YouSaid · the spoken record

Avi Loeb

lines on the record: 200
first: 2021-01-14
most recent: 2021-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Deep space. And there is no geological activity on the moon. So on Earth, every hundred million years, you know, we could have had computer terminals on Earth that could have been a civilization like ours With electronic equipment”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moon is different from the earth in the sense that it doesn't have an atmosphere. So objects do not burn up on their way to it. It's sort of like a museum. It collects everything that comes from.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's absurd. But if you put blinders on your eyes, you don't see it. I should say that we do have meteors that we see. These are rocks that by chance happen to collide with the earth. And if they're small, they burn up in the atmosphere. But if they're big enough, tens of meters or more, hundreds of meters, the outer layer burns up, but then the core of the object... Makes it through. And this is our chance of putting our hands around an object if this meteor came from interstellar space. So one path of discovery is to search for interstellar meteors. And with a student of mine, we actually looked through the record and we thought that we found one example of a meteor that was reported that might have come from interstellar space. And another approach is, for example, to look at the moon.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be great because it will clarify the matter. These are not, as you said, hundreds of thousands. These are not once in a lifetime events. So it's possible to take scientific instrumentation and explore, go to the ocean where someone reported that there are frequent events that are unusual. And check it out Do a scientific experiment. What's the problem? Why only do experiments dip into the ocean and look at the oceanography or do other things? We can do scientific investigation of these sightings and figure out what they mean. I'm very much in favor of that. But until we have the evidence, I would be doubtful as to what they actually mean.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If, for example, pilots report about them or the military finds evidence for them is because it may pose a national security threat. Life is a little too far for me until we have evidence that stands up to the level of scientific credence, that we are 100% sure that for multiple detectors through a scientific process. Now again, if the scientific community shies away from these reports, We will never have that. It's like saying, I don't want to take photographs of something because I know what it is. Then you will never know what it is. But I think if some scientists, if grants, let's put it this way, if funding will be given to scientists. To follow on some of these reports and use scientific instruments that are capable of detecting those sightings with much better resolution, with much better information.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of things that we are confident about. And they haven't turned that way. It's always on the borderline of believability. And because of that, I believe that it might be most likely artifacts of our instruments or some natural phenomena that we are unable to understand. Now, of course, the reason you must examine those.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And therefore, I would agree with you, I would be hard pressed to imagine that someone wants to really spy on us. So I would think, you know, as a starting point, that we don't deserve attention and we shouldn't expect someone, but who knows? Now, the problem that I have with UFO citing reports is that, you know, 50 years ago, there were some reports of fuzzy images, you know, sorcerer-like things. By now, our technologies are much better, our cameras are much more sensitive, these fuzzy images should have turned into crisp, clear images.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to answer this question, we need better evidence. My starting point, as I said, out of modesty is that we are not particularly interesting.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, science to me is not an occupation of the elite. It doesn't allow me to feel superior to other humans that are unable to understand the math. To me, it's a way of life. If there is a problem in the faucet or in the pipe at home, I try to figure out what the problem is. And with a plumber, we figure it out. And we look at the clues. And the same thing in science, you look at the evidence, you try to figure out what it means. It's common sense in a way. And it shouldn't be regarded as something removed from the public. It should be a reflection of the public's interest. And I think it's actually a crime to resist the public. If the public says, I care about this And you say, no, no, no, that's not sophisticated enough for me. I want to do intellectual gymnastics on anti-deterter space. To me, that's a crime.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But who cares that the fact that there is science fiction? I mean, if you have the scientific methodology to address the same subject, I don't care that other people spoke nonsense about this subject or said things that make no sense. Who cares? You do your scientific work just like you explore the dark matter. You explore the possibility that umu amua is an artifact. You just look for evidence and try to deduce what it means. And I have no problem with doing that. To me, it sounds like any other scientific question that we have. And given the public's interest, we have an obligation to do that.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the public funds science. So, how dare the scientists? Shy away from addressing these questions if they have the technology to do it. It's like saying, I don't want to look through Galileo's telescope. It's exactly the same. You have the technology to express this question, to find evidence, and you shy away from it. You might ask, why do people shy away from it? And perhaps it's because of the fact that there is science fiction. I'm not a fan of science fiction because it has an element to it that violates the laws of physics in many of the books and the films. And I cannot enjoy these things when I see the laws of physics violated.