EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,016 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- JRJoe Rogan
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- ALAvi Loeb
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) All right. Good to see you, sir.
- ALAvi Loeb
Great to be with you, Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a perfect time to bring you on because, uh, things are getting very wild.
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation. You know, some people said I invented 3I Atlas, this object, uh, in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that what-
- ALAvi Loeb
And, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
... people are saying?
- ALAvi Loeb
(laughs) Yeah. And I said, "Look, this object-"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
"... is the size of Manhattan Island. It's at, uh, four and a half times the earth-sun separation. Um, if I was able to put it out there, you know, the, uh, I would be more powerful than the Pope."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
And because we're talking about-
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs)
- ALAvi Loeb
... a giant object that you can see from any place on earth, you know, you can buy online, uh, uh, uh, a telescope that, uh, will allow you, uh, l- half a meter in size, that will allow you to see it. It's out there. Uh, it cannot be faked.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, those people are fools. You can't listen to those people.
- ALAvi Loeb
I don't listen to those ... I d- I don't listen to many people, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, initially, a lot of people were dismissing your concerns and they were saying that this object is nothing but a comet and it's very normal. Uh, but then as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you're correct.
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, I, I have-
- JRJoe Rogan
This is a very unusual object.
- ALAvi Loeb
There is something really important to recognize here that d- usually when you deal with scientific matters, they have very little impact on the future of humanity, very little. You know, if the neutrino has a little bit of a mass, doesn't really matter, you know, when we discovered the Higgs boson, the biggest impact was to confirm some idea we had back in the '60s and, uh, uh, you know, obviously that affected, uh, you know, the, those people who got the Nobel Prize, but m- most of us continued, uh, as if nothing happened. However, here, if we ever encounter alien technology, everything will change. It will affect the financial markets. It will affect politics in a major way. So my point is simple. This is different than other scientific matters, and the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be considered seriously because they have m- they could have major implications. Just think about October 7th. The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamas will do nothing, and they got data that indicated something is going on out there, but they dismissed it because of their theory. Now, because as a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot of people died on both sides for... that... This could have been avoided if they were to consider a black swan event, an event that you put a small probability for it happening, but you look at anomalies in the data and say, "Look, the implications are so huge, we have to consider it." And, you know, this idea was already considered by the philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal. He talked about God, and he said, "Look, of course you might think that God doesn't exist, the probability for that is small, but the implications, if God exists, the implications are so huge that we have to discuss it." That was the argument, Pascal's wager, and the intelligence agencies know that. Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again. Now, here comes an object from outside the solar system and it shows anomalies. The scientist would say, "We should be as careful as possible at talking a- about anything other than a rock." Now, they say that when they know that we launched, humanity launched a lot of space junk, you know, a lot of technological objects through space, and we also know that there are a hundred billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most of them formed billions of years before the sun, and there are billions of earth-sun analogs. Now, we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals. You know, that's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this earth. And so it's quite likely that, you know, we are not the first one. Sorry to break the news, uh, Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us. And you can ask the question, how long does it take our own technology, the Voyager spacecraft that we launched out of the solar system, how long does it take it to move to the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy? You know, thousands of light years away, takes less than a billion years. And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it. And all we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks or maybe one of these objects might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. And the reason I say that is, you know, we live at our home, at our, uh, uh, at the, uh, on earth, uh, next to the sun, we look around us in the cosmic street, and we see a lot of houses just like ours. There are billions of them probably. Now, my colleagues, those scientists who think traditionally, they say, "Well, you know, microbes came to earth very early, therefore they must be everywhere. So let's define our highest priority searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street." And I say-Good. You can do that from the vantage point of your home. You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbors' yards. But you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument that would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes, you know, on exoplanets. Uh, and think about the possibility that there was actually, there is a resident in one of those houses. You know, that resident might show up in your front door-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
... at some point. Or you might see, um, an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that per- uh, resident.
- JRJoe Rogan
A black swan event.
