Lunar UAP & Life On Mars | Avi Loeb

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I'm Tim Ventura and we're joined today by Dr. Avi Lobe, the Frank B. Baird Jr.

[00:00:05]Professor of Science at Harvard University. Avi is a theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology, formerly the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, the founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

[00:00:28]Among his many achievements, AI is a best-selling author, has published over 700 papers and essays, made major contributions to scientific topics, including black holes and gravitational microlensing, and received recognition and awards from dozens of prestigious scientific organizations and academic institutions.

[00:00:51]So, Avi, let me start by saying welcome back. It is truly a pleasure and honor to have you with me again. So, I think that we've had kind of a big upset in the last week. We've had the first batch of files released by the office of the presidency about UFOs. And one of the things that immediately hit me was photos taken by the astronauts on the Apollo missions from the moon of UFOs.

[00:01:19]Not just one photo, but there were several photos there. This speaks directly to the work that you are doing with the Galileo project, right? You're looking at UAP. You're looking at interstellar objects. You're looking at the connections between UFOs and space.

[00:01:34]What are your thoughts on this?

[00:01:36]>> Yeah, so it's a broad search. Uh, you know, we are opening a very large net that involves interstellar objects, objects that potentially arrive into the inner solar system are technological in nature. um as well as objects that may be very close to earth and uh that's what the US government uh data is all about. Uh and the both both of them are connected obviously uh with respect to the moon.

[00:02:05]immediate thought was that we just had last month the Artemis 2 astronauts taking lots of photos, thousands of photos that um some of which were released, some are uh still in in the process of being released. Uh and um they saw six flashes of light from impact of asteroids, rocks on the surface of the moon. Uh but they haven't seen any lights orbiting the moon. Okay.

[00:02:32]And nowadays, of course, the cameras are far better and their vantage point was much better than cameras on the moon itself because uh they could look at the dark side of the moon as they were passing behind it. And it's easier to see flashes of light in the background of uh the dark side of the moon. And there was no report of an unusual source of light in their images so far. I mean, maybe some of the images that were not released yet would show it, but to me that illustrates the fact that presumably the Apollo mission images that we see in the released files um you know the the lights in them are either uh a result of reflection from the optics within the camera. Sometimes you get those uh or uh these are uh flashes of light from impact of of rocks on the surface of the moon that somehow shattered the uh the moon's surface at the time that the astronauts were taking those pictures. And uh it's difficult to tell. I'm doing a simple calculation of the statistics of those flashes. Uh so it's unlikely that within a distance of tens of meters there would be an impact at the time they were taking the photos.

[00:03:45]And to me it sounds more like um a problem with the optics of the of the camera. I find it hard to believe that uh such uh sources of light would not be noticed since then because the moon has been observed quite carefully. Um in fact we know the surface of the moon better than we know the bottom of the oceans on earth you know. Uh so um I I wasn't particularly excited about the Apollo images. However, there are lots of uh interesting images and and reports in in this release and they date all the way back to 1946 47 just after the Roswell incident and and it's striking to see uh letters that written by very serious people you know high level officials uh about objects that are not fully understood. There was also a report from the FBI that summarizes eyewitness testimonies about a big object that uh was observed to instantly disappear. uh and you know that's that looks like um a reliable um report and however it's not accompanied by any data from instruments any cameras and we all know from FIFA the soccer world organization that when they want to decide if there is a goal or not they don't ask the audience or the players as to what happened they actually use cameras to figure out and that is the the objective best approach to do it. So I what I was looking for and actually I felt like a kid in a candy store with all of these documents. Uh I was looking for unreliable evidence, something that is beyond any reasonable doubt that indicates nonhumanmade technological object. I haven't found that. Uh I mean the some of the information was reducted. you could see um the important information about uh the the circumstances for taking a a video like uh what was the camera attached to and and uh which region on earth are we looking at and so these details were not there and you know while reduction is necessary in in the case of the Epstein files for example uh uh and and it doesn't really change the context here.

[00:06:16]You know, if if you have an image without any information about it, you basically lose the the content uh of the image, you can't really figure out what's going on. You need to know the distance to the object. Uh you need to to know the kind of uh camera that was used and what was it attached to because the camera may move and you would think the object moves in very strange ways back and forth, but it's actually the camera. Um so um that's why within the Galileo project that I'm leading we uh calibrated our cameras. We have infrared and visible light cameras that in each observatory we have three observatories.