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's ridiculous for another reason. Not because of just the scientific benefits that we might have by exploring it, but because the public cares about these questions.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm willing to suffer the pain so that younger people in the future will be able to speak freely about the possibility that some of the anomalies we find in the sky. Are due to technological signatures”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you ask yourself okay, so you know science still made progress. What's the problem? The problem is that this baby came out barely, you know, and there was a delay of four decades. So the progress was delayed. And I wonder how many babies were not born because of this resistance. So there must be ideas that are as good as this one that were suppressed because they were bullied, because people ridiculed them. That were actually good ideas, and these are missed opportunities. And I'm willing to push this frontier of the search for technologies or technological signatures of father civilization because when I was young, I was in the military in Israel. It's obligatory to serve. And there was this saying that one of the soldiers sometimes has to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can go through.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so astronomers on time allocation committees of telescopes for 40 years argued this is not possible because we know why Jupiter resides so far from the Sun. You cannot have Jupiter so close because there is this region where ice forms far from the Sun. And beyond that region is where Jupiter-like planets can form. There was a theory behind it which ended up being wrong by today's standards. Anyway, they did not give time on telescopes to search for such systems until the first system was discovered four decades after Otto Struve And the Nobel Prize was awarded to that just a couple of years ago.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now they say, oh, yeah, of course. The Nobel Prize was given to the LIGO collaboration. Of course, now they are supportive of it. But my point is if you suppress innovation early on, there are lots of missed opportunities. The discovery of exoplanets is one example. In 1952, there was an astronomer called Otto Struve, and he wrote a paper saying, why don't we search for Jupiter like planets close to their host star? Because if they're close enough, they would move the star back and forth and we can detect the signal.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People go to other disciplines. You never search for it well enough, you will never find anything. I mean, look at gravitational wave astrophysics. It's a completely new window into the universe pioneered by Ray Weiss at M And at first, it was ridiculed. And thanks to some administrators at the National Science Foundation, it received funding despite the fact that the mainstream of the astronomy community was very resistant. It and now it's considered a frontier. So all these people that I remember as a postdoc, a young postdoc, these people that dash this field and said bad things about people said nothing will come out of it”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's the problem of defining it as a search goal using the same technologies? The problem is that there is a taboo. We are not supposed to discuss extraterrestrial intelligence. There is no funding for this subject. Not much, very little. And young people, because of the bullying on Twitter, all the social media and elsewhere, young people with talent that are curious about these questions do not enter this field of study. And obviously, if you step on the grass, it will never grow, right? So if you don't give funding, obviously the mainstream community says, look, nothing was discovered so far. Obviously nothing would be discovered if talented.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but the pollution you have to understand we think of pollution as a problem But on a planet that was too cold, for example, to have comfortable life on it, you can imagine terraforming it and putting a blanket of polluting gases such that it will be warmer. And that would be a positive change. an industrial or a technological civilization wants to terraform a planet that otherwise is too cold for them, they would do it.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can search for that. And I wrote a paper five years ago suggesting that. Now, what's the problem? You can just tell NASA, I want to build this telescope to search for oxygen, but also for industrial pollution. Nobody would say that. Because it sounds like Know on the periphery of the field. And I ask you would.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether there is life there. Now, how can it be confident? There is actually a way. If instead of looking with the same instruments, if you look for molecules that indicate industrial pollution, For example, CFCs that are produced by refrigerating systems or industries here on Earth, that dilute the ozone layer.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the idea that this would be a marker, a signature of life. Now, the problem with that is Earth didn't have much oxygen in its atmosphere for the first two billion years. Roughly half... Half of its life didn't have much oxygen, but it had life. It had microbial life. It's not clear yet as of yet what the origin is for the rise in the oxygen level after two billion years, about 2.4 billion years ago. But we know that a planet can have life without oxygen in the atmosphere because Earth did it. The second problem with this approach is that you can have oxygen from natural processes. You can break water molecules and make oxygen. So even if you find it, it will never tell you that for sure life exists there. And so even with these billions of dollars, the mainstream community will never be confident.