Podcast: An Alien Probe? No, Serious Question with Avi Loeb

Transcript

Listen: Buckle up, we're going interstellar. A visitor from another star and earth-like planets. Joining Ian Bremmer to sort all of this out is a very special guest: Avi Loeb. He's head of astronomy at Harvard and he's made a compelling case about an "alien probe." #Oumuamua #AlienLife More on that soon.

TRANSCRIPT: An Alien Probe? No, Serious Question with Avi Loeb

Professor Avi Loeb:

I don't regard the existence of life elsewhere as a speculation. Why would we think that we are alone?

Ian Bremmer:

Hi. I am Ian Bremmer and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of small puppets. This week I sit down with renowned Harvard astrophysics, Professor Avi Loeb, who made headlines in recent months by theorizing that alien life may exist, and he's still at Harvard, and then he may have spotted evidence of it as recently as 2017. No news on 2019, but let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Understands the value of surface, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

Avi Loeb, professor director of the astronomy department here at Harvard, founder of the Black Hole Institute. Many of the things we could say, welcome to the program.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Thank you for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

And I guess you should be welcoming me here because of course I've invaded your space and it's a rather special place. Could you tell our audience where we actually are right now?

Professor Avi Loeb:

Well, we are at the Harvard College Observatory that was constructed about 170 years ago. With this telescope here and only a century later, the Harvard Astronomy Department as an educational institution was established. Before that, it was mostly about research and there were many important discoveries made in this building. For example, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the previous chairs of the astronomy department, in her PhD thesis, discovered that the sun is made mostly of hydrogen. And at the time there was a lot of resistance to the idea and eventually turned out that most of the universe is made of high hydrogen unlike the earth.

Ian Bremmer:

Now you're presently chair of this department and you're advancing a theory, a hypothesis that is also being strongly resisted by pretty much every colleague you have in the field which is that there is this interstellar object which is now in orbit, not around, I mean, leaving the suns orbit rather quickly. Oumuamua. Oumuamua. Oumuamua. It's a Hawaiian word, and it means scout.

Professor Avi Loeb:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

So tell us what it means.

Professor Avi Loeb:

This object was discovered on October 19th, 2017 by a telescope that was looking for objects that might cross the orbit of Earth. These are called killer asteroids of the type that killed the dinosaurs, for example. We are worried about them because we have a lot of infrastructure on earth and we would like to prevent such an asteroid or comet from hitting us. And in the process of monitoring the sky, this very strange object was discovered and it seems to be unbound to the sun. In other words, it moved too fast to remain bound to the sun to come back again and again like all the other objects that we have seen before, asteroids or comets. And at first people said, "Well, it must be a rock just like an asteroid." And then-

Ian Bremmer:

But a rock unlike any rock we've ever seen before.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Well, it was found out after about a week of monitoring this object, it became clear that it is very unusual, unlike any asteroid or comet that we have seen before. For one thing, as it turned around every eight hours, its brightness changed by a factor of 10. And that means that since it reflects sunlight, we are basically seeing the reflected sunlight changing in time because the area of the object projected on the sky is changing. And the factor of 10 means that it is 10 times longer than it is wide. Very extreme shape. A factor of a few more extreme than any object we have seen before.

Ian Bremmer:

It kind of looks a bit like a cigar effectively.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Not necessarily, it could be a pancake. And in fact, a pancake is preferred based on the tumbling motion that it exhibited. So there were papers discussing the extreme shape, the fact that it might be a pancake. And then it was found that this object actually deviated from an orbit that is shaped just by the sun's force of gravity. And usually such a thing can happen if there is outgassing, if ice on the surface of a comet evaporates and then gives it a push - the tail. That's what we see as a tail, but it acts as a rocket. Basically, the evaporation of gases from the object pushes the object in the opposite direction, just like a jet engine on an airplane.

