all these anomalies.

There is much more nickel with very little iron.

So that's why I said, let's consider the possibility

that it is a black swan event.

An event that has a very low probability

but could have big implications for humanity.

And therefore, we should consider it serious

be that it might be technologically designed,

at least its properties were designed.

Right.

And you've been studying this for many years now.

And you said earlier, you've never

seen anything like this, right?

Yeah.

I mean, there are only three interstellar objects

that were identified by astronomers from telescopes.

And this is the third one.

So there cannot be an expert on those interstellar objects

because we had only two before this one.

Just think about it as a blind date

with objects that come from outside the solar system.

If you go on a blind date with two people

and then you have a third one and the first

and the third look really strange to you.

Obviously, you should not make any judgment

about their nature because you don't have a big enough sample

to decide what is normal.

And of course, there are people who

marry the first blind date.

They decide that it's sufficiently exceptional for them

to get attached to that person, even though it's

the first one that they ever sampled.

So we can't really tell how unusual

because we have only a sample of three.

But there are anomalies that we cannot explain.

And to me, it raises the possibility

that there could be a subpopulation,

a fraction of those objects that

might be technological in origin.

And there aren't as many of them,

but they target the inner solar system for a reason.

Right.

What were the leading theories for the other two objects

where they similar theories as this one are different?

No.

So the first one was discovered in 2017

by a telescope in Hawaii called the Panstars.

It was given the name Omo Moa, which

means a scout in the Hawaiian language.

And then that first one was anomalous in other ways,

very different from three Atlas.

There was no gas or dust around it.

And therefore, it was not a comet of the time

that we're familiar with, definitely not a comet.

And then, moreover, the brightness of the object

changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours.

So it meant that the object has a very extreme shape

so that the surface area of the object

was changing by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling.

Just think about a piece of paper that

is very thin and tumbling in the wind.

And the shape of the object was most likely flat,

based on the variation of reflected sunlight.

And so the fact that it was tumbling

and had this extreme shape was unusual.

But moreover, it exhibited an excess push away from the sun

by some mysterious force.

And it couldn't be the rocket effect

from cometary evaporation.

Usually, you do see jets in comets

that give it a boost just like a rocket.

But there was no gas or dust around it,

or Moa Moa that we detected.

And so the question was, what is pushing it?

And I said, well, maybe it's just sunlight pushing it.

And for that, the object had to be very thin,

like a membrane.

And I suggested that, therefore, it

must be technological in origin.

It can be a surface layer of that

was torn apart from a technological object

or a broken piece of some megastructure, like an ice

on sphere.

We don't know what it is.

We didn't get enough data on it.

But in fact, the push away from the sun

declined inversely with distance squared.

So that's what you expect from solar radiation pushing

on a thin object.

And just three years later, the same telescope in Hawaii

discovered another object that was definitely pushed

by reflecting sunlight.

And then they realized a few months later

that it's made of stainless steel.

They took a spectrum of this object,

realized it's stainless steel.

And then they said, oh, yeah, this one is actually

a rocket booster that was launched by NASA in 1966.

We know about it as part of a lunar lander mission.

And so here is an example of a technological object

that displayed the same quality as Omo Moai.

And we know that it's technological,

because we produce the question is who produced Omo Moai?

And then the second object that was discovered

was in 2019, the second interstellar object.

And that one was definitely a comet,

a similar to comets that we've seen before,

from the solar system.

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So altogether we have three

the first one was a normal loose in different ways

than the third one and three outlaws.

So I'm just open minded to the possibility that one of these two

might be technological.

That makes sense.

Yeah, three's not that many at all.

I feel like if aliens were out there,

there'd be way more, right?

Yeah, well, maybe not everywhere,

but they might have a purpose in the inner solar system.

There might be a reason why maybe even they are parked

in the outer solar system.

We can't see them.

We cannot see an object smaller than the size of a football

field within the Earth Sun separation,

with our biggest telescope, we are looking obviously

for objects under the lamppost, just like looking

for the keys under the lamppost is the sun.

And when you put an object too far from the lamppost,

you can see it.

And so even if there was an object as big a starship,

our biggest rocket, we wouldn't be able to see it

at the distance larger than the Earth Sun separation.

And so I can imagine the solar system

extends out to 100,000 times the Earth Sun separation.

That's the edge of the or cloud.

And so just parking something at a thousand times

the Earth Sun separation, even if you parked

the biggest constructions that we've made in space,

our biggest telescopes will never be able to see those things.

