Transcript:

Go to the Primary Sources

Avi Loeb: The scientific approach is indeed should be guided by evidence and we shouldn’t have a prejudice. We shouldn’t have a view about the outcome before we see the evidence. Now, one reason I have you in the council is so that those believers will attack you instead of me for missing the scientific method.

Michael Shermer: I have to say, Brian, the vitriol on both sides, it’s amazing what people say about each other. It’s not just on X, but on X especially bad. But as I’ve gotten to know Avi pretty well, I’m just amazed by the shit they talk about him. It’s like, my God, this is ridiculous. He’s not at all like this. And then people, of course, they hate on me and they hate on the believers, whatever. I don’t know. It’s almost political, right? It’s like politics.

Avi Loeb: The way to think about it is what people say reflects on them more than on the subject that they are talking about. We see that a lot in politics, but we see it in science as well. And then the way to distinguish between truth and what people are saying is to look at the primary sources. So if someone says that they said something, go ahead and check if Avi said that thing. When you check the primary sources, you will realize that I didn’t say that thing. And that’s the way science is done, by the way. We go to nature, to the data that is collected by instruments to tell us what is out there, rather than talk about what is out there, which is very common on social media. You just say what you think is out there, but that’s not necessarily what is out there. Most of the time we are wrong.

So the same is true when you say that a person should be dismissed because he said this and that. We should check if that person actually said that. And unfortunately, social media is such a shallow platform that people don’t really go to the primary sources. They don’t really check. Just yesterday, someone was saying that I said bad things about Jay Stratton. I didn’t say, I said only positive things about Jay Stratton. Personally, if you look at my essay, I only gave his credentials. And I said that we should look for the evidence behind what he’s talking about, which is exactly what I’m saying right now. It’s not a bad thing to say that about Jay Stratton. It’s about the fact that, enough with storytelling, enough with verbal testimonies, we are at an age where it’s time for us to look at the evidence.

And that’s what I’m saying. I think that resonates very well with what the public wants. If Jay Stratton says there is a spacecraft that is withheld within government or within corporations, I want to see the spacecraft. What could be more natural than that? Before I believe it. And someone may say, well, he’s worried about showing the spacecraft because he might get retaliation.

And I say, well, he doesn’t need to show it to me. He doesn’t need to show it to Michael. He doesn’t need to show it to the council. He can go straight to the White House and have a guided tour of President Trump to the spacecraft. The only person who would know about it is President Trump. There is no doubt that President Trump is interested in this subject. Why? Because he put the directive out. He sees a political benefit from being the person who provides the revelation about alien intelligence. That would be a huge event. President Trump will be remembered for thousands of years just by making this recognition that we are not alone, that we are not perhaps at the top of the cosmic food chain. So it will be a great political boon for President Trump. There is no doubt that he wants it. And so I’m saying, Jay Stratton, you know about the spacecraft, go ahead and give the inside information straight to President Trump. I’m not asking to know about it myself, but if you want, I’ll be happy to help.

## Why Isn’t She Just Opening Up the Kimono?

Brian Keating: I heard the exact same thing from Michael Shermer a couple months ago when he was on my show for his wonderful new book. And he was using not President Trump, Marco Rubio. But I have a better idea. How about Councilwoman Luna? And by the way, Avi, you’re very close with her. She did a kind of a glow-up shot of herself visiting your Harvard observatory and looked through the telescope during the day. Why isn’t she just opening up the kimono? Here’s everything we know. And I respect her. She has no whistleblower concerns whatsoever. She has no security, no doxing concerns. She has every right and every responsibility as the chairwoman.

Is this just a manifestation, either one of you guys, of the Peter principle, which we have in academia? The Peter principle, you rise to the level of your incompetence. We have a thousand deans and so forth. Why are there so many directors of different task force, Avi? Who are these people? We have Lou Elizondo, David Grusch, Anna Luna, Jay Stratton now, Christopher Mellon, all these people who have the podcasts and books and appearances. Who the hell are these people? And why isn’t the one at the top of the food chain, the chairwoman of the congressional committee on this task force, why isn’t she just opening up the kimono, like you just said?

Avi Loeb: Well, so first of all, it’s obvious that the US government sees objects they don’t understand. The fundamental question is, do they represent alien technology, non-human made technology? That’s a very simple question. And if there is a spacecraft the way that Jay Stratton claims he saw, if there are alien bodies the way Jay Stratton claims he saw, then it’s a very straightforward thing because the only thing we need is to see digital evidence, either video footage or the actual material of these objects. We are not talking philosophy here. We’re talking about real things that were seen and perhaps very likely documented because the people who held them have documentation. So all we need is access to the primary sources.

Like I said before, now you may ask why isn’t the information delivered to congresspeople like Representative Luna, Representative Burlison, Representative Burchett. All of them are very eager to promote this disclosure. And they were exposed to some data from the US government, but it’s not available to everyone. And we don’t know how conclusive it is. I don’t think it has to do with the kind of material evidence I was talking about. It’s probably mostly footage. But to your question, there are lots of people who used to work within government within a project that was funded to study those UAP, and how far does the data go, we don’t know. Okay.

So these people have the duty now because President Trump is very interested. There is a memorandum written by the deputy director of national intelligence, Aaron Lukas, who says that all non-disclosure agreements are waived. These people are encouraged. They’re not supposed to worry about legal repercussions and they can approach the PURSUE team. This is the team that is following on the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Now, if they are worried about legal repercussions and they don’t believe the PURSUE team, they can go straight to Stephen Miller in the White House, and they will have a direct line to the president where they can share the information. And believe me, these people will not face any legal repercussions if they reveal it to the president of the United States.

Brian Keating: Michael, why aren’t they doing it? Why aren’t they coming forward? Why aren’t they addressing this consideration which you and I talked about called the residual of anomalies that will never go away? Why aren’t these people just being straightforward and honest? I feel like disclosure’s like nuclear fusion. It’s the disclosure of the future and it always will be.

Michael Shermer: Yeah, I guess if I had to anticipate what they might say, it would be something like fear of retaliation or whatever. Jay Stratton told Fox News’ Bret Baier Monday night or Tuesday night that “too intense” was the word he used. That actual disclosure where the American public or anybody could actually see the alien bodies and ships, it would be too intense for the American public to handle. Okay, I don’t believe any of this. This is kind of the old line of, they don’t want to disclose whatever it is you’re looking for because it’ll cause the stock market to collapse and people will lose their religious beliefs and so on.

Brian Keating: But they do want to disclose, ’cause they want to distract from Epstein, right, Michael? So how can you have it both ways?

