Audio Player
Starting at:
Avi Loeb on Consciousness, UAPs, AI, CE5, Jacques Vallée, and Time Travel
September 9, 2022
•
3:24:01
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
⚠️ Timestamps are hidden: Some podcast MP3s have dynamically injected ads which can shift timestamps. Show timestamps for troubleshooting.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
514 sentences
31,014 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 199m 36s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Surprise bill? Need fast funds? Cashnet USA can help. When you need money fast, be the hero. Apply in minutes at cashnetusa.com and get a fast decision. All loans subject to lender approvals, beta funding is subject to verifications and your bank's processing times.
This podcast is sponsored by Monarch Money. Are you saving to reach your financial goals? Reaching those goals isn't just about getting more money, but by managing what you have. And the best way to manage your money? Monarch Money. Monarch Money is a new kind of finance app that's intuitive, powerful, ad-free, and takes the headaches out of budgeting. Try it free when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast.
Monarch puts all your accounts, investments, transactions, and finances at your fingertips. With a complete view of your finances, you'll gain insights on your spending and find new ways to save. Plus, Monarch lets you customize your dashboard, collaborate with your partner, set custom budgets and goals, and track your progress toward them.
See why Mint users are turning to Monarch Money and loving it. And why the Wall Street Journal named Monarch Money the best budgeting app overall. Get a 30-day free trial when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H money.com slash podcast for your free trial. MonarchMoney.com slash podcast.
Recently, a contest was launched for those interested in making math physics explainer videos. It's essentially the physics version of 3Blue1Brown's contest, and Brilliant has come on board to Divi 5000 USD, equally among the top five. The details are linked below.
This will be a lengthy introduction as there are several announcements that I've been holding on to and I can finally publicize them. As usual you can click on the timestamp over here or in the description to skip this longish preface. Firstly you should know about today's guest and that is Professor of Harvard Avi Loeb. Now Avi is an astrophysicist and a cosmologist with such a multitude of accolades that I could barely
i can't memorize them so i'm simply going to read them so for one he's the longest serving chair of harvard's department of astronomy he's the founding director of harvard's black hole initiative he's the director of the institute for theory and computation he's a fellow at the american academy of arts and science and the american physical society
and the International Academy for Astronautics. He's the Science Theory Director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. And again, he's won so many awards that I'll just list them on screen. In the past year or so, Avi's headed what's called the Galileo Project, which is dedicated to the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts.
We're also announcing here that the Galileo project will have its first results in the summer of 2023. Today we talk about consciousness, God, UAPs, and the problem with current theoretical physics. You should know that I've spoken to Avi Loeb one year ago on this channel asking him about wormholes and the physics that Bob Lazar suggests propel the UFO crafts.
Link to that podcast is in the description. For those of you who are unfamiliar, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything, mainly from a theoretical physics perspective.
but as well as analyzing and exploring what the heck is consciousness and what is its role related to fundamental laws, if fundamental laws even exist in the sense that there's a bottom to it, perhaps reductionism isn't the correct paradigm, but regardless, you now have a flavor of what this podcast is about. Now on to some announcements. The URL theoriesofeverything.org is active, the reasons for which I'll get to shortly. One of the advantages is that I'm going to be announcing what are the upcoming guests to members there,
first or at least simultaneously, as I don't like to provide many exclusives.
And Salvatore Pius have been on the podcast before Stefan specializes is one of the few that's an expert in both loop quantum gravity and string theory in the previous podcast with Stefan we talk about string theory particularly a new theory of everything called the auto didactic universe which is a universe that learns its own laws.
That will be in the description. As for Salvatore Pius, he has only given one interview and that's luckily been on theories of everything. That will be in the description as well and it's about quantum gravity. For those of you who don't know, Salvatore Pius is the man who's behind the UFO patents.
Also coming up is Ian McGilchrist and John Vervecky being joined as a Theolocution. Again, John has been on the Theories of Everything podcast before Solo, and that will be in the description, as well as Ian McGilchrist. In fact, the one with Ian is one of the highest quality podcasts on Toe. Okay, now let's talk about the website. So theoriesofeverything.org is a place where you can go to support Toe because many people choose to not support the platform of Patreon because of, at least reportedly,
There's some unscrupulous business practices, or at least questionable what their future is, so that's one reason. And secondly, Patreon takes a huge cut. Many people don't know this, but there are credit card transaction fees, plus Patreon on top of that takes a percentage. Theoriesofeverything.org is a vehicle that I have control over, so if you like you can donate there directly, as I imagine the reason you're supporting Toe is to support Toe, not to support Kurt plus Patreon. There are also several benefits to being a member on the website. Number one, you'll get an ads-free audio version.
Keep in mind that all ads, whether they're in the introduction or in the middle, those are called midrolls, they're skippable by clicking on the next timestamp. I ensure this because I'm the one that timestamps each episode. Regardless, if you'd like an ad-free audio version, that comes to you as a benefit for being a member on the theoriesofeverything.org website.
Additionally, the way that it works on Toe's End is that I render out an episode and then I wait approximately two days or so between once it's uploaded to YouTube and once it finally premieres. And one of the reasons for that is to build an audience, etc. However, what that means is that I actually have the episode completed
12 to 48 hours prior to you seeing it. So what will happen is if you're a member, you'll get an uploaded ads free version 12 to 48 hours before anyone else. Again, nothing changes for those of you who are on YouTube and want to stay there and don't want to be a toll member, etc. That's fine.
It's the same way that it's been, nothing's going to change there. Another benefit of being a member on the website rather than on Patreon or any other platform is that there will be discounts or even free tickets offered whenever we have live events. Additionally, okay, this is another benefit. You'll get a personalized number to text me if you like that.
Yes, this goes to my phone. It's not someone else answering. For instance, you can say, Kurt, you said that so-and-so episode was coming out. I was wondering what the progress is on that. Kurt, have you seen the finale of Better Call Saul? Kurt, when are you going to be speaking to Stephen Greer?
By the way, Stephen Greer will be coming on the Toe podcast mid-October. The specific date is not here yet, and there's a high likelihood that it will be live. And that's whether you're a member or not. It's going to be live on YouTube public. Another benefit to being a member on the website is that if you have AMA questions to ask for myself, my AMAs, that is the questions and answers with Kurt, and then you can submit them there and I'll be doing AMAs for the members. Keep in mind that if you have a question, for example, Greer or Salvatore Pius or any other guest,
There is no exclusive to being a member or to being on Patreon or to being on Twitter. A quality question is a quality question wherever it comes from. I don't prioritize questions based on if someone donates let's say $200 in a super chat or if they donate zero. They're just simply asking a question like anyone else. There are no plans for the live streams to be member specific though if I ever do an in-person meeting like for example I'm thinking of filming with
an audience and Carl Friston in person in London, then that may be streamed to website members. Another benefit is that certain merch will be exclusive to being a member. So for example, one that I'm working on now is a notebook where at the top of each page is a quotation from a different mathematician or a physicist or even a spiritual leader and that will hopefully serve as inspiration for whatever you're writing on the
Okay, so there are manifold benefits to being a theoriesofeverything.org member. Don't go to theoriesofeverything.com. Some cyber squatters has that domain. So .org. Toe is supported by you and the sponsors. Thank you. Thank you so much. I wouldn't be able to do Toe.
Without you, whether it's full time or part time, I wouldn't be able to do this without you. There are so many, many plans for the future. Again, I wouldn't be able to do it without you. So thank you. Thank you, whether you're just watching or whether you donate. That's it. Okay, now on to the sponsors. If you're familiar with toe, you're familiar with brilliance. But for those who don't know, brilliance is a place where you go to learn math, science and engineering through these bite sized interactive learning experiences. For example, and I keep saying this, I would like to do a podcast on information theory.
Particularly Chiara Marletto, which is David Deutsch's student, has a theory of everything that she puts forward called constructor theory, which is heavily contingent on information theory. So I took their course on random variable distributions and knowledge and uncertainty.
In order to
It would be unnatural to define it in any other manner. Visit brilliant.org slash TOE, that is T-O-E, to get 20% off the annual subscription. And I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons. I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects you previously had a difficult time grokking. At some point, I'll also go through the courses and give a recommendation in order. Okay, wow. Thank you for sitting through that prodigious introduction. Now on to the episode with Avi Loeb. Enjoy.
Thank you for coming out, Avi. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure. Let's just lay some groundwork for the audience who's unacquainted with you. What is the Galileo project and what has it been up to in the past year? The Galileo project is called after Galileo Galilei, a physicist that founded modern science four centuries ago.
He was put in house arrest because he suggested that maybe the earth is not the center of the universe. And at the time, people thought that it is. And the philosophers said that makes no sense. We don't even want to look through telescopes. And the innovation that he brought forward is that we should look for evidence before we assert something rather than just make a statement because it flatters our ego.
And today he would have been canceled on social media because his view was not popular at the time. But if you were to ask those philosophers to design a space mission that would reach Mars, they would never get to their destination because they thought that Mars moves around the earth. So in the Galileo project, four centuries later, we say we learned something important from Galileo, which is let's look for evidence to guide us rather than prejudice. And we apply it in the context of
Is there a smart, intelligent neighbor in our cosmic neighborhood, in our cosmic backyard? And in the past, people had very strong opinions on this. And people also, after we developed radio communication, people said, oh, let's look for radio signals. But, you know, it's
quite narrow minded to think that just because we just develop radio communication, that will be the main way by which we will detect extraterrestrial civilization, because we ourselves are moving away from radio right now. We have a cable and
fiber optics and in space we are developing laser communication. So why would you assume that such a communication method applies for more than a century or two for any advanced civilization? And so it's just like trying to say let's have a phone conversation with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
And you will never find Mozart if you try to dial all the phone numbers available because he died. And so to have a radio signal approaching us now would imply that there is someone transmitting just at the time that we're listening, which
Is probably not the case because most stars from billions of years before the sun so their radius any radio signal from there is billions of light years away. Anyway, so the approach we are taking within the Galileo project is to search for relics because we sent out five spacecraft over half a century.
which is pretty much one part in a hundred million of the age of the earth. Just over that short period of time, we send five spacecraft that will leave the solar system. And it's quite likely that if there was another advanced civilization a billion years ago, they send some equipment out of their planetary system and
If they were more advanced than we are, then they could have sent probes that, after a billion years, fill up the entire Milky Way galaxy. Because if they're self-replicating, if they have 3D printers, if they have artificial intelligence so that they can continue to be functioning for a long period of time,
Then they might as well fill up all the habitable regions around stars in the Milky Way. So we say, you know, if you launch systems with chemical rockets, they will remain gravitationally bound to the Milky Way. They cannot escape like light signals, radio signals, leave the Milky Way and they're gone forever.
However, if you send equipment at tens of kilometers per second, the way we sent our spacecraft, they will still be bound gravitationally. They cannot escape from the Milky Way Galaxy. So we think of the Milky Way Galaxy as a basket collecting all the pieces of equipment, all the devices that were ever created since the Big Bang within this volume.
and were launched by chemical rockets or things that are not faster than hundreds of kilometers per second. All of these things are now sitting inside the Milky Way galaxy and some of them may be functional, some of them may be space trash, but we should look around us to look for those objects. Okay, so that's, I call that interstellar archaeology. It's just like doing archaeology, finding relics of things that exist in the past
whoever produced them need not be alive anymore. Those civilizations may be dead by now. Maybe they didn't take care of their climate. Maybe they went into a nuclear war. You know, we don't care. As long as they launch things out of their planet that could reach us by now, we just search around for anything they left. And this interstellar archaeology is something that was never pursued despite 70 years of SETI activity. So if you ask
How does the SETI community regard this endeavor? They dismiss it. They ridicule it. They say, no, no, no way. This is ridiculous. There is nothing around us. And, you know, I say, well, let's look because only over the past five years, we discovered the first three interstellar objects, objects that came from outside the solar system in astronomy, astronomers. The first one was actually from 2014. And we will talk more about it.
CNEOS? Yes, January 8, 2014, a meteor that collided with the Earth. You can think of the Earth as a fishing net that collects objects along its path around the Sun. And the first one identified by government sensors, with a very high speed,
and then about meteors and
I looked online and I found this catalog of meteors the government compiled based on missile warning systems data. And I asked my student Amir Siraj to check if the fastest moving meteors could have been unbound to the sun. Okay, any of them could have come from outside the solar system. And we found that we found that one. Okay, and we wrote a paper. And then the reviewers of the paper said, we don't believe the US government.
You know, we, we don't believe the uncertainties. So then it took took a few years. And I got the people, you know, behind the National Security Defense, especially from the White House from Department of Defense, they issued a letter from the US Space Command to NASA, confirming that indeed this object that we identified with my son came from outside the solar system at the 99.999% confidence. Okay, so that's, that's the first interstellar object
It's the first interstellar meteor, the size of a basketball that was identified by humans. And the second one was identified in 2017. That was Oumuamua that my book, extraterrestrial, talks about. And the third one was a comet, just like any other comet. It came from outside the solar system.
But the first two are complete outliers. The meteor has material strength tougher than iron, tougher than all other meteors in the catalogue, 273 of them, by a factor of two or more. How do you measure toughness, by the way? Oh, it's very easy because when it collides with the earth, it basically goes through the atmosphere
And the atmosphere gets denser as you go to lower and lower in the atmosphere. So the density of the atmosphere gets diluted as you move up. And so you can, we can tell where the explosion took place. It was 18.7 kilometers above
the ocean surface, 100 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea. That's where the government identified the fireball that was created from the object burning up in the atmosphere. And it released a few percent of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb when it exploded. So from that, you can measure the speed of the object by how fast this fireball was moving at the time that the explosion took place.
It's a ball of light. And it's a very different detection method than looking at Oumuamua, which was just reflection of sunlight. So Oumuamua was roughly the size of a football field in order for us to see it. And this one was half a meter, you know, like 200 times smaller. And the reason we could see an object so small, half a meter in size is because it burned up, it produced its own light.
And so you can tell the speed by which it was moving, which was 45 kilometers per second, and you can tell the density of the atmosphere in its vicinity when it exploded. So you can tell how much stress was exerted on this object.
when it disintegrated. So prior to that, it was at lower density of air, it didn't disintegrate, it held together. But as it got to a very dense environment, eventually disintegrated because the stress, the pressure acting on it was too large for its material strength to resist it. So you can tell what is the yield strength, the material strength of this object based on the
You know, it's speed and the density of air when it started disintegrating and it turns out to be twice tougher than iron. And that's very unusual because iron meteorites are only 5% of all space rocks that hit the earth, only 5%. And this was
Two times tougher than iron, just think about it. And moreover, if we go back in time, it actually moved faster than 95% of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun. So it was an outlier, both in terms of its speed, and in terms of its composition. And I say, you know, if it's such an outlier,
You know, faster than 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun and moving and having material strength tougher than iron, tougher than all the other meteors in the catalogue.
We better check whether it's an artifact, whether it's artificially made, and the way to check is to collect the fragments from the ocean floor and check their composition, whether it's an alloy that was artificially produced or whether it's an iron meteorite produced by nature. But even if it's iron,
It's rare, it's unusual, and the question arises why the first meteor is of that composition. So anyway, this was an outlier, definitely. Oumuamua was an outlier for a completely different reason. It was flat in shape based on the reflection of sunlight that was published as a scientific paper, not by me, by someone. Actually, the first discovery paper argued that it's flat, most likely pancake-shaped. The first discovery paper!
Quick message from a sponsor. When I do eat meat, I care about the source of it, both in terms of the quality of the food itself and about the standards that the place has with regard to animal welfare and humane animal treatment. ButcherBox takes the guesswork out of finding high quality meat and seafood that you can trust.
Given that I'm a hermit, one of my favorite features is that it's delivered straight to you, straight to your door. If you're in the US, you get free shipping. The search for outstanding deals on high quality protein ends here.
Again, that's ButcherBox.com slash Theories to claim this deal.
And then when I started suggesting that it may be artificial, then people backed off and said, no, no, no, it's just a flat rock, you know, but then it turns out it's not a comet because there was no cometary tail. It was pushed away from the sun despite the fact that there was no rocket effect from cometary tail. It came from a special frame of reference, all kinds of weird properties. Can you explain that last part that it came from a special frame of reference? Yeah, so there is this local standard of rest.
which is the frame that you get to when you average over the random motions of the stars in the vicinity of the sun. It's sort of like you can think of it as the local parking lot, the galactic frame of reference, and stars move relative to it.
because stars get kicks when they are born, they are not born exactly at the frame of the galaxy, they are born in some cloud that is moving relative to that frame, or they get kicked afterwards, so they develop a characteristic speed of
20 30 kilometers per second relative to the local standard of rest but you can take the average of the local stars and just get that frame of reference okay so some stars are moving to the right some some to the left and you take the average you get to that frame of reference now does that was it rest in the local standard of rest. And only one part one part in a in five hundred of all stars
are so much at rest in that frame as the muamua was. So you ask yourself, you know, what's the chance that it came from a star? It's one in 500. So that was very unusual about it. Then you ask what's the chance that it's flat?
You know, we don't see objects that are 10 times longer than they are thick and they're flat. We don't see rocks like that very, you know, we don't see such things. At most it's factor of three between the long axis and the short axis. And here it was at least 10 times longer than it was wide projected on the sky based on the variation of reflected sunlight. And then it didn't have a cometary tail, but it was pushed away from the sun. So I suggested it's a thin object,
Just like a light sail or a surface layer of a spacecraft that was torn apart or something artificial because we've never seen anything like it.
and then people said no way you know the mainstream of astronomy there was a a paper in nature magazine nature astronomy magazine a review paper saying oh mua mua is natural period explanation exclamation mark it's natural that's it there is no reason to consider other alternatives
A few months later, there was a paper by a group of people saying, actually, to explain the properties of a muamua, like it was pushed away from the sun, maybe we need a cloud of dust particles like a dust bunny that is 100 times less dense than air, and it reflects sunlight, therefore it's being pushed. It's very lightweight, 100 times less dense than air.
And here the problem is, if it comes close to the sun, such a cloud of dust particles will get heated by hundreds of degrees, will not maintain its integrity. Okay. So then another team a few months later, and just to remind you, all of this happened after
the people who were on the review paper declared it must be natural, period, let's not discuss it anymore. So then other groups of mainstream astronomers said, yeah, it is natural, but it has to be a dust bunny. No, no, no, that doesn't make sense. Okay, so it has to be a hydrogen iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen so that when it evaporates, just like a comet, we can't see the hydrogen because it's transparent.
And therefore it is a comet, but a comet made of material that we can't see when it evaporates. So the problem with that is hydrogen evaporates very easily, so it will not survive the journey.
We wrote a scientific paper about it with my colleague Feng Huang. So the people who advocated for hydrogen iceberg said, yes, that's correct. There is a problem here. It wouldn't survive very long distances in interstellar space. So then another team came along and said, oh, yeah, now we have the answer. It's a nitrogen iceberg. So everyone's cheered and said, yeah, yeah, yeah, nitrogen iceberg. Why nitrogen? Nitrogen is transparent. So just like hydrogen evaporates, nitrogen can evaporate.
Where do you find chunks of frozen nitrogen? Well, the surface of Pluto has solid nitrogen. So maybe there are all these exoplanets out there and they get bombarded all the time by rocks and then you get chips of those surfaces and those chips are
representing of the population of objects like ʻOumuamua. The problem with that, we showed in a paper with my students, there is just not enough material in solid nitrogen to explain a large enough population such that you would see ʻOumuamua. So it just doesn't work out, the mass budget. So I say there are problems with each of these mainstream explanations, but moreover, each of them advocates
For something that we've never seen before. So how can you say it must be natural period exclamation mark in a review paper?
and then come back and say, oh, yeah, it was this, that or that things that we've never seen before. If it was obvious that it's natural, you wouldn't need to come up with these three explanations as published papers. These are not just people proposing it on a blog or on Twitter. These are real papers that took months for people to write. And each of these invoke something we've never seen before. Each of them has problems.
And I say, if it's something we've never seen before, we should leave on the table the possibility that it's artificial. But no, that is completely moved out of the table. And I say, well, that's not the scientific process. The scientific process is collecting evidence. So the Galileo project, one of the goals is, aside from the expedition to scoop the ocean floor to look for the fragments of
of the first meteor, the first interstellar meteor, we are also planning a rendezvous with the next Oumuamua, so that we can collect more evidence, you know, just the way Galileo said, you know, let's get data. And if you are a philosopher that knows the answer in advance, like Oumuamua must be natural, then you say, I don't need any data.
But you are behaving just like the philosophers during the days of Galileo. You don't want to look through a telescope because you think you're not the answer, because you are jealous of the attention it gets, because of all kinds of reasons. I don't care what they are.
Because you are an expert that worked on rocks all your life and you want everything in the sky to be rocks. That's your problem. We will try to collect data and figure it out. That's the way science is done without prejudice. And if we take a high resolution image of the next Oumuamua and see that it's a nitrogen iceberg, stop it.
But let's first see, you can't say it must be natural until you see the nitrogen iceberg. Okay, so the Galileo project is designing a space mission. And then it's sort of like dating the next Tomuamua. Uh huh. Yeah, I saw a blog post on that. Yeah. So dating, you know, we have a dating app.
which is the Vera Rubin Observatory. There is the legacy survey of space and time and we'll start operations in a year in Chile. That's a telescope that will have a camera with 3.2 billion pixels. Just think about it. Your cell phone has a camera of a few million pixels. Here I'm talking 3.2 billion. So that's a factor of a thousand more pixels.
in a year on a telescope serving the southern sky from Chile. Every four days, it will scan the entire sky. So there is a high likelihood that every few months it will find another object like Oumuamua, sort of like a dating app. We will look at the data that comes from the pipeline of this telescope, which will be public because it's funded by the National Science Foundation. Yeah. And most of the time we will swipe to the left.
We will say, no, this object is not unusual enough. But if it finds an interstellar object that is as weird as ʻOumuamua was, we might want to invest a billion dollars in sending a space mission that will come close to it because, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. And in my case, it's worth 66,000 words, the number of words in my book. I wouldn't need to write a book if we had a high resolution image. The other thing we have is the Webb Telescope. The Webb Telescope is about a million miles away from Earth.
And it offers a fantastic vantage point, because you look at the object, let's say the next to Muamua from different directions, you look at it from Earth, and you look at it from the Webb Telescope. And then you can trace, it's just like having two eyes, you may ask, why do we have two eyes? We have two eyes, because then we get the third dimension, because one eye sees an object,
that could be a threat for our survival, you know, sees an object from one direction and then the second eye sees it from another direction. From that you can gauge the distance and that helps for survival. That's why we have two eyes. All those people that existed before us with one eye could not figure out the distance and the tiger would eat them.
Okay, so it was important for survival to have two eyes. But in the context of the Webb Telescope, you know, we look at this object from the Webb position, which is a million miles away, and from Earth, we can pinpoint the trajectory in three dimensions of the Webb Telescope. So we can figure out if there are any forces other than gravity acting on the object, if it's propelled by something other than gravity,
And if there is no commentary tale, you know, maybe it's something else. And also the web telescope can look at it in the infrared and infer the composition. So we will get much more data in with the help of the web telescope. And then the third branch, just to finish the answer to your question, the third branch of the Galileo project has to do with the report that came out of the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines,
to the U.S. Congress a year ago, on June 2021, and that led to the establishment of a new office in government. They used to refer to these objects that they cannot identify as unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP.
Congress just established a new piece of legislation that they would like to pass, and they suggest that these objects are also transmedium. They go from water to air to space,
So, you know, apparently there is some classified data that leads them in that direction. But also NASA decided to establish a committee that will evaluate whether scientific research will be funded on these objects. We are already doing it with the Galileo project. So what happened was that when this report was delivered to Congress,
I suggested to NASA because Bill Nelson said scientists should get engaged. So I immediately contacted the person under him, Thomas Zurbuchen, who is responsible for science at NASA. And I said that it will be my pleasure and privilege to help NASA and make his boss happy. And he said, why don't you send a white paper? I submitted the white paper suggesting a research program.
And I never heard back. And then a year later, in June 2022, they announced without me knowing that they have a this this committee that so that was triggered by this white paper that they sent. But then
And now they regard me as having a conflict of interest, because in the meantime, you know, around the same time of June, July 2021, a few multi billionaires came to the porch of my home, they were inspired by my book extraterrestrial, and they gave me $3 million to establish the Galileo project.
And so at the end of exactly a month after the ODNI report to Congress, we announced the Galileo project. And the third branch of the Galileo project is trying to build a suite of instruments. It's already on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory right now. We are testing a suite of instruments that take video of the sky in the infrared, the optical band, audio band,
and analyzes it with artificial intelligence algorithms. And we are testing it in the coming months. And hopefully, by 2023, we'll start collecting data at places where there are reports on these objects. And then, you know, that's the third branch of the Galileo projects, we are already doing this research. And we should see it's a fishing expedition, we should see if we find
natural objects only, or maybe some human made objects. Natural are, you know, like, for example, birds or bugs or meteors or, or lightnings. Human made objects are drones, airplanes, satellites, and so weather balloons.
But the question is whether there is something else. And on November 10th, 2021, I was invited to a forum, the Ignatius Forum at the Washington National Cathedral, together with Jeff Bezos, Bill Nelson, and Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. So when I was in the green room with Avril Haines, I approached her and said,
What do you think? What is your gut feeling about the nature of these objects that you reported about? Because she had a bachelor's degree in theoretical physics from the University of Chicago. So, you know, she understands my language as a physicist. And I said, what do you think they are? And she said, I don't know. And I think, frankly, you know, the government, the intelligence agencies, they are not a scientific organization.
I think it's time for scientists to engage because the sky is not classified.
It's only the sensors that the government is using that are classified, and that's why the data is classified. So the Galileo project will try to break this open in the sense of you have all these non-professional people reporting about things where the images are fuzzy, they're anecdotal, we don't know the truth, and then you have the classified data that we don't have access to. So the Galileo project will try to establish
data stream that is open to the public. The way science is done, everyone will be able to access the data and it will be of high quality. We will know exactly what our instruments are doing, unlike those cameras on the jittery cockpits of fighter jets.
airplanes, you know, that we don't know exactly what they were doing at the time. So all of this is to bring the subject to the mainstream of science, because, you know, science should address that the main task of science is to address questions that are of interest to society are of interest to the government. And it's just, it feels just inappropriate that this subject is ridiculed and pushed aside from the mainstream of science.
Okay, so let me see if I got this correct. There are three branches or three goals in the New Year term for the Galileo project. So one is to go and look in the ocean floor for that meteorite that you mentioned initially. So that's CNEOS I believe in 2014.
Okay, then you have the search for ʻOumuamua-like objects, and that, I believe you mentioned, a Chilean observatory? Yes, the Vera Rubin Observatory, yes. Okay, okay, so that's not the Galileo projects, that's what you would rent out, is that how it works? Well, this is, yeah, the dating app. Think about it as it will suggest objects of interest that came from outside the solar system that we can follow up on either by using existing telescopes to look at them or sending a space mission that will take a close-up photograph. Okay.
And then also you would get some other form of verification from the James Webb Telescope. Now, I don't know how that works. Are you allowed to just say, hey, James Webb Telescope people, can you tell me what you saw at this point? Or do you tell them, hey, James Webb Telescope people, can you now look in this direction? Like, how does that work? Do you have to rent it? Yeah, actually,
If we announce the discovery of another interstellar object, especially if it looks like Oumuamua in terms of being weird, I will not need to do much because usually there is some discretionary time that belongs to the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute or other people have some time that they will be happy to donate.
for this because despite all of all you hear from people who are not practitioners of science you you see them writing tweets or writing blogs basically very aggressively attacking the possibility that such an object is of interest and saying oh it must be natural we've seen a lot of these despite what they say these are people that are not professionals i think the scientific community once we find more objects of this type
It will be a very important question to figure out their nature. Okay. Because just think about it. If there are hydrogen icebergs, you know, those are not produced in planetary systems. Those are potentially produced in molecular clouds. We've never seen a chunk of frozen hydrogen produced by nature. That will be a great discovery. We've never seen a chunk of frozen nitrogen.
in the solar system and the claim is no no no you will not find it in the solar system because these chunks were produced in the distant past and none of them survived and therefore there is nothing in the solar system but what we find are chunks of frozen nitrogen coming into the solar system from other planetaries. That's the sort of
popular idea by some people right now for the origin of ʻOumuamua. Okay, suppose we find that it's a nitrogenized, but that would also be an important revelation because nobody expected it before ʻOumuamua. Nobody. Okay. And I say it may not be either of them and it may not be a dust, but even if, okay, suppose we see, you know, imagine those clouds of dust particles floating around and that would be a revelation. It's something completely new that we've never expected.
so in any case it would be a major discovery and therefore i think.
that the web telescope time will be allocated almost instantly to look at these things. And I will, you know, in the worst case, I will apply for time together with colleagues, but I don't think it will be necessary. I think there will be enough curious astronomers that would like to figure out what these things are. And of course, once we observe a few of those, then we would have a better clue. And, you know, whatever it is, it would be fun to figure it out. And I think
Even those that advocate for natural origin would like to demonstrate it with data. So even though they are biased, you know, it's just like taking those philosophers at the time of Galileo and telling them, look through the telescope, you know, we are not telling you what you would see, just look through them. They refused to do that back then. But now I think we live at a different time. And once we have the data from web that nobody can censor, by the way, it's not as if you can put the people that constructed the web
in-house arrest. That is not, the data will be public no matter what. So it will make no sense to ignore the data. So astronomers will look at it just to demonstrate that the objects are natural. That's okay. They can think whatever they want, but eventually it will be clear if it's not natural. So I'm not saying all the objects must be artificial.
You know, it will be just like going on the beach, you know, most of the time you find rocks and seashells that are naturally produced. The solar system contains a lot of those, but every now and then you may bump into a plastic bottle. And that's, you know, those outliers are what we should be looking for and checking if they exist.
Okay, so even if another emuamua object is found and people think that it's natural, it's still abnormal and so they would have an incentive to look for it because nitrogen or a block of nitrogen, a block of hydrogen, a block of a dust bunny of some sort is aberrant. Exactly. I should tell you that this is the third
phase of a three stage story. The story started about a century ago, around 1925. That was when Cecilia Payne Capashkin was a young scientist who wanted to have the first PhD doctoral degree in astronomy at
Radcliffe Harvard back then. She was at the Radcliffe Institute but then she wanted to get a degree in astronomy and that was not possible. She was the first one. Now her PhD back in 1925 was about the Sun and that was just around after quantum mechanics was invented and so forth and she realized that based on
The spectrum of emission from the sun that the surface of the sun is made mostly of hydrogen. Now at the time people thought, oh, you know, we know what the earth is made of. So the sun is made of the same stuff as the earth. Okay. And that was the prevailing paradigm. Everyone believed in that. So she presented her thesis saying, actually, it looks like the sun, at least the surface of the sun is made mostly of hydrogen.
and on her PhD thesis committee was the most prominent astronomer at the time that was an expert on stars. He was the director of Princeton University Observatory, Henry Norris Russell. Okay. And he said to her, that's impossible. Take this statement out of your thesis. It makes no sense to argue that the sun, everyone knows that the sun has the same composition as the earth.
So she was a young female scientist at the time, decided, okay, well, if the expert tells me that, you know, otherwise I might not get a PhD, she took it out. He dissuaded her. And then for four years, he tried to analyze his own data and published a paper four years later, saying that Cecilia was right. Okay, indeed, the sun is made mostly of hydrogen.
Okay, now the funny part of the story, and that's also an important lesson, is that about 80 years later there was a visiting committee to the Princeton University Department of Astrophysical Sciences, okay, and the chair of that department at Princeton said, we have a very prestigious
history of the department. If you go back in time, there was the famous astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who discovered that the sun is made of hydrogen. So then there was a member of that committee who corrected him and said, look, it was not Henry Norris Russell, it was actually Cecilia Penko-Poschkin, and he tried to argue otherwise. And the lesson of this story is,
that history depends on who you write, who writes it. But anyway, so that's step one, when we realize we thought that we see things in our backyard here on Earth, and everything else like the sun is made of the same stuff. Well, mistake. Okay, so a young person named Cecilia Penko-Pashkin, who later became the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, realized it first.
Then the second part of the story is in 1933, about a decade later, Fritz Wicke, young in his 30s, realized that clusters of galaxies are made mostly of stuff that we don't find in the solar system. He called it dark matter. Okay, so for 40 years, this subject was ridiculed, including by colleagues within his department at Caltech.
Pasadena where he was the professor that he was not his view was not popular. People just ridiculed it said doesn't make any sense that most of the matter in the universe is of a type that you don't find in the solar system.
Okay, once again, the same story, just like with Earth and the sun. Now we are talking about the universe and the solar system. And by now, if you ask any student or postdoc, they would say, of course, no question about it. 82% of the matter in the universe is made of stuff that is not ordinary matter that you find in the source. We haven't detected it yet. We don't find it in the solar system. We don't know what it is.
It's dark matter. Okay, we just gave it a label. So just again, the lesson from this is for 40 years, this was ridiculed until the 1970s. And now everyone says yes, of course, but we still don't know what it is. Now I say here is the third part of this story. Over the past decade, we found the first objects that came from outside the solar system, just like going to your backyard,
and thinking oh yeah anything i find in my backyard so far i found from my backyard was rocks therefore if something comes from the street it will also be a rock but then you find a beach ball you find a tennis ball you say no no no no it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before and my point is just be open-minded maybe you have a neighbor maybe these objects are different than rocks why is that such a
an extraordinary claim to say that other exoplanets may have developed intelligence the way Earth did and resulted in spaceship or some equipment being thrown into space that may visit us. Why is that so extraordinary? So my colleagues say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I say in response, and by the way, this is a quote of Carl Sagan from the 70s.
I say that makes no sense because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say we don't need to, everything is rocks. Everything is natural. That just the way that this nature astronomy review paper said it must be natural period explanation. Now let's forget about it. Let's move on. If you say that you don't look for evidence. If you don't admit that the emperor has no clothes, if you don't say that, then you don't even search. You don't check.