So there could be things parked in the solar system.

And every now and then they send a probe.

We just don't know.

I mean, that could be the answer to Enrico Fermi's question

from 1950.

He asked, where is everybody?

Well, they might not be very far,

and he didn't build the telescope to search for them.

It does a mistake that a lot of lonely people make,

my wife before she met me.

She said, there is nobody out there for me.

It's pretty difficult for me to find a partner.

And if you give up on the search,

if you say there is nobody out there,

you will never find a partner.

You know, so the mistake that Fermi made

was that he didn't build the telescope.

He didn't really search for,

he just said, I don't see anyone having lunch,

any extraterrestrial sitting next to me at lunch

in Los Alamos in 1950.

Therefore, where is everybody?

You think they'll invent better technology,

whether it's a telescope or something more advanced

in the future, where we could see farther out?

Oh yeah.

So right now, the best survey telescope we have

is called the Rubin Observatory in Chile.

It was funded by the National Science Foundation,

Department of Energy,

just started operations half a year ago,

and it has a camera with a 3.2 billion pixels.

So a thousand times more pixels

than your cell phone camera that you're looking through.

So it's an amazing instrument.

The camera is roughly half the height of a person.

It's quite amazing,

and it will survey the southern sky every four days.

So it could alert us to interstellar objects

bigger than a football field.

Every few months, we should potentially find something

like that.

However, it's only limited to the southern sky,

and we need a copy of it in the northern sky,

so that would require an investment of a billion dollars

to have a second one.

And I think it would be worthwhile

so that we cover the entire sky.

And that would be sort of an alert system

to big objects, bigger than a football field

that come from interstellar space.

But then if we find clear evidence

that any one of them is a tennis ball

that was thrown by a neighbor,

it's a artificial, not natural, iceberg, or rock,

it will change everything.

Because then we will fill a potential threat

from alien technologies.

And that would mean that we might decide

to allocate a significant fraction of the military budgets

worldwide to defend the Earth, defend our planet

from a completely new type of threat.

In the past, we imagined that rocks

may collide with Earth, because a giant rock,

the size of Manhattan Island, killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

So we do have a planetary defense office at NASA

that is engaged with identifying all the rocks

bigger than a football field that may collide with Earth,

just to prevent the catastrophe across the metropolitan region.

But we've never prepared for a technological object

in space that is threatening the Earth.

And that is much more complicated,

because it could have an intent, it could maneuver,

and we can't really forecast its path.

So the minute we find evidence for alien technology,

I think it will change our priorities.

And if we decide to invest the trillion dollars a year

in a fraction of the military budgets in space exploration,

we can build an array of interceptors in space

that will come close to every interstellar object,

get us a close-up photograph so we can tell its nature.

And perhaps even we will have some kind of a solution

of how to defend the Earth against those threats,

if the X is.

But so that will change dramatically

the funding for space exploration by a factor of almost a thousand

or at least a hundred.

But for that, we need to find evidence.

And the strange thing is that someone just a couple of weeks ago

submitted the, his name is John Greenwald,

submitted a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act

request to the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency,

asking them if they have any documents, any records

that mentioned 3A Atlas.

And the reply was, we cannot confirm nor deny

the existence of such records.

Interesting.

And to me, it illustrates the fact that they must have

some records, because if they had nothing,

they would say we have nothing.

And the question is, why would the CIA consider 3A Atlas?

Well, if they want to entertain the possibility

that it might be a Black Swan event,

they want to have an analysis of all the data available

to figure it out.

And they don't want the public to know about it just in order

not to create any panic unnecessarily.

So that makes a lot of sense.

And I suggested back in July that, actually,

we should establish a scale, a classification scale,

of interstellar objects, where zero means a natural object,

can means a possible technological threat.

And we should just rank on this scale, which

is called the lobe scale.

We should rank every interstellar object in the future.

I like that.

Yeah, there's a lot of mystery with 3A Atlas.

And I know with NASA, they wouldn't release the photos, right?

Well, there was a government shutdown, which was the reason

that they said they could not process the photographs.

And then they had a press conference where the images they

showed were very fuzzy.

So I didn't really understand why they

would hold such a press conference.

A month later, the Hubble Space Telescope

got much better images.

So they should have had a press conference

with the Hubble images.

But anyway, NASA is obviously a bureaucratic organization

that the press conference was held by officials.