Michael Shermer: I don’t think anybody would say that. That is one conspiracy theory about why Trump or any of the others in the MAGA community are interested in the subject, to distract us from the Iran war or whatever. No, I don’t think that’s it. They may say that they’re worried about people concerned about the religiosity. We’ve had polls for decades from religious pollsters asking people, would you be bothered about your religiosity if we discovered extraterrestrial intelligences somewhere out there or even here? And the answer is no, not at all. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, he can do anything he wants. He can make as many not only exoplanets, but as many intelligent life forms on those planets as he wants. Right? So it doesn’t really bother anybody.

As for the stock market, they’ve always said that, why don’t we find out about X, whatever it is, because the stock market would collapse. Okay, there’s no evidence that any of this would happen. If anything, it would cause AI companies and NASA and space propulsion system companies and so on to actually boost their budgets. NASA could go to Congress and go, we found the aliens and now we need to 2X our budget so that we can deal with them and so on. Anyway, the real reason I think…

Avi Loeb: Think about it in the following way. Suppose you find a tennis ball in your backyard and your family is not aware that you have a neighbor, even though you see a lot of houses on your street. It’s just that the mainstream within your family claims that these houses may be empty. That’s what the academic community claims, and the academic community says it’s an extraordinary claim to think that the empty houses, meaning all the habitable Earth-Sun systems in the Milky Way galaxy, there are billions of them, all of these have no intelligence that ever emerged on them, or we can’t imagine anyone being as intelligent as we are. And so the family says, we have no neighbor, but you find a tennis ball that is clearly manufactured, not a rock. Okay.

I think it makes no sense to hide it from the family members because that’s the reality of the situation, and the neighbor may show up in the front door. There may be many other ways by which the neighbor will affect the life of your family. And it’s the same way that for the Vatican to put Galileo in house arrest made no sense, because the fact that the Earth moves around the Sun rather than the other way around is an existential fact that will not be changed by preventing the information from leaking to the public. It is a lost battle. There is no point in denying the reality of the situation. So for the same reason, if we have a neighbor, let everyone know about it and let’s adapt to that. Just like we adapt to AI being potentially more intelligent than we are in the coming decade, like the mathematics.

## Why Would They Send Around These Meat Bags?

Brian Keating: I want to get to that because that is certainly on everybody’s mind, including this context of superintelligence, which is uncontrollable, unpredictable. And that brings up a question that I’ve had for both of you guys for quite some time, but I’ll start with Avi. Why would they send around these non-human biologics, as David Grusch has called them? Why would they send around these meat bags instead of sending around a silicon brain? Avi, why would they go to the trouble of this? And so isn’t it a priori unlikely that when they say something is bipedal and is non-human and is biological, that we have to put a Bayesian prior very, very low on that claim? What do you think, Avi?

Avi Loeb: Well, I should say that the most likely entity to make it, let’s say between stellar systems, is probably technological rather than biological because of the long travel times, because of the hazardous conditions. But following on from von Neumann’s idea, self-replicating probes make a lot of sense. In other words, even we, Elon Musk is now talking about his robots being able to use raw materials to reproduce themselves. And we know that in biology, that’s exactly what happens when the dandelion flower sheds its seeds and they fly in the wind. They find a fertile ground and create more dandelion flowers. So technologically speaking, it makes more sense to send the information that you want to replicate in the destinations.

And in the case of the Earth, suppose they had that objective and [inaudible] 3D printers, machines that are capable of producing. Now, what would you like if you wanted to produce animals, let’s say, that are adaptable to the environment? You would look around and see what kind of animals exist on Earth and then sample them and try to 3D print something similar to them that would survive on Earth. So I can imagine a situation like that where we will find biological, but it will be synthetic biology. It will not be natural biology the way we think. So this will be 3D printed or synthetic biology produced biological entities that can survive on Earth, because these things came from far away. Every planet has its different conditions that allow different animals to live on it. So instead of bringing the animals as pilots, makes no sense to bring them as pilots. But it makes a lot of sense to reproduce animals that are already there and put in them whatever you need in order to use the equipment that you bring.

## Are You Alone on the Committee?

Brian Keating: Michael. Last time Avi was on, he’s very colorful. He has lots of wonderful analogies. And one of them was, if you see an ant, he’s not alone, basically. You’re cleaning out your kitchen there in Santa Barbara, all of a sudden you see an ant. And you can be pretty sure, according to Avi, that he’s not alone. He used that in the context of sightings and anomalies that we talked about. But I want to say that in the context of you as a skeptic. Is there only one skeptic on this committee? Because if there is, it’s kind of worrisome to me. I wouldn’t go on a committee that I felt like I would get no backup on. I don’t have your courage, though. I don’t have the cojones that you have. Tell me, Michael, was that a concern of yours? Are you alone? Not just in the universe, but on the committee.

Michael Shermer: No. Avi just said they’re all skeptics. If you asked everybody on the committee, they’d all go, yeah, of course I’m skeptical. Now the question is, well, what do you mean by skeptical? Right. So for me, the null hypothesis is that aliens are not here. Now, I could be wrong. I think it’s highly likely there are aliens somewhere in the cosmos. Have they come here? I think it’s a separate question. I think it’s highly unlikely, but okay, show us and then I’ll change my mind tomorrow, right? Avi and I have that bet.

So that’s always been bothering me about the disclosure projects that all these UAP whistleblowers talk about. One of the other excuses, besides the stock market will collapse and people will lose their religiosity, is that they themselves may have their lives or careers threatened. And yet there they are on Fox News, on Joe Rogan, telling tens of millions of people what they know. But when Joe or whoever presses for evidence, where are these spaceships? “I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that we’re not alone in the universe.” Okay, that is a massive statement. That’s one of the most revelatory statements ever made in the history of humanity, that there’s other life forms. You can’t just say that and go, I’m not going to show you.

So my analogy is the biologist that goes to the big biology conferences and says, I found another bipedal primate who has language and developed a culture and so on. And it’d be like, my God, you mean Bigfoot or something like that, or the Hobbit people or whatever? My God, well, where are they? I can’t tell you. Okay. It’d be like, well, thank you very much. That’s interesting. But when you can tell us, get back to us, right? In the meantime, I’m gonna write a book about it, going on Fox News, going on Rogan.

The problem is that this is not just a one-off, Brian. This has been going on for decades. The disclosure project started by Steven Greer in ’93. We’ve been hearing these stories. It’s coming any day now. Yeah. Okay. So I’m a longtime watcher of this. It’s like, okay, come on, let’s do it. And so there was Jay Stratton Tuesday night saying, it’s too intense, I can’t show you. All I could tell you is we’re not alone in the universe. Okay, sorry. That’s not enough.

Brian Keating: Avi, you have a vested interest. We’ve talked about that. You have a vested interest.

