Avi Loeb on 3I/ATLAS: an interstellar visitor

3:11argument that uh to to convince anyone, and that is um there are retro reflectors. These are corner reflectors that were put on the moon and were used over the past few decades to bounce laser beams off them so that we can gauge the distance to the moon very precisely. And in fact that was used to imply that Newton's constant doesn't change in a trillion years. You know by one part in a trillion it doesn't change um so over one year. So so this these retro uh reflectors are there. We can use them to bounce laser beams. They were not there by any alien civiliz. We put them there. >> Couldn't we put them there with rovers or machines?

3:56>> Not really. Not really. Uh, and um, so there was a moon landing. Of course, we have also samples that were brought back to Earth, but you might argue maybe these were found on Earth. >> Von Braun picked them up in Antarctica in 65. >> But these reflectors were, you know, and and there is also, I think, an American flag on the moon that you can find. >> So, my point is there are things on the moon that were definitely put back then that wouldn't be there otherwise. Well, it I I do understand the argument that when the one of the big questions is why haven't we been back? And it does make sense to me why we wouldn't need to send people back, right? Because it's like again to our original conversation about NASCAR, it's too much of a risk to send

4:41humans way out there when we can do it just as good of a job with robots, >> right? Uh so the for science definitely it makes sense to send robots because humans are more vulnerable to the harsh conditions in space. Also, you know, we haven't used AI in space as of yet. And it would be necessary if we take long trips because right now all of our missions on the Mars or the moon are being uh helicopter parented by engineers in the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. So um and I say helicopter parented because there is a helicopter that you know that was parented on Mars by these engineers. And um so um the the

5:29point is if we send a mission to a much uh more distant uh destination then we can't really provide guidelines to the these probes because it takes a long time for light to cross that distance. For example, Voyager now is one light day away and Voyager just started in the 70s. Now Voyager will exit the solar system in 10,000 years through the outskirts of the or cloud of the solar system and >> you know it will take several years for a signal to get there and if it reaches the nearest stars you know it may take even longer and so the point is you know if it faces some immediate decision to be made about what to do under some circumstances when it lands on a target

6:14uh those decisions cannot be made by engineers on Earth they have to be made by the probe itself. It needs to be autonomous and that means it needs to have its own brain and it would feel like sending kids out of your home uh when they are autonomous. You know they can make their decisions. That's what you what happens after a certain age. You send off your kids and every now and then they send a postcard or or or report about what happens to them. And so we will get reports from those very distant probes that we send, but we will have to rely on them doing their job according to the guidelines we gave them. And that requires AI and we haven't used AI as of yet on a space a spacecraft. That will be the next frontier

7:00>> using AI on a spacecraft. >> Yes. What? So, going back to the moon real quick, what is the most practical use for us uh or or the most practical reason for us to go back to the moon or study the moon? What use to us is the moon other than its obvious like being the gravitational and moving the tides and keeping us in this in this >> I should say up front that I'm not hugely excited about the vision of going to the moon and Mars is the ultimate you know um [snorts] destiny of humanity because you know these are rocks that are not better than earth. Earth is a paradise. It has an atmosphere, liquid

7:46water. We feel comfortable here. We better preserve it as much as we can. But if we ever want to put a significant fraction of humans out there, we better build a space platform that can accommodate them. Uh that will have its own energy source. For example, nuclear reactors will have its own habitat and its own uh gravity based on rotation. You know that the you can produce if the spacecraft rotates, you can produce a centrifugal force that would mimic gravity. And so um in principle, one can come up with a concept. Now you might say it's very expensive, but think about the fact that we're investing $2.4 trillion a

8:31year in military budgets worldwide. And um if we if we decided to allocate a significant fraction of that to space exploration, we would spend a trillion dollars a year. Meaning that it would be a super Manhattan project size ambition that uh the best architects, the best technologists, the best scientists will be engaged in. And I believe that if with a trillion dollars a year, we can actually build a spacecraft, we can move to space uh in a way that is much better than relying on a rock that, you know, existed for a long time and using missions that cost billions of dollars instead of trillions of dollars. >> But how big could this thing possibly be? Like how many humans could it fit? And would it be cheaper than building