It was not held by the scientists who analyzed the data.

That's where I would expect content to come out.

Right.

Will if NASA or the military won't fund the telescope,

maybe you could give Elon Musk a call.

Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental question

is whether Elon Musk is the most accomplished space

entrepreneur since the Big Bang.

And he might want to know the answer for that,

because if the answer is yes, he will get a big boost to his ego.

My personal assessment is that there are 100 billion stars

like the Sun, most of them formed billions of years

before the Sun, just in the Milky Way galaxy.

And so my guess is that we are not

at the top of the food chain.

There are things better than us.

And that's an opportunity for us to learn.

And so it makes a lot of sense to invest in the search.

Unlike Enrico Fermi, who just asked the question,

we can actually search for partners.

And when you go on blind dates, the best advice

that someone could give you is to aim high, not to aim low.

You should look for a partner that is better than you.

Agreed.

And at this time, the astronomy community

is focused on searching for microbes.

And I argue, this is lower than us.

I want to find something better than us.

So I would like us to invest billions of dollars

in parallel to searching for microbes,

also in the search for a higher level of intelligence,

technological civilizations out there.

If we are searching for primitive life,

let's search for technological civilizations

at the same time with the same level of investment,

because the signatures of technological civilizations

might be easier to detect.

Because they create products that are different from nature.

And if we find any of these products in our backyard,

we would know that they exist.

And finding microbes is very challenging from a distance.

But yeah, they've been trying to do not Mars for decades, right?

Yeah, that's an object that is close to us

that we can visit and look for the signal.

Well, Mars is a planet right now,

because it has a desert and no very little atmosphere there

and no liquid water on the surface.

But the idea of the mainstream of astronomy right now

is to search for molecules like oxygen

or methane in the atmospheres of exoplanets,

planets in the habitable zone around the other stars.

The problem is not only that it's very challenging

to find those fingerprints,

backer fingerprints are very faint and difficult to detect,

but also that once we find them,

it will not be obvious that the same molecules

cannot be produced by geological processes.

This will be debated, it will not be a clear cut situation.

Whereas if we find an object, an interstellar object

with buttons on it, it's clear that it's technological.

If we have an image of it.

So let's invest a similar amount of money in both searches.

And let nature decide what is easier to find.

Rather than us saying, well, it's an extraordinary claim

to imagine something as sophisticated as we are.

I think that is a mistake.

And I hope that Elon Musk will find it exciting enough

to support it if he's interested.

I'll be delighted to discuss it with you.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, we came from somewhere, right?

We still don't know what happened there.

Yeah, well, if you believe in the most conventional

scientific scenario, we came out of a soup of chemicals

on the early Earth.

Evolution, right?

And so that means imagine being a chef

where you create food.

Obviously, if you start from similar ingredients,

you have a chance of ending up with the same product.

If you just follow the same path.

And so if there are 10 billion Earth sun analogues

in the Milky Way galaxy alone, which is the current estimate,

the chance is high that conditions were similar

to those on Earth.

And at least the large number of them.

And therefore, things like we have here on Earth

came about elsewhere.

And it's unlikely that we are really the pinnacles of creation.

And if you just read the news every day, it's clear

that we are not that intelligent.

Look at how many mistakes we make.

We invest a lot in fighting each other

and wasting resources rather than working together.

Yeah, I agree.

How much attention do you pay towards UFOs and UAPs

do you take any of that serious?

Oh, yeah.

So in fact, I'm leading the Galileo project.

And we started the project after the director

of National Intelligence submitted three reports

to the US Congress discussing objects in the sky

that they cannot figure out.

And that's a rare admission of a government official

that they're not doing their job.

Because for national security purposes,

there is a trillion dollars allocated to the defense budget

in 2026.

And if those officials admit that they can't figure out

some objects in the sky, they are not doing their job.

And so that's a serious matter that has to be dealt with.

And of course, there is a possibility

that these are not human-made objects

or not all of them are even made objects.

And I was intrigued by that.

So the Galileo project is building observatories.

We, by now, we constructed three observatories,

one in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania,

and a third one in Nevada.

In fact, where you are Las Vegas.

On the sphere, right?

On the sphere, yeah.

And then, and near also within 10 kilometers of the sphere,

not just in one location, we have three units.

But the whole point is we are looking at the sky,

trying to figure out if we can identify

all the objects there as being human-made.