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, to show you the conservatism of the mainstream in astronomy. And by the way, I have leadership positions. I was chair of the astronomy department for nine years, the longest serving chair at Harvard. And I'm the chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies. It's a primary board. And I'm director of two centers at Harvard and so forth. So I do represent the community in various ways, but at the same time, I'm a little bit disappointed by the conservatism that people have. And so let me give you an illustration of that. So the astronomy community actually is going right now through the process of defining its goals for the next decade. And there are proposals for telescopes that would cost billions of dollars and whose goal is to find evidence for oxygen. In the atmosphere of planets around other stars.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the right distance to have life. But other than that, there are lots of implicit assumptions about all the other factors that will enable us to detect a signal. Now, I should say the Drake equation has a very limited validity just for signals from civilizations that are transmitting at the time that you're observing them. However, we can do much better than that. We can look for artifacts that they left behind, even if they are dead, you can look for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of planets. Why do I bring this up?”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to tell because the Drake equation is again quantifying our ignorance. It's just a set of factors. The only one that we know, or actually two that we know quite well, is the rate of star formation in the Milky Way galaxy, which we measured by now. And the frequency of planets like the Earth around stars”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then figure it out. And one side. So again, experimental test of a theology. So even theology, if it puts a skin in the game, you know, if it makes a prediction, Could be tested, right? So why can't string theories test themselves? Or why can't even cosmic inflation, that's another model that one of the inventors from MIT, Alan Guth, argues that it's not falsifiable. My point is a theory that cannot be falsified is not helpful because it means that you can't make progress. You cannot improve your understanding of nature. The only way for us to learn about nature is by making hypotheses that are testable, doing the experiments and learning whether we are correct or not.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had a voice memo up on his cell phone. He could have pressed this up and recorded the voice of God. And that would have been experimental evidence that God exists. Fortunately he didn't. But it's an experimental test. There is a third example, I should tell, and that is Ellie Wiesel attributed this story to Martin Buber, but it's not clear whether it's true or not. At any event, the story goes that Martin Buber, you know, he was a philosopher, and he said, you know, the Christians argue that the Messiah arrived already and will come back again in the future. The Jews argue that the Messiah never came and will arrive in the future. So he said, why argue? Both sides agree that the Messiah will arrive in the future when the Messiah arrives. We can ask whether he or she came before, you know, like visited us.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that was offensive. So I said to that. I said to that professor, I said, Great. I wanted to introduce some scientific tone to the discussion. And I said, This is great because now you basically laid the foundation for an experimental test of this theology. What is the test? We now know that other stars are like the Sun. And we know they have planets like the Earth around them. So suppose we find life there and we figure out that they sinned, then we ask them, did you witness Christ? And if they say no, it means that this theology is ruled out. So there is an experimental test. So this experimental test number one. Another experimental test in the Bible, in the Old Testament, Abraham. Heard the voice, the voice of God to sacrifice his son, right? Only son. And that's what the story says. Now, suppose Abraham, my name, by the way,”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was offensive to the church. Why was it offensive? Because there is the possibility that this life sinned. And if that life sinned on planets around other stars, it should have been saved by Christ. And then you need multiple copies of Christ. And that's unacceptable. How can you have duplicates of Christ? And so they burned the guy.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out that my book already inspired a PhD student at Harvard in the English department. Pursue a PhD in that direction. And she invited me to the PhD exam a couple of months ago. And in the exam, one of the examiners, a professor, asked her, Do you know why Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake? And she said, No, I think it's because he was an obnoxious guy and irritated a lot of people. Is true But the professor said no. It's because Giordano Bruno said that other stars are just like the sun. And they could have a planet like the Earth around them that could host life.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my point is without experiments giving you a reality, without the ATM machine showing you whether your ideas are bankrupt or not, without putting skin in the game. And by skinning the game, I mean, don't just talk about theoretical ideas. Make them testable. If you don't make them testable, they're worthless. They're just like theology that is not testable. By the way, theology has some tests. Let me give you...”