- ALAvi Loeb
A black swan event. Or you might see some construction project in, uh, from a distance. That might be easier to detect than microbes. So we should hedge our bets. You know, we should, uh, invest billions of dollars on both fronts. At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10 billion to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence. And I say that, that is an oversight.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, they have found evidence of microbes on Mars, correct?
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, it's not-
- JRJoe Rogan
Not evidence?
- ALAvi Loeb
... conclusive. We need to bring materials back. It's, it's called sample return, and NASA has plans. We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories, we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that do look as if they were made by microbes, because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth. By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body, so it has a bigger surface area for its mass. The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process and then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool. And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth. So life may have started on Mars actually, 'cause it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water, and it could have been actually delivered to Earth. Uh, you know, we might be all Martians. And when Elon Musk, uh, uh, you know, considers going to Mars, um, it might be the second trip around. Uh, we might be going back to our, uh, childhood home, uh, because there were tiny astronauts inside rocks that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth and seeded the Earth with life as we know it.
- 15:00 – 30:00
(laughs) …
- ALAvi Loeb
canceled him on social media.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
And, and my point is, that's the first sign that, you know, humans are ... They want to think that it's all about them, you know? Like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And it's not surprising. But the Vatican admitted their mistake. In 1992, they issued an official letter saying Galileo was right. That was 350 years after he died.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
And, you know, it's the worst public relations affair that you can have, to admit that you were wrong for, for, you know, like 350 years. And how could they have avoided that? Very simply. If they said, "We have more money than Galileo, we will buil- build an even bigger telescope to figure out the truth, and we will prove him wrong." And then they would have found that he was right. And so then they would have corrected course. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or they would have put more people under house arrest.
- ALAvi Loeb
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That's probably what they would have done.
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, so, so my point is, it's really important in cases like this or 3i Atlas, it's really important to get as much data as possible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
Because once you reach a certain threshold, you can't shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking the way that my colleagues do. Just to give an example, the first interstellar object was Oumuamua, okay? And it was, uh, discovered 2017 and it, it was really strange 'cause, uh, you know, the... It was, uh, shaped like a pancake, uh, based on the, all the data we have and, um, and it was pushed away from the sun, uh, uh, by some mysterious force without showing any evaporation. No gas or dust around it. What did these conservative comet experts say most recently? Just, just in December 2024 there was a paper of them saying, "It's a comet. It's a dark comet." In other words, a comet where you can't see the cometary tail around it. So it's just like experts, you know, specializing in zebras. And they go to the zoo and they see an elephant. So then they say, "Oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes." And I say, "No, it's a completely different animal." You know, a spacecraft would appear differently than a rock, than a comet, because it will not have a, a, a, a cometary tail. It could be propelled by something else. So, so let me go back to the big picture that I mentioned before. So we live on this Earth moving around the sun, and my colleagues in academia, you know, one thing I often say is, "Common sense is not common in academia." (laughs) Because my colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo, they know very well about the possibility of black swans, and they say, "It's an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us, as smart as we are, near another star." And I say, "No, it's an ordinary claim. Why would you think it's extraordinary?" And, by the way, if you decide not to collect evidence, not to look for it, then you will not find it. So I say, and, you know, I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.
- NANarrator
Hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
Um, you really need to put resources to find the evidence by not attending to, to this possibility, you will ne- by not imagining this. And by the way, I much prefer to listen to imaginative science fiction writers, you know, first class-
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
... because, uh, they're much more interesting than second-class scientists who don't have any imagination and they don't want... uh, they not only have a problem with discussing alien intelligence, they also have a problem with whoever discusses it, and they would try to suppress that voice. And I think it makes no sense whatsoever 'cause the public really cares about it. You know, my essays on medium.com, they get a few million readers a month now. Uh, the public cares about it. The public funds science, therefore scientists should attend to this question, are we alone? It's the most romantic question in science. You know, it's like... So, uh, and so just to finish my big picture before we-
- NANarrator
Okay.