[00:06:56]The most advanced one is in Las Vegas and there we have three units uh separated by 10 kilometers from each other so that we look at the same object from different directions and that allows us to triangulate to figure out the distance velocity and acceleration.

[00:07:12]So if you consider these three components distance or altitude um velocity and acceleration you can ask where are all humanmade objects clust where are they located and and if we see an outlier out of this range of values that are characteristics of drone and uh airplanes uh balloons helicopters satellites if we see something completely out of of the range of the performance envelope of humanmade technologies. We we know that it's clearly an outlier. That's the scientific approach of making sure that indeed we identify something unusual.

[00:07:56]Unfortunately, in these files that were released in the first batch, we don't have that. I would argue that probably the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies have much better data nowadays because they're using an array of satellites that can resolve the ground within a few inches. And uh as a result, if they see an unusual object, they can not only get an image of the object, but also how it moves relative to the ground. And uh because the satellite is so high up, there is no ambiguity.

[00:08:26]uh at least in two dimensions you can see how it's moving and you can tell if it's unusual. There is no ambiguity about what the camera is doing. Uh and of course it would have been amazing to see such an image or or video from the the present day satellites but these are classified sensors and I I would be really surprised if we see that. Um but um there are 46 videos that were requested by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna related to past incidents and presumably in the next um batch we would see those and uh perhaps there would be some more convincing data. uh the first batch is is really important uh for psychological reasons to bring the conversations to the mainstream of uh the public discourse and the scientific discourse and uh I'm very curious to see if there is something more substantive in the future releases.

[00:09:28]>> It is absolutely exciting. Now I did want to ask a little bit more about the moon if it's okay and the reason is this is an area that has been incredibly exciting for me. I'm a giant fan of Arthur C. Clark's work. He had written a short story called The Sentinel that was the basis for 2001 of Space Odyssey. And decades ago, he suggested that we might look at the moon for observation posts looking at Earth. Now, I've done a little bit of research on this myself and I think one of the obstacles to that is lunar regalith turnover. Right? When asteroid impacts do occur, either large or microaststeroids, they kick up regalith which sticks to things. So if you did have some kind of an observation post, it's possible that by now it would be completely covered with dust. But as an astrophysicist, as someone who specializes in this area, doesn't that seem like a a wonderful place to put something to observe what's going on with Earth, especially if it was a civilization that was perhaps passing by millions or billions of years ago?

[00:10:35]>> Definitely. Um uh that would be a very good observing spot in the in the side that is facing the Earth. The moon is tidily locked, meaning that it's always facing the earth with the same side. So that's ideal for a monitoring camera. I mean, you can think of it as monitors in a baby room.

[00:10:55]If you want to figure out, you know, you have this young civilization coming up and you want to figure out what what's going on and you put a monitor in the baby room. And the beauty about the moon is that it's always facing the earth with the same size. So you don't lose any you don't need to put it on both sides. You just put it in one you know spot. Now um the moon is in principle a museum because it has no atmosphere. So on earth um small objects that collide with earth like rocks, asteroids or or icebergs like comets they burn up in the atmosphere. If they are smaller than the size of a person, h much of the material gets burned up in a fireball as a result of friction on air >> and the small micrometeorites never reach the ground. So we are protected from them. However, on the moon there is no atmosphere. So everything collects on the surface, collides with the surface and shatters the surface. That's why the surface of the moon is covered with dust. Very fine dust. It's sort of like shattered glass. It's very uh sharp and dangerous actually to you know the astronaut suits for example or to anyone working in that environment. You know if you try to build some infrastructure and you you would definitely raise some of this dust and it could cause a lot of damage to the machinery. That's a serious matter and the question is how to mitigate uh the the very fine and and sharp dust. It's sort of like working with asbestos.

[00:12:28]If you ever try to touch it, you know, your fingers get scrapes. And so um here we are doing with the moon covered with those very uh sharp uh pieces of dust.

