Should Scientists Take UAPs More Seriously? Garry Nolan & Avi Loeb (343)

Transcript

most stars like the sun formed 5 billion years before the sun now we didn't hear the cries for help from those civilizations that were on these habitable planets like the Earth and said wow we're losing our oceans we're losing everything they cried for help they must have sent lots of spacecraft in fact most of the interstellar objects most of the interstellar crafts may have been launched at this last phase when the civilizations that were highly evolved technologically realized we're about to die a lobe joining us uh all the way from the Eastern Seaborn cdge Massachusetts Harvard and we have a new friend joining us today also young and distinguished and that's uh Professor Gary Nolan so we've got three professors here in this pre-thanksgiving uh day that uh it's my favorite holiday and I couldn't be more grateful than to share it with uh such a wonderful uh set of guests thank you guys for joining me Gary how are you today up north great thank you and up north yes yes up in The Frigid North of Paulo Alto and AI is jealous of that frigidity I'm sure AI how are you sir I'm doing great but most of the universe is much colder than the earth so I I feel sympathy to the rest of the universe oh that is great well uh for those of you who are new to this channel we have conversations with the greatest luminaries in science technology engineering and math we have uh luminaries ranging from 14 Nobel Prize winners uh four billionaires and that includes Ai and Gary uh so those are two new billionaires uh we've had guests on from all over the spectrum of culture and today we're having a very special pre-thanksgiving episode which is to discuss and and have a a gentleman's debate about the impact the import the knowledge and the future of unexplained aerial phenomena and this is an area that these two gentlemen have made a contribution I want to thank you guys in particular because uh you know a lot of what we do when we are expressing an interest in this uh in this subject gets met with derision with um maybe attempts to humiliate to dis to discredit folks that are interested I find that uh repugnant but uh but the fact is you guys are some of the most distinguished intellects on this planet we're very lucky to to have you in this community but you're also incredibly open-minded so I don't expect you to reply to that uh but I just want I do have a reply I just wanted to um mention that in politics you see it very often that there is polarization where you have the extremes on both ends uh fueling each other because one side says nonsense and then the other side uses it as fuel to say also nonsense and then you end up with a situation that doesn't make much sense and uh the middle ground of Common Sense is not populated H not in politics these days and I would say not in Academia and uh also on this question of unidentified objects because what I realized is first of all you know as an astronomer I was driven into it by data that implied an object that looks really unusual and that what happened to be the first object from outside the solar system that we identified called the mua mua and since then we find two others before it meteors with my student we can talk about it yeah but the point is these looked unusual they didn't look familiar so I said okay let's stud them and of course the subject was ridiculed by mainstream astronomers and then they tried to explain those things in terms of rocks that we had never seen before objects that we had never so to me I mean it it didn't sound like they are trying to use familiar objects to explain them but they appealed to unfamiliar objects that still keep them sort of relaxed that they are natural and so forth so they dismissed any possible association with other technological civilizations even though we ourselves launched five probes to Interstellar space and you know why not imagine that others did it as well billions of years before us and then on the other hand you have those believers who would interpret anything unusual in the sky in terms of being extraterrestrial and the reason I say that is you know when Ukrainian astronomers reported about some dark objects and didn't have good distance estimates for those and I suggested that maybe got the distance wrong and as a result these would be just artillery shells uh those Believers jumped at me and said you know it must be EXO teres because there could be new physics and I say well for new physics you really need a very high bar you know like we work really hard we you need Exquisite data to convince you that you are missing something in the known physics and you can't just jump into a conclusion about new physics because you know you see something that you didn't really measure well okay okay if it's sloppy data that cannot be justification for new physics you need to have Exquisite data to argue for so you see this polarization of two sides and one uses the other to justify their extreme positions so the scientists say we don't want to be to share the same bed with those people that don't believe in the scientific method and those that don't you know those Believers on the other hand say look at the scientists they don't pay attention to this so my point is populating the middle ground that makes common sense and following the scientific method is unpopular okay and that is really surprising to me I thought it's only the realm of politics but over the past year I learned that it's the realm of science as well in some areas yeah and we've we've talked uh before about new physics uh but today we're going to talk about new biology and that's courtesy of our of our new guest on the show which is uh which is a real treat Gary Nolan uh you're perhaps you know along with AI my most frequently requested guest on this subject and I just want to introduce you to my my audience you know most of the Nobel laurates I've had on are physicists although I have had on a Stanford Professor weedo imbens who's a colleague on campus and I have Jay bataria not a Nobel Prize winner yet but he's coming on next um to talk about his experiences with a Galileo like Affair that we'll talk about when he's on uh but Gary's an immunologist an academic an inventor business executive uh helps to uh to to lead or or or works with six different companies he holds the Ratchford and caroleta a Harris professor in dowed chair and the department of pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine uh usually Gary and AI knows this I usually ask you to start off by describing your latest book but you told me uh you prefer papers and uh and I wna I just get a quick tease of this upcoming paper if you're allowed to to talk about it just from to set the stage in your Bona fees for my physics minded audience oh we've got well and let let me first riff off of something that uh AI was just saying about this you know this divide and you know I think a lot of it begins with something that I've always focused on especially in my lab meetings is finding the point which is off the the line and paying attention to it and not ignoring it because you can continue to walk that line and continue to basically do conventional science but it's when you see the point off the line and you try to explain it either as being an error or as something that is indicative of either you know new biology or new physics or new observations Etc you know I and I think I'm mean I've been having this conversation with a fair number of people lately about you know what is a standard of proof and you know the standard of proof really differs depending upon who you are you know science has a standard of proof that says you know I I can reproduce it I can hand it the data to you you know I it's not an anecdote I mean I have my own anecdotes of things that I've observed that you know in standard science might be thought of as preliminary data it's preliminary data it's sufficient for me to get sufficiently interested but it is not something that I could hand to somebody else and say here is proof of a new object or a new physics or what so I think we we I think one of the things that is important for both I think what AI is doing what I'm doing is to teach the lay public what these different kinds of proof structures are that enable one to be thought of as say a Believer or to be thought of as a scientist now a Believer isn't a negative thing I mean religions are believers but they if you want to take the realm of religion and belief and hand it over to science that's where this disparity happens so I'm I'm happy to occupy that middle ground where AI is basically arguing we should be a scientists and argue to the people on my let's say far science extreme and say you know what you guys are acting more like priests than you are like scientists uh so why don't you come a little bit closer to this line and then you say to the people on the far other side you're acting more like you know you're not act you're acting more like priest and if you want to talk to the scientist you need to come to the middle and so let's find a way to to create languages which allow the two sides to talk to each other that said I'm not you know this is not the UN I'm completely willing to ignore both sides just do the work create the data publish a paper get it peer reviewed and say there it is now you try to argue with the data that I've just presented you and if you can't come up with a different conclusion that justifies the data and at least the speculations I'm coming up with then get out of here yeah Brian if I may just add yeah go ahead Abby two two short points one there is a a Common Thread between spirituality and the frontiers of Science in both cases you are exploring the unknown and we should be humble in the sense of not assuming we know the answer in advance you know a lot of scientists H do their job in order to demonstrate that they're smart it's all about themselves you know they will do mathematical gymnastics even if the real Universe didn't show that there there are more than three spatial Dimensions they will just show that they are smart for 50 years by doing manipulations in extra Dimensions even though we have no clue for that now I say okay five years 10 years reasonable 50 years is starting to be excessive and the point is it's not about us not demos you know showing off it's about learning about nature and unless unless you get some dialogue with nature getting some evidence for what you're doing you're doing math mathematics okay and you are trying to show off but you're not explaining nature so that's a first thing first thing is we need humility H to learn from Nature by experiments to get the feedback and respect the data whatever it is if it looks unusual we should not brag that we know everything in advance that we are experts that we can explain everything by past knowledge we should be open-minded to new knowledge the second Point uh that you know that is really important is that science is about the signal to noise ratio yes okay what does it mean there are all the time noisy you know fluctuations things that happen by chance that do not signify anything unusual it's just rare phenomena that happen now and then okay and what people fail to understand like in a war zone if you go to Ukraine you increase the level of Noise Okay that's why I was reluctant to consider Ukraine because there is a there are lots of things flying in the sky many of which we don't know because the US government wants it to be classified or the Europeans want it to be classified or the Russians want it to be but there are things flying in the sky all the time this in increases the level of noise in the sense that we don't know what they are okay and there would be spy satellites all kinds of things you have to realize that given that the noise level is high the chance of you sign seeing something that you don't understand is higher okay so it's all about how significant is the signal that you detect relative to things that happen by chance in the environment that you're looking at and that's something that the public fails to uh follow because they say we will go to the war zone because maybe they will be there but then you have to understand that that burden of proof is actually higher it's higher if you are in a noisy environment you have to work harder to demonstrate that there is something unusual going on and you know that very well from the cosmic microwave background from studies of the UN I mean we looked for fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background Relic from The Big Bang for many decades until the signal to noise ratio per pixel was above one at that point it was detected and before that it was not so it's really all about the not just the signal but how unusual is the signal relative to some random occurrences in the environment that you're looking at yeah I think that's uh that's often missed out and and one of the things that I most frequently hear about is that uh there's you know kind of a conflation of the of the notion that these are legitimate phenomena to study but also that they could be representative of much more plausible I mean effectively much more plausible uh explanations they could be um you know hallucinations or mass delusions they could be military s Ops there could so do you guys think that a lot of the kind of um dereliction or the or or the denigration of this subject Gary I'm I'm interested particular to get to to get your take on it because you've been incredibly courageous and uh it's almost like when you talk about it you're immediately assume that you must cleave to one camp or the other so I want to ask you in in keeping with Avi said do you did you come into this field I mean this is not your field you're an eminent world renowned scientist uh did you come into this fill with any preconceived notions that there were phenomena and then so so there's been a great sacrifice that you and AI to sux then have have undertaken so explain what was your motivation how did you what's your origin story in this Gary well I mean I mean I have two Origin stories if you will I mean and I I've been open about this I mean I saw an object when I was young as a as a paper boy uh and it went right over my head it was you know it was un uh un mistakable uh you know that it was not supposed to be there but I was what I think I was 11 or 12 years old I don't really remember um but I didn't know what it was but I remembered it years later so that when the whole subject of what UFOs or whatnot