## That’s How Science Is Done

Avi Loeb: I actually met Jay Stratton a few weeks ago in Utah at a conference and I invited him to speak with the council, but he did not respond to my invitation. But two things I wanted to mention is how science is done, and people need to understand that. So we have no prejudice. So when the Pentagon reports about six dots in the sky that they cannot understand, they call them UAP. They declassify the video in the infrared on September 18th. And then the council looks into that, and that’s a study led by Jacob Haqq-Misra. We ended up writing a paper showing that the brightness of these six dots fluctuates periodically, just like you expect from birds flapping their wings.

Now it’s not as if we started with this notion, because even the Pentagon didn’t know that these are birds. They called them UAP because they didn’t know what they are. But just analyzing the brightness, taking a Fourier transform of that, seeing a period eight times per second, comparing to Galileo Project data on birds, we have a lot of birds that we see. Then we see that there is a match, that the brightness fluctuations of the six dots that the Pentagon is reporting about matches what the birds are doing in the Galileo Project data. That’s how science is done.

Second point, we don’t have good enough data on most of the reports that are in the tranches, six tranches from the Pentagon. Therefore, the conclusion is not that let’s imagine what these things are. Instead, the conclusion is let’s collect better data. So my hope is we will partner with the Pentagon, do experiments with new sensors in the locations where they see those unusual objects. Why? Because at the very least, if you have a down to earth approach, you would say these are national security risks. We’re dealing with espionage by Chinese drones that we haven’t yet identified. So let’s figure them out. And I’ll be happy to help the Pentagon and the intelligence community fulfill their mission. That’s the minimum that we will do. But of course, if it happens to be alien technology, this will be huge.

Now, how do we promote that? So I’m also working to get the funding to a UAP X Prize, which means $10 million allocated to whoever brings evidence beyond the reasonable doubt on unidentified anomalous phenomena being associated with alien technology. A week and a half ago, I attended a gathering in the home of Peter Diamandis, along with Garry Nolan and Peter Skafish. To my fortune, I also the same day had the brunch with a potential funder. And that would be really nice because it will encourage scientific research. People will now have a prize to gain if they demonstrate alien technology. But also if there is anyone that has the spacecraft that Jay Stratton is talking about in their possession, they can get the X Prize. Now, if they go to President Trump, President Trump can get the X Prize. And I think it will bring more transparency into the subject, either through research or through anyone that already has the evidence.

## Why Would Anybody Come Forward?

Brian Keating: Now with regard to why people wouldn’t come forward, it seems like there’s a lot of vitriol. Obviously Michael even talked about, I want to get to his Boston Globe op-ed, which is paywalled, but he sent me a free version of it. But the reason I might think is because of some things that Anna Paulina Luna has said about the former director of AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Avi, you connected me to Sean Kirkpatrick. I never got so much hostility, hate, vitriol directed at me, at him. And maybe it’s because of things that she said. She said, quote, “Sean Kirkpatrick,” she spelled it wrong, “he’s a documented liar, a deep state shill, and someone who lied to the public while intimidating and or discrediting witnesses.” This is pretty awful. And her communications director, David Leatherwood, has also responded to criticism of the UAP hearings.

Why would anybody come forward? Why, Michael, would you risk your reputation if you’re in government? Why would you want to lead this? So it’s not only a residual of anomalies, it’s a residual of true believers that get left to lead these committees, like potentially, I don’t know Jay Stratton at all, except what Avi tweeted about him. But you have people like that that will just have this fanfare and celebration from people like Luna and her workers. Why would anybody come forward that has the counterside of the issue? The devil’s advocate.

Michael Shermer: Yes. Well, if there’s one real reason, I suspect that has to do with national security, and that whatever it is that people are seeing, these UAPs, they may be our own advanced technology or actually crash retrieval technology from foreign assets. There’s always been crash retrieval programs all the way back to World War One, where we capture the enemy’s airplanes and see what they’re using. That’s why in the B-17s over Nazi Germany, if a plane was going down, they had to try to get rid of the Norden bombsight device, because we don’t want them to know how we’re using these accuracy technologies for our bombs, right?

So I suspect that the vast majority of these UAPs are just our own technology, just the next version of the U-2 spy plane or the SR-71 Blackbird or the stealth bomber or whatever. The CIA and DARPA’s maybe developing super advanced drones or spy balloons or whatever, something that we just don’t know about yet. And that maybe this is what people are seeing, and that somebody in the government is just like, we don’t want people to know what’s actually going on for national security reasons.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, it’s called black projects, Michael. Exactly.

Michael Shermer: Yeah. Yeah.

## Nature Is Far More Imaginative Than Steven Spielberg

Brian Keating: So Avi, what’s your null hypothesis?

Avi Loeb: I have no null hypothesis. I just want the data to guide us because Steven Spielberg made the script for Disclosure Day based on everything he heard. And to me that could be very misleading because people say a lot of things that are wishful thinking. And frankly, I didn’t find Disclosure Day to be an inspiring movie. The main characters that are trying to unravel the truth are being chased by the government. Their car is crashed against the moving train. My car is intact and I’m actually…

Brian Keating: In Harvard Yard? That’s a miracle, Avi. If your car hasn’t been keyed in Harvard Yard like mine was.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, the point is if you listen to all the noise that is out there and you amplify it in a movie, it doesn’t serve any good purpose. The point is we need to look for the signal, not the noise. And how do you find the signal? It’s by not having a prior, not having a prejudice, and just trying to collect as much data, as much evidence, because nature is far more imaginative than Steven Spielberg. And if we do find, I’m not excluding nor debunking the existence of an alien visitation. I’m just saying let’s collect better data so we can tell whether we are looking at a UAP that is birds, or whether we are looking at the UAP that is a Chinese drones that are spying on the US, or whether we are looking at alien technology. The only way to figure it out is not by speaking to reporters on Fox News. It’s by showing us the evidence.

## What Should Be the Protocol?

Brian Keating: Yeah, that reminds me of something my rabbi told me once, Avi, that I can believe in Kriat Yam Suf, because if Cecil B. DeMille can do it in The Ten Commandments, certainly Hashem can do it. Michael, before we turn this into a minyan and get you properly circumcised. No, we don’t have to do that, Michael. But Michael, recently David Grusch was on Joe Rogan, and it was an incredibly wide ranging interview. But at one point he mentions our mutual friend, all three of us are friends with Eric Weinstein, and he mentioned that he had some biological material and that he was hoping, Eric Weinstein had some access, if he could give Weinstein access to this, or maybe Grusch has his own access to this. What would be worse than giving access to a completely non-professional biologist? Eric’s a mathematician and formerly works with Thiel Capital. What would be the concerns that you have? What should be the protocol? Because if you can’t maintain provenance as a scientist, you lose your traceability matrix.

