EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,016 words- 0:00 – 1:24
Misinformation swirl and why 3I Atlas is a high-stakes anomaly
- 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.
- 1:24 – 5:27
Black swans, intelligence failures, and Pascal’s wager as a scientific mindset
- 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
- 5:27 – 7:12
Where to look for life: microbes vs. intelligence (and the funding gap)
- ALAvi Loeb
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.
- 7:12 – 8:56
Mars life, sample return, and panspermia (are we all Martians?)
- 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Panspermia.
- ALAvi Loeb
Pansperm- Yeah. And, and in fact, you know, we can find out. If we get this material back to Earth, as NASA is planning to do, hopefully within a decade, uh, then we can make sure that these were microbes. And perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of, uh, process took place in both places.
- 8:56 – 10:06
Mars ‘structures,’ right angles, and the Moon/Mars as museums for space debris
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars, particularly the right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure?
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah. I've, I've, uh, seen the data. It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing 'cause both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere right now. So what happens on Earth is that when a, an object roughly the size of a person, you know, or smaller, goes through the atmosphere, it burns up, uh, creates a fireball, uh, just like an atomic explosion, you know. And actually, you have, uh, an object of order a meter colliding with Earth every year. Every year, there is an atomic explosion size, uh, fireball in our atmosphere. It's not reported in the news 'cause it happens pretty high, uh, at an altitude of 50 kilometers, so it doesn't do anything. And m- you know, 71% of the Earth is covered by oceans. But, um, uh, yes, uh, so, um, these, um, meteors and, you know, they, they are quite, uh, important. Ob- obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were, uh, extinguished by a giant
- 10:06 – 13:33
Planetary defense meets alien-tech risk: monitoring interstellar objects
- ALAvi Loeb
impact, by, uh, uh, an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island. And, uh, we are aware, by the way, that such an impact could endanger us and that's why, um, the US Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come close to Earth, uh, with a size bigger than a football field, about 140 meters, so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. So we think we are smart. We can see these rocks coming. But just imagine alien technology. It will not follow a path that you expect if it has-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
... some intelligence in it, and that's a risk that was never attended to. And I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical Union to, uh, develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come from outside the solar system, like 3I Atlas, that, um, could, that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin.
- JRJoe Rogan
The, the structures on Mars, like what, what do you think when you look at them? When you see that one that looks like a square?
- ALAvi Loeb
I think it's very intriguing. Both Mars and the Moon have no atmosphere, so the objects that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before about Earth. And, um, therefore, they serve as museums. Okay, so any, uh, you know, space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two billion years-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
... would not have burned in the atmosphere. It would have landed and, and, and we can... We need to check the surface. Even if we know that, you know, there wasn't any civilization out there over the past two billion years 'cause conditions are really harsh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... um, uh, Mars may have collected, uh, technological debris from other civilizations because it would stay on the surface. It's just like a museum.
- JRJoe Rogan
This, this is an enormous structure. The- it's at least they think, I think they think 300 meters, but-
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, but that's not enormous 'cause-
- JRJoe Rogan
... possibly quite, quite a bit longer.
- ALAvi Loeb
... 3I Atlas, the size of 3I Atlas-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... is at least five kilometers the, in diameter. And, uh, I derived it in a paper, uh, a couple of weeks ago because-... we know that it's losing mass. So, a- and fr- eh, it's mostly from the side that is facing the sun.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh.
