From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They call me Ben. We're joined with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know, coming to you directly from Earth. Yeah, that was a good way to open it, right. Still, Yeah, just get in front of that. We get that question pretty often.
Earth realm, guys. I'm sorry.
I've been playing the New Mortal Kombat a lot lately, so I exclusively refer to this planet as Earth realm ight love it.
In Neil Stephenson's Anathema, which is anathem which is a fantastic, by the way, examination of multi dimensional stuff that I don't want to spoil. But in that one, uh, there are different versions of Earth and they all have a name derived from if dominant civilizations went a different way. So there's like laterire where sort of France became like the United Kingdom. Basically anyway.
Nice soon?
Oh yeah, oh yeah, sorry.
Techechnic is coming out too, Tech and eight is coming out.
That's fine, and I've never been a tech inhead.
But the New Mortal Kombat is like a reboot kind of almost like Marvel Cinematic Universe style, where it's like a multiversal version of the whole Mortal Kombat lore, which has never been like that deep. But they really do a good job with it. And man, some of the cinematics in it. You look at it and you think you're watching a movie. I mean, they've really got that's kind of bonkers.
They're good with the cut scenes, but I am a tech tech them forever.
Bring me Kuma any day?
Is that you play as a giant panda?
Yes, yeah, it's a bear.
It's a bear, different.
Skins, and there's also a isn't there a boxing kangaroo named Roger?
Did I make that up?
Yeah? Roger comes and goes. It depends on the iteration iteration kind of. But it does not have any good aliens. They're not good aliens in Teken and it's also a problem in astronomy, at least for the casual fans, because there are no good aliens in astronomy, they're actually zero proven aliens. I know, but it's it's a pickle. We
talked about the Fermi paradox in the past. It is mathematically certain that life has to exist somewhere out in the ink, but those same numbers that make life statistically inevitable make it highly improbable, almost certain, that human life and these other life forms will not interact directly. Right, that's the great bummer.
Well, yeah, m it's just so far away.
Yeah, so much time too.
Yeah, you know, he's kind of so poudy just then that it is. It really is a bit of a bummer.
I mean, just the fact that we can see so far back in time and through space, but there's just no way to do anything about it. Or we've come up with some really interesting ways and we're going to talk about sometimes to potentially do something about it. But again, it's the time. The time is the problem. You're right, Yeah, you.
Haven't thought about the time? Yeah, like the time like flip it, flip it around. You know, there's a say, there is another sapien sentient civilization way out there in the dark, and they are seeing light or they are able to observe Earth. They're going to see dinosaurs and stuff. They have no idea that we made Velcrow and Tang and case ideas they have. They're so behind on Earth life the.
Great Wonders of the World. You just mentioned him there in one go There.
I go, that'd be pretty amazing if saw some life saw Plesiosaurus walking around and they got here and they found.
Case of dias.
I think I've mentioned this before, but it always reminds me of this really wonderful episode of Pete and the Adventures of Pete and Pete called Johnny Unitas and the Universe, where there's this character who's like becomes friends with Pete and he's a little off. He's kind of nerdy and a spoiler alert I guess for a twenty year old show. But it turns out he's an alien and he experienced
Earth through these transmissions of TV signals. But there was such a delay that he saw this, Like Johnny Unitas is like a famous like football star, he saw his big game as it was happening for him, but it was actually like, you know, decades later for when it actually happened on Earth. Really really interesting episode, very thoughtful and sweet.
We see that time dilation idea in a lot of a lot of fiction because it's something people have always thought about. Just the harrowing, astonishing math of what we call the universe, which is the observable universe for earth lets. In tonight's episode, we're returning to something we talked about in Strange News a while back. Did a Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Lobe find proof of alien life? Here are the facts? Okay, first off, not a wing nut. We have to say
that this is a really, really smart guy. Oh yeah, I don't.
Think any relation to the Lisa Lobe of Nine Stories and Stay fame. But Professor Lobe is a storied scholar.
Well, I'm not a member of nine Stories.
With tons of accolades under his belt across the course of a decade's spanning career. Born on February twenty sixth of nineteen sixty two, he possesses a bachelor and a master's and a PhD.
What a show off, all from.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and currently he is the Frank B. Baird Junior Professor of Science at Harvard University. That sounds like some accolades that are pretty legit. Some bonafides if you will.