9:17like an underground city in a cave on the moon? >> Oh, well, uh, that can be done. And also on Mars, you can in principle use a cave or a um >> these like uh these lava tubes, right? >> Exactly. And uh what I would like to find out is if we enter one of these lava tubes, whether there are any prehistoric paintings there because maybe someone else went there before us, especially on Mars, which for half of its lifespan had conditions very similar to Earth. There were lakes, oceans, rivers of water there. And we just don't know if intelligent life was twice as fast in developing on Mars than on Earth. All you need is a factor of two which is not very big cuz you know we

10:02exist 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed and Mars um you know if >> yeah we were very late on Earth. >> We we are very late by the way if you want to get a good dose of modesty then you have to realize we are not at the center of the universe. We know that since copernicus and galo despite the wishful thinking of the Vatican. But um we also came very late to the cosmic play. You know only over the past few million years the human species came to exist and the universe existed for 13.8 billion years. So the conclusion from that is if you arrive late to the play and you're not at the center of stage the play is not about you. It's a very simple conclusion and you better find

10:48other actors >> to ask them what the play is about. We have very limited knowledge of what happened to our cosmic neighborhood before we came along. I mean, we have some indirect evidence, but documented human history is only 8,000 years old. And so much has happened on Earth. Uh we don't even know if on Earth there was a very advanced civilization before ours, >> right? that may have you know created self-inflicted wounds and died they perished you know and um also it's quite likely that all the civilizations elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy if you ask where is everybody like Enrico Fermy asked they're probably most most of them are probably dead because if you ask where are most of the humans that lived on earth you know there were more than

11:33100 billion of them and now there are only 8 billion they died okay so most civilizations died billions thousand of years ago, we were not around to witness their pain, their struggles, their history. And the question is, if we want to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy, we need to do one thing, not stay on this planet. We need to build monuments in interstellar space that will maintain some memory of us. And I don't mind if humans are on these monuments. You know what I call monuments are basically spacecraft that go to interstellar space. Uh it could be with humans, it could be with AI. I don't mind. The point is we want

12:18anyone else in the Milky Way galaxy to know that we existed or to remember the guiding principles that we cherished. And if we stay on this planet, you know, we might survive another million years, maybe a billion years, but not more than that because the sun will brighten up in a billion years. and basically uh boil off all the oceans on earth all the liquid water and um the earth will become a desert just like Mars. So we have 1 billion years left about 20% of the age of the earth left for us to do something about it. If not nobody would mourn the fact that we died. You know we can disappear from the surface of earth. There is nobody in the cosmos that will hold a funeral or say good things about

13:04us unless we take our fate into our own hands. And you said earlier that humans are known to for taking risks and having the human spirit of so I think the best um uh way of displaying it would be to become an interstellar species. >> Yeah. If we got wiped out and there was a another another civilization of humans popped up a million years from now, they might see like the Hoover Dam and the Washington Monument and like whoa >> even that may not be visible if there's enough dust from asteroids impacting the earth and >> yeah I mean um but the point is that um we are very shortsighted because if you look right now we are engaged mostly in conflicts we live for a short time each

13:49of us just century >> territorial apes. Yeah. And you know, we invest most of our time in either shortening the lifespan of other humans or preventing them from shortening ours. Like this is completely non-intelligent. Okay. So, my hope is and and that's the main reason I'm working on interstellar objects. My hope is that we will get a package from another civilization in our mailbox that will imply that we can do better and we might want to imitate them. Those that arrived to our backyard before we arrived to their backyard [snorts] >> and you know it's just like finding a sibling of your family that you didn't know about that is more accomplished than you are and therefore you you get inspired. As Oscar Wild said the

14:35imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So in that context you know for example I studied the interstellar objects for eight years now and the SETI community that is looking for radio signals was very critical of this work and still is >> and they were you know banning any discussion about technological gadgets near earth in their conferences. But recently, just um a few months ago, they wrote a paper some of these people in which they say we need to check if interstellar objects might be technological. And again, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I don't need them to say to give me credit. I just realize that when they do what I do, it's actually a compliment.

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16:54push back on your on the three Atlas stuff and I want to get to that in a minute. But like going back to the Mars stuff, do you think it's possible that there was a point in history where Mars was habitable for life and had a more robust atmosphere and and a place where human definitely we know that the conditions were similar to Earth. In fact, um I mean for about at least 2 billion years, if not 2.5 billion years, which is half the age of Mars. The Mars lost its atmosphere only in the second half of its history. And it's not of obvious what the trigger was, but presumably it didn't have a strong enough magnetic field to keep the atmosphere bound and perhaps the the solar wind ripped it apart. And we we just don't know the details but there

17:39[snorts] is definitely clear evidence u that there was liquid water on the surface just like and it was a place similar to earth now in fact it started before earth because it's a smaller body so the cooling of a body is proportional to the surface area I mean it stores some heat from the formation process and then it cools from the surface >> and the amount of heat that is in it is proportional uh to its mass or the volume that it has. So, so Mars is a smaller body. Therefore, it had more surface per it mass. So, it was easier for the heat to leak out from a smaller body than right than Earth. And therefore, it had life probably before Earth. And therefore at at that time,

18:25you know, in the first hundreds of millions of years of its lifespan, after it cooled enough, it could have delivered life to Earth because there were rocks that were basically um making the trip from the surface of Mars to Earth as a result of an impact by a bombardment by some asteroids. We know that there was there were lots of bombardments. And um we have uh one rock that was analyzed about 45 years ago uh from Mars. And it was possible to say that this rock never heated was never heated to more than 40° C uh during its entire journey from the surface of Mars and passage through the

19:11Earth's atmosphere created a fireball and then landing on the Earth. Never the core of the rock was never heated by [clears throat] to more than 40° cuz it has magnetic properties that would have been erased if it were to be heated by more. And that means that microbes could have survived at the center at the core of this this rock that we have an example of. And the [clears throat] same is true for the rocks that came early on. So it's possible that microbes were the first astronauts really that came from Mars to Earth. And when Elon Musk wants us to send astronauts to Mars, that will be just like returning to our childhood home in a way. Um, >> is this disputed and contested at all that Mars was once inhabitable for human beings and had an atmosphere?

19:57>> Human beings is a separate matter, but for microbes definitely for microbes. >> We don't we don't >> very similar to Earth. >> Yeah, similar to Earth. Now the question is whether intelligent creatures, you know, existed on Mars after two billion years. You know, on Earth definitely not. we we didn't have that. But if the evolution of life was accelerated for some reason on Mars by a factor of two, that's that's the only thing you need. Then you could have had uh intelligent creatures over there as well. And they were wiped out as obviously for the same reason that we will be wiped out in a billion years when uh you know the all the liquid water on the surface would be gone. >> Well, it's interesting. There's that element, the xenon 129 that was found on Mars.

20:42>> And um the only place on Earth that's actually found is like ground zero of of the tests of thermonuclear bombs. >> That's interesting. Yeah. >> So, wherever there's nuclear explosions where we we've tested nuclear bombs on land, we find this xenon 129. Interesting. >> And that seems to be that I guess it's an isotope and that was found >> on Mars. Well, imagine a situation where there was a population there uh that went into a nuclear war and wiped itself. >> And it's not a So, yeah, it's not a So, the Xenon 129 is not a naturally occurring phenomena. >> That's interesting. >> It's only allegedly created where there's nuclear bombs and we found it on Mars. Like, did we detonate [clears throat] a nuke on Mars? >> We we never did that, of course. Right.

21:27So that's an interesting clue because you can't make isotopes easily without the nuclear process, right? >> It's much easier to to do chemistry on the surface of planets than nuclear physics because you know it requires much more energy density to to I mean you can't really have the high temperatures needed >> to produce isotopes of this nature. So that's interesting. you know, maybe something happened on our neighboring planet, but that doesn't mean that we need to go there. I mean, we can go there as archaeologists to to survey the land and figure out what was there to start with. And, you know, there could have been also Mars right now is like a museum because if you imagine a a a rock

22:12that is roughly the size of a person impacting Earth, and by the way, that happens once a year or so. uh a rock of about half a meter to a meter in size. What happens to it is it usually burns up 50 km uh at a 50 km altitude uh and there is not much impact on the ground because it's way up there. It releases as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb and uh we just don't hear about it in the news. Every year there is something like that except a much bigger rock can penetrate through and reach the ground and then you get some major effect but most of the time you know 71% of the earth is ocean so you don't but nevertheless these things happen all the time but uh the point is that on Mars

22:58there is no atmosphere so such an object will reach the ground and Mars is like a museum it collects everything that impacts it at least over the past 2 billion years before that it had an atmosphere and so we can look at it as a museum and check you know whether any technological objects impacted Mars be before we came there. Uh nobody is planning right now to do it. Uh NASA is mostly interested in microbes. >> Mhm. >> Um you know astronomers are most mostly interested in microbes. The the decadal survey of 2020 defined in astrophysics and astronomy defined as the highest priority searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in the

23:43atmospheres of planets near other stars. That that is the highest priority with an investment of about 10 billion over the next two decades. >> So we haven't found any evidence of life on Mars yet? >> Not yet. I mean the most recent um uh clue is the these rocks that were discussed in a recent press conference where uh it looks like um they have some residue that could have been from microbes and but to to be sure about it that it's not geological effects that that produce those residues. We need to bring these rocks to Earth and analyze them to make sure that it's not something geological but rather biological that created their appearance which resembles rocks on Earth with

24:30microbes on them. >> Would that be a difficult thing to do to bring big rocks back from Mars? >> It's not difficult. It's just it costs money. uh that's called the Mars um uh sample return mission that was uh originally planned but because of the cost was you know sidelineed but but now Mars is back looking into cheaper possibilities of doing it and I think it's really fascinating another comment on this is that and that was never discussed is that now we are starting to find interstellar objects meaning objects that came from other stars and reached um the inner solar system and Um um so even if these are just rocks, if we were to design an a a an interceptor, a

25:17mission that lands on such a rock, brings a sample back to Earth, we would be able to study the building blocks of potential life around other stars. I'm saying even if it's just a if three Atlas is just a natural rock, you know, just imagine a rock the size of a city, we know that it's about 5 kilometers or so or maybe even bigger. [snorts] Um, first it's it's a big object. Second, this one actually moves in the plane of the planets around the sun which offers an ideal opportunity for us to intercept it and land on it. However, we didn't know about it in advance. I calculated I wrote a paper that I published shortly after it was discovered that in fact

26:02there is a spacecraft around Jupiter called Juno that was launched by NASA and if they kept the original fuel that it had they could have used it to intercept to to actually collide with three Atlas on March 16th when it will come closest to Jupiter but they used most of the fuel so they can't do it but it illustrates the fact that if you detect an object like three Atlas early enough, you can intercept it or land on it. And >> how fast is that threei Atlas moving? >> Uh it entered the solar system at 60 km/s. So coming back to the NASCAR race, it's faster than the fastest car we have by a factor of 600. 600 times

26:48faster. >> And you can land on that? Well, it depends how you design the interceptor. I mean, uh you can definitely cross its path and but then obviously uh the spacecraft will be demolished as a result of the impact. >> It it could send us close-up photographs >> right before it gets >> yeah incinerated. But there are [clears throat] also situations where [snorts] for example if the interstellar object comes on an orbit that is not that fast and actually goes behind the earth then it would be relatively easy to land on it bring something to earth. Uh so my point is this is a frontier a window into the universe that was never

27:33explored because a astronomers always focused on remote observing using telescopes to look far out. M >> nowadays we also use gravitational wave detectors to look at the universe. It doesn't matter. In both cases we're looking at very distant sources trying to infer what is out there. It's just like you you are in a home in your home at a house on the street you see many houses similar to yours and you look at them through the window with telescopes let's say. Yeah. >> So you can learn if they have microbes for example. But it's very different than getting a physical object that came from a neighbor's yard that you can study. If it's a rock, you can learn what the neighbor's yard has. Um, if it's a a tennis ball that was thrown by

28:19a neighbor, you can learn about the neighbor and maybe the neighbor might come and and knock on your front door. That's the other possibility that we have to contemplate. We haven't really considered what to do if there is a visit by alien technology that could pose a threat to humanity. You know, people would say it's very small probability that this would happen. First, they don't know how to calibrate. We don't know how much traffic there is of interstellar technological objects. But secondly, um we don't have a protocol for how to deal with that. And you know the intelligence agencies always have a protocol for how to deal with black sworn events. These are events that have small probability but big impact on society. And the reason you need to deal with them is because