[00:12:41]And um of course that's the result of all these impacts over the years. Now under the dust, you know, if you go down a meter or so, then you might start finding all the objects that collided over the past you know, four point something billion years that the moon existed uh because it collected all of these things. And so it's a beautiful museum. If we ever have a chance to do archaeology on the moon, uh we could find, for example, if there were probes uh visiting the inner solar system, they happened to be dysfunctional, collided with the moon, uh something like Voyager, you know, within a billion years it would not be working. it could just slam into any object. So if there are lots of small props, some of them may have collided with the moon and we would find them on the surface of the moon. Um and um uh but as you say, it could have been intentional. Someone may have planted something there to monitor what happens on Earth and potentially we could find that as well. Uh the dust can uh can be mitigated if you arrange for some setup that cleans itself. every now and then. So that shouldn't be an issue.

[00:13:54]Um altogether, you know, the moon is a very fascinating environment because we could also put scientific instruments there. For example, if you put an intererometer that is the size of a a football field um uh meaning uh you put small um uh uh mirrors and use it as if it's a a telescope with a large aperture. the size of the separation between those mirrors. Um that's called an intererometer where you are um combining the light uh that is arriving at the different mirrors that are widely separated uh and you know exactly the separation. So you combine it constructively and then in that sense you you have an aperture that is as big as a football field even though it's not filled with mirror. uh but that would allow us to resolve object the image of an object like three atlas uh at a distance of roughly the earth's sun separation. So so we don't uh you know the advantage of the moon why why can we do that there because there is no atmosphere to blur the image and uh therefore the light that comes from the object is not being scrambled by turbulence in the atmosphere the way it does on earth. on earth we have to correct for the turbulence in the atmosphere in order to get a clear image. Uh so um so the moon has a great benefit because we can avoid the turbulence in the atmosphere. There is also no s seismic noise. So the the ground is not shaking the way that the earth does. So you could put um a gravitational wave detector just like LIGO on the moon and it would be far more sensitive actually. So there are lots of opportunities on the moon but the question is how soon will we take advantage of them because it's a harsh environment you know and one thing that is not attended to of course everyone knows about cosmic rays energetic particles impacting the human body and can they can actually cause a lot of harm. Uh there is also the the low gravity on the moon that can cause harm because the human body loses about 1.5% of the bone mass per month in a low gravity environment. So it's not clear that astronauts can stay there for years without being affected considerably with a deteriorating health condition. But but um uh one thing that is not often thought about is all these micrometeorites you know the the web telescope uh within a few months after it was launched it's like about 10 m um um including the the sunshield and 10 mters in in in diameter and um it was impacted by micrometeorites >> and so within a few months and so you worry that you know if you're an astronaut uh if a micrometeorite comes and it's not burning up because there is no atmosphere on earth we are protected by the womb of the atmosphere over there you're not protected so it actually moves 10 times faster than the fastest bullet that a rifle can shoot and if such a micrometeorite impacts your body you are dead on the spot I mean there is it's very difficult to protect against it unless you you live underground of course And uh so um it's a it's a very harsh work environment and perhaps we should put some robots to do the the job for us because uh they are much more resilient. You can repair them in a machine shop. You don't need a hospital for a robot. Uh and now that we have AI, you know, they will have their own intelligence. So in fact, they could be autonomous, nearly autonomous. So they could be our workers on the surface of the moon. And one thing we can do with them is also some science and archaeology and and and try to see if there's anything out there.

[00:18:02]>> Yeah, it is so exciting. When you were describing that environment and things that are hidden below the regalith, my mind immediately went to this idea of ground penetrating radar, right? And you know, AI, robotics, things like that, being able to send drones over the surface, you know, the lunar surface. I mean, not just to look for relics from extraterrestrial civilizations, but just to do basic science, right? To see the different kinds of impacts that have been there. I'm sure that we have Martian meteorites that have impacted it. Things from all sorts of different comets and asteroids. It is so exciting.

[00:18:39]>> Well, there is this notion that perhaps it will be just like the Wild West, you know, that uh anyone can go there. The international law is difficult to enforce over there. And and initially different organizations which seek resources that are rare on earth for example water ice is a very important commodity over there because first of all it's important for drinking if there are humans over there. But if you break the molecules of water by uh electrolyis basically running a an electric current through it powered by sunlight let's say then um you can use the oxygen for breathing and the hydrogen for rocket fuel. Uh and so water is really a very important resource there. and and and the question is how to find it if it's if there are reserves under the surface that are difficult to see because of the dust. As you mentioned, the radar mapping could help in that. Uh so instead of searching for oil, we would search for water ice once there is a human base over there.

[00:19:50]Uh and of course there are other things like rare minerals that one may look for or um in u helium 3 which is a fuel for fusion reactors that is much more abundant over there. I should also mention that on Mars I just wrote a recent essay pointing out that uh in the first few billion years two to three billion years the there were there was liquid water on the surface of Mars. We know that we see the geological evidence for that. So there were oceans, rivers um and lakes um of water and and um it's very natural to assume that they had life in them. So there was bacteria, algae in those uh water reservoirs. And what we find on earth is if you go uh there are some rocks that are 3.2 two billion years old and they were analyzed and we found evidence for oil that is the product of these algae and bacteria being in deep sediments and and uh being converted into oil. So potentially there could also be oil on Mars and the question is should we drill and look for it? Because aside from the benefits of perhaps burning it if if you have oxygen you can burn it. uh so you can produce oxygen from water but um in addition it will give us a a a clear picture about the how early life started if you date the oil that you find underneath you know how early life started on Mars it's possible that it started before it started on earth because it's a smaller body and it has more surface area through which it can cool uh for the amount of heat that it was trapped in in it so the amount of heat when it formed is proportional to its volume, but the surface to volume ratio is bigger for a smaller object than it is for the Earth.

[00:21:49]And so Mars cooled to the conditions that allow life to form in liquid water, the chemistry of life to to take place uh before Earth did. And we know that the rocks were transferred between the two planets at that early time. It was Yeah. So it could it could be that we are all Martians that life started on Mars and was delivered and and these microbes that were that survived in in the course of of those rocks that were transferred from Mars to Earth, they were the first astronauts, you know, predating human astronauts by billions of years. So when Elon Musk dreams of going back to Mars and dying on it, you know, that's just like dreaming of going back to your childhood home uh and and and ending your life there. So it's really fascinating that these near uh these worlds near us like the moon or or or Mars carry a lot of history with them and that is difficult for us to to get to here on earth because earth was you know geologically active. Everything on the surface was mixed with the interior over periods of hundreds of millions of years. So, we don't really know how the early Earth exactly looked like because it it's all buried now. And on on on the moon, we we can in principle find out on Mars as well.

[00:23:16]>> No, that is so intriguing. I I did a podcast with Dr. Robert Zubran the other day and he has been collaborating with Dr. Steven Benner who is a remarkable geneticist and they have a pretty solid hypothesis. They believe that there is life still on Mars in kind of a semi- dormant state I guess as it were but you know they make a pretty interesting case for I believe it's called lithopanspermia where it would come here from Mars and so as you'd said all life may have begun there but >> Steve actually sent me his latest paper and um it's very intriguing uh if I were to visit Mars I would like to visit the the caves the lava tubes that are there because first I would check whether there there are any prehistoric paintings there. Uh you know uh if um intelligence or complex life forms evolved twice as fast on Mars than it did on Earth just a factor of two uh then before Mars lost its atmosphere and lost the liquid water on it on its surface we could have had intelligent life on Mars. And of course it's gone by now. I mean if there was a civilization we would not easily find any traces from it because the surface was bombarded with rocks with asteroids as we discussed. I calculated that for every square uh mile there were tens of uh atomic explosion equivalent release of energy by impacts over the past two billion years. So, so everything was devastated on the surface and um so the question is was there uh complex life on Mars and perhaps that was preserved in those caves and lava tubes much more so than on the surface that we are now examining with the NASA missions.

[00:25:14]>> What the part that blows my mind though was you just brought up the idea of drilling for oil on Mars. And so, you know, Elon Musk has been looking at colonization, but I think if he gets wind of the idea of putting up the first oil rig on Mars, right, that even might be more exciting.

[00:25:30]>> I would love to have dinner with him and tell him my ideas about what kind of interest. I would also caution him to, you know, all the health risks that I mentioned with respect to the moon uh apply also to Mars because the atmosphere is very thin over there. But um on the other hand maybe one can send some robots to establish a habitat. I also suggested in an essay to use a Phobus which is one of the satellites as a a a port you bring things there and then from there is it's much easier to deliver them to the surface of Mars. So um there are some logistical issues for how to deliver things to the surface of Mars as we start constructions there. Um altogether you know um these are the nearest rocks to us and nature is under no contract to make us happy. Uh so they are not necessarily very friend friendly environments. So I think we should also contemplate building a spacecraft that can car that has habitable conditions that let's say the size of a city you know uh size of Manhattan Island u uh that has artificial gravity uh because it spins and if you stand on a spinning uh wheel then you would feel the centrifugal force and it would feel as as if it's gravity. uh so you would not lose any bone mass and of course that was envisioned in science fiction stories but um my point is if we were to say it's as important for us to move to space as it is to kill each other on earth to engage in conflicts I mean right now we spend $2.4 $4 trillion a year on military budgets worldwide. So if we allocated a trillion dollars a year, you know, that's already uh maybe a hundred times more than the NASA budget for for space exploration for science. um you know 100 times more and uh every year um then um by the end of this century I think if we we can put all the the best architects, engineers, scientists on such a project we would potentially come up with a way of constructing something you know large in space that can accommodate humans for long periods of time. And the advantage of that relative to the rocks that we find naturally like the moon or or or Mars is that in principle we can bring it anywhere. You know we can't change the orbit of the of Mars or the moon.

[00:28:08]But if we build a spacecraft uh 10 km in size and and you know that can carry uh humans or I mean you can think of it as no arc in principle but um it could be equipped for a long journey if you put a nuclear fusion reactor on it. So um this would be an ambitious project and my you know we may not realize that it's worth worthy of our money but if we find that another civilization did that we would be filled with jealousy that we have siblings of our family of intelligent civilizations that are more accomplished than we are. So we might want to imitate them and build something like that's why I'm searching for technological probes or uh gadgets that are in our vicinity uh because they might inspire us to do better in in in our ambitions for space and you know eventually we'll have to leave earth. There is no doubt about it because the sun will die and you know actually the sun will expand once the fusion reactions in the core of the sun die out you know in 7.6 billion years the envelope of the sun will expand and engulf the earth and the moon together and what will happen then is that the drag of the moon on the envelope of the sun >> would bring it crashing on the surface of the earth. So the moon will come back to earth once the sun dies and then the earth will start spiraling into the core of the of the dying sun and of obviously everything we built you know including the ballroom in in the white house or whatever you want to think of you know humans over the uh over the centuries were very proud at making constructions here on earth you know like that we are proud of but all of this will be completely demolished and become part of the white dwarf, this remnant of the sun's core. And so with that in uh retrospect, you know, uh uh we should recognize that um in order for us to leave a monument that survives, we need to go to space. That's the only way by which our civilization will be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy billions of years from now. Everything we build here on Earth will go into the dead sun and end up there. Nobody would know about it. And presumably there were lots of tragedies just like that in the history of the Milky Way because we are seeing lots of corpses says in the in the graveyard of the Milky Way. You know these are uh the remnants of stars like the sun that died by now and we see them in the form of a white dwarf. There are billions of of white dwarfs because the sun is a relatively late to the cosmic party. It just arrived in the last onethird of cosmic history. The age of the sun is 4.6 billion years. That's exactly one/ird of the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the big bang. So we came to exist I mean the sun came to exist only in the last onethird of cosmic history. Most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. And therefore, we already see dead stars that started like the sun in our vicinity. And that means that if they had civilizations just like ours that just predated us. First of all, if they were ambitious enough, they could have sent probes out and and these probes, even at the speed of the Voyager spacecraft, they can cross the Milky Way galaxy within a billion years. So they had plenty of time to reach our vicinity. But the second thing is you know whatever was on the planet that gave rise to that civilization by now is gone you know and if the civilization was sufficiently ambitious to leave their planet then something from it would remain. These are all the probes that they sent out of their planetary system. And that's what I'm searching for because it will give us a perspective of of um what needs to be done by us in order for us to to survive. But but in addition, of course, it will tell us that we have a neighbor that there is someone out there.

[00:32:31]>> Well, and this speaks to the Drake equation, right? I mean, the Drake equation implicitly assumes that civilizations end. And I think that there's also an assumption that they will leave behind relics, and that speaks to potentially the moon, potentially Mars, as well as objects like Threeey Atlas. And to go to ThreeI Atlas, that is something where it became more and more interesting the more that we learned about that. You stayed ahead of the game on that. You were one of the first people who did real analysis on that. You pointed out, you said this is important. You need to pay attention to it and the closer it came to the sun, the more that we saw. Right.

[00:33:13]>> Right. So, one thing about the objects visiting uh the solar system, it's not really the Drake the Drake equation is more about electromagnetic signals, you know, the detecting radio signals. For that, you need someone who who is active so that the signal will reach you at the right time. Um, however, you know, so that's just like waiting for a phone call at home. You're waiting for someone to call you. Uh, however, there is another way of learning that you have residence in your cosmic street and that is by getting a package in your mailbox and that package will stay in your mailbox even if um you don't visit the mailbox uh or if the sender is dead, it it's completely irrelevant because it was already sent. And so all these interstellar objects, you know, they typically move at a speed that is uh below the escape speed from the Milky Way galaxy. So the Milky Way is confining all of these gravitationally.

[00:34:12]And so they keep accumulating over time and the number of objects that you may find in your vicinity depends on how many were produced over the history of the Milky Way galaxy. That is a different uh equation than the Drake equation. I wrote it down in one of my papers. Um, and it's basically telling you what's the likelihood that you will find a physical object manufactured by another civilization. And if this object is still technologically active, it might clust you might cluster such objects in regions of interest just like bees. Uh, they cluster around flowers, right? So you might find many more such gadgets that are operational in the vicinity of earth just because this is the habitable zone of the sun compared to an average uh volume of interstellar space which is not interesting. There aren't any resources there. So um at any event um yeah so the search for these things is just at its infancy right now and 3iatlas was the third one discovered by telescopes and um I noticed that it has a a number of anomalies and and one thing that struck me was that if it happens to be alien technology and it could by the way be something like a Trojan horse. It looks from the outside completely innocent like like a comet, but it has some technology or some life inside of it. Um, just like the the the Trojan horse that the the city the city of Troy did not suspect being uh filled with soldiers inside. Um so uh I decided to define a scale between zero and 10 where zero is an object that is definitely natural uh m either rock or an iceberg that poses no threat to humanity whereas 10 would be alien technology that is a great risk to earth and I argue that we should uh classify each interstellar object that we would find in the future on this scale. And I gave three Atlas a rank of four, the same as Omua Mua, the first interstellar object that also had anomalies. Thria Atlas had very different anomalies. It came in the plane of the planets around the sun. So that already, you know, it came within 5 degrees of that plane.

[00:36:37]That already gave it, I mean, raised the suspicion that maybe it's targeting the the planets in the solar system.

[00:36:44]uh and it also had an anti-tail namely a jet pointed towards the sun rather than away from the sun the way you find in comets. It also had a very high abundance of dutarium a thousand times more than the cosmic abundance and dutarium as we know is uh fusion fuel the most effective fusion. uh there was also uh there were uh organic molecules that are usually indicative of life detected around it. Nobody talked about the possibility that it may have life but I pointed this out and people just preferred to ignore it. Uh but definitely the kind of molecules that if you find in an exoplanet the entire astro astrobiology community will be thrilled. They would say amazing maybe there is life on that planet. when the same molecules were found around the threei atlas, nobody wanted to discuss it uh and this submission that this this manuscript that I wrote was basically blocked from the journal. So um it's just a matter of fashion you see that that that the somehow you know the mainstream of the astronomy community is willing to search for microbes in exoplanets but when I say oh here are organic molecules next to an iceberg is it possible that there is life in it they would completely ignore it. uh and uh if we were to land on such an object bring materials back to earth we could examine if the building block if it has any life the building blocks of I'm talking even about microbial life and not not about technological infrastructure of you know that has intelligent life associated with it so at any event this was a fascinating um interstellar object because of all the anomalies I summarized them on several essays in medium.com The most recent one was from April 2026 and uh anyone interested can just go there and see. But um uh I think it's a wakeup call for us to take more more seriously future objects and perhaps design as soon as we find four I by the way I means interstellar. So four is the fourth four I Reubin because the Reubin Observatory is now monitoring uh the sky. So when we look at 4 I Rubin my hope is that NASA will consider an intercept mission basically launching if we learn about 4 I Rubin when you know just let's say 6 months to a year before it comes closest to earth um we would have plenty of time to launch and intercept uh a mission a spacecraft that will come close to its path and perhaps uh cross the path and crash on the object so that we can learn much more about it. Because if we get a close-up photograph or if we put some equipment that that gives us diagn diagnostics of the surface, we could immediately tell whether it's a rock or a technological object cuz if you collide with a hard surface of a technological spacecraft, let's say, obviously the behavior of the crash, I mean the what will happen to our intercept spacecraft would be quite different than smashing against rock and and and we actually had such an intercept in the context of the Dart mission that NASA launched >> where a spacecraft collided with a rock belonging to the solar system and um we saw what happened there.