And if we see any object outside the performance

and the level of human-made technologies,

then obviously we will write a scientific paper about it.

If we don't see such an object

and everything looks as if it's human-made, so be it.

And then I wouldn't feel that my time is wasted

because the Pentagon can take advantage

of the software we develop, the instruments we use.

In order for national security purposes,

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So that sounds pretty complicated.

So is there AI integrated with those systems?

Yes.

So we are using AI or machine learning

to train models on familiar objects.

And we are asking the AI to check

if there is anything any outline.

Wow.

It's not going to be.

Now, it's not an easy process because even a single object

like an airplane can be looked at from different directions.

And it really depends on how the direction of the sun

relative to the camera.

And of course, we are also looking at night,

at infrared radiation emitted by all warm objects.

But then if we have a large enough training data set,

then eventually our hope is that we will automate the process

and find all the anomalous objects.

And as of now, we're planning to look

at the few million objects in the coming year.

Wow.

So it will be a big sample.

There's that many objects in there, a few million?

A few million in the year.

Wow.

Yeah, because all the planes and the satellites are it.

Yeah, exactly.

Most of them, I would say, 99% or more than 99%

are definitely human-made.

Wow.

What do the odds you think we find some sort of alien technology

in our lifetime?

Well, it really depends if it's out there.

So if it's not out there, when you go on dates

and you hope to find a path, the path may not be out there.

You might be out of luck.

And then it doesn't matter how much work you do,

you won't find a partner.

So it really, I mean, and the other thing to keep in mind

is that it doesn't really matter what idea is popular

on social media, what the mainstream of the scientific community

thinks is likely because the question of whether we

have a neighbor or not is already settled.

Either we have a neighbor nearby or not.

And then it's up to us to check.

And if we decide that we know the answer in advance,

if we decide that the probability for that

is very small that we have a neighbor,

we can maintain our ignorance forever.

There is no guarantee that we will see the light.

And it's really up to us to search.

Now, I'm saying that the mainstream of science

is investing in searching for things

like microbes, investing in searching

for most of the matter in the universe.

We don't know what it is.

It's 84% of the matter in the universe

is of a substance that we've never found.

It's called a dark matter.

And we are investing billions of dollars

in searching for dark matter for about 50 years now.

We haven't found it.

So a searching for things that we don't know if they exist

is part of the frontier science.

And we already spent billions of dollars on searching.

You know, just a couple of weeks ago,

there were two experiments that was searching

for a gross particle, which is called sterile neutrino.

And there was the two experiments cost $90 million.

And they obviously took a decade

for the people working on those experiments

to bring them to fruition.

And at the end of the day,

they ended up not finding the particle.

Even though they had good reasons to expect

that it might be there based on anomalies

in other experiments, it was not found.

So very often, you find in the mainstream

an investment of large amounts of money,

a lot of research, a lot of time dedicated

in a direction that proves to be dead end.

There was a search for a new symmetry of nature

because super symmetry by the large hydrant collider at CERN.

And that large hydrant collider cost them $10 billion or so.

It was also searching for dark matter.

Haven't found super symmetry in no dark matter.

And it's part of doing science.

And of course, all I'm saying is that on a question

that is so important for the public,

where the public funds science,

the question of whether we are alone

is their intelligent life out there.

How can the scientific community ignore that question

and say it's too speculative?

And let's invest just in the search for microbes.

That is unclear to me.

Yeah, that's always been your frustration

with the scientific community, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a matter of common sense

to say let's at least invest as much time and money

as we did in the search for specific types of dark matter.

Let's search for intelligence.

For 50 years, invest billions of dollars

if we don't find anything.

We'll be at the same place as the dark matter searches are

right now.

So it's not an unusual request.

And I think it makes a lot of sense

given the interest of the public.

We can search, for example, for city lights

on the night side of exoplanets.

We can search for industrial pollution in the atmospheres,

not just for microbes.

And we haven't done that.

Of course, what we did do, I mean,

there is a community that was searching for radio signals.

But if you think about radio communication,

it's just an old technology

that we are slowly abandoning.

Right.

And the communication in the future

might be handled with lasers.

Right now, we have fiber optics using

used on earth for communication.

So it's not at all clear that a century from now

or 1,000 years from now or a million years

or a billion years, this technology

will be actually being used.

So why are we putting all our eggs in one basket,

searching for radio signals?

It's also like waiting for a phone call.

You might wait forever.

Nobody would call you.

And it's a very different approach to search

for a package in your mailbox, or some tennis ball

thrown by a neighbor in your backyard.

Looking for physical objects is a completely different approach

because you don't need the sender to be active or to be alive.

You can still find those objects.

That makes sense.

You said earlier, 84% of the universe is dark matter,

but they can't find it.

How did they know that 84% is dark matter?

Right, among the met, there is also dark energy on top of that.

So I was saying, out of all the matter in the universe,

only 16% is ordinary matter that we are made of.

So the thing about ordinary matter is that we can see it.

It interacts with light.

And this substance that is called dark matter,

just to express our ignorance, is dark in the sense

that it doesn't interact with light.

And how do we know that it exists?

It's because the amount of mass associated with big objects

like galaxies or clusters of galaxies is much bigger

than we can see in stars or in gas,

the ordinary matter that we are used to.

And moreover, we can follow the history of the universe

and based on that history, which we measured

to exquisite the precision, using the cosmic microred background,

we can tell that there is a substance that was not coupled

to the cosmic radiation.

This relic radiation from the hot big bang

that the universe started hot and dense

and then it expanded.

So we see the radiation left over from that hot dense phase.

It's called the cosmic microred background

or cosmic radiation background.

That radiation background was coupled to ordinary matter

early on when the universe was dense.

And we would not exist if there was only ordinary matter

in the universe because the ordinary matter

was coupled to the radiation.

The radiation was smoothing all inhomogeneities

in the ordinary matter.

So the ordinary matter was smooth just like the radiation was.

However, the dark matter was more clumped

as a result of some physics in the early universe

that there were some inhomogeneities created in it.

But it wasn't coupled to the radiation

so there was no smoothing force acting on it.

And so the reason that the Milky Way galaxy exists

is because the dark matter maintained memory

of the initial inhomogeneities.

And so it collapsed.

So this region that was denser the average in the universe

mostly full of dark matter ended up collapsing upon itself

because of its high density

and making a galaxy like the Milky Way.

And the ordinary matter just fell into that gravitational

potential well of the dark matter.

If there was no dark matter, if all the matter was coupled

to the radiation, there would be no inhomogeneities

that could see the formation of the Milky Way galaxy.

We would not exist.

The Milky Way galaxy would not form.

Stars like the sun would not condense

out of the gas of the Milky Way galaxy.

So we will not exist.

So we all are existence to dark matter

because it maintained memory of the clumpiness

that was induced early on in the universe.

And as a result of that clumpiness,

objects started forming in the universe,

including the Milky Way galaxy inside of which

the sun formed next to which the earth formed.

And so we exist on the surface of a tiny rock

that was left over from the formation of the sun.

And the sun formed out of the gas

in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy.

But the Milky Way galaxy as a whole

would never come to fruition unless there was dark matter

seeding its growth and collapse.

Wow, that's crazy.

That is crazy.

And by the way, a lot of astronomers are not aware of that.

So what I'm telling you is really a process

that is underappreciated.

So in fact, we all are cosmic roots to dark matter.

Without dark matter, we wouldn't exist.

It's like Yin and Yang.

You need both dark and light, right?

But we don't know what it is, by the way.

We don't know who to thank.

If you want to send a thank you note,

we just don't know where to send.

I mean, we are searching for the substance

in laboratory experiments, you know,

for any traces of this matter that we

can find other than through the force of gravity.

But we haven't yet found it.

What about dark holes?

How are those made, do you think?

For black holes, we see them in a way.

You know, we already have some images of black holes.

And the first one was obtained at the Black Hole Initiative

at Harvard University that I served as the founding

director of back in 2016.

That's when we founded it.

And then in 2019, there was the first image of a black hole

in a giant galaxy called the M87 that the black hole there

is about six billion times the mass of the sun.

Wow.

The what we can see is the silhouette of the black hole

because light coming from behind it

is basically swallowed by the black hole.

So you end up seeing a shadow on the background of the brightness

from the gas surrounding it.

And so that image was obtained.

We know black holes exist.

We find giant black holes like this one

at the centers of galaxies.

These are called supermassive black holes.

And then we find another type of black holes

that are a result of the collapse of massive stars,

stars that are more than 10 times the mass of the sun.

They end up their life.

And then gravity is so strong that their core collapses

to a black hole.

We see the process of that collapse

because sometimes you end up the material

that falls into the black hole creates jets.

And if the jet happens to be aligned with the direction

that we observe, these collapse,

we would see it as a flash of gamma rays.