Oh yeah, if any of that sounds familiar, Ben, you brought this up, I think on Strange News back in September last year. That's all I was like, Oh yeah, this is all coming back. So Arvy Lobe is a fascinating person. Before we like, we cannot understate this. This is a learned scientist who is interested in the things that you're probably interested in, what's going on out there,
and he is working towards it. So when we get into some of the claims and some of the things he's pursuing, this is a scientist that knows what he's doing.
Yeah. And also, to be fair, we're gonna have to correct or clarify some I would say not quite mis reporting, but maybe misframing of what he is doing, because in headlines so often we hear stuff like Harvard scientists aliens and those are the only three words you walked away with from the headline, and that's doing a disservice to some really important pioneering in quite difficult science.
But it also reminds me of kind of what's going on with some of these disclosure stories, and it's a bit heartening where you start to hear reports from folks who you know have skin in the game, you know who are politicians or former politicians and or government officials who are coming out and saying there's some sand to this stuff. So when you add in folks like Lobe, it really makes you start to think, you know, maybe there is something to all this alien talk.
Yeah, and he's also he by all accounts, is a really chill hang a really nice guy. And he's got that gift that some of our favorite scientists exhibit, which is being able to explain tremendously complex things in approachable, understandable ways. That's how you know someone genuinely understands what they're talking about.
Science communicator.
There's one article that I think we all read for this where he puts on like a one man show in his attic or something for a reporter who shows up to like describe and to again to help communicate what's going on in his life. It's cool.
He also he also will I mean, because again he's been doing this for quite some time. You can see any number of interviews with him. People just show up at his house and he's like, hey, sit down and they have a conversation and they get to the actual questions, but there's also a lot of like hanging out discursive conversation when it's like, you know, Steven Hawking sat right
where you're sitting, and you know, my wife cooked and dinner. Man, I just want you to know he ate everything, and the guy's like, cool, okay, thanks, doc.
No.
But that's just a sign of someone who's genuinely passionate about their field, not just in this isolated academic bubble that we often you see.
This is somebody wants to spread.
The word beyond those kind of niche corners of Harvard and academia.
Yeah, he's written quite a robust body of scientific literature. He has made notable contributions to multiple fields of physics and astronomy. He's written or co written around eight hundred different papers. He's published textbooks, popular science books, the stuff that's meant to be accessible to the public. And then with those popular science or you know, kind of lay person named books, we start to see indications of his interest.
Books like Extraterrestrial The First Side of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth twenty twenty one, or Interstellar not the movie Interstellar, the Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars, published just last year. In twenty twenty three, he co founded the Galileo project. All they do is try to
find evidence of interstellar objects or some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence. So, I mean, we could spend hours talking about this exoplanets, gravitational lensing which I did not know about, thank you, doctor Lowe, gamma ray burst etched.
And let's talk about just really quickly, this starshot mission. This is something that is so interesting to me, and I think maybe one of the biggest takeaways is something that's stated in an article written for Scientific American by
and Fink Biner. So the concept is to create these tiny, little, almost weightless things that would be a solar sale attached to a microchip, like the microchip that you'd find in your cell phone, and you literally shoot a laser at this thing once it's in orbit, and it ends up accelerating to about twenty percent the speed of light and can get out to like Alpha Centauri in like four
to five years. And it but it's just the whole idea is that it would like take it would fly past another star system and take some pictures and then take like five years to send it back to Earth. But just that concept.
Auvi was on the.
Team that was developing this project and that kind of thing is so amazing. But the only reason it was even possible as a concept is because this billionaire, Yuri Milner had he was a billionaire and he was like, well, let's try something crazy. Here's one hundred million dollars. Let's put a team together and find out if we can do it.
Quick.
Quick reminder, solar sales that is existing technology, right, that's not just conceptual or is it?
I think it is kind of conceptual.
Still, everything in the project when it was created was conceptual, like a possibility.
Solar sale is a material or a technology that essentially harnesses solar radiation to propel something using this material.
Right, Yeah, it has been. It's one of those like science fiction becoming fact things because it has been i think used first in like twenty ten. So it's still got that new car smell, but it is. It is cool stuff and unfortunately, Yeah, another big part of doing you know, the Big Kid science is the constant quest for funding.
Well, yeah, one of the main points in that article is that NASA has to go slow, has to get funding. Is you know it could lose funding for a major project at any moment, but when you're a billionaire, you literally just throw a bunch of money on the table and you say.
Let's do this.
Let's get weird with it. Private industry is huge in space exploration and astronomy. I want to shout out an astrobiologist, Karen J. Meach, who has a fantastic ted talk about something that really brought Professor Loