This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More What You Here weekday afternoons on the Drive. Abraham ave Lobe is a professor of science at Harvard University, longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and current director of the Institute of Theory and Computation within the Center of Astrophysics. She's got a new book out that's fascinating if you
are like me and like to look into these kinds of things. It's called Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars. Ave Lobe, welcome, thanks for having me. Let's start with just our recent history. I mean, we've come a long way in exploring the stars and learning and understanding the stars since the rs CEBO radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
Yeah. Well, ours CBO was looking for radio signals, which is similar to waiting for a phone call at phone, and that will not necessarily happen if nobody is calling you when you're listening, You'll need the counterpart to be active. Different approach which might be much better. That's the one I'm describing in my book is to check around your backyard or your mailbox whether there is any package there that may have arrived. The sender doesn't need to be alive
at the time that you recovered the package. And that's a completely different approach, and we haven't done so until the last decade. Only over the past decade we've found the first objects from outside the Solar System in the vicinity of Earth. And guess what the first two of them. It was a meteor from twenty fourteen and a large object that passed near Earth from twenty seventeen called Uma. Both of the looked really strange relative to asteroids or comets that were
familiar with. Yeah, I gather they had a symmetry to them. And one of the things I've learned I do a lot of scuba diving, and when you're in a search and rescue situation, you look for symmetry symmetry spaces because nature is not symmetrical. Yeah, I mean, so, what was unusual about the meteor was that it was moving very fast. In fact, outside the Solar System, it was moving faster than ninety five percent of all the stars in the vicinity of the Sun relative to the frame of the Milky
Way galaxys. And moreover, when it collided with Earth, it only exploded in the lawera atmosphere of the Earth, and that implied that it has material strength puffer than all the space rocks we had seen before that were cataloged by
NASA over the past decade, one hundred and seventy two of them. So that raised the possibility, at least in my mind, that maybe it's artificial in origin, because if you imagine voyager that we sent to interstellar space in the distant future colliding with another planet that looks like the Earth, it would appear as the meteor in the sky of that planet. So that's one object,
the meteor. And then in twenty seventeen there was another one the size of a football field that didn't collide with Earth, but past near Earth. And it was very strange because it was flat in its shape and was also pushed away from the Sun without evaporating, without any rocket effect, And so the question is what was shing it? So these are the normalies of these two objects. They didn't look like the typical space rocks that were used to
He calls it a practical wakeup called Abraham RV. Lobe is with us his book Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars, and he does it in a way that makes it very easy to understand it. You can tell by by just by talking to him. That is the I think the mind boggling thing too, av is that, Okay, when we see the light from a star that is hundreds of light years away, conceivably that star could have already exploded and expired. We just haven't seen it
happen yet. So it makes sense that if something's being transmitted to us from Afar, it would be the same effect, right, And just keep in mind that for chemical rockets of the type that we launched, all the spacecraft that we launched, it takes about half a billion years to cross the Milky Way galaxy. So it's a very long time. And actually our son in
one billionaire will extinguish all life forms on errors. It will basically vaporize all the oceans and boil them off, and that would mean that life as we know it will not exist on Earth once the Earth's ages by another billion of years, and that is twenty percent fifth of the age of the Earth so
far. So we just have twenty percent left, and you can think of other stars that they may have formed earlier than the Sun. In fact, most stars on billions of years before the Sun, they already went through that phase if they had a planet like the Earth around them. And there must have been a lot of tragedies in the history of the Milky Way in the
past where civilizations like us were eliminated. And obviously if they send the equipment to space, if they send spacecraft just like we did, you could still find those things. They would be relics. Just in the way that we do archaeology, we can find relics of cultures that exist in the past and are not around anymore. Talking to Ave Lobe his book Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and and Our Future in the Stars, what can the reader
do to go along with this? I mean, is this all being done by scientists with Van Dyke beards and telescopes, or is there something the average person can do to feel as though they're part of this well. I established the Galileo Project at Harvard University where we have an observatory in monitoring the sky twenty four seven, and we are planning to make copies of this observatory in place them in various locations within the US. And one way to take part
in that is, I mean, obviously by funding those observatories. I mean, we know exactly how to make such an observatory. We need funding at a level of a fraction of a million dollars pair of observatory, and it can be named after any donor that is interested in contributing. So so there is of course a lot of work to be done. It can be done in many places by planting those observatories that would monitor the sky interstellar the search
for extraterrestrial life and our future in the stars. There's been a lot of recent videos that people have been spreading around on social media that cannot be explained. Many NASA experts chiming in on them, but I gather you don't get into that too much. An interstellar No, I actually discuss it because it's a hot topic in Washington right now. Hearing at the House of Representatives where really eyewitnesses talked about this, and one of them even said that there are
programs for retrieval and reverse engineering of alien spacecraft. That's David Grush and hopefully the Congress we look into that and see if the story is real. But the point is that, you know, we don't need to wait for the US government to tell us because this is a scientific matter. The sky is not classified, the oceans are not classified, and I went to the Pacific Ocean after an interstellar meteor. We already analyze the materials and the results will
be reported tomorrow. Professor of Science at Harvard University, Chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, and his new collection, his new creation, Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars alb Lobe. We look forward to reading the book. Thank you for John, Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeart Media presentation