[00:40:29]>> Well, and that's an excellent point. Um NASA as well as the ESA have launched missions to investigate comets and asteroids and so we are expanding that knowledge base. the opportunity from a scientific perspective to investigate 4I Rubin when it's discovered and we know a little bit more about its trajectory seems like it's just amazing potential >> right so not to speak about the if we do discover clear evidence by taking a close-up photograph um or by um landing on it if we see a clear uh clear evidence that it's a technological object Then there is a question of planetary defense of how to protect the earth. I think that would bring much more money to space studies and exploration because we would probably deploy a network of interceptors that will uh alert us to incoming uh probes in the future. Um and it will change the the way we think about our place in the universe. You know when when you are encountering a a blind date of interstellar proportions um there are two possibilities either the dating partner is friendly or it may be a serial killer you know a hostile uh uh dating partner in which case you have to protect yourself and we can't assume in advance uh what the dating partner is we should collect data that will inform us and uh I think it will bring humanity to a better place because it's a risk that all humans on earth would face. It's not a risk in between nations and it has nothing to do I mean we are all in the same boat.

[00:42:18]>> So the geopolitics >> uh or the international law doesn't apply to nature. Nature is under no contract. You know the universe is under no contract of making us happy. Um and uh if we want to protect the earth we have to work together all humans on this planet. So it will change everything of course. Now the U. UAP subject the unidentified objects that are found uh in the release for example or there will be additional releases by the US government you know they are important because the interpretation of those objects is either that you know all of them are humanmade or natural. So in in which case it's a serious matter of importance to national security because if these are humanmade objects that we can't figure out that the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies cannot figure out then we have vulnerability to uh adversarial nations and potentially other nations have technologies that we are not we are too naive. We can't really figure them out. Um and so we have to figure it out in order to protect the nation. Uh but even if one in a million of these objects ends up being extraterrestrial uh artifacts, you know, technological objects, uh that would be the biggest discovery ever made by science.

[00:43:44]>> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, I keep leaning more and more towards the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I'm not sure if that would be something biological or potentially something artificial like at AI astronauts as you've talked about, but you know, I mean, we are seeing organic molecules on exoplanets as you've mentioned, organic molecules near threei atlas, interstellar objects, as well as organic molecules on the moon now. And I can't help but wonder if we're seeing the the the fertile nature of planets, asteroids, interstellar objects, things like that, how far behind could life possibly be? I think that we probably live in a galaxy full of at least primitive life and complex life is probably not far behind it, right?

[00:44:34]>> Yeah. I would argue that we're very likely not at the top of the food chain uh cosmologically speaking and that is because we came relatively late to the cosmic party and just think about the technologies that we will invent in a thousand years or in a million years. We just had one century of modern science and technology and we can't even combine the theories that we developed of Einstein's gravity and quantum mechanics. we can't put them together.

[00:45:04]Over the past 50 years, there was a whole community of theoretical physics trying to marry these two pillars of modern physics and they haven't come up with a unique answer that is predictive.

[00:45:15]That's a string theory. So, we don't know what happened before the big bang.

[00:45:19]We don't know what happens inside a black hole. Uh and we don't know what 95% of the uh composition of the universe is. We call it some dark stuff.