- ALAvi Loeb
... get to, to more. So then, um, you know, we live on this planet, everyone says, "Okay, we are not at the center of the universe, but we might be the only intelligent species out there."
- NANarrator
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- ALAvi Loeb
Again, we need the next Copernican revolution, the next Galilean revolution to realize that there is a smarter kid on the block, okay? And it's just like the experience of my daughters on the first day to the kindergarten. They, at home, they thought that they are the center of the, of the universe because they had a, you know, their, um, uh, learning, uh, was based on a, a, a data set that was limited to home. It's just like LLMs, you know, uh, uh, artificial intelligence systems-
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
... that learn from their, uh, data sets, and they had limited environment. And then when they went to the kindergarten, they realized there are kids just like them, some are smarter. So we are yet to mature in that sense and that's the big picture. Now, why is it so important for the future of humanity? Because, you know, the earth is not... would not exist forever.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
By the way, when people talk about climate, global climate change and so forth, they don't realize, you know, the issue is not the earth. The issue is humanity, the future of humanity. And, you know, the earth itself would be very likely, based on detailed calculations, it will be engulfed by the sun in 7.6 billion years. And here is something that you won't find much discussed. The moon, because of the friction on the envelope of the sun, will crash back to earth and then the earth will move all the way to the center of the sun. Nothing will be left. No monument will survive 7.6 billion years ago, uh, into the future. Um, and we have an obligation if we want to be remembered on cosmic, in cosmic history, you know, we have an obligation not to go to Mars. That's not really a g- a great vision, you know. Going to Mars is just like, you know, you have, uh, a group of chimpanzees, uh, living in the, in the jungle, you know, in, in, in a g- you know, on some trees and they have some bananas and so forth. And then one of the chimpanzees looks far, far away into the horizon and says, "Oh, look up there. There is another s- region that, that we can go to." And, and it... Actually, it's clear that there are no bananas there. So the same is about Mars, you know, like Elon says, "Let's go to Mars to save humanity." But it's actually not a great place to be on. There is not-
- NANarrator
Yeah, but you gotta start somewhere.
- ALAvi Loeb
No.
- NANarrator
You have to start somewhere if you want to populate a planet.
- ALAvi Loeb
No. So here is my... So here is my point.
- NANarrator
Okay, here's your point.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Mm-hmm. …
- ALAvi Loeb
years. Uh, we didn't have the technology before that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
And so we just don't know how much traffic there is of interstellar-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. We missed a lot.
- ALAvi Loeb
So we had, you know, the first survey telescope that found Oumuamua was Pan-STARRS in Hawaii and the reason it was constructed is because the US Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to Earth. These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on Earth. We want to protect the Earth, so we want to know about them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And they asked, uh, NASA and the National Science Foundation to search, you know, to build observatories that will search for such, uh, objects and, um, that's why Pan-STARRS was established. And then it saw a near-Earth object, so they flagged it for that reason and they realized it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun and that was Oumuamua. And then it looks- looked weird. Now, I had no agenda.I was working on cosmology, uh, at the time. You know, I was working on black holes. I was a founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, and Stephen Hawking had passed over at my home in 2016. Eh, this object was discovered a year later. And, um, um, I said, "Well, okay, that's interesting, but it has anomalies." You know, it- it- the amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10 as it's tumbling. That's really strange. (laughs) Uh, and I started getting more and more into the anomalies and I noticed-
- JRJoe Rogan
So, you had no... P- p- previous to that, you had no real connection to the UAP phenomenon, nothing?
- ALAvi Loeb
No, zero. Zero. I-
- JRJoe Rogan
So, you're just basing entirely on the data that you were getting from-
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah. And I didn't-
- JRJoe Rogan
How do you say it? Omumua?
- ALAvi Loeb
Oumuamua.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oumuamua.