might be I could look back on that and say well you know in so far as what everybody else is claiming this to be that was a UFO it was clearly it to me it looked like technology it had lights uh it was making no noise it was 30 feet over my head uh and it was you know 5:30ish in the morning um but you know as I I explained this to to um Avi at one point uh it's an anecdote and so it is it is not sufficient for me to use that as proof of anything except to myself to me it it currently motivates me to continue to look into this because some level I want to prove not only to myself that I wasn't seeing something uh but I want to prove to others that it's it's worth it but I got you know I I got brought into it uh by basically a visit by government agencies and an aerospace Corporation asking me to help them understand how uh pilots and uh intelligence Personnel or how they had been harmed and they you know they came to me because um my lab had developed or involved in developing uh one of the world's most advanced blood analysis uh uh instruments and they said okay well in the in part of a a larger medical workup on these individuals is would you please help us look at the blood of these individuals to look for signs of inflammatory disorders uh and they showed me data uh and that data was sufficient for me to get more and more interested in this and then I got you know shown additional and more data and frankly it was just like I was saying before it was data off the line and that didn't just it I'm just drawn to that kind of stuff I mean it it is one of those kinds of unsolvable problems that are just was begging for an answer and I suppose the reason why I continue to get more involved is because people told me not to get involved other scien oh you shouldn't be doing this it'll ruin your career and I just it just I had an an inner Welling I guess of anger about it is why would you even say that you're it seems that you're closing your mind to some fascinating possibilities and anyway it's my time so why do you care right right I think that's the you know kind of the the the you know to whatever extent there is a conspiracy and I'm not a conspiracy minded person I don't think you guys are either but there is a um a desire not to think about these things I mean I me Avi mentioned religion earlier um you know one of the reasons there's a conspiracy there's a conspiracy by scientists to tell you to not think about it which isn't like it's being driven by anybody behind the scenes right it's like this it's like this uh I don't know it's like they're afraid of being painted with a brush of your belief even though I'm not asking them to believe in it but what do you say to somebody Avi who says look you guys are I mean they're gonna bring out this card you guys are three chaired white male professors you are the peak of privilege blah blah blah um how can you legitimately say AI that you there's a conspiracy against you you're one of the most Peak performers the planet has ever know I mean how do you answer those kind of critiques well there is no conspiracy I don't believe in those but I wanted to mention that two-thirds of the America of all Americans believe that there is extraterrestrial life um and that's more than the number you know the the nearly 50% that believe God exists okay so and then there was a poll recently uh by Elizabeth stanway in the UK she pulled of all 350 astronomers and 94% of them admitted that they uh were fascinated with science fiction and and then um 60 something perc of them AR suggested that they chose astronomy as a result of reading science fiction and um you know thinking about them extraterrestrial intelligence so I say to myself well it must you know resonate very deeply with those astronomers and with the general public the only question is why professionally they put this makeup of pretending they don't care about it they don't want to fund it and they want to assume that the universe as a zero uh assumption that the universe is dead lifeless which is pretty much what cosmologists do all the time and um you know I I do believe that unidentified aerial phenomena are a mixed bag I think many of them are probably used for Espionage but by other nations uh I think that some of them are just weather balloons or um you know drones or US Government developing some equipment that others are not aware of or you know it could be some you know natural phenomena like birds or or thunderstorms or whatever or meteors but it's sufficient to have one object which originated from an extraterrestrial origin for this to change the future of humanity because imagine us finding a gadget and you know the chance that the gadget was produced by a civilization which is exactly at the same technological phase as we are is minute because we developed our Science and Technology over one century quantum mechanics was discovered a 100 years ago and all of our gadgets are based on that understanding of quantum mechanics just 100 years my my point is that's one part in 100 million of the age of the universe so most like and most stars formed five billion years before the Sun so most likely they're much more advanced than we are whoever produced this gadget and we can learn a lot it um you know and and one thing we need not to worry about that's something that Stephen Hawking argue that you know we should be really careful they might harm us I don't think so I think there so much Superior to us it's just like a biker you know driving down the sidewalk and what the colony of ants does in the crack of the pavement is completely irrelevant I mean they can decide about a protocol how to engage with a biker but that doesn't really matter so I think we are dealing with something far beyond us which in a way you know is a similar to religions that believe in in something much more powerful so I I that's why I said that spirituality and the frontier of science may have something in common well let me you know since you've heard my Spiel a little bit ofy but maybe Gary hasn't um you know I of the three of us might be you know I mean I think we're all skeptical I think that's the job of a scientist to be skeptical but also approach things with an open mind and maybe the latter is not as common as the former should be and the default reaction of a scientist you know should be essentially as Isaac azimoff said you know that's odd not like Eureka I have found it um but I've said to you OB I've said you know the first of all the the the appeal to popularity right so I was in Europe recently at Galileo's house I mean this is amazing I was at Galileo's prison house in Florence in aret and uh and I was there and I was thinking you know at the prison bars on there that he was imprisoned for saying something essentially that was that was true and that didn't go against the prevailing religious doctrine of the day in other words uh the the person who came up with the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe wasn't you know Jesus Christ it was Aristotle and té now you guys know better than than than the average person those were pagans right so why did the Catholic Church Avi did you know this that the Catholic Church uh you know made Aristotle effectively baptized him 1,400 years after his so that the so that the sun could not be the center of the universe I I well no I mean you can understand it from a political point of view because if people uh if you flatter the EOS of people they adapt your Doctrine so in order to attract more Believers what you would argue is that we are Central to the universe we are Central actors God is really focused on us and then people will believe you if you say oh we are just side actors you know there are much more important things happening in the universe and we are just we happen to be here by chance and then people say well you are just depressing you know like this Doctrine is not appealing to me I want to be at the like all the alpha males want to be at the center and guess what if you were to tell Putin that by conquering a piece of land he would look like an ant hugging a single grain of sand on the landscape of a huge beach you know he would be really upset but that's the truth you know the universe is huge we are insignificant we just came at the end if you come at the end to a play and you are not at the center of the stage guess what the play is not about you but people don't like that message they want to be Central and important they want God to look over their shoulder and re respond to everything they do and as a result if the church adapts this doctrine that we are Central to the universe they get more Believers so I think it was serving a very good political purpose basically well that that brings me to a to a question for Gary so that that uh one of my friends uh um here in San Diego wanted me to ask you why should we expect along the lines of what ABI said the centrality this notion our Cosmic ego and significance why would we expect or should we expect that alien would even have DNA or or have any kind of chemical composition like we are is that something that we would abono expect in in other words is DNA the fundamental operating system of life in the universe uh or would we are we being too um what do you say anthropocentric by assuming that if there are life forms that they must be quote unquote like us well I think you can you can take that question in two directions I mean one there's plenty of evidence that uh the raw materials for DNA are everywhere um that's pretty clear um there's some there's two interesting papers that I'm aware of about uh about sort of the the panspermia um notion uh one of them is it's sort of applying Moore's law to DNA uh regulatory complexity and the the the regulatory programs that uh you can infer uh from everything from you know viruses through bacteria yeast up until us and the the premise is that you can essentially show that there is a Moors law of genetic complexity that uh would uh you can draw across the timeline of um life on Earth the problem with the timeline and the mors complexity is that it goes It goes back to and points to a a time about 8 billion years ago when life lik uh exist or started in terms of if it were a linear line now you so there's two solutions to that it either happened 8 billion years ago well before our uh solar system was around and got here on meteorites or uh other uh basically modalities or it rapidly ascended in the complexity basically happened in maybe a 100 million years and then uh achieved linearity um so that's that's one fascinating uh aspect and it's it's a an interesting published paper people can go and argue about the math if they want I'm not going to get into the that arle you know the authors of that Gary so I can put it in the text um I'll I'll go find it for you I haven't got it on on my computer here but um no problem I'll put in later it's a Moors law um argument about it it's fascinating and the other is the so-called it's called the wow signal in the in the genetic code um and it was by a couple of uh scientists from I think it was aeran mathematicians looking at the at the the genetic code structure and essentially laying out again a mathematical argument that the DNA code the genetic code for determining a triplet of bases into into proteins was designed right and so they said that basically that's the wow signal that we're all looking for now again I mean the problem I mean it's a fascinating argument and the math looks good uh but um the problem is it falls pre to the uh to the the attack that you you you can't apply simple linear mathematical approaches to Evolution it's the same thing that you know the uh the selfish Gene of Richard Dawkins his beautiful book um basically lays out that you know just because the eye didn't Abino uh evolve out of nothing it doesn't mean that there's a God involved but the wow signal it's a it's a beautiful it really is a beautiful paper it's a think piece I posted it in the in um it's overlaid your face right now but I see it there no no it's great um and you know I just again I I don't think it's proof of anything Kazakhstan not aeran I apologize to both Nations don't start any wars in that part of the world please Gary yeah but I think that those are those are two papers that um underpin the sort of scientific notion that this panspermia effect can be at least analyzed by traditional approaches mathematics at the least but then the other is you know I think you go back and and probably AI knows this as even better the so-called notion of bolman brains right are you aware of this Brian the bolman brain yes we spoke with Sean Carol about that and uh yeah I mean it's it's fascinating that you know you you can perhaps have organized plasma or organized objects in 3D space that if they could be uh if they could self-contain themselves there's no reason that they cannot be conscious right it's not life as we understand it but you could still imagine it as conscious or Consciousness and you know if if such existed it's been around since the beginning of of what we would call time that's right yeah if I may add Brian um what traditionally humans called God in religious texts in philosophical texts you know there is a lot of philosophy around it could simply be attributed to an advanced scientific civilization because we are getting to the point where we will uh develop life in our Laboratories and you can and again it's a 100 years after modern science started so you can imagine that a civilization that had a million years of scientific work might know how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity even though for 5050 years string theorists were not really able to come up with predictions maybe a more advanced civilization was able to figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and and and gravity and and engineer that knowledge okay so once you understand it you can engineer it and create perhaps a baby Universe in the laboratory and so my point is that here is a path it's often thought that religion and science are somewhat contradictory but that's if you stick to traditional Notions but it could well be that you know when you advance to a high enough level of intelligence you realize that what we called God is actually a manifestation of of a much higher level of intelligence or scientific development and that's where I think that we can bring philosophy religion and science together it's not necessarily contradictory let's just but for that we need to be open-minded H we need to allow H when we attend the class of intelligent civilizations allow for a smarter student in the class not just say we are the smartest there is nobody else in the in the room but rather say let's check okay because that was the biggest shock my daughters had when I brought brought them on the first day to kindergarten they realized there is a smarter kid around you know like that is a shock and a lot of people prefer not to look and say we are the only ones in class and we are so smart that nobody else exists out there and I say well you know you be behave just like those people who put Galileo in house arrest because they didn't want to learn about something new let's let's go back to the pans spermia by by the way this I I can't resist that uh on my channel I like to give away stuff and one of the things I give away are meteorites H here are some meteorites uh and uh Gary brought it up of course and and I can't resist so you can actually win your own meteorite if you go to my mailing Les Brian king.com list and you'll be entered to win a drawing of a real genuine meteorite that crashed into Argentina about 5,000 years ago was discovered in the 1500s and was used for tools and and other sorts of implements and and it's really fun and I'll send that to you I may even send one lucky winner some uh Uranus soap because you need to keep Uranus clean as we all know uh but but uh but actually my point is a serious one so panspermia works both ways right so I want to ask both of you guys um maybe starting with Gary Pence Premia should work the opposite way in other words life on Earth should have disseminated throughout the uh throughout our solar system and over the billions of years you are absolutely right uh the origin of life you know better than me uh we believe started about four billion years ago in other words it's just a few hundred million years after this meteorite uh was created in the same Proto solar system right the fact is we don't observe any evidence for life in our solar system I'm not saying it's dis positive as I think Carl San said uh you know lack of evidence is not evidence of lack uh and you know there's my favorite finger puppet of of Carl Sean I've got all sorts of props I'm a prop Cosmic prop Cosmic uh but I want to ask you Gary to what extent can we use in aasian framework the lack of observation of any trace of any existence of life on a meteorite on uh on another planet as some constraint on the facund argument that life should be ubiquitous once it gets started so I don't think that the basian framework operates here in two for two reasons one we haven't done the real test first of all I mean so we sent uh I mean actually the department that I got my PhD in here at Stanford the genetics department um they actually built the experiments uh that were done on Mars and the Viking Landers uh and you know there was there's actually been a lot of post talk analysis of that original data that said that this actually probably was evidence of life but um strangely and I don't understand this I'm not saying that it's a conspiracy or anything they they keep sending back microscopes that look at rocks but they don't send back a growth Media or anything to try to see if something if they were to drop a piece some dirt from Martian soil in it if if any Critters grow bacteria or what have you so you know so first of all the experiment has been done so you can't populate the priors in the and inference uh there um second well Venus at least from the you know Viewpoint of um the kind of life that we would be looking for is is not a not a nice place to be if you're if you're life but you know I mean I think we're all looking at the at the Under Ice oceans around the larger planets here and I would I I would bet any amount of money that we're going to find something under there I mean all the necessary requirements for the kind of life that we think of are going to be there um water heat uh and probably things like hydrogen sulfide or or other Redux related chemicals that would be sufficient for growing uh let's say the even primitive life will will be there I I 100% sure that that's where it is going to be here is an interesting anecdote let me just mention that um you know if there was a news media back two and a half billion years ago they would say some good news and some bad news about life in the solar system because what happened was that Mars lost its atmosphere around that time and it used to have liquid water on the surface it's pretty obvious based on all the data we have from uh the perseverance Rover more most recently so there was clearly there were clearly lakes and eventually for some mysterious reason Mars lost its atmosph I mean it it it has a much lower gravity than the earth but there was some event that caused it to lose its atmosphere and as a result all liquid water on its surface all all life form so we might find evidence that life existed on early Mars because it was not very different from Earth early Earth now around the same time two and a half billion years that's a complete it could be a complete coincidence or maybe not but the oxygen level in the ATM atmosphere of Earth Rose abruptly we don't know why I mean we know what produced the the oxygen canano bacteria but we don't know why there was this sudden rise in the oxygen level and that of course enabled all the chemistry that allowed complex life forms like ourselves to exist okay without that we wouldn't exist there wasn't much oxygen in the first half of the life of the earth and both both events occurred at the same time there was bad news on Mars good news on Earth for intelligent life or complex life and maybe they were related I don't know but when we look at other planets one thing to keep in mind is you know that we have a 50% chance to conclude the the to conclude that life exists if there is oxygen because there was microbial life on Earth for half of its life without much oxygen in the atmosphere and the second is that within a billion years from now the sun will boil off all the oceans on on Earth okay so even Earth will lose its atmosphere and the water on its surface and that's 1 billion years from now so that's like 20% left you know we don't have much time left anyway and all the tricks we are doing about global climate change and so forth you know it wouldn't change much when the sun will heat up the surface of the Earth right good thing we have tenure though now most stars like you say we have 10 years that what you say that's right but one thing to keep in mind most stars like the sun form five billion years before the Sun so they already went through that now we didn't hear the cries for help from those civilizations that were on these habitable planets like the Earth and said wow we're losing our you know Atmos we're losing our oceans we're losing everything and we and they cried for help there must have been sort of a a an immediate Exodus they must have sent lots of spacecraft in fact most of the interstellar objects most of the interstellar uh crafts may have been launched at this last phase when the civilizations that were highly evolved technologically realized we're about to die okay so they sent everything as much as they can and so most of the things we find in the inter Med may be relics from that desperation but we couldn't hear them because we were not around and you know these radio signals passed by the earth when microbes were around we were not there to hear them and we will go through that in a billion years uh if we are if we will survive all the other catastrophes but my point is that's something to keep in mind when we look for set signal radio signals you know they cannot come from a star that evolved into the red giant phase you know like most of the sunlight Stars went through that and therefore just forget about it well I guess you know the my my point in bringing this up is that you know you I either have two different uh conjectures one is that the day after we discover unequivocal evidence for the existence of life outside of the Earth that will transform everything and I I sometimes feel like that stands in direct contradistinction to the fact pattern that we've already seen and that's the following in 1996 late 1996 early 1997 President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the discovery of meteorites not unlike this uh and Antarctica where I've been twice and I've spent about a month of my life there and uh it's a Barren place it's a frozen dead continent uh just like the ice Planet Hoth um I I I love the people there but I wouldn't want to live there right uh now that was never falsified in fact there were in order to get a NASA press conference on the White House lawn it had to be peer-reviewed right AI uh and and that peer review process took place and it's never been anti- peer reviewed it's never been retracted formally and my question to you guys is why wait what was the what was the results ites from the Allen land Hill meteorite fall was actually discovered and it was believed to either contain microbial life okay this one yeah right and that was and you can see it in the movie contact there's a scene where President Clinton is talking and jod Foster's on and uh and that's really real it's not CGI he actually did that and they used the actual NASA press conference so my point is that we already in the general public has already been through this they don't know it's been retracted I mean I meet people all the time that don't know my bicep two paper was you know the conclusions were retracted and AI knows that story very well because he was there uh but I want to ask you guys the question Gary if the general public you know really hasn't gotten up in arms about this discovery which in their minds is still valid it's still a actual scientific discovery what makes us think that if you come up with proof or AI comes up with some discovery that anything will be different 20 years from now well you know I I said this before I think if it doesn't affect kitchen table issues um or doesn't challenge somebody's religion uh or their status in the in the world they probably will just ignore it um until it I I think EES out in and leaks out into into the general scientific framework so that it becomes as of many things uh it now is an accepted fact and two years ago it it it wasn't so I I mean I'm I'm perfectly fine with the public not agreeing with the conclusions or any conclusions at any point in time I'm only I'm only interested in convincing a sufficient cadr of scientists uh that something is worth studying uh so that you know continued research can be done on it I mean you know I was I often say I was I was raised Catholic but brought up Jewish uh by uh two fantastic scientist mentors when I was a gr gr student here at Stanford Leonard and and Leonard herzenberg and Lee herzenberg the the the wife was always with the when I asked a certain question says Gary you're asking a question that is yes or no and you can that's sort of a Las Vegas question you can be spending so much of your time uh on a no and you've wasted you know as many months or years of your life as possible sometimes it's easy enough to just switch the mode of the question around so that it's a Zen outcome uh so that no matter what the answer is it's interesting and so I think that this is one of those kinds of questions this whole subject matter it doesn't matter what the answer is I mean if it's if it's no it's maybe disappointing but that's still interesting because that means life on on Earth is unique but if it's yes uh if it's yes that there is life even in our own solar system doesn't proved There Are UFOs or uaps but it is at least a step in the direction of saying well it could have been I'm convinced that no matter what we find on mars or under the oceans of Titan or what have you are is going to be you know is going to be related to us whether it started there and came here or vice versa I don't really necessarily care but there are actually genetic ways to to get at that probably by the way Brian I should emphasize to me science is about learning I mean it's a learning experience about reality okay so uh nature is educating us and we better pay attention it's a dialogue with nature it's not a monologue okay and very often we get into a monologue which is a very bad um attitude when you date with a partner right you need to listen to the other side and that's why experiments are so important okay now the point why is it beneficial to us to listen and figure out what reality is is because we it allows us to adapt to it if we have the wrong ideas if we live in the metaverse and put goggles on our head and believe that we look like Brad Pit all day long and that we are very attractive next to celebrities you know we may feel good about oursel but it will not be the reality that we all share and the same if you take recreational drugs you may feel high and very good and but it's not the reality that now the scientific inquiry allows us to figure out what reality is and sometimes it contradicts our you know prior beliefs like quantum mechanics you know was in conflict with the traditional thinking and Einstein had a problem with that but he was wrong okay so the point of the matter is that by understanding why you are wrong you can then realize how to cope with the new sense of reality so for example if you know that the Earth moves around the sun when you design a space mission you take that into account if you believe very decisively that the sun moves around the earth you will never get to your destination by launching a rocket okay because you have the wrong idea so reality is whatever it is and we better adapt to it and the only way to do that is by you know collecting data not human beings are not scientific sensors they're not scientific tools we learn that over history that's why we we are using instruments and that's what Science is based on so collecting quantitative data and understanding your instruments and then learning something new about reality will benefit us no matter what we find absolutely and I wonder Gary what do you tribute and and I think you know just with with all lack of false sincerity to mix a lot of things uh I think you in particular have been in part uh crucial in the destigmatization of this phenomena and to the fact now that it's being studied by none other than NASA what do you attribute the recent upsurge that kind of you know the three of us are old enough maybe to remember Nancy carrian uh why me you know why now why is this becoming in the in the Forefront of our Collective you know frontal lobe