Will We Ever Become An Interstellar Civilisation? - Avi Loeb

what do you think is the chance that our universe was created by aliens in a lab it's a possibility we don't understand how the big bang came to exist uh and it's really troubling that there was a beginning in time uh and it's um in in a way it shows the shortcoming of Einstein's theory of general relativity which has singularities and the Big Bang is one of them it's it's a Time Singularity if we go back in time there was a point in time when uh the space and time you know had the Very extreme conditions and and and we can't go beyond that point and clearly the reason for that is that there is no quantum mechanical theory of gravity that is predictive the you know for the past few decades there were attempts to put these two theories together of generativity and quantum mechanics and I must say that despite the the claims made by string theory is they don't make any predictions about the Big Bang they don't even make predictions about what happens inside a black hole so as far as I'm concerned you know if you are a plumber and I ask you can you fix my toilet and you say no that's too difficult and I ask you okay so can you fix uh um my faucet and you say no that's also too difficult and then you tell me but actually in the metaverse you know I'm a real plumber that doesn't buy much for me I I would say you're not a real plumber so claiming that you're working on the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity and and you have some partial success doesn't count if you can't solve the main problems that face us and one of them is how the big bang started and I can imagine an advanced technological civilization that has these two theories unified because they had more than a century of physics to work on and uh if so they might engineer their knowledge into creating a baby Universe in the lab and of course our our universe could have been the result of a lab experiment and in that case it's just like humans you know the babies grow up to become adults and they have their own babies and so forth so you can have a universe inside of which the you know it gives rise to technological civilizations that give birth to new baby universes and and it goes forever this way so that's one possibility and I consider it as possible I suppose this would nicely fold in the fine tuning argument as well why is the cosmological constant just so so delicately balanced along with gravity along with the strong and weak etc etc well I think it stems from the fact that a very Advanced technological civilization is a good approximation to God and of course some people believe that God created the universe and I'm just saying it could have been a technological civilization that unified quantum mechanics and gravity and then the fine tuning is also argued oh well there was a design here that some numbers worked out so that we exist and these numbers were designed by some Divine entity well you know here I say again whatever we see around us including life could have been created by an advanced technological civilization and the only way to find out I mean the difference from religion is that I'm talking about something that can be tested experimentally if we find evidence for such a civilization we will know their capabilities I mean at some point once we visit their home uh we can see what they are up to or we might see gadgets that are so Advanced that you know we wouldn't be able to understand that but and and they would be considered as Miracles just the way Moses you know in the Old Testament the Bible Moses saw the burning bush and that was a miracle that convinced Moses that God exists well if I was around Moses at the time I would use infrared cameras that we are using right now in in the Galileo project that I'm leading and I could advise more Moses about the the surface temperature of the burning bush the amount of energy emitted period of time and I could assess very clearly whether the burning which is a natural phenomena or some creation of a super human entity so that he would you know have more or less oh from this phenomena and perhaps decide whether he believes in in God or not but what I'm saying is if a cave dweller came to New York City right now the cave dweller would be at all and would think that everything around must be a miracle and that's what Moses felt you've talked about a number of Super Advanced civilizations talk to me about the different ways to classify civilizations and their respective usefulness right so kardashev Russian astronomer he um classified civilizations based on the amount of energy that they are harvesting uh so right now we are using up a small fraction of the energy from the Sun uh that is intercepted by Earth and you can imagine like Freeman Dyson did the surrounding the star with some Mega structure that would Harvest all the energy coming out of the star that's the next step and kardashev even imagined harvesting all the energy from all the stars within our Milky Way galaxy and that would be and of course one can even think farther than that using all the energy that the Universe the observable universe creates um but then that is rather difficult engineering wise and also I don't think it's the right skill but you know it's not it's not a size that matters let's put it that way in terms of energy it's really what you do with it and how you change your environment and um so obviously animals they adapt to their environment whatever it is and as humans we started changing the environment climate change uh we created the atomic bomb as Illustrated in their recent film Oppenheimer you know that was a major event because previously uh you know nuclear energy was visible to us in stars but was never used and and once we started using it of course it changed history change politics change society um and so the fact that we're able to change nature as of now is quite remarkable and you know we're making substitutes to biological uh entities like humans the human brain instead we have the artificial intelligence that could potentially surpass our abilities mental abilities intellectual abilities but uh one can eventually imagine us changing environments on a bigger scale and obviously the larger scale would be to create a baby Universe in the laboratory so I think that it's a much more appropriate to evaluate the abilities of or to gauge the technological abilities of a civilization by the way that it changes everything around it uh ending up with creating new universes what do you make of the last few years and specifically the last few months of alien rumors what's what what do you think is going on well um I should take responsibility for part of the discussion here because um uh about a couple of years ago I created the Galileo project along with a colleague of mine Frank laukian and um that that was the result of my previous book extraterrestrial where I discussed the first reported Interstellar object uh omuamua that was discovered by telescope in Hawaii and uh means that this word means Scout in the Hawaiian language and at first everyone thought it's a Rock From Another Star but then it had anomalies it didn't look like familiar rocks and it was flat in its shape had an extreme uh shape and moreover was pushed away from the Sun by uh some mysterious Force without showing any commentary of operation that could give it the rocket effect so all together it looked weird and I suggested maybe it's pushed by reflecting