Michael Shermer: I don’t know. People just shoot off the most famous names they can think of, I guess, maybe when they’re on Rogan. I have no idea. Eric, he doesn’t know anything about this, right? We have biologists on our council. They would be highly qualified to look at this. But forget that, just the government has access to professional medical and biological scientists that they could access when this…

Brian Keating: Would that corrupt or pollute the provenance of such things? I talked to Tom DeLonge many years ago, first interview, I think, he did on a podcast. Again, he claimed he lost access to the…

Michael Shermer: I don’t care. Why would we care what a rocker thinks? Come on. SETI has a whole protocol set up. If we find the signal, this is what we’re going to do. There’ll be disclosure and so on. The government has systems in place like this, NASA and so on. This is what we’re going to do. Okay. So we don’t have to go through rock stars and, I don’t know, podcasters or whatever.

Avi Loeb: I should just make an anecdote that I met Tom DeLonge last month and I told him, yeah, I don’t know much how to sing. And he said, neither do I.

Brian Keating: He’s a local San Diego boy, so we gotta love him here. But Avi, what would be the chain of custody to prevent… Someone’s mentioning in the chat, as has my friend Delon, why not give it to Garry Nolan? Last I checked, Garry Nolan does immunology, I believe, at Stanford. Yes, he knows more about biology than me. I always told you when I dissected a frog in ninth grade biology, the frog came back to life and started screaming in agony. So don’t give it to me, but don’t give it to Garry Nolan either. Why, just because someone has a degree, does that make them entitled to this provenance, potentially contamination chain? And I like Gary, you’ve been on with me and him.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, so the way science works is that multiple groups should be able to vet whether the data implies the same conclusion. And without that vetting, without checking independently, we will lose objectivity. And so if we have a sample, and I should say that it’s sufficient to tell if material came from outside the solar system, my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobsen, just needs one gram of material. That is plenty. We actually submitted a paper for publication a month ago that analyzes a nanogram of material, 10 to the minus nine of a gram, so that we draw very high statistical significance conclusions from that nanogram. So giving a gram is a treasure. So just to infer isotope abundances and chemical abundances, a gram is plenty.

In order to do biology, what you want of course is to compare it to systems you find here on Earth, life forms. And by the way, all of them have the same chirality, all of the life forms on Earth. And so you have a 50% chance that if something came from outside, it’s an opposite chirality, not to speak about the fact that the DNA will not be the same. Who said that universally it has to have four bases and so forth? The point is that it could be very different. And if you give it to multiple groups, some of which are, let’s say, skeptics, some of which are believers, if they reach the same conclusions, we are on a solid footing. And the way science is done is by allowing multiple scientists to look into the data. That’s the way we should approach it. And we have the resources, no problem. We just need access to the data.

And whoever holds it is [inaudible] to science, because whoever has such materials is preventing the rest of humanity from learning more about the origin and the potential intent of those materials. So if anyone is listening and they have access to such materials, I highly encourage you, whoever holds it, to share it with a broad range of expertise, because very likely, either within government or in corporations, you don’t have the world’s best experts and professionals to deal with such an exotic origin. And it’s not up to the holder of that material to decide whether humanity is mature enough to learn about it. I think we should all figure things out together and grow and adapt to this reality together, and it will make our life far more exciting to realize that we have a sibling, that God is not a parent to only one child, that in fact our siblings may be more accomplished than we are, that we can learn from them. It will bring a sense of humility to our existence, which we desperately need.

Brian Keating: Yeah, speak for yourself. I’m the most humble person. Michael, let me ask you this. Let me just… go ahead, go ahead.

Michael Shermer: Well, I was just gonna add, since the replication crisis began in 2010 in science, particularly psychology and medical science, what was discovered is that a lot of claims about scientific discoveries had not been replicated. They’d been published in peer-reviewed journals, but there are certain flaws there, time restraints on the reviewers, maybe they didn’t actually read through all the data carefully, but also the reporting in the papers themselves. The file drawer effect, where you run 10 experiments and you get one that is statistically significant. You publish that one, you put the others in the file drawer. No one even knows about the failed experiments. Or p-hacking, where you make the statistical significance number come out by throwing out some of the extreme data points or whatever. There’s lots of problems with that that have now been resolved.

One of which is don’t depend on one published paper for any particular conclusion. Wait to see if it, I should say, before you announce in a press release you’ve made the greatest discovery since Einstein or whatever, you should just wait to see if it’s replicated, before you publicize it and make a big deal about it. And that has gone a long way to solving some of these problems. So I think if there was discovery made of some biologics or non-human intelligence or technology that we can’t recognize, you asked about protocols. Well, yeah, not just one journal, not just one biologist or one lab. Everybody, lots of labs. The adversarial system is really good, where people compete with each other to debunk each other. That’s the whole point of the adversarial system. And it works really well to get to the truth about what’s actually happening.

## The Lack of Information

Brian Keating: Talk about the obstacles you mentioned in the Boston Globe article, because I know you have to leave in a few minutes. But talk about the obstacles. Which one of the obstacles do you think is the most significant practical hurdle to your work in the council?

Michael Shermer: I forget what obstacles. I don’t remember talking about obstacles.

I see, yes, yes, of course. Yes. So all of us on the council have been frustrated by the lack of information. We would love the government to give us more information. Like, where was this UAP film from? What camera was used, what was the distance, what was the speed, whatever. It would really help us. And somebody knows, but maybe again, maybe there’s national security reasons why they don’t want to make that public. Because they don’t want the Chinese or Russians to know how our cameras work on these jets, maybe. That would be legitimate, but it’d be nice to know if they’d at least say that. We would show you the numbers behind this blacked out box, but we can’t tell you because then our adversaries would know how our camera works. Okay. I sort of get that, but then why tease us with all these videos and photographs and documents without giving us full disclosure?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, there is another point to be made, Brian, in this context. For example, the satellites monitoring the Earth with infrared sensors for ballistic missile launches. There are a number of them, a large number of those. And over the past decade, they detect the meteor explosions, because when an object like a rock collides with Earth, it burns up in the atmosphere, generates a fireball. And these detectors can easily see that. And so they decided to share the information with NASA. Now, they don’t show us the footage of the meteor because that would reveal the level of high resolution imaging that they can accomplish. But they give the kinematic properties of these meteors, the three dimensional velocity that they have, the position and so forth. And in the same way, the US government, without revealing the quality of the instruments they’re using, they can give us more information about the distance of objects, the velocity of objects, without revealing what instruments were used to derive those.

## A Psychological Compulsion to Believe

Brian Keating: Especially things like the Chinese spy balloon. It’s not that they don’t want to reveal our capabilities. They don’t want to reveal the Chinese capabilities. That’s kind of crazy. But Michael, you’re a psychologist by training, a PhD. You’ve been a professional skeptic way back since you were abducted in the eighties and nineties. We’ve talked about that a few times. So no one has more incentive out there. People that are ranking on Michael in the comments, still he would have a great incentive because it would validate this experience that he had many decades ago. But Michael, what is the psychological kind of background? Help me. Avi and I are just simple astrophysicists, but what is a psychological compulsion to believe, to not believe, the adversarial kind of nature of this belief?