- ALAvi Loeb
And you would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction, just like a rocket.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
And I used, um, together with two colleagues, uh, 4,000 data points from 227 observatories a- around the Earth, the 3i Atlas, that monitored its motion across the sky. And, and, uh, we were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity. There is no evidence for this recoil. And that means that the object is very massive. And I derived the value of 33 billion tons. A huge thing. Which, if you take solid density, it means it's more than five kilometers in diameter. So when you mention a few hundred meters, that's nothing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And this object, by the way, was discovered just over the past decade, uh, of observing the sky, you know. So who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the moon, because they are good museums, you know, the, for, for... And by the way, I see that as their most important value. Uh, l- let me just say one thing about my, um, fundamental point of view.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- 13:33 – 32:52
Humility, Galileo, and why evidence beats tradition in frontier science
- ALAvi Loeb
You know, each of us, uh, would live for about 100 years if we are lucky, right? That's the kind of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
It's pretty depressing, right? 'Cause th- there is so much we, we would like to know and we have only 100 years so... And, you know, that already tells you that you need to be modest and humble, 'cause you don't have a lot of time, right? So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... why, uh, engage in conflicts, why, uh, reduce the, the lifespan of other people, you know, in wars? It, it makes no sense, all of this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
Y- you have limited time, let's just use it for something constructive. Anyway, we are born on this rock, which is just three millionths of the mass of the sun. It's leftover material from the formation process of the sun. Some debris was left over in a disc and the Earth was made out of that. That's it. And it's just a speck of material, nothing significant. And this Earth was moving around the sun 4.54 billion times before the Vatican even existed. And why do I say the Vatican? Because the Vatican put Galileo Galilei in house arrest when he said, "I don't think everything moves around the Earth. (laughs) I see some moons through my telescope, you know, I th- I see some moons, uh, around Jupiter, they don't seem to revolve around the Earth, th- they revolve around Jupiter, therefore the Earth is not at the center." So they put him in house arrest. Today, they would have, you know, 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.
- 32:52 – 36:41
AI, propaganda, and two existential ‘AIs’: artificial vs. alien intelligence
- ALAvi Loeb
And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's-
- ALAvi Loeb
It's really bad.
- JRJoe Rogan
Propaganda.
- ALAvi Loeb
By the way, the main problem with social... With, um, AI that I see is not so much that, you know, they will bring, uh, calamity on their own. It's that they would drive people to do crazy stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
So, they will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us, the robots-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
You know, it will not need access to the physical world. It will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage, and we see that already. The polariz-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's already happening-
- ALAvi Loeb
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
... with- with AI using bots-
- ALAvi Loeb
That's the biggest risk.
- JRJoe Rogan
... on social media. Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
And nobody is attending to that. And the question is, how do we suppress the amazing polarization that we see in society where, you know, bullets are being shot-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
... uh, and I- I really worry about it 'cause... And- and so humans may actually bring their own doom by- by self-inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their minds.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think you're right. I think in that regard, I think people need to stop using it. I really do. I just think it's not good for you.
- ALAvi Loeb
That's what I'm doing.
- JRJoe Rogan
I just think-
- ALAvi Loeb
I'm not using AI at all, by the way.
- JRJoe Rogan
You can use it sometimes, but I've, I t- I treat it like a glass of wine.
- ALAvi Loeb
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, don't drink wine all day. It's not good for you.
- ALAvi Loeb
You know, I'm- I'm, uh, I'm working with students and, uh, every now and then, a student delivers a paper to me to look at, and I realize some of the references do not exist 'cause I know the literature, you know. That, I ask the student, "What- what is this? I've never heard about this paper." And the student says, "Oh, sorry." And it turns out the AI just took names of authors and faked a reference.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, make... Fakes things, yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
And the same thing within the paper itself. There are statements that are clearly because the student was using AI. I'm really worried about that because the young people are not reading.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
They don't read history, so they go to protests that make no sense.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 36:41 – 40:09
3I Atlas case for ‘design’: size, rarity, trajectory alignment, and peer-review pushback
- ALAvi Loeb
Oh yeah, my... That's my point, that 3i Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Oumuamua.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And I immediately, as it was discovered, you know, it was July 1st, and my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba two days later, and, uh, as I was...... going on the plane, and as I arrived there, I realized, "Wait, that doesn't make sense 'cause we should have seen millions of, uh, Oumuamuas before we saw this one. You know, it's so big." And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade. You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometer in diameter, you would imagine once per 10,000 years. So I wrote immediately a scientific paper. My wife was not happy that, you know, on our vacation, I was sitting on my computer-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
... but I just couldn't resist it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And by the way, this paper I submitted for publication, uh, that was July 3rd or something, um, and, um, then the editor said, "Oh, the paper is fine, but you have a concluding sentence at the end where you say, 'Well, unless the object is smaller than estimated, maybe it was targeting the inner solar system.'" That was my solution to say, you know, one way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner solar system by design. And indeed the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within five degrees. The chance for that at random is one in 500, okay? And it's moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini-probes that will get into the planets. It gets close to Mars, it gets close to Jupiter, it goes on the opposite side of the sun, uh, relative to Earth when it's closest to the sun and that's the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the sun's gravitational assist. You know, all of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory. So I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying maybe the trajectory was designed. And the editor said, "No, no, no, the paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence."