sunlight and actually three years later there was an object discovered by the same telescope in Hawaii that was pushed by reflecting sunlight it ended up being a rocket booster that was launched by NASA in 1966 given the name 2020 so and so as a result of my book A lot of people came to the porch of my home including some multi-billionaires and they provided me with funds to establish the Galileo project a month after the Director of National Intelligence talked about unidentified anomalous phenomena objects in the sky that the government doesn't understand and I actually met the Avril Haynes that the Director of National Intelligence and about half a year later at the Washington National Cathedral and when we were in The Green Room I said you delivered this report and you have a bachelor's degree in physics from University of Chicago what do you make of these objects that are not identified and she said I don't know and I believe her I think the government is simply puzzled doesn't know and I'm here to help them figure it out with the Galileo project we have a functioning Observatory at Harvard University and we are planning to make copies of it and place them in different locations and we are basically observing the sky 24 7 uh using infrared Optical radio and audio sensors and then analyzing the data with the machine learning artificial intelligence to differentiate between birds natural objects or balloons drones airplanes human-made objects and we're just checking if there's anything else but as part of the Galileo project we also have other branches one is to find more objects like that passed away from Earth and never came very close um and also to look for Interstellar meteors these are object that came from outside the solar system and collide with Earth and I discovered the the first such object from 2014 together with my student Amir siraj and the government confirmed this discovery and I led an expedition about a month and a half ago going to the Pacific Ocean to the site of this meteor and we did find some materials that we're analyzing now and we can talk more about it so that's my Approach using the scientific method to answer a question that I'm curious about that the public is curious about and that the government is curious about so I think it's really inappropriate for scientists to shy away from it to ridicule the subject because science should serve humanity and not just by building nuclear bombs or nuclear reactors but also by figuring out whether we have a neighbor that's a fundamental question that will change our future and we can use the tools of science to address this question not by waiting for a phone call the way we did for seven years waiting for a radio signal to be transmitted in our Direction that's what the city was all about and surprisingly the city people are not open-minded I mean they are really uh upset that this line of research of looking for objects is being taken that I'm promoting it I'm not sure why you know I came from a culture of cosmology where for example the nature of most of the matter in the universe is not known it's called Dark Matter 83 percent of the matter in the universe was never seen in the solar system and so in that culture if you suggest a possible explanation to this puzzling data about matter that we don't know it's nature then people are encourage that because then you can have experiments that test that hypothesis it's part of doing science however people that uh worked in the context of seti for many years looking for radio signals are upset that there is another method which is looking for objects in our backyard to check if there is a tennis ball that the neighbor may have been from that the neighbors through in our Direction um and I don't understand that I also don't understand those people who worked on stones in the sky for decades so there are experts on meteor or meteorites that are made of stone or or iron at the very best iron meteorites uh they basically argue that anything in the sky must be Stone and what I say to that is that this represents the Stone Age of science you can't learn something new if you think that everything in the sky must be Stone it got to a point where the US government reports data and they confirmed it in a letter to NASA about this meteor that I described from 2014 uh and you know they uh check the data and they wrote an official letter to NASA saying yes indeed as argues this is of intestinal origin of the 99.99 and yet a year later astronomers are you know the government data is wrong by a factor of three because otherwise we can't fit the data with a stone and I say you will never learn about something new this way uh we know that for example there is matter in the universe that is not Stones it's called Dark Matter we haven't seen it why not be open-minded I mean uh yeah obviously they feel threatened by Notions that you know something else might be out there why why Stone we we have there are many many different elements we know that in the heart of every Star that all of these are created I I don't understand what it threatens for the current scientific establishment if it wasn't Stone why have they hitched themselves to this particular Stone shaped wagon oh it's very simple because if you say that the government data is wrong by a factor three that this object was moving three times slower than claimed and by the way I should say this is the same government agency the U.S space command that is monitoring the sky not for meteors they are monitoring it for ballistic missiles and if they would make a mistake by a factor of three they could tell the US president that there is a missile heading towards Mexico where it's actually headed towards Washington DC I just think it's completely irresponsible of astronomers to argue that the main agency that is funded as much as NASA or more actually the U.S space command can make a mistake by a factor of three after they wrote a letter to NASA saying this is of interstellar origin and moreover the data originated from satellites whereas the astronomers say oh it probably came from a radar but it was publicly shared that it came from a satellite so you know it's actually quite um insulting to say that to a government agency that went beyond their day job to confirm uh the identity of a meteor just for the benefit of pure science and another way to look at it is I went there to their site in the Pacific Ocean and amazingly I found molten droplets from this object concentrated along the meteor path that they talked about the government talked about so I sleep better at night because I know that if there are ballistic missiles ever launched towards the US they would figure it out whereas my colleagues would argue no they can get it wrong all the time so then you know what happens to these tens of billions of dollars per year that are going in their Direction like they are completely fooling themselves if the astronomers know that this this object must be Stone so the point is the the argument is that it's a factor of three slower therefore it was actually not from outside the solar system and only then can the data be fitted with a model for a stone because these are the most common rocks that come from the sky there are asteroids that belong to the solar system and they are the most common things you know there is only one I still don't understand why they're so bothered about it being Stone why well that that's 95 percent of the rocks that fall from the sky you