You say, well, it's a rock of some type of the very unusual type. Forget about it. There are more important pressing items like dark matter. But fundamentally, it may be much more important than dark matter, because if we find that dark matter is super symmetric,
particles, it will have zero impact on our daily lives. If we find that there is a smarter kid on our block, it will change the future of humanity. So I say, how can you ignore that possibility? And the point is that, you know, we should be guided by evidence. That's the key to being humble, being modest, saying, you know, we don't know the answers,
Let's just figure them out. Let's allow nature to educate us. That's something else that's important that I don't think is talked about much that when someone dismisses something because it's quote unquote, improbable, it's not simply a probabilistic argument. There's also a value judgment there. And the reason is,
when i'm driving along a country road and there's a hill i can't see the cars that are coming up and let's say i've passed 50 of them and there's no cars it's empty i still slow down at the top of the hill even though it's improbable there's another car because it's important that i don't hit someone or that i don't get hit and so even if it's improbable that it's life the importance of it is so high that
That needs to be taken into account as well. Exactly. That was Blaise Pascal's argument why we should discuss the possibility of God because the implications are so great. And my point in response to Carl Sagan's quote is that extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.
And, you know, we invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter over the past several decades. The most recent attempt was using the Large Hadron Collider that cost $10 billion to find the lightest supersymmetric particle as a candidate for the dark matter. And people said, you know, it will be found. It's around the corner. String theory was established on the foundation of supersymmetry.
And there are some very natural set of parameters for supersymmetry that everyone believed in and awards were given to people who suggested that and so forth. And then the Large Hadron Collider at the cost of $10 billion didn't find it. There is no supersymmetry at the natural set of parameters. There was no dark metaparticle that we discovered so far.
And so I say, you know, if we were to invest billions of dollars in the search for equipment from other civilizations in outer space, and we would spend billions of dollars for decades and not find anything,
then we would be exactly at the same point as dark meta searches are right now. So why didn't anyone say supersymmetry is an extraordinary claim? There is no extraordinary evidence for it. Therefore, we should not fund the search. Why didn't anyone? No, it's legitimate to search for supersymmetry because there was a community that agreed that it's a good idea. Okay. So we invested the billions of dollars. We didn't find it.
Does anyone take responsibility for that? No, people say, well, that's the nature of science. You imagine something, you don't find it. So now, why do we block funding for something that we as a civilization already did in terms of sending equipment out of the solar system? Why do we block funding for the search for something similar that was initiated by
a duplicate of ourselves because, you know, the dice was rolled tens of billions of times in the Milky Way galaxy, the dice of intelligence. We know that somewhere between a few percent to a hundred percent of all the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly the same separation. That's from the Kepler satellite. We already know that. So what we find in the solar system is not an extremely rare situation. And I say, okay, you roll the dice of intelligence,
so many times tens of billions it's quite possible and most stars from billions of years before the sun we should allow for this possibility to me it doesn't sound more far-fetched or more speculative than the lightest supersymmetric particle being the dark matter okay but on that front we invested billions of dollars in the search for the lightest supersymmetric part on the front of searching for what we are doing from another
kid on our cosmic block, we didn't spend anything from federal funding. So the Galileo project is funded by private donations. And we haven't really engaged scientifically in that search. So I say, there is a mismatch between the current academic approach to this subject. And moreover, you may say, Oh, scientists are conservative. I say, how, how is that possible?
to imagine that scientists are conservative because you have a whole community of theoretical physicists that for four decades are working on extra dimensions, on the multiverse, on string theory, ideas that have no foundation in experimental verification. There is no evidence for those ideas, yet they are part of the mainstream. And on the other hand,
We have some evidence that we exist as an intelligent species. We have evidence that we send out equipment that will exit the solar system. We have evidence that a planet like the Earth around a star like the Sun is very common. You know, there are billions, if not tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And many of these stars from billions of years before the Sun
So how can we even argue that this is a very speculative idea to imagine that Albert Einstein was not the smartest scientist that ever existed since the Big Bang? I mean, that makes no sense. It's very likely that there was a scientist smarter than Albert Einstein that lived a billion years ago on an exoplanet. And the civilization who benefited from the discoveries of that scientist may have sent probes
Furthermore, there's the simulation hypothesis, which presupposes something like another intelligent life. Why is it that certain mainstream ideas, like you mentioned, extra dimensions and many worlds and even simulation and so on is the simulation is more philosophical than it is physics based. But why is it that these ideas are taken more seriously? However, the ideas that
There's extraterrestrial intelligent life that has visited us, whether or not it exists. I think many or perhaps most scientists would say yes, but whether or not they've visited us or continue to visit us to this day is something different. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that they don't like that idea? It's clearly because there's a stigma. So why is that stigma there? Yeah, the answer is very simple. Humans enjoy ideas that flatter their ego.
okay so if the idea says we are at the center of the universe that's great we can adapt it for a thousand years we can put Galileo in house arrest and refuse to look at the evidence why because it flatters our ego to think that we are at the center of the universe that god considers us special unique and privileged okay so then
You find evidence after a while, even though you lock Galileo, eventually it turns out that we are not at the center of the universe. Eventually it turns out that we came to the cosmic stage just at the end. So if you come to a play, you know, 13.8 billion years after the cosmic play started, just at the end, and you are not at the center of the stage, then guess what? You are not a primary actor.
okay and you better search for other actors to tell you what the play is about okay but that goes against the human ego that's not flattering so what do you do you say okay i'm not at the center of the play but there are no other actors therefore i am important despite everything and i am the smartest
Now I can understand that approach because when my daughters were young, they were at home and they thought that they are the smartest in the world until we took them to the kindergarten. And on the first day in the kindergarten, they had a psychological shock to realize that there is a smarter kid.
in their neighborhood. Now I say how can you avoid going to the kindergarten? Very easily. You just ridicule on social media any possible intriguing evidence that that's not the case. The way the philosophers behaved at the time of Galileo. You hope that nobody else will pay attention to Galileo. Why? Because you put him in house arrest so that nobody can listen. You don't look through the telescope and you suppress the information as much as you can and you say there is nothing there.
Forget about it exclamation mark period forget about it you say that you put him in house arrest or nobody would listen you think that would cure the threat to your ego but it doesn't because eventually someone else finds the evidence and reality is whatever it is.
If you were to ask those philosophers to design a space mission that would reach Mars, they would never get to their destination because they thought that Mars moves around the Earth. But reality is not like that. You know, you can launch a spacecraft and it will never reach the destination if you have the wrong ideas. So by today's standards, what Galileo said was trivial because you can look at the Earth from a distance, you can go to Mars and you realize Galileo was right. Okay, there is no way these philosophers
You know that. Okay, but for a while they were able to dominate public opinion, to be popular and to maintain their grip on the false notion of reality.
So that's a tendency, that's the ability of humans to basically go on Twitter and make a lot of noise about something that they don't like. Now, it may work in politics, you know, in politics, things are, you know, you don't have hard facts sometimes. So you can argue whatever you want, you can get a lot of likes, and you feel good about yourself. But in science,
What does he want to adapt to reality you better pay attention to evidence so i say when there is something intriguing that doesn't line up with what you expected.
Your duty as a scientist is to collect more evidence. Your duty is to say, well, maybe the emperor has no clothes. Maybe what we think is incorrect. And the only way to find out is to admit that possibility. To admit the possibility that the dark matter may not be weakly interacting massive particle because if you do fund the Large Hadron Collider and it doesn't find it, you know that your previous notion was incorrect. That's the way science makes progress.
It checks possibilities by looking for evidence. And if you, on the other hand, say you know the answer in advance, you may be just like those philosophers. Just to give you an example, this expedition to Papua New Guinea gained a lot of traction recently because the NBC had a beautiful video about it. And the NPR reported about it. And then
As soon as the NPR story broke out, just yesterday broke out for the second time, some people had negative things. They injected poison into the discussion by saying... Some people? Yeah, some people. And many of them are not practicing astronomers. And so I don't want even to get into the issue of what their qualifications are. But the point of the matter is,
You know, this expedition is funded from donations. It's done by a team of scientists. And all we're doing is going to a place where a meteor disintegrated and trying to check what the fragments are made of. Like, why would that bother anyone? Why would anyone resist that other than the instinct that the philosophers had at the time of Galileo? What I'm trying to say is four centuries later, we still see the same phenomenon where people
with very strong conviction, oppose the gathering of evidence and data.
And why are we going to Papua New Guinea? Why? Because this object was tougher than iron. There is evidence for that. Because the government measured the properties of the meteor, and it looks like it came from outside the solar system. So it was an outlier. That's all. So it's all guided. You know, I didn't dream this object at night. It was not a subject of a science fiction story.
It was evidence the government provided that allows you using the laws of physics to figure out that this is an outlier that came from outside the source. That's all. It motivates us to examine what its composition is. So why wouldn't everyone cheer up and say, great, let's figure out what this object is. Let's find more evidence. Why would it bother people?
This is happening and the only way i can see it is first jealousy that this project gets attention okay so whenever there is a flower blooming above the grass level people try to step on the flower. Because it bothers them that there is something different rising above the grass level they would rather see only grass.
okay so that's one tendency that out of jealousy they don't like the fact that there is a flower blooming above the grass level okay so whenever there is a flower they would step on it so that's a reason for toxicity you know like in social media but a second thing is prejudice and we don't you know people find it uh offensive to consider the possibility that we are not the smartest kid on the cosmic block it really bothers people because
You know, just imagine that. Imagine that we see the 100th version of the iPhone coming from space. And it does magic.
Sort of like a cave dweller finding a cell phone or going to New York City and seeing all the gadgets there. The cave dweller would never be able to reverse engineer these things. It would look like magic, but it would be a blow to the ego of the cave dweller who is used to hunting animals or playing with rocks. So obviously, if the cave dweller finds a cell phone, the first impression would be, oh, it's a rock of a type that I've never seen before.
Okay, just like Oumuamua is a rock of a type that we've never seen before. So that's the first impression because you're used to a vocabulary that, you know, you play with rocks all your life. This is a rock of a type that I've never seen before. But then you start realizing that this gadget does things that the rock doesn't. Like if you press a button, it records your voice or records your image. So then it will change your perception. And eventually you would realize there is magic here.
That something that goes beyond what I was able to accomplish in my life of hunting and gathering. Okay, so the cave dweller will realize that. And for us, the way to realize it is that we will figure out that something is not natural, doesn't look like the composition of a natural object, or that it behaves in ways that go beyond our technologies. Okay, so I say we can follow the same learning exercise. We can
By getting more evidence, we can get out of our comfort zone. But most people prefer to stay in their comfort zone, just like the philosophers prefer to stay in their comfort zone of us being at the center of the world. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?
I see those as the same. The first one, which is the flower that stands above the grass and wanting to stomp it out out of jealousy. And then the second one out of wanting to be the most brightest kid on the block.
Because both point out one's own insufficiencies as far as one thinks that it's almost a view of oneself. If I was to correct or if one was to correct, although I'm speaking to myself, my own insecurities and my own lowly view of myself, then I wouldn't be so quick to criticize others and also maybe see that something else being more
valuable means that I can use that as an aim so I can see it as a positive rather than a detriment that it doesn't shine such a negative light on me or shine no light because all the spotlight is elsewhere. Yeah there is a simple remedy to that and let me just mention what is the solution? The solution is to look at kids because kids don't know much about the world okay so they learn from experience so if they see an object they go and check it
And an adult would sit and say, oh, I know what the subject is, forget about it. But a kid would go there and a kid often takes risks in this learning process, you know, because they're not doing any calculations about what the risk might involve and what kind of danger might be there and so forth. So they are much more innovative in the way they explore the world. They go to the object and touch it and they move it around and they play with it. And
You know, the advantage of this approach is that you may discover something that you didn't expect. Whereas if you think that you are the expert, that you know everything that you will find based on your past knowledge. And if you pretend to have the image of an adult, you know, where you know everything, and you never show weaknesses as being unfamiliar with something,
Then you lose the edge of finding new things, okay, discovering new things. So the remedy to the problems we discussed before is to behave more like kids. You know, when I see adults, very often I try to figure out how, what is the kid behind this adult?
Because we all pretend to be much more than we actually are. And fundamentally, you know, if you look at what we know and what we don't know about the universe, we are still like classmates in the first day of class.
There is so much we don't know, you know, so many scientists got awards just for what you may regard as accounting. You know, they just account for how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much dark energy there is in the universe, but we still don't know what it is. You're just saying, okay, there is, you know, a certain 25% of the cosmic mass budget is dark matter, 5% is ordinary matter, 70% is dark energy.
Okay, it sounds very impressive and a lot of awards and prizes are given to the people who pinpoint the exact accounting, but we still don't know the substance. Okay, so there is so much we don't know, and we should be humble. It's a sense of humility. You see, the exploration of the unknown is just like spirituality. You know, you are exploring something bigger than you. So you should not put yourself
Up from that's what our ego wants to do to put yourself as the center point. But if you know that you're in a
a learning experience like a kid. If you just say, I don't know much, I just want to figure it out. If that is the attitude rather than say, I know a lot and I want to portray an image so that I will get more honours and awards and more recognition and so forth. The way adults do their calculations, they portray an image that they know much more than they actually know. If you do that, then you are missing the opportunity of discovering the truth. And a kid on the other hand admits, you know,
The kid doesn't know much. And therefore, you know, the kid takes risks that the kid admits when things are not clear. So if we adapt that approach to doing science, I think there is the rate by which we make discoveries will be accelerated. And there is a simple reason for that, that the intellectual climate will not be about demonstrating how smart you are, but will be about demonstrating what
what we learn, you know, and, and it's a different task because you can demonstrate that you are smart by asking a question of
How many angels can dance on the tip of a pin? Okay, that sounds like a fascinating question. We don't know if angels exist and whether they dance on the tip of a pin, but you can ask this question. Suppose there are angels and they dance on the tip of a pin, how many can do it? And then you can say, okay, let me generalize this equation in 10 dimensions and do the calculation in 10 dimensions and develop your very sophisticated math. And people say, wow,
wow that's amazing how was that possible to solve the equations of angels dancing on the tip of a pin in 10 dimensions that's really exciting and then they would say oh yeah but actually this is not completely
you know, undeserving the fact that we dedicated decades to asking this question, because we can use the mathematics to solve that question. We can use it in the context of understanding quantum chromodynamics, you know, like we can apply it to QCD, to the study of nuclei. Okay, so you develop some mathematics for one question, you say, oh, now I can use that mathematics for another question. Well, I say that's
That's legitimate, that's good, but that's not the work of a physicist. A physicist is supposed to ask questions that have to do with reality. And the way you learn about reality is by experiments and not by intellectual gymnastics. And the reason that you can be engaged just in intellectual gymnastics without any contact with reality is if the motivation to show that you are smart. If that is the motivation, then you don't care about experiments.
And that, unfortunately, is much more prevalent right now in the theoretical physics community, showing that you are smart and doing mathematical gymnastics. And I say, you know, that's a distraction from the main objective of physics, which is to describe reality. And why is that important to understand reality? Because we live in that reality and we have to adapt to it. OK, so in order to adapt to reality,
We need to understand it. We need to know what environment we live in. You know, we need to know if there is climate change so that we can develop policy for that. We need to know if the earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the earth in order to develop spaceship that will go into space in the right direction and will move correctly. So all of these, if we want to cure diseases, if we want to cure the pandemic, you know, we need to understand how viruses operate
and develop an mRNA vaccine for them. So all of this has to do with us figuring out what reality is and adapting to it. And it's irresponsible of us to pursue a different goal, which is to elevate our ego, to boost our ego, to brag in our intellectual gymnastics, because that may have nothing to do with the reality that we're trying to understand as physicists.
Okay, have many technical questions. So but let me just briefly get to one comment. So would you be okay then if theoretical physicists change their name from theoretical physicists to pure mathematicians? Oh, yeah, still be a problem. It's purely a categorization problem. No problem whatsoever. It's a cut or, you know, if a plumber comes to my home, okay, and says, I'm a plumber, then I would ask the plumber to fix the toilet.
Now suppose the plumber will tell me, no, that's too difficult of a task. I cannot do it. So I would say, OK, can you fix my faucet? You know, it's not working. And the plumber would say, oh, that's also too difficult. Then I would say, you're not a plumber. So I ask string theorists, I say, OK, you are working on the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. I have two problems for you, just like the toilet and the faucet. One problem is what happened around the Big Bang.
Can you tell me? And they say, no, that's too difficult. We can't really solve that problem. So I say, okay, forget about the Big Bang. Let's discuss the singularity at the center of a black hole. We know that we need quantum mechanics and gravity for that. Can you solve that problem? And they say, no, it's too difficult. So I say, okay, well, so change your job definition, because unless you solve problems,
You cannot call yourself a physicist. Problems about objects in reality, like the Big Bang, we know the universe started from a hot, dense phase. And if you use Einstein's equations, you get to a singularity. So curing that singularity is a fundamental question that currently we don't
have a solution to because you know we don't have a quantum theory of gravity but if string theory is you should first offer the solution before claiming that you're solving quantum gravity okay and the same about singularities of black holes so all i'm saying is the job definition matters because people get paid to be plumbers you see you can't just say that you're yeah okay i understand
Also, there's this claim that hey, in pure physics, or sorry, not pure physics, theoretical physics and pure math, that eventually today's abstractions are tomorrow's applied. For example, in string theory, there's plenty of applications to condensed matter physics. However, and that comes about decades later or so. However, I find that to be a dubious claim. And the reason is that if you look at
what's applied now it almost certainly has a theoretical origin but if you look at the totality of theoretical work it's not as if all of it's applied like i haven't seen an analysis done on string theory let's say let's look at all the string theory papers how much of it has been applied to condensed matter physics or seen even pure mathematics so it's easy to look back with hindsight and say oh yes cryptography yes we used combinatorics that we thought would never have any applications from the 1940s and 50s but then it did
okay yeah but you have a survivorship bias there so you can't just fund research no matter what thinking that hopefully it will have some application because in the past anything that was applied was theoretical before because you have to look at the other direction too and i don't know if an analysis has been done no so i have no issue whatsoever with pure math i think that's a very valuable occupation but you have to define your work as pure math that that's perfectly fine and then universities can decide how big the departments of pure math would be
But you can't have people that practice pure math for a century, you know, which is the lifetime of a person in the physics. So the question, there is a characteristic time scale. If you do pure math, let's say for a decade or two before it actually is compared to experiments, that was the traditional practice of physics. But if you do pure math for the entirety of your career,
And then we will never know during your lifetime, whether it's relevant to reality or not, I say, you know, it's, that's what pure math is all about, that you never know how, because even pure math by mathematicians is applied eventually in some context of physics, right? But the way to define pure math is as ideas that are not necessarily applied to the real world, and describe the real world,
During the lifetime of the practitioners, not necessarily. And there are mathematicians that invented the mathematical concepts that were applied shortly after they invented them and they were mathematicians. Okay.
So the distinction is that physics is engaged with reality through experiments. And if there is a subject on which no experimental data comes our way for a very long time, there are many other subjects that we can work on. Doesn't mean that we should insist working on something that we have no data on.
perhaps we should wait for that data in the context of quantum gravities waiting for example for gravitational waves to be detected from the early universe or learning something about black hole singularities that we didn't know about but until that data comes along we have no guidance and my point is if we look at 100 years back quantum mechanics was discovered by experiments nobody expected it in fact in around 1900 a very
famous, one of the most distinguished experimental physicists, Michelson, who actually did the Michelson-Morley experiment that led to Einstein's special theory of relativity. He gave a speech at the inauguration of a laboratory in Chicago, and he said that from now on, you know, most of physics is solved. That was 1900. Most of physics is solved, and the only thing that remains is
measurements of the fundamental constants in physics to the sixth decimal point. And how wrong was he? Because five years later Albert Einstein came with special theory of relativity that revised our notions of space and time, then general theory of relativity that revised our notion of gravity, and then quantum mechanics, a completely unexpected discovery, okay, that reality is not what we expect from classical physics. Just to show you that
Without experimental guidance that led to the birth of quantum mechanics, we would never be there. Albert Einstein argued that quantum mechanics
Perhaps can be interpreted in the same way as classical physics, but he was wrong. Niels Bohr was right on this. And now all the gadgets that we use, you know, like these computers that the two of us are using to communicate or cell phones, it's all based on quantum mechanics. So here is applied physics, a whole industry of applied physics that came out from the discovery of quantum mechanics from experiments. And I say, what's the lesson of that? That
Nature is very subtle. We don't know in advance before experiments what nature is about. And if you don't have guidance by experiments, you may go in the wrong direction. You may go into a dark alley. And to claim that we can come up with a theory of quantum gravity just based on pure thought is arrogant. And in fact, string theory did not come up with very concrete
solutions to the Big Bang to singularities in black holes over five decades. Okay, so I say, we took that path. It didn't lead to predictions that can be tested experimentally. And I asked young people, do you want to be engaged in an endeavor that is part of course itself part of physics, but does not have any confrontation with reality? I mean, you could spend your life with a notion that is not necessarily
Use by nature. Okay. And there are many other fundamental questions that we can address that have experimental tests. So why not engage in those, you know, there are huge problems that society faces.
And at the same time, as you see that, you know, that attitude of saying, let's toy with mathematical ideas that, you know, that we can do gymnastics, intellectual gymnastics on at the same time that you have that as part of the mainstream simply because there wasn't any experimental feedback from
you know, from the superconducting supercollider that was envisioned back in the 1980s, but was not funded by Congress. As a result, there was no feedback from experiments. So there was this entire community of theories divorced from experiments. So at the same time that you see that in the mainstream, you see also resistance to study
And it's a fraction of the cost as well compared to how much is spent on theoretical physics each year. Let's get to the first goal, which was the Papua New Guinea expedition. Now, let me quickly summarize to see if I have this correct. NASA was studying the skies and the reason they do so is
partly military. So they study the sky and they look for, well, they're looking for threats, but they occasionally catch meteorites or meteors. So meteorite is when it hits the ground. A meteor is when it just disintegrates without hitting the ground. Okay. And a meteoroid, I just looked this up, a meteoroid is when it would have been a meteor, but it's not, it's around the same size, doesn't even hit earth. Correct? Yeah. It's basically an object, an object that collides with the earth and burns up in the atmosphere. Yes. Okay.
So there were 274 or so of these that were collected across several years. Yeah, you looked at some of the data and you saw that the speed of one was greatly different than the speed of the rest and greatly different in that it exceeded the speed of the rest. And now I speed is important is because just like there's an escape velocity of the earth to get out of Earth's orbit, there's an escape velocity of a solar system, which I never considered before. And so if we're thinking of interstellar,
objects, then it would have to be around that speed or greater. OK, so then what we saw was or what you saw was that there was a high speed meteorite.
Okay, great high speed meteorite and that and the speed matters because it tells you potentially its origin.
This podcast is sponsored by Monarch Money. Are you saving to reach your financial goals? Reaching those goals isn't just about getting more money, but by managing what you have. And the best way to manage your money? Monarch Money. Monarch Money is a new kind of finance app that's intuitive, powerful, ad-free, and takes the headaches out of budgeting. Try it free when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast.
Monarch puts all your accounts, investments, transactions, and finances at your fingertips. With a complete view of your finances, you'll gain insights on your spending and find new ways to save. Plus, Monarch lets you customize your dashboard, collaborate with your partner, set custom budgets and goals, and track your progress toward them.
See why Mint users are turning to Monarch Money and loving it. And why the Wall Street Journal named Monarch Money the best budgeting app overall. Get a 30-day free trial when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H money.com slash podcast for your free trial. MonarchMoney.com slash podcast.
Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,
So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime.
Visit HensonShaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything.
So that's something that I want to I kept hearing you bring up speed. I'm like, why the heck does speed matter? Okay, so this is why speed matters. Yeah, because I just think about if you throw a rock up in the air, it will fall back because you don't throw it hard enough. But if NASA launches a spacecraft,
and it moves fast enough, it will escape the pull of the earth. So speed matters. You need to overcome the gravitational potential of the earth. It's sort of like imagine a trampoline, okay, and the earth is at the center of the trampoline, and it's sort of like a bowling ball, you know, it creates a well. And if you want to throw a marble out of the trampoline, you need to
throw it at a high enough speed because otherwise it will fall back. And so there is always an escape speed above which an object will escape from the gravitational potential well of the earth or of the solar system in the case of the sun. And then, and this object, by the way, wasn't moving just fast enough to escape.
but it was moving actually outside of the potential well faster than 95 percent of all the stars it was moving at 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system if you were traveling back in time so it was really fast okay and just to get some numbers out of the way approximately 11 kilometers per second is earth's yes and what is the escape velocity of the solar system
No, the solar system is at the location of the earth, it's 42 kilometers per second. It's always a square root of two times the velocity of a circular orbit around the object that you care about. If you have gravity produced by a single point mass at the center, there is a certain speed by which an object will move in a circular orbit. In the case of the earth, it's about 30 kilometers per second. And therefore the escape speed is
the speed such as the kinetic energy will equal the potential energy and that's a square root of two faster than the circular speed and square root of two times 30 is about 42 kilometers per second. So that's the speed by which an object would move.
if it were just to escape from the pull of the sun and came from the vicinity of Earth. But this object was moving even faster than that. I mean, it collided with Earth at 45 kilometers per second. But if you take out the motion of the Earth, because it came from the side, so to speak, then it actually moved at 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system. It was really fast.
okay and then last question before i get to someone skinwalker and ce5 and unidentified submerged objects and so on the last question is okay so not only was this going extremely quickly but then when you analyzed well what's its toughness it was twice as tough as the second highest rock as well okay so it has unusual characteristics okay now my question is how the heck do you
find such an object when we can't find Malaysian airlines hours after let alone decades later and it's a larger object and we had governments involved and we knew what it looked like and the size and so on so what does this look like what does this Papua New Guinea expedition look like? Okay so the Malaysian airplane did not create a fireball
It did not explode so that satellites or ground-based observatories would see it in the night sky. So all we know about it is that it moved along a certain path. Okay. And we don't know at which point along the path it plunged into the water. Okay. So then we have a very long path to study.
On the floor and the area that you have to explore is huge. So even though the object is bigger than this meteor that we're talking about, the area that you need to explore is much, much larger. Okay. And in the case of the meteor, we know where the explosion took place. So we have
a square region that we will study. We also know what the wind speed was at the time of the explosion, what the elevation was and what the water currents were. So we can calculate, depending on the fragment size distribution, we can calculate where the small fragments fell and where the bigger fragments fell and just
It's just like mowing the lawn, basically scoop the thin layer, the top layer of the ocean for any fragments left. And my point is this meteor was really bright and we know precisely, just think about GPS systems, they can localize your car in Boston or in any other city to within a few meters. So imagine you get the GPS coordinates of your car and then it explodes.
Okay, so you ask yourself, how can I find, you know, like, if you only knew that the car moved between New York City and Boston, you know, it will be much tougher to find the car. If it and suppose it didn't explode, it just went off the road somewhere, then you will it would take you a lot of time to find it and you might not find it.
But if it exploded and you had photographs from satellites, you know the GPS location within a few meters, it's a piece of cake to find the fragments. So that's the difference. All right, let's get to a question about Jack Valley.
So Jack Vallee, I saw this video and I'll play it for the people who are watching right now. 20 years ago, you know, that was a very marginal idea in science. Today it's not such a marginal idea in science. If you look at the Sky and Telescope magazine a year and a half ago published an article about the creation of universes
Okay, so as a physicist, the standard approach you take when you examine experimental data
is to say we have a standard model of physics.
It's a set of rules and equations that were tested many times in many laboratory experiments. And that's what we use for technological development. When we develop a cell phone, we base it on the known laws of physics. No company would say, oh, maybe the quantum mechanics is wrong. Let's develop a cell phone based on some idea about how quantum mechanics may be wrong, or maybe we will build a cell phone that operates in other dimensions, or maybe a cell phone that
communicates with another universe. No company would survive if it were to advocate that it will build a piece of technology based on unknown physics because it will most of the time almost always be proven right. If this company is successful,
then they will get the Nobel Prize because they discovered the new law of physics. So the standard approach in doing science or physics is to adapt what is known as the standard model of physics and use it first to interpret any data you get, any experimental evidence. So suppose you include UAP in the unidentified objects, the first approach of the Galileo project in particular would be to use the standard laws of the
standard model of physics to interpret whatever we see. So we have a set of instruments detecting things, we will use the laws of physics as we know them. Now, if we see an object behaving in ways that definitely violate the laws of physics, we will go there. But before we see that, there is no reason. And moreover, I should say, the first thing I would check if I see something moving, let's say faster than light, just as an example, you see a point of light
moving across the sky faster than light. And you can in principle infer that. It could be that it's an artifact of the optics because there is some reflection in your detector that moves the point of light faster than light if you think that it's far away, but in fact it's moving only within the instrument. And it's really difficult. You do a lot of experiments, you don't find deviations,
So it's not as if you just see something unusual and you say, okay, the laws of physics are wrong. You can't just do that. That's irresponsible. You have to
study the whatever you're studying with the best instruments, you have to understand the instruments, you know, it takes a lot of steps. And currently, the data on UAP is not good enough. It's, you know, many of the images are blurry, many of them are based on, you know, amateurs taking the data. And so we really need to go through the scientific process to validate that there is something beyond
standard physics, okay? Jacques Vallee is mentioning that as a possibility. I say, you know, there are many possibilities, just like, you know, in the context of string theory, there is a possibility that, you know, string theory is of one type of another type. And of course, a lot of people can suggest a lot of possibilities. Jacques Vallee may suggest one possibility and then someone else will suggest another. But it doesn't mean that we need to take it seriously until there is
data that is validated, that is reproducible, that is based on well understood suite of instruments that detects it. And so we are not there yet. That's what the Galileo project aims to do. And if we find that there is no physics, of course that would be extremely exciting because it should apply to the rest of the universe, not just this object. So suppose you find something completely new that physicists never imagined,
then it applies everywhere in the universe. And that would be of much broader consequences because you can build new devices based on that. At that point, technology development companies in Silicon Valley could build gadgets that make use of this knowledge. So it would be revolutionary. But before we claim that we have something revolutionary, we should consider the mundane first.
There was a paper published last week by Zilyaev and Petukhov and Reshetnik about UAPs in Ukraine. Did you happen to look at this or are you aware of it? Yeah, I actually saw it and, you know,
Obviously, Ukraine is currently in a military conflict. And there are lots of things flying in the sky. Okay. And usually in scientific experiments, we want to minimize the level of noise of spurious things that may be misinterpreted. So if I were to design a place where I would search for unidentified objects, Ukraine would be my last choice, because
There would be so much noise, you know, and an experiment usually wants to maximize the signal to noise ratio. So I, you know, I find it surprising that a paper about unidentified objects would be written from that location, because if you wanted to study UAP, you would go to a remote site far away. Okay, speaking of a remote site that may have plenty of signal rather than noise, what about Skinwalker?
Have you thought about putting some observatory at Skinwalker? And if not, why not? What are the criteria that you use to select where to place an observatory? Right, so the first limitation we are facing is the level of funding that we have because at the moment we have one suite of instruments that cost me about $250,000 and we're testing it right now and within a few months hopefully everything will work.
and then we will deploy it at the site that would allow us to get the useful data and analyze it. So hopefully by the summer of 2023, we'll have the data that we can share with
the public, the scientists, and that will be peer reviewed in terms of its interpretation. But in order for us to build many more systems like it, we need to expand the funding level of the Galileo project. At the moment, it's only a few million dollars.
And in order for us to expand it by a factor of 10, we need a few tens of millions of dollars. So if we do get that, we will be able to place a lot of stations in many locations, including perhaps
skinwalker i have no in fact it would be interesting to see if there is anything unusual there the only locations that i'm hesitant about are those that may involve sensitive facilities like nuclear plants or military bases simply because of national security issues so i don't want
us to be at risk of violating the law or I don't want the intelligence agencies to worry about the data that we collect. So I want us to do the job of astronomers. Astronomers have observing sites in remote locations, in places that are of no national security risk,
and I see this research project as an astronomy project. In fact, the administrators at Harvard asked me, is this part of your day job? Just as I was about to establish the Galileo project and I thought about it for a few hours and then I said, yes, it is part of my day job because in astronomy we use telescopes to collect data
And there is no lower limit on the distance, you know, we study the sun, we study meteors, we study asteroids, comets. So that's exactly what we do in the Galileo project, we use telescopes, collect data and interpret it. So yes, it is part of my day job.
and Harvard University approved of that. And indeed, it's a project embraced by the university. And the other unusual thing about this project is usually you have to work really hard to get funded. And in this case, it was individuals that gave me the money without any fundraising effort on my behalf, which to me illustrates the fact that the subject is of great interest to the public. It's of great interest to the government as well.
Earlier you mentioned transmedium so then I know you're an astronomer and so you care about the sky but at some point do you envision in the future it would look for unidentified submerged objects? Well if we look at the horizon you know and we are near the ocean and definitely we will be near the ocean in some of our observations
simply because there were a lot of reports on objects near the ocean. Then we will be able to see if they have anything to do with coming out of the ocean, going back to the ocean. And the same is true about them coming from outer space. I mean, we know that's what meteors do. And this meteor that we discussed before, the interstellar meteor, was discovered by missile warning systems that the government employs. It was not necessarily
NASA, it was intelligence agencies that are worried about national security that are monitoring any object entering the sky because they worry about ballistic missiles. And, you know, every now and then they see a rock coming from out there and colliding with earth. Okay, so that's called the meteor. And most of these rocks belong to the solar system.
There are a thousand times more rocks that belong to the solar system than rocks that come from outside the solar system based on the statistics that we now know about interstellar objects. So most of the time you just see rocks from the solar system. These are leftover rocks from the construction project of planets. You know that early on in the solar system there were small rocks that came together to make planets like the Earth and now some of them are dispersed. They are sort of like Lego pieces that are filling up
And so they hit the earth every now and then. A big chunk, a big rock hit the earth, you know, 66 million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. We know that. The dinosaurs did not have telescopes and they were not smart enough.
To worry about the sky, they just ate grass, were happy, and thought that they'd dominate their environment. Well, guess what? They were wiped out because they didn't have telescopes. And we, as the human civilization, we are smarter, so we develop telescopes, we can look at near-Earth objects. That's how Oumuamua was discovered. It was identified as a near-Earth object. It was labeled that way. That's why they looked at it.