- ALAvi Loeb
And, you know, I am driven by curiosity. I'm no different than the- the kid that I was. You know, I grew up on a farm and people who knew me back then say I didn't change. I'm not willing to change what I say just for political benefit or for just to be liked, but I don't have any social media accounts. I don't care about that. But when something b-
- JRJoe Rogan
Thank God.
- ALAvi Loeb
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Somebody.
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, it's thanks to my wife, not God.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
My wife said, "You should not have any footprint on social." So, she's really wise.
- JRJoe Rogan
She's wise.
- ALAvi Loeb
And that was a dec- more than a decade ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. She-
- ALAvi Loeb
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
... she spotted the problem real early.
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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- ALAvi Loeb
And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Right. …
- ALAvi Loeb
that, you know, you could sort of separate nickel from iron 'cause they're produced together in exploding stars.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 times more by, by mass. And so, um, we just don't know as in the case of this, uh, jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tail now, uh, over the month of September. And also, you know, why was it changing structure? It is not clear. There are lots of anomalies. There was also a very negative polarization of the light. And also, two weeks ago, I realized the arrival direction of 3I Atlas was within nine degrees of the Wow! signal that was detected in 1977.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, right.
- ALAvi Loeb
Which was an enigmatic powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this earth. We don't know from where. It was coming from a source that was approaching the sun. And the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of 3I Atlas is 0.6%. And, um, I just said, "Well, that's interesting," 'cause 3I Atlas was, uh, at a distance of three light days, uh, from the earth at that time, you know. And, um, uh, you just need about the, uh, the output of a nuclear reactor on earth, a gigawatt or so, to produce such a radio signal. By the way, Voyager, ri- as of now, is one light day away from Earth. Just think about it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- ALAvi Loeb
One light day, our, you know, the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away and the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we are talking about tens of thousands of light years. So one day out of tens of thousands of years, that's the difference between the distance that we managed to bridge so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Now, have we ever observed things in the past that have changed their tail like this?
- ALAvi Loeb
So there are fake-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or gone from a jet to a tail?
- ALAvi Loeb
Thi- this is called an anti-tail when it's pointing towards the sun.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
There were optical illusions. In a situation where, you know, the, uh, there is a tail which is pushed away from the sun by radiation and solar wind.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
But you're observing it as the earth goes through the orbital plane of, of, of, of this, uh, object, of this comet, and you are seeing it from a perspective that it looks as if the tail is pointed at the sun, but in fact it's, it's just a perspective thing, it's a optical illusion.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
And there were cases like that, that, that was seen. But as far as I know, none seen in a situation where it's clear. And in 3I Atlas, it was very far from the sun and earth, and we saw it towards the sun. There cannot be an optical illusion under these circumstances 'cause it was approaching both the earth and the sun roughly at the same direction. So I'm not aware of another, but most importantly, you should look at the response of the comet expert community to that anomaly. They say, "Well, comets are strange. We don't know. Maybe it's, um, these are dust particles that are very big so they don't get pushed back much." But then how do you scatter sunlight? Usually you need particles that have a size of the order of the wavelength of the light that is being scattered. That's the most efficient process. And when you have dust particles, the ones that have, you know, sub-micrometer, uh, dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight. So why in this case you will have only big ones that are not getting pushed back? It could be fragments of ice that are scattering the sunlight that have nothing to do with dust, but those fragments of ice get, get evaporated and so they don't have enough time to turn back, you know. I, I wrote two papers on that trying to explain it. But my point is, many scientists are not curious. You, you would find it surprising. Why are they not curious? Why are they not willing to consider alternative explanations to what is commonly thought? And it's because they're afraid of taking any risk, you know. And, uh, I came from a background where I worked in cosmology trying to figure out puzzles. Like most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't know what it is, you know. We, we call it dark matter, it's just...... to, to reflect our ignorance. You know, Nobel Prizes were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is. These are constituents whose nature is unknown. And just think about it, giving a Nobel Prize to people who just said how ignorant we are. We don't know what these things are. Ordinary matter mi- makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe. And in this culture of cosmology, when, uh, you know, I worked in for three decades, um, it was, you know, completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies. I mean, the dark matter is an anomaly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
You don't know what it is. And people were rewarded for coming up with ideas, imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally. That's the way you make progress. You don't know something, you are still putting on the table possibilities and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one. And that was the culture, and I think of it as the culture of chess players-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ALAvi Loeb
... okay? Trying to figure out things. When I get to work on comets, you know, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology, I encounter, you know, a- a- a culture of mud wrestlers.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mud wrestlers?
- ALAvi Loeb
It's different from chess players.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
Um, and, you know, I don't want to mud wrestle. I don't want to get dirty. I don't respond to the... I learned my lesson with Oumuamua. I don't respond to those people because once we collect, I just want as much evidence as possible so that they would not be able to shove the anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking. That's my motivation.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
So, I'm, uh, inspiring a debate right now and there is a huge interest in that debate, so that we will collect as much data as possible so that by the end of the day, we'll figure out what our dating partner is. If it happens to be a rock, you know, on the other side of the table, you go on a date and you see a rock, so be it. If it's something else, that has huge implications.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And therefore, we should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is it about your field in particular that you think, uh, motivates mudslinging? Like, why, why are they averse to risk and why do they not just... Why are they not just averse to risk, but why they are attacking you for proposing what seems to me to be a reasonable alternative considering the possibilities given all the planets and stars that we know are out there?
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Wow. …
- ALAvi Loeb
is... You know, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics, you know, like, um, uh, half a century ago... By the way, I lived throughout half of modern physics, roughly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ALAvi Loeb
Half of modern physic- So, half a century ago, it was thought that there is a symmetry of nature called super symmetry, and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry 'cause it's stable.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And everyone said, "That must be right." And lots of castles were built on this foundation, including string theory, uh, that was assuming this to be true. And then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built for $10 billion, searched for super symmetry and didn't find it. Now, what is the lesson? Yes, it was a beautiful idea and sometimes nature is not what we think it is. Okay? So we should not, uh, ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes. This was a m- I mean, a lot of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
... money and effort went to that. There are thousands of papers basing their analysis or, or mathematical constructions on super symmetry.
- JRJoe Rogan
And a lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well, right?
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, but the point is, if you allow people to follow not just the beaten path, but other paths, you have a better chance of discovering something new.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
Because we cannot... I mean, Einstein made, you know, three mistakes between 1935 and 1940. He said black holes probably do not exist, he said gravitational waves probably do not exist, and he said quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. And all three received Nobel Prizes for the teams that proved him wrong. Those are Nobel Prizes from the past decade. Three teams-... you know, uh, d-doing different types of experiments and observations. And, but did Einstein was wrong to assume, uh, to make assumptions or, or claims that turned out to be wrong? No, because that's the nature of working at the frontier. You make mistakes. Every now and then, you know, you might be right and that will be a breakthrough, but you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks. And it's really ... I mean, the whole idea of tenure in academia was based on, on, on the proposition that you want people to take risks so that they don't have job insecurity, they don't worry about their ... So what these zealots, I call them, say is, you know, "We don't want people to deviate from the beaten path because we base our stature, we base our honors, awards, and so forth on past knowledge. We don't want new knowledge, unless it's proven beyond any doubt." But how would it be proven if you keep ridiculing anything different? You know, we- uh, those exp- most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky. And then in 1803, there was a meteor shower in Liege and Biot, a French p- physicist, realized it's real. There are rocks falling from the sky. Now all my colleagues say, "There could be only rocks in the sky." You know, we know that we launched some spacecraft, but, you know, we're probably alone, uh, and it doesn't make sense. Um, but let me just mention a few other, uh, anecdotes from the past week, because I didn't really finish. So Jamie, can you, uh, show the next one?
- JRJoe Rogan
What is it?
- ALAvi Loeb
This one is about Sphere in Las Vegas. Uh, as you know, it's the, uh, the most impressive, uh, venue for entertainment in the world.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you been there? Have you seen a show there?
- ALAvi Loeb
I'll tell you. I, not only I've been, I've been to the top of the Sphere, which is, like, 120 meters high. Here you see me from inside the Sphere. This is the exosphere, by the way. It's covered with LED displays. We went all the way to the top. Why? Because a year ago, um, two very distinguished visitors came to the front door of my home. By the way, lots of interesting people show up at my, uh, front door. Uh, this was, uh, Jim Dolan, uh, uh, who owns the Madison Square Garden, as you know, and also the Sphere, um, and, uh, Jane Rosenthal, the CEO of, uh, Tribeca Enterprises, and they made me an offer that I cannot refuse. And they said, uh, "Would you be able to put a Galileo Project observatory..." I'm leading the Galileo Project to look for unusual objects, uh, around the earth. And they said, "Could you build an observatory on top of the Sphere?" Because, you know, Jim Dolan really is, uh, interested in science and especially in finding, you know, whether there is, uh, some, uh, alien intelligence out there. Uh, and I said, "Of course. I will be delighted." So that was September 2024, one year after the Sphere was, uh, opened with a U2 concert, as you may know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
I don't know if you've been there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. I've been there for the UFC. Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
Oh, yeah, UFC. Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
So anyway, I was there just a few months ago with my research team. We went all the way to the top and installed, as you can see here, an array of infrared cameras that monitors the entire sky above Vegas at all times. So you can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background. It's like a freckle, you know, on top of the Sphere, the exosphere-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... which is the biggest display on earth, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
But we measured that there is not much light pollution actually, and we can operate this observatory. We also put a, an array of, uh, visible light cameras there and it's operating, okay? And we hope to see a few million objects over the sky of Vegas and decide whether any of them has, uh, performance that deviates from the envelope of human-made technologies. How do we do that? We, we have the Sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that, that, that observatory, uh, 10 kilometers away o- on a triangle. And, um, uh, that allows us to look at objects in the sky from different directions, just like we have two eyes so we can gauge the distance.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- ALAvi Loeb
So here we have three eyes looking at th- the sky above Vegas, and we can tell the distance, the velocity, the acceleration of objects and ask whether they are lying within the performance envelopes of human-made objects, and that will be amazing. It's very exciting. I see that also an- as an opportunity to communicate to the public the excitement about science. That's what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal really wanted to deliver. And, um, I'm hoping, uh, that we will find something really anomalous, you know, because as we know, the, uh, uh, intelligence agencies are reporting to the US Congress about objects they cannot identify. And, you know, that could be two things. They're getting, you know, the defense budget for 2026 is a trillion dollars, okay? If they tell us w- that with a trillion dollars there are still objects they cannot identify above the US, they're not doing their job. They're not doing their job, and we should be worried. Who send these objects? Could it be adversarial nations? Okay? That's one possibility which has to do with national security. The second possibility is that it's maybe something from outside of this earth, which would be even more significant. So either way, we need to figure this out, and I don't think I'm wasting my time leading the Galileo Project to figure out whether there are anomalies, you know, that go beyond human-made technologies, because if it turns out that all the objects are human-made, I will be happy to deliver the set of sensors we developed with the machine learning software that we developed...... to the Department of War so that they can employ it for national security purposes. So my time was not wasted as a scientist.
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course, it's not wasted.
- ALAvi Loeb
I'm doing something useful to society.
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course.
- 1:15:00 – 1:24:18
Yes. …
- ALAvi Loeb
center of stage, it's not about you. Okay? And our, uh, responsibility needs to be, you know, to find other actors that were around for much longer, because they know what the play is about.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- ALAvi Loeb
And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Let me ask you this.
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you, uh, seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited?