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ALAvi Loeb
So now when you a- when you listen to comet experts that say, "Well, this claim or that claim was never published in a peer-reviewed journal," guess what? They are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities. And I think it's inappropriate, especially in the case of alien technology, because it could be a black swan event. It could be something that affects the future of humanity and we... if we behave, you know, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Arrogant.
- ALAvi Loeb
... very conservatively we might not last very long.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's also arrogant. It's, uh, you're-
- ALAvi Loeb
It's arrogant.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Th- this object is n- h- shows that there's no iron.
- ALAvi Loeb
Oh, no.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it-
- ALAvi Loeb
So yeah, so then the composition-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- ALAvi Loeb
... of the plume of gas around it.
- JRJoe Rogan
So this is, this is before you knew about the composition-
- ALAvi Loeb
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... when you wrote this paper.
- ALAvi Loeb
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ALAvi Loeb
And so-
- JRJoe Rogan
So as time is going on, you are being shown to be correct.
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, we found more, more anomalies.
- JRJoe Rogan
More anomalies.
- ALAvi Loeb
More anomalies. So for-
- JRJoe Rogan
That this is not a normal thing.
- 40:09 – 48:50
Physical anomalies: anti-tail/jet toward the Sun, nickel-without-iron, and the Wow! signal alignment
- ALAvi Loeb
Not a normal thing. So for one thing, uh, there was a glow that looks like an extended feature and everyone said, "Oh, that's a tail. That's the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... signature of a comet."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And I said, "Wait a minute, it, it's pointing towards the sun. It's not pointing away from the sun." Usually cometary tails are made of dust and gas which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind, you know. Um, and so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun, and the question is why? And, um, actually I calculated that, you know, it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the sun but we were looking at it like a cigar. We were looking almost along the cigar long axis, uh, within 10 degrees of the object's sun axis. So we were looking almost edge-on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ALAvi Loeb
And I calculated if you were to correct for that, this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide, uh, you know, and, and that means it's like a jet. So the object was... had a jet in front of it towards the sun. The question is why? And, you know, the comet experts ignored it and just said, "Well, you know, comets are strange, you know, the who knows?" Um, but my point is, this is a blind date of in- interstellar proportions and my advice on blind dates is not to speak or say what you think this is but to observe the other side. You know, the best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side. Don't speak, just observe the other side because it may be different than what you think and maybe, you know, on one of the dates you will have a serial killer-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
... on the other side.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh boy. Now, um, e- explain if you could how we know the composition of this thing?
- ALAvi Loeb
Right. So we can figure out composition of a plume of gas, uh, by, um, taking a spectrum of it which means, um, you basically have some kind of a prism that breaks, uh, you know, that, uh, uh, light with different wavelengths is bent at different angles and so you spread the light into the different colors and if you do that you, you can find the, uh, fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules because each atom or molecule has transitions. I, I actually teach... I taught it just, uh, two days ago, uh, in a class that I teach, uh, that is mandatory, obligatory at the Harvard Astronomy Department where I was chair for a decade, you know, like between 2011, 2020. So this is the mandatory class and I, I just taught how, you know, spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules just two days ago. So this is a very well-known thing and we know the, the wavelengths of those and, and we use them to identify the composition. Uh, you know, we know which atoms produce these spectral lines, the fingerprints. It's just like fingerprints, okay? And, and so what was found, you know, and that's by multiple teams, there are three papers on that, uh, we found...... nickel, a lot of nickel, but no, very little iron. At first, no iron whatsoever. Now, usually in all the comets in the past from the solar system and also from interstellar space, there is one comet, Borisov, that was found. It's the second interstellar object w- which looked just like a familiar comet. I had nothing to say about that one. It looked like a comet, behaved like a comet, it was a comet. But it had similar abundances of nickel and iron. The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially. For example, uh, for aerospace applications.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ALAvi Loeb
Uh, nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron, so, uh, maybe the skin of this object is, is industrially produced. That's, that was my suggestion. But what the authors of these papers said is maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries. So they made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway, which is well known in the industry world, uh, carbonyl is the pathway, the name of the pathway. They said, "Well, maybe this carbonyl pathway happens in nature." Uh, we have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. Um, is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy?
- ALAvi Loeb
No, it's not an alloy, it's just that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, something that-
- ALAvi Loeb
... some- somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed. Nobody would argue 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.
- 48:50 – 53:21
‘Chess players vs. mud wrestlers’: academic jealousy, harassment, and motivating better observations
- ALAvi Loeb
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?
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, I got a hint, uh, for the answer to your question. When I wrote the first paper on Oumuamua-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... I suggested it might be technological.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
And the paper got accepted for publication. Within three days record, the reviewer said, "This is a great idea because it's consistent with all the data we have. It's, it's most likely a flat object, and therefore it could be pushed by reflecting sunlight." Which was my proposal. Then the media came to my door and people started asking me a lot of questions. I got, you know, I- I- I got well-known. At that point, the attacks, the personal attacks started. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... it's, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
So, it's jealousy.
- ALAvi Loeb
... jealousy. Yeah, it's je-
- JRJoe Rogan
A lot of jealousy.
- ALAvi Loeb
Um, and, you know, but I can tell you that I learned my lesson.
- JRJoe Rogan
You can't respond.
- ALAvi Loeb
I just ignore it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ALAvi Loeb
And let me give you a few anecdotes of what-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- 53:21 – 1:09:34
Galileo Project: the Sphere observatory in Las Vegas and triangulating the sky
- ALAvi Loeb
Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go to California. There is a NASCAR car race where one of the racers decided to put my image with 3I Atlas with the Galileo project that I'm leading on his car. So let me show you some images that ge-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, show me the image because what is the current best image of 3I Atlas?
- ALAvi Loeb
Oh, we will get to that. So here you see the car-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
... and he promised to let me drive it, uh, during the-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ALAvi Loeb
... just before the race.
- JRJoe Rogan
Who is this guy?
- ALAvi Loeb
Uh, Alex-
- JRJoe Rogan
Kevin Harvick Raceway?
- ALAvi Loeb
No, Kevin Harvick is the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that's the raceway.
- ALAvi Loeb
... that's the name of the-
- JRJoe Rogan
What is, uh, the driver's name?
- ALAvi Loeb
Alex Malik.
- JRJoe Rogan
Alex Malik?
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah. And he contacted me out of the blue.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, he's just a big fan?
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, he's just a big fan.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that's cool.
- ALAvi Loeb
Uh, and I will go there and...
- JRJoe Rogan
It's pretty smart of him, right? Because that's definitely going to get you a lot of attention.
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah, so he just sent it to me this morning. The- they j- this is in the shop where they put all these, uh, things on it, and tomorrow I'll- I'm going to drive it.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is Comet Lemon in the back?
- ALAvi Loeb
Oh, that's just another comet. So he, he just put-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, so he's like a comet fan, this guy.