why is it not the Avi lobe uh why is it uh why is it now coming to the Forefront such that what was previously derided and you have suffered a lot of slings and arrows personing G why is it now coming you sort of kosher to to investigate this so much so that NASA itself is investigating it what do you attribute that to well I I I think it's a conversation across the multiple fields of let's say human professional uh uh Arenas I mean one it's the Sciences um you know it was for me actually very exciting when um Avi got on board because I felt like okay well here's another person uh another serious scientist uh that I can point to and say say yeah I'm not the only I'm not the only one um but I second you know I think it was the really the efforts of people in the intelligence Services I mean we all know of Lou alzando and Chris melon and then the pilots who came forward and not because I think that they're they were addressing some sort of conspiracy they were actually being scientists they were saying look there's there's data off the curve here that needs to be understood we don't know what it is uh and I think them going public and going I mean everything even though the the the New York Times article changed things in back in 2017 I think those Pilots being on 60 Minutes it was that kind of personal uh frankly anecdote uh that was you know given and conveyed by um by credible individuals uh that changed things because you you heard people speaking in their own terms I mean I can speak to another scientist in my own terms with in my own language anguage of Science and they will believe me because of that so there was something essentially very human about what these individuals did were they they took more bricks and arrows than than I ever did um and and so I think that it was it's that kind of back and forth there's a there's a Ricochet effect occurring um where I I don't think we can expect that Ricochet to be sufficient to propel it I think we need to Contin to work on it and frankly we need to I need to be able to provide the kind of proof that I think another scientist would agree with me is is irrefutable and I've had I think that's kind of what it's about last year I had on um Jim semivan you know former CIA um operative executive maybe uh along with Tom dong with my good friend Kurt jongle who may be listening his YouTube channel theories of everything everyone should subscribe to that uh conversation and actually thank you Kurt for putting me in touch with Gary I have to give hakarat right AI uh when I talk about uh these these subjects with Tom dong he mentioned a problem that he has but he's not a scientist so he could get away with it and that was that he claimed to have alien technology an artifact from a a downed Craft um and he claims that it's 100% genuine however the means by which he acquired it cannot be either divulged or reproduced in other words there's a chain of custody problem that Avi and I don't suffer from right if Ai and I look at a uh at a muon uh their muons are like Commodities they're fungible one mu you've seen one muon you've seen them all um they're they're interchangeable uh but but alien craft aren't and so therefore it's very important the provenance so to speak and I and I guess I'm wondering you know from your excursions what do you make of of the claims of say Tom dong or or jacqu Val who I know you you've worked with well if he's if he's talking about the uh the the so-called um magnesium bismuth metam material um you know I I have pieces of that uh and I don't think that there is sufficient evidence at this point to claim that is clearly uh you know from an extraterrestrial vehicle um that said I don't think that sufficient analysis has been done on it it does have slightly altered magnesium ratios i' I've looked at that myself but they're not so far off that they that they can't be um construed as some other sort of reason for in in the in the making of it so unless he's talking about something else I I don't I don't know and nor have I seen it uh the the evidence and so it's I I I put it into the into the anecdote category and I like Tom I mean I'm I'm a you know he's a friend uh but I I haven't seen anything else now I have been given uh pieces of material that do have chains of evidence this is the so-called uat tuba event where we did do a very detailed uh analysis using secondary ion Mass Spec of the isotope ratios of two pieces one was and we did it in the same instrument at the same time under the same vacuum conditions uh one piece was perfectly conventional uh magnesium ratios the other were way off I mean so far off as to be the only thing that I could imagine is it was manufactured now that doesn't prove it's a UAP that doesn't prove it was alien it just says to me somebody back in the 70s spent a lot of money to change the isotope ratios and then blew it up over a beach in Brazil and so the only question that raises to me is who would do that and why would they do it right I mean because we don't use Isotopes or anything other than either medical reasons or blowing stuff up so so if I may add there Brian so um given the landscape that I described before of scientists being skeptical and then Believers being very um proactive in um so forth uh given that you would ask yourself okay who would be the first to notice something unusual it's obviously the government who has the day job of worrying about National Security because they have to monitor the sky at all times yeah and you know protect military personnel so they keep patrolling or looking from above from satellites on Earth and if there is anything unusual they would be the first to notice it because the astronomers build telescopes that focus on a small region of the sky look at very distant sources and if something flies above their telescope they dismiss it and even if they see an object from intera space that looks unusual they would say oh it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before so you can C the by the way an anecdote a colleague of mine wrote a review paper in annual reviews of astronomy and astrophysics about UAA the first reported in object and he said I just finished writing it uh a review about the comet om mua mua and I said what do you mean the comet UA we all know that there was no cometary tale detected and in fact the spe Space Telescope looked very deeply couldn't see any traces of carbon based molecules so he said well I have a that in fact the this object had a commentary tale when we didn't look at it and didn't have a commentary tail when we looked at it so I said that's just like going to the zoo and looking at an elephant and saying the elephant is a zebra it's just that the stripes show up when you don't look at at at the elephant and just think about it mainstream astronomer writing the authoritative review on an object that looked unusual and calls it something that is inappropriate like a comet why would he do that first he has the backing of people that say oh it's natural forget about it second he wants to have the Cozy warm feeling of something familiar okay so when you call it a comet you feel okay we can move on now my point is this is not supposed to be the way science is done we are all supposed to be kids wondering about the world without pretensions without pretending that we are experts of we know everything and without bullying any opinion that might be different than ours that is the way science should be done and here I see a problem because when young scholars see this Behavior they hesitate to innovate and then science is not progressing at the same rate as it should it should be blue sky research we should encourage young people to be creative to deviate from dogmas and you know it's just very depressing to me to see this be and he's Young by the way so he wants to show as if he size up because he's looking for a job but this should not be the climate that we live I agree I've often said you know there was a guy in the in the 1850s who had these incredible ideas that there was an ether and that the uh space of the vacuum was actually not a vacuum there were little gears and whirlpools and vortices and thank God for James Clerk Maxwell that Twitter didn't exist back then because he would have been ridiculed and humiliated and we would have thrown the electromagnetic laws that are associated with his name 160 years later out with the bath water but I think you're wrong Obby because I think scientists are like children I mean we don't play well with others we're very jealous we like attention and we and we don't like to share our toys right so I want to ask Gary when our when we see things like this and aie please you too and I just want to remind every we're talking about AI lobe Gary Nolan uh some of the most eminent uh scientists who happen to have turned at Great personal risk and I want say this with respect um I don't have the courage that you guys do I I kind of do this because I believe that we as scientists have a moral obligation to share the data to share the uh discoveries in a way that our taxpaying public who pay our freaking salary I don't care you guys are at private institutions I'm not a public institution but you guys are supported by the public at a a very deep level as well I just want to put that out there I feel it's my moral obligation to share but I don't have the courage to go out on a limb to go on Tucker Carlson like like Gary to go on the various Outlets that that you've gone on as well Obi because I I I am worried I'm worried about the the obviously there's there's career risk Etc but there's also kind of a intellectual capture that occurs when when you believe something to be true that no one else maybe agrees with you or very few of your colleagues agree with you it's a very lonely place and and I'm just saying in all honesty not many scientists have that courage not many uh people have that c courage is the rarest of all human emotions in my opinion so I just want to express that but I do want to say along the lines of data I've heard people say and when Avi was on with Eric Weinstein we heard things like the data is ours it belongs to the public I don't know if I necessarily disagree that the data belongs to the public but don't we have an obligation as scientist Gary to interpret the data are very complex someone who's watching this channel may be a lay person very bright brilliant I mean the smartest audience in the universe uh watches this channel but do they have the tools to assess at the level that you do because of your because of the privilege that you have to be a scientist can an average lay person really understand what it is that maybe you might be claiming or or is it your job to explain it in a way that they could does it belong basically I mean again this is kind of a literally a riff on what um on what AI just said I don't think of frankly what we're doing as courageous I'm just doing what I thought science was teaching me to do right and that's really what Avi was saying is that you know that that that if if if science is about following rules that somebody else wrote on stone tablets then science is done right and so uh I've spent my whole career doing things that people told me shouldn't or couldn't be done like when I was doing starting companies back in the early 90s or mid 90s I was told you're going to you know destroy your career you shouldn't do it now everybody does it right and people people who used to come to me and tell me I'm ruining my career come ask me how to start a company uh so that's that's fine so I don't consider it I don't consider it courageous I'm just doing what I think we're supposed to be doing um you know that's the that's the first part of it and sorry what was the second part of your question that you know when we see data for example I'll hear it that you know the Deep Field is data right it belongs to the public NASA made the Hubble Deep Field uh James web telescope but um it's a pretty picture at one level right AI it it doesn't really have spectroscopic image so what level do you have to have as a responsibility Obi to distill it in a way that the general taxpaying audience who pays our salaries at some level should understand yeah so that's the rationale for the gal project where we say we don't need to wait for the government to declassify data we'll just collect data that we will open to the public so that everyone can see it uh and we are funded by donations and therefore we owe nothing I mean there is no um level of of of of secrecy the other thing I wanted to mention very often uh funding is not done from the private sector but from committees that allocate federal funds to researchers and these committees argue we shouldn't take risks because otherwise we will waste taxpayers money well guess what if you were to ask the taxpayers uh what do they care about more the nature of Dark mattera Being let's say the lightest super symmetric particle or um whether we are alone or in our class of intelligence civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy they would say the latter and if you don't want to waste taxpayers money you should put it all in the direction that taxpayers want it to be spent and that poll was never made so instead what you have is the mainstream deciding on it on its own what's what they believe is risky and as a result they suppress innovation in other directions and I say you know this subject is different it's not just that I'm deviating from the path in trying to pursue it it's the path that the public cares about the most and that will have a huge impact on the future of humanity so by calling it thinking outside the box we are missing the point the box is in the wrong place I'm thinking straight based on common sense and one day my hope is the Box will be placed when I'm exactly at the center of that box okay but it takes time and that happened to me multiple times in my career where I just did what common sense makes because after all I'm a farm boy you know I was born on a farm I don't feel that I'm that I belong to any Elite uh even though I was chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years you know I feel like the common person I think straight I think with my common sense I try to reflect what the public cares about and my point is that uh you know that's the way that science should be done that we should be just you know um pursuing what people care about in instead what you find in Academia is a lot of acrobatics of people trying to show off that they are smart and sometimes they go in dark alleys that nobody cares about like worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin you know the equivalent of that would be to say let's work for 50 years about the notion of exod Dimensions without evidence without evidence for super symmetry you invested the a lot of billions of dollars in the large hydron collider we didn't find it okay my point is it's not a bad thing to do that though those things but at the same time you shouldn't ridicule study of something that the public cares about that will have huge impact and that so far was not funded federally at all and why would we even doubt that thing you know why would we if we are doing we are sending inell props why wouldn't we search for others that were sent in our Direction in my view it's a completely natural thing to do and the the community is like 180 degrees away from where it should be so it's the box that is in the wrong place you know I'm not thinking outside the bo I'm thinking what I you know is following common sense the box is out of the common sense that's what I would arue I want to ask you you know OB I want to throw I want to throw a bit of a stink bomb though at Nasa if I may yeah go for it um this UAP uh committee that they're doing the task force y several of those so-called scientists and I'm going to call you a so-called scientist until you prove otherwise whoever I'm uh deriding here have come out before they've even said anything and done many of the things before they've even done the analysis and have done many of the things that AI has been uh discussing they've they've pre-boxed their conclusions and protected themselves against others being uh who might uh uh say something negative about them because of being even on the committee how so how so Gary well I you know I think I can't remember the name of the woman but she basically came out and said something along the lines of we don't think that any of this stuff is uaps and uhan Nadia Drake probably the daughter of Frank Drake She TW yeah I mean she made a statement and then there was another person a be or maybe it's a he just came out this morning he was just recently uh put on uh the committee he said something similar where it's like that what a sad sad scientist you are that you feel that you have to say something like that before you even look at the data um I'm I'm just I'm just disappointed I I would take people like that off the committee and I'll do something say something else I think is a little why is it only astronauts and astrophysicists who are on this committee why where are the other kinds of scientists there's many other kinds of scientists Sor there actually is there's Paula Boni she's a biological oceanographer there's the industry people from uh from the biological oceanographer oh there's pic Institute of of policy studies I I agree David grinspoon is a planetary scientist actually ition of a type of scientist that I think um has a predilection to not uh think outside of the box or in the right box um because they're more afraid of what they're colleagues might think than others I I I question the constituency of the individuals who are on that committee but but but accepting that let's ask the meta question Gary is this a good thing is it is it in principle I mean we shouldn't prejudge their conclusions just as as as you are I'm happy i' be delighted if they prove me wrong okay way by the way I met with the committee and had a very good conversation with them the one thing that surprises me is not what Gary just mentioned what surprises me is that a year ago there was a committee appointed by the seti community and decided not to have discussions on UAP unidentified aial phenomena in any of the conferences related to seti now you ask yourself setti is supposed to be the closest Ally to the study of objects that are unusual okay uh why would they reject any discussion and dismiss it up front not allowing any discussion in their in their conferences and the only way I can understand that is they want to distance themselves from from those studies because they want to show the rest of the community that in fact they are in the middle they are actually mediators and they are more sane than another group in their mind and as a result they deserve funding and I find that that apologetic tone to be completely inappropriate we should search for radio signals fine we didn't find any in 70 years just like waiting for a phone call but we should also search our mailbox for any packages that arrived and that's a completely different method and I don't see a contradiction and I don't see why one is supposed to be considered as less uh valuable or as less worth pursuing especially when the government comes out and see and sees things they don't understand so let's just figure it out and why should the SEI community be the one to resist studies of UAP so I find that really strange I must tell you because it shows how the dynamic of Academia is controlled by societal forces not by logical thinking do you think that they are under constraints let's say they discover something you know potentially transformative you know or definitive proof that aliens don't exist whatever that means okay no are they under constraints because they they are not gonna I've I've spoken with David spurgle who happens to be a personal friend of mine um and he's not going to come on the I mean he said he'd come on the podcast but he has this thing called the US Congress to testify in front of first okay so that'll come down the line shelle writes uh my upstairs neighbor uh UC San Diego so they they are sworn you know to do a good job and come out with these results now on one hand we we have talked about you know the the the fallibility or the or the implicit bias that we have as human beings to confirm or refute hypotheses that agree or disagree with our preconceived notions now I've heard a lot of say and there is a substantial amount of Aviation and space you know uh related people that are on this uh including people from the FAA um I have heard a lot of things from Pilots uh over the past couple of years and I happen to be a pilot with uh with instrument ratings and and all sorts of of goodies that fly little tiny planes around uh Southern California not far from by the way where some of these Tic Tacs and stuff were observed but uh I want to get your impression first of all AI uh uh and then Gary uh for the claims of of Commander David fraver you know you can't comment on their braver I mean they're far braver and they've done things that I'll never do and I never criticize them uh you know personally but we're you know we're very skeptical of eyewitness evidence in a courtroom why are we so you know willing to believe in the Pro UFO UAP as alien craft why is it so readily accepted that the testimony of an eyewitness who is mostly trained to look at his instruments and flying his instruments or her instruments um why do we take that with outsize credulity AI first and then Gary I'd like to get your impression of I don't think we it should be regarded as scientific evidence uh now let me first comment on why I think you see the behavior of members of the committee or others in seti and so forth uh there was a congressman uh who expressed anti-gay statements publicly when he was in Congress okay and once he retired a couple of years ago he confessed that he is gay okay and what does it show you about human psychology that very often people are really intrigued by something and they pretend to be something else okay so because of what they see around them and I think a lot of that is happening in the context of UAP those that object to it the most are the ones that are actually very intrigued by them and by the way in religion very often if you want to convert someone to a religion those that you know you target those that object the most because they care about it and then you realize you can convince them so anyway just putting that aside with respect to fravor and all these testimonies you know they're intriguing they're fascinating and of course we want to believe that there is something else out there because it's fascinating it's intriguing the it will change everything but from a scientific point of view I'll tell you two I I'll give you two scenarios that could explain what the nits report was about one is there was a swarm of objects okay so they saw an object at one point and then short time later it was behind them now they say it moved so fast you know that nothing can do that but in fact it was two different objects that came in and out of view and it was not the same object so unless you have scientific evidence you're dealing with you know you can re the Ser read the serial number of the object and tell that it's the same object it may not be the same object it could also not be a physical object like if you have a laser pointed at a you know and creating a blob of hot gas that appears in your infrared uh images and appears in your radio images it may not be a real object so we don't know maybe there was some new equipment the government was testing and not telling those those who saw it uh the point is that this is intriguing enough for me or the Galileo project to build a suite of instruments that we will employ and bring to those locations and you know monitor the sky take a video of the sky in the infrared the optical the radio and try to figure it out if if it comes back again and we will of course let everyone know and it will not be I Witnesses so the point of the matter is this is good enough to trigger scientific inquiry it's not good enough as scientific evidence I agree I mean I call it like I said before it's preliminary data I could be working at my bench or when I used to work at the bench uh and I can see something in the data uh that to me is pretty clear evidence but I know that there is a standard of proof that's required to hand to others and so you know if we could get all of the necessary data from the fraver and the other individuals maybe that could be you know constituted as as actual proof um but you know I so I think in a in a nod to the to the true Skeptics I don't mean the the pseudos Skeptics and the pathological Skeptics it's like yeah we haven't done our job yet uh or the job isn't we we don't have the necessary access to do the job so I think what the Galileo project is doing and uh is exactly what needs to be done is just you know let's take it into our own hands and do it and if the government wants to participate and have us help that's a that's a great thing I mean one other thing that I think is kind of exciting though about this notion of um let's say preliminary evidence or whatever if if some civilization has made it past the inflection point of self- imulation that we are you know seem to be on the prace of ourselves I see that as a positive thing um I I look at you know these supposed events that people see in these objects even if they're not real as as a as a horizon to which we can Aspire right if something can do this or if we if we force our minds to think well can we do something like that that to me is a is a fantastic uh way to excite the younger generation to come up with new ideas and new technologies even if everything that uh is going on around uaps ends up being to be a complete uh an utter illusion right well we're going to take questions from the audience so uh I've seen couple thousand comments go by uh but I'm going to start start the process now of actually looking through them uh by taking my host prerogative and just a reminder we're talking with Professor Avi lobe of uh a small institution in Cambridge I love it when I meet somebody from from Harvard Avi and they say I go to school near Boston in Cambridge Massachusetts oh really you go to the Cambridge Institute of H virology um so I I will Define the the institution as having smarter undergrads than many faculty I know everywhere wow well that is uh in contradistinction to William F Buckley Jr who said I'd rather have my me my government be comprised of the first 50 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University but I did I did once meet somebody who said I go to the best university in the world uh and I said oh yeah which one she said I'll give you a clue it starts with an h and ends with a D and I said Harvard she said Howard are you crazy um so that's shout out to uh some of my young colleagues um Gary Nolan joining us from Stanford University um AI has some book news that I want to share and first of all I put links to both the uh gentleman's web uh Pages down in the in the description I put a link to the paper that Gary referred to about uh the wow signal and DNA uh but uh but in particular ai's got a series of articles in addition to his uh Smash Hit book called extraterrestrial which he for which he was on the show a year ago or two years ago now I can't believe it Obby it's going to be two years in January and he's promised he'll come back for his new book uh say a little bit about your new book Obby yeah it's called Interstellar and it will be about the implications to humanity of everything we discussed so stay tuned for that I should say that um you know over the past since my previous book appeared I I was on about 1,800 podcasts and interviews for TV and newspapers and so forth but the biggest satisfaction came about a week ago I attended a summit in Palm Desert and um a woman came to me uh originally from Iran and she said can I have a selfie with you and I said sure she knew about me and she took a selfie and then she said the the following morning she said I posted it on Instagram and there are hundreds of Iranian women scientists that wrote back to me and said that they are following your work and I thought to myself wow that's quite remarkable because I'm originally from Israel and I'd never imagined there would be hundreds of Iranian women following my work and I basically recorded a video snippet with her in which I supported the women of Iran in their fight right now in the protest so what I would like to say is this subject resonates with a lot of people around the world a lot of people are excited about it we are going to do the expedition to Papua nugini there is a lot going on uh every day I get surprising things happening uh and within a year or two I bet you that we will have a convers the landscape will change okay it's not up to Federal institutions to authorize progress It's not up to the dogma of Academia to to tell us what reality is like we will just figure it out like kids and then you know I don't really by the way I keep thinking about gal that knew the truth about the Earth and the Sun and was put in house arrest like who cares whether the public knows about it whether people don't like it you know that's completely irrelevant if you know what reality is like one way or the other it will the news will break out okay because that's the reality you can hide the virus you can avoid people knowing about it but the virus if it's there people will get sick you know so that the reality is whatever it is irrespec of what humans try to do to hide it and I like to look at the pimples of reality I don't want any makeup you see the people around me try to put makeup on reality so it looks better so that we are the only intelligent you know uh civilization out there we feel better about oursel this way I want to to realize if there is a smarter kid we we want to learn from the smartest kid in our class that's what we should aim at because it will give us inspiration so we want to find who is smarter you know out there one reason I search for intelligence in space is because I don't often can find it when I open the newspaper right and G uh a I can't resist uh you quoting your your top uh your top aphorism from last appearance when you were on with Eric Weinstein I'll put a link to it what did you say about the sky and being classified AI well the sky is not classified and um that's why we should look at it you know and I think we are we we we should think of ourself as students of nature let let nature educate us rather than having a a monologue in which we say what nature is supposed to be and part of nature you know I grew up on a farm and to me nature is the entire universe okay and there is M so we are focused most of the time on the two-dimensional surface of this rock that we were born on the the Earth but it's it's it's just a tiny Rock in in a huge space and and just you know let's be more modest and and and look up that's all I'm asking let's look up let's check our mailbox like why are we so close-minded you know like uh that that is really and fery asked 70 years ago where is everybody that's so self-centered like to stay at home and say I don't see my neighbors you know like what is going on here well you didn't look through the windows you didn't use a telescope back in 1950 uh so how can you claim where is everybody like that well hopefully we'll we'll get a lot of good packages in the mail this Black Friday with books by a uh in them uh so first question from the audience uh for Gary uh comes from uh uh one of my listeners uh who's asking are you related to Christopher a uh and then an all seriousness uh red panda koala asks any updates on the Havana syndrome uh and have you noticed any patterns and experiences held by people that you've encountered so Havana syndrome up upgraded I mean well the I mean I I mean the Havana syndrome relationship work for me basically was um you know when we had a 100 individuals that were you know the the some of the data Medical Data was taken to me you know we had back around 2014 2015 already figured out that there were um well we had called it at the time interference syndrome we didn't know that it was basically some sort of was related to the um the uh the issues going on at the um at the US Embassy in Havana um those cases that I was involved with with Havana have been handed over to the US government they're not my I would say that's a good thing they're not my problem anymore you know science is about classification and once we could classify them as some kind of frankly uh attack on our diplomatic core or individuals those individuals were then taken out of my hands I mean not in a negative sense just said I could hand them over because they were class they were I could classify them as something other than let's say UAP they weren't interesting to me anymore because they were understandable but what was left on the table and I think is really this is what the individual is is asking about um are the individuals who were harmed in some way or had damage uh who claimed some kind of UAP interaction again it's for for me the the story of the UAP intervention is less interesting to me than is the damage that happened to them and how they came about to be damaged and what was the let's say the technology that uh caused the damage and so I I try I've said this before I try to stay away from the anecdotal aspect of the story because I can't verify that but I can look at the same x-ray or the same medical analysis of an individual and I can reproduce that analysis and so that's where I'm I'm focused uh and I'm sorry if that's not the kind of answer that uh Mr koala wants but that's really as far as I'm willing to go I the other thing I've said is I will not do science by press release yes I will wait until the science is vetted by other individuals I mean I got in big trouble doing science by press release with that so-called ocama thing and that you know I the gentleman Steven Greer who I had speculated along the way that I thought that some of the DNA results looked odd and and maybe it was an alien or something but they what I found is that if you speculate to the public who don't know what the limits of speculation mean they sometimes take what you're saying as a conclusion and when I basically published the paper showing that this uh unfortunate um mummy was in fact a young girl likely born prematurely and had multiple mutations in uh genes that were um basically in bone development genes and I had literally the world's expert on bone development genes Ralph lochman from here at Stanford three other Stanford professors who were specialists in South American genetics and all the rest validate verify the results 13 or 14 postto graduate students Ro science Ro Diagnostics on the paper etc etc and I published it it didn't matter they could all they could basically say was I was I somehow had convinced a Cadre of 15 or so people to to fabricate the data because I got a grant from the dod for doing ovarian cancer and that was my payoff I mean I mean that is literally it's it's that's what I had to go through and I realized okay you really do the ethics of how science is done really do work work you have to stick to the rules and the rules are be very careful what you speculate uh because the people who don't understand the rules will run with it I mean we see this in the newspapers and social media every day so that's why I won't go any further so I'm sorry red koala Panda AI for you this comes from uh Professor Brian keing if you had unlimited budget let's just say unlimited budget what would you be doing what what could you be doing and Gary I'm gonna ask you the same question what would you do with effectively unlimited budget I'm I'm tweaking this I tweeted to Elon Musk yesterday about this very question go ahead Abby yeah I should note that this is not a hypothetical question no I know I know it is okay so uh because I'm I'm you know I I I get to meet a number of people that are quite excited uh and many of them come to the porch of my home to discuss it with me so you know as I said the two-thirds of Americans really care about and believe in extraterrestrial life and you might assume that many of the multi-billionaires that became wealthy recently are drawn out of that population so many of them care about it what would I do so um I would follow um studies along three tracks what which is pretty much what the gal project is doing just much more uh forcefully so one track is um right now I have money to perhaps um uh duplicate system of uh instruments that we have maybe a few times and put it in three locations okay uh but if I get tens of millions or more than that I will have I could have hundreds of those systems and that is really the minimum needed to U study the problem thoroughly and get enough statistics on all the unidentified aial phenomena that appeared in report so what I need is a factor of 10 in funding or more than that and the more the better in the sense that we know how to make those instruments in fact this week is very um sort of historic for the Galileo project because For the First time we're getting data from all the instruments and bringing them to the computer systems uh that we have and starting to analyze with artificial intelligence algorithm so we are as in the coming weeks we will basically make sure that everything works and then within a month or so we can start planning where to put additional uh copies of that Suite of instruments and what I'm limited by is the funding so if I get enough funding let's say tens of millions to 100 million that would allow me to get to the bottom of this question what are unidentified aerial phenomena I can promise that and we we can demonstrate that we know what we are doing with a current system we just need more copies of it so that's one track the second one is going after the fragments of interstellar meteor so we are going to papuan nugini to uh scoop the ocean Flor that's one Interstellar meteor from 2014 the first Interstellar object in the solar system tougher than iron tougher than all the other space rocks known and therefore it's possibly of H some artificial alloy composition so we want to find out by collecting the fragments and we are fully funded for that that's a one and a half million but there is another interal meteor that we identified and we would like to go after that as well so that's at the level of a few million dollars we can go after Interstellar meteors okay so we have the Tens of millions or 100 million for the UAP and uh at the level of Millions for the Expeditions then the big ticket item is really space missions so objects that do not collide with Earth like UA mua was we could come close to them and take a close-up photograph and such a mission is actually a billion dollars in cost so we are thinking about proposing uh to space agencies like NASA or others uh but at first we are designing the mission the parameters of such a mission and we will have a dating app the Vera ruin observatory in Chile that will start operations next year and it serves as a dating app because we will see more objects like UA mua and we will swipe to the left for most of them but some of them would look intriguing and we would like to uh approach them as they come towards us and perhaps take a closeup photograph and that's the most expensive so if I had unlimited budget I will have those uh you know space missions that meet unusual Interstellar objects just like UA mua and take a close-up photograph maybe even land on them so that they can tell whether it's a hydrogen Iceberg a nitrogen Iceberg a Dust Bunny in which case you will pass through it these are the suggestions by advertising billboard right yeah or they have some screws and bolts and we can land and I would love to press a button if it's well actually uh so Joe is asking a question Joe Wescott is asking he'd love to help out he's got a lot of money because he donated uh 20 bucks to the Super Chat so I'm I'm expecting he's also a billionaire so now I've had on five billionaires on the podcast um how can an ordinary uh stem professional participate in the Galileo project okay so we have two uh on the Galileo website there are two uh items one is how to contribute if someone wants to contribute funds um how to support support us uh and the second is volunteering to be part of the research team and there is a different tab for that and you just fill the fill a form and we will look at your um credentials and make a decision great or you can contact me you can just email me okay and uh yeah we'll have links we have links to your website on the comment section down below Gary if you had unlimited funds say Phil Knight decides to make another $400 million donation to that fair University to let the Winds of Freedom blow on This research uh what would you do with unlimited budget it's really kind of a a surreptitious question actually well you know as as some people know I've been interested in these claimed materials that have been either Left Behind or or dropped from these uh uaps I mean there's there's an interesting um pattern where an object is seen and uh it drops something often a molten metal in fact I published a peer- reviewed paper on exactly this in uh on a on a well credential uh event um you know we didn't find anything unusual but there in terms of the constituency because it was a mton metal but how does a molten metal end up in the middle of a field uh where everybody saw a glowing blinking object you know just a a few hours before um so you know in in in that vein and say uh looking at things that for instance Tom Delan says that he has or that others might have there is there are a range of scientific instruments which could be brought to bear as well as a couple that need to be built including something called an atomic Imaging scope uh that um you know if if you have something how do you prove that it wasn't made here well you need to know that it was made of things for instance that humans don't normally make that's hard to say because we can pretty much put any set of elements in a in a that mix them together and and they'll be there but it's how they're put together um and if it isn't an obvious technology nuts and bolts as AI just alluded to uh then um how do you understand or how do you prove that it it is from elsewhere um but secondly let's say that you do have something which is verifiably not human and it is millions of years ahead of us in in some manner or developed by a technology or a civilization farther ahead the the next point of of just claiming beyond what it is that it is from somewhere else is what does it do and how does it do it and so you know if we're going to learn lessons from our betters let's say uh what better way to do it than to understand the material that it's made of and so as it turns out I have seen data supposedly from inside of the government uh on some of these supposed materials uh and I was left wanting for the kind of analysis that were that was done it just was insufficient um and so there needs to be sort of a standardized pipeline of how the data should be how materials should be processed so that you can compare apples to apples oranges to oranges so at the end of the day you get a report which can be read by the scientific Community to say one way or the other I just want to I just want to produce the data in a way that is credible and then let the conclusions flow from the data but I have you know the the the amounts of money to create some of those to put together a suite of such instruments is in the tens of millions of dollars to do this and to do the make the instrument that I want to make uh you know actually turns out I have the funding for it now uh but you're talking uh you're talking a lot of money uh as well I mean producing data is one thing analyzing the data is wholly another right and so you basically need to basically bring in the the kinds of experts uh PhD and otherwise to to do it I I can't do it anymore I don't have the time yeah and I mean looking at you know infinite budgets I mean the government can actually print their own money so in a certain sense they have infinite budget are you impressed with the budget they've dedicated to date to this UAP task force AI or Gary I'm I'm satisfied that they're putting the money to it and so to the extent that they actually do something with it and don't come out with some you know I I hope that they put a report out uh for commentary before they finalize that report uh I think I mean that I think would lend a lot of credibility to it um so we'll see I'm I'm withholding judgment and I would love I would love to say six months from now when they're done with it I'm sorry to the committee for insulting them okay uh next up AI this is for you uh you can obviously comment on whether or not you think the sufficiency of the federal government NASA budget is adequate do you just comment on that quickly AI well we don't know what it will be um the right now it's a study that was funded at 100K uh and is supposed to recommend within a year by June 2023 uh how much money NASA should uh allocate to the study of UAP so this is not really a study of the nature of unidentified object it's more about whether NASA should invest in such a research uh and therefore the funds will be allocated if they are recommended only probably two years from now if you think about it realistically and My Hope Is that the landscape of research on this subject will change in the meantime because the gal project for example will collect data and um so I you know I believe we should not wait uh for others to approve the research if there are sufficiently wealthy individuals that are excited about this question we can do it ourself we don't need to wait for anyone you know it's just like the play of Samuel Becket waiting for godau you can wait for ever either for the government to declassify data or to fund things that you want it to fund and then you realize that you're actually the some of your colleagues are blocking it because they want the same funding for something else um but however if the funding comes from the private sector and most of my funding came from the private sector over the past decade and I established um a new center at Harvard that unrelated to the subject on black holes for example and all of the funding comes from foundations or private donations and my point is uh in that case you can explore new territories and you can pretty much decide about what seems exciting what is exciting to the public and uh I think that's a much better path for Innovation simply because of the reasons we discussed before that there is a lot of inertia for experts to claim that they already know everything and they deserve more prices in addition to the ones they already deserve therefore new knowledge should not be gaed because it would threaten their status yeah uh so comes in another question this is from a a fellow farmer Obby Simon farmer who asked the following question um what criteria do you have established to determine if uh you spot something uh whether or not its design is terrestrial human-made or not oh it's very simple um basically the two categories of objects that we are familiar with these are human-made objects or natural objects we all know about airplanes drones satellites weather balloons yes um you know Rockets um these are human made and we also know about birds insects you know and uh meteors that are Rocky and so the first task is to basically um see if everything we we find in the sky belongs to one of these two and if we see an object behaving in ways that are not uh explainable as human-made technology because we don't have that capacity you know we pretty much know the limitations of existing I mean either from Espionage or from what we develop I mean all you know countries around the world are not Head and Shoulder above the us so we pretty much know our limits and if we see something behaving technologically far you know better than what we can produce then we know that you know it's not us and at the same time if we verify that it's not biological it's not natural uh then we know that it's not from this Earth okay so that's really uh now we still don't know what it is so my point is it will take a long time for through the learning experience of figuring out what it's seeking what kind of information is trying to get how should we respond to it uh and we don't have a protocol for that there is no organization that represents Earth because we never imagine that we'll have a visitor in our backyard or that we will find a package in our mailbox you know if you find a package in your mailbox that is not sent by your family members but uh in the home you know like send to just put there by your kids or something um if it's if it came from far away you know you have to decide what to do with it because you don't know what what's inside and one way to figure it out maybe is to try and and learn about it what is it trying to do what is uh what could be the content of this package and and that will be a learning experience we can use artificial intelligence for that because a it might be equipped with AI itself you know so our AI systems will have kinship to their AI systems more than to us and that's the way I see the future by the way I'm very proud of our technological kids AI systems uh I don't necessarily think about sending humans to space I think about sending technological gadgets that are equipped with AI and so I think it will be a learning curve uh for us to figure out what it is but at first the first step is just to uh find something that is not familiar okay that's the first a follow-up question from Anton sh asks uh are you gonna open source the either AI or the machine learning research data is that going to be open source and he says kaggle is a good platform yeah yeah so okay so we are currently developing it and we are also starting to collect data eventually the data will be public and the tools that we use will be public so people can check us and also do their own work that's the way science is done and we plan to follow that until you know we verify that things work to our satisfaction you know before that it's premature we don't want to cry wolf you know for no good reason so we want to actually uh veryify that what we're getting is is is reliable we calibrate our instruments we will test our algorithms and we have already eight papers that we submitted to the Journal of astronomical instrumentation where we describe the instrumentation that we are currently already testing uh so we will be open as open as possible uh that will be a breath of fresh air into the subject because people are used to secrecy or I mean it's clear why the government has classification because they collect the data by sensors that that are classified they don't want adversaries to be aware of the capabilities of the US so uh it's not so much the data it's the sensors and if we developed our our own sensors that are open you know off the shelf then we have nothing to hide next question comes from my friend Delon Levy uh who asks um Gary does the does or did the government or some other earth based institution have a live alien and what if anything did they learn about these internal composition of such creatures if such and I'm not dering it and I've you know I've seen fascinating you know a fascinating movie moment of contact from James Fox about uh some of these kinds of events I don't know I've not seen anything um and uh so is sadly it's it it's anecdote um but I think there's a there's a different kind of question question that is being asked here is how do you deal with um the hundreds or thousands of individuals uh and often uh children their testimonies how do you deal with the testimonies of individuals as as let's say basy and priors uh you know how do we deal with that kind of information um and is it sufficient to get uh others interested again there's different audiences is it's not sufficient for a scientist as proof but maybe it's sufficient for politicians uh that it's worth um you know at the very least I mean John Mack from Harvard actually went through exactly this is whether whether what these people are seeing or not is is interesting or real it does tell you something interesting about the human mind yeah I I would like to mention an anecdote that I was asked by the Boston magazine um uh when they made a profile about me um a year ago that um um about what will happen if a spacecraft landed uh in our backyard and my wife said if they land back then she said if they ever land and want to pick you up just make sure that you leave the car keys with me and ask them not to ruin the loan when they take off now actually I was asked this question again at a forum public forum just a month ago and I so when I came home I asked my wife again I asked her did you change your opinion and she said to me that well this time I will tell you make sure that you turn off the lights and I will join you because she's a little bit disappointed with what's going on around the world now uh so you know there might be an opportunity for us to stay together even if I go on board wonder I wonder what the frequent F mile situ would you get you know alien Premier gold or magnesium you get magnesium status I tell you what My worry is when I go to Europe I see the same movie again and again but if you go to Alpha centuri you'll have to see it millions of times that that will be very boring well unless unless it goes faster than light ofy that's true that's true uh we could all be using the alier drive or some derivative yeah Gary uh mumi which is one of the names I chose for one of my kids actually uh sends us a Norwegian donation asking you Gary do you have an update on the sphere you got from heart I don't cold heart well yeah this is another um situation where you know somebody had some anomalous I I I won't go into the into the details of it here but they have an anomalous material and it's the same thing I've said to to others is um yes I have the I have the material no I have not yet done the analysis because I'm not going to do the analysis until I have all of the right instruments l lined up so that uh when I do it it's not just it's just not a one-off data point it's a one-off data point is useless it's correlated to nothing yes and so um you know as as I said it's expensive people don't understand how expensive it it is yeah okay so I run it I'll I'll get iron and maybe some chromium or whatever that doesn't improve anything to anybody yeah so you know I just it's just and even if I did if it if it were something worth uh you know uh announcing I won't do it in a press release I'll publish a paper probably in a really boring place and let the world deal with it from there because one data point in isolation is nothing to me let me ask you this question that that came up in the context of a of a friend of mine who was uh received I won't say too much about it not to be you know purposely mysterious but but just because I don't know if it's anyway he wanted to use some campus resources um you know uh x-ray fluorescent spectroscopy etc etc to look at some um uh some ancient artifacts found uh in a shipwreck and and this was uh you know something that we could look at with tools that we have here and he was even willing to pay for it but the question came up you know can you use you know campus resources or even government do you think you know you might face if if you did get you know as part of your reluctance to to kind of I mean obviously you want to avoid being on People magazine although I was just in People magazine recently not for world's sexiest man don't get your hopes up uh but instead guys it was for a comment I made about the sun uh but but anyway um Gary do you speaking about that I don't know if I mention to you but um one day um someone pointed out to me a tweet uh of a husband who said his wife got she said she has a crash of on an on a scientist named ailo but who she thinks is sexier than Anthony fouchi and I mentioned it immediately to my wife good and her response was fouchi is a low bar you guys you should be on the Bor circuit I know well that's our yeah we we Obi and Brian we we we do go on tour uh but Gary would would you face opposition for using you know do you have to be totally privately funded no not at all um first of all I mean I would't I won't use NIH funds to do things for you know that are aren't validated but I have an endow chair yes uh that you know it it basically generates a few hundred, doar a year that I can use for anything I happen to be on very good terms with the family uh that originally donated the money that generates those endowed funds for me every year they're perfectly fine with me doing it um and Stanford is perfectly fine with me doing it because at the higher levels uh at least he at least here they're you know they understand that inquiry like this is is uh laudable um and if they ever dared to try to stop me I would find ways to embarrass them ominous that's uh good to know and I don't want to get on your bad side Gary and and if you are related to Christopher Nolan that that could even be more impressive okay we're going to ask uh some existential questions of Gary I've asked these to AI but but actually I want to get it's time for an update AI uh it was two years ago you were on the first time on this podcast um so I'll take a couple more questions from the audience there's still time in the closing minutes just a reminder you're talking to uh professors Avi lobe good good friend of the show four-time guest five time now on the into the impossible podcast I have links to his previous episodes along with all the content I've had I've had on Skeptics Gary you should know I've had on Michael shurmer I've had on Mick West these are people I don't know if you want to comment on them but they've uh they they are decidedly not on the UFO as alien technology front well you know that Michael Shermer uh is also a member of the gal project and I brought people from both sides because I think evidence will eventually so