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you have no way to test. Through experiments, and experiments really are key. It's not just the nuance. You say, okay, forget about experiments. As some philosophers try to say, you know, if there is a consensus, what's the problem? The point is it's key. Then that's what Galileo. It's key to have feedback from reality. You can think that you have a billion dollar or that you are more rich than Elon Musk, that's fine. You can feel very happy about it. You can talk about it with your friends and all of you will be happy and think about what you can do with the money. Then you go to an ATM machine and you make an experiment. You check how much money you have in your checking account. And if it turns out that you don't have much, you can't materialize your dreams. So you realize you have a reality check”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also know that the conditions of Earth are reproduced in billions of systems throughout the Milky Way galaxy. So what's more conservative than to say, if you arrange for similar conditions, you get the same outcome. How can you imagine this to be, it's not speculative at all. And nevertheless, it's regarded the periphery. And at the same time, you have physicists, theoretical physicists working on extra dimensions, supersymmetry, super string theory, the multiverse. Maybe we live in a simulation. All of these ideas that have no grounding in reality. Some of which sound to me like just like what someone would say.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mainstream community regarded it as a mainstream activity to search the nature of the dark matter And nobody complained that it's speculative to consider weakly interacting massive particles. Now, I ask you, why is it speculative to consider extraterrestrial technologies? We have a proof that it exists here on Earth.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, they look less plausible to me personally. But my point is if we discuss things that were never seen before, right, why not discuss, why not contemplate an artificial origin? What's the problem? Why do people have this pushback? You know, I worked on dark matter, and we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. It's called dark method. It's just an acronym because we have no clue. We simply don't know. So it could be all kinds of particles. And over the years, people suggested weakly interacting massive particles, axions, all kinds of particles. And experiments were made. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They put upper limits, constraints that ruled out many of the possibilities that were proposed as natural initially.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something we have never seen before. Or it's a hydrogen iceberg. It actually evaporates like a comet, but hydrogen is transparent. You don't see it. And that's why we don't see the cometary tail. Again, we have never seen something like that. In both cases, the objects would not survive the long journey. We discussed it in a paper that I wrote afterwards. But my point is those that try to explain the unusual properties went into great length at discussing things that we have never seen before. So even when you think about a natural origin, you have to come up with scenarios that Things that were never seen before”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the one thing I would like them to do because something bad happens to these kids when they become tenured professors. They start to worry about their ego. About themselves more than about the purpose of science, which is curiosity driven, figuring out from evidence. Evidence is the key. So when an object shows anomalies like umua, what's the problem discussing whether it's artificial or not? So I should tell you, there was a mainstream paper in nature. Published saying it must be natural. That's it. It's unusual, but it must be natural, period. And then at the same time, those means some other mainstream scientists try to explain the properties. And they came up with interpretations like it's a dust bunny. You know, the kind that you find in a household, a collection of dust particles. Pushed by sunlight”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we should figure it out. And it's not about us, the scientific activity is about figuring out nature. And sometimes we may be wrong. Our image will not be preserved. That's the fun. Kids explore the world. Out of curiosity. And I always want to maintain my childhood curiosity. And I don't care about the labels that I have. In fact, having tenure is exactly the opportunity to behave like a child because you can make mistakes. And I was asked by the Harvard Gazette, the Pravda of Harvard.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a monologue. They know what, and in fact, their monologue is centered on anti-decitter space, which we don't live in. Now, you know, it's to me, it's just like the Olympics. You define 100 meters and you say, whoever runs these 100 meters is the best athlete, the fastest, you know. And it's completely arbitrary. You could have decided it would be 50 meters or 20 meters. Who cares? You just measure the ability of people this way. So you define anti-decittel space as a space where you do your mathematical gymnastics and then you find who can do it the best and you give jobs based on that, you give prizes. But as we said before, you know, nature doesn't care about the prizes that you give to each other. It cares, it has its own...”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all three turned out to be wrong. Then you make mistakes. It's inevitable because you can tell what is true or not. And avoiding making mistakes in order to preserve your image. Makes you extremely boring. You will get a prize, but you will be a boring scientist because you will keep repeating things we already know. If you want to make progress, if you want to innovate, you have to take risks and you have to look at the evidence. It's a dialogue with nature. You don't know the truth in advance. You let nature tell you, educate you, and then you realize that what you thought before is incorrect. A lot of my colleagues Prefer to be in a state where they have a monologue. You know, if you look at these people that work on string theory,”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to recognize that we should make our statements based on evidence. Science is not about ourselves, it's not about glorifying our image, it's not about getting honors, prizes. A lot of the scientific activity is geared towards creating your echo chamber where you have students, postdocs repeating your mantras so that your voice is heard loudly so that you can get more honors, prizes, recognition. That's not the purpose of science. The purpose is to figure out what nature is, right? And in the process of doing that, it's a learning experience. You make mistakes. You know, Einstein made three mistakes at the end of his career. He argued that in the 1930s, he argued that black holes don't exist, gravitational waves don't exist. And quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a self for filling prophecy. If you never look, you will never find if you are not ready to find wonderful things. You will never discover them. And the other thing I would like to say is reality doesn't care whether you ignore it or not. You can ignore reality, but it's still there. So we can all agree based on Twitter that aliens don't exist, that umu amua was a rock We can all agree and you will get a lot of likes. You will have a big crowd of supporters and everyone will be happy and give each other awards and honors and so forth. But Umumu might still be an alien artifact. Who cares what humans agree on? There is a reality out there. And we have to be modest enough”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very different. So I think when we see something like that, we would be shocked not to speak about seeing technology. So I don't even dare to imagine, you know. And I think, you know, obviously we can bury our head in the sand and say it's never aliens. Like many of my colleagues say.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the nearest star system, these animals would be. Quite strange, they would have eyes that are detectors of infrared, very different from ours. Moreover, this planet, Proxima B, faces the star always with the same side. So it has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. And obviously the creatures that would evolve on the permanent day side, which is much warmer, would be quite different than those on the permanent night side. Between them, there would be a permanent sunset. Strip and my daughters said that that's the best opportunity for high value real estate because you will see the sunset throughout your life, right? The sun never sets. On this trip. So, you know, these worlds are out of. Our imagination.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very far away. But if you think about it, this star is a dwarf star and it's much cooler than it's twice as cold as the sun. And it emits mostly infrared radiation. So if there are any creatures on the planet close to it that is habitable, which is called proxima B, there is a planet in the habitable zone, in the zone just at the right distance where in principle liquid water can be on the surface. If there are any animals there, they have infrared eyes because our eyes was designed to be sensitive to where most of the sunlight is in the visible range. But Proxima Centauri emits mostly infrared.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very different than we can imagine. By the way, I should start from the point that even biological life, you know, just without technology getting into the game could look like something we have never seen before. Take, for example, the nearest star, which is Proxima Centauri. It's four and a quarter light years away. So they will know about the results of the 2016 elections only next month, in February 2021.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what that means is any object that you see, irrespective whether it came from the local standard. So we said that this object is special because it came from a local standard of France. But even if it didn't, you would never be able to trace where it came from because all these Oort clouds overlap. So if you take some direction in the sky, you will cross as many stars as you have in that direction. Like there is no way to tell which Old Cloud it came from.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because of all the solar system, the outermost edge of the solar system is called the Oort cloud. It's a cloud of icy rocks of different sizes that were left over from the formation of the solar system. and it's thought to be roughly a ball or a sphere and it's halfway the extent of it is roughly halfway to the nearest star okay so you can imagine each planetary system basically touching the orb clouds of those stars that are near us are touching each other space is full Of these billiard balls that are very densely packed”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The caveman would think, since the caveman played with rocks all of his life, he would say, it's a rock. Just like my fellow astronomers Exactly.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another possibility if there are millions or billions of years into their technological development, they created their own habitat, their own cocoon where they feel comfortable, they have everything they need. And it's risky for them to establish communication with other. So they have their own cocoon and they close off. They don't care about anything else now. In that case, you might say, Oh, so how can we find about them if they are closed off? The answer is they still have to deposit trash, right? That is something from the law of thermodynamics. There must be some production of trash. And we can still find about them just like investigative journalists going through the trash cans of celebrities in Hollywood. You can learn about the private lives of those celebrities by looking at the crash.”
2021-01-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #154 – Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source