29:05even if you say it's unlikely, the impact would be huge. And therefore you must have a way of collecting information that would basically neutralize the threat. and serious people in government in the intelligence agencies always spend a lot of resources on events that never materialize. >> We don't know about it. They [clears throat] may have prevented some disasters you know like terrorist attacks but it's part of the rational thing to do and scientists on the other hand do not understand that because if they say if a scientist says at the 99% confidence I know that three atlas is a rock or a comet >> even if you say that at the 99%

29:51fine that is okay when you deal with interpretation of events that have no impact on society you know like you deal with a galaxy far away, an exploding star far away, no impact on our future. However, when you deal with something coming to our backyard, you can't just say 99%, you know, it's a rock and therefore we shouldn't even worry about it. Because if you take the 1% chance that it might be alien technology and multiply by the potential impact on the future of humanity, you get a huge number. So what what you have to do our duty as scientists is to collect as much data as possible to figure out whether there are any anomalies anything that looks strange and we can't explain it that might be indicative of

30:37technology and that's my point my point is we have to mature scientists have to mature and realize that in this case there are political financial societal implications and therefore they cannot use the procedure of saying at some high likelihood this is well understood and that's what NASA did basically in a recent press conference they said it's a rock it's a it's a rock don't worry about it the point is that the nature of the object should not be decided by NASA officials it should be decided by scientists that analyze the data and I would much rather have at this press conference scientists talking about it and explaining why this or that facts

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32:53just basic give us a basic basic rundown of of what exactly it is and how you discovered it and why is it called ThreeI Atlas? >> It's I didn't discover it. I just paid attention to it. >> Okay. >> Um so three atlas is the third interstellar object. So that's why you have three eye atlas is the name of the telescope in Chile that discovered it only half a meter in size. Um every day now when uh you know I write on medium.com and reports about 3las and every day you can see images of 3 atlas taken by halfmeter telescopes that are owned by amateurs you know with at a cost of I don't know thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Compare that to the instruments used by NASA that cost

33:38altogether billions of dollars. Nevertheless, the information in those images taken by amateurs now is much greater than in the NASA images at the press conference that we heard about. But three atlas was discovered on July 1st and it was very bright and July 1st is just 3 days before the July 4th holiday. That's important because my wife wanted to go on a vacation and uh I immediately realized this object is bright you know it's the fact that half a meter telescope saw it at a distance of 4 and 1/2 times the earth sun separation means that it's a very bright very big object and I calculated that if it's a you know the brightness of this object is as a result of refle

34:25reflection of sunlight from a solid body it has to be 20 km in diameter which is the size of Manhattan at Nile you know the length uh that's a huge object that's you know comparable to the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaur 66 million years ago these are extremely rare things so then during as we got to the uh to to the vacation place I immediately did a calculation and argued that there is not enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver such a big package >> over the past decade because this survey went only for one decade And you would expect it once per 10,000 years. Now you might say, oh well maybe, you know, it's a a rare object that happens to come by that that's obviously

35:12possible, but at the probability of 0 0.1% or so or less. Uh and then so that was the first anomaly that struck me, you know, uh >> the size >> the the mass. So it's a a million times more massive than the first interstellar object discovered in 2017 called a Mua Mua. That was the size of a football field. So compare the size of a city to a size of a football field. That's the difference in size. And the mass goes like size cubed. >> And how do we how do we determine that mass again? What is the calculation there? >> Oh, it's just the you take the size the diameter, let's say, and cube it multiply by the typical density of a solid and you get the mass. And in both cases and you irrespective I mean if you

35:58use the same density for both objects which is solid density about one gram per cubic centimeter you get a large size of all the 5 km or bigger uh for three atlas. So it's at least a thousand times more massive than the second interstellar object called the borisov which was found back in 2019 >> and a million times more massive than Mua which was found in 2017. So that's by itself it's an anomaly. Why? Because I wrote in my paper I said you know either the object itself is much smaller than we think. Maybe there is a very dense plume of gas and dust around it that reflects sunlight and the object itself the nucleus is much smaller. >> That would be then that would relieve