it's sort of like a lithos test if everyone is united in the interpretation of the data I know that we're not missing something so I said the to so Michael said that at some point um you know if you find evidence that is conclusive I will be glad to write an article about it in my magazine skeptic MH and I told him you know that's not enough I want you to change the name of the magazine from skeptic to believer to believer wow that's now you can play the pope uh a we can really mix up some Catholic and Judaism um okay so uh just a reminder we're talking AI L of Harvard and Gary Nolan of of Stanford University and uh and I'm Brian ke your humble host of the into the impossible podcast where we've had on uh dozens of conversations on this Most Fascinating subject and we have another one coming up with jacqu Val another uh introduct to me by none other than Kurt jongle who's lurking in the chat room and uh is been so kind to to introduce me to Gary and uh and I want to thank him for that so jacqu will come on I'm trying to get Eric Weinstein on with jacqu so let me know give a thumbs up if you'd like to see that pairing uh before the end of the year okay and maybe we'll have you and Eric Weinstein that would be fun I know he's interested to talk to you Eric's a friend yeah that would be great uh and he's also you know been ping around with people like Lou elzando lately so I want to get an update for him um okay and and just a quick reminder if you do want some Interstellar uh meteorites you can uh uh sign up for my mailing list Brian king.com list and you may win some extraterrestrial maybe Interstellar I don't know I can't I can't be sure uh but uh but maybe Interstellar what's that they're all Interstellar that's right okay so Gary you have not been on uh this podcast but I love to ask the deepest questions of life because a scientists you know what they say about scientists how do you know a scientist is outgoing Gary because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you um uh but we have this Trope that we're you know we're these unhuman inhuman androyal you know kind of thinking robots and and sometimes we deserve it right uh we're we're we're on some kind of a spectrum I'm so far on the Spectrum I'm off the Spectrum but but uh but I do like to humanize my guess and I'm not uh implying that you're not human in any way but I asked these questions and you haven't really seen them I don't think but uh they really kind of relate to the most important things of of Life the kind of meaning questions of life and I want to start with something that I asked Avi about when he was back on the show and it's something in Hebrew called a Zava it's an ethical will not a material will and it has to do with what you want to leave the planet with in terms of your wisdom your learning your your knowledge not your material Goods which you know I don't know where those will go uh but what wisdom would you most want to communicate to all of humanity and your ideological erors once you spring forth this Mortal coil as the Barb said um well I I mean these are in some ways trit but give more than you take um and you know less than you think you do uh and listen more to others that the observations will teach you more than anything you think you understand I mean I mean that's to me what I was always brought up as give more than you take um and uh and frankly if you can take nothing beautiful and leave no Trace right there no backpacking uh Avi did you want to comment yeah so so I actually met with a class of undergrads at Harvard a couple of weeks ago and my advice to them was um drawn from the metaphor of walking on the beach you know you often see some sea shells that maintain you know unique colors and and structure and then these are the the youngest those that were swept ashore very recently but those that uh over time were um rubbing against each other as a result of being dragged by ocean waves um they eventually lose their unique colors and become you know break up into indistinguishable U grains of sand okay so my message to the young people is don't rub against each other on social media too often because then you will lose your unique colors and and the I want people to maintain it and you know when I was um a young kid I grew up on a farm and that taught me that independent thought is most important in life because very often humans are swayed by wishful thinking that that's very common and uh if you want to find your Truth uh you should not seek it in others you should look for it yourself and keep your unique colors don't surrender to how many likes you have on Twitter and besides Twitter may go away so well yeah I mean if uh if Elon keeps up with his case of innovation uh although I'm trying to get him you know to spend a tenth of what he bought Twitter for on some uh some transformational physics project so something's happened to your sound uh oh what about now can you hear me now yeah there it goes okay good um so the next question has to do with and by speaking of Twitter you can follow Gary at Gary P noan on Twitter and uh Avi is to uh his time is too precious so he's not on Twitter but the Galileo project has a Twitter account it is Galileo Pro project one on Twitter and hopefully it will have a blue check mark if they can come up with the eight bucks from one of ai's billionaire buddies okay next question for you guys uh the namesake of this podcast uh dates to uh the man whose Center we have at UCSD the Arthur C Clark Center for human imagination and I am the associate director of that fine August institution and of course we open the audio podcast which you can subscribe to as well with sir Arthur's actual reading of the following statement and any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic and I want to ask you if you had access Gary to a monolith an object of great permanence that could last not just 120 years but billions of years into the future what would you put on it or in it to bepe of the magical technology that human beings have been able to construct in our short few hundred thousand years as a species of homo sapiens what most Majestic magical thing in your field maybe you created or somebody else created would you put on a monolith to give a little Swagger to humanity oh I was going to say a Rubik's Cube but um uh let's see well I think one of the most amazing devices that we've created well I mean many but I I I think any the lens right because it's a you know the the the Glass Lens it's a you know it's emblematic of looking deeper right it's kind of I mean beyond the wheel uh it's probably one of the first devices we ever created that allowed us to look Beyond ourselves and and that to me is uh you know perhaps the best that's great it's interesting that Gary is thinking in my direction because lenses are often used in astronomy uh but my preference would be to put artificial intelligence uh so that um especially a system that can evolve and the learn machine learning uh because then it will be dynamic and whoever finds it will interact with it and learn much more if we store enough information in fact I was advocating in a recent paper putting a um you know a a reboot system on the moon that will be if something catastrophic happens on Earth we want to keep all the precious information out there and so I bought a laptop over the summer and together with it I had a backup system that a small tiny dis like system that keeps all the information so the same thing we can keep on the moon and basically communicate to it by by a laser and transmit all the DNA information about all life forms on Earth so that it's stored there and all human Creations all the music all the books and so forth so that's sort of of a monolith um because it keeps all the information but I will add to that an AI system that is able to use that like you know what you use when you Google something you know that's an AI system and uh so that would be fun to interact with yeah no I agree I just uh I put a CD ROM you know when I did this and unfortunately you know the Microsoft paperclip could not decipher the CD anyway I'm just joking guys uh okay last two questions for you distinguished gentlemen actually have to do with another quote from Sir Arthur C Clark which is the following he said when a distinguished but elderly scientist I'm not calling you guys elderly okay come off when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right but when they State something is impossible they are very probably wrong Gary I want to ask you with all humble respect and admiration what have you changed your mind about what have you been wrong about well I don't know that I'm right or wrong about it but I'm more of the opinion that the universe is somehow designed or made for life um you know maybe that's just by lack of appreciation of of uh of the possibilities but I I I I'm more of the opinion that the universe is uh is somehow constructed to enable life now could just be that's the way it is but um it's easy enough to also imagine that some larger entity uh you know in a universe beyond us uh you know and we're encapsulated within that you know created conditions such that we are here I just find it fascinating that the way that all of the objects that operate down at the fundamental units of of nature uh can come together in a way that allow for life I mean I'm in I'm in a greater level of awe about it if anything and if awe equals a religious sort of uh consideration then that's kind of where I am I've let me connect to that um so when I started astrophysics that was 35 years ago uh there was this notion that the early universe is simple simply because we don't have data on it that many people said that oh cosmology is simple you know just because we haven't gathered enough data and once we collect the data we will find that it's as complex as the universe nowadays full you know the universe now has you know in addition to life it has stars it has galaxies very complex structures now as we got more data about the early Universe now we have a lot of data it's still simple now this explains the error of time okay because the universe started simple and you can ask why and you know some people advocate for infl Cosmic inflation that created initial conditions that are quite unique and simple you know the universe was pretty much uniform except for small fluctuations some of us are not sure that Cosmic inflation took place and maybe some other process did it the bottom line is the universe started simple and became complex and um you know if you think about um you our life it also goes that way we start simple you know as babies and then we get more complex as adults uh but here is the catch complexity doesn't continue forever okay because eventually we die and we become really simple once again so if you look at old people in a way they're as vulnerable as babies and they eventually become simple because they end up dead and so um the same will happen to our universe now it's sort of at the peak of its complexity maybe it will continue for a little while but eventually we will be surrounded by vacuum because the expansion is accelerating and the there will be only our galaxies surrounded by nothing because the all the other galaxies will exit from our Horizon and that's a simpler State okay and eventually all the stars will die that's a simpler State than we have now and life will not exist so my point is we are used to complexity increasing with the errow of time there will be a point where Simplicity will increase with the arrow of time so it's not always true that error of time is in the direction of increasing complexity and that's all because of gravity you know that drives everything in ways that we do not expect from thermodynamics yeah well guys this has been fascinating and delightful speaking of inflation I wish you both uh much inflation of your waistline although Avi you're wasting away I I used a picture you know of AI from like a year or two ago and uh I had to take it down because you've you've lost considerable number of kilos which I will be conserving those kilos because you and I are in exchange where I gain the weight you I I've not been so kind in the P well since the pandemic started every day now for three years actually I've been jogging at Sunrise and I must tell you it makes me younger I feel really great about it and it increases the density of thoughts per unit mass in my body so how about you Gary do you have a quick one two second uh daily routine something important to you or weekly routine that's that's important to you uh weekly routine um well I work in my garden I have a greenhouse I collect carnivorous plants because what mad scientists you know shouldn't collect carnivorous plants as well as being interested in uaps I've been interested in that sort of stuff saw you tweet about that yeah well uh gentlemen it's been a a distinct honor for me and I know for my audience um and uh I hope we can H have many more conversations like this as new evidence new data arises and as you guys uh continue also in your story career uh Obi you've had a paper out recently about disconfirming inflation I want to have you back on for that as well as for your new book Interstellar which I put up the uh the the monograph the cover of it on the screen a couple of uh maybe an hour ago now Gary I want to have you back on talk about all sorts of exciting projects you're involved with get your opinions on hot topics like crisper genan editing artificial life in the lab and other things so hopefully you'll do me another honor come back on someday yep happy too thanks so much well for now everybody thank you so for joining the podcast a reminder we'll have on jacqu valet hopefully soon maybe with or without Eric Weinstein and we'll hopefully have Gary and Avan many many times uh to come so please do subscribe and if you do want to win a chunk of interstellar space Schmutz I'm shaking it here these are actual meteorites four billion years old at least found in Argentina about uh 500 years ago uh you can enter to win your chance at Brian keen.com list and I'll send some to you guys maybe a Carnivor plant and uh and then for one lucky winner I will send you some Uranus soap to keep Uranus clean everybody enjoy Thanksgiving if you're in America if you're in Canada I hope you enjoyed it last month like Kurt my friend my good friend Kurt jongo I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving I hope you all have a wonderful uh holiday season coming up and stay tuned to the end the impossible podcast bye everybody