know Are Made of Stone okay and a five percent are made of iron they are called iron meteorites so so they say we have a model that fits a lot of data on these rocks okay and we can fit the government data if the government was wrong by a factor of three in its speed then we can fit it with a Stony meteorite that's what they say and I say well actually I respect the government data I respect data okay I'm I'm not trying to be arrogant and say oh the data must be wrong if my model doesn't fit it I say I respect the data because they checked it and because I respect the data this object could not have been a rock now think about Voyager um colliding with an exoplanet billions of years from now we launched five probes to Interstellar space over the past five decades and one of them is Voyager and it could collide with another planet and then it would appear as a meteor if the planet looks like the Earth and it has an atmosphere and oceans and so forth and and obviously there you would have those astronomers saying oh no no the measurement was wrong it's actually a rock but whoever respects the data would say no it must be tougher than the Rocks because it survived and it was moving Faster by the way this meteor moved faster than 95 percent of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun relative to the local frame of the Milky Way galaxy and moreover it must have been tougher than all the rocks that were cataloged by NASA over the past decade 272 of them and that's the way that Voyager would appear That's why I thought it's a possibility and they say no it's not a possibility I say okay well you write this paper now after I came back from the site and I have the spheroes in my hands you tell me there's stones but I actually check their composition on the ship at the time that this paper was published and and approved for publication by the way it's not just the writers the authors it's actually whoever reviewed it wanted it to appear at the time that I'm coming back and when I'm coming back I'm coming with materials from this object and I check them on the ship using an x-ray fluorescence analyzer and I find that they are mostly made of iron so obviously not a stone and then there are other elements in in the composition that I I cannot mention because we are now writing the paper on these findings so what I'm saying is there are some scientists who declare that they are representing science when they're actually violating uh the the way science is done which is follow the evidence so when the evidence doesn't fit what they expect they would argue the data must be wrong but then I respect the data go there collect materials from the path of the meteor bring back the materials already knowing that it's mostly iron and they publish a paper exactly at the same time saying no it's Stone and what can I say I have respect for for the US government for figuring it out because now I sleep better at night and I'm not so worried about ballistic missiles but this astronomers must be really worried serious serious drama going on in the astronomy World okay so you go to this site you find these spherials these tiny tiny little balls you get to bring them back you say that they have got a very high iron content along with some of the stuff that we can't talk about how do you know that these little tiny little balls are Interstellar objects how do you know that they're not just something that's been naturally created terrestrially here on Earth well that's what the paper will address but then I I can tell you how in principle it can be shown uh before that I just wanted to mention uh you know after the sixth day of the Expedition we found mostly I mean we had a sled with magnets on it that collected mostly volcanic ash and I wrote 43 diary reports that were read by millions all over the world and were translated to Spanish people were inspired to see how science is done so the public appreciates that um and then on the sixth day I basically said where are the spirals because I expected more than droplets to come off the surface of the object when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball that it created as it moved through air and there were a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy released into 500 Kilograms so obviously there should have been some molten droplets and I wrote an essay saying where are they we we haven't found them yet and just to demonstrate to you that when I don't find something I expect I say that okay I uh I'm straightforward I don't manipulate people in the case of omuamua we didn't have enough data to reach firm conclusions but I said maybe it's of artificial origin it's a possibility we should live on the table that was the entire debate whether we should leave it on the table or not here I decided to take matters to my hand and go and collect the materials so I can figure it out and the when the geologists of the team came a day later after I wrote this essay came down the stairs from the analysis room and said Avi I was the chief scientist of the mission he said Avi we found this feral I immediately rushed up and looked at the microscope and it was obvious you could see this uh spherical marble you know that looked very distinct from the background less than a millimeter in size and I basically hugged the person next to me who found it first and I said you don't understand how happy it makes me you know uh I'm so happy it was something we you know it was very challenging to find millimeter size particles across the region that is 10 kilometers in size where the ocean depth is two kilometers and finding it with a sled that is just a meter in width that has magnets on it is isn't a remarkable achievement now to your question so then I knew immediately we will find more because I'm familiar with what happens in the kitchen I wash dishes every day that was their agreement with my wife that's my duty at home and when I see an ant I get alarmed because I realize there must be many more ants out there so when I saw the first feral I said now we will find a lot uh and indeed within hours we found them more and over the 26 lines that we surveyed through this region of 10 kilometers in size we found the 50. uh and then when we came back I have a summer intern uh and she aspires to become a science journalist but at some point she said that her name is Sophie Bergstrom she said that if I can be of help let me know and I arranged for her tweezers and microscope so she can go over the materials once again and because the the ship was Rocky and we just didn't have enough time to go carefully and so she went over the materials and found 650 of them so now we have more than 700 spherols and that's amazing and then we could do statistics so to answer your question first thing is we looked at the distribution of spherols relative to the expected path of the meteor and there is a clear enhancement along the path of the meteor relative to the background okay so that's Point number one point number two we can now take those ferals each of them is a milligram roughly and analyze them using a mass spectrometer try to figure out their composition and that includes two aspects one is elements from the periodic table we can ask is the abundance of elements similar to solar system materials and just to remind you the solar system formed out of a cloud of gas that was enriched by an exploding star nearby a supernova and it gave it roughly the same abundance of heavy elements and so you know