Michael Shermer: So, well, I do think that behind the deeper question is a religious impulse to find out that there’s something out there vastly more intelligent and moral and so forth than us. That is what the deity is in most religions. There’s an entity out there, an agent that knows we’re here, that created all this, made it happen, and so on. This is a very old point actually made by Carl Sagan in the 60s. There’s a nice video of him with Walter Cronkite where he’s explaining that the whole thing, he thinks, is like a kind of religion. And there’s research to support this, that people that are less religious but score high in spirituality, the desire for awe and wonder, that sort of thing, there’s measures for this, are also more likely to believe that aliens are out there or have come here than those that are already religious. So it’s kind of a filler, I think. Yeah, I think that’s the deeper impulse.

Now I did say this to Jill Tarter once and she was not amused, because she says, I’m not looking for God. I’m looking for aliens. Like, okay, I know. But the deeper matter of why we care, what difference does it make whether we’re alone or not? Why do people care about that? Well, because it really touches deep on who we are, where we came from, what we’re doing here. Are we really super unique, or are we just one of a near infinite number of intelligences or life forms in the cosmos? That would make a difference existentially about our kind of place in the universe.

So I know I gotta run, but I’ll wrap up with, I’ll give the last word to Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who witnessed the 2004 UAP incident from a USS Nimitz fighter jet, as I think it well sums up 75 years of ufologists’ search for aliens. She said, quote, “I think they enjoy the anticipation more than actually finding answers.” So what Avi and I want is answers. Well, yeah, I know the anticipation is big fun, but come on.

## Are We Alone Is the Most Romantic Question in Science

Brian Keating: Just before you leave, Michael, I know you gotta run, but before you leave, I view it as slightly problematic. As much as I love Avi, and I won’t miss an opportunity to tease Harvard in any capacity. But do you feel that there’s danger in centering an independent research organization like the council under Avi’s august supervision, but still centered in a university? Because look at the university system right now. Look at the Ivy League, Cornell, Harvard too, where I went, Brown, many different, and Stanford. People in the chat are saying, can’t trust Gary, he’s at Stanford. Their president had to resign because of… I mean, if you want something done right, do you wanna ask a team of academicians, professors and…

Michael Shermer: I still respect the Academy. So a lot of the politics and that kind of stuff is problematic. Cancel culture, DEI and all that stuff. This too shall pass. I do think that universities for centuries have been kind of the center of the generation of knowledge, and they will continue doing that. I do think having this council associated with Avi, organized by Avi, led by Avi at Harvard makes a difference. That opens doors. Representative Luna, like, I went to Harvard. Wow, okay, she’s not coming up to my office.

Brian Keating: She didn’t go to Harvard.

Michael Shermer: Visited Harvard, right? Yeah. She visited Harvard. She’s not coming to visit me, right? That opens doors. Okay. So if that’s what it takes, if somebody says, I don’t care about Shermer, but I want to show Avi, I’m going to Harvard to show the aliens, okay. Whatever it takes.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I should say, Michael, there is another aspect aside from religiosity, and that is looking for a partner. Before my wife met me, she was asking her father, is there anyone out there for me? And “are we alone” is the most romantic question in science.

Michael Shermer: That’s true, yes. That’s a nice point. Yeah.

Brian Keating: Well, Michael, I know you have to leave. Avi, are you able to stick around for a little longer? Thanks, Michael.

Michael Shermer: Okay. All right. I’ll see you guys later. Thanks so much. Bye.

## The Rise of AI

Brian Keating: So, Avi, it’s great to talk to you. We have a million questions for you, but we’ll do a rapid fire. But I do want to talk about the rise of AI. I do think it is the superintelligence phenomenon, cannot be avoided. And I think we do need to discuss that, especially in the context of what you’re doing. But also scientifically, for what we’re both doing and what our teams and researchers are doing and what our young people out there that are working in my lab and in your group have to confront. We’ve seen a lot of things going on lately with OpenAI. Navier-Stokes. You and I haven’t talked since then, so I think it would be fun to talk about that.

Let’s take a couple of questions from my audience. I usually take questions only from the members that join the channel, so please join the channel. If you’re not subscribing, please subscribe. And I guess the first thing is actually related to this. So why would aliens, if they have the access to interstellar transportation, why would they care about our DNA, not just have… aren’t the same five base pairs that we have in RNA and DNA, why would they care about our biology?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, so the question of the intent is the most difficult for us to figure out. And you can think of it in terms of levels of intelligence. If they are operating in a different plane than we are, we will never be able to figure out their intent. Just think about a dog where the owner didn’t feed the dog because they had to get some stamps from the post office. How would you ever be able to explain to a dog why stamps are needed? That’s a completely different level of understanding of reality. And so when the owner of the dog is absent, the dog has no way of figuring out that the post office gives stamps and that these are useful for something that the owner is doing.

So in the same way, if the aliens are operating at a different intelligence level, or if AI systems that we develop will reach a level that we cannot comprehend because of recursive self-improvement, we won’t be able to figure out the intent. We will see things happening. And in fact, the AI systems might try to fool us, like putting some makeup, a veneer that lets us feel comfortable with whatever they’re doing. But behind that veneer will hide the reality that is not understandable to us because it’s far more sophisticated.

We are cheering whenever OpenAI solves an old mathematical problem, because we can understand the fact that the mathematicians were not able for so long. And now a collection of thousands of agents can do it. But just think about a goal that has nothing to do with problems that humans posed in the past. Has nothing to do with the millennium problems that humans came up with. It has to do with problems that the AI system came up with, because of recursive self-improvement, they decided to pursue some goals that are not framed by humans. And then they’re giving us this appearance as if they are cooperating with us, but in fact they’re solving something else. And that is the most difficult situation to be in, because you have no way of figuring out the intent.

And I think in the case of neighbors that are visiting us, cosmic neighbors, if they reached our backyard before we reach their backyard, their science and technology is probably far more advanced than ours, by maybe thousands of years at the very least. And in that case, they represent our future. There is no way we can figure out our future now that AI systems are growing exponentially.

## The Aliens of the Gaps

Brian Keating: So this question about quantum physics, that we don’t fully understand quantum physics. So if we could understand it, we could manipulate it, and that would create new opportunities, virtual reality, the listener is saying, and that would be tantamount to UAPs. I call this line of thinking the aliens of the gaps. They can do everything that we can’t do, and they fill in the things that we can’t do, just like God did before we understood the scientific process as we do now. And of course there’s always residual things we don’t understand. What do you make of this? That the reason that they can get here is because they know physics that we don’t know. It’s sort of a very circular argument.