[00:45:31]uh either dark matter or dark energy. Uh and by the way, that's interesting because uh when Omua Mua was not understood to be a comet because there was no gas or dust around it, the mainstream of the comet expert community decided to call it a dark comet. So it looks like whenever you can't understand something in the context of traditional thinking, all you're doing is taking the terms from the traditional thinking and putting the word dark in front. So you know, for example, dark matter and dark energy. They may be modified forms of gravity. You know, we we think that there are these ghosts, particles that we don't see, but in fact, gravity is being modified. It's not the same as we expect from Einstein's equations. And uh we don't allow that by calling it dark matter or dark energy. And anyone that works on modified gravity is sidelined by the mainstream of the cosmology community. Even though we, you know, for 50 years we've searched for dark matter, we haven't found it yet. And in the context of MUA, you know, it's very convenient to call it a dark comet because then you feel relaxed. It's a comet, but you just can't see the telltales of a comet. This is the approach in Hans Christian Anderson's tale where the kid has the emperor has no clothes and the adults in the room tell the kid, "Oh, the emperor does have clothes. They are just invisible."

[00:46:56]It's exactly the same psychology.

[00:46:59]>> Well, Obby, on that note, I want to thank you so much for your time today.

[00:47:04]And I want to close by asking what is coming up next for yourself and for the Galileo project. I'm going to put links in. people need to remember to visit. I mean, the work that you guys are doing is more relevant and important than ever, and I think that it will continue to grow in relevance as this presidential unsealing of UAP records continues.

[00:47:27]>> Yeah, thank you. Um >> so um in terms of my science um we just completed some very exciting u work that has to do with the materials we retrieved from the expedition to the Pacific Ocean where we searched for the materials from an interstellar meteor that exploded over the Pacific Ocean and we went there with a ship and collected materials from the bottom of the ocean at the sight of that fireball brought them back and now um I would say we have evidence with statistical significance of 99.99999% that some of the materials came from outside the solar system and so that's very exciting and I cannot go into a lot of details because um you know we just submitted the paper for publication but we have the results so it's very exciting um in addition uh tomorrow I'm actually flying to New York City where I I I was invited to uh be on the set of a new movie that comes out >> uh Saul Hershovitz and the search for extraterrestrial life and they want me to play a cameo uh playing myself. Now this is a privilege playing myself is a privilege that the Brad Pit does not get. He always gets asked to play someone else. So for me it will be straightforward um to do that and it shows you that the subject gets into >> uh the public uh you know people sort of if I can play myself it means that they know about me you know like um and so that that would be fun. It's the first time I appear on a movie set so but playing myself is what I did all my life you know throughout my career so it shouldn't be difficult. Um and then um there will be a Netflix documentary coming out hopefully within this year uh about the expedition to the Pacific Ocean and also a book that I am now doing the final edits of uh related to the expedition. Uh and so these are interesting things and I should say that just a few months ago I started a YouTube channel that uh this is the official YouTube channel of of me that has the label P which is professor Alo and you can find it on YouTube. It's relatively new and I did it uh just because other people were using my voice and image with AI uh generators to create videos that with content that I do not approve. So I decided to create my own YouTube channel. So I have presence now on social media, something I haven't had before. AI convinced me to do that. Uh so um you can find content there and every day I post an essay on medium.com.

[00:50:17]every day. Yeah. In fact, even over the past day when I had 23 interviews on televisions, that was quite amazing. In the morning, I woke up. I usually jog at sunrise and suddenly I start getting a a flood of requests and because the the White House released all these UFO videos and you know it was difficult for me to respond to each and every request in a timely fashion because I would get new requests the rate that is faster than I can respond and overall in in in a matter of 24 hours I had about 23 interviews which was really exhaust.

[00:50:56]exhausting and um but nevertheless I managed to write an essay summarizing my view of the UFO file release. So um I I maintained my routine of doing it almost every day and and I haveund maybe 150,000 followers of my essays on medium.com. So I invite anyone I mean the subscription is free and anyone that is interested in in the updates about my research is welcome to go there. We now have uh the Galileo project getting triangulated the data on objects and that's another exciting frontier uh where we are looking for outliers not just waiting for the government to release uh data but also producing the data ourselves and you will hear from us if we find any uh UFO or UAP you will know it uh and we will have much better data than the ones the data that was released so far by the government. So just stay tuned that we have no issue with declassifying our data because it was never classified.

[00:52:05]>> Amazing. Amazing. And you did mention to me before the interview how incredibly busy you are. So thank you so much for your time today, sir.

[00:52:15]>> My pleasure. And uh it's always great speaking with you and I had a wonderful time.