Professor Avi Loeb:

And the problem is, the only problem, is that we haven't seen a cometary tail. There was no dust behind this object and there was no gas detected. Carbon-based molecules were searched for with a Spitzer Space Telescope and were not found. And moreover, this object appeared to be very shiny and there wasn't any heat observed from it. And in addition, it was peculiar in the sense that it came from a very special frame of reference, which is the frame of reference where you average over all the motions of the stars in the vicinity of the sun. And it is only one star in about 500 stars is so much at rest in that special frame of reference, which is called the local standard of rest.

Professor Avi Loeb:

So for all these reasons, this object looked very weird. And one thing that I really wanted to understand is how does it get this push without a cometary tale? And the explanation that came to mind is that the sunlight is pushing it. And sunlight or light in general can push on an object just like wind pushes on a sail. Basically by reflecting off it, it gives it a little kick. And in fact, there is this concept of a LightSail which we as a civilization are currently developing for space exploration. And so the idea was perhaps this object has a LightSail. And if so, if it's very thin so that the sunlight would be effective in pushing it, then it may be artificially made.

Ian Bremmer:

So you're saying that there's nothing that occurs in nature that would allow for a sun-driven push in velocity of an object?

Professor Avi Loeb:

It seemed very unlikely to me because the object needs to be less than a millimeter thick, so very thin and the size of other tens of meters. And so to me, it sounded like a sail that is artificially made. However, months after our paper was written, and by the way it as a regular scientific paper in which we had a paragraph saying that it might be of artificial origin and we didn't plan on any press release. This was in my mind, just like any other paper I wrote before where I put out a conjecture. For example, most of the matter in the universe is dark. We don't know what it is. It's not ordinary matter that we are made of.

Professor Avi Loeb:

And so a year ago I wrote a paper that was published in Nature, a very prestigious magazine, where we postulated that maybe the dark matter has some electric charge in order to explain an anomaly that was discovered by some observers. And that didn't get much attention. To me, it's more of a speculation than thinking about the possibility that there is some space debris out there that was produced by another civilization because-

Ian Bremmer:

It's in both cases. It's a question that science does not have yet an answer for. There's no consensus and you're providing something that seems plausible given the realm of what we know.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Right. And science is based on evidence, and we should put all possibilities on the table and examine the evidence. When the church argued that they don't want to look through a telescope and they put Galileo in house arrest, that didn't change the fact that the Earth moves around the Sun. People not willing to entertain some possibilities does not make these possibilities go away. Reality is whatever it is, this object is whatever it is unrelated to what is being said about it on Twitter. And by the way, I have no footprint on social media. I don't really care what other people say. I care mostly about evidence.

Professor Avi Loeb:

So if I would've seen an image of this object and it would look like a rock, I would be happy with that and not write this paper. But given all the weirdness of this object, it seemed to me that this possibility has to be entertained since this is the very first object we have seen from outside the solar system. And we ourself sent out Voyager 1, Voyager 2. And so it's possible that there is space debris out there. It may be defunct, maybe the civilization that sent it is dead by now, but nevertheless, it's just like doing space archeology. We should examine anything that enters the solar system because it saves us the time to go elsewhere and search.

Ian Bremmer:

Is there another plausible theory that is out there right now about how this object exists?

Professor Avi Loeb:

Well, some people say, "Well, maybe there is cometary outgassing, but it's in the form of gases that we have not been able to detect." In other words, for example, it's pure water without any carbon-based molecules and the water molecules are difficult to detect. Now, it would mean that it's pure water. We haven't seen that before and everything is possible. But once again, I rest my case. This object is very unusual. And given how unusual it is, we should search for more of the same.

Professor Avi Loeb:

One possibility to learn more about the object would be to chase it down, but it's a special guest we had for dinner that looked very unusual. By the time we realized that it's unusual, it left out the front door into the dark street and it's receding away from the sun. We use the sun as a lamppost that illuminates the environment. But since it's so far from the sun, it's very dim and we can't really observe it at the distance. We could contemplate sending a spacecraft that runs after it. The problem is that all the rockets that we have cannot move fast enough to chase it down. And moreover, you need to equip such a mission with a telescope that would search for it because we don't know exactly where it went.