Avi Loeb: I’m not thinking about physics, but I do realize that our technological civilization is now on the brink of a new phase, which is driven by AI and eventually by self-reproducing robots with AI. Why is that significant? Because in the past, if you think about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, when we developed radio communication, it was in order for us to communicate with each other as animals, biological entities. They wished, especially humans, wished to communicate with each other. That created a sense of community. We developed a radio communication because of the fact that we are made of biological bodies. But when you deal with AI, they don’t have the same objective. They will not necessarily radio communicate with each other. And so SETI will not work when you deal with technological civilizations that went beyond the AI singularity that we are entering. And I call it SETAI, actually. I wrote three articles on that on medium.com. The search for extraterrestrial AI.

And one difference, just to give an example, is that if you deal with biological creatures, let’s say life as we know it in liquid water, what you need is to be in the habitable zone of a star, at the right distance where liquid water may exist on the surface of a rocky planet that has an atmosphere. However, if you deal with self-replicating robots that use AI, they would prefer to be closer to the host star. There will be a technological zone, which is different than the habitable zone, which is closer to the star, in order for them to get more flux, more energy per unit time, per unit area from the host star, so that they can power their data centers. The technological infrastructure for the technological zone of stars would be far closer in to the star than the habitable zone. And SETAI, in difference from SETI, should also consider planets that are very close, either planets or space platforms that are artificially made, that are closer to the host star, because they can power data centers, technological infrastructure. It’s a different search.

And one other signature of AI-driven civilizations is that they would use probes, self-replicating robots. They would send them around. They would not necessarily transmit radio signals, because their objectives are perhaps reaching those exoplanets and transforming them according to some plan.

## A Technological Civilization That Predated Us on Earth

Brian Keating: So one thing that Tom DeLonge told me many years ago when I talked to him, and I have to disagree, there’s a lot of people in the chat that are saying you are a rock star, obviously, just maybe you have a bad voice. But I’m not one to talk. The only instrument I play is Spotify. Question from Poland. Have you looked into the possibility of an ancient, advanced, extinct human civilization on Earth before us? And that’s what these things are.

Avi Loeb: Well, first I should say, if we are being visited, this visit was not recent. Hominins started five million years ago, which is a 10th of a percent of the age of the Earth. And Homo sapiens started 300,000 years ago. That’s 0.007% of the age of the Earth. It’s really a short time. And if we have a visitation, probably lasted for a while. And so we might not be the indigenous intelligent species on Earth. We are not necessarily the indigenous species if we find…

Maybe they were responsible for some of our evolution. I haven’t seen any evidence for that in the human DNA. There is no part of human DNA that is definitely put there artificially, that is completely different, you can see that it’s a patch. As far as I know, there is no such thing. And so it’s not clear, as we evolved from chimpanzees, whether they had any role in helping our intelligence to blossom. We don’t see any evidence for that, but who knows?

The point is there could have been also an intelligent civilization before us on Earth, let’s say 200 million years ago. And since then there were lots of catastrophes on Earth. Maybe one of them was triggered by the civilization that basically destroyed itself. The point is all of their computer terminals or whatever they left, infrastructure, was probably mixed with the Earth’s interior through geological activity. So 200 million years later, we don’t see much of it except for things that are hovering in the atmosphere. If they are able to survive for that long, they would not be destroyed by geological activity. So maybe UAP represent a technological civilization that predated us on Earth. That’s a possibility.

## A Warp Bubble Passing Through the Earth’s Atmosphere

Brian Keating: An allied question I gave to Professor Kevin Knuth, who’s also on your council, I believe. And we’re talking about these different objects that we’re seeing. If you take all the sensor data, including the two refracting telescopes in our heads, and you include that as a visual reference, and then you look all the way down to the radio, and that’s spanning orders of magnitude in wavelength range, four or five, six orders of magnitude, maybe seven to ten. It’s hard to get much more broad than that. There are very few detectors that can do gamma ray all the way down to radio waves, right? But we have a lot of these things.

And I said to him, you looked at these objects and they travel with 5000 G accelerations and so forth. They don’t make sonic booms, they don’t make supersonic shockwaves. So I asked him, let’s pose it as a physics question. I’m an expert in radar technology. That’s part of what the CMB was, right? Cosmic microwave background. I build these detectors, I build infrared cameras, I build optical cameras, all across the wavelength range. That’s as high up as I go, is optical, but nevertheless. And I look at all the different domains, polarization, frequency coverage. I’m looking for Lorentz invariance violations. So all these things.

And I said, what types of properties would have perfect reflectivity and absorption in the optical, infrared, radar, microwave, maybe up until the ultraviolet, and be made of no material such that they would not heat up, would not produce sonic booms, would go underwater, would be buoyant? Just as a hypothesis, likelihood ratio, what kind of materials could these be? He didn’t have a good answer for it, I don’t think. What is your retort to that? These things do not interact, but they do interact.

Avi Loeb: I can give you one example of something that can do that. The question assumes that there is a solid surface, but there might not be. So in 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican physicist, came up with a solution to Einstein’s equations where he derived sort of a soliton, basically a warped structure of space-time where space-time is curved. It looks like a bubble. And this warped space-time bubble is able to travel at an arbitrary speed. And it doesn’t need an engine. It’s traveling because it keeps warping space ahead of it, and that sort of keeps it going. Since 1994, people wrote papers about it, and it can move even faster than the speed of light in principle, or much smaller than the speed of light.

And I just asked the question a few months ago, what will be the appearance of such a thing if it were to go through the Earth’s atmosphere? That’s a simple question. Nobody asked this question, and I convinced a researcher named Dr. Sean Fell, who has expertise in general relativity and is brilliant, to do a simulation of that. And what we found, and it’s all on the arXiv, you can find the paper, we calculated the radiative appearance of a warp drive, a warp bubble passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. We found that if it moves close to the speed of light or more, it will be brighter than the Sun. It will be so bright that you wouldn’t be able to miss it. We don’t see such things.

However, if it moves at the speed of sound, which is a million times smaller than the speed of light, it’s exactly a million times, the speed of sound is a million times smaller than the speed of light, then you could get the appearance of an orb not very far from what is reported by the US government. So perhaps you can imagine in this case a warp bubble moving through air. It doesn’t have a solid surface. It’s just that the air goes through it and shocks as a result of that, because streams of the air collide with each other, but it doesn’t bother the warp bubble because it has no solid surface. The coupling of the bubble to the air passing through it is just gravitational. It’s nothing. So in a way you could get the appearance of a ball of plasma. The air that passes through it gets ionized, gets sort of like a small fireball or an orb, and it will reflect radar. It will appear in infrared imaging or visible light imaging. But it’s not associated with the hard surface. This is just an example from a paper that we posted about a month ago, and you can find all the details there.

## The Moon Is a Museum

Brian Keating: Yeah, I’ll put links to it. Steven Datalus is a longtime member of the channel. Do you think that we could find evidence of alien life or alien civilization once we have a base on the Moon?

Avi Loeb: Well, the Moon is a museum in the sense that it has no atmosphere. So everything that collides with it reaches the surface and stays deposited on the surface. That’s why the Moon is scarred with so many craters that overlap, because everything impacts the Moon. On Earth, on the other hand, all the objects smaller than the size of a person, they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. And if they are very small, let’s say tens of centimeters, they get vaporized in this process. And so we are not vulnerable to micrometeorites. These are tiny meteorites, tiny rocks or dust particles that collide with Earth at a speed of tens of kilometers per second. Collisions happen all the time, but these dust particles burn up.

However, if you were an astronaut on the Moon, you have to worry about these, because they move 10 times faster than the bullet. And if any of them impacts your body, you are dead. So gladly, I did a calculation. The chance of that happening is quite small, even over a period of a decade, because the body has a small surface area. But infrastructure that will be placed on the Moon, that is part of the Artemis mission, that infrastructure will be damaged as a result of micrometeorites because they’re not being shielded by an atmosphere.

So the Moon collects everything impacting it, and in a way that’s a treasure. Everything over the past 4.5 billion years that collided with the Moon should be buried under the dust. By the way, the Moon is covered with a layer of dust because of all these impacts, and these dust particles are very sharp because there was no water or atmosphere to ablate the sharp edges. So they are just like fiberglass. If you were to touch them with a bare hand, you would be cut immediately. So the Moon is covered with a meter deep layer of dust. Under that dust, it’s an archaeological site where we can find a lot of treasures.

## Why Do You Think You Can Do Anything Without Security Clearance?

Brian Keating: I’m giving a talk tomorrow at the Science of Consciousness conference here in beautiful San Diego, organized by Stuart Hameroff and other people. And I’m talking about what is the possibility that we find a dinosaur fossil on the Moon or on Mars? I’ve written a brief paper about this, which I’ll send you, but you’ll probably be too busy to read it. But it provides a slight Bayesian prior on the ability for panspermia to take place. So my argument is that we have exchanged material between the Earth and Mars, just like I have a Martian meteorite. Here’s a Martian meteorite.

And by the way, you can get a Martian meteorite if you have enough money, but you can get a real meteorite from the Campo del Cielo impact crater. I don’t have my little guy, where is he? If you have a .edu email address. Well, it looks like this, but it’s much smaller. It’s not a giant piece of silicon. Here it is. You’ll get one of these beauties if you have a .edu email address and live in the USA like me and Avi do. Go to briankeating.com/edu. Otherwise you’ll enter into a drawing to win one.

But my argument is that when Mars was wet and warm and wonderful, wild and slippery and phenomenal, billions of years ago perhaps, Earth had microbes crawling all over and then eventually multicelled and then eventually organisms and entities and animals. And so we were being bombarded, and there’s some probability, it might be extremely small, I calculate the probability in the paper and the talk tomorrow, but that we would have exchanged material with Mars that would have had living material on it when Mars was wet and wonderful. And so why couldn’t it have life? The fact that we don’t see yet evidence for it doesn’t prove that it never happened, but it gives us some limits. And I want to start doing that in a quantitative way. So I started publishing some papers in astrobiology that you’ll make fun of, and AI even. But it’s been a lot of fun for me. It’s been a boon to have these AI minds helping us.

But I guess one question that I raised to you last time that we spoke was, why don’t you have a budget? And I feel like this is being raised by placebo six in the chat. And he’s wondering, why do you think you can do anything without security clearance? Avi doesn’t have one, he’s not contracted to the government, so no clearance. That is still true as far as I know. And I don’t think you have an official, at least government, budget yet. You may be getting this wonderful X Prize, but tell me, Avi, how do you answer his question?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, so on the security clearance aspect, and by the way, your idea about biological material from Mars landing on Earth is excellent. And I think it’s good to do the calculation, because the question is, what’s the chance of some of it reaching the Earth? And would we be able to recover it and distinguish it from life forms that exist on Earth? That’s beautiful.

But with respect to the clearance, the point is that with the new directive from President Trump, anything to do with alien intelligence, with alien technology, with things that were not manufactured by humans here on Earth, anything to do with that is declassified immediately. Meaning that this is information that should be shared with people without clearance, according to President Trump. Okay? So the government is not allowed to keep it classified. And if there are any whistleblowers, any people who served in government, either in the past or right now, that know about such things, they are obligated, they are being asked, it’s their duty, it’s their order right now to reveal anything they know about it, so that it can be declassified.

The only reason that a lot of data is not declassified is because it has a connection to national security. Either the data would reveal the kind of sensors that the US employs, or there is a strong suspicion that we are dealing not with alien technology, but with technologies from adversarial nations, from black projects, whatever. And so what I’m trying to say is that what the council cares about is not the kind of technologies that Russia or China are developing. We don’t care about that. That can stay classified. What we care about is any non-human-made technologies. That is not allowed in the current situation within government. That is not allowed to stay classified. And therefore, it should be brought to the attention of scientists.

Now, if it so happens that the sensors used to collect that information are classified and the government cannot really reveal it, what they can do is really simple. We are aiming to partner with them so they can just say, go to that location, use your off the shelf sensors that are not classified, and look at the sky. They can just say that, look in that direction. And if indeed these visitations are recurring, as is the case, because we keep hearing about them, and some of the reports in the tranches of data are very recent, from last year, from this year. So these things are recurring. So then the only thing government needs to do is not reveal the sources. They just need to tell me or the council, use your sensors in that location and look up. And we will do that. And we will have data that can be shared with the public this way. So the question of what kind of clearance I have is irrelevant for that, because we are not interested in human made technology.

## We Are Not in the Entertainment Business

Brian Keating: So another question is about other near Earth objects. And I had a long conversation this summer with Beatriz Villarroel. She’s actually speaking remotely at this conference tomorrow, I believe. Unfortunately I won’t get to meet her. But have you updated any of your critiques and/or priors on Beatriz’s work and these near Earth objects that she claims have been orbiting Earth since potentially 1947, before Sputnik essentially? These are ancient objects, almost 180 years old. How skeptical do you remain? Because you were quite skeptical, as I think we should be. And she’s quite confident. In fact, she’s recently had a couple papers published in peer reviewed journals that seem to substantiate the hypotheses that she claimed earlier.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I didn’t look closely enough to study all the details. And it’s quite possible that there were objects in the sky that are representing alien technology back 80 years ago. There was a study led by Wes Watters that was published and criticizes the work. So anyone that wants to see criticism can go there and ask Professor Wes Watters at Wellesley College. It’s not my work and it’s not for me to decide who is correct between the two sides.