36:44the tension of in terms of the size or the mass. Um, and the second possibility is that if it's so big, maybe it targeted the inner solar system. It was not drawn from the reservoir of rocks in interstellar space. And this was my last sentence. Maybe it targeted the inner solar system. The editor of the journal, and that was just a few days after the the object was discovered, the editor said, um, I will publish this this paper only if you remove this last sentence. Um >> they they said that they would not publish it unless you removed the last sentence. >> Yes. Basically, you shouldn't say that it was targeting the solar system as a possibility. It's definitely a comet according to the editor. And that was

37:29just the early days. We didn't have much data at that time. Um just to show you how science operates these days. So I said, "Okay, well I wanted to be published." So uh I I took out that sentence and then the rebel that I am I wrote a full paper on the technological option and uh in that paper with in collaboration with two other authors that was peer-reviewed and published just to show you that this editor was out of line because this paper was eventually published peer-reviewed. Um and we show that also you know the fact that it was targeting the the inner solar system is supported by the trajectory which is aligned with the plane of the planets within 5° and the

38:16chance of that happening at random if you consider all incoming orbits uh only one in 500 will be so so aligned with the planets and >> one in 500. >> Yeah. And this is the third object. So, you know, again, >> we we've only been monitoring these interstellar objects for how long? >> Uh, about 8 years. >> About 8 years. Yeah. Okay. So, since about roughly 2017. >> Yeah. 2017 is when the first one was uh discovered by telescope in Hawaii that was looking, right? >> Yeah. Um, and which means a scout in the Hawaiian language. And that one um was just found it was flagged because it came near Earth. And this survey telescope was trying to find near-Earth objects that pose a threat because

39:03Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field. And this survey telescope was constructed to find near-earth objects. Then it found a move but realized that it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun. And so that's how interstellar objects are flagged. you see an object moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun and therefore it must have arrived from outside the solar system. >> So they discovered it by complete coincidence. Then a couple of years later, I found together with my student Amir Siraj, we found a meteor. Uh, in other words, an object that collided with Earth half a meter in size in a catalog of fireballs that again NASA

39:49compiled uh based on US government satellites that monitor the Earth all the time for nuclear ballistic missiles. you know um obviously you know we know that a lot of ballistic missiles were launched from Iran you know uh last year and so there is there is a network of uh infrared sensors looking at the earth for flashes of heat >> satellites and stuff >> yeah satellites and those existed uh back in 2014 and they noticed a fireball from an object colliding with earth so that was definitely not uh should not be classified. So they released it to the scientific community and said here is a meteor and documented the the speed by

40:34which it was moving. And all we did was look at that speed and realize well it was moving at 60 km/s relative to the sun outside the solar system. If we go back in time this object was moving as fast as three atlas and so we said it's an interstellar meteor. That's it. And then the paper was not accepted for publication because the referee the reviewer said we don't believe the US government data. So at the time I was um >> who said they don't believe the US government data? >> The reviewer of the paper >> in someone sitt [clears throat] someone sitting in a university somewhere. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Exactly. You have to understand the government is very believable because they discovered flashes of gamma rays back in the late 1960s where with villa

41:22satellites that were aimed to monitor uh any nuclear explosions above the atmosphere back then. Uh there was an agreement with Russia with the Soviet Union. Uh and but um you the US wanted to verify that that the Soviets are actually not exploding anything and and then they looked for gamay flashes and found every day or so there is a flash. So I'm sure in the first few days there was an alarm in Washington DC but but then they realized it comes from the rest of the universe and so it was declassified and eventually reported these are gamray bursts. Turns out they come from the edge of the universe from massive stars that collapse to make black holes and then the black holes as

42:09the matter is funneled towards the black holes you get jets being produced of outro. So, so the matter forms a a disc of material that spirals just like water in going down the drain, you know, and in the process of doing that um some of the material ends up being cumated in two jets that are perpendicular to the >> uh the disc of material around >> this is what you see around the black hole. >> You see that for big black holes. But in this case, the same phenomena occurs for small black holes, stellar mass black holes. When the core of a star collapses, you end up with the material spiraling in and creating those jets. And those jets eventually drill a hole in the envelope of the star that

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