Professor Avi Loeb:

And so a much more plausible approach would be to look for other objects that are similar that are also unbound to the sun, and there should be many of those if this is one member of a population of random objects. And so there is the large synoptic survey telescope that is under construction and will start operation within three years. And it is much more sensitive than the Pan-STARRS telescope that was used to discover Oumuamua, and it should detect one such object every month or so. So we just need to wait a few years and then we will see a lot of these if they are out there. And if we don't see-

Ian Bremmer:

Why should it detect one every month? Because?

Professor Avi Loeb:

Because it's much more sensitive. So it can see these objects at a greater distance and also potentially objects that are of smaller size.

Ian Bremmer:

So by random distribution as opposed to by another civilization actually sending an object, how frequently should an object actually pass through our solar system?

Professor Avi Loeb:

So if it's a random population of objects, there should be roughly one such object or a fifth of such an object inside the volume occupied by the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Okay? There are plenty of those objects within the solar system right now on the way to us, and we just need a sensitive enough telescope to see them at a distance. And the farther we can see them, the more of them that we would see. And so this future telescope that will come into play within three years should see one every month. If we don't see that, it may indicate that Oumuamua was strange in one other way, that it was unique. It was sent into the inner region of the solar system for a purpose. This is the habitable zone, the region where potentially life can exist. And one can imagine, another purpose for it being center.

Professor Avi Loeb:

I should say that I don't regard the existence of life elsewhere as a speculation. One thing I tell my students in class is that the sky teaches us modesty. First because the universe is huge and there are so many stars. There are more habitable planets, planets just like the Earth, in the observable volume of the universe than there are grains of sand on all beaches on earth. And when you think about emperors or kings that conquer the piece of land on earth and boasted about it, it's just like an ant that hugs a single grain of sand on the landscape of a huge beach. It's not very impressive. So we should be modest.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Now, a quarter of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, we now know have a planet with surface conditions similar to the earth. And all I'm saying is if the conditions are similar on other planets, then the outcome might be similar whereby this planet would develop a technological civilization. Why would we think that we are alone? That must be arrogant on our behalf. Moreover, it reminds me of my daughters. When they were infants, they tended to think that the world centers on them and they matured once they went out to the street and saw other kids out there. So we as a civilization will mature as soon as we go to the cosmic street and look around and we might find that we are not the smartest kid on the block.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, the problem is, of course, is that we are the only kid on the block right now. I mean, Oumuamua is a data problem. Right now you have one object that you study. And I'm going to-

Professor Avi Loeb:

One object that came into our house which is the solar system.

Ian Bremmer:

Randomly.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Right, right. But this is our home. I'm saying about going out to the streets.

Ian Bremmer:

I know. So what I wanted to ask you related to that is that I mean a lot of what you do for a living is also confined by an N of 1, a data set that's very limited. Here we are, we're the only human beings that we have observed in the observable universe, but we all know that there are all of these planets where life, in principle, could have emerged. For me, the question has always been given all of those planets, not what the likelihood of life is, which seems to be almost certain, but what the likelihood of life at any given point in time is.

Professor Avi Loeb:

That's right. Indeed, the way we behave indicates that the lifetime of our civilization may be rather short. Because the technology evolves nowadays on a timescale of a few years and it evolves exponentially. And you can imagine that within centuries from now, we will develop the means for our own destruction very quickly, and we will not survive more than a thousand years.

Ian Bremmer:

And we've only been asking these questions for-

Professor Avi Loeb:

Recently.

Ian Bremmer:

... a few thousand years. So it's a tiny, tiny-

Professor Avi Loeb:

It's a tiny.

Ian Bremmer:

... blip.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Exactly. And so that may explain why we are not seeing contact from other civilizations because they're short-lived, but that doesn't mean that we will not find evidence for them.

Ian Bremmer:

Debris.