- ALAvi Loeb
The only data I'm aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies, uh, of Oumuamua, of 3I Atlas, which are very different anomalies.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And there was also, uh, a meteor that, uh, I discovered with my former s- uh, undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, uh, a meteor that was identified by US government satellites back in 2014. And it was moving so fast that it definitely came from outside the solar system. And my colleagues were very concerned and they said, "We don't believe the US government." So maybe, um, Jamie can show us. I said, uh, "Okay." Uh, at the time, I was chairing the Board on Physics and Astronomy for National Academies.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why didn't they believe the US government about this?
- ALAvi Loeb
Because all the previous meteors they thought must have been from the solar system, and therefore, you know, and the US government also makes, uh, mistakes every now and then, they said.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the US government, what department was observing this?
- ALAvi Loeb
This is, uh, the Space Force, the, the US Space Command. So what I ha- what I did is, at, at dinner, uh, as I was-
- JRJoe Rogan
What year was this?
- ALAvi Loeb
This was, uh, around the, uh, 2020.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ALAvi Loeb
And, um, I expressed my frustration at dinner with, uh, as, uh, chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy from the National Academies. And there was a member there from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and he said, "Let me help you." We've- we managed to reach out to the US Space Command through the White House at the time, and, um, we got a, an official letter from the US Space Command saying, "We looked at the data, and we can verify to 99.999% that this object, this meteor, which was roughly half a meter in size, came from outside the solar system." That's what they said. At that point, I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean where the explosion was identified from the fireball, there was a huge amount of light, to go there and search for the materials from that object, because it was moving fast. It was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the solar system, very similar to 3I- 3I Atlas. So it was fast, and, uh, moreover, the object maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere. It didn't explode until it got within 20 kilometers of the surface of the ocean. So it must've been extremely tough, much tougher than all the previous meteors cataloged, uh, by NASA. Okay? So I can show you some images from that, uh, trip to the Pacific Ocean. Actually it was documented by Netflix, uh, and there will be a documentary coming out, um, within a year, next year, uh, 2026. This, this was the team of, uh, researchers that came with me on the deck of the ship, and we collected materials with a magnetic sled. This is a sled made- a- with magnets on top of it. You can see the Netflix team, uh, at the lower left here. Um, and, um, then I brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here. I shipped it by FedEx to my home. Uh, this was a $1.5 million expedition, so...
- JRJoe Rogan
Why would you ship it by FedEx? Why wouldn't you just carry it with you?
- ALAvi Loeb
Because I was worried that someho- somewhere in the airport they would say, "No, we have to confiscate that."
- JRJoe Rogan
But don't they know who you are? Can't you like get somebody to call in?
- ALAvi Loeb
(laughs) I don't want to, uh, take any risks.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay. So it's just-
- ALAvi Loeb
It, it-
- JRJoe Rogan
... a bunch of metal?
- ALAvi Loeb
No, it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
What did you find?
- ALAvi Loeb
Here, you can see the material. So it's mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean, two kilometers deep, you know, one mile or so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh. Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
Uh, a little more than a mile. And then we- I, I found these, you know, we found these, uh, molten droplets, you see, that are very distinct relative to grains of sand, and we isolated them. I had, uh ... you can go to the... you can see here the, these molten droplets, and turns out that 10% of them, uh, did not have the composition of materials from the solar system. And so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson, and, uh, I had a summer intern, uh, Sophie Bergstrom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis. How did my colleagues respond to that? They said, "Oh, he went to the wrong place," because there was a seismic signal that could've been misidentified and could've been a truck passing nearby. And so a reporter from the New York Times said, "Oh, they went to the wrong place, because there w- it could've, it was not a meteor, it was a truck." And I wrote to the reporter and I said, "How irresponsible are you? You, you didn't even ask me."The data that led us to this place was based on the fireball, on the light that was detected by US government satellites. And the US Space Command confirmed the location. It was not based on the seismic detection of the signal. We just u- we just looked and found this seismic-
- JRJoe Rogan
So it seems like your colleagues are contacting New York Times to try to dismiss you.
Episode duration: 2:14:55
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