the solar system when it was made was roughly of the same composition and in fact there are some elements that have very precise values in their abundances and what we can do is check whether the the the spherols have the same abundances along the meteor path and then of course when we deviate from the meteor path go far away they should have the solar system abundances and that's something we can check and we are already checking we already have some data I cannot speak about it and then the second thing we can do and we already did is check Isotopes radioactive isotopes these are elements that have a finite lifespan and you can think of them as time bombs they they exist for a period of time and they have a half-life and you can use them as clocks they Decay into daughter products and you can compare the abundance of these parent Isotopes to the daughter products and figure out uh the age of the material again we can compare it to the age of the solar system so there is a very simple and straightforward way of telling apart any material you find compare relative to the solar system and of course until now all the rocks that fell from the sky were from the solar system you know because this is the first identified Interstellar meteor it's the first one where we knew that it's Interstellar came from outside the sources because of its high speed it was more you know we translated the speed near the Earth to the speed that it had far away and it was moving at 60 kilometers per second outside of the solar system it was faster than nearby Stars 95 percent of them outside the solar system so it was really fast and if it were to collide with Earth head on as the Earth moves around the Sun it would have had a relative speed of 90 kilometers per second however it came from behind the Earth so it had only 45 kilometers per se so anyway um when such an object passes through Earth through the atmosphere of Earth uh it loses some elements and that is called fractionation and just by examining the spherols you can also distinguish between materials that came from Earth itself geological activity and materials that came through the air at a high speed because evaporation removes some of those and some of the elements and and so what I'm saying is that there are signatures of both a meteor passing through the atmosphere and moreover a signature of materials associated with that meteor that came from outside the solar system because if it came from far away it was exposed to a different Supernova a different exploding star and different different abundances of elements presumably this means that it could just be a normal meteor from outside of the solar system it doesn't necessarily mean that it's an alien artifact that it's a voyager probe but from some other star system okay so here we get to the second question uh the second question is is it technological in origin how can we address that well imagine Voyager entering the Earth's atmosphere at 45 kilometers per second and appearing as a meteor just given its path it could happen in a few billionaires that it will collide with an Earth-like planet okay and then imagine the surface of this Voyager meteor melted as a result of the friction with the air and creating spherols obviously their composition let's say of stainless steel would appear different than a rock okay and imagine uh melting the surface of a computer screen or melting semiconductors obviously you'll have some rare elements that appear at much higher abundance than you find in nature so there are ways of telling something technological because you can see some pattern of elements that you wouldn't find under a natural setting uh in nature so uh that's the second question that we want to address and of course that would be a dramatic realization if true but even if we just find it to be a rock from another planet far away near another star very far away very different from Earth that is a historic Discovery because it's the first time that humans put their hands on the materials from a large object that came from outside the solar system and we will have confirmation from two directions one is the speed of the object which some of my colleagues dismiss and say the government measured it wrong but completely independently if we see that the composition of the materials is not solar system material then um you know that's obviously an independent piece of evidence telling us that it came from far away it's Interstellar which happens to be the title of my book Interstellar so let's see what happens so that's us detecting using uh experimental design in order to be able to search for out there and also detect samples of materials that are from different star systems let's get on to us us as Humanity if it's the case that we are on a very long but still ticking down clock to where the ultimate global warming is going to occur when the sun expands right like global warming is happening regardless of how vehement you disagree with the levels of sea temperature because over a long enough time the sun's going to engulf us all that means that we need to get off Planet eventually in your opinion what are some of the most promising ways that we could travel across Interstellar distances what have you what have you sort of thought about when it comes to this right so first I should say that irrespective of what we do about our own industrial pollution and global warming that we trigger by our Technologies uh there will be an inevitable global warming that will basically boil off the oceans and that will happen in about a billion years because the sun is getting uh brighter and the calculations of the evolution of the sun imply that uh there would be um uh boiling of the ocean as a result of um um the interplay between the Earth's atmosphere and the and the ground and um so um we don't have more than 20 percent of the lifespan of Earth to continue Life as we know it okay and we will and and it's you know most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun and uh therefore stars like the sun with planets like the Earth already went through that a lot of them billions of those and we probably didn't hear the cries for help from those civilizations who decided to stay on the planet it was the biggest item in the news reports not so much the the global warming they make as a result of the Technologies if they happen to overcome that it was the fact that they they just sit at a fixed distance from their star and the furnace is getting hotter so you have to move out but you can't and we if you are stuck to the planet and perhaps they had some major Exodus in spacecraft leaving the planet that we are not aware of there must have been a lot of tragedies that's what I'm trying to say over a cosmic history we just tend to think about stars and say look these Stars evolve in this way in that way based on the physics we know but we are missing the human perspective of just imagine the star evolving in the way that we expect it to how many tragedies of other cultures other technological civilizations happen in the Milky Way galaxy alone and then you know now there are these uh completely desert-like surfaces of planets that used to have Life as we know it and it's really tragic we a lot was lost over Cosmic history now if you ask me what would the future hold so actually frankly I'm very proud of our technological kids okay which at this time are the artificial intelligence systems that we are developing and they are growing in their capabilities exponentially so it's possible that by the end of this decade they would surpass by a large margin uh the human brain okay and I'm proud of that I don't see that as a threat because it's not obvious to me that biological creatures like ourselves are any different than um the Primitive uh you know single cell organisms that were on Earth to start with and they were replaced by more advanced uh entities and so perhaps we are just one phase in the evolution and ultimately it will be all about artificial intelligence and self-replicating probes that are not biological okay we we of course learn from nature we are trying to replicate the human brain we're trying to make 3D printers that will produce three-dimensional objects we haven't yet produced a self-replicating car you know a car even a car that can repair itself like the human body that you put a banded Aid on it after an accident and it will repair itself we don't have that and it will take us a little while but then ultimately you know we will get to the point where artificial intelligence carries the torch of intelligence at least here on Earth and I believe that it should do so also in space because when you send the probe to Interstellar distances it would take Millions to billions of years for it to reach any destination and and that means thousands of light years away and any such prob cannot wait for guidance from the senders it will take thousands of years for a one-way communication signal and so they need to have their brain if you want them to function when they reach their destination obviously artificial intelligence is a better path forward than biological brains because they're very vulnerable biology is very vulnerable to cosmic rays you know you can't survive in space for more than a few years exposed to cosmic rays even if you were a spacesuit um and that's one problem by in going to Mars that doesn't have an atmosphere we would need to go into caves in into lava tubes to be protected from cosmic rays but moreover human lifespan is very limited and this would be millions billions of years so it's much better to send technological gadgets potentially that would self-replicate and that's the way I see it uh now they will carry uh whatever uh you know tasks we provide them with maybe we can ask them to replicate what we care about here so instead of sending what we have here uh by biology the way we have it we can perhaps have them see the biology over at Great distances by using the raw materials on a planet that appears to be habitable or create whatever we feel like out there and to me that's that's the best path forward sending the type of equipment that can carry the intellectual DNA the whatever we care about um elsewhere and reproduce it wherever we want it if we want to replicate it so that we have many copies of it now of course in the solar system we might bring people to the moon to the to to Mars um and then it would be interesting to establish colonies there but this is not really going very far from the sun and it would not solve the long term issue of longevity so I do believe in technology leading the way and of course if we find that someone else did it already that would Inspire us that would give us a glimpse at our technological future that's why you know I was actually I'm jogging every morning at Sunrise and I did so also on the ship that was fittingly called Silver Star and I had a filming crew with me and you know there were 50 filmmakers and producers and directors that contacted me they wanted to be on the ship and I selected one but the director of that filming crew he decided to uh fill me one morning on the deck of the ship when I was jogging and he said to me either you are running are you running away from something or towards something and I told him I'm running away from some of my colleagues who have very strong opinions without seeking evidence and I'm running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space yes so what you're suggesting is it seems it seems like you you think it would be unlikely for a human or a Generation ship of a series of humans to go from Earth to some other star system like let's say Proxima Centauri Alpha Centauri Etc you think it's much more likely much more feasible to go artificial intelligence put it on a ship maybe have a desktop encoder for bioengineering or something like that it's got the code it gets there it then deploys the code I think I I understand how you could see that as a solution uh I don't think that that's going to satisfy most people's feeling or their desire for human civilization to continue it will not satisfy most people's desires but just think about a dandelion flower okay what does a dandelion do it sends off seeds that are carried by the wind and they carry the DNA of the dandelion flower and establish new flowers now you might say oh that's not satisfactory because as a dandelion flower I really want to be out there in other places but no that's not what nature what nature cares about is longevity of information content and in the case of the dandelion flower it's not the identity of the single dandelion actually for humans as well you know all of us die right so we we have kids that carry our DNA we gave up on us living forever or some people didn't give up but we don't have an option okay let's put it that way and what I'm saying is if you think about it more broadly it's not so much about yourself as an individual uh it's about maintaining longevity of the what you care about uh and the dandelion flowers I mean at least from the point of view of biology cares about having more dandelion flowers like it preserving the beauty of the dandelion flower and therefore it doesn't have any umbilical cord connecting it to the seeds you might say if it wanted it could have been connected to the cities no but that doesn't work very well because then you need a long wire that goes all the way to where the seed lands on the floor uh and only then the dandelion will learn something about what this the whereabouts of the seeds but in the way that nature does it it just sends the seeds with the wind and they do their job and sort of there is some trust in the system so in the same way that you send a spacecraft with AI somewhere and you don't communicate with it because it takes a long time it's very cumbersome for the for you to communicate with it you just trust it it will do the job and that's the way nature works do you think that we will ever physically visit another galaxy whether that be an AI robot whether that be a spacecraft that has the seeds of our Noah's Ark spacecraft Noah's Ark um obviously I'm aware that we're talking about oh my God we found something from outside of the solar system and I'm saying why don't we take it one step further and get outside of the Galaxy but what do you think is is that something that's realistic could we get when the Milky Way to elsewhere here is a fact of life that we need to accept that the universe is not just expanding its expansion is accelerating and that means that any distant Galaxy beyond the local group of galaxies the ones surrounding the Milky Way any Galaxy farther away than a few million light years uh is running away from us at an ever increasing speed and once the universe will age by a factor of 10. all these galaxies will recede away from us faster than the speed of light so even if you build the fastest spacecraft that moves at the speed of light you won't be able to catch up with them and if you ask me there is only one galaxy outside the Milky Way that we have a chance of getting to I mean we could aim to get to more but that would require proportionate speeds that are getting close to the speed of light but the one that we have a good chance of getting to is the one that will collide with the Milky Way and merge with it that's a cheat that I knew you were going to give that answer and that's cheating we can't we can't wait for Andromeda to come to us that's not the same thing that I meant so I actually did a calculation and asked them suppose you move uh you know at a higher speed than chemical Rockets how far can we go okay and if you have a spacecraft that moves 10 times faster you can go within the so-called Virgo cluster of galaxies that's within a distance of some tens of millions of light years we can do that but you need the propulsion scheme that uh is 10 to 100 times faster 100 times would buy us that uh otherwise it's just um you know the the universe expansion is too rapid uh so I can imagine us getting to other galaxies as long as we can make our propulsion let's say a hundred times faster than all the spacecraft that we launched so far and of course there is a benefit to that because then we can all settle in a bigger environment like the center of the vehicle cluster includes the the Galaxy m87 which is a giant elliptical galaxy and there are many more stars there uh than the Milky Way has by a factor of about a hundred so um uh you know we will just have a bigger party over there as the rest of the universe recedes away from us more resources and actually I had a correspondence with Freeman Dyson about a decade ago on this subject because um what I pointed out is that as the universe is accelerating you know we will be left in a lonely place and he said why don't we contact all these other civilizations out there far away and arrange a project of cosmic engineering where all of us will come together by moving Our Stars with us and I said that's too much work I mean we can do much better by just simply going to a cluster of galaxies like the Virgo cluster and finding you know hundreds or maybe thousands of times more stars in our environment and instead of us moving stars we can just go to where the stars are which are clusters of a cluster of galaxies nearby okay so this is this is kind of the same as Cosmic fertile ground so to speak yeah so I know that you mentioned about how galaxies are moving apart they're going to move apart they're ever ever increasing speeds is the Virgo cluster even though they are distinct individual galaxies are they sufficiently gravity bound that that's going to stick together that's not going to blow apart will stick together but if we don't go there it's going to go away to move away from us so what we need is to go there and then we'll have uh you know the company of let's say a thousand times more stars than the Milky Way has so um you might imagine a situation where we are not the first to recognize that that in fact other civilizations decided to do that and then you have a flow of these spacecraft towards the center of the vehicle cluster right now because everyone recognizes that they want to be there to raise to the fertile ground well I would call it the cosmic party where you can celebrate until you EXO until the the lights go down and the lights the lights will go down if you ask me when would that happen that would happen uh when the smallest stars will burn up their fuel which will happen when the universe will age by another factor for almost a thousand uh so in 10 trillion years that's when the tiniest Stars will go away and those are the most common Stars so we are fortunate the nearest star to the sun is actually a dwarf star Proxima Centauri and it would live for trillions of years you know the sun will die at an age of one percent of that so um so it's a hundred it will have a hundred times longer life span and obviously if you want to uh get the light from a nuclear furnace like this like a star then we want to come close to a dwarf star like Proxima centaurian and amazingly it has a planet in the habitable zone but then you might ask why are we close to a star that is not typical if most of the stars are dwarfs why do we reside next to the Sun and there might be a reason for that because these furnaces the dwarf stars you know they're much uh fainter because they have less fuel but and they burn it more slowly than the Stars like the Sun so in order to keep yourself warm you need to get closer to them in the case of Proxima Centauri you need to get 20 times closer that's where the habitable zone is and then when you are so close to a star you are vulnerable to the eruptions on the star the flares and those can remove the atmosphere of habitable planets so it's possible that the best place is uh being close to to a star like the Sun but obviously you know in the future the sun will not stay around and we would we could create our own nuclear energy you know we can use a nuclear reactor to provide all of our energy needs well my favorite Theory one of my favorite theories about far-flung future civilizations uh it is the idea that we would wait until you get really close to heat death of the universe because it's then very very cold which means that if you want to run computer systems they can burn off all of their heat as a byproduct of that they can be kept cool they can run more efficiently you're now doing simulations within simulations within simulations of you and all of your ancestors and it's this blissed out completely perfect world that you want to exist in or whatever artificially recreated consciousness you can do that much more easily when the universe is much cooler so yes you have a you have an energy problem because you no longer have as much energy that you have access to but I've seen a number of theories that talk about almost going into hibernation super Advanced civilizations going into hibernation capturing energy or finding a way to create their own energy for as long as they need to and then switching off or going into standby mode waiting for the universe to get down to a requisite cool temperature I mean this is um similar to um you know some people as they get old they go on a diet that keeps them more healthier so they can live longer but of course the best way to prolong the longevity of your DNA is to have a lot of kids that will have more kids that will have more kids rather than you uh and so here I come back to the idea that if we you know by that time it's quite likely that whoever is around will figure out how to make baby universes and by creating baby universes can basically put whatever you want in those babies in terms of their qualities such that you will know that life will continue in them have you thought about how long the average civilization that doesn't become Interstellar would exist for obviously that that depends a lot on how intelligent they are because if you look at what we do we spend two trillion dollars every year on Military budgets uh we are thinking about how to kill other people or how to protect ourselves from being killed you know that that was the true you know when we were in the jungle you know and had the to survive in zero-sum games it's not true anymore we could have worked together uh instead of conquering small pieces of land and being proud of that uh you know we're talking about um you know the the surface of this rock that we happen to be born on like why is that so valuable uh why do we need to feel Superior relative to other people just for superficial reasons like the color of their skin or their ethnic origin I mean this is completely ridiculous if you think about it from a perspective of intelligence yet we spend two trillion dollars a year on that now imagine if we were you know if we were to find them as sign of a cosmic neighbor and we will tell ourselves wait a minute that makes no sense you know look at this other civilization they live much longer look at the Technologies they develop why aren't we having a different set of priorities and and then we will remember the words of the song by John Lennon who said imagine all the people living in peace and we would say oh yeah that's a good idea let's live in peace and let's use then we will have a a surplus two trillion dollars a year what can we do with it uh we can use it for space exploration and I did the calculation I did the math and with that budget we can send a probe to every star in the Milky Way galaxy by the end of this century billions of probes by the end of this Century sending them of course it will take them time to get there you know maybe billions of years but we can just do that now imagine a a another civilization who reached this conclusion they have their own John Lennon they got their own inspiration they're more intelligent than we are they are not wasting resources on fighting each other and conquering a small piece of land on this rock that they were born on okay they instead they say let's work together rather than kill each other let's not feel Superior relative to each other let's Thrive towards uh a better future so Prosperity is recognized as a priority rather than zero-sum games and imagine them sending props everywhere and then these props make their way and by the way uh the speed of those probes that we send so far is at least 10 times smaller than the speed needed to escape from the gravitational pull of the Milky Way galaxy so if if others send probes like that they would keep accumulating in the Milky Way galaxy over Cosmic time and over billions of years so just like Plastics in the ocean and many of those will not be functional anymore just imagine you know Voyager a billion years for now it will not be working it will just paste trash and just like Plastics in the ocean it's trash but it keeps accumulating and the same would happen with all these probes that's what I'm talking about let's check out backyard and see if there is a tennis ball thrown by a neighbor right we have the difficulties that are facing going Interstellar pale in insignificance in the different difficulties going into galactic one thing that I was really interested by no matter what the spacecraft is let's say that it was seeded with a tabletop bioengineering 3D printer that can recreate human babies in a test tube or something can you just talk me through the Journey pick any star that you want pick any star that you think looks like a nice piece of real estate within the Milky Way galaxy can you just explain what the major hurdles upon that Interstellar Journey would consist of I know we've got the Oort cloud we've got different things that we need to get through like what are the what are the main hurdles that we need to get past right so first I should say that even biology we should not dismiss it all together because just recently there were some worms found in the uh in the Siberian permafrost and then they were frozen and after they were rejuvenated in the laboratory they came to life 46 000 years after they became Frozen 46 000 years so one can imagine engineering biology perhaps to survive Interstellar travel that that is something for the future um so we don't yet know if it's possible but it may be but then in terms of the timetable um so let's imagine the kind of spacecraft we are launching right now because that's what we are doing I mean I of course am leading a very ambitious initiative called star show to launch a spacecraft at the fifth of the speed of light to the nearest star it will take 20 years but we are not there yet the technology is very challenging so let's um imagine chemical Rockets of the type that we used um and so a chemical rocket just like Voyager One Voyager two Pioneer 10 Pioneer 11 and New Horizons that are making their way out of the solar system so these were launched over the past 50 years okay so they are still deep in inside the solar system the solar system by the way the old cloud is a hundred thousand times larger than the Earth's sun separation okay so these uh spacecraft will exit we'll get to the outskirts of the solar system the edge of the old cloud which is by the way halfway to the nearest star Proxima Centauri they will get there uh within about ten thousand twenty thousand years depending on which spacecraft you are talking about um uh so we're talking tens of thousands of years okay they will not be functional we may be gone by then that's another lesson that you can look for packages in your mailbox while the sender is dead that's the advantage of of that compared to the method of City to look for a phone call to search for someone sending you a radio signal it needs to be active so here you know we might be dead by the time our packages leave the solar system at least the ones that we send so far and if we send something much faster in the future it will overtake those very slow ships that sail through space um okay so after 10 000 years we leave the solar system we start making our way into into this is truly Interstellar space at that point because we cross the midpoint separating us from the nearest star okay and then to get to the nearest star we're taking uh some more tens of thousands of years because we cross the midpoint uh so we're talking tens of maybe 50 000 years to reach the nearest star and that is roughly the time that elapsed since the first humans left Africa okay just think about it if we were to send a spacecraft when the first humans left Africa it would get to the nearest star just now and then if we continue to The Voyage Through space how long will it take us to go to the other side of the Milky Way galaxy that will take us half a billion years so it sounds long but it actually is not so long because the time difference between the formation of most stars and the formation of the sun is billions of years most stars formed billions of years before the Sun so there was enough time even for chemical Rockets to make their way to our doorstep but that's um and and at that speed we can't really exit the solar system as you can tell because the edge of the solar system is another factor of 10 farther away and that would make the travel time equal to the age of the universe and you mean the edge not the edge of the solar system the edge of the Galaxy you mean sorry then yeah the the time to cross the age of the Milky Way galaxy would be longer than the age of the universe yes okay and because it's ten times bigger than the Milky Way disc that I was alluding to before going to a star on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy so there is the entire hello of dark matter of the Milky Way which is 10 times bigger or even more 20 times bigger than the extent of the disk of stars that are at this near the center of the Milky Way galaxy so actually if you think of galaxies there is the Luminous part which is sort of like a light bulb in the middle but then there is this big structure that is invisible