These are called gamma ray bursts.

So they are sort of the signatures of a birth of a black hole

that we see out of the collapse of a massive star.

So we do the birth of the black holes

out of the collapse of massive stars.

And we know, for example, in the Milky Way galaxy,

there are about 10 million such black holes,

stellar mass black holes.

We also see them in gravitational waves

when you have two such black holes in a pair.

And they are close enough together

so that they create ripples of spacetime

that we can detect from a distance.

According to Einstein's gravity,

when you have a single object, it curves spacetime.

But when you have two objects moving around,

they create ripples.

These are called gravitational waves.

And that gets outwards is as if you move a stick

on the surface of a pond and it creates those waves

getting out.

So in the same way, we could potentially detect

the gravitational waves from a merging pair of black holes.

We did detect that in 2015.

And that was exactly a century after Einstein came up

with his theory of gravity.

And Einstein would have been delighted to see.

He thought at some point that gravitational waves

do not exist.

But now we detected them.

And the Nobel Prize was given for that detection

of two black holes coming together, stellar mass black holes

coming together.

And they were detected not by light,

but by gravitational waves.

Wow.

Completely new method in astronomy.

And there is another probe.

I mean, this was done by laser interferometers on Earth.

One, you know, the discovery was done

by the LIGO experiment that was funded

by the National Science Foundation in the US.

But we are planning also an interferometer in space.

And that would be sensitive to the core lessons

of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

So when two galaxies come together,

the two black holes spiral together

and eventually create gravitational waves

at much lower frequencies than stellar mass black holes,

because they're much bigger.

And so we can detect those.

Hopefully, within a decade, we'll detect those.

This is an experiment called Lisa planned

for about a decade from now.

And hopefully, we'll learn much more about merges

of supermassive black holes as well.

By the way, the Milky Way galaxy is about to merge

with the nearest neighbor, the sister galaxy called Andromeda.

We can see it in the sky.

And the Andromeda galaxy, when it collides with the Milky Way,

both of them have a black hole at their centers.

And they will come together and create

such a pair of supermassive black holes.

Wow.

What's that going?

Is that going to impact Earth at all

when those merge together?

There might be a burst of radiation

that could potentially affect the Earth, yes.

And I actually wrote a paper about it a decade ago,

trying to figure out.

It turns out that if a star with a habitable planet

like the Earth is close to the center of a galaxy

where you will have such a merger,

that planet can be sterilized by the burst of radiation.

We see such bursts of radiation all the way

to the edge of the universe.

These are called quasars.

We see a point source of light when a supermassive black hole

is being fed with a lot of gas.

And one way to feed it is if you have another black hole

emerging towards it that feeds it with gas.

I did not know there was space radiation.

I always thought it was from nuclear weapons, you know?

Well, that's the risk that we pose to ourselves.

It's sort of like a self-inflicted wound.

We can shoot ourself in the foot if we use nuclear weapons.

But we could also be impacted by our cosmic environment.

And the dinosaurs obviously realized that after a giant rock,

yet there could be exploding stars that could affect the Earth.

I also wrote a paper last year about the fact

that the solar system was presumably a few million years ago

was passing through a very dense cloud of gas.

And that cloud of gas compressed the solar wind.

You know, the solar wind is flowing out of the sun.

There is an outflow.

And it meets the ambient medium, the interstellar medium,

at a distance that is about 100 times the Earth's own separation.

That's where Voyager is.

So Voyager just crossed that boundary recently.

And then, however, if we are to cross through a very dense cloud

of gas, that region where the solar wind is confined

by the ambient medium will shrink to a scale smaller

than the orbit of the Earth around the sun.

And then we will not be protected as much as we are right now

from energetic particles.

So a few million years ago, we calculated

it could have been a situation where we passed through a dense cloud

of gas and that compressed the solar wind.

And we lost protection on Earth.

Another interesting paper that I just published a few months ago

had to do with the star that is seen passing by.

And we show that this particular star

may have passed very close, I mean, within a thousand times

the Earth's own separation.

And in that case, it could have sent comets

or that collided with Earth at a much higher rate than usual.

So that could explain why a few million years ago

there was a change in the climate on Earth.

By the way, that's around the time

when humans appeared on Earth.

So we published in Nature a paper showing

that this passing star could have triggered basically

the enhanced rate of comets raining down

on Earth and changing the climate on Earth.

We don't tend to think that we are affected by our environment.

This is true on short time scales,

but every now and then there is some catastrophic event

that could be triggered by our cosmic neighborhood.

By the way, the Sun itself about 150 years ago

had an eruption that if it happened today

there would be a loss of electronic technological equipment

including all the satellites around there.

At the level of probably a trillion dollars of space.

Back then, in the 19th century,

there wasn't much technology that could be destroyed

by a huge solar flare.

It's called the Carrington event.

And so it could happen anytime.

We are not protecting our infrastructure against that,

against giant solar flares like the Carrington event.

Such a thing should happen once every few hundred years.

And it could happen anytime.

We just, once it happens, of course,

then we will start protecting our technologies against it.

But our technologies are less than a century old,

modern science and technology.

I mean, quantum mechanics was discovered just a century ago.

So during that short period of time,

we didn't have any giant catastrophe on Earth.

There was not a solar eruption

that could devastate our technological infrastructure.

There was no impact by a big asteroid.

So we tend to think nothing that can happen from the sky.

But that's an illusion.

If we wait a few centuries,

definitely there would be a huge solar eruption

actually wrote two papers about it.

But nobody pays attention until it happens.

That's a human nature that, until something happens,

we are not allowed to it.

And so I believe there would be much more funding

to defend the Earth against such things once they have.

Yeah, what causes those solar eruptions?

Is it similar to a volcano eruption?

No, so the Sun is just a hot ball of gas,

that is being fueled by,

it's basically a nuclear reactor,

a fusion reactor that we are trying desperately to produce on Earth.

But the Sun,

and basically is a condensation of gas and very hot,

that got very hot at the center.

It just came together by gravity.

And at the center, the temperature reached about 13.5 million degrees.

Wow.

High enough to burn hydrogen.

And so it's basically a nuclear fusion reactor

that is held together by gravity.

And it gets its power from the nuclear reactions.

Eventually it will consume all of its fuel.

And at that point, it will die.

The nuclear reactor will stop working.

And then the core of the Sun will condense into a metallic ball,

roughly the size of the Earth.

So about 60% of the mass of the Sun

will end up condensing into a very cold object

that is the size of the Earth.

These objects are called white dwarfs.

And we see a lot of them in the graveyard of Sun-like stars

in the Milky Way galaxy.

Just like if you go to a graveyard,

you realize that you will die one day,

because you see all these monuments for dead people.

And the same is true for the Milky Way galaxy.

We see all these relics of dead the Suns

that these are white dwarfs.

That's what will happen to the Sun.

But until then, it burns its nuclear fuel.

And then the Sun is powered by this nuclear fuel.

And it has also magnetic fields.

And the magnetic fields come out of the Sun.

And every now and then, two of them cross each other,

because the Sun is rotating, there is turbulence.

So when two magnetic fields cross each other,

what happens is a process called reconnection.

They basically cut through each other.

They carry hot gas, and they inject a lot of energy

into the particles of the gas, and you end up with a flare,

a solar flare or an eruption.

And on how much energy stored in the magnetic field loops

that break up as a result of this process,

you end up with a solar flare or solar eruption

of different proportions.

And the amount of energy released, obviously,

most of the time is relatively small.

You don't get much of an impact on Earth.

I mean, there are these plumes of hot gas coming out

of the Sun that many times they're missing the Earth.

They're going in a direction that they don't intercept the Earth.

But every now and then, there is a bigger eruption

that sends a plume of hot gas that would collide with Earth

and cause a lot of damage to our technologies.

And that's what we, and the more energy

is stored in this plume, the more rare it is.

So we just have to wait a few centuries

before one giant eruption will affect the Earth.

Interesting.

So the Sun has a lifespan.

What about Earth?

Do you think this planet has a lifespan?

And there's all this talk.

So when the Sun, well, first of all,

the Sun will brighten up in a billion years

to a level that will boil off all the oceans,

all the liquid water on the surface of Earth

through the greenhouse effect.

So there wouldn't be much left, liquid water on Earth.

It will become like a desert and all life forms

will disappear from the surface of the Earth.

But within 7.6 billion, by the way,

one billion years is about 20% of the lifespan of Earth.

So we just have 20% left before life will not be possible.

But in 7.6 billion years, the Sun will die,

basically, and will expand.

The envelope of the Sun will expand and engulf the Earth.

And it will also engulf the Moon.