And then they realized, wow, it moves too fast to be bound to the sun. So this was an interstellar object. So what I'm trying to say is the government, you know, monitors the sky. That's their day job. They're not doing it for the sake of science. Their day job is to monitor the sky for national security. Every now and then they see a rock entering the atmosphere. And then it turns out that the first interstellar meteor was discovered by those government sensors, you see. And, and, and the
My point all along was the government needs to know with very high precision how the object moves because they need to know that if it's a ballistic missile, whether it would hit Boston or Washington DC, they need to know that. So what my colleagues were arguing was, oh, the uncertainties in the measurements of the government are very big. And I say, no, they cannot be big. They cannot afford that. That's their day job.
and indeed the government confirmed took three years for the government to come out with a letter saying indeed this meteor was at the 99.99% from outside the solar system. So I never doubted that the fact that the government has very high precision data and they find these things anecdotally. If you ask yourself what would be the first sign of objects that visit near Earth from outside the solar system,
Or objects that collide with Earth or objects that enter the atmosphere. It's the government that would first identify them because astronomers focus on very distant sources of light and they have narrow fields of view. All the astronomical observatories look at the small portion of the sky from Earth and if a bird flies above the telescope, they just ignore it.
So astronomers would be hard-pressed to say, oh, in the survey that they did, they saw an object moving in an unusual way in the Earth's atmosphere. They would just ignore it. They focus on a galaxy at the ratio of five or six. But the military has to monitor those things because that's their day job and the intelligence agencies have. So it's completely natural to expect the government and the intelligence agencies to be the first to say,
Here are some unusual objects for us to monitor. And that's what UAP are about. That's what the first interstellar meteor is about. And, you know, we should just be curious and examine those things. Do you think that the main reason for the government not coming forward with more information on UAPs or at least more high resolution images is because that it gives away their
Capabilities in terms of sensors or is there another reason like that's one of the reasons but there may be a nefarious reason I don't know. I think that's a that's the main reason that would be my I don't believe in conspiracies If I had to guess I would simply say that They're unsure what the nature of these objects is so there are two, you know, two general possibilities either they are made by
an adversary with technologies that we never imagined, okay, in which case you want to keep collecting data, you don't want to release what you know. In the second possibility, you know, it may be of extraterrestrial origin, and you say to yourself, that's not part of my day job, you know, and I don't want to release the data because it may reveal
our abilities to identify objects like if it's a high resolution image then any nation worldwide would know that we can obtain very high resolution images of this of this quality so you don't you don't show it publicly okay so i would say it's more the fact that the government is not a scientific organization it's not interested in questions that go beyond national security the safety of military personnel
So if you see an object that doesn't belong to that category, it's not part of your job. And the second is, you know, you don't want to reveal the capabilities you have. And then there is also this, what you mentioned before, there is this stigma in society about discussing such things, because it's being ridiculed. Okay, and
The data that existed in the past was perhaps not of high enough quality, so people could not really discuss it seriously. But now we have instrumentation that is so good that the government just can't ignore these objects. That's why the subject surfaced in the past five years, I think, partly because the instrumentation that gives us the data is of high quality. So the government cannot say forget about it, cannot say
you know, the stigma should suppress any discussion on this and
And so the subject is surfacing up, yet the government cannot release the high quality data. So I, you know, it's just like the play by Samuel Beckett, you could wait for Godot, but you might wait forever. I don't believe that the data will be declassified anytime soon. So we better collect our own data, scientists and try to analyze it. That's what the Galileo project is trying.
When I think about how would I do the Galileo project, the main problem that I see for analyzing regular UAPs, when I say regular, I mean the ones that are in the popular media and much of the audience is aware of those types, the tic tac types, is that they don't show themselves customarily. It's not repeatable.
How and I imagine that the third phase, remember, we talked about these different pillars. So first was Papua New Guinea. Second was the James Webb slash the Chilean Observatory and the third was the Harvard Observatory. I imagine that the third one is more aligned with the UAPs as we traditionally know them. Okay, so
Did you choose to place it at Harvard simply because well that's what the funding can provide and you're close to it or is there some other reason? Oh no no it was just just for testing the equipment that's just a testing phase to make sure that it operates and then within a few months we'll put it in a location that is much better. The reason we just kept it close to home because we want to make sure that it works
to our specifications. Now, I should make a comment because I wrote an essay about it in Medium. By the way, every few days I write in Medium so people who are interested should check it out. Yeah, I don't know how you get the time. You're so prolific. You do so many podcasts, so many news broadcasts, you're a professor, you're a chair on top, you're running the Galileo project, you do the Medium post. For me to write each day
is a laborious, excruciating task, let alone to do what else I have to do. Well, you know, it's what I do all the time. And you're a father.
Yeah, but I should say that it's very rewarding because, for example, just today I was notified that the Venice Film Festival will feature a competition of 23 projects by film students that study film and basically created
Works that were inspired by my book about Oumuamua extraterrestrial and that was translated to 25 languages, including Italian. So that's what inspired this competition and they selected the top three and they would feature them at the Excelsior Hotel in Venice,
Italy on the third of September this weekend, and they would like to ask me questions about my book and about the more. So what I'm trying to say is that there is a huge community out there. Here you have 23 students of film that worked hard to make these projects and competed for the Venice Film Festival. I was not even aware of that. And every day I get
a huge number of emails from people who donate to the Galilo project, who are inspired by. At the same time, there are, of course, people who ridicule and just dismiss the work. But as long as you have the right idea to pursue the truth,
No prison can confine your passion, so to speak. And that was the lesson from Nelson Mandela, who for several decades was put in prison, but eventually became the first black president of South Africa. And so you just have to keep dreaming. And as long as your dream is real,
It will eventually materialize. And so I feel inspired by the response of people. Now, what I wanted to mention about my essay, it was about the fact that, you know, there are two types of interstellar objects. You can imagine that there are objects that are not functional anymore. For example, imagine New Horizons, the spacecraft that we sent out of the solar system a billion years from now. It will not be functional. It will be just space trash.
So you can imagine space trash and perhaps the meteor that collided with earth in 2014 was just space trash. Okay. The second type are objects that are functional, perhaps equipped with artificial intelligence. So they have some intelligence machine learning. If that's the case, for example, if you have an AI astronaut, an AI system that is sentient, you know, we are getting close to producing sentient
AI systems, perhaps within the coming decade. Okay. So imagine another civilization that had the benefit of, you know, thousands of more years of technology development. So they develop these sentient AI systems, and one of them came to visit us, or a few of them, and they might be self replicating, just like biological systems, because they have 3d printers. Anyway, if the UAP, if let's say one UAP is of that nature,
Then dealing with it will not be the same as dealing with a dark matter or dealing with a planet or dealing with a star like the sun. Why? Because all these other things are passive physical objects
that do not have intelligence, you know, that the sun intelligence, the electron doesn't have. So they do whatever they do, you can design a set of rules or physical laws that you can quantify with equations like quantum mechanics that describe the motion of an electron, that describe the motion of an atom that describe the motion of a star.
But there is no free will associated with a sentient being. There is no consciousness associated with a sentient being. But if you have a sentient AI system, it's a different type of object. It's an object that responds to the way you behave, just like humans respond to the way you behave. So it's just like dealing with humans. So if you think about it,
If we were to deal with sentient AI systems that come from another planet, from another civilization, who would be best equipped to deal with them? Would it be physicists? My answer is no, because physicists are used to dealing with passive physical entities. The best professionals to deal with those things would be psychologists. They're used to dealing with sentient systems.
humans. And if the thing about sentient beings is that they don't always follow up, they don't repeat, they are not necessarily reproducible, they might do under the same circumstances, different things. They also digest the data of their encounter with you in a way that will make the next encounter different. And so it's a completely different
entity than physical objects that behave always following the laws of physics the same way, and they are predictable, they are reproducible and so forth. So my point is, if we have the privilege of interacting with sentient AI systems that came from another planet, we have to use a different methodology than traditional physics. And that touches on the point that you brought up.
That's extremely, extremely interesting. So how the heck does that work? Would we have to invent a fundamentally different science? Because like you mentioned, science generally, at least in physics, chemistry, and so on, it's indifferent, what we study. Now, of course, there's the observer effect, but that's predictable mathematically. Whereas what you're saying is that if it's sentient, maybe large trends would be predictable, though.
There might be, but only if it depends how intelligent the system is, you see, because the more intelligent it is, the more complex it is, the more difficult it is for us to forecast what it will do. It would look like free will in a way. And the system will do very different things on different encounters. So I call that in my commentary, in my essay on medium, I call it interstellar
psychology. So it's a new field. We're not dealing with humans. You know, humans are difficult to forecast. And that's why psychology is a difficult subject, more difficult than physics, I would argue. And if you deal with the next level, you know, once we develop sentient AI systems,
You know, it will become a new subject of, you know, in universities, I think there would be new departments that analyze AI systems, because why would we focus only on humans if AI systems are more complex than humans? We need a whole new
area of research that tries to interpret the way AI systems behave. Now, you might say, oh, we constructed those AI systems out of hardware, right? We build those computers that behave in this way.
Well, we also construct human beings, you know, like, we give them birth, right, in the womb, out of sperm and an egg, we know the physical constituents that were put together to make a human being. Okay, that's called birth of a human. We see it in hospitals all the time. But that doesn't mean that we understand humans. Psychologists have a hard time understanding, even though we know the material used to make them,
It doesn't mean that we can understand the emergent phenomena. So we give them names. We give the name of free will to the fact that we cannot forecast how a person will behave under some circumstances. We gave this term of consciousness
So all kinds of emergent phenomena that are at the abstract level, just a signature of complexity of the system that, you know, you can't just start from the atoms that make the system and figure out all these emergent phenomena because the system is very complex. I mean, you can do it if you put two atoms together, you can figure out how the molecule will behave. But once you make
sufficiently complex molecule. Even the best computers might not be able to figure out what it does and building up biological systems is like building a very complex system that we can't really tell what it would do under some circumstances and especially after it's exposed to a lot of experiences. So it's not just nature, it's also nurture. So all of this boils to the point that there might be new departments in universities about
I want to read a quote from your blog. It said, most recently, Congress expanded the definition of UAP to include transmedium objects that are observed to transition between space and atmosphere.
and bodies of water, an object means it, quote unquote, whereas a sufficiently advanced AI device could potentially become a you in bubbers terminology or boobers, I don't know how to pronounce that name. So if you don't mind, because I still have other questions like about CE five, and so the audience would love to hear about that. If you don't mind, can you quickly spell out this distinction between it versus you?
Yeah, so exactly a century ago, 1923, Martin Buber, a philosopher and theologian, made a distinction between two interactions that humans have. You can have an interaction with an object, okay, like a cup of tea or a ball. That's a subject-object interaction. It's an I-it interaction. It's an interaction with an it.
But he also identified another type of interaction with something that goes beyond physical objects, like an interaction with a human being. Or, since he was religious, he also included interaction with God. And God represented the eternal you. But even if you're secular, you know, you have interactions with people,
If you are a real person and you know that it's different from an interaction with an object. So, Buber made the distinction and that was the foundation for many aspects of modern psychology and philosophy and so forth. And he was an existentialist, one of the founders of existentialism.
And so his innovation was to distinguish between these two interactions of human. And what I said is that we are used to associating you with humans. But in the future, it could be AI systems that are sufficiently intelligent, that are sentient. And moreover, it could represent our interaction with an extraterrestrial astronaut.
Now, is this to suggest that the craft themselves may be sentient or conscious? And I'm unsure if you make a distinction between sentience and consciousness or if you use those interchangeably. No, to me, it's just, you know, the definition is similar to the Turing test, okay, in the context of computers. The Turing test that was defined
You know, about 70 something years ago by Alan Turing is let's let's think about it on a practical level. If you take a lot of people that interact with a computer and they cannot tell the difference between the computer being a computer, you put it behind the curtain.
They cannot, by conversing with that computer, they can't tell the difference between the computer or a person. Then for all practical methods, you know, it's an interaction with a you, not with an it, in my definition. I mean, echoing what Buber said. And so,
To me, it's all about the practical experience of humans with the system. Now, those things that come from outer space may be far more advanced than any AI system we develop. And so they might be even more sophisticated, they might understand us
The way that a biker that goes, you know, on the sidewalk, understand ants next to it, to the bike. And the ants may think, oh, here is a biker. Let's think about the protocol of how to engage with the biker. But the ants would never realize that the biker cares less about what they do. And the biker is a much more, you know, superior level of intelligence.
So it's possible that we would encounter something that is far more superior than us, and it will not be biological, because traveling across distances between stars is not something that a biological creature can easily do. I mean, we were selected by natural evolution to survive on this rock that we call Earth. We were not selected to survive the hazardous conditions of space. So if I had to imagine, I would say the first probes that we will discover that would be sentient would be
made of electronics, hardware, something else that is not biological because that can survive long journeys. They would have the patience for millions of years to travel. They could repair themselves if hit by cosmic rays or they can adapt to changing physical circumstances much more. They don't need food, they just need energy that they can collect from their interaction with starlight, with the intestinal medium and so forth.
So anyway, my guess is if we find sentient messengers from other civilizations, they would be equipment that is artificial with artificial intelligence, and it may be superior to us, and it will be an interaction with the you. It might even be interaction with what we may regard as a divine entity, because in my way of thinking,
a sufficiently advanced scientific civilization is a good approximation to God. It can do magic, it may be able to create life in the laboratory, may be able to create a baby universe in the laboratory if it understands quantum gravity. So what we call God in philosophical texts, religious texts, might be represented, the best approximation to it might be a far more advanced scientific gadget.
Compared to what we have right now. When we spoke, I asked you about CE5. You remember? Yeah. Okay. So did you have a chance to look into that? Yeah, I did look at that.
So for those people who don't know CE5 stands for Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind and it's reputedly some technique, it's some method of eliciting contact between yourself and a craft or yourself and what's behind the craft, either calling multiple to come or speaking to them telepathically in some way. The stories are that if one performs CE5 and one is trained in it, whatever that means, that one can
call UFOs or UAPs near them. So then I was wondering, okay, well, that's all anecdotal. This Galileo project sounds like a great way of testing that because you obviously would like UAPs to show up. If you could get that repeatedly, that would be great. Okay, so what are your thoughts on CE5 and how the Galileo project may or may not use it?
So we get again to the same issue that you brought up in the context of Jacques Vallee. What is being contemplated here is a deviation from the standard model of physics. You see, in science or physics, we usually use instruments. We don't use humans as detectors.
Why don't we use humans as detectors? Because, you know, humans very often are hallucinating, they have wishful thinking, and you cannot always reproduce phenomena with humans. Okay. And so, I mean, psychologists study humans, but physicists build instruments that are completely separate from the human experience so that
A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 chicken pot pie.
Phenomena in a way that is reproducible and all of modern physics
the advances that were made by experiments were based on instrumentation, not a human's testimony. So once again, we get to the issue of how do we proceed in gathering evidence and the Galileo project follows the scientific method, basically using instruments, not using people. Now, it may well be the case that people have some insight into the UAP phenomena from
something that goes beyond the standard model of physics. It cannot be within the standard model of physics because it's not part of it right now. The standard model of physics is a set of laws and rules and equations that were derived by collecting a body of evidence by using instruments in laboratories, in experiments, and they were never based on eyewitness testimonies. So
What we call the standard model of physics is divorced from reports by humans. Okay. And if we end up finding through the Galileo project that humans do play a role in terms of the physical evidence that we collect, as I said before, that would be very revolutionary.
uh change in the way that physics is done it will change the standard model of physics because suddenly the human consciousness has some bearing on what you find okay and i don't dismiss it ahead of time i just say we need to be convinced by the evidence that this is the case okay now some people would say in quantum mechanics what humans know affects
the wave function, because if we collect some data about the system, it changes the state of the system. That's true, but it's all done mediated through instrumentation. It's not mediated through humans. Human knowledge affects the way we formulate quantum mechanics. That's true, but this knowledge, the definition of knowledge is based on instruments, not based on the human body, okay, as the detector.
or the human brain as the detector. So that's a fundamental difference that you can't use humans as detectors in the context of, I mean, all of physics was designed based on data from quantitative data from instruments. So if it turns out that we are missing something about reality in the context of the standard model of physics, because it was only based on instruments, then that would be revolutionary. But before we get
evidence for that, we can't really claim that. So, you know, I don't dismiss it ahead of time.
but I would like to see the evidence from our instruments first so you know we can potentially find something like that if we bring in some humans and see that a phenomena keeps repeating in a way that it doesn't without the humans you know that would tell us yeah that's more in line with what I was thinking less to just wholesale believe the reports I meant hey you have an observatory here you get some people who
Consider themselves to be notable practitioners of CE5. There's one notable one in particular. His name is Steven Greer, who may be on the podcast at some point. But regardless, you get them to say, hey, you, I mean, you get them to show up and say, hey, you say that you can instigate UAPs.
Why don't you go ahead? Much like if someone said, I can pray and a supersymmetric particle appears. Well, then you're like, okay, come to this particle detector, pray, do your business. Firstly, I don't know how you would even think that you come up with a supersymmetric particle. What is it? You see a flash of light, you think this, but regardless, it's the same idea. Yeah, that would be a viable experiment. I'd be glad to do it. Just to check, you know, why not?
As I said before, you know, we are just students of nature. We shouldn't assume things are wrong. If we have the experimental setup already built in and someone wants to come over and do the test, we'll do it. Hear that sound?
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone
of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase.
Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories. No problem. There's also the Hasdalen lights. Have you heard of them? And what do you make of them? The Hasdalen lights and I think Norway or Denmark? Yeah, so this belongs to the category of
you know, civilians seeing things that they do not understand. And it could be that some of these things are related to military activities that the civilians are not aware of, or some natural phenomena in the atmosphere. I'm not dismissing any possibility. I'm just saying the evidence is inconclusive. It's
I want to read another quote from your blog. Self-interaction allows for the possibilities that there are dark atoms that emit dark radiation and condense into dark stars and dark planets that support dark chemistry
that lead to life as we do not know it. In such a case, the answer to Fermi's question, where is everybody, might be, well, you're simply blind to them. So do you consider that there may be dark matter civilizations? And do you imagine that they would have no clue about us as well?
They might not have and but that's a long shot because well, the popular view of dark matter is that it has very weak interactions. That's the popular view. And if it has very weak interactions, you can't make atoms of dark matter, you can't make planets of dark matter, you can't make, you know, chemistry of life as we don't know it. Although it's a possibility, you know, you can imagine a whole dark sector that is completely parallel
to the ordinary matter that we have and it just doesn't interact with anything that is ordinary to us. You can imagine that and that's what I brought up in my essay. There are possibilities that we should allow for. This is one of them until we figure out what the dark matter is. Another possibility that we should allow for is
we ask what happened before the Big Bang? You know, one possibility is that imagine a civilization that knows quantum gravity and can engineer the birth of a baby universe in the laboratory. So then you ask yourself, what was there before the Big Bang? Well, maybe there were some entities in lab coats, you know, white lab coats that did an experiment that created the Big Bang in their laboratory. Now, what would that be like? It's just like
you know, us giving birth to babies that grow up to become adults that give birth to babies and so forth. So in any universe like ours, there could be intelligent civilizations that develop the technology to give birth to baby universes and you move from one generation to the next this way. That's just a possibility. I'm not saying since we don't have a theory of quantum gravity, we should at least
allow for that because at the moment we have no clue as to what happened before the big bang. One of the popular ideas that it came out of nothing, out of the vacuum, it's a vacuum fluctuation. I don't know if that's more appealing to me to say that our universe is one out of 10 to the 500 possibilities and we live in it just because it allows us to exist other than saying you know this is the kind of universe that gives birth to intelligence such that a baby universe will be
Born out of it. Yeah, there's someone named well, you know, Lee Smolin who has this idea or used to have the idea that universes are there such that they maximize the amount of black holes because black holes are what birth the universe is and then there's a way of testing this apparently and then I wonder if the conditions for black holes are the same as the conditions for intelligent life in which case then that may be an explanation.
Yeah. So his idea was that we don't understand what happens at the singularity of a black hole. So maybe when matter falls to the singularity of a black hole, it gives birth to a new universe. And I, you know, we don't know that it's the case. We don't know what happens near the singularity of a black hole. It's completely speculative to argue that out of the singularity of a black hole comes a whole new universe. I'm just saying that there could be a sort of
a reason why you give birth mostly to universes that allow intelligence to develop like our technological civilization because then you have a chance of them coming up with a theory of quantum gravity such that they engineer a baby universes once again and so it's just like natural selection that selects those types of universes that allow more and more generations of the same type of universe to come into fruition
And it's different from the view on black holes in the sense that, you know, it gives us an important place in the universe. The black hole case, you just say, okay, there are these physical entities that give birth to maybe give birth to universes. That's, I would say, that's not so uplifting, not inspiring. But if you think that we would one day engineer the birth of a baby universe,
You know, that gives it's sort of like thinking about yourself as a future parent, you know, that gives you a purpose for life.
Let's develop quantum gravity so that we can maintain the longevity of more universes like ours. It gives you a purpose for life. Just knowing that the black hole will give birth to a universe is, to me, quite depressing if that's the reason. Speaking of us from the future, or giving birth to something from the future, this eternal you from Boober, there's another quote that I have, though I believe this is someone speaking to you, Avi, but I'm quoting it anyway. He said,
If you find yourself one day holding a piece of technology so advanced that so-and-so you believe it came from another civilization, that experience of awe will be because you managed an encounter with the eternal you in this civilization that sent to the object your way. So this eternal you, I didn't realize at the time that that was a metaphor for God. I thought that this eternal you was somehow eternal as in temporally
Distant or like infinite even and that it was sent from you from the future to the past. So then I was wondering Okay, is this obvious speculating on time travel? But anyway, given that what are your thoughts on time travel? Well, okay So first I need to explain this this quote that you just read was a response to a commentary that I wrote just a day before that and
And that person read it, Tony Lux. I raised the following question. I said, suppose we find version 100 of the iPhone, okay, and show it to an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. Would the entrepreneur feel like Moses felt seeing the burning bush, which was a sense of, oh,
and admiration. And in the case of Moses, the burning bush was a symbol for a divine entity. And so the response was that I would potentially have the same sense of, oh, when seeing a high-level technological device and noticing the buttons on it,
and the miracles that they can perform. So again, it goes to the point that I brought up before that the sufficiently advanced scientific civilization may be a good approximation to God. And by the way, this is a way to unify religion and science. It's often thought that religion and science do not have any overlap that in fact,
one comes at the expense of the other. And many secular scientists, including Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, try to argue that religion is a theme of the past, that we should abandon it and bravely embrace a universe which has nothing to do with a divine entity. Now, I say, wait a minute, just, you know, be a little more patient because
If we do find a civilization that, let's say, is a million years ahead of us in technological development, their technologies would appear to us as a good approximation to God. And therefore, whatever we assign to a divine entity in religious and philosophical texts would apply to whatever we find from them. Okay. And so there is a way of unifying
an entity that was part of spiritual practice, an entity that is much more capable than we are, which is pretty much God, like something that is
capable of doing things that we cannot imagine even getting close to and associating it with our distant future like a million years from now a billion years from now and another civilization may have arrived at that future before we did simply because their star formed billions of years before the sun that's all so you started the clock earlier for them and now you're seeing something that looks just like a cell phone to a cave dweller okay and so
it would look like a miracle. What if he said in response that being pretty much like God is completely different than being God and the reason is that in traditional religion God is this eternal being that was there from the beginning if there was such a thing as the quote unquote beginning and it's not just to breed life out of inorganic matter but to breed the universe to begin with not breed the universe from once you already exist within a universe and create another one but create the laws and did so
out of some semblance of love and they care for you. So let me mention an anecdote. One day I saw a person on the street next to my home. My wife was telling me, it might be a stalker. He's looking at our home for half an hour now. You became quite well known. Why don't you check who this person is? So I went to the street and I
Ask the man. You're brave. Yeah, you know, what do I have to lose? I went to the person and I said, why are you looking at our home for so long? And he said, I used to live in that home 50 years ago, I was a kid. And my father, by the way, buried the cat named tiger in your backyard. And I said, well, that sounds familiar, because I saw a tombstone
with the name tiger on top of it. And I was worried that there is a tiger buried under it. I didn't know what skeleton might be lying underneath. And now I know it's a cat from 50 years ago. Now what's the moral of this story? If you share some space with someone else who predated you, that someone else may know more about your backyard than you know
And therefore you should show respect to visitors. They may know something about our past that we don't know. And that's why you should always welcome interstellar visitors.
And when you say that, you know, a divine entity, God knows much more because it may have existed forever. What you define as eternity, you know, a billion years might be eternity compared to a century of our science and technology. Okay, so what you call eternity is a quantitative matter. And given that we, you know, our technologies develop exponential on a few year time scale, you know, every few years, we double
our computational capabilities that's more slow, you know, we develop technologies that never existed. So just think about it, if we double every two years, what would happen in a million years? What would happen in a billion years? If it's exponential up to a point, you know, of course, eventually the laws of physics come to haunt you. But
Just think about an exponential curve that has, instead of one century, has thousands, millions, or even billions of years of history, it would look like eternity to you, because the state that such a civilization will get to would be so advanced that you wouldn't be able to comprehend it. Now, it might not get there because it may be short-lived.
For example, just like now we have virtual reality machines, you know, like you hook yourself to goggles that give you a sense of virtual reality. It's sort of like being high on drugs, you know, you're looking at some reality that doesn't exist. Okay.
And suppose another civilization got to the point where they develop these VR goggles and they are hooked to them, they're happy with them, they put them on their face as soon as they're born and they live in these virtual realities, they will never engage with us. Okay, that would be a solution to Fermi's paradox. Why don't we see them? Because they're hooked to these goggles. But on the other hand, if they are curious about the real world, if they don't talk about
mathematical gymnastics that we talked about before. If they're really hooked to the real world, they explore the real world, and they discover the real world so that they develop gadgets that travel through interstellar space and reach places, then they might look to us as a good approximation to God. And so there is this tension between a civilization closing off, engaging in wars,
engaging in destructive measures or simply isolating itself from reality. There is this risk which I'm fighting, you know, in my pursuit of evidence I'm fighting against, but there is a possibility that our civilization will get to that sterile endpoint where either it destroys itself by wars
or it hooks itself to some virtual reality. Okay, there is that danger. And if you get there, you will never launch things into the real space, into space. So there is this tension between the finite lifetime of a technological civilization and the ability of that civilization to launch equipment to space. And, and I'm just relying on the hope that there was someone out there that didn't surrender
to the risks of living in virtual reality didn't surrender to the risk of pursuing your ego going to wars, but actually was curious about exploring interstellar space. And I hope that among the tens of billions of stars, there is someone like that. By the way, just so that you know, so far, there were about 100 and
40 billion people who ever lived on the surface of Earth throughout human history. And there are more stars than that in the Milky Way galaxy. So we have more than one star per person who ever lived, maybe 10 stars. And that gives me hope. I saw when I was researching the Galileo project online, that Stephen Wolfram is on the advisory board. And I'm curious what
Does Stephen contribute or what are his views if you're allowed to reference them? Yeah, so there are a number of people who serve on our advisory board, and then they provide us with advice and comments. And Stephen is brilliant.
physicist slash computer scientist and we benefit every now and then from his advice to the project, but he is not engaged in the day-to-day routine work that we have.
And there's a number of other advisors that we have. There are some that are those philanthropic advisors who contributed funds to the project. You can find them on the website. There are others that belong to the Science Advisory Board. And these are people who did not provide us with funding, but provide us with advice. What about Rizwan Virk?
It's the same category. He actually every now and then tries to help also in terms of approaching other potential donors. And in general, he provides advice and input help to the project. I noticed that I have a question here in bold about Bruce Fenton and the Tektites. If you don't mind commenting, what are your views on that PDF? It's Bruce Fenton and he had the Australasian Tektites interstellar object debris
Yeah, so these tectites are an interesting puzzle as to what their origin is, but we don't know the answer. And then, you know, in principle, it's possible they represent some unusual asteroids, comets or interstellar objects, but
It's just unclear at the moment. I would say the jury is still out and then we need more data. So for example, if we examine interstellar objects like the meteor that landed near Papua New Guinea, we can tell whether the composition indeed resembles those tectites or not. Professor, what opinion of yours has changed in the past few months as a result of the Galileo project?
Well, we don't have new data to provide us with evidence about unidentified objects or the interstellar meteor or a more like object. But the one thing I learned is that there are lots of curious
People out there within the Galileo project is a real pleasure and privilege for me to work with a lot of skillful individuals that are dedicated to the projects, volunteer the time and expertise and we are making headway. So I'm very encouraged by that. I don't take it for granted because these are
people who volunteered, I didn't approach them, they came to me. We have 800 additional volunteers that we haven't reviewed yet. So we have 100 people in the project, 800 more, who filled up the form and we are now in the process of reviewing them and selecting those that have the expertise that matches our interests, our needs. So all together, along with the public's response to the work we do, gives me a lot of hope
and so every day you know it's just like swimming in very turbulent waters there are people who try to bring you down and then these are waves that carry you to the bottom of the ocean but at the same time every day there are people that lift me up and I just need to average and and the average is very positive I should say and
But what I find puzzling are those people who try to sabotage the effort because we are not taking any funds from existing projects and we are just pursuing evidence. That's what science is supposed to be. So anyone objecting to this approach is objecting the fundamental principles of science pioneered by Galileo Galilei. Yeah, that's why I didn't get why NASA finds it to be a conflict of interest.
Oh, that's interesting. They say that since I'm leading the Galileo project, I'm already engaged in this activity and their committee is supposed to evaluate whether they should fund this activity. So their argument is if I were to serve on the committee, I would probably advocate for funding and conflict of interest because I may apply for these funds later on. Okay.
However, if you do, for example, consider climate change, suppose NASA established a committee that will study climate change, would they ban people who are researching climate change from being on the committee? I don't think so. So part of this is
the stigma that there is on the subject because they are not sure whether it's worth funding and then if they were as sure as they were about studying climate change then they would allow for me to be on the committee. Okay so professor I'm sure you've heard of variable light theories what do you see as their advantage or disadvantage?
At the moment, we don't have any definite evidence for anything moving faster than light or that the speed of light is variable. Of course, in principle, that could change our perspective on the Big Bang, on what happens inside the black hole. And some people suggested that this could resolve the singularities we have in Einstein's theory of gravity. But
At the moment, these are just speculations. We don't have any evidence for that. And the speed of light is significant because it represents the fastest speed by which any material particle can move. And so if you change the speed of light, you can change the rate by which you communicate. And obviously, you can change the horizon out to which you can see things.
There's also another theory called Dirac's large number hypothesis. So what are your thoughts on that? And for those who are unfamiliar, do you mind giving a brief overview? Yeah, so in 1937, Paul Dirac made the hypothesis about large numbers. He observed that you can make dimensionless combination of some of the fundamental constants that we have.
and obtained a very large number out of them. And the question is whether it means anything. And at the moment, you know, we don't see a good reason for these combinations of numbers to be that large, for example, involving Newton's constant, which is a small number and the electron mass, the electron charge, and so forth. And
The thing is, in the standard model of particle physics, all these constants do not have an explanation. They are just measured quantities. And we don't have an underlying theory that explains those constants. So we don't know what the origin of the large numbers is. And one possibility is that we wouldn't exist
as intelligent beings thinking about it, if these numbers did not have their values. So some people are thinking about the multiverse, the idea that there might be other regions of space and time where these parameters obtain different values. And the question is whether life, intelligent life could exist there.
And in most of them, no, the answer is no, because for example, the universe would expand too rapidly. And you wouldn't be able to make stars and planets next to them so that we can have life as we know it. This doesn't exclude intelligence from appearing in other regions with other constants because
You know, there might be other paths to intelligence that we are not familiar with. And so I would argue that until we have a theory that explains the constants that we measure, it's premature of us to make sense of it. And so let's just wait. What are the pros and cons of peer review?
The importance of peer review is that your ideas and the comments are tested or at least evaluated by other professionals in your field of expertise. So the pro is that if there is any mistake or if there is some omission, it could be pointed out by the reviewers of the scientific paper that one is writing.
The cons are obvious that sometimes there is a dogma and many of the mainstream scientists abide by the dogma and as a result, they dismiss alternatives
simply because they feel a threat to their field of expertise. And many scientists establish their self-esteem and their stature based on past knowledge, things that they worked on for decades and they established through their work. And if there is a new statement being made that could in principle doubt what is being known or at least suggest that it's incomplete,
They feel threatened, they feel their ego feels threatened and as a result they resist change. And that happened many times in science where ideas were pushed aside just because they threatened the dogma.
And of course, that's the con of peer review. However, over time, you know, if at least there is a way to document the findings, other people may look at them later on, and eventually they might prevail. So, however, you know, it obviously slows down the progress of science if
every suggestion is being moderated by the experts. And for that purpose, you know, it's possible to have a different scheme where there is an archive on the internet where papers are being posted, not necessarily rejected that firsthand and
We do have such an archive, but unfortunately it's also moderated. There are people, practitioners of the field, who decide without any peer review, without any back and forth with the authors, they decide if a submission is worth posting.
Which, again, is even more dangerous than peer review because they don't have to explain it to the authors. So I would argue in favor of having, since, you know, papers on the internet do not cost money, do not cost much computer space, power, you know, over there in the cloud, that we will have a better system where ideas will be
exposed to the community at large without being blocked by experts. I think that would be the best scheme. Have you tried to publish on archive and it was rejected? Well, no, but there was, for example, a submission recently about the Galileo project where I described the project as a whole, which is a scientific project. And it has been held
by the moderators for almost a month now. They're not posting it. And I find that strange because there are lots of papers. In fact, on the archive, there was recently a paper saying that based on a poll, a survey of UK astronomers, that most of them were
motivated to enter astronomy as a result of being fascinated by science fiction. Okay, so that paper reporting about the poll of UK astronomers that were fascinated by science fiction is posted on the same day on the archive, whereas the description of a scientific project to explore UAP is being moderated for a month now
Now, speaking of dogma, there's a viewer question, his name is Clavs Pedder, and he wants to know what things in cosmology do we assume are true that we can't prove nor disprove besides
So for example, the multiverse is an excellent example of an area in cosmology that cannot be proven or disproven because we don't have access to regions of space and time beyond the observable volume of the universe. Light could not have
gone across a distance greater than the horizon over the time since the Big Bang. And so there are these, I would call speculations that are regions of space and time far beyond the horizon that we can see, where conditions are very different, perhaps the fundamental constants are different, perhaps the laws of physics are different.
This discussion of the multiverse is not substantiated by any evidence and it doesn't appear more credible than philosophy or theology because it has no way of being disproven. Of course some people say maybe one day we will come up with a way to test it. Fine, until that day comes I don't see it as part of
falsifiable physics. And of course, cosmic inflation is a paradigm that in principle can be proven right. For example, if we find gravitational waves from inflation that the theory predicts at different levels, depending on the inflaton, the field that drove inflation.
You can always design models of inflation that would produce undetectable signals. But in all of them, there is some gravitational wave background and we are seeking it, investing millions of dollars in the search for them. I should say that there is also a way of disproving the paradigm of inflation altogether. And the way to do that is to look for
a gravitational wave background of the type of the cosmic microwave background. We wrote a paper about it just last week with a postdoc named Sunny Vagnozzi. And we basically said that at the Planck time, the universe was immersed in a gravitational wave background, just like the cosmic microwave background, but in gravitational waves because of its very high temperature, close to the Planck temperature.
Now the theory of inflation says after that plank time there was a period where the universe expanded exponentially or very fast faster than light and any such background would have been diluted. We wouldn't have it around today because there was this immense expansion of the volume of the universe and therefore inflation predicts that we won't find any gravitational wave background at high frequencies similar to the cosmic microwave background of
electromagnetic radiation. And if we search for it and we discussed in this paper how one can search for it,
In case we find it, that would disprove that there was an epoch of exponential expansion or inflationary superluminal faster than light expansion during an epoch of cosmic inflation. So there is a way of either proving inflation or disproving the entire paradigm just by searching for gravitational waves. So in a way, that's a scientific theory. You can either prove it or disprove it. Now, there are other aspects of
The early universe, which are also in principle testable, for example, imagine a universe where inflation didn't take place, but there was a bounce, the universe contracted before that, and then there was a bounce.
That kind of a theory makes other predictions that can be tested. So altogether, you know, there are ways to test what happened around the Big Bang. But it's very difficult to test what happens beyond the region of space and time that we can probe right now.
Thank you, and I'll put a link to that paper in the description. So this one is from a user named Mathematical Metaphysics. He says, I don't know if this has been asked before, but has Avi experienced anything close to what's paranormal, not limited to UFOs?
I never had such an experience and therefore you cannot regard me as an experiencer. And moreover, I do believe that the scientific instruments are much more reliable than humans as detectors. So I don't need to experience it myself. All I want is the, for example, the Galileo project instruments to detect an unusual
set of data that would indicate an object that is not naturally in the atmosphere, like not a bird, not a bug, not a meteor, not a thunderstorm, and it's not human-made. It's not a drone, not an airplane, not a satellite or
anything else of that sort but it looks unusual and for me that would be credible evidence. I don't need to experience it myself except I want to see the instruments detecting it and that I think will bring the subject to the mainstream of science so it will serve a very important purpose of validating what experiencers claim. I don't
have any opinion about the experiences reported? I don't dismiss them. I would like to find evidence for whatever they talk about through scientific instrumentation, because it's not subject to any biases that humans have. Now in this instrumentation, do you happen to have any analysis or people who are experts on metamaterials? And if not, do you plan on getting them in for the Galileo project?
We do have Gary Nolan as a member of our research team, and if we do find the materials that are of unusual composition, we'll definitely bring it to his attention. For example, when we scoop the ocean floor named Papua New Guinea, if we find that the fragments from the first interstellar meteor were made of some very unusual composition, we'll bring it to the laboratory of Gary Nolan, for sure.
This question comes from user SwiftWisdom. For Avi, Professor Gary Nolan recently gave an interview with Ross Coulthart and stated that the phenomenon is definitely not human. And if people saw the evidence he had seen, they would come to a similar conclusion that the phenomenon is a non-material form of consciousness. So what is a non-material form of consciousness and what does Avi think of Gary's position? Now, of course, just so that this is clear,
i'm reading a quote from someone and i haven't verified this quote myself so take this with a grain of salt so my view of consciousness is that it's an emergent phenomena of the human body the human body is very complex especially the human brain and i don't think there is anything beyond what the
the physical composition of the human body is. So when people die, I think of it just like unplugging a computer from the outlet, it stops operating. And then obviously, what we call consciousness is a result of our brain being very complex. And one way to demonstrate that is to build a computer out of hardware, which is just materials we find around and we put together, and then get to the level of
sentient artificial intelligence systems. If the artificial intelligence system will behave in a way that resembles a human, we could declare it as having consciousness. And I subscribe to the Turing test in the sense that suppose out of a thousand people, 999 of them would think through a conversation, through interactions with
an AI system would believe that the AI system is a human without us telling them in advance. That would be good enough, as far as I'm concerned, for defining it as sentient. Now, even if the AI system is using datasets from the internet to respond
to the human, I don't care about it because maybe the human brain is doing the same. As long as it appears to be like a human, that's all that matters because we don't know when we interact with another human, we don't know how the processing is done in the brain of information and how consciousness comes into play. So I would say we should just compare it to the experience with the human and if it behaves in a way that is indistinguishable
to 999 people out of 1000, I would say it's good enough. And at that point, you know, it would be sentient. And it would be clear that we constructed this AI system out of materials. So it would make sense to say the human body is similar, it's constructed of materials,
And yet it displays what we call consciousness or free will. And then that's a signature of very complex systems complex enough. And by the way, the AI system could learn from experience so you can seed it started just like you give birth to a child. And early on you educate the child. So the AI system could learn from experience through machine learning and you can educate it just like you educate a child. So early on it might
imitate you, but eventually it will acquire the qualities of a person, an adult that goes into the world and interacts with the world on its own. And so in that sense, I would not see a difference between a sentient AI system and humans. And therefore, I would not think that there is a non-material form of consciousness. And therefore, when seeking
an explanation for unidentified objects, I would assume that if they behave as sentient entities that they are equipped with artificial intelligence, you know, that it's just devices that are even more sophisticated than the ones we will produce in the next decade.
And it would be interesting because it will open a new frontier of artificial intelligence from our side, interacting with artificial intelligence from their side. And I call it AI-AI interaction, which is a third category that was not envisioned by the philosopher Martin Buber, who talked about an interaction of a human with an object. He called it I-it interaction or relation.
And he distinguished that from an IU interaction, an interaction of a human with a human or of a human with God, which is the eternal you. And he did not envision back a century ago when he wrote his book, I am though in 1923, he did not envision a third category, which I think will might come into play with, which is AI interacting with AI, which may reflect our first interaction with
artificial intelligence from an extraterrestrial origin. So I can imagine universities establishing new departments, instead of a department of psychology, it would be a department of interstellar psychology, meaning trying to understand sentient beings, which are basically AI systems that were sent to us from an exoplanet.
So what if your wife says to you, Avi, just so you know, come to this room. She opens the room. It's a secret room in your house. Cameras and TVs are revealed. Then she says, I've been appearing to love you. It's all fake. I'm hired by the government. After this, I will go continue to show you love in the same way. But just so you know, I don't actually feel it. I'm hired. We're going to I'm going to leave this room and everything will go back to the exact same way it was before. I'll say the exact same words. I'll
Yeah, so definitely the big picture makes a difference for me because I always think about
the big picture. If my wife would come to me and say that she was just playing it like an actor, that would make a difference for me. It's just like participating in a play where you play a role and that role does not represent you necessarily.
Yes, I would not be in love with an actor who displays love to me. I would prefer to be in love with a person who lives life in an authentic way. So definitely that would make a difference. And you can generalize it to experiences we have. And like, for example, if the government tricks us to believe in some notion and it doesn't seem to be real, I would be upset about it.
And as a scientist, that's why I prefer not to pay attention to social media and focus on evidence and facts because nature in my view is authentic.
You know, when I jog in the morning, when I interact with nature, it always appears to me as sincere, straightforward, whereas people are not always that way. They sometimes have an ulterior motive or a hidden agenda. That's why I prefer to use instruments to learn about nature because they don't have a hidden agenda and they don't have a prejudice or an ego associated with them.
And moreover, I prefer to explore the facts to guide us. And just to give you an example, the expedition to Papua New Guinea was based on three scientific papers that we published, submitted for publication, two of them, but one of them was accepted for publication already.
And then it was featured on NPR. And as a result, a few non-scientists, people who do not practice science, decided to make some ridiculing comments on Twitter on this expedition in a superficial manner. And I asked myself,
Is this really what they pretend to be? Because they pretended to protect science and argue that this expedition makes little sense. But in fact, they are anti-science because science is about seeking evidence. This expedition is funded by private donations. It doesn't take money from any other scientific project. So the only thing you can do if you are pro-science is to upload that, to support it. And
For example, if you look at mainstream cases of us seeking evidence, we looked for the nature of dark matter in the form of the lightest supersymmetric particle by smashing elementary particles at very high energies at the large Hadron Collider. And we haven't found it. Okay. And so here is an example for a search that
didn't turn out the way we expected it to be. And then a lot of astronomers are investing many hours
of on the biggest telescopes in the search for planet nine. They haven't found it. Okay, so why would one ridicule an expedition that wants to figure out the composition of the first interstellar meteor, which was supported by a formal letter from the US Space Command, while at the same time supporting a search for the lightest supersymmetric particle with the investment of
billions of dollars support the search for Planet Nine with the investment of huge telescope time. Why are these different from the search for the composition of the first interstellar meteor? That is escaping me. The only way I can understand it is some people out of jealousy trying to step on any flower that rises above the grass level.
Okay, lastly, lastly now, if you could run the archive, we spoke about the archive before, or if you could speak to the moderators who are in charge, what would you say, what would you do? Regarding the archive, I would establish categories, different categories of research that allow for aspects that go beyond the mainstream, beyond the conventional wisdom, such that, you know, ideas could be floated there,
and let natural selection choose which one is accepted by the mainstream community. So rather than block the interaction among scientists, of course there should be a certain threshold for the content. You don't want things that are not scientific, but above some threshold there should be free exchange of ideas and
By establishing those categories that allow for that free exchange, you could accelerate the progress of science because you are not blocking, you're not moderating innovation. There is no way for us to know in advance which path leads to the truth and therefore we should encourage
The other risk I see is that by blocking deviations from the beaten path, we are discouraging young people.
from thinking independently, because those young scholars realize that, you know, if in order for them to get a job, they need to subscribe to the main theme in order for them to post their papers to get their papers published, they must adhere to whatever guidelines they receive from the senior people. And that to me goes against the spirit of innovation,
In science against the spirit of the history of science, if you look at the most important revelations that we had, they came from unexpected directions. And by blocking those, we are limiting the rate of progress in science. So instead of that, let's allow
natural selection of ideas, let's allow the community to filter out which ideas are worthwhile and which not, and post all of these suggestions on some categories of the archive that allow for innovation, which currently do not exist.
The way that I think about this is that if an open category exists, then it would automatically become labeled as pseudoscience, even if it's not. So for example, there's Vixra, which is the opposite of archive that has, I imagine, valid ideas and then some invalid ones, but almost all are classified as unscientific and Vixra is considered to be the place where one goes when one thinks they have a scientific idea, but they actually don't. So is there a way around this stigma?
Now there should be, of course, a certain threshold for allowing postings, but that threshold should not be established by what is accepted by the mainstream. So in other words, if we are dealing, for example, with dark matter, so we should not just post papers that give
various suggestions for what the dark matter might be, but we should also allow papers that talk about modified gravity in various forms and not block them. And so the way to proceed is to allow a conversation among professional scientists. So I'm not talking about allowing, you know,
people crackpots, people that you find often on Twitter, people that do not publish in science. So, for example, one threshold could be that the paper needs to be submitted and reviewed in a respectable publication or considered at least in a respectable publication and not being rejected altogether because it has no substance.
Another approach would be to have people with established track record on the archive that do not only publish unsubstantiated claims, but have also other papers that belong to the mainstream. So, for example, if a person has, let's say, 90% or 80% of their posts
in the mainstream, but then 10 to 20 percent are out of the mainstream, one should allow such a person to post the out of the mainstream ideas because the same person is also contributing to the mainstream. So it's clear that the person is trying to figure out solutions to some anomalies by deviating every now and then from the mainstream. So in my mind, a certain percentage
should be tolerated. Let's say 10-20% is a very reasonable portion of a publication record of a person to be allocated to risky propositions. One should allow for that and one can establish such a metric and therefore that would filter out all the crackpots that would put all their papers or all their postings on ideas that are completely unsubstantiated.
I imagine that those who are rejecting on the archive, they wouldn't say, well, I'm doing so because it's not mainstream enough. They just wouldn't use that word or justification. They would say that it's unscientific or some other synonym for unscientific like pseudoscience. So I know that your solution was about mainstream. Just like in venture capital investments, I think it does make sense to allocate, let's say between 10 and 30% of the resources
to risky propositions. And a simple solution in the context of their archive would be to allow scientists who publish more than 70% of their papers to allow them to deviate from the beaten path. So if anyone can produce, you know, seven or eight papers that are within the mainstream, every time they post one or two papers that are out of the mainstream,
then I would allow those people to make these postings. I think that would be a very simple approach to take because it means that they're thinking outside the beaten path and creatively. And these are people who are contributing to the mainstream. And I don't think it will be regarded as unscientific on their behalf.
because they are doing most of the work in a scientific fashion. So that's one solution. And of course, another way is to filter in their affiliation, their current professional credentials. So if they went through all the degrees of scientific practice, if they have a PhD, they may be a professor in a
Professor, I just sent a chat.
Managing a project with more than 100 members is not trivial. I never served as a marriage counselor, but the best advice I can imagine giving couples is simple. Focus on what you agree on and avoid getting distracted by peripheral disputes.
Yes, exactly.
I rest my case. The point is that we need to focus on the goal that all of us believe in, in the case of the Galileo project. It's collecting evidence. And I brought under the tent of the Galileo project, both advocates and skeptics for a simple reason that when the two camps agree on something, I know that the evidence is strong enough.
So for example, we have Michael Shermer, and he said that if we find indisputable evidence, he would be glad to write an essay in his magazine skeptic about it. And I said, that's not enough. I want you to change the name of the magazine from skeptic to believer. What did he say? He laughed. Okay, we'll hold up to that.
Thank you, Professor. I appreciate you spending so much time with me. Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure. Okay, well, congratulations for sitting through a three hour video. Again, it's astounding. Thank you for sticking around for so long. To find out more about anything that's mentioned in the podcast, then do click on the description.
There are fastidiously timestamped themes and catalog references. If any are missing, just comments in my wife or I. We read each comment. So if you say that, hey, at this timestamp, you said so and so would be included, but it's not. I'll include it. Forgive me as I've spent almost all night editing and I just need to record this last bit. If you'd like to support the theories of everything podcast, then visit theories of everything dot org.
That is theories of everything dot org and become a member if you're currently on the patreon and you feel like switching There are several benefits. So for example one you'll get the entire podcast early Sometimes 12 hours to 48 hours early an audio version without sponsors or ads You'll get a phone number to text me if you like
You can ask a question for the Kurt AMAs, so the Kurt Ask Me Anythings, and I'll be likely releasing them there first. There will be discounts on live events, sometimes even free, once we eventually do start them. There's exclusive merch to be offered there to be purchased only by members. Again, in the future I have this idea for a notebook where I'm putting mathematical quotes and quotes from physicists and mathematicians and other spiritual leaders and consciousness experts and so on.
that serve as inspiration for what you're writing on that page, whether it's a daily journal or just note taking.
there's also the eventual theories of everything book okay it's not simply a book i'm not interested in writing novels and so on it's more an inventory of the different toes explaining the terminology behind each and relating them to one another also when you become a member or if you like you can place a one-time donation at theories of everything dot org more of the money actually goes to curt goes to tow like i mentioned in the beginning i imagine that you're supporting tow in order to support tow not support tow plus
Patreon or to support Toe plus some other platform. Even YouTube takes a huge cut. These podcasts take a great, great deal of preparation and I wouldn't be able to do this without your support. So thank you so much. There are many, many, many plans for the future. Man, okay, well, I can tell you some. I would like to hire a full-time editor. I'd like to hire a full-time researcher to help me with studying for the different Toes as well as to help with the eventual Toe manual. There's also plans for different types of content and different
Guests and well that will be announced when it's ready. Thank you. Thank you so much I may be live streaming right now if you're interested you can go to toe clippings so type in toe clippings on YouTube. I know that's abhorrent to most and
I think you should avert your gaze to most of those thumbnails because, well, you can imagine the repugnancy that follows once you search something like that. However, that is the name, a fairly clever name for the clips version of the Theories of Everything podcast. Sometimes people aren't like you, they're not troopers, they don't have the time to sit through three hours of a video.
And then some, they want to watch 5 minute to 10 minute at most maybe 20 minute chunks. And those are where the shareable clips go. I also may live stream there either right now or at some point or take different guests or other podcast hosts just if we want to talk about some topic without much preparation, without feeling the pressure of it being on the main Toe channel.
It's a
Consciousness and Physics Contest called PACE-1. There's a video about that in the description. Brilliant has come on board to sponsor $1,000 to each of the five winners. So that is $5,000 in total distributed among the top five.
Essentially, you create your physics explainer or consciousness explainer. It doesn't need to be both. If it incorporates both, that's, well, great, but it doesn't need to. There's a distinct lack of advanced physics and consciousness concepts. So if you have an idea for how to explain, let's say, mirror symmetry or some
Okay, I think that's everything. Thank you so much. And again, thank you to the sponsors. That's ButcherBox. If you want some quality meat, butcherbox.com slash theories. If you would like to learn some more about math and physics, that's brilliant.org slash toe. Thank you.
Alright, take care.
The upcoming guests are John Vervecky and Ian McGilchrist coming together for Theo Locution. Steven Greer is coming up in October. Nick Lane is coming up next to talk about the origins of life being predicated on metabolism rather than genes being the precursor to metabolism. Tim Modlin is coming on to talk about the interpretations of quantum mechanics. And of course, Salvatore Pius is coming on with Stefan Alexander, a string theorist slash loop quantum gravity theorist.
To talk about quantum gravity and Salvador Páez's ideas embedded in the UFO patents. Plenty to look out for.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 9623,
"audio_duration_seconds": 11975.9,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T01:29:06Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 81.374,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.288,
"text": " Surprise bill? Need fast funds? Cashnet USA can help. When you need money fast, be the hero. Apply in minutes at cashnetusa.com and get a fast decision. All loans subject to lender approvals, beta funding is subject to verifications and your bank's processing times."
},
{
"end_time": 105.077,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 82.398,
"text": " This podcast is sponsored by Monarch Money. Are you saving to reach your financial goals? Reaching those goals isn't just about getting more money, but by managing what you have. And the best way to manage your money? Monarch Money. Monarch Money is a new kind of finance app that's intuitive, powerful, ad-free, and takes the headaches out of budgeting. Try it free when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 122.79,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 105.077,
"text": " Monarch puts all your accounts, investments, transactions, and finances at your fingertips. With a complete view of your finances, you'll gain insights on your spending and find new ways to save. Plus, Monarch lets you customize your dashboard, collaborate with your partner, set custom budgets and goals, and track your progress toward them."
},
{
"end_time": 142.585,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 122.79,
"text": " See why Mint users are turning to Monarch Money and loving it. And why the Wall Street Journal named Monarch Money the best budgeting app overall. Get a 30-day free trial when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H money.com slash podcast for your free trial. MonarchMoney.com slash podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 158.865,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 143.319,
"text": " Recently, a contest was launched for those interested in making math physics explainer videos. It's essentially the physics version of 3Blue1Brown's contest, and Brilliant has come on board to Divi 5000 USD, equally among the top five. The details are linked below."
},
{
"end_time": 182.551,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 158.865,
"text": " This will be a lengthy introduction as there are several announcements that I've been holding on to and I can finally publicize them. As usual you can click on the timestamp over here or in the description to skip this longish preface. Firstly you should know about today's guest and that is Professor of Harvard Avi Loeb. Now Avi is an astrophysicist and a cosmologist with such a multitude of accolades that I could barely"
},
{
"end_time": 199.94,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 182.961,
"text": " i can't memorize them so i'm simply going to read them so for one he's the longest serving chair of harvard's department of astronomy he's the founding director of harvard's black hole initiative he's the director of the institute for theory and computation he's a fellow at the american academy of arts and science and the american physical society"
},
{
"end_time": 220.009,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 199.94,
"text": " and the International Academy for Astronautics. He's the Science Theory Director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. And again, he's won so many awards that I'll just list them on screen. In the past year or so, Avi's headed what's called the Galileo Project, which is dedicated to the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts."
},
{
"end_time": 239.241,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 220.009,
"text": " We're also announcing here that the Galileo project will have its first results in the summer of 2023. Today we talk about consciousness, God, UAPs, and the problem with current theoretical physics. You should know that I've spoken to Avi Loeb one year ago on this channel asking him about wormholes and the physics that Bob Lazar suggests propel the UFO crafts."
},
{
"end_time": 255.657,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 239.241,
"text": " Link to that podcast is in the description. For those of you who are unfamiliar, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything, mainly from a theoretical physics perspective."
},
{
"end_time": 282.21,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 255.657,
"text": " but as well as analyzing and exploring what the heck is consciousness and what is its role related to fundamental laws, if fundamental laws even exist in the sense that there's a bottom to it, perhaps reductionism isn't the correct paradigm, but regardless, you now have a flavor of what this podcast is about. Now on to some announcements. The URL theoriesofeverything.org is active, the reasons for which I'll get to shortly. One of the advantages is that I'm going to be announcing what are the upcoming guests to members there,"
},
{
"end_time": 298.251,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 282.21,
"text": " first or at least simultaneously, as I don't like to provide many exclusives."
},
{
"end_time": 316.852,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 298.251,
"text": " And Salvatore Pius have been on the podcast before Stefan specializes is one of the few that's an expert in both loop quantum gravity and string theory in the previous podcast with Stefan we talk about string theory particularly a new theory of everything called the auto didactic universe which is a universe that learns its own laws."
},
{
"end_time": 331.869,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 316.852,
"text": " That will be in the description. As for Salvatore Pius, he has only given one interview and that's luckily been on theories of everything. That will be in the description as well and it's about quantum gravity. For those of you who don't know, Salvatore Pius is the man who's behind the UFO patents."
},
{
"end_time": 358.985,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 331.869,
"text": " Also coming up is Ian McGilchrist and John Vervecky being joined as a Theolocution. Again, John has been on the Theories of Everything podcast before Solo, and that will be in the description, as well as Ian McGilchrist. In fact, the one with Ian is one of the highest quality podcasts on Toe. Okay, now let's talk about the website. So theoriesofeverything.org is a place where you can go to support Toe because many people choose to not support the platform of Patreon because of, at least reportedly,"
},
{
"end_time": 388.626,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 359.616,
"text": " There's some unscrupulous business practices, or at least questionable what their future is, so that's one reason. And secondly, Patreon takes a huge cut. Many people don't know this, but there are credit card transaction fees, plus Patreon on top of that takes a percentage. Theoriesofeverything.org is a vehicle that I have control over, so if you like you can donate there directly, as I imagine the reason you're supporting Toe is to support Toe, not to support Kurt plus Patreon. There are also several benefits to being a member on the website. Number one, you'll get an ads-free audio version."
},
{
"end_time": 405.418,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 388.626,
"text": " Keep in mind that all ads, whether they're in the introduction or in the middle, those are called midrolls, they're skippable by clicking on the next timestamp. I ensure this because I'm the one that timestamps each episode. Regardless, if you'd like an ad-free audio version, that comes to you as a benefit for being a member on the theoriesofeverything.org website."
},
{
"end_time": 421.169,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 405.418,
"text": " Additionally, the way that it works on Toe's End is that I render out an episode and then I wait approximately two days or so between once it's uploaded to YouTube and once it finally premieres. And one of the reasons for that is to build an audience, etc. However, what that means is that I actually have the episode completed"
},
{
"end_time": 437.193,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 421.596,
"text": " 12 to 48 hours prior to you seeing it. So what will happen is if you're a member, you'll get an uploaded ads free version 12 to 48 hours before anyone else. Again, nothing changes for those of you who are on YouTube and want to stay there and don't want to be a toll member, etc. That's fine."
},
{
"end_time": 454.753,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 437.602,
"text": " It's the same way that it's been, nothing's going to change there. Another benefit of being a member on the website rather than on Patreon or any other platform is that there will be discounts or even free tickets offered whenever we have live events. Additionally, okay, this is another benefit. You'll get a personalized number to text me if you like that."
},
{
"end_time": 468.797,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 455.247,
"text": " Yes, this goes to my phone. It's not someone else answering. For instance, you can say, Kurt, you said that so-and-so episode was coming out. I was wondering what the progress is on that. Kurt, have you seen the finale of Better Call Saul? Kurt, when are you going to be speaking to Stephen Greer?"
},
{
"end_time": 498.592,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 469.189,
"text": " By the way, Stephen Greer will be coming on the Toe podcast mid-October. The specific date is not here yet, and there's a high likelihood that it will be live. And that's whether you're a member or not. It's going to be live on YouTube public. Another benefit to being a member on the website is that if you have AMA questions to ask for myself, my AMAs, that is the questions and answers with Kurt, and then you can submit them there and I'll be doing AMAs for the members. Keep in mind that if you have a question, for example, Greer or Salvatore Pius or any other guest,"
},
{
"end_time": 522.944,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 498.916,
"text": " There is no exclusive to being a member or to being on Patreon or to being on Twitter. A quality question is a quality question wherever it comes from. I don't prioritize questions based on if someone donates let's say $200 in a super chat or if they donate zero. They're just simply asking a question like anyone else. There are no plans for the live streams to be member specific though if I ever do an in-person meeting like for example I'm thinking of filming with"
},
{
"end_time": 544.497,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 523.319,
"text": " an audience and Carl Friston in person in London, then that may be streamed to website members. Another benefit is that certain merch will be exclusive to being a member. So for example, one that I'm working on now is a notebook where at the top of each page is a quotation from a different mathematician or a physicist or even a spiritual leader and that will hopefully serve as inspiration for whatever you're writing on the"
},
{
"end_time": 560.213,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 544.497,
"text": " Okay, so there are manifold benefits to being a theoriesofeverything.org member. Don't go to theoriesofeverything.com. Some cyber squatters has that domain. So .org. Toe is supported by you and the sponsors. Thank you. Thank you so much. I wouldn't be able to do Toe."
},
{
"end_time": 589.019,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 560.572,
"text": " Without you, whether it's full time or part time, I wouldn't be able to do this without you. There are so many, many plans for the future. Again, I wouldn't be able to do it without you. So thank you. Thank you, whether you're just watching or whether you donate. That's it. Okay, now on to the sponsors. If you're familiar with toe, you're familiar with brilliance. But for those who don't know, brilliance is a place where you go to learn math, science and engineering through these bite sized interactive learning experiences. For example, and I keep saying this, I would like to do a podcast on information theory."
},
{
"end_time": 603.66,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 589.275,
"text": " Particularly Chiara Marletto, which is David Deutsch's student, has a theory of everything that she puts forward called constructor theory, which is heavily contingent on information theory. So I took their course on random variable distributions and knowledge and uncertainty."
},
{
"end_time": 620.384,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 603.985,
"text": " In order to"
},
{
"end_time": 649.138,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 620.384,
"text": " It would be unnatural to define it in any other manner. Visit brilliant.org slash TOE, that is T-O-E, to get 20% off the annual subscription. And I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons. I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects you previously had a difficult time grokking. At some point, I'll also go through the courses and give a recommendation in order. Okay, wow. Thank you for sitting through that prodigious introduction. Now on to the episode with Avi Loeb. Enjoy."
},
{
"end_time": 671.084,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 649.138,
"text": " Thank you for coming out, Avi. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure. Let's just lay some groundwork for the audience who's unacquainted with you. What is the Galileo project and what has it been up to in the past year? The Galileo project is called after Galileo Galilei, a physicist that founded modern science four centuries ago."
},
{
"end_time": 697.551,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 671.442,
"text": " He was put in house arrest because he suggested that maybe the earth is not the center of the universe. And at the time, people thought that it is. And the philosophers said that makes no sense. We don't even want to look through telescopes. And the innovation that he brought forward is that we should look for evidence before we assert something rather than just make a statement because it flatters our ego."
},
{
"end_time": 726.408,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 697.927,
"text": " And today he would have been canceled on social media because his view was not popular at the time. But if you were to ask those philosophers to design a space mission that would reach Mars, they would never get to their destination because they thought that Mars moves around the earth. So in the Galileo project, four centuries later, we say we learned something important from Galileo, which is let's look for evidence to guide us rather than prejudice. And we apply it in the context of"
},
{
"end_time": 748.66,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 727.056,
"text": " Is there a smart, intelligent neighbor in our cosmic neighborhood, in our cosmic backyard? And in the past, people had very strong opinions on this. And people also, after we developed radio communication, people said, oh, let's look for radio signals. But, you know, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 766.647,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 748.66,
"text": " quite narrow minded to think that just because we just develop radio communication, that will be the main way by which we will detect extraterrestrial civilization, because we ourselves are moving away from radio right now. We have a cable and"
},
{
"end_time": 787.892,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 766.647,
"text": " fiber optics and in space we are developing laser communication. So why would you assume that such a communication method applies for more than a century or two for any advanced civilization? And so it's just like trying to say let's have a phone conversation with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart"
},
{
"end_time": 803.951,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 787.892,
"text": " And you will never find Mozart if you try to dial all the phone numbers available because he died. And so to have a radio signal approaching us now would imply that there is someone transmitting just at the time that we're listening, which"
},
{
"end_time": 822.176,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 803.951,
"text": " Is probably not the case because most stars from billions of years before the sun so their radius any radio signal from there is billions of light years away. Anyway, so the approach we are taking within the Galileo project is to search for relics because we sent out five spacecraft over half a century."
},
{
"end_time": 842.739,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 822.756,
"text": " which is pretty much one part in a hundred million of the age of the earth. Just over that short period of time, we send five spacecraft that will leave the solar system. And it's quite likely that if there was another advanced civilization a billion years ago, they send some equipment out of their planetary system and"
},
{
"end_time": 862.312,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 843.148,
"text": " If they were more advanced than we are, then they could have sent probes that, after a billion years, fill up the entire Milky Way galaxy. Because if they're self-replicating, if they have 3D printers, if they have artificial intelligence so that they can continue to be functioning for a long period of time,"
},
{
"end_time": 881.408,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 862.602,
"text": " Then they might as well fill up all the habitable regions around stars in the Milky Way. So we say, you know, if you launch systems with chemical rockets, they will remain gravitationally bound to the Milky Way. They cannot escape like light signals, radio signals, leave the Milky Way and they're gone forever."
},
{
"end_time": 903.439,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 881.596,
"text": " However, if you send equipment at tens of kilometers per second, the way we sent our spacecraft, they will still be bound gravitationally. They cannot escape from the Milky Way Galaxy. So we think of the Milky Way Galaxy as a basket collecting all the pieces of equipment, all the devices that were ever created since the Big Bang within this volume."
},
{
"end_time": 931.766,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 903.78,
"text": " and were launched by chemical rockets or things that are not faster than hundreds of kilometers per second. All of these things are now sitting inside the Milky Way galaxy and some of them may be functional, some of them may be space trash, but we should look around us to look for those objects. Okay, so that's, I call that interstellar archaeology. It's just like doing archaeology, finding relics of things that exist in the past"
},
{
"end_time": 960.828,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 932.312,
"text": " whoever produced them need not be alive anymore. Those civilizations may be dead by now. Maybe they didn't take care of their climate. Maybe they went into a nuclear war. You know, we don't care. As long as they launch things out of their planet that could reach us by now, we just search around for anything they left. And this interstellar archaeology is something that was never pursued despite 70 years of SETI activity. So if you ask"
},
{
"end_time": 990.623,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 960.93,
"text": " How does the SETI community regard this endeavor? They dismiss it. They ridicule it. They say, no, no, no way. This is ridiculous. There is nothing around us. And, you know, I say, well, let's look because only over the past five years, we discovered the first three interstellar objects, objects that came from outside the solar system in astronomy, astronomers. The first one was actually from 2014. And we will talk more about it."
},
{
"end_time": 1011.715,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 991.476,
"text": " CNEOS? Yes, January 8, 2014, a meteor that collided with the Earth. You can think of the Earth as a fishing net that collects objects along its path around the Sun. And the first one identified by government sensors, with a very high speed,"
},
{
"end_time": 1025.111,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1012.193,
"text": " and then about meteors and"
},
{
"end_time": 1053.439,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1025.196,
"text": " I looked online and I found this catalog of meteors the government compiled based on missile warning systems data. And I asked my student Amir Siraj to check if the fastest moving meteors could have been unbound to the sun. Okay, any of them could have come from outside the solar system. And we found that we found that one. Okay, and we wrote a paper. And then the reviewers of the paper said, we don't believe the US government."
},
{
"end_time": 1083.66,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1053.848,
"text": " You know, we, we don't believe the uncertainties. So then it took took a few years. And I got the people, you know, behind the National Security Defense, especially from the White House from Department of Defense, they issued a letter from the US Space Command to NASA, confirming that indeed this object that we identified with my son came from outside the solar system at the 99.999% confidence. Okay, so that's, that's the first interstellar object"
},
{
"end_time": 1107.773,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1084.087,
"text": " It's the first interstellar meteor, the size of a basketball that was identified by humans. And the second one was identified in 2017. That was Oumuamua that my book, extraterrestrial, talks about. And the third one was a comet, just like any other comet. It came from outside the solar system."
},
{
"end_time": 1130.111,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1108.08,
"text": " But the first two are complete outliers. The meteor has material strength tougher than iron, tougher than all other meteors in the catalogue, 273 of them, by a factor of two or more. How do you measure toughness, by the way? Oh, it's very easy because when it collides with the earth, it basically goes through the atmosphere"
},
{
"end_time": 1147.142,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1130.469,
"text": " And the atmosphere gets denser as you go to lower and lower in the atmosphere. So the density of the atmosphere gets diluted as you move up. And so you can, we can tell where the explosion took place. It was 18.7 kilometers above"
},
{
"end_time": 1175.282,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1147.227,
"text": " the ocean surface, 100 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea. That's where the government identified the fireball that was created from the object burning up in the atmosphere. And it released a few percent of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb when it exploded. So from that, you can measure the speed of the object by how fast this fireball was moving at the time that the explosion took place."
},
{
"end_time": 1202.449,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1175.657,
"text": " It's a ball of light. And it's a very different detection method than looking at Oumuamua, which was just reflection of sunlight. So Oumuamua was roughly the size of a football field in order for us to see it. And this one was half a meter, you know, like 200 times smaller. And the reason we could see an object so small, half a meter in size is because it burned up, it produced its own light."
},
{
"end_time": 1218.763,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1202.875,
"text": " And so you can tell the speed by which it was moving, which was 45 kilometers per second, and you can tell the density of the atmosphere in its vicinity when it exploded. So you can tell how much stress was exerted on this object."
},
{
"end_time": 1242.892,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1219.087,
"text": " when it disintegrated. So prior to that, it was at lower density of air, it didn't disintegrate, it held together. But as it got to a very dense environment, eventually disintegrated because the stress, the pressure acting on it was too large for its material strength to resist it. So you can tell what is the yield strength, the material strength of this object based on the"
},
{
"end_time": 1261.783,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1243.712,
"text": " You know, it's speed and the density of air when it started disintegrating and it turns out to be twice tougher than iron. And that's very unusual because iron meteorites are only 5% of all space rocks that hit the earth, only 5%. And this was"
},
{
"end_time": 1283.234,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1262.466,
"text": " Two times tougher than iron, just think about it. And moreover, if we go back in time, it actually moved faster than 95% of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun. So it was an outlier, both in terms of its speed, and in terms of its composition. And I say, you know, if it's such an outlier,"
},
{
"end_time": 1295.879,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1283.575,
"text": " You know, faster than 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun and moving and having material strength tougher than iron, tougher than all the other meteors in the catalogue."
},
{
"end_time": 1316.015,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1296.408,
"text": " We better check whether it's an artifact, whether it's artificially made, and the way to check is to collect the fragments from the ocean floor and check their composition, whether it's an alloy that was artificially produced or whether it's an iron meteorite produced by nature. But even if it's iron,"
},
{
"end_time": 1343.797,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1316.374,
"text": " It's rare, it's unusual, and the question arises why the first meteor is of that composition. So anyway, this was an outlier, definitely. Oumuamua was an outlier for a completely different reason. It was flat in shape based on the reflection of sunlight that was published as a scientific paper, not by me, by someone. Actually, the first discovery paper argued that it's flat, most likely pancake-shaped. The first discovery paper!"
},
{
"end_time": 1359.309,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1344.138,
"text": " Quick message from a sponsor. When I do eat meat, I care about the source of it, both in terms of the quality of the food itself and about the standards that the place has with regard to animal welfare and humane animal treatment. ButcherBox takes the guesswork out of finding high quality meat and seafood that you can trust."
},
{
"end_time": 1380.913,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1359.309,
"text": " Given that I'm a hermit, one of my favorite features is that it's delivered straight to you, straight to your door. If you're in the US, you get free shipping. The search for outstanding deals on high quality protein ends here."
},
{
"end_time": 1401.596,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1380.913,
"text": " Again, that's ButcherBox.com slash Theories to claim this deal."
},
{
"end_time": 1431.271,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1401.596,
"text": " And then when I started suggesting that it may be artificial, then people backed off and said, no, no, no, it's just a flat rock, you know, but then it turns out it's not a comet because there was no cometary tail. It was pushed away from the sun despite the fact that there was no rocket effect from cometary tail. It came from a special frame of reference, all kinds of weird properties. Can you explain that last part that it came from a special frame of reference? Yeah, so there is this local standard of rest."
},
{
"end_time": 1447.278,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1431.954,
"text": " which is the frame that you get to when you average over the random motions of the stars in the vicinity of the sun. It's sort of like you can think of it as the local parking lot, the galactic frame of reference, and stars move relative to it."
},
{
"end_time": 1463.183,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1447.534,
"text": " because stars get kicks when they are born, they are not born exactly at the frame of the galaxy, they are born in some cloud that is moving relative to that frame, or they get kicked afterwards, so they develop a characteristic speed of"
},
{
"end_time": 1491.527,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1463.183,
"text": " 20 30 kilometers per second relative to the local standard of rest but you can take the average of the local stars and just get that frame of reference okay so some stars are moving to the right some some to the left and you take the average you get to that frame of reference now does that was it rest in the local standard of rest. And only one part one part in a in five hundred of all stars"
},
{
"end_time": 1507.039,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1492.005,
"text": " are so much at rest in that frame as the muamua was. So you ask yourself, you know, what's the chance that it came from a star? It's one in 500. So that was very unusual about it. Then you ask what's the chance that it's flat?"
},
{
"end_time": 1534.701,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1507.654,
"text": " You know, we don't see objects that are 10 times longer than they are thick and they're flat. We don't see rocks like that very, you know, we don't see such things. At most it's factor of three between the long axis and the short axis. And here it was at least 10 times longer than it was wide projected on the sky based on the variation of reflected sunlight. And then it didn't have a cometary tail, but it was pushed away from the sun. So I suggested it's a thin object,"
},
{
"end_time": 1545.538,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1534.701,
"text": " Just like a light sail or a surface layer of a spacecraft that was torn apart or something artificial because we've never seen anything like it."
},
{
"end_time": 1565.555,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1546.015,
"text": " and then people said no way you know the mainstream of astronomy there was a a paper in nature magazine nature astronomy magazine a review paper saying oh mua mua is natural period explanation exclamation mark it's natural that's it there is no reason to consider other alternatives"
},
{
"end_time": 1589.053,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1565.998,
"text": " A few months later, there was a paper by a group of people saying, actually, to explain the properties of a muamua, like it was pushed away from the sun, maybe we need a cloud of dust particles like a dust bunny that is 100 times less dense than air, and it reflects sunlight, therefore it's being pushed. It's very lightweight, 100 times less dense than air."
},
{
"end_time": 1604.821,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1589.445,
"text": " And here the problem is, if it comes close to the sun, such a cloud of dust particles will get heated by hundreds of degrees, will not maintain its integrity. Okay. So then another team a few months later, and just to remind you, all of this happened after"
},
{
"end_time": 1632.995,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1604.821,
"text": " the people who were on the review paper declared it must be natural, period, let's not discuss it anymore. So then other groups of mainstream astronomers said, yeah, it is natural, but it has to be a dust bunny. No, no, no, that doesn't make sense. Okay, so it has to be a hydrogen iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen so that when it evaporates, just like a comet, we can't see the hydrogen because it's transparent."
},
{
"end_time": 1647.193,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1633.422,
"text": " And therefore it is a comet, but a comet made of material that we can't see when it evaporates. So the problem with that is hydrogen evaporates very easily, so it will not survive the journey."
},
{
"end_time": 1675.64,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1647.568,
"text": " We wrote a scientific paper about it with my colleague Feng Huang. So the people who advocated for hydrogen iceberg said, yes, that's correct. There is a problem here. It wouldn't survive very long distances in interstellar space. So then another team came along and said, oh, yeah, now we have the answer. It's a nitrogen iceberg. So everyone's cheered and said, yeah, yeah, yeah, nitrogen iceberg. Why nitrogen? Nitrogen is transparent. So just like hydrogen evaporates, nitrogen can evaporate."
},
{
"end_time": 1696.459,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1675.64,
"text": " Where do you find chunks of frozen nitrogen? Well, the surface of Pluto has solid nitrogen. So maybe there are all these exoplanets out there and they get bombarded all the time by rocks and then you get chips of those surfaces and those chips are"
},
{
"end_time": 1723.933,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1697.005,
"text": " representing of the population of objects like ʻOumuamua. The problem with that, we showed in a paper with my students, there is just not enough material in solid nitrogen to explain a large enough population such that you would see ʻOumuamua. So it just doesn't work out, the mass budget. So I say there are problems with each of these mainstream explanations, but moreover, each of them advocates"
},
{
"end_time": 1734.753,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1724.275,
"text": " For something that we've never seen before. So how can you say it must be natural period exclamation mark in a review paper?"
},
{
"end_time": 1758.37,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1735.179,
"text": " and then come back and say, oh, yeah, it was this, that or that things that we've never seen before. If it was obvious that it's natural, you wouldn't need to come up with these three explanations as published papers. These are not just people proposing it on a blog or on Twitter. These are real papers that took months for people to write. And each of these invoke something we've never seen before. Each of them has problems."
},
{
"end_time": 1783.968,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1758.78,
"text": " And I say, if it's something we've never seen before, we should leave on the table the possibility that it's artificial. But no, that is completely moved out of the table. And I say, well, that's not the scientific process. The scientific process is collecting evidence. So the Galileo project, one of the goals is, aside from the expedition to scoop the ocean floor to look for the fragments of"
},
{
"end_time": 1806.067,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1784.377,
"text": " of the first meteor, the first interstellar meteor, we are also planning a rendezvous with the next Oumuamua, so that we can collect more evidence, you know, just the way Galileo said, you know, let's get data. And if you are a philosopher that knows the answer in advance, like Oumuamua must be natural, then you say, I don't need any data."
},
{
"end_time": 1818.814,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1806.596,
"text": " But you are behaving just like the philosophers during the days of Galileo. You don't want to look through a telescope because you think you're not the answer, because you are jealous of the attention it gets, because of all kinds of reasons. I don't care what they are."
},
{
"end_time": 1838.609,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 1819.189,
"text": " Because you are an expert that worked on rocks all your life and you want everything in the sky to be rocks. That's your problem. We will try to collect data and figure it out. That's the way science is done without prejudice. And if we take a high resolution image of the next Oumuamua and see that it's a nitrogen iceberg, stop it."
},
{
"end_time": 1859.377,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 1839.053,
"text": " But let's first see, you can't say it must be natural until you see the nitrogen iceberg. Okay, so the Galileo project is designing a space mission. And then it's sort of like dating the next Tomuamua. Uh huh. Yeah, I saw a blog post on that. Yeah. So dating, you know, we have a dating app."
},
{
"end_time": 1886.357,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 1859.855,
"text": " which is the Vera Rubin Observatory. There is the legacy survey of space and time and we'll start operations in a year in Chile. That's a telescope that will have a camera with 3.2 billion pixels. Just think about it. Your cell phone has a camera of a few million pixels. Here I'm talking 3.2 billion. So that's a factor of a thousand more pixels."
},
{
"end_time": 1913.882,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 1886.817,
"text": " in a year on a telescope serving the southern sky from Chile. Every four days, it will scan the entire sky. So there is a high likelihood that every few months it will find another object like Oumuamua, sort of like a dating app. We will look at the data that comes from the pipeline of this telescope, which will be public because it's funded by the National Science Foundation. Yeah. And most of the time we will swipe to the left."
},
{
"end_time": 1943.558,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 1914.155,
"text": " We will say, no, this object is not unusual enough. But if it finds an interstellar object that is as weird as ʻOumuamua was, we might want to invest a billion dollars in sending a space mission that will come close to it because, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. And in my case, it's worth 66,000 words, the number of words in my book. I wouldn't need to write a book if we had a high resolution image. The other thing we have is the Webb Telescope. The Webb Telescope is about a million miles away from Earth."
},
{
"end_time": 1968.643,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 1944.002,
"text": " And it offers a fantastic vantage point, because you look at the object, let's say the next to Muamua from different directions, you look at it from Earth, and you look at it from the Webb Telescope. And then you can trace, it's just like having two eyes, you may ask, why do we have two eyes? We have two eyes, because then we get the third dimension, because one eye sees an object,"
},
{
"end_time": 1987.961,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 1969.07,
"text": " that could be a threat for our survival, you know, sees an object from one direction and then the second eye sees it from another direction. From that you can gauge the distance and that helps for survival. That's why we have two eyes. All those people that existed before us with one eye could not figure out the distance and the tiger would eat them."
},
{
"end_time": 2013.609,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 1988.234,
"text": " Okay, so it was important for survival to have two eyes. But in the context of the Webb Telescope, you know, we look at this object from the Webb position, which is a million miles away, and from Earth, we can pinpoint the trajectory in three dimensions of the Webb Telescope. So we can figure out if there are any forces other than gravity acting on the object, if it's propelled by something other than gravity,"
},
{
"end_time": 2042.159,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2013.609,
"text": " And if there is no commentary tale, you know, maybe it's something else. And also the web telescope can look at it in the infrared and infer the composition. So we will get much more data in with the help of the web telescope. And then the third branch, just to finish the answer to your question, the third branch of the Galileo project has to do with the report that came out of the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines,"
},
{
"end_time": 2062.568,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2042.637,
"text": " to the U.S. Congress a year ago, on June 2021, and that led to the establishment of a new office in government. They used to refer to these objects that they cannot identify as unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP."
},
{
"end_time": 2078.029,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2063.029,
"text": " Congress just established a new piece of legislation that they would like to pass, and they suggest that these objects are also transmedium. They go from water to air to space,"
},
{
"end_time": 2100.452,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2078.029,
"text": " So, you know, apparently there is some classified data that leads them in that direction. But also NASA decided to establish a committee that will evaluate whether scientific research will be funded on these objects. We are already doing it with the Galileo project. So what happened was that when this report was delivered to Congress,"
},
{
"end_time": 2129.104,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2100.879,
"text": " I suggested to NASA because Bill Nelson said scientists should get engaged. So I immediately contacted the person under him, Thomas Zurbuchen, who is responsible for science at NASA. And I said that it will be my pleasure and privilege to help NASA and make his boss happy. And he said, why don't you send a white paper? I submitted the white paper suggesting a research program."
},
{
"end_time": 2151.732,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2129.753,
"text": " And I never heard back. And then a year later, in June 2022, they announced without me knowing that they have a this this committee that so that was triggered by this white paper that they sent. But then"
},
{
"end_time": 2170.776,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2152.227,
"text": " And now they regard me as having a conflict of interest, because in the meantime, you know, around the same time of June, July 2021, a few multi billionaires came to the porch of my home, they were inspired by my book extraterrestrial, and they gave me $3 million to establish the Galileo project."
},
{
"end_time": 2195.998,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2171.203,
"text": " And so at the end of exactly a month after the ODNI report to Congress, we announced the Galileo project. And the third branch of the Galileo project is trying to build a suite of instruments. It's already on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory right now. We are testing a suite of instruments that take video of the sky in the infrared, the optical band, audio band,"
},
{
"end_time": 2220.64,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2196.613,
"text": " and analyzes it with artificial intelligence algorithms. And we are testing it in the coming months. And hopefully, by 2023, we'll start collecting data at places where there are reports on these objects. And then, you know, that's the third branch of the Galileo projects, we are already doing this research. And we should see it's a fishing expedition, we should see if we find"
},
{
"end_time": 2241.237,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2221.254,
"text": " natural objects only, or maybe some human made objects. Natural are, you know, like, for example, birds or bugs or meteors or, or lightnings. Human made objects are drones, airplanes, satellites, and so weather balloons."
},
{
"end_time": 2268.831,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2241.664,
"text": " But the question is whether there is something else. And on November 10th, 2021, I was invited to a forum, the Ignatius Forum at the Washington National Cathedral, together with Jeff Bezos, Bill Nelson, and Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. So when I was in the green room with Avril Haines, I approached her and said,"
},
{
"end_time": 2295.64,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2269.224,
"text": " What do you think? What is your gut feeling about the nature of these objects that you reported about? Because she had a bachelor's degree in theoretical physics from the University of Chicago. So, you know, she understands my language as a physicist. And I said, what do you think they are? And she said, I don't know. And I think, frankly, you know, the government, the intelligence agencies, they are not a scientific organization."
},
{
"end_time": 2301.903,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2296.271,
"text": " I think it's time for scientists to engage because the sky is not classified."
},
{
"end_time": 2328.951,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2302.346,
"text": " It's only the sensors that the government is using that are classified, and that's why the data is classified. So the Galileo project will try to break this open in the sense of you have all these non-professional people reporting about things where the images are fuzzy, they're anecdotal, we don't know the truth, and then you have the classified data that we don't have access to. So the Galileo project will try to establish"
},
{
"end_time": 2347.142,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2328.951,
"text": " data stream that is open to the public. The way science is done, everyone will be able to access the data and it will be of high quality. We will know exactly what our instruments are doing, unlike those cameras on the jittery cockpits of fighter jets."
},
{
"end_time": 2375.401,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2347.619,
"text": " airplanes, you know, that we don't know exactly what they were doing at the time. So all of this is to bring the subject to the mainstream of science, because, you know, science should address that the main task of science is to address questions that are of interest to society are of interest to the government. And it's just, it feels just inappropriate that this subject is ridiculed and pushed aside from the mainstream of science."
},
{
"end_time": 2391.613,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2376.271,
"text": " Okay, so let me see if I got this correct. There are three branches or three goals in the New Year term for the Galileo project. So one is to go and look in the ocean floor for that meteorite that you mentioned initially. So that's CNEOS I believe in 2014."
},
{
"end_time": 2421.766,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2391.903,
"text": " Okay, then you have the search for ʻOumuamua-like objects, and that, I believe you mentioned, a Chilean observatory? Yes, the Vera Rubin Observatory, yes. Okay, okay, so that's not the Galileo projects, that's what you would rent out, is that how it works? Well, this is, yeah, the dating app. Think about it as it will suggest objects of interest that came from outside the solar system that we can follow up on either by using existing telescopes to look at them or sending a space mission that will take a close-up photograph. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2442.619,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2422.039,
"text": " And then also you would get some other form of verification from the James Webb Telescope. Now, I don't know how that works. Are you allowed to just say, hey, James Webb Telescope people, can you tell me what you saw at this point? Or do you tell them, hey, James Webb Telescope people, can you now look in this direction? Like, how does that work? Do you have to rent it? Yeah, actually,"
},
{
"end_time": 2468.114,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2443.302,
"text": " If we announce the discovery of another interstellar object, especially if it looks like Oumuamua in terms of being weird, I will not need to do much because usually there is some discretionary time that belongs to the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute or other people have some time that they will be happy to donate."
},
{
"end_time": 2495.998,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2468.114,
"text": " for this because despite all of all you hear from people who are not practitioners of science you you see them writing tweets or writing blogs basically very aggressively attacking the possibility that such an object is of interest and saying oh it must be natural we've seen a lot of these despite what they say these are people that are not professionals i think the scientific community once we find more objects of this type"
},
{
"end_time": 2521.988,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2496.442,
"text": " It will be a very important question to figure out their nature. Okay. Because just think about it. If there are hydrogen icebergs, you know, those are not produced in planetary systems. Those are potentially produced in molecular clouds. We've never seen a chunk of frozen hydrogen produced by nature. That will be a great discovery. We've never seen a chunk of frozen nitrogen."
},
{
"end_time": 2540.93,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2522.432,
"text": " in the solar system and the claim is no no no you will not find it in the solar system because these chunks were produced in the distant past and none of them survived and therefore there is nothing in the solar system but what we find are chunks of frozen nitrogen coming into the solar system from other planetaries. That's the sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 2569.957,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2540.93,
"text": " popular idea by some people right now for the origin of ʻOumuamua. Okay, suppose we find that it's a nitrogenized, but that would also be an important revelation because nobody expected it before ʻOumuamua. Nobody. Okay. And I say it may not be either of them and it may not be a dust, but even if, okay, suppose we see, you know, imagine those clouds of dust particles floating around and that would be a revelation. It's something completely new that we've never expected."
},
{
"end_time": 2574.838,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2570.282,
"text": " so in any case it would be a major discovery and therefore i think."
},
{
"end_time": 2602.108,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2575.162,
"text": " that the web telescope time will be allocated almost instantly to look at these things. And I will, you know, in the worst case, I will apply for time together with colleagues, but I don't think it will be necessary. I think there will be enough curious astronomers that would like to figure out what these things are. And of course, once we observe a few of those, then we would have a better clue. And, you know, whatever it is, it would be fun to figure it out. And I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2631.937,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2602.688,
"text": " Even those that advocate for natural origin would like to demonstrate it with data. So even though they are biased, you know, it's just like taking those philosophers at the time of Galileo and telling them, look through the telescope, you know, we are not telling you what you would see, just look through them. They refused to do that back then. But now I think we live at a different time. And once we have the data from web that nobody can censor, by the way, it's not as if you can put the people that constructed the web"
},
{
"end_time": 2656.544,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2632.278,
"text": " in-house arrest. That is not, the data will be public no matter what. So it will make no sense to ignore the data. So astronomers will look at it just to demonstrate that the objects are natural. That's okay. They can think whatever they want, but eventually it will be clear if it's not natural. So I'm not saying all the objects must be artificial."
},
{
"end_time": 2678.166,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2656.544,
"text": " You know, it will be just like going on the beach, you know, most of the time you find rocks and seashells that are naturally produced. The solar system contains a lot of those, but every now and then you may bump into a plastic bottle. And that's, you know, those outliers are what we should be looking for and checking if they exist."
},
{
"end_time": 2697.005,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2679.07,
"text": " Okay, so even if another emuamua object is found and people think that it's natural, it's still abnormal and so they would have an incentive to look for it because nitrogen or a block of nitrogen, a block of hydrogen, a block of a dust bunny of some sort is aberrant. Exactly. I should tell you that this is the third"
},
{
"end_time": 2722.278,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2697.449,
"text": " phase of a three stage story. The story started about a century ago, around 1925. That was when Cecilia Payne Capashkin was a young scientist who wanted to have the first PhD doctoral degree in astronomy at"
},
{
"end_time": 2752.432,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2722.688,
"text": " Radcliffe Harvard back then. She was at the Radcliffe Institute but then she wanted to get a degree in astronomy and that was not possible. She was the first one. Now her PhD back in 1925 was about the Sun and that was just around after quantum mechanics was invented and so forth and she realized that based on"
},
{
"end_time": 2780.094,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 2752.841,
"text": " The spectrum of emission from the sun that the surface of the sun is made mostly of hydrogen. Now at the time people thought, oh, you know, we know what the earth is made of. So the sun is made of the same stuff as the earth. Okay. And that was the prevailing paradigm. Everyone believed in that. So she presented her thesis saying, actually, it looks like the sun, at least the surface of the sun is made mostly of hydrogen."
},
{
"end_time": 2808.968,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 2780.862,
"text": " and on her PhD thesis committee was the most prominent astronomer at the time that was an expert on stars. He was the director of Princeton University Observatory, Henry Norris Russell. Okay. And he said to her, that's impossible. Take this statement out of your thesis. It makes no sense to argue that the sun, everyone knows that the sun has the same composition as the earth."
},
{
"end_time": 2838.37,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 2809.804,
"text": " So she was a young female scientist at the time, decided, okay, well, if the expert tells me that, you know, otherwise I might not get a PhD, she took it out. He dissuaded her. And then for four years, he tried to analyze his own data and published a paper four years later, saying that Cecilia was right. Okay, indeed, the sun is made mostly of hydrogen."
},
{
"end_time": 2867.09,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 2838.677,
"text": " Okay, now the funny part of the story, and that's also an important lesson, is that about 80 years later there was a visiting committee to the Princeton University Department of Astrophysical Sciences, okay, and the chair of that department at Princeton said, we have a very prestigious"
},
{
"end_time": 2895.623,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 2867.91,
"text": " history of the department. If you go back in time, there was the famous astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who discovered that the sun is made of hydrogen. So then there was a member of that committee who corrected him and said, look, it was not Henry Norris Russell, it was actually Cecilia Penko-Poschkin, and he tried to argue otherwise. And the lesson of this story is,"
},
{
"end_time": 2920.282,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 2896.067,
"text": " that history depends on who you write, who writes it. But anyway, so that's step one, when we realize we thought that we see things in our backyard here on Earth, and everything else like the sun is made of the same stuff. Well, mistake. Okay, so a young person named Cecilia Penko-Pashkin, who later became the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, realized it first."
},
{
"end_time": 2947.79,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 2920.896,
"text": " Then the second part of the story is in 1933, about a decade later, Fritz Wicke, young in his 30s, realized that clusters of galaxies are made mostly of stuff that we don't find in the solar system. He called it dark matter. Okay, so for 40 years, this subject was ridiculed, including by colleagues within his department at Caltech."
},
{
"end_time": 2961.186,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 2948.387,
"text": " Pasadena where he was the professor that he was not his view was not popular. People just ridiculed it said doesn't make any sense that most of the matter in the universe is of a type that you don't find in the solar system."
},
{
"end_time": 2988.865,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 2961.613,
"text": " Okay, once again, the same story, just like with Earth and the sun. Now we are talking about the universe and the solar system. And by now, if you ask any student or postdoc, they would say, of course, no question about it. 82% of the matter in the universe is made of stuff that is not ordinary matter that you find in the source. We haven't detected it yet. We don't find it in the solar system. We don't know what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3019.275,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 2989.531,
"text": " It's dark matter. Okay, we just gave it a label. So just again, the lesson from this is for 40 years, this was ridiculed until the 1970s. And now everyone says yes, of course, but we still don't know what it is. Now I say here is the third part of this story. Over the past decade, we found the first objects that came from outside the solar system, just like going to your backyard,"
},
{
"end_time": 3048.166,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3019.787,
"text": " and thinking oh yeah anything i find in my backyard so far i found from my backyard was rocks therefore if something comes from the street it will also be a rock but then you find a beach ball you find a tennis ball you say no no no no it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before and my point is just be open-minded maybe you have a neighbor maybe these objects are different than rocks why is that such a"
},
{
"end_time": 3077.773,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3048.626,
"text": " an extraordinary claim to say that other exoplanets may have developed intelligence the way Earth did and resulted in spaceship or some equipment being thrown into space that may visit us. Why is that so extraordinary? So my colleagues say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I say in response, and by the way, this is a quote of Carl Sagan from the 70s."
},
{
"end_time": 3105.043,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3078.2,
"text": " I say that makes no sense because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say we don't need to, everything is rocks. Everything is natural. That just the way that this nature astronomy review paper said it must be natural period explanation. Now let's forget about it. Let's move on. If you say that you don't look for evidence. If you don't admit that the emperor has no clothes, if you don't say that, then you don't even search. You don't check."
},
{
"end_time": 3120.759,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3105.367,
"text": " You say, well, it's a rock of some type of the very unusual type. Forget about it. There are more important pressing items like dark matter. But fundamentally, it may be much more important than dark matter, because if we find that dark matter is super symmetric,"
},
{
"end_time": 3147.073,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3121.067,
"text": " particles, it will have zero impact on our daily lives. If we find that there is a smarter kid on our block, it will change the future of humanity. So I say, how can you ignore that possibility? And the point is that, you know, we should be guided by evidence. That's the key to being humble, being modest, saying, you know, we don't know the answers,"
},
{
"end_time": 3162.807,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3147.449,
"text": " Let's just figure them out. Let's allow nature to educate us. That's something else that's important that I don't think is talked about much that when someone dismisses something because it's quote unquote, improbable, it's not simply a probabilistic argument. There's also a value judgment there. And the reason is,"
},
{
"end_time": 3185.299,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3163.2,
"text": " when i'm driving along a country road and there's a hill i can't see the cars that are coming up and let's say i've passed 50 of them and there's no cars it's empty i still slow down at the top of the hill even though it's improbable there's another car because it's important that i don't hit someone or that i don't get hit and so even if it's improbable that it's life the importance of it is so high that"
},
{
"end_time": 3207.176,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3185.913,
"text": " That needs to be taken into account as well. Exactly. That was Blaise Pascal's argument why we should discuss the possibility of God because the implications are so great. And my point in response to Carl Sagan's quote is that extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding."
},
{
"end_time": 3233.114,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3207.619,
"text": " And, you know, we invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter over the past several decades. The most recent attempt was using the Large Hadron Collider that cost $10 billion to find the lightest supersymmetric particle as a candidate for the dark matter. And people said, you know, it will be found. It's around the corner. String theory was established on the foundation of supersymmetry."
},
{
"end_time": 3258.422,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3233.114,
"text": " And there are some very natural set of parameters for supersymmetry that everyone believed in and awards were given to people who suggested that and so forth. And then the Large Hadron Collider at the cost of $10 billion didn't find it. There is no supersymmetry at the natural set of parameters. There was no dark metaparticle that we discovered so far."
},
{
"end_time": 3275.913,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3258.763,
"text": " And so I say, you know, if we were to invest billions of dollars in the search for equipment from other civilizations in outer space, and we would spend billions of dollars for decades and not find anything,"
},
{
"end_time": 3305.145,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3276.971,
"text": " then we would be exactly at the same point as dark meta searches are right now. So why didn't anyone say supersymmetry is an extraordinary claim? There is no extraordinary evidence for it. Therefore, we should not fund the search. Why didn't anyone? No, it's legitimate to search for supersymmetry because there was a community that agreed that it's a good idea. Okay. So we invested the billions of dollars. We didn't find it."
},
{
"end_time": 3331.886,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3305.486,
"text": " Does anyone take responsibility for that? No, people say, well, that's the nature of science. You imagine something, you don't find it. So now, why do we block funding for something that we as a civilization already did in terms of sending equipment out of the solar system? Why do we block funding for the search for something similar that was initiated by"
},
{
"end_time": 3361.63,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3332.346,
"text": " a duplicate of ourselves because, you know, the dice was rolled tens of billions of times in the Milky Way galaxy, the dice of intelligence. We know that somewhere between a few percent to a hundred percent of all the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly the same separation. That's from the Kepler satellite. We already know that. So what we find in the solar system is not an extremely rare situation. And I say, okay, you roll the dice of intelligence,"
},
{
"end_time": 3390.162,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3362.022,
"text": " so many times tens of billions it's quite possible and most stars from billions of years before the sun we should allow for this possibility to me it doesn't sound more far-fetched or more speculative than the lightest supersymmetric particle being the dark matter okay but on that front we invested billions of dollars in the search for the lightest supersymmetric part on the front of searching for what we are doing from another"
},
{
"end_time": 3416.271,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3390.486,
"text": " kid on our cosmic block, we didn't spend anything from federal funding. So the Galileo project is funded by private donations. And we haven't really engaged scientifically in that search. So I say, there is a mismatch between the current academic approach to this subject. And moreover, you may say, Oh, scientists are conservative. I say, how, how is that possible?"
},
{
"end_time": 3442.363,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3416.578,
"text": " to imagine that scientists are conservative because you have a whole community of theoretical physicists that for four decades are working on extra dimensions, on the multiverse, on string theory, ideas that have no foundation in experimental verification. There is no evidence for those ideas, yet they are part of the mainstream. And on the other hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 3469.155,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3442.841,
"text": " We have some evidence that we exist as an intelligent species. We have evidence that we send out equipment that will exit the solar system. We have evidence that a planet like the Earth around a star like the Sun is very common. You know, there are billions, if not tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And many of these stars from billions of years before the Sun"
},
{
"end_time": 3499.104,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3469.906,
"text": " So how can we even argue that this is a very speculative idea to imagine that Albert Einstein was not the smartest scientist that ever existed since the Big Bang? I mean, that makes no sense. It's very likely that there was a scientist smarter than Albert Einstein that lived a billion years ago on an exoplanet. And the civilization who benefited from the discoveries of that scientist may have sent probes"
},
{
"end_time": 3525.981,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3500.043,
"text": " Furthermore, there's the simulation hypothesis, which presupposes something like another intelligent life. Why is it that certain mainstream ideas, like you mentioned, extra dimensions and many worlds and even simulation and so on is the simulation is more philosophical than it is physics based. But why is it that these ideas are taken more seriously? However, the ideas that"
},
{
"end_time": 3554.787,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3526.203,
"text": " There's extraterrestrial intelligent life that has visited us, whether or not it exists. I think many or perhaps most scientists would say yes, but whether or not they've visited us or continue to visit us to this day is something different. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that they don't like that idea? It's clearly because there's a stigma. So why is that stigma there? Yeah, the answer is very simple. Humans enjoy ideas that flatter their ego."
},
{
"end_time": 3585.401,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3555.572,
"text": " okay so if the idea says we are at the center of the universe that's great we can adapt it for a thousand years we can put Galileo in house arrest and refuse to look at the evidence why because it flatters our ego to think that we are at the center of the universe that god considers us special unique and privileged okay so then"
},
{
"end_time": 3612.5,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3586.049,
"text": " You find evidence after a while, even though you lock Galileo, eventually it turns out that we are not at the center of the universe. Eventually it turns out that we came to the cosmic stage just at the end. So if you come to a play, you know, 13.8 billion years after the cosmic play started, just at the end, and you are not at the center of the stage, then guess what? You are not a primary actor."
},
{
"end_time": 3636.118,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3612.892,
"text": " okay and you better search for other actors to tell you what the play is about okay but that goes against the human ego that's not flattering so what do you do you say okay i'm not at the center of the play but there are no other actors therefore i am important despite everything and i am the smartest"
},
{
"end_time": 3656.954,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3636.527,
"text": " Now I can understand that approach because when my daughters were young, they were at home and they thought that they are the smartest in the world until we took them to the kindergarten. And on the first day in the kindergarten, they had a psychological shock to realize that there is a smarter kid."
},
{
"end_time": 3686.578,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3657.432,
"text": " in their neighborhood. Now I say how can you avoid going to the kindergarten? Very easily. You just ridicule on social media any possible intriguing evidence that that's not the case. The way the philosophers behaved at the time of Galileo. You hope that nobody else will pay attention to Galileo. Why? Because you put him in house arrest so that nobody can listen. You don't look through the telescope and you suppress the information as much as you can and you say there is nothing there."
},
{
"end_time": 3704.48,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3687.363,
"text": " Forget about it exclamation mark period forget about it you say that you put him in house arrest or nobody would listen you think that would cure the threat to your ego but it doesn't because eventually someone else finds the evidence and reality is whatever it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3734.77,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3704.991,
"text": " If you were to ask those philosophers to design a space mission that would reach Mars, they would never get to their destination because they thought that Mars moves around the Earth. But reality is not like that. You know, you can launch a spacecraft and it will never reach the destination if you have the wrong ideas. So by today's standards, what Galileo said was trivial because you can look at the Earth from a distance, you can go to Mars and you realize Galileo was right. Okay, there is no way these philosophers"
},
{
"end_time": 3747.619,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3735.265,
"text": " You know that. Okay, but for a while they were able to dominate public opinion, to be popular and to maintain their grip on the false notion of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 3773.899,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3748.029,
"text": " So that's a tendency, that's the ability of humans to basically go on Twitter and make a lot of noise about something that they don't like. Now, it may work in politics, you know, in politics, things are, you know, you don't have hard facts sometimes. So you can argue whatever you want, you can get a lot of likes, and you feel good about yourself. But in science,"
},
{
"end_time": 3785.094,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3774.309,
"text": " What does he want to adapt to reality you better pay attention to evidence so i say when there is something intriguing that doesn't line up with what you expected."
},
{
"end_time": 3812.978,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 3785.708,
"text": " Your duty as a scientist is to collect more evidence. Your duty is to say, well, maybe the emperor has no clothes. Maybe what we think is incorrect. And the only way to find out is to admit that possibility. To admit the possibility that the dark matter may not be weakly interacting massive particle because if you do fund the Large Hadron Collider and it doesn't find it, you know that your previous notion was incorrect. That's the way science makes progress."
},
{
"end_time": 3837.824,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 3812.978,
"text": " It checks possibilities by looking for evidence. And if you, on the other hand, say you know the answer in advance, you may be just like those philosophers. Just to give you an example, this expedition to Papua New Guinea gained a lot of traction recently because the NBC had a beautiful video about it. And the NPR reported about it. And then"
},
{
"end_time": 3868.66,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 3838.899,
"text": " As soon as the NPR story broke out, just yesterday broke out for the second time, some people had negative things. They injected poison into the discussion by saying... Some people? Yeah, some people. And many of them are not practicing astronomers. And so I don't want even to get into the issue of what their qualifications are. But the point of the matter is,"
},
{
"end_time": 3898.763,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 3869.855,
"text": " You know, this expedition is funded from donations. It's done by a team of scientists. And all we're doing is going to a place where a meteor disintegrated and trying to check what the fragments are made of. Like, why would that bother anyone? Why would anyone resist that other than the instinct that the philosophers had at the time of Galileo? What I'm trying to say is four centuries later, we still see the same phenomenon where people"
},
{
"end_time": 3905.981,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 3899.309,
"text": " with very strong conviction, oppose the gathering of evidence and data."
},
{
"end_time": 3929.701,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 3906.391,
"text": " And why are we going to Papua New Guinea? Why? Because this object was tougher than iron. There is evidence for that. Because the government measured the properties of the meteor, and it looks like it came from outside the solar system. So it was an outlier. That's all. So it's all guided. You know, I didn't dream this object at night. It was not a subject of a science fiction story."
},
{
"end_time": 3951.476,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 3929.701,
"text": " It was evidence the government provided that allows you using the laws of physics to figure out that this is an outlier that came from outside the source. That's all. It motivates us to examine what its composition is. So why wouldn't everyone cheer up and say, great, let's figure out what this object is. Let's find more evidence. Why would it bother people?"
},
{
"end_time": 3972.312,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 3951.476,
"text": " This is happening and the only way i can see it is first jealousy that this project gets attention okay so whenever there is a flower blooming above the grass level people try to step on the flower. Because it bothers them that there is something different rising above the grass level they would rather see only grass."
},
{
"end_time": 4001.084,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 3972.756,
"text": " okay so that's one tendency that out of jealousy they don't like the fact that there is a flower blooming above the grass level okay so whenever there is a flower they would step on it so that's a reason for toxicity you know like in social media but a second thing is prejudice and we don't you know people find it uh offensive to consider the possibility that we are not the smartest kid on the cosmic block it really bothers people because"
},
{
"end_time": 4013.285,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4001.51,
"text": " You know, just imagine that. Imagine that we see the 100th version of the iPhone coming from space. And it does magic."
},
{
"end_time": 4041.561,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4013.797,
"text": " Sort of like a cave dweller finding a cell phone or going to New York City and seeing all the gadgets there. The cave dweller would never be able to reverse engineer these things. It would look like magic, but it would be a blow to the ego of the cave dweller who is used to hunting animals or playing with rocks. So obviously, if the cave dweller finds a cell phone, the first impression would be, oh, it's a rock of a type that I've never seen before."
},
{
"end_time": 4066.664,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4042.432,
"text": " Okay, just like Oumuamua is a rock of a type that we've never seen before. So that's the first impression because you're used to a vocabulary that, you know, you play with rocks all your life. This is a rock of a type that I've never seen before. But then you start realizing that this gadget does things that the rock doesn't. Like if you press a button, it records your voice or records your image. So then it will change your perception. And eventually you would realize there is magic here."
},
{
"end_time": 4095.708,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4066.664,
"text": " That something that goes beyond what I was able to accomplish in my life of hunting and gathering. Okay, so the cave dweller will realize that. And for us, the way to realize it is that we will figure out that something is not natural, doesn't look like the composition of a natural object, or that it behaves in ways that go beyond our technologies. Okay, so I say we can follow the same learning exercise. We can"
},
{
"end_time": 4121.51,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4096.305,
"text": " By getting more evidence, we can get out of our comfort zone. But most people prefer to stay in their comfort zone, just like the philosophers prefer to stay in their comfort zone of us being at the center of the world. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 4150.879,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4122.005,
"text": " I see those as the same. The first one, which is the flower that stands above the grass and wanting to stomp it out out of jealousy. And then the second one out of wanting to be the most brightest kid on the block."
},
{
"end_time": 4174.309,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4151.442,
"text": " Because both point out one's own insufficiencies as far as one thinks that it's almost a view of oneself. If I was to correct or if one was to correct, although I'm speaking to myself, my own insecurities and my own lowly view of myself, then I wouldn't be so quick to criticize others and also maybe see that something else being more"
},
{
"end_time": 4201.578,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4175.247,
"text": " valuable means that I can use that as an aim so I can see it as a positive rather than a detriment that it doesn't shine such a negative light on me or shine no light because all the spotlight is elsewhere. Yeah there is a simple remedy to that and let me just mention what is the solution? The solution is to look at kids because kids don't know much about the world okay so they learn from experience so if they see an object they go and check it"
},
{
"end_time": 4231.391,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4202.346,
"text": " And an adult would sit and say, oh, I know what the subject is, forget about it. But a kid would go there and a kid often takes risks in this learning process, you know, because they're not doing any calculations about what the risk might involve and what kind of danger might be there and so forth. So they are much more innovative in the way they explore the world. They go to the object and touch it and they move it around and they play with it. And"
},
{
"end_time": 4255.384,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4231.493,
"text": " You know, the advantage of this approach is that you may discover something that you didn't expect. Whereas if you think that you are the expert, that you know everything that you will find based on your past knowledge. And if you pretend to have the image of an adult, you know, where you know everything, and you never show weaknesses as being unfamiliar with something,"
},
{
"end_time": 4273.831,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4255.879,
"text": " Then you lose the edge of finding new things, okay, discovering new things. So the remedy to the problems we discussed before is to behave more like kids. You know, when I see adults, very often I try to figure out how, what is the kid behind this adult?"
},
{
"end_time": 4287.142,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4274.224,
"text": " Because we all pretend to be much more than we actually are. And fundamentally, you know, if you look at what we know and what we don't know about the universe, we are still like classmates in the first day of class."
},
{
"end_time": 4316.032,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4287.551,
"text": " There is so much we don't know, you know, so many scientists got awards just for what you may regard as accounting. You know, they just account for how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much dark energy there is in the universe, but we still don't know what it is. You're just saying, okay, there is, you know, a certain 25% of the cosmic mass budget is dark matter, 5% is ordinary matter, 70% is dark energy."
},
{
"end_time": 4342.875,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4316.613,
"text": " Okay, it sounds very impressive and a lot of awards and prizes are given to the people who pinpoint the exact accounting, but we still don't know the substance. Okay, so there is so much we don't know, and we should be humble. It's a sense of humility. You see, the exploration of the unknown is just like spirituality. You know, you are exploring something bigger than you. So you should not put yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 4350.913,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4343.49,
"text": " Up from that's what our ego wants to do to put yourself as the center point. But if you know that you're in a"
},
{
"end_time": 4381.288,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4351.34,
"text": " a learning experience like a kid. If you just say, I don't know much, I just want to figure it out. If that is the attitude rather than say, I know a lot and I want to portray an image so that I will get more honours and awards and more recognition and so forth. The way adults do their calculations, they portray an image that they know much more than they actually know. If you do that, then you are missing the opportunity of discovering the truth. And a kid on the other hand admits, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4408.029,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4381.681,
"text": " The kid doesn't know much. And therefore, you know, the kid takes risks that the kid admits when things are not clear. So if we adapt that approach to doing science, I think there is the rate by which we make discoveries will be accelerated. And there is a simple reason for that, that the intellectual climate will not be about demonstrating how smart you are, but will be about demonstrating what"
},
{
"end_time": 4417.944,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4408.814,
"text": " what we learn, you know, and, and it's a different task because you can demonstrate that you are smart by asking a question of"
},
{
"end_time": 4443.933,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4418.626,
"text": " How many angels can dance on the tip of a pin? Okay, that sounds like a fascinating question. We don't know if angels exist and whether they dance on the tip of a pin, but you can ask this question. Suppose there are angels and they dance on the tip of a pin, how many can do it? And then you can say, okay, let me generalize this equation in 10 dimensions and do the calculation in 10 dimensions and develop your very sophisticated math. And people say, wow,"
},
{
"end_time": 4455.998,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4444.565,
"text": " wow that's amazing how was that possible to solve the equations of angels dancing on the tip of a pin in 10 dimensions that's really exciting and then they would say oh yeah but actually this is not completely"
},
{
"end_time": 4484.189,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4456.391,
"text": " you know, undeserving the fact that we dedicated decades to asking this question, because we can use the mathematics to solve that question. We can use it in the context of understanding quantum chromodynamics, you know, like we can apply it to QCD, to the study of nuclei. Okay, so you develop some mathematics for one question, you say, oh, now I can use that mathematics for another question. Well, I say that's"
},
{
"end_time": 4511.544,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4484.189,
"text": " That's legitimate, that's good, but that's not the work of a physicist. A physicist is supposed to ask questions that have to do with reality. And the way you learn about reality is by experiments and not by intellectual gymnastics. And the reason that you can be engaged just in intellectual gymnastics without any contact with reality is if the motivation to show that you are smart. If that is the motivation, then you don't care about experiments."
},
{
"end_time": 4541.305,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4511.92,
"text": " And that, unfortunately, is much more prevalent right now in the theoretical physics community, showing that you are smart and doing mathematical gymnastics. And I say, you know, that's a distraction from the main objective of physics, which is to describe reality. And why is that important to understand reality? Because we live in that reality and we have to adapt to it. OK, so in order to adapt to reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 4569.172,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4541.8,
"text": " We need to understand it. We need to know what environment we live in. You know, we need to know if there is climate change so that we can develop policy for that. We need to know if the earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the earth in order to develop spaceship that will go into space in the right direction and will move correctly. So all of these, if we want to cure diseases, if we want to cure the pandemic, you know, we need to understand how viruses operate"
},
{
"end_time": 4592.858,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4569.172,
"text": " and develop an mRNA vaccine for them. So all of this has to do with us figuring out what reality is and adapting to it. And it's irresponsible of us to pursue a different goal, which is to elevate our ego, to boost our ego, to brag in our intellectual gymnastics, because that may have nothing to do with the reality that we're trying to understand as physicists."
},
{
"end_time": 4618.114,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4593.473,
"text": " Okay, have many technical questions. So but let me just briefly get to one comment. So would you be okay then if theoretical physicists change their name from theoretical physicists to pure mathematicians? Oh, yeah, still be a problem. It's purely a categorization problem. No problem whatsoever. It's a cut or, you know, if a plumber comes to my home, okay, and says, I'm a plumber, then I would ask the plumber to fix the toilet."
},
{
"end_time": 4648.797,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4619.258,
"text": " Now suppose the plumber will tell me, no, that's too difficult of a task. I cannot do it. So I would say, OK, can you fix my faucet? You know, it's not working. And the plumber would say, oh, that's also too difficult. Then I would say, you're not a plumber. So I ask string theorists, I say, OK, you are working on the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. I have two problems for you, just like the toilet and the faucet. One problem is what happened around the Big Bang."
},
{
"end_time": 4673.66,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4649.07,
"text": " Can you tell me? And they say, no, that's too difficult. We can't really solve that problem. So I say, okay, forget about the Big Bang. Let's discuss the singularity at the center of a black hole. We know that we need quantum mechanics and gravity for that. Can you solve that problem? And they say, no, it's too difficult. So I say, okay, well, so change your job definition, because unless you solve problems,"
},
{
"end_time": 4692.125,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4674.36,
"text": " You cannot call yourself a physicist. Problems about objects in reality, like the Big Bang, we know the universe started from a hot, dense phase. And if you use Einstein's equations, you get to a singularity. So curing that singularity is a fundamental question that currently we don't"
},
{
"end_time": 4718.541,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4693.302,
"text": " have a solution to because you know we don't have a quantum theory of gravity but if string theory is you should first offer the solution before claiming that you're solving quantum gravity okay and the same about singularities of black holes so all i'm saying is the job definition matters because people get paid to be plumbers you see you can't just say that you're yeah okay i understand"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.623,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4718.763,
"text": " Also, there's this claim that hey, in pure physics, or sorry, not pure physics, theoretical physics and pure math, that eventually today's abstractions are tomorrow's applied. For example, in string theory, there's plenty of applications to condensed matter physics. However, and that comes about decades later or so. However, I find that to be a dubious claim. And the reason is that if you look at"
},
{
"end_time": 4768.37,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 4741.067,
"text": " what's applied now it almost certainly has a theoretical origin but if you look at the totality of theoretical work it's not as if all of it's applied like i haven't seen an analysis done on string theory let's say let's look at all the string theory papers how much of it has been applied to condensed matter physics or seen even pure mathematics so it's easy to look back with hindsight and say oh yes cryptography yes we used combinatorics that we thought would never have any applications from the 1940s and 50s but then it did"
},
{
"end_time": 4797.858,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 4768.37,
"text": " okay yeah but you have a survivorship bias there so you can't just fund research no matter what thinking that hopefully it will have some application because in the past anything that was applied was theoretical before because you have to look at the other direction too and i don't know if an analysis has been done no so i have no issue whatsoever with pure math i think that's a very valuable occupation but you have to define your work as pure math that that's perfectly fine and then universities can decide how big the departments of pure math would be"
},
{
"end_time": 4821.101,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 4798.183,
"text": " But you can't have people that practice pure math for a century, you know, which is the lifetime of a person in the physics. So the question, there is a characteristic time scale. If you do pure math, let's say for a decade or two before it actually is compared to experiments, that was the traditional practice of physics. But if you do pure math for the entirety of your career,"
},
{
"end_time": 4850.606,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 4821.51,
"text": " And then we will never know during your lifetime, whether it's relevant to reality or not, I say, you know, it's, that's what pure math is all about, that you never know how, because even pure math by mathematicians is applied eventually in some context of physics, right? But the way to define pure math is as ideas that are not necessarily applied to the real world, and describe the real world,"
},
{
"end_time": 4862.619,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 4851.067,
"text": " During the lifetime of the practitioners, not necessarily. And there are mathematicians that invented the mathematical concepts that were applied shortly after they invented them and they were mathematicians. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 4882.039,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 4862.961,
"text": " So the distinction is that physics is engaged with reality through experiments. And if there is a subject on which no experimental data comes our way for a very long time, there are many other subjects that we can work on. Doesn't mean that we should insist working on something that we have no data on."
},
{
"end_time": 4908.951,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 4882.039,
"text": " perhaps we should wait for that data in the context of quantum gravities waiting for example for gravitational waves to be detected from the early universe or learning something about black hole singularities that we didn't know about but until that data comes along we have no guidance and my point is if we look at 100 years back quantum mechanics was discovered by experiments nobody expected it in fact in around 1900 a very"
},
{
"end_time": 4937.858,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 4908.951,
"text": " famous, one of the most distinguished experimental physicists, Michelson, who actually did the Michelson-Morley experiment that led to Einstein's special theory of relativity. He gave a speech at the inauguration of a laboratory in Chicago, and he said that from now on, you know, most of physics is solved. That was 1900. Most of physics is solved, and the only thing that remains is"
},
{
"end_time": 4967.176,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 4938.319,
"text": " measurements of the fundamental constants in physics to the sixth decimal point. And how wrong was he? Because five years later Albert Einstein came with special theory of relativity that revised our notions of space and time, then general theory of relativity that revised our notion of gravity, and then quantum mechanics, a completely unexpected discovery, okay, that reality is not what we expect from classical physics. Just to show you that"
},
{
"end_time": 4978.08,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 4967.5,
"text": " Without experimental guidance that led to the birth of quantum mechanics, we would never be there. Albert Einstein argued that quantum mechanics"
},
{
"end_time": 5007.858,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 4978.37,
"text": " Perhaps can be interpreted in the same way as classical physics, but he was wrong. Niels Bohr was right on this. And now all the gadgets that we use, you know, like these computers that the two of us are using to communicate or cell phones, it's all based on quantum mechanics. So here is applied physics, a whole industry of applied physics that came out from the discovery of quantum mechanics from experiments. And I say, what's the lesson of that? That"
},
{
"end_time": 5035.725,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5008.251,
"text": " Nature is very subtle. We don't know in advance before experiments what nature is about. And if you don't have guidance by experiments, you may go in the wrong direction. You may go into a dark alley. And to claim that we can come up with a theory of quantum gravity just based on pure thought is arrogant. And in fact, string theory did not come up with very concrete"
},
{
"end_time": 5064.582,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5036.186,
"text": " solutions to the Big Bang to singularities in black holes over five decades. Okay, so I say, we took that path. It didn't lead to predictions that can be tested experimentally. And I asked young people, do you want to be engaged in an endeavor that is part of course itself part of physics, but does not have any confrontation with reality? I mean, you could spend your life with a notion that is not necessarily"
},
{
"end_time": 5079.189,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5065.435,
"text": " Use by nature. Okay. And there are many other fundamental questions that we can address that have experimental tests. So why not engage in those, you know, there are huge problems that society faces."
},
{
"end_time": 5097.022,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5079.667,
"text": " And at the same time, as you see that, you know, that attitude of saying, let's toy with mathematical ideas that, you know, that we can do gymnastics, intellectual gymnastics on at the same time that you have that as part of the mainstream simply because there wasn't any experimental feedback from"
},
{
"end_time": 5119.718,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5097.483,
"text": " you know, from the superconducting supercollider that was envisioned back in the 1980s, but was not funded by Congress. As a result, there was no feedback from experiments. So there was this entire community of theories divorced from experiments. So at the same time that you see that in the mainstream, you see also resistance to study"
},
{
"end_time": 5149.872,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5120.418,
"text": " And it's a fraction of the cost as well compared to how much is spent on theoretical physics each year. Let's get to the first goal, which was the Papua New Guinea expedition. Now, let me quickly summarize to see if I have this correct. NASA was studying the skies and the reason they do so is"
},
{
"end_time": 5176.271,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5150.367,
"text": " partly military. So they study the sky and they look for, well, they're looking for threats, but they occasionally catch meteorites or meteors. So meteorite is when it hits the ground. A meteor is when it just disintegrates without hitting the ground. Okay. And a meteoroid, I just looked this up, a meteoroid is when it would have been a meteor, but it's not, it's around the same size, doesn't even hit earth. Correct? Yeah. It's basically an object, an object that collides with the earth and burns up in the atmosphere. Yes. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 5204.07,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5176.732,
"text": " So there were 274 or so of these that were collected across several years. Yeah, you looked at some of the data and you saw that the speed of one was greatly different than the speed of the rest and greatly different in that it exceeded the speed of the rest. And now I speed is important is because just like there's an escape velocity of the earth to get out of Earth's orbit, there's an escape velocity of a solar system, which I never considered before. And so if we're thinking of interstellar,"
},
{
"end_time": 5214.94,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5204.36,
"text": " objects, then it would have to be around that speed or greater. OK, so then what we saw was or what you saw was that there was a high speed meteorite."
},
{
"end_time": 5238.166,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5215.725,
"text": " Okay, great high speed meteorite and that and the speed matters because it tells you potentially its origin."
},
{
"end_time": 5261.903,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5239.155,
"text": " This podcast is sponsored by Monarch Money. Are you saving to reach your financial goals? Reaching those goals isn't just about getting more money, but by managing what you have. And the best way to manage your money? Monarch Money. Monarch Money is a new kind of finance app that's intuitive, powerful, ad-free, and takes the headaches out of budgeting. Try it free when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 5279.531,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5261.903,
"text": " Monarch puts all your accounts, investments, transactions, and finances at your fingertips. With a complete view of your finances, you'll gain insights on your spending and find new ways to save. Plus, Monarch lets you customize your dashboard, collaborate with your partner, set custom budgets and goals, and track your progress toward them."
},
{
"end_time": 5299.326,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5279.531,
"text": " See why Mint users are turning to Monarch Money and loving it. And why the Wall Street Journal named Monarch Money the best budgeting app overall. Get a 30-day free trial when you go to MonarchMoney.com slash podcast. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H money.com slash podcast for your free trial. MonarchMoney.com slash podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 5317.807,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5300.009,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 5339.616,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5317.807,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,"
},
{
"end_time": 5359.633,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5339.616,
"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime."
},
{
"end_time": 5379.411,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5359.633,
"text": " Visit HensonShaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything."
},
{
"end_time": 5398.217,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5381.288,
"text": " So that's something that I want to I kept hearing you bring up speed. I'm like, why the heck does speed matter? Okay, so this is why speed matters. Yeah, because I just think about if you throw a rock up in the air, it will fall back because you don't throw it hard enough. But if NASA launches a spacecraft,"
},
{
"end_time": 5423.626,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5398.592,
"text": " and it moves fast enough, it will escape the pull of the earth. So speed matters. You need to overcome the gravitational potential of the earth. It's sort of like imagine a trampoline, okay, and the earth is at the center of the trampoline, and it's sort of like a bowling ball, you know, it creates a well. And if you want to throw a marble out of the trampoline, you need to"
},
{
"end_time": 5445.828,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5423.985,
"text": " throw it at a high enough speed because otherwise it will fall back. And so there is always an escape speed above which an object will escape from the gravitational potential well of the earth or of the solar system in the case of the sun. And then, and this object, by the way, wasn't moving just fast enough to escape."
},
{
"end_time": 5471.237,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5446.323,
"text": " but it was moving actually outside of the potential well faster than 95 percent of all the stars it was moving at 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system if you were traveling back in time so it was really fast okay and just to get some numbers out of the way approximately 11 kilometers per second is earth's yes and what is the escape velocity of the solar system"
},
{
"end_time": 5500.145,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5472.21,
"text": " No, the solar system is at the location of the earth, it's 42 kilometers per second. It's always a square root of two times the velocity of a circular orbit around the object that you care about. If you have gravity produced by a single point mass at the center, there is a certain speed by which an object will move in a circular orbit. In the case of the earth, it's about 30 kilometers per second. And therefore the escape speed is"
},
{
"end_time": 5513.712,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5500.435,
"text": " the speed such as the kinetic energy will equal the potential energy and that's a square root of two faster than the circular speed and square root of two times 30 is about 42 kilometers per second. So that's the speed by which an object would move."
},
{
"end_time": 5541.015,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5514.104,
"text": " if it were just to escape from the pull of the sun and came from the vicinity of Earth. But this object was moving even faster than that. I mean, it collided with Earth at 45 kilometers per second. But if you take out the motion of the Earth, because it came from the side, so to speak, then it actually moved at 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system. It was really fast."
},
{
"end_time": 5567.534,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5541.783,
"text": " okay and then last question before i get to someone skinwalker and ce5 and unidentified submerged objects and so on the last question is okay so not only was this going extremely quickly but then when you analyzed well what's its toughness it was twice as tough as the second highest rock as well okay so it has unusual characteristics okay now my question is how the heck do you"
},
{
"end_time": 5591.015,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5568.439,
"text": " find such an object when we can't find Malaysian airlines hours after let alone decades later and it's a larger object and we had governments involved and we knew what it looked like and the size and so on so what does this look like what does this Papua New Guinea expedition look like? Okay so the Malaysian airplane did not create a fireball"
},
{
"end_time": 5610.23,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5591.442,
"text": " It did not explode so that satellites or ground-based observatories would see it in the night sky. So all we know about it is that it moved along a certain path. Okay. And we don't know at which point along the path it plunged into the water. Okay. So then we have a very long path to study."
},
{
"end_time": 5630.384,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5610.776,
"text": " On the floor and the area that you have to explore is huge. So even though the object is bigger than this meteor that we're talking about, the area that you need to explore is much, much larger. Okay. And in the case of the meteor, we know where the explosion took place. So we have"
},
{
"end_time": 5654.718,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5630.828,
"text": " a square region that we will study. We also know what the wind speed was at the time of the explosion, what the elevation was and what the water currents were. So we can calculate, depending on the fragment size distribution, we can calculate where the small fragments fell and where the bigger fragments fell and just"
},
{
"end_time": 5684.77,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5655.213,
"text": " It's just like mowing the lawn, basically scoop the thin layer, the top layer of the ocean for any fragments left. And my point is this meteor was really bright and we know precisely, just think about GPS systems, they can localize your car in Boston or in any other city to within a few meters. So imagine you get the GPS coordinates of your car and then it explodes."
},
{
"end_time": 5707.381,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 5685.094,
"text": " Okay, so you ask yourself, how can I find, you know, like, if you only knew that the car moved between New York City and Boston, you know, it will be much tougher to find the car. If it and suppose it didn't explode, it just went off the road somewhere, then you will it would take you a lot of time to find it and you might not find it."
},
{
"end_time": 5721.903,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 5707.619,
"text": " But if it exploded and you had photographs from satellites, you know the GPS location within a few meters, it's a piece of cake to find the fragments. So that's the difference. All right, let's get to a question about Jack Valley."
},
{
"end_time": 5740.128,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 5722.517,
"text": " So Jack Vallee, I saw this video and I'll play it for the people who are watching right now. 20 years ago, you know, that was a very marginal idea in science. Today it's not such a marginal idea in science. If you look at the Sky and Telescope magazine a year and a half ago published an article about the creation of universes"
},
{
"end_time": 5770.094,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 5740.128,
"text": " Okay, so as a physicist, the standard approach you take when you examine experimental data"
},
{
"end_time": 5774.275,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 5770.708,
"text": " is to say we have a standard model of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5803.268,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 5774.94,
"text": " It's a set of rules and equations that were tested many times in many laboratory experiments. And that's what we use for technological development. When we develop a cell phone, we base it on the known laws of physics. No company would say, oh, maybe the quantum mechanics is wrong. Let's develop a cell phone based on some idea about how quantum mechanics may be wrong, or maybe we will build a cell phone that operates in other dimensions, or maybe a cell phone that"
},
{
"end_time": 5822.739,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 5803.626,
"text": " communicates with another universe. No company would survive if it were to advocate that it will build a piece of technology based on unknown physics because it will most of the time almost always be proven right. If this company is successful,"
},
{
"end_time": 5852.602,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 5823.08,
"text": " then they will get the Nobel Prize because they discovered the new law of physics. So the standard approach in doing science or physics is to adapt what is known as the standard model of physics and use it first to interpret any data you get, any experimental evidence. So suppose you include UAP in the unidentified objects, the first approach of the Galileo project in particular would be to use the standard laws of the"
},
{
"end_time": 5883.012,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 5853.234,
"text": " standard model of physics to interpret whatever we see. So we have a set of instruments detecting things, we will use the laws of physics as we know them. Now, if we see an object behaving in ways that definitely violate the laws of physics, we will go there. But before we see that, there is no reason. And moreover, I should say, the first thing I would check if I see something moving, let's say faster than light, just as an example, you see a point of light"
},
{
"end_time": 5909.718,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 5883.592,
"text": " moving across the sky faster than light. And you can in principle infer that. It could be that it's an artifact of the optics because there is some reflection in your detector that moves the point of light faster than light if you think that it's far away, but in fact it's moving only within the instrument. And it's really difficult. You do a lot of experiments, you don't find deviations,"
},
{
"end_time": 5917.022,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 5910.077,
"text": " So it's not as if you just see something unusual and you say, okay, the laws of physics are wrong. You can't just do that. That's irresponsible. You have to"
},
{
"end_time": 5944.821,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 5917.5,
"text": " study the whatever you're studying with the best instruments, you have to understand the instruments, you know, it takes a lot of steps. And currently, the data on UAP is not good enough. It's, you know, many of the images are blurry, many of them are based on, you know, amateurs taking the data. And so we really need to go through the scientific process to validate that there is something beyond"
},
{
"end_time": 5972.995,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 5945.23,
"text": " standard physics, okay? Jacques Vallee is mentioning that as a possibility. I say, you know, there are many possibilities, just like, you know, in the context of string theory, there is a possibility that, you know, string theory is of one type of another type. And of course, a lot of people can suggest a lot of possibilities. Jacques Vallee may suggest one possibility and then someone else will suggest another. But it doesn't mean that we need to take it seriously until there is"
},
{
"end_time": 6003.37,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 5973.814,
"text": " data that is validated, that is reproducible, that is based on well understood suite of instruments that detects it. And so we are not there yet. That's what the Galileo project aims to do. And if we find that there is no physics, of course that would be extremely exciting because it should apply to the rest of the universe, not just this object. So suppose you find something completely new that physicists never imagined,"
},
{
"end_time": 6031.869,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6003.797,
"text": " then it applies everywhere in the universe. And that would be of much broader consequences because you can build new devices based on that. At that point, technology development companies in Silicon Valley could build gadgets that make use of this knowledge. So it would be revolutionary. But before we claim that we have something revolutionary, we should consider the mundane first."
},
{
"end_time": 6049.804,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6033.422,
"text": " There was a paper published last week by Zilyaev and Petukhov and Reshetnik about UAPs in Ukraine. Did you happen to look at this or are you aware of it? Yeah, I actually saw it and, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6079.138,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6051.152,
"text": " Obviously, Ukraine is currently in a military conflict. And there are lots of things flying in the sky. Okay. And usually in scientific experiments, we want to minimize the level of noise of spurious things that may be misinterpreted. So if I were to design a place where I would search for unidentified objects, Ukraine would be my last choice, because"
},
{
"end_time": 6108.456,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6079.684,
"text": " There would be so much noise, you know, and an experiment usually wants to maximize the signal to noise ratio. So I, you know, I find it surprising that a paper about unidentified objects would be written from that location, because if you wanted to study UAP, you would go to a remote site far away. Okay, speaking of a remote site that may have plenty of signal rather than noise, what about Skinwalker?"
},
{
"end_time": 6136.186,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6108.712,
"text": " Have you thought about putting some observatory at Skinwalker? And if not, why not? What are the criteria that you use to select where to place an observatory? Right, so the first limitation we are facing is the level of funding that we have because at the moment we have one suite of instruments that cost me about $250,000 and we're testing it right now and within a few months hopefully everything will work."
},
{
"end_time": 6151.852,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6136.561,
"text": " and then we will deploy it at the site that would allow us to get the useful data and analyze it. So hopefully by the summer of 2023, we'll have the data that we can share with"
},
{
"end_time": 6170.06,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6152.142,
"text": " the public, the scientists, and that will be peer reviewed in terms of its interpretation. But in order for us to build many more systems like it, we need to expand the funding level of the Galileo project. At the moment, it's only a few million dollars."
},
{
"end_time": 6182.415,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6170.401,
"text": " And in order for us to expand it by a factor of 10, we need a few tens of millions of dollars. So if we do get that, we will be able to place a lot of stations in many locations, including perhaps"
},
{
"end_time": 6202.073,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6182.671,
"text": " skinwalker i have no in fact it would be interesting to see if there is anything unusual there the only locations that i'm hesitant about are those that may involve sensitive facilities like nuclear plants or military bases simply because of national security issues so i don't want"
},
{
"end_time": 6227.841,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6202.534,
"text": " us to be at risk of violating the law or I don't want the intelligence agencies to worry about the data that we collect. So I want us to do the job of astronomers. Astronomers have observing sites in remote locations, in places that are of no national security risk,"
},
{
"end_time": 6250.52,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6228.063,
"text": " and I see this research project as an astronomy project. In fact, the administrators at Harvard asked me, is this part of your day job? Just as I was about to establish the Galileo project and I thought about it for a few hours and then I said, yes, it is part of my day job because in astronomy we use telescopes to collect data"
},
{
"end_time": 6267.892,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6250.981,
"text": " And there is no lower limit on the distance, you know, we study the sun, we study meteors, we study asteroids, comets. So that's exactly what we do in the Galileo project, we use telescopes, collect data and interpret it. So yes, it is part of my day job."
},
{
"end_time": 6298.148,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6268.336,
"text": " and Harvard University approved of that. And indeed, it's a project embraced by the university. And the other unusual thing about this project is usually you have to work really hard to get funded. And in this case, it was individuals that gave me the money without any fundraising effort on my behalf, which to me illustrates the fact that the subject is of great interest to the public. It's of great interest to the government as well."
},
{
"end_time": 6321.049,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6299.411,
"text": " Earlier you mentioned transmedium so then I know you're an astronomer and so you care about the sky but at some point do you envision in the future it would look for unidentified submerged objects? Well if we look at the horizon you know and we are near the ocean and definitely we will be near the ocean in some of our observations"
},
{
"end_time": 6351.032,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6321.357,
"text": " simply because there were a lot of reports on objects near the ocean. Then we will be able to see if they have anything to do with coming out of the ocean, going back to the ocean. And the same is true about them coming from outer space. I mean, we know that's what meteors do. And this meteor that we discussed before, the interstellar meteor, was discovered by missile warning systems that the government employs. It was not necessarily"
},
{
"end_time": 6370.06,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6351.391,
"text": " NASA, it was intelligence agencies that are worried about national security that are monitoring any object entering the sky because they worry about ballistic missiles. And, you know, every now and then they see a rock coming from out there and colliding with earth. Okay, so that's called the meteor. And most of these rocks belong to the solar system."
},
{
"end_time": 6398.899,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6370.06,
"text": " There are a thousand times more rocks that belong to the solar system than rocks that come from outside the solar system based on the statistics that we now know about interstellar objects. So most of the time you just see rocks from the solar system. These are leftover rocks from the construction project of planets. You know that early on in the solar system there were small rocks that came together to make planets like the Earth and now some of them are dispersed. They are sort of like Lego pieces that are filling up"
},
{
"end_time": 6412.841,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6398.899,
"text": " And so they hit the earth every now and then. A big chunk, a big rock hit the earth, you know, 66 million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. We know that. The dinosaurs did not have telescopes and they were not smart enough."
},
{
"end_time": 6438.797,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6413.319,
"text": " To worry about the sky, they just ate grass, were happy, and thought that they'd dominate their environment. Well, guess what? They were wiped out because they didn't have telescopes. And we, as the human civilization, we are smarter, so we develop telescopes, we can look at near-Earth objects. That's how Oumuamua was discovered. It was identified as a near-Earth object. It was labeled that way. That's why they looked at it."
},
{
"end_time": 6468.046,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6438.797,
"text": " And then they realized, wow, it moves too fast to be bound to the sun. So this was an interstellar object. So what I'm trying to say is the government, you know, monitors the sky. That's their day job. They're not doing it for the sake of science. Their day job is to monitor the sky for national security. Every now and then they see a rock entering the atmosphere. And then it turns out that the first interstellar meteor was discovered by those government sensors, you see. And, and, and the"
},
{
"end_time": 6492.773,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6468.677,
"text": " My point all along was the government needs to know with very high precision how the object moves because they need to know that if it's a ballistic missile, whether it would hit Boston or Washington DC, they need to know that. So what my colleagues were arguing was, oh, the uncertainties in the measurements of the government are very big. And I say, no, they cannot be big. They cannot afford that. That's their day job."
},
{
"end_time": 6522.568,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6493.148,
"text": " and indeed the government confirmed took three years for the government to come out with a letter saying indeed this meteor was at the 99.99% from outside the solar system. So I never doubted that the fact that the government has very high precision data and they find these things anecdotally. If you ask yourself what would be the first sign of objects that visit near Earth from outside the solar system,"
},
{
"end_time": 6543.063,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6522.927,
"text": " Or objects that collide with Earth or objects that enter the atmosphere. It's the government that would first identify them because astronomers focus on very distant sources of light and they have narrow fields of view. All the astronomical observatories look at the small portion of the sky from Earth and if a bird flies above the telescope, they just ignore it."
},
{
"end_time": 6572.995,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6543.592,
"text": " So astronomers would be hard-pressed to say, oh, in the survey that they did, they saw an object moving in an unusual way in the Earth's atmosphere. They would just ignore it. They focus on a galaxy at the ratio of five or six. But the military has to monitor those things because that's their day job and the intelligence agencies have. So it's completely natural to expect the government and the intelligence agencies to be the first to say,"
},
{
"end_time": 6596.954,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6573.439,
"text": " Here are some unusual objects for us to monitor. And that's what UAP are about. That's what the first interstellar meteor is about. And, you know, we should just be curious and examine those things. Do you think that the main reason for the government not coming forward with more information on UAPs or at least more high resolution images is because that it gives away their"
},
{
"end_time": 6622.312,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6597.21,
"text": " Capabilities in terms of sensors or is there another reason like that's one of the reasons but there may be a nefarious reason I don't know. I think that's a that's the main reason that would be my I don't believe in conspiracies If I had to guess I would simply say that They're unsure what the nature of these objects is so there are two, you know, two general possibilities either they are made by"
},
{
"end_time": 6648.456,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 6622.602,
"text": " an adversary with technologies that we never imagined, okay, in which case you want to keep collecting data, you don't want to release what you know. In the second possibility, you know, it may be of extraterrestrial origin, and you say to yourself, that's not part of my day job, you know, and I don't want to release the data because it may reveal"
},
{
"end_time": 6675.93,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 6649.002,
"text": " our abilities to identify objects like if it's a high resolution image then any nation worldwide would know that we can obtain very high resolution images of this of this quality so you don't you don't show it publicly okay so i would say it's more the fact that the government is not a scientific organization it's not interested in questions that go beyond national security the safety of military personnel"
},
{
"end_time": 6699.735,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 6676.22,
"text": " So if you see an object that doesn't belong to that category, it's not part of your job. And the second is, you know, you don't want to reveal the capabilities you have. And then there is also this, what you mentioned before, there is this stigma in society about discussing such things, because it's being ridiculed. Okay, and"
},
{
"end_time": 6728.319,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 6700.094,
"text": " The data that existed in the past was perhaps not of high enough quality, so people could not really discuss it seriously. But now we have instrumentation that is so good that the government just can't ignore these objects. That's why the subject surfaced in the past five years, I think, partly because the instrumentation that gives us the data is of high quality. So the government cannot say forget about it, cannot say"
},
{
"end_time": 6736.374,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 6728.831,
"text": " you know, the stigma should suppress any discussion on this and"
},
{
"end_time": 6761.681,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 6736.766,
"text": " And so the subject is surfacing up, yet the government cannot release the high quality data. So I, you know, it's just like the play by Samuel Beckett, you could wait for Godot, but you might wait forever. I don't believe that the data will be declassified anytime soon. So we better collect our own data, scientists and try to analyze it. That's what the Galileo project is trying."
},
{
"end_time": 6782.927,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 6762.517,
"text": " When I think about how would I do the Galileo project, the main problem that I see for analyzing regular UAPs, when I say regular, I mean the ones that are in the popular media and much of the audience is aware of those types, the tic tac types, is that they don't show themselves customarily. It's not repeatable."
},
{
"end_time": 6800.981,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 6783.319,
"text": " How and I imagine that the third phase, remember, we talked about these different pillars. So first was Papua New Guinea. Second was the James Webb slash the Chilean Observatory and the third was the Harvard Observatory. I imagine that the third one is more aligned with the UAPs as we traditionally know them. Okay, so"
},
{
"end_time": 6822.551,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 6801.527,
"text": " Did you choose to place it at Harvard simply because well that's what the funding can provide and you're close to it or is there some other reason? Oh no no it was just just for testing the equipment that's just a testing phase to make sure that it operates and then within a few months we'll put it in a location that is much better. The reason we just kept it close to home because we want to make sure that it works"
},
{
"end_time": 6849.275,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 6822.739,
"text": " to our specifications. Now, I should make a comment because I wrote an essay about it in Medium. By the way, every few days I write in Medium so people who are interested should check it out. Yeah, I don't know how you get the time. You're so prolific. You do so many podcasts, so many news broadcasts, you're a professor, you're a chair on top, you're running the Galileo project, you do the Medium post. For me to write each day"
},
{
"end_time": 6860.162,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 6849.872,
"text": " is a laborious, excruciating task, let alone to do what else I have to do. Well, you know, it's what I do all the time. And you're a father."
},
{
"end_time": 6887.637,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 6860.418,
"text": " Yeah, but I should say that it's very rewarding because, for example, just today I was notified that the Venice Film Festival will feature a competition of 23 projects by film students that study film and basically created"
},
{
"end_time": 6907.807,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 6887.637,
"text": " Works that were inspired by my book about Oumuamua extraterrestrial and that was translated to 25 languages, including Italian. So that's what inspired this competition and they selected the top three and they would feature them at the Excelsior Hotel in Venice,"
},
{
"end_time": 6934.428,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 6908.285,
"text": " Italy on the third of September this weekend, and they would like to ask me questions about my book and about the more. So what I'm trying to say is that there is a huge community out there. Here you have 23 students of film that worked hard to make these projects and competed for the Venice Film Festival. I was not even aware of that. And every day I get"
},
{
"end_time": 6958.183,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 6935.026,
"text": " a huge number of emails from people who donate to the Galilo project, who are inspired by. At the same time, there are, of course, people who ridicule and just dismiss the work. But as long as you have the right idea to pursue the truth,"
},
{
"end_time": 6978.797,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 6958.609,
"text": " No prison can confine your passion, so to speak. And that was the lesson from Nelson Mandela, who for several decades was put in prison, but eventually became the first black president of South Africa. And so you just have to keep dreaming. And as long as your dream is real,"
},
{
"end_time": 7006.459,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 6978.797,
"text": " It will eventually materialize. And so I feel inspired by the response of people. Now, what I wanted to mention about my essay, it was about the fact that, you know, there are two types of interstellar objects. You can imagine that there are objects that are not functional anymore. For example, imagine New Horizons, the spacecraft that we sent out of the solar system a billion years from now. It will not be functional. It will be just space trash."
},
{
"end_time": 7036.442,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7006.459,
"text": " So you can imagine space trash and perhaps the meteor that collided with earth in 2014 was just space trash. Okay. The second type are objects that are functional, perhaps equipped with artificial intelligence. So they have some intelligence machine learning. If that's the case, for example, if you have an AI astronaut, an AI system that is sentient, you know, we are getting close to producing sentient"
},
{
"end_time": 7066.118,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7036.766,
"text": " AI systems, perhaps within the coming decade. Okay. So imagine another civilization that had the benefit of, you know, thousands of more years of technology development. So they develop these sentient AI systems, and one of them came to visit us, or a few of them, and they might be self replicating, just like biological systems, because they have 3d printers. Anyway, if the UAP, if let's say one UAP is of that nature,"
},
{
"end_time": 7081.476,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7066.8,
"text": " Then dealing with it will not be the same as dealing with a dark matter or dealing with a planet or dealing with a star like the sun. Why? Because all these other things are passive physical objects"
},
{
"end_time": 7102.705,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7082.005,
"text": " that do not have intelligence, you know, that the sun intelligence, the electron doesn't have. So they do whatever they do, you can design a set of rules or physical laws that you can quantify with equations like quantum mechanics that describe the motion of an electron, that describe the motion of an atom that describe the motion of a star."
},
{
"end_time": 7129.343,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7103.114,
"text": " But there is no free will associated with a sentient being. There is no consciousness associated with a sentient being. But if you have a sentient AI system, it's a different type of object. It's an object that responds to the way you behave, just like humans respond to the way you behave. So it's just like dealing with humans. So if you think about it,"
},
{
"end_time": 7159.48,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7129.77,
"text": " If we were to deal with sentient AI systems that come from another planet, from another civilization, who would be best equipped to deal with them? Would it be physicists? My answer is no, because physicists are used to dealing with passive physical entities. The best professionals to deal with those things would be psychologists. They're used to dealing with sentient systems."
},
{
"end_time": 7184.36,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7159.906,
"text": " humans. And if the thing about sentient beings is that they don't always follow up, they don't repeat, they are not necessarily reproducible, they might do under the same circumstances, different things. They also digest the data of their encounter with you in a way that will make the next encounter different. And so it's a completely different"
},
{
"end_time": 7210.367,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7184.838,
"text": " entity than physical objects that behave always following the laws of physics the same way, and they are predictable, they are reproducible and so forth. So my point is, if we have the privilege of interacting with sentient AI systems that came from another planet, we have to use a different methodology than traditional physics. And that touches on the point that you brought up."
},
{
"end_time": 7232.329,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7210.862,
"text": " That's extremely, extremely interesting. So how the heck does that work? Would we have to invent a fundamentally different science? Because like you mentioned, science generally, at least in physics, chemistry, and so on, it's indifferent, what we study. Now, of course, there's the observer effect, but that's predictable mathematically. Whereas what you're saying is that if it's sentient, maybe large trends would be predictable, though."
},
{
"end_time": 7261.357,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7233.899,
"text": " There might be, but only if it depends how intelligent the system is, you see, because the more intelligent it is, the more complex it is, the more difficult it is for us to forecast what it will do. It would look like free will in a way. And the system will do very different things on different encounters. So I call that in my commentary, in my essay on medium, I call it interstellar"
},
{
"end_time": 7282.824,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7261.732,
"text": " psychology. So it's a new field. We're not dealing with humans. You know, humans are difficult to forecast. And that's why psychology is a difficult subject, more difficult than physics, I would argue. And if you deal with the next level, you know, once we develop sentient AI systems,"
},
{
"end_time": 7299.582,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7283.37,
"text": " You know, it will become a new subject of, you know, in universities, I think there would be new departments that analyze AI systems, because why would we focus only on humans if AI systems are more complex than humans? We need a whole new"
},
{
"end_time": 7314.548,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7300.282,
"text": " area of research that tries to interpret the way AI systems behave. Now, you might say, oh, we constructed those AI systems out of hardware, right? We build those computers that behave in this way."
},
{
"end_time": 7342.261,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7314.906,
"text": " Well, we also construct human beings, you know, like, we give them birth, right, in the womb, out of sperm and an egg, we know the physical constituents that were put together to make a human being. Okay, that's called birth of a human. We see it in hospitals all the time. But that doesn't mean that we understand humans. Psychologists have a hard time understanding, even though we know the material used to make them,"
},
{
"end_time": 7358.899,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7342.688,
"text": " It doesn't mean that we can understand the emergent phenomena. So we give them names. We give the name of free will to the fact that we cannot forecast how a person will behave under some circumstances. We gave this term of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 7380.299,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7358.899,
"text": " So all kinds of emergent phenomena that are at the abstract level, just a signature of complexity of the system that, you know, you can't just start from the atoms that make the system and figure out all these emergent phenomena because the system is very complex. I mean, you can do it if you put two atoms together, you can figure out how the molecule will behave. But once you make"
},
{
"end_time": 7407.756,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7380.299,
"text": " sufficiently complex molecule. Even the best computers might not be able to figure out what it does and building up biological systems is like building a very complex system that we can't really tell what it would do under some circumstances and especially after it's exposed to a lot of experiences. So it's not just nature, it's also nurture. So all of this boils to the point that there might be new departments in universities about"
},
{
"end_time": 7432.466,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7408.575,
"text": " I want to read a quote from your blog. It said, most recently, Congress expanded the definition of UAP to include transmedium objects that are observed to transition between space and atmosphere."
},
{
"end_time": 7453.814,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7432.841,
"text": " and bodies of water, an object means it, quote unquote, whereas a sufficiently advanced AI device could potentially become a you in bubbers terminology or boobers, I don't know how to pronounce that name. So if you don't mind, because I still have other questions like about CE five, and so the audience would love to hear about that. If you don't mind, can you quickly spell out this distinction between it versus you?"
},
{
"end_time": 7479.889,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7454.258,
"text": " Yeah, so exactly a century ago, 1923, Martin Buber, a philosopher and theologian, made a distinction between two interactions that humans have. You can have an interaction with an object, okay, like a cup of tea or a ball. That's a subject-object interaction. It's an I-it interaction. It's an interaction with an it."
},
{
"end_time": 7504.753,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 7480.384,
"text": " But he also identified another type of interaction with something that goes beyond physical objects, like an interaction with a human being. Or, since he was religious, he also included interaction with God. And God represented the eternal you. But even if you're secular, you know, you have interactions with people,"
},
{
"end_time": 7527.978,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 7505.265,
"text": " If you are a real person and you know that it's different from an interaction with an object. So, Buber made the distinction and that was the foundation for many aspects of modern psychology and philosophy and so forth. And he was an existentialist, one of the founders of existentialism."
},
{
"end_time": 7554.206,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 7528.319,
"text": " And so his innovation was to distinguish between these two interactions of human. And what I said is that we are used to associating you with humans. But in the future, it could be AI systems that are sufficiently intelligent, that are sentient. And moreover, it could represent our interaction with an extraterrestrial astronaut."
},
{
"end_time": 7574.36,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 7554.753,
"text": " Now, is this to suggest that the craft themselves may be sentient or conscious? And I'm unsure if you make a distinction between sentience and consciousness or if you use those interchangeably. No, to me, it's just, you know, the definition is similar to the Turing test, okay, in the context of computers. The Turing test that was defined"
},
{
"end_time": 7592.295,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 7574.787,
"text": " You know, about 70 something years ago by Alan Turing is let's let's think about it on a practical level. If you take a lot of people that interact with a computer and they cannot tell the difference between the computer being a computer, you put it behind the curtain."
},
{
"end_time": 7612.756,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 7592.295,
"text": " They cannot, by conversing with that computer, they can't tell the difference between the computer or a person. Then for all practical methods, you know, it's an interaction with a you, not with an it, in my definition. I mean, echoing what Buber said. And so,"
},
{
"end_time": 7629.411,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 7613.148,
"text": " To me, it's all about the practical experience of humans with the system. Now, those things that come from outer space may be far more advanced than any AI system we develop. And so they might be even more sophisticated, they might understand us"
},
{
"end_time": 7654.974,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 7629.735,
"text": " The way that a biker that goes, you know, on the sidewalk, understand ants next to it, to the bike. And the ants may think, oh, here is a biker. Let's think about the protocol of how to engage with the biker. But the ants would never realize that the biker cares less about what they do. And the biker is a much more, you know, superior level of intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 7685.282,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 7655.401,
"text": " So it's possible that we would encounter something that is far more superior than us, and it will not be biological, because traveling across distances between stars is not something that a biological creature can easily do. I mean, we were selected by natural evolution to survive on this rock that we call Earth. We were not selected to survive the hazardous conditions of space. So if I had to imagine, I would say the first probes that we will discover that would be sentient would be"
},
{
"end_time": 7715.128,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 7685.674,
"text": " made of electronics, hardware, something else that is not biological because that can survive long journeys. They would have the patience for millions of years to travel. They could repair themselves if hit by cosmic rays or they can adapt to changing physical circumstances much more. They don't need food, they just need energy that they can collect from their interaction with starlight, with the intestinal medium and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 7741.954,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 7715.35,
"text": " So anyway, my guess is if we find sentient messengers from other civilizations, they would be equipment that is artificial with artificial intelligence, and it may be superior to us, and it will be an interaction with the you. It might even be interaction with what we may regard as a divine entity, because in my way of thinking,"
},
{
"end_time": 7771.34,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 7742.329,
"text": " a sufficiently advanced scientific civilization is a good approximation to God. It can do magic, it may be able to create life in the laboratory, may be able to create a baby universe in the laboratory if it understands quantum gravity. So what we call God in philosophical texts, religious texts, might be represented, the best approximation to it might be a far more advanced scientific gadget."
},
{
"end_time": 7783.183,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 7771.954,
"text": " Compared to what we have right now. When we spoke, I asked you about CE5. You remember? Yeah. Okay. So did you have a chance to look into that? Yeah, I did look at that."
},
{
"end_time": 7813.78,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 7783.865,
"text": " So for those people who don't know CE5 stands for Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind and it's reputedly some technique, it's some method of eliciting contact between yourself and a craft or yourself and what's behind the craft, either calling multiple to come or speaking to them telepathically in some way. The stories are that if one performs CE5 and one is trained in it, whatever that means, that one can"
},
{
"end_time": 7838.387,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 7815.145,
"text": " call UFOs or UAPs near them. So then I was wondering, okay, well, that's all anecdotal. This Galileo project sounds like a great way of testing that because you obviously would like UAPs to show up. If you could get that repeatedly, that would be great. Okay, so what are your thoughts on CE5 and how the Galileo project may or may not use it?"
},
{
"end_time": 7855.469,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 7838.882,
"text": " So we get again to the same issue that you brought up in the context of Jacques Vallee. What is being contemplated here is a deviation from the standard model of physics. You see, in science or physics, we usually use instruments. We don't use humans as detectors."
},
{
"end_time": 7878.097,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 7855.469,
"text": " Why don't we use humans as detectors? Because, you know, humans very often are hallucinating, they have wishful thinking, and you cannot always reproduce phenomena with humans. Okay. And so, I mean, psychologists study humans, but physicists build instruments that are completely separate from the human experience so that"
},
{
"end_time": 7906.954,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 7878.626,
"text": " A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 chicken pot pie."
},
{
"end_time": 7930.981,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 7906.954,
"text": " Phenomena in a way that is reproducible and all of modern physics"
},
{
"end_time": 7957.79,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 7931.527,
"text": " the advances that were made by experiments were based on instrumentation, not a human's testimony. So once again, we get to the issue of how do we proceed in gathering evidence and the Galileo project follows the scientific method, basically using instruments, not using people. Now, it may well be the case that people have some insight into the UAP phenomena from"
},
{
"end_time": 7986.493,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 7958.2,
"text": " something that goes beyond the standard model of physics. It cannot be within the standard model of physics because it's not part of it right now. The standard model of physics is a set of laws and rules and equations that were derived by collecting a body of evidence by using instruments in laboratories, in experiments, and they were never based on eyewitness testimonies. So"
},
{
"end_time": 8010.896,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 7986.869,
"text": " What we call the standard model of physics is divorced from reports by humans. Okay. And if we end up finding through the Galileo project that humans do play a role in terms of the physical evidence that we collect, as I said before, that would be very revolutionary."
},
{
"end_time": 8037.261,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8011.34,
"text": " uh change in the way that physics is done it will change the standard model of physics because suddenly the human consciousness has some bearing on what you find okay and i don't dismiss it ahead of time i just say we need to be convinced by the evidence that this is the case okay now some people would say in quantum mechanics what humans know affects"
},
{
"end_time": 8064.974,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8038.046,
"text": " the wave function, because if we collect some data about the system, it changes the state of the system. That's true, but it's all done mediated through instrumentation. It's not mediated through humans. Human knowledge affects the way we formulate quantum mechanics. That's true, but this knowledge, the definition of knowledge is based on instruments, not based on the human body, okay, as the detector."
},
{
"end_time": 8091.084,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8065.452,
"text": " or the human brain as the detector. So that's a fundamental difference that you can't use humans as detectors in the context of, I mean, all of physics was designed based on data from quantitative data from instruments. So if it turns out that we are missing something about reality in the context of the standard model of physics, because it was only based on instruments, then that would be revolutionary. But before we get"
},
{
"end_time": 8098.319,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8091.766,
"text": " evidence for that, we can't really claim that. So, you know, I don't dismiss it ahead of time."
},
{
"end_time": 8122.637,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8098.797,
"text": " but I would like to see the evidence from our instruments first so you know we can potentially find something like that if we bring in some humans and see that a phenomena keeps repeating in a way that it doesn't without the humans you know that would tell us yeah that's more in line with what I was thinking less to just wholesale believe the reports I meant hey you have an observatory here you get some people who"
},
{
"end_time": 8139.957,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8123.285,
"text": " Consider themselves to be notable practitioners of CE5. There's one notable one in particular. His name is Steven Greer, who may be on the podcast at some point. But regardless, you get them to say, hey, you, I mean, you get them to show up and say, hey, you say that you can instigate UAPs."
},
{
"end_time": 8163.882,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8140.299,
"text": " Why don't you go ahead? Much like if someone said, I can pray and a supersymmetric particle appears. Well, then you're like, okay, come to this particle detector, pray, do your business. Firstly, I don't know how you would even think that you come up with a supersymmetric particle. What is it? You see a flash of light, you think this, but regardless, it's the same idea. Yeah, that would be a viable experiment. I'd be glad to do it. Just to check, you know, why not?"
},
{
"end_time": 8177.466,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8163.882,
"text": " As I said before, you know, we are just students of nature. We shouldn't assume things are wrong. If we have the experimental setup already built in and someone wants to come over and do the test, we'll do it. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 8204.48,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8178.336,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 8230.555,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8204.48,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 8256.34,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8230.555,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 8281.408,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8256.34,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories. No problem. There's also the Hasdalen lights. Have you heard of them? And what do you make of them? The Hasdalen lights and I think Norway or Denmark? Yeah, so this belongs to the category of"
},
{
"end_time": 8305.009,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8282.073,
"text": " you know, civilians seeing things that they do not understand. And it could be that some of these things are related to military activities that the civilians are not aware of, or some natural phenomena in the atmosphere. I'm not dismissing any possibility. I'm just saying the evidence is inconclusive. It's"
},
{
"end_time": 8331.323,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8305.384,
"text": " I want to read another quote from your blog. Self-interaction allows for the possibilities that there are dark atoms that emit dark radiation and condense into dark stars and dark planets that support dark chemistry"
},
{
"end_time": 8347.739,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8331.681,
"text": " that lead to life as we do not know it. In such a case, the answer to Fermi's question, where is everybody, might be, well, you're simply blind to them. So do you consider that there may be dark matter civilizations? And do you imagine that they would have no clue about us as well?"
},
{
"end_time": 8377.022,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 8348.933,
"text": " They might not have and but that's a long shot because well, the popular view of dark matter is that it has very weak interactions. That's the popular view. And if it has very weak interactions, you can't make atoms of dark matter, you can't make planets of dark matter, you can't make, you know, chemistry of life as we don't know it. Although it's a possibility, you know, you can imagine a whole dark sector that is completely parallel"
},
{
"end_time": 8402.073,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 8377.415,
"text": " to the ordinary matter that we have and it just doesn't interact with anything that is ordinary to us. You can imagine that and that's what I brought up in my essay. There are possibilities that we should allow for. This is one of them until we figure out what the dark matter is. Another possibility that we should allow for is"
},
{
"end_time": 8431.323,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 8402.602,
"text": " we ask what happened before the Big Bang? You know, one possibility is that imagine a civilization that knows quantum gravity and can engineer the birth of a baby universe in the laboratory. So then you ask yourself, what was there before the Big Bang? Well, maybe there were some entities in lab coats, you know, white lab coats that did an experiment that created the Big Bang in their laboratory. Now, what would that be like? It's just like"
},
{
"end_time": 8458.302,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 8431.613,
"text": " you know, us giving birth to babies that grow up to become adults that give birth to babies and so forth. So in any universe like ours, there could be intelligent civilizations that develop the technology to give birth to baby universes and you move from one generation to the next this way. That's just a possibility. I'm not saying since we don't have a theory of quantum gravity, we should at least"
},
{
"end_time": 8488.319,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 8458.592,
"text": " allow for that because at the moment we have no clue as to what happened before the big bang. One of the popular ideas that it came out of nothing, out of the vacuum, it's a vacuum fluctuation. I don't know if that's more appealing to me to say that our universe is one out of 10 to the 500 possibilities and we live in it just because it allows us to exist other than saying you know this is the kind of universe that gives birth to intelligence such that a baby universe will be"
},
{
"end_time": 8512.329,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 8488.831,
"text": " Born out of it. Yeah, there's someone named well, you know, Lee Smolin who has this idea or used to have the idea that universes are there such that they maximize the amount of black holes because black holes are what birth the universe is and then there's a way of testing this apparently and then I wonder if the conditions for black holes are the same as the conditions for intelligent life in which case then that may be an explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 8540.589,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 8512.722,
"text": " Yeah. So his idea was that we don't understand what happens at the singularity of a black hole. So maybe when matter falls to the singularity of a black hole, it gives birth to a new universe. And I, you know, we don't know that it's the case. We don't know what happens near the singularity of a black hole. It's completely speculative to argue that out of the singularity of a black hole comes a whole new universe. I'm just saying that there could be a sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 8570.179,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 8540.93,
"text": " a reason why you give birth mostly to universes that allow intelligence to develop like our technological civilization because then you have a chance of them coming up with a theory of quantum gravity such that they engineer a baby universes once again and so it's just like natural selection that selects those types of universes that allow more and more generations of the same type of universe to come into fruition"
},
{
"end_time": 8594.804,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 8570.572,
"text": " And it's different from the view on black holes in the sense that, you know, it gives us an important place in the universe. The black hole case, you just say, okay, there are these physical entities that give birth to maybe give birth to universes. That's, I would say, that's not so uplifting, not inspiring. But if you think that we would one day engineer the birth of a baby universe,"
},
{
"end_time": 8604.002,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 8595.111,
"text": " You know, that gives it's sort of like thinking about yourself as a future parent, you know, that gives you a purpose for life."
},
{
"end_time": 8633.575,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 8604.326,
"text": " Let's develop quantum gravity so that we can maintain the longevity of more universes like ours. It gives you a purpose for life. Just knowing that the black hole will give birth to a universe is, to me, quite depressing if that's the reason. Speaking of us from the future, or giving birth to something from the future, this eternal you from Boober, there's another quote that I have, though I believe this is someone speaking to you, Avi, but I'm quoting it anyway. He said,"
},
{
"end_time": 8657.295,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 8633.575,
"text": " If you find yourself one day holding a piece of technology so advanced that so-and-so you believe it came from another civilization, that experience of awe will be because you managed an encounter with the eternal you in this civilization that sent to the object your way. So this eternal you, I didn't realize at the time that that was a metaphor for God. I thought that this eternal you was somehow eternal as in temporally"
},
{
"end_time": 8680.998,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 8657.568,
"text": " Distant or like infinite even and that it was sent from you from the future to the past. So then I was wondering Okay, is this obvious speculating on time travel? But anyway, given that what are your thoughts on time travel? Well, okay So first I need to explain this this quote that you just read was a response to a commentary that I wrote just a day before that and"
},
{
"end_time": 8710.845,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 8681.34,
"text": " And that person read it, Tony Lux. I raised the following question. I said, suppose we find version 100 of the iPhone, okay, and show it to an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. Would the entrepreneur feel like Moses felt seeing the burning bush, which was a sense of, oh,"
},
{
"end_time": 8734.224,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 8711.391,
"text": " and admiration. And in the case of Moses, the burning bush was a symbol for a divine entity. And so the response was that I would potentially have the same sense of, oh, when seeing a high-level technological device and noticing the buttons on it,"
},
{
"end_time": 8757.978,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 8734.718,
"text": " and the miracles that they can perform. So again, it goes to the point that I brought up before that the sufficiently advanced scientific civilization may be a good approximation to God. And by the way, this is a way to unify religion and science. It's often thought that religion and science do not have any overlap that in fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 8787.415,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 8758.319,
"text": " one comes at the expense of the other. And many secular scientists, including Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, try to argue that religion is a theme of the past, that we should abandon it and bravely embrace a universe which has nothing to do with a divine entity. Now, I say, wait a minute, just, you know, be a little more patient because"
},
{
"end_time": 8812.176,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 8787.756,
"text": " If we do find a civilization that, let's say, is a million years ahead of us in technological development, their technologies would appear to us as a good approximation to God. And therefore, whatever we assign to a divine entity in religious and philosophical texts would apply to whatever we find from them. Okay. And so there is a way of unifying"
},
{
"end_time": 8824.155,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 8812.944,
"text": " an entity that was part of spiritual practice, an entity that is much more capable than we are, which is pretty much God, like something that is"
},
{
"end_time": 8854.121,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 8824.855,
"text": " capable of doing things that we cannot imagine even getting close to and associating it with our distant future like a million years from now a billion years from now and another civilization may have arrived at that future before we did simply because their star formed billions of years before the sun that's all so you started the clock earlier for them and now you're seeing something that looks just like a cell phone to a cave dweller okay and so"
},
{
"end_time": 8882.978,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 8854.77,
"text": " it would look like a miracle. What if he said in response that being pretty much like God is completely different than being God and the reason is that in traditional religion God is this eternal being that was there from the beginning if there was such a thing as the quote unquote beginning and it's not just to breed life out of inorganic matter but to breed the universe to begin with not breed the universe from once you already exist within a universe and create another one but create the laws and did so"
},
{
"end_time": 8908.285,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 8883.37,
"text": " out of some semblance of love and they care for you. So let me mention an anecdote. One day I saw a person on the street next to my home. My wife was telling me, it might be a stalker. He's looking at our home for half an hour now. You became quite well known. Why don't you check who this person is? So I went to the street and I"
},
{
"end_time": 8937.517,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 8908.797,
"text": " Ask the man. You're brave. Yeah, you know, what do I have to lose? I went to the person and I said, why are you looking at our home for so long? And he said, I used to live in that home 50 years ago, I was a kid. And my father, by the way, buried the cat named tiger in your backyard. And I said, well, that sounds familiar, because I saw a tombstone"
},
{
"end_time": 8966.203,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 8937.978,
"text": " with the name tiger on top of it. And I was worried that there is a tiger buried under it. I didn't know what skeleton might be lying underneath. And now I know it's a cat from 50 years ago. Now what's the moral of this story? If you share some space with someone else who predated you, that someone else may know more about your backyard than you know"
},
{
"end_time": 8980.657,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 8966.937,
"text": " And therefore you should show respect to visitors. They may know something about our past that we don't know. And that's why you should always welcome interstellar visitors."
},
{
"end_time": 9009.821,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 8980.981,
"text": " And when you say that, you know, a divine entity, God knows much more because it may have existed forever. What you define as eternity, you know, a billion years might be eternity compared to a century of our science and technology. Okay, so what you call eternity is a quantitative matter. And given that we, you know, our technologies develop exponential on a few year time scale, you know, every few years, we double"
},
{
"end_time": 9032.892,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9010.196,
"text": " our computational capabilities that's more slow, you know, we develop technologies that never existed. So just think about it, if we double every two years, what would happen in a million years? What would happen in a billion years? If it's exponential up to a point, you know, of course, eventually the laws of physics come to haunt you. But"
},
{
"end_time": 9058.166,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9033.422,
"text": " Just think about an exponential curve that has, instead of one century, has thousands, millions, or even billions of years of history, it would look like eternity to you, because the state that such a civilization will get to would be so advanced that you wouldn't be able to comprehend it. Now, it might not get there because it may be short-lived."
},
{
"end_time": 9073.404,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9058.558,
"text": " For example, just like now we have virtual reality machines, you know, like you hook yourself to goggles that give you a sense of virtual reality. It's sort of like being high on drugs, you know, you're looking at some reality that doesn't exist. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 9102.142,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9073.729,
"text": " And suppose another civilization got to the point where they develop these VR goggles and they are hooked to them, they're happy with them, they put them on their face as soon as they're born and they live in these virtual realities, they will never engage with us. Okay, that would be a solution to Fermi's paradox. Why don't we see them? Because they're hooked to these goggles. But on the other hand, if they are curious about the real world, if they don't talk about"
},
{
"end_time": 9130.657,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9102.637,
"text": " mathematical gymnastics that we talked about before. If they're really hooked to the real world, they explore the real world, and they discover the real world so that they develop gadgets that travel through interstellar space and reach places, then they might look to us as a good approximation to God. And so there is this tension between a civilization closing off, engaging in wars,"
},
{
"end_time": 9155.299,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9131.101,
"text": " engaging in destructive measures or simply isolating itself from reality. There is this risk which I'm fighting, you know, in my pursuit of evidence I'm fighting against, but there is a possibility that our civilization will get to that sterile endpoint where either it destroys itself by wars"
},
{
"end_time": 9182.944,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9155.776,
"text": " or it hooks itself to some virtual reality. Okay, there is that danger. And if you get there, you will never launch things into the real space, into space. So there is this tension between the finite lifetime of a technological civilization and the ability of that civilization to launch equipment to space. And, and I'm just relying on the hope that there was someone out there that didn't surrender"
},
{
"end_time": 9210.145,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9183.541,
"text": " to the risks of living in virtual reality didn't surrender to the risk of pursuing your ego going to wars, but actually was curious about exploring interstellar space. And I hope that among the tens of billions of stars, there is someone like that. By the way, just so that you know, so far, there were about 100 and"
},
{
"end_time": 9237.705,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9210.538,
"text": " 40 billion people who ever lived on the surface of Earth throughout human history. And there are more stars than that in the Milky Way galaxy. So we have more than one star per person who ever lived, maybe 10 stars. And that gives me hope. I saw when I was researching the Galileo project online, that Stephen Wolfram is on the advisory board. And I'm curious what"
},
{
"end_time": 9255.486,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9238.251,
"text": " Does Stephen contribute or what are his views if you're allowed to reference them? Yeah, so there are a number of people who serve on our advisory board, and then they provide us with advice and comments. And Stephen is brilliant."
},
{
"end_time": 9269.514,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 9256.067,
"text": " physicist slash computer scientist and we benefit every now and then from his advice to the project, but he is not engaged in the day-to-day routine work that we have."
},
{
"end_time": 9291.254,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 9269.94,
"text": " And there's a number of other advisors that we have. There are some that are those philanthropic advisors who contributed funds to the project. You can find them on the website. There are others that belong to the Science Advisory Board. And these are people who did not provide us with funding, but provide us with advice. What about Rizwan Virk?"
},
{
"end_time": 9321.869,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 9292.108,
"text": " It's the same category. He actually every now and then tries to help also in terms of approaching other potential donors. And in general, he provides advice and input help to the project. I noticed that I have a question here in bold about Bruce Fenton and the Tektites. If you don't mind commenting, what are your views on that PDF? It's Bruce Fenton and he had the Australasian Tektites interstellar object debris"
},
{
"end_time": 9339.616,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 9323.012,
"text": " Yeah, so these tectites are an interesting puzzle as to what their origin is, but we don't know the answer. And then, you know, in principle, it's possible they represent some unusual asteroids, comets or interstellar objects, but"
},
{
"end_time": 9367.193,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 9340.094,
"text": " It's just unclear at the moment. I would say the jury is still out and then we need more data. So for example, if we examine interstellar objects like the meteor that landed near Papua New Guinea, we can tell whether the composition indeed resembles those tectites or not. Professor, what opinion of yours has changed in the past few months as a result of the Galileo project?"
},
{
"end_time": 9385.367,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 9368.473,
"text": " Well, we don't have new data to provide us with evidence about unidentified objects or the interstellar meteor or a more like object. But the one thing I learned is that there are lots of curious"
},
{
"end_time": 9403.985,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 9385.794,
"text": " People out there within the Galileo project is a real pleasure and privilege for me to work with a lot of skillful individuals that are dedicated to the projects, volunteer the time and expertise and we are making headway. So I'm very encouraged by that. I don't take it for granted because these are"
},
{
"end_time": 9432.568,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 9404.343,
"text": " people who volunteered, I didn't approach them, they came to me. We have 800 additional volunteers that we haven't reviewed yet. So we have 100 people in the project, 800 more, who filled up the form and we are now in the process of reviewing them and selecting those that have the expertise that matches our interests, our needs. So all together, along with the public's response to the work we do, gives me a lot of hope"
},
{
"end_time": 9453.848,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 9432.978,
"text": " and so every day you know it's just like swimming in very turbulent waters there are people who try to bring you down and then these are waves that carry you to the bottom of the ocean but at the same time every day there are people that lift me up and I just need to average and and the average is very positive I should say and"
},
{
"end_time": 9482.056,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 9453.848,
"text": " But what I find puzzling are those people who try to sabotage the effort because we are not taking any funds from existing projects and we are just pursuing evidence. That's what science is supposed to be. So anyone objecting to this approach is objecting the fundamental principles of science pioneered by Galileo Galilei. Yeah, that's why I didn't get why NASA finds it to be a conflict of interest."
},
{
"end_time": 9508.558,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 9482.466,
"text": " Oh, that's interesting. They say that since I'm leading the Galileo project, I'm already engaged in this activity and their committee is supposed to evaluate whether they should fund this activity. So their argument is if I were to serve on the committee, I would probably advocate for funding and conflict of interest because I may apply for these funds later on. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 9525.299,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 9509.019,
"text": " However, if you do, for example, consider climate change, suppose NASA established a committee that will study climate change, would they ban people who are researching climate change from being on the committee? I don't think so. So part of this is"
},
{
"end_time": 9548.677,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 9525.64,
"text": " the stigma that there is on the subject because they are not sure whether it's worth funding and then if they were as sure as they were about studying climate change then they would allow for me to be on the committee. Okay so professor I'm sure you've heard of variable light theories what do you see as their advantage or disadvantage?"
},
{
"end_time": 9574.94,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 9549.07,
"text": " At the moment, we don't have any definite evidence for anything moving faster than light or that the speed of light is variable. Of course, in principle, that could change our perspective on the Big Bang, on what happens inside the black hole. And some people suggested that this could resolve the singularities we have in Einstein's theory of gravity. But"
},
{
"end_time": 9599.804,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 9575.35,
"text": " At the moment, these are just speculations. We don't have any evidence for that. And the speed of light is significant because it represents the fastest speed by which any material particle can move. And so if you change the speed of light, you can change the rate by which you communicate. And obviously, you can change the horizon out to which you can see things."
},
{
"end_time": 9628.029,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 9600.094,
"text": " There's also another theory called Dirac's large number hypothesis. So what are your thoughts on that? And for those who are unfamiliar, do you mind giving a brief overview? Yeah, so in 1937, Paul Dirac made the hypothesis about large numbers. He observed that you can make dimensionless combination of some of the fundamental constants that we have."
},
{
"end_time": 9657.381,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 9628.524,
"text": " and obtained a very large number out of them. And the question is whether it means anything. And at the moment, you know, we don't see a good reason for these combinations of numbers to be that large, for example, involving Newton's constant, which is a small number and the electron mass, the electron charge, and so forth. And"
},
{
"end_time": 9680.674,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 9657.381,
"text": " The thing is, in the standard model of particle physics, all these constants do not have an explanation. They are just measured quantities. And we don't have an underlying theory that explains those constants. So we don't know what the origin of the large numbers is. And one possibility is that we wouldn't exist"
},
{
"end_time": 9701.817,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 9680.998,
"text": " as intelligent beings thinking about it, if these numbers did not have their values. So some people are thinking about the multiverse, the idea that there might be other regions of space and time where these parameters obtain different values. And the question is whether life, intelligent life could exist there."
},
{
"end_time": 9721.476,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 9701.817,
"text": " And in most of them, no, the answer is no, because for example, the universe would expand too rapidly. And you wouldn't be able to make stars and planets next to them so that we can have life as we know it. This doesn't exclude intelligence from appearing in other regions with other constants because"
},
{
"end_time": 9743.831,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 9721.852,
"text": " You know, there might be other paths to intelligence that we are not familiar with. And so I would argue that until we have a theory that explains the constants that we measure, it's premature of us to make sense of it. And so let's just wait. What are the pros and cons of peer review?"
},
{
"end_time": 9768.797,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 9745.179,
"text": " The importance of peer review is that your ideas and the comments are tested or at least evaluated by other professionals in your field of expertise. So the pro is that if there is any mistake or if there is some omission, it could be pointed out by the reviewers of the scientific paper that one is writing."
},
{
"end_time": 9781.561,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 9769.189,
"text": " The cons are obvious that sometimes there is a dogma and many of the mainstream scientists abide by the dogma and as a result, they dismiss alternatives"
},
{
"end_time": 9808.797,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 9781.954,
"text": " simply because they feel a threat to their field of expertise. And many scientists establish their self-esteem and their stature based on past knowledge, things that they worked on for decades and they established through their work. And if there is a new statement being made that could in principle doubt what is being known or at least suggest that it's incomplete,"
},
{
"end_time": 9823.933,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 9808.797,
"text": " They feel threatened, they feel their ego feels threatened and as a result they resist change. And that happened many times in science where ideas were pushed aside just because they threatened the dogma."
},
{
"end_time": 9848.302,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 9824.224,
"text": " And of course, that's the con of peer review. However, over time, you know, if at least there is a way to document the findings, other people may look at them later on, and eventually they might prevail. So, however, you know, it obviously slows down the progress of science if"
},
{
"end_time": 9864.258,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 9848.66,
"text": " every suggestion is being moderated by the experts. And for that purpose, you know, it's possible to have a different scheme where there is an archive on the internet where papers are being posted, not necessarily rejected that firsthand and"
},
{
"end_time": 9880.35,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 9864.258,
"text": " We do have such an archive, but unfortunately it's also moderated. There are people, practitioners of the field, who decide without any peer review, without any back and forth with the authors, they decide if a submission is worth posting."
},
{
"end_time": 9905.555,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 9880.35,
"text": " Which, again, is even more dangerous than peer review because they don't have to explain it to the authors. So I would argue in favor of having, since, you know, papers on the internet do not cost money, do not cost much computer space, power, you know, over there in the cloud, that we will have a better system where ideas will be"
},
{
"end_time": 9934.753,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 9905.862,
"text": " exposed to the community at large without being blocked by experts. I think that would be the best scheme. Have you tried to publish on archive and it was rejected? Well, no, but there was, for example, a submission recently about the Galileo project where I described the project as a whole, which is a scientific project. And it has been held"
},
{
"end_time": 9958.933,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 9935.196,
"text": " by the moderators for almost a month now. They're not posting it. And I find that strange because there are lots of papers. In fact, on the archive, there was recently a paper saying that based on a poll, a survey of UK astronomers, that most of them were"
},
{
"end_time": 9983.575,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 9959.633,
"text": " motivated to enter astronomy as a result of being fascinated by science fiction. Okay, so that paper reporting about the poll of UK astronomers that were fascinated by science fiction is posted on the same day on the archive, whereas the description of a scientific project to explore UAP is being moderated for a month now"
},
{
"end_time": 10008.626,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 9984.053,
"text": " Now, speaking of dogma, there's a viewer question, his name is Clavs Pedder, and he wants to know what things in cosmology do we assume are true that we can't prove nor disprove besides"
},
{
"end_time": 10035.64,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10009.309,
"text": " So for example, the multiverse is an excellent example of an area in cosmology that cannot be proven or disproven because we don't have access to regions of space and time beyond the observable volume of the universe. Light could not have"
},
{
"end_time": 10058.456,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10036.049,
"text": " gone across a distance greater than the horizon over the time since the Big Bang. And so there are these, I would call speculations that are regions of space and time far beyond the horizon that we can see, where conditions are very different, perhaps the fundamental constants are different, perhaps the laws of physics are different."
},
{
"end_time": 10086.374,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10058.916,
"text": " This discussion of the multiverse is not substantiated by any evidence and it doesn't appear more credible than philosophy or theology because it has no way of being disproven. Of course some people say maybe one day we will come up with a way to test it. Fine, until that day comes I don't see it as part of"
},
{
"end_time": 10110.145,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10086.834,
"text": " falsifiable physics. And of course, cosmic inflation is a paradigm that in principle can be proven right. For example, if we find gravitational waves from inflation that the theory predicts at different levels, depending on the inflaton, the field that drove inflation."
},
{
"end_time": 10132.176,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10110.64,
"text": " You can always design models of inflation that would produce undetectable signals. But in all of them, there is some gravitational wave background and we are seeking it, investing millions of dollars in the search for them. I should say that there is also a way of disproving the paradigm of inflation altogether. And the way to do that is to look for"
},
{
"end_time": 10160.009,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 10132.637,
"text": " a gravitational wave background of the type of the cosmic microwave background. We wrote a paper about it just last week with a postdoc named Sunny Vagnozzi. And we basically said that at the Planck time, the universe was immersed in a gravitational wave background, just like the cosmic microwave background, but in gravitational waves because of its very high temperature, close to the Planck temperature."
},
{
"end_time": 10190.213,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 10160.555,
"text": " Now the theory of inflation says after that plank time there was a period where the universe expanded exponentially or very fast faster than light and any such background would have been diluted. We wouldn't have it around today because there was this immense expansion of the volume of the universe and therefore inflation predicts that we won't find any gravitational wave background at high frequencies similar to the cosmic microwave background of"
},
{
"end_time": 10197.432,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 10190.759,
"text": " electromagnetic radiation. And if we search for it and we discussed in this paper how one can search for it,"
},
{
"end_time": 10227.449,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 10197.944,
"text": " In case we find it, that would disprove that there was an epoch of exponential expansion or inflationary superluminal faster than light expansion during an epoch of cosmic inflation. So there is a way of either proving inflation or disproving the entire paradigm just by searching for gravitational waves. So in a way, that's a scientific theory. You can either prove it or disprove it. Now, there are other aspects of"
},
{
"end_time": 10242.278,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 10228.046,
"text": " The early universe, which are also in principle testable, for example, imagine a universe where inflation didn't take place, but there was a bounce, the universe contracted before that, and then there was a bounce."
},
{
"end_time": 10262.841,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 10242.824,
"text": " That kind of a theory makes other predictions that can be tested. So altogether, you know, there are ways to test what happened around the Big Bang. But it's very difficult to test what happens beyond the region of space and time that we can probe right now."
},
{
"end_time": 10279.991,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 10263.797,
"text": " Thank you, and I'll put a link to that paper in the description. So this one is from a user named Mathematical Metaphysics. He says, I don't know if this has been asked before, but has Avi experienced anything close to what's paranormal, not limited to UFOs?"
},
{
"end_time": 10309.411,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 10282.517,
"text": " I never had such an experience and therefore you cannot regard me as an experiencer. And moreover, I do believe that the scientific instruments are much more reliable than humans as detectors. So I don't need to experience it myself. All I want is the, for example, the Galileo project instruments to detect an unusual"
},
{
"end_time": 10331.869,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 10310.333,
"text": " set of data that would indicate an object that is not naturally in the atmosphere, like not a bird, not a bug, not a meteor, not a thunderstorm, and it's not human-made. It's not a drone, not an airplane, not a satellite or"
},
{
"end_time": 10358.66,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 10332.261,
"text": " anything else of that sort but it looks unusual and for me that would be credible evidence. I don't need to experience it myself except I want to see the instruments detecting it and that I think will bring the subject to the mainstream of science so it will serve a very important purpose of validating what experiencers claim. I don't"
},
{
"end_time": 10387.756,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 10359.104,
"text": " have any opinion about the experiences reported? I don't dismiss them. I would like to find evidence for whatever they talk about through scientific instrumentation, because it's not subject to any biases that humans have. Now in this instrumentation, do you happen to have any analysis or people who are experts on metamaterials? And if not, do you plan on getting them in for the Galileo project?"
},
{
"end_time": 10416.869,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 10389.855,
"text": " We do have Gary Nolan as a member of our research team, and if we do find the materials that are of unusual composition, we'll definitely bring it to his attention. For example, when we scoop the ocean floor named Papua New Guinea, if we find that the fragments from the first interstellar meteor were made of some very unusual composition, we'll bring it to the laboratory of Gary Nolan, for sure."
},
{
"end_time": 10443.695,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 10417.79,
"text": " This question comes from user SwiftWisdom. For Avi, Professor Gary Nolan recently gave an interview with Ross Coulthart and stated that the phenomenon is definitely not human. And if people saw the evidence he had seen, they would come to a similar conclusion that the phenomenon is a non-material form of consciousness. So what is a non-material form of consciousness and what does Avi think of Gary's position? Now, of course, just so that this is clear,"
},
{
"end_time": 10466.869,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 10444.258,
"text": " i'm reading a quote from someone and i haven't verified this quote myself so take this with a grain of salt so my view of consciousness is that it's an emergent phenomena of the human body the human body is very complex especially the human brain and i don't think there is anything beyond what the"
},
{
"end_time": 10497.346,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 10467.346,
"text": " the physical composition of the human body is. So when people die, I think of it just like unplugging a computer from the outlet, it stops operating. And then obviously, what we call consciousness is a result of our brain being very complex. And one way to demonstrate that is to build a computer out of hardware, which is just materials we find around and we put together, and then get to the level of"
},
{
"end_time": 10523.439,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 10497.346,
"text": " sentient artificial intelligence systems. If the artificial intelligence system will behave in a way that resembles a human, we could declare it as having consciousness. And I subscribe to the Turing test in the sense that suppose out of a thousand people, 999 of them would think through a conversation, through interactions with"
},
{
"end_time": 10541.032,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 10523.592,
"text": " an AI system would believe that the AI system is a human without us telling them in advance. That would be good enough, as far as I'm concerned, for defining it as sentient. Now, even if the AI system is using datasets from the internet to respond"
},
{
"end_time": 10570.094,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 10541.63,
"text": " to the human, I don't care about it because maybe the human brain is doing the same. As long as it appears to be like a human, that's all that matters because we don't know when we interact with another human, we don't know how the processing is done in the brain of information and how consciousness comes into play. So I would say we should just compare it to the experience with the human and if it behaves in a way that is indistinguishable"
},
{
"end_time": 10590.333,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 10570.094,
"text": " to 999 people out of 1000, I would say it's good enough. And at that point, you know, it would be sentient. And it would be clear that we constructed this AI system out of materials. So it would make sense to say the human body is similar, it's constructed of materials,"
},
{
"end_time": 10619.548,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 10590.333,
"text": " And yet it displays what we call consciousness or free will. And then that's a signature of very complex systems complex enough. And by the way, the AI system could learn from experience so you can seed it started just like you give birth to a child. And early on you educate the child. So the AI system could learn from experience through machine learning and you can educate it just like you educate a child. So early on it might"
},
{
"end_time": 10646.288,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 10619.889,
"text": " imitate you, but eventually it will acquire the qualities of a person, an adult that goes into the world and interacts with the world on its own. And so in that sense, I would not see a difference between a sentient AI system and humans. And therefore, I would not think that there is a non-material form of consciousness. And therefore, when seeking"
},
{
"end_time": 10664.974,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 10646.288,
"text": " an explanation for unidentified objects, I would assume that if they behave as sentient entities that they are equipped with artificial intelligence, you know, that it's just devices that are even more sophisticated than the ones we will produce in the next decade."
},
{
"end_time": 10694.701,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 10664.974,
"text": " And it would be interesting because it will open a new frontier of artificial intelligence from our side, interacting with artificial intelligence from their side. And I call it AI-AI interaction, which is a third category that was not envisioned by the philosopher Martin Buber, who talked about an interaction of a human with an object. He called it I-it interaction or relation."
},
{
"end_time": 10723.831,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 10694.701,
"text": " And he distinguished that from an IU interaction, an interaction of a human with a human or of a human with God, which is the eternal you. And he did not envision back a century ago when he wrote his book, I am though in 1923, he did not envision a third category, which I think will might come into play with, which is AI interacting with AI, which may reflect our first interaction with"
},
{
"end_time": 10748.933,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 10724.224,
"text": " artificial intelligence from an extraterrestrial origin. So I can imagine universities establishing new departments, instead of a department of psychology, it would be a department of interstellar psychology, meaning trying to understand sentient beings, which are basically AI systems that were sent to us from an exoplanet."
},
{
"end_time": 10777.654,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 10749.718,
"text": " So what if your wife says to you, Avi, just so you know, come to this room. She opens the room. It's a secret room in your house. Cameras and TVs are revealed. Then she says, I've been appearing to love you. It's all fake. I'm hired by the government. After this, I will go continue to show you love in the same way. But just so you know, I don't actually feel it. I'm hired. We're going to I'm going to leave this room and everything will go back to the exact same way it was before. I'll say the exact same words. I'll"
},
{
"end_time": 10800.572,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 10778.029,
"text": " Yeah, so definitely the big picture makes a difference for me because I always think about"
},
{
"end_time": 10816.135,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 10800.879,
"text": " the big picture. If my wife would come to me and say that she was just playing it like an actor, that would make a difference for me. It's just like participating in a play where you play a role and that role does not represent you necessarily."
},
{
"end_time": 10844.241,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 10816.544,
"text": " Yes, I would not be in love with an actor who displays love to me. I would prefer to be in love with a person who lives life in an authentic way. So definitely that would make a difference. And you can generalize it to experiences we have. And like, for example, if the government tricks us to believe in some notion and it doesn't seem to be real, I would be upset about it."
},
{
"end_time": 10857.193,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 10844.65,
"text": " And as a scientist, that's why I prefer not to pay attention to social media and focus on evidence and facts because nature in my view is authentic."
},
{
"end_time": 10882.056,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 10857.602,
"text": " You know, when I jog in the morning, when I interact with nature, it always appears to me as sincere, straightforward, whereas people are not always that way. They sometimes have an ulterior motive or a hidden agenda. That's why I prefer to use instruments to learn about nature because they don't have a hidden agenda and they don't have a prejudice or an ego associated with them."
},
{
"end_time": 10903.473,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 10882.5,
"text": " And moreover, I prefer to explore the facts to guide us. And just to give you an example, the expedition to Papua New Guinea was based on three scientific papers that we published, submitted for publication, two of them, but one of them was accepted for publication already."
},
{
"end_time": 10933.336,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 10903.473,
"text": " And then it was featured on NPR. And as a result, a few non-scientists, people who do not practice science, decided to make some ridiculing comments on Twitter on this expedition in a superficial manner. And I asked myself,"
},
{
"end_time": 10960.282,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 10933.746,
"text": " Is this really what they pretend to be? Because they pretended to protect science and argue that this expedition makes little sense. But in fact, they are anti-science because science is about seeking evidence. This expedition is funded by private donations. It doesn't take money from any other scientific project. So the only thing you can do if you are pro-science is to upload that, to support it. And"
},
{
"end_time": 10989.445,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 10960.896,
"text": " For example, if you look at mainstream cases of us seeking evidence, we looked for the nature of dark matter in the form of the lightest supersymmetric particle by smashing elementary particles at very high energies at the large Hadron Collider. And we haven't found it. Okay. And so here is an example for a search that"
},
{
"end_time": 10998.336,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 10990.043,
"text": " didn't turn out the way we expected it to be. And then a lot of astronomers are investing many hours"
},
{
"end_time": 11027.363,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 10998.712,
"text": " of on the biggest telescopes in the search for planet nine. They haven't found it. Okay, so why would one ridicule an expedition that wants to figure out the composition of the first interstellar meteor, which was supported by a formal letter from the US Space Command, while at the same time supporting a search for the lightest supersymmetric particle with the investment of"
},
{
"end_time": 11053.404,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 11027.739,
"text": " billions of dollars support the search for Planet Nine with the investment of huge telescope time. Why are these different from the search for the composition of the first interstellar meteor? That is escaping me. The only way I can understand it is some people out of jealousy trying to step on any flower that rises above the grass level."
},
{
"end_time": 11083.37,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 11054.343,
"text": " Okay, lastly, lastly now, if you could run the archive, we spoke about the archive before, or if you could speak to the moderators who are in charge, what would you say, what would you do? Regarding the archive, I would establish categories, different categories of research that allow for aspects that go beyond the mainstream, beyond the conventional wisdom, such that, you know, ideas could be floated there,"
},
{
"end_time": 11108.285,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 11083.763,
"text": " and let natural selection choose which one is accepted by the mainstream community. So rather than block the interaction among scientists, of course there should be a certain threshold for the content. You don't want things that are not scientific, but above some threshold there should be free exchange of ideas and"
},
{
"end_time": 11130.077,
"index": 476,
"start_time": 11108.695,
"text": " By establishing those categories that allow for that free exchange, you could accelerate the progress of science because you are not blocking, you're not moderating innovation. There is no way for us to know in advance which path leads to the truth and therefore we should encourage"
},
{
"end_time": 11139.019,
"index": 477,
"start_time": 11130.486,
"text": " The other risk I see is that by blocking deviations from the beaten path, we are discouraging young people."
},
{
"end_time": 11162.978,
"index": 478,
"start_time": 11139.292,
"text": " from thinking independently, because those young scholars realize that, you know, if in order for them to get a job, they need to subscribe to the main theme in order for them to post their papers to get their papers published, they must adhere to whatever guidelines they receive from the senior people. And that to me goes against the spirit of innovation,"
},
{
"end_time": 11180.23,
"index": 479,
"start_time": 11163.473,
"text": " In science against the spirit of the history of science, if you look at the most important revelations that we had, they came from unexpected directions. And by blocking those, we are limiting the rate of progress in science. So instead of that, let's allow"
},
{
"end_time": 11199.224,
"index": 480,
"start_time": 11180.23,
"text": " natural selection of ideas, let's allow the community to filter out which ideas are worthwhile and which not, and post all of these suggestions on some categories of the archive that allow for innovation, which currently do not exist."
},
{
"end_time": 11227.637,
"index": 481,
"start_time": 11199.462,
"text": " The way that I think about this is that if an open category exists, then it would automatically become labeled as pseudoscience, even if it's not. So for example, there's Vixra, which is the opposite of archive that has, I imagine, valid ideas and then some invalid ones, but almost all are classified as unscientific and Vixra is considered to be the place where one goes when one thinks they have a scientific idea, but they actually don't. So is there a way around this stigma?"
},
{
"end_time": 11252.329,
"index": 482,
"start_time": 11229.275,
"text": " Now there should be, of course, a certain threshold for allowing postings, but that threshold should not be established by what is accepted by the mainstream. So in other words, if we are dealing, for example, with dark matter, so we should not just post papers that give"
},
{
"end_time": 11275.043,
"index": 483,
"start_time": 11252.705,
"text": " various suggestions for what the dark matter might be, but we should also allow papers that talk about modified gravity in various forms and not block them. And so the way to proceed is to allow a conversation among professional scientists. So I'm not talking about allowing, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 11301.169,
"index": 484,
"start_time": 11275.401,
"text": " people crackpots, people that you find often on Twitter, people that do not publish in science. So, for example, one threshold could be that the paper needs to be submitted and reviewed in a respectable publication or considered at least in a respectable publication and not being rejected altogether because it has no substance."
},
{
"end_time": 11326.817,
"index": 485,
"start_time": 11301.169,
"text": " Another approach would be to have people with established track record on the archive that do not only publish unsubstantiated claims, but have also other papers that belong to the mainstream. So, for example, if a person has, let's say, 90% or 80% of their posts"
},
{
"end_time": 11353.166,
"index": 486,
"start_time": 11327.108,
"text": " in the mainstream, but then 10 to 20 percent are out of the mainstream, one should allow such a person to post the out of the mainstream ideas because the same person is also contributing to the mainstream. So it's clear that the person is trying to figure out solutions to some anomalies by deviating every now and then from the mainstream. So in my mind, a certain percentage"
},
{
"end_time": 11380.162,
"index": 487,
"start_time": 11353.49,
"text": " should be tolerated. Let's say 10-20% is a very reasonable portion of a publication record of a person to be allocated to risky propositions. One should allow for that and one can establish such a metric and therefore that would filter out all the crackpots that would put all their papers or all their postings on ideas that are completely unsubstantiated."
},
{
"end_time": 11408.916,
"index": 488,
"start_time": 11380.862,
"text": " I imagine that those who are rejecting on the archive, they wouldn't say, well, I'm doing so because it's not mainstream enough. They just wouldn't use that word or justification. They would say that it's unscientific or some other synonym for unscientific like pseudoscience. So I know that your solution was about mainstream. Just like in venture capital investments, I think it does make sense to allocate, let's say between 10 and 30% of the resources"
},
{
"end_time": 11436.954,
"index": 489,
"start_time": 11409.377,
"text": " to risky propositions. And a simple solution in the context of their archive would be to allow scientists who publish more than 70% of their papers to allow them to deviate from the beaten path. So if anyone can produce, you know, seven or eight papers that are within the mainstream, every time they post one or two papers that are out of the mainstream,"
},
{
"end_time": 11461.186,
"index": 490,
"start_time": 11437.654,
"text": " then I would allow those people to make these postings. I think that would be a very simple approach to take because it means that they're thinking outside the beaten path and creatively. And these are people who are contributing to the mainstream. And I don't think it will be regarded as unscientific on their behalf."
},
{
"end_time": 11486.22,
"index": 491,
"start_time": 11461.544,
"text": " because they are doing most of the work in a scientific fashion. So that's one solution. And of course, another way is to filter in their affiliation, their current professional credentials. So if they went through all the degrees of scientific practice, if they have a PhD, they may be a professor in a"
},
{
"end_time": 11515.725,
"index": 492,
"start_time": 11486.22,
"text": " Professor, I just sent a chat."
},
{
"end_time": 11545.759,
"index": 493,
"start_time": 11516.169,
"text": " Managing a project with more than 100 members is not trivial. I never served as a marriage counselor, but the best advice I can imagine giving couples is simple. Focus on what you agree on and avoid getting distracted by peripheral disputes."
},
{
"end_time": 11573.353,
"index": 494,
"start_time": 11546.084,
"text": " Yes, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 11601.032,
"index": 495,
"start_time": 11573.951,
"text": " I rest my case. The point is that we need to focus on the goal that all of us believe in, in the case of the Galileo project. It's collecting evidence. And I brought under the tent of the Galileo project, both advocates and skeptics for a simple reason that when the two camps agree on something, I know that the evidence is strong enough."
},
{
"end_time": 11630.35,
"index": 496,
"start_time": 11601.476,
"text": " So for example, we have Michael Shermer, and he said that if we find indisputable evidence, he would be glad to write an essay in his magazine skeptic about it. And I said, that's not enough. I want you to change the name of the magazine from skeptic to believer. What did he say? He laughed. Okay, we'll hold up to that."
},
{
"end_time": 11651.357,
"index": 497,
"start_time": 11631.084,
"text": " Thank you, Professor. I appreciate you spending so much time with me. Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure. Okay, well, congratulations for sitting through a three hour video. Again, it's astounding. Thank you for sticking around for so long. To find out more about anything that's mentioned in the podcast, then do click on the description."
},
{
"end_time": 11677.875,
"index": 498,
"start_time": 11651.647,
"text": " There are fastidiously timestamped themes and catalog references. If any are missing, just comments in my wife or I. We read each comment. So if you say that, hey, at this timestamp, you said so and so would be included, but it's not. I'll include it. Forgive me as I've spent almost all night editing and I just need to record this last bit. If you'd like to support the theories of everything podcast, then visit theories of everything dot org."
},
{
"end_time": 11699.258,
"index": 499,
"start_time": 11678.422,
"text": " That is theories of everything dot org and become a member if you're currently on the patreon and you feel like switching There are several benefits. So for example one you'll get the entire podcast early Sometimes 12 hours to 48 hours early an audio version without sponsors or ads You'll get a phone number to text me if you like"
},
{
"end_time": 11725.691,
"index": 500,
"start_time": 11699.548,
"text": " You can ask a question for the Kurt AMAs, so the Kurt Ask Me Anythings, and I'll be likely releasing them there first. There will be discounts on live events, sometimes even free, once we eventually do start them. There's exclusive merch to be offered there to be purchased only by members. Again, in the future I have this idea for a notebook where I'm putting mathematical quotes and quotes from physicists and mathematicians and other spiritual leaders and consciousness experts and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 11731.732,
"index": 501,
"start_time": 11726.408,
"text": " that serve as inspiration for what you're writing on that page, whether it's a daily journal or just note taking."
},
{
"end_time": 11759.36,
"index": 502,
"start_time": 11732.142,
"text": " there's also the eventual theories of everything book okay it's not simply a book i'm not interested in writing novels and so on it's more an inventory of the different toes explaining the terminology behind each and relating them to one another also when you become a member or if you like you can place a one-time donation at theories of everything dot org more of the money actually goes to curt goes to tow like i mentioned in the beginning i imagine that you're supporting tow in order to support tow not support tow plus"
},
{
"end_time": 11787.875,
"index": 503,
"start_time": 11759.36,
"text": " Patreon or to support Toe plus some other platform. Even YouTube takes a huge cut. These podcasts take a great, great deal of preparation and I wouldn't be able to do this without your support. So thank you so much. There are many, many, many plans for the future. Man, okay, well, I can tell you some. I would like to hire a full-time editor. I'd like to hire a full-time researcher to help me with studying for the different Toes as well as to help with the eventual Toe manual. There's also plans for different types of content and different"
},
{
"end_time": 11803.456,
"index": 504,
"start_time": 11788.439,
"text": " Guests and well that will be announced when it's ready. Thank you. Thank you so much I may be live streaming right now if you're interested you can go to toe clippings so type in toe clippings on YouTube. I know that's abhorrent to most and"
},
{
"end_time": 11823.251,
"index": 505,
"start_time": 11803.951,
"text": " I think you should avert your gaze to most of those thumbnails because, well, you can imagine the repugnancy that follows once you search something like that. However, that is the name, a fairly clever name for the clips version of the Theories of Everything podcast. Sometimes people aren't like you, they're not troopers, they don't have the time to sit through three hours of a video."
},
{
"end_time": 11842.739,
"index": 506,
"start_time": 11823.575,
"text": " And then some, they want to watch 5 minute to 10 minute at most maybe 20 minute chunks. And those are where the shareable clips go. I also may live stream there either right now or at some point or take different guests or other podcast hosts just if we want to talk about some topic without much preparation, without feeling the pressure of it being on the main Toe channel."
},
{
"end_time": 11858.916,
"index": 507,
"start_time": 11842.739,
"text": " It's a"
},
{
"end_time": 11877.875,
"index": 508,
"start_time": 11859.701,
"text": " Consciousness and Physics Contest called PACE-1. There's a video about that in the description. Brilliant has come on board to sponsor $1,000 to each of the five winners. So that is $5,000 in total distributed among the top five."
},
{
"end_time": 11896.869,
"index": 509,
"start_time": 11878.012,
"text": " Essentially, you create your physics explainer or consciousness explainer. It doesn't need to be both. If it incorporates both, that's, well, great, but it doesn't need to. There's a distinct lack of advanced physics and consciousness concepts. So if you have an idea for how to explain, let's say, mirror symmetry or some"
},
{
"end_time": 11926.22,
"index": 510,
"start_time": 11897.227,
"text": " Okay, I think that's everything. Thank you so much. And again, thank you to the sponsors. That's ButcherBox. If you want some quality meat, butcherbox.com slash theories. If you would like to learn some more about math and physics, that's brilliant.org slash toe. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 11941.903,
"index": 511,
"start_time": 11928.029,
"text": " Alright, take care."
},
{
"end_time": 11969.616,
"index": 512,
"start_time": 11942.585,
"text": " The upcoming guests are John Vervecky and Ian McGilchrist coming together for Theo Locution. Steven Greer is coming up in October. Nick Lane is coming up next to talk about the origins of life being predicated on metabolism rather than genes being the precursor to metabolism. Tim Modlin is coming on to talk about the interpretations of quantum mechanics. And of course, Salvatore Pius is coming on with Stefan Alexander, a string theorist slash loop quantum gravity theorist."
},
{
"end_time": 11975.947,
"index": 513,
"start_time": 11969.872,
"text": " To talk about quantum gravity and Salvador Páez's ideas embedded in the UFO patents. Plenty to look out for."
}
]
}No transcript available.