Professor Avi Loeb:

We might find debris from dead civilizations. We might find burnt up surfaces of planets, civilizations that went through a nuclear war and destroyed themselves or did not preserve the climate on their planet or left some mega structures or artifacts that we could find. I call that space archeology. And the importance of doing that is that we might learn a lesson to get our act together and not to share the same fate as those civilizations. So in fact, astronomy can teach us not only modesty, but also a sense of urgency in terms of dealing with our planets and our future. Currently, all our eggs are in one basket, the earth. And I think it's inevitable for us to think about going to space in order to preserve the things that we care about.

Ian Bremmer:

Given what you know about the observable universe. I mean, I know that there've been some scientists, I think it was Drake's equation was one of them. Trying to understand the likelihood, just the math from all of those planets that are out there and how long the universe has been around, where does that bring you in terms of likelihood of life in the universe now?

Professor Avi Loeb:

I think in terms of a very simple principle of cosmic modesty, which means that I don't think that we're special. I don't think that we are unique. I don't think that we're the pinnacle of creation. I think that there are likely civilizations much more advanced than we are. And that once we find evidence for them, it would look like magic. It would look like something we cannot understand. Similar to showing a cell phone to a caveman. The caveman would think that the cell phone is just like a piece of rock that is very specially shaped. But it seems to me that technology, even our own technology a thousand years from now, would look to us now as magic.

Ian Bremmer:

Sure, like magic.

Professor Avi Loeb:

And potentially, you might even consider a very advanced civilization as an approximation to God because it will be able to do things that we assign or assign in the past to God. You can imagine creating synthetic life in the laboratory. And in fact, there are experiments attempting to do that. Physicists also imagine the possibility of creating a baby universe in the laboratory. These experiments, if we ever get to doing them, would have theological implications because we will become creators of life and new worlds. And it's interesting to ask the question, perhaps our own universe was created in the laboratory of another civilization.

Professor Avi Loeb:

So it's sort of like a process where every time you create a baby universe, there is a civilization in it that creates a new baby universe and you keep having these generations of universe. So my view is that biological life, the way we see it today, first of all is just one cake that was baked on earth out of the chemicals that were available in some fashion.

Ian Bremmer:

Good to be something else.

Professor Avi Loeb:

But we all know that you can use the same ingredients in making very different cakes. It depends on how you put the ingredients together, at what order, and over what time.

Ian Bremmer:

But what I wanted to ask though is, again, on the basis of the evidence that we have, the science, which is so limited, we understand that. But what do you think? Do you think it is likely plausible or exceptionally unlikely that other life exists in the observable universe now?

Professor Avi Loeb:

I think it's very likely that life exists elsewhere. I should say that primitive life, the kind of microbial life, single cell organisms and so forth that many of my colleagues would regard as very plausible is actually much more challenging to produce out of chemicals just by chance processes. For the chemicals to make a living cell is a great fit. I mean, it can be done, it was done on earth and people are trying to do it in the lab, but it is a major challenge to assemble chemicals in a way that will make a cell. It's much more of a challenge than once you have a cell making a system of cells that is much more complex. So getting life to go from a single cell into complex creatures like ourself, in my mind, is easier than creating the first cell.

Professor Avi Loeb:

And as a result of that, I'm driven to conclude that intelligent life is just a natural progression and nothing special. And that in fact, it may happen many other places. And if intelligent life already existed elsewhere for a billion years ahead of us, then it has developed to a level that we cannot envision. In particular, humans are not well-designed to travel across the vast distances between stars. And I can imagine creating robots with artificial intelligence that are equipped with 3D printers that will be sent out and they can survive long periods of time. They can make out of the raw materials of the targets that they would visit. They can make anything we want, which can just give them the blueprint to make perhaps even humans in the future or create life elsewhere of the type that we have here on earth.

Ian Bremmer:

There is a pancake shaped object, for example.

Professor Avi Loeb:

That's another possibility. Plausibly.

Ian Bremmer:

Avi Loeb, thank you very much.

Professor Avi Loeb:

My pleasure.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here in next week, same place, same time. Unless you're watching on social media. In which cases, wherever you happen to be, don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Understands the value of surface, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.