And so the Moon, because of its friction

on the envelope of the Sun, it will eventually crash on Earth.

The Moon came from Earth, but as a result of a collision

with a Mars-sized object, but now it will come back to us

after the Sun engulfs both the Earth.

Reunited.

Yeah, and then the combination of the two

will sink to the center of the dying Sun,

and will become part of the white wolf that will be there.

So there will be nothing left of us,

nothing left of what we care about on Earth

in the long term, 7.6 billion years from now.

And therefore, all of the ambitions that we have

about leaving some monuments that we'll be remembered in the future,

they will disappear.

The only monuments that will stay around

are anything we send to space,

that especially to interstellar space.

And that's the only way for us to be remembered

in the history books of the Milky Way Galaxy.

And so if another civilization realized that,

that's what they will do.

They will embark on an interstellar trip

or send the probes or instruments

that will carry their legacy to the Sun Space.

And so I think we should search for such objects

because it will encourage us, it will give us a tip,

it will encourage us to imitate them.

It will give us a role model of how we can do better.

And it's an extension of the Darwinian principle

of the fittest survives.

If you think about long term,

the fittest means that you leave your home planet

and you survive in space for on a space platform.

Star Trek.

Well, Star Trek is limited to the imagination

of Hollywood script writers.

I can imagine things, in fact, I think nature

is probably far more imaginative than we are.

So I look forward to finding such objects

because my belief is that they would be something

we've never imagined.

Right, I can't wait till that happens.

Hopefully we get to see it one day.

And I think by billions of years,

we'll probably be multi-planetary by then, right?

Well, so then the only planet that we can go to

is obviously Mars.

But it doesn't have a much of an atmosphere

and it's impossible to survive on the surface of Mars

for more than a few years.

The human body would be bombarded

by energetic particles, cosmic rays.

So we have to go underground.

And it's just another rock

that has much worse conditions than on Earth.

So why would you leave your home planet

and go to a planet that is much worse

in terms of habitability?

My recommendation is to invest

maybe a trillion dollars in a project

to build a space platform that can accommodate humans.

So we design it in a way that would give all the nutrients,

all the, you provide the habitat,

provide the artificial gravity

and all the conditions that we are used to on Earth

and put it in space.

Because we went from the jungle,

South Africa to high rises in cities.

And that was a big leap

because we had to search for food in the jungle

and it was a zero-sum game.

If someone gets that food, the others will not.

And now you can order the food

and if you come to your doorstep.

That was a huge transition.

We just made it in maybe hundreds of thousands of years.

And going from high rises in cities to space

to me sounds like less of a leap.

And then we just need to focus our ambitions

on that transition.

And then instead of making humanity multi-planet species,

making it a space engaging species.

And if we build our own habitats

that we can make sure that it provides what we need,

that we can equip it with nuclear energy

and with artificial intelligence.

We can create sort of a heaven.

And frankly, I would love to go on a journey away from Earth.

When I read the news every day, I'm very frowned.

Yeah, I don't blame you.

I don't blame you.

Hope to see you in space one day.

Well, I asked the students in my class one time.

I said if there was a spacecraft landing at Harvard Square

and they would invite you for a one-way trip,

would you go on it?

And I was surprised that the young students,

Gen X or even younger said that we will do that

but under one condition that we can share the experience

through Instagram or friends.

And I found that to be quite ridiculous, frankly,

because you will never see your friends once you go on a trip.

What's the point about sharing experiences?

Just enjoy it.

That's the only reason I would do it

just for the fun of experiencing something new.

Yeah, the younger kids have to document everything.

They gotta show off where they're traveling,

where they're vacationing, what they're eating for dinner, you know?

Yeah, but you're basically wasting your life

sharing it with other people.

Just enjoy it for yourself.

Yeah, I agree.

Well, Avi, it's been a pleasure.

How can people watching this find you support you

and keep up with you?

So I have essays on medium.com.

The link is avi-loeb.medium.com

where I provide updates about three-hour Atlas

or anything else that I'm working on.

And I have two books at a popular level

that I published in recent years.

One is extraterrestrial.

The other one is interstellar.

And there is a third one.

They just finished their writing

and should come out in 2026

about the expedition that I led to the Pacific Ocean.

There will also be a Netflix documentary about that.

And that was in search for materials

from an interstellar meteor.

So stay tuned for the Netflix documentary.

Awesome, can't wait.

We'll link it all below.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Yup.

Thanks for watching all the way to the end guys.

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