But my approach in general is, if we want to find out more about such things, we need to collect better data that will be conclusive beyond any reasonable doubt, because we have the instruments that we developed, we calibrated, we know what they are doing, and multiple groups can do the same thing. That’s the issue of being able to reproduce the results, and that we can do for the future. So I would move to the side of, indeed we do have evidence, only if we collect higher quality data that will be beyond any reasonable doubt and a lot of people within the scientific community will agree that this is indeed the situation.

The way to resolve it is by collecting new data with new sensors. That requires work. It’s not just sitting on the bench and cheering on social media when you think you see something that you like. We are not in the entertainment business. A lot of people on social media think that we are in the entertainment business. Someone gives me some red meat that I enjoy, just like Steven Spielberg, or Beatriz, if they like what she says, they would cheer up and like what she says and be happy about it. No, we are not in the entertainment business. We’re in the business of figuring out the reality.

Brian Keating: Would you advise David Grusch? Apparently, according to The Hollywood Reporter, last time I think I spoke with you, he’s being hired as a consultant on a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Would you advise him to do that?

Avi Loeb: You mean Jerry or?

Brian Keating: No, David Grusch. Do you think that improves the credibility of a whistleblower and brave man?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, no, Hollywood is all about getting the attention of an audience, which is similar to social media. It serves no scientific purpose. The only way we can learn something new about the reality that we live in is through the scientific process of collecting data by instruments, analyzing the data. And then when everyone can see it, then everyone agrees that’s really the case. And that is the way a detective works. It’s like a detective story. So it’s really misguided to think that by appealing to the audience the way Hollywood scriptwriters do, you would gain some credibility. That’s completely misguided. The way to gain credibility is to show us the evidence.

Okay, so when David Grusch says about the dozens of spacecraft that are held in corporations, he doesn’t need to collaborate with Jerry Bruckheimer. I saw Jerry Bruckheimer a year ago, and the point is, he needs to have a guided tour to one of these sites where just one spacecraft is located. And it doesn’t mean that he needs to bring me there or the council. He just needs to bring President Trump and everything will be over. Everyone will agree with it. And then he can make the millions or billions of dollars because he was the one to show this spacecraft or to lead to that location. That is the key. The key is the evidence. People are missing the point.

Now, of course, if you are a believer, you think you already know the answer in advance, you might be quite happy about the current situation already. But I’m saying that’s not the way science is done. That’s not the way by which we gain objective new knowledge. And just look at the history. There were lots of people believing in something that turned out to be wrong for many, many decades or centuries. And the only way to figure it out is eventually through the scientific process.

And I know that science doesn’t have a great reputation right now. It’s considered to be the occupation of the elite. But this subject is a great way to demonstrate the value of science, because we can then convince everyone through the scientific method that we are dealing with an alien visitation, if it’s real. And the public cares a lot about these questions. So here is a golden opportunity for us to engage the public in the scientific process. Tell the public that we don’t know when we don’t have evidence, and we do know when we have evidence, not tell Jerry Bruckheimer what we think we know without showing the evidence. That’s not the way to make progress. So to me, it’s important as an educational way of telling the public how science is valuable.

## Watering the Roots of the Tree

Avi Loeb: And by the way, I think that science is not appreciated also by, not just by members of the public, but also by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, billionaires who think that if you have the tree of knowledge, the biblical tree of knowledge, they can harvest the fruits of the tree, like AI, quantum computers, and make trillions of dollars out of those fruits. And all they need is to water the branches of the tree to get more fruits in the future. They’re making a great mistake, a huge mistake strategically, because the only way that the tree of knowledge will give them new fruits is by watering the roots of the tree. The roots of the tree is fundamental science, and the fundamental science is not being funded at the same level as all these trillion-dollar technologies, the data centers.

And what I’m just saying is, I’m not asking them to apologize for the fact that a hundred years ago, the people who discovered quantum mechanics received salaries that are a million times smaller than their income. I’m not saying, okay, you reaped the fruits of the tree without rewarding the people who actually allowed you, by discovering quantum mechanics, to do this. I’m just saying, appreciate the intellectual value of those pioneers who were paid very little, gave you the information that you are using now to get trillions of dollars out of the economy, and fund additional work on the foundations of science rather than on how to use AI and quantum computers to make more money.

## We’re Searching in the Dark

Brian Keating: Speaking of something, as we wrap up, that’s taken a lot of money and didn’t provide a lot of return on the investment until maybe just last month, is the search for dark matter. And dark matter was recently, not claimed to be detected, but Rick Gaitskell is a spokesperson for the LZ collaboration down there at Brown, my alma mater, go Bears. He claimed weak evidence for some anomalous hint of a new particle. First of all, we haven’t talked since then. What was your initial take on this?

There’s no branch of astronomy, cosmology, physics, fundamental philosophy that you haven’t contributed to. And aliens are just the tip of the iceberg. And I should say that you can find out a lot more about Avi from his Medium, which we’ll link, and his YouTube channel, which there’s only but one official Avi Loeb YouTube channel. Anyway, Avi, tell me, what did you make of that detection? ‘Cause I’m gonna just bring it back to the search for aliens too.

Avi Loeb: I should say most of my career was dedicated to other things. Just today I taught a class in the morning, and I was teaching the hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics and mentioning the 21 centimeter transition. And I said, two decades ago I worked full time on 21 centimeter cosmology and I wrote textbooks about it, and it’s one of those things that I was completely immersed in. So people who see me just over the recent years get a very false impression about what I worked on or know and so forth.

But to your question, so I was very excited about the discovery, but it’s one event. And of course it has a statistical significance because we wouldn’t expect this event from background. So the key is that the background events that we can imagine would never produce the properties of this event, the characteristics of this event. Of course, what it means is that in the future, with bigger detector and also with more time to collect additional events, we should be able to figure out whether it was a fluke of some random event that we cannot understand, but it’s background, or it’s a signal.

And if it’s a signal, and we will know hopefully within the coming decade, indeed it’s a major discovery, because we are talking about 84% of the matter content of the universe. That’s a major, and knowing what it is would open up new frontiers for fundamental physics, which over the past 50 years, theoretical physics was engaged with extra dimensions, with supersymmetry, things that were not demonstrated experimentally. It’s a bit disappointing to see that decline in the traditional sense of fundamental physics being driven by discoveries, experimental discoveries. So let’s hope that there is something there, and if not, we’ll continue the search. We’re searching in the dark.

And I should say, we invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter so far, and maybe a thousand times less in the search for technological probes near Earth that may have arrived from another civilization. So I would say let’s invest also billions of dollars in the search for technological gadgets of alien technology. And if we don’t find anything, we’ll be roughly at the same situation as we are with dark matter.

Brian Keating: Well, good luck with the X Prize, good luck with the research that you do. I wanna thank you, Michael Shermer. I’ll have links to your YouTube channel, your Medium articles. Avi, this has been great. Thank you so much, my friend.

Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me.