- ALAvi Loeb
Yeah. By the way, I told him that, um, the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than 3I Atlas, 600 times. So, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ALAvi Loeb
... it's a compliment to me to be featured on his car but 3I Atlas doesn't care much because it's already moving 600 times faster than his car can move, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 1:09:34 – 1:15:16
Government, Congress, and the ‘Waiting for Godot’ problem of disclosure
- ALAvi Loeb
And by the way, by the way, um, I gave a briefing to the US Congress on May 1st, uh, 2025, and, uh, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was there, and, um, and, uh, she was very excited about the work we are doing. Uh, but the day before that, um, I visited, um, an office in the Pentagon that is called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and I asked them, you know, "You looked into an- uh, all these, uh, unidentified objects reported in the past by military personnel. Did anything trigger your attention as something truly anomalous?" And they said, "Not really. There are some, uh, you know, there are some reports, uh, by FBI agents that saw really crazy stuff, but we don't have any data from instruments." And this is an office within the Pentagon which is funded to figure out things, and so obviously what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo Project that I'm leading. But you would think that it would be sort of the vested interest of government, you know, to invest in research related to that, which is what the Galileo Project is doing, but I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, here's the thing. I would have thought it was already done.
- ALAvi Loeb
I don't know, it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, until we're having this conversation, I can't believe that they're not monitoring the sky constantly for anomalous objects.
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, they... You remember the- the- the Chinese spy balloon that was missed-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- ALAvi Loeb
... right, and shut down?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but that's- that was silly.
- ALAvi Loeb
So- so the thing to keep in mind, they're getting data on things in the sky. But if you don't have the right software, now with AI-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... if you don't have high-quality scientists the way that the Manhattan Project employed, you might not figure out things. There is a reason why the Manhattan Project recruited the very best scientists. So I say put a billion dollars on this or more, bring in the best scientists in the world to figure it out. I'm funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galileo Project. The government can do a bi-... What is a billion dollars? It's- it's- it's a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon. But if, you know... You- you should think about the- the- the- the potential risk from drones that are used by adversarial nations, and you want to have the very best sensors using the very best-
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course.
- ALAvi Loeb
... AI algorithms.
- JRJoe Rogan
I just can't believe that that's not already being done.
- ALAvi Loeb
Again-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's what's so confusing.
- ALAvi Loeb
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
I would have thought that there was some sort of very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already.
- ALAvi Loeb
Well, that's the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Especially when you take in all these anecdotal stories, all these different stories of people spotting ar- some sort of a ship, something.
- ALAvi Loeb
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Something that moves in a very strange way.
- ALAvi Loeb
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
I would- I would think that they're monitoring this stuff all the time, and not just with radar.
- ALAvi Loeb
You see, there is a- an approach which is to wait for the government to figure out things or to release, declassify them, so a lot of people want the government-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ALAvi Loeb
... to declassify. I think it's just like Waiting for Godot.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ha.
- ALAvi Loeb
You can wait forever-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 1:15:16 – 1:33:33
Interstellar meteor expedition: Pacific Ocean recovery and the fight over chain-of-evidence
- 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.
- ALAvi Loeb
I wrote to the editor at the time and said, "Look, if this is what you write about science, how can we trust what you write about politics?"
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Yeah. So these objects, these very small molten droplets-
- ALAvi Loeb
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... w- what did you determine from them?
- ALAvi Loeb
We found that, uh, 10% of them had a composi- chemical composition different than solar system materials that were found before. And again, my colleagues, some of them said, "Oh, they found coal ash." You know, the burnt, uh, material from, uh, coal. So we said, "Okay, well, let's check." We, uh, identified 61 elements from the periodic table and showed that it's definitely not coal ash. And then they said it's something else from the crust of the earth. We checked that. It's not from the crust of the earth. It's a- a- an endless battle to basically... I mean, they can throw mud without having access to the material.
Episode duration: 2:14:55
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