to us of dark matter that is 20 times bigger what is your proposed propulsion mechanism to get to the the nearest closest star at one-fifth the speed of light oh that is using a light sail basically a very thin membrane that's the concept of the Starship project uh if this membrane weighs about a gram if it has the size of a person roughly and it's being pushed by a very powerful laser 100 gigawatt laser for a few minutes it would reach a fifth of the speed of light and you can put in this light cell you can put some electronic uh infrastructure that could record for example take a photograph when it comes close to the planet near Proxima Centauri and also transmit the signal to us that is not so much of a challenge the big challenge is generating this Photon engine the radiation that uh associated with the laser such that you have a beam of light focused on the sail and pushing it uh the sale itself can be made of materials that we already know and that it could be sufficiently tough the main challenge is getting it to maintain a stable ride on the Light Beam with a very powerful laser and then communicating whatever it finds uh near the planet around Proxima centaurian I should say that it takes a few minutes to get it to a fifth of the speed of light then it continues the travel like a bullet to towards the destination that will take 20 years at the fifth of the speed of light so it's two minutes of very fast acceleration and then coasting over 20 years before it gets to the destination that's right you need a lot of patience that's all I'm saying well you need a little bit of patience you need a lot more accuracy I think that's the main that's the main thing yeah so one other thing that I was thinking about it seems to me it's probably disheartening to hear that you know there isn't going to be a human or it seems unlikely in your estimation that a human will go to some other system that it's it's likely to be seeded by whatever whatever well I would not really doubt by the way if you go through the numbers if we develop this technology of light sales and you get to the extreme of using all the energy intercepted by Earth from sunlight you know uh and you use all that energy to create a very powerful radio beam that is pushing a sale a giant sale this time it could propel humans at an acceleration of 1G for about a year and if you accelerate at one G for one year you can reach the speed of light wow and that is possible in principle and we would not feel any different than being on Earth because gravity gives us an acceleration of 1G on the surface of Earth so if you board a spacecraft that is accelerated accelerating at one G it would feel just like being on the surface of Earth and the only issue is how to build such the infrastructure necessary to use all the power coming from the Sun on Earth towards creating a giant radio beam that pushes on a light sail but in principle I did the calculation it's possible is there not a second problem which is how do you slow down oh for that you need a similar Beam on the other end but if you just get to the speed by the way if you bought such a ship and you continue accelerating at one G for 20 years you can cross the entire universe while the universe is aging but because of time dilation according to Einstein's special theory of relativity you can do it in your lifetime so the only problem there is that you need a huge amount of power to keep accelerating for 20 years at 1G but I thought you wanted to go quicker than the speed of light you cannot well according to what we know in physics we cannot go faster than light but you don't need to you just need to go very close to the speed of light and then time is ticking more slowly in your spacecraft than it is in elsewhere so the universe you know will age by billions of years while you are aging just by a decade and because you're getting so close to the speed of light of course there are lots of practical problems how to get enough power to propel you at 1G for such a long period of time also when you're moving so fast any particle of dust or any material that you collide with Will generate a huge explosion on your ship yeah very good I saw a visual representation a computer simulation of what it would be like to approach the speed of light from the front deck of a ship and all manner of weird stuff starts happening the way that the light moves past you and doesn't um it's very very bizarre by the way that is the best way to maintain longevity when the universe ages by billions of years you are just aging by decades just move fast move faster yeah just move fast and of course then if you have a similar system elsewhere you can slow down the the problem is you need someone else to build it um so um otherwise you will just move at that speed for a very long time um of course this is you know this is science we are not I mean there are practical problems but it's all Allowed by the laws of physics I don't like science fiction because it violates the laws of physics the the storyline very often Avi lobe ladies and gentlemen Avi I really appreciate your work I'm very excited to see what you come up with on this new paper what you can reveal to the world once you've finally got your work done and got it past everything and I'm interested to see what other groups of people and colleagues you can piss off as you continue to to do your research where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're talking about and Publishing and all the rest yeah I just wanted to comment on what you said the footnote that uh you know we know that we are not at the center of the universe and we also know that humans came to exist only over the past few million years so if you come to a play a cosmic play in this case you are not at the center of the stage and you're coming at the end of the play the play is not about you and the best way to find out what it's about is to look for other actors and ask them so that's what I'm trying to do um in terms of my writings I have essays on medium.com and you can just type avilo at medium.com where you can find updates about my research also I have a website on at Harvard University that you can go to the professional website where you can see some links to papers and videos and interviews and other things and I have no footprint whatsoever on social media because you know I just realized that if you want an airplane to fly faster you reduce the friction with air you reduce its cross-sectional area so I reduce my friction to the best of my ability with other people who may criticize me may want to slow me down I simply don't have any footprint on social media another metaphor that I should mention in this context there is the metaphor of The Crow and the Eagles so the crow is the only bird that can sit on the Eagle's back and pick at the Eagle's neck and there are photographs of crows on the backs of eagles but the Eagles do not waste any energy or effort pushing the crows away uh what they do is rise to Greater Heights where the oxygen level is low and the crows just drop off they're back to me the the greatest height is to do my science in the best possible way by collecting evidence material evidence and studying it and reaching my conclusions based on what the evidence shows and once I get to those Heights all the crows that are currently pecking at my neck will drop off what a mic drop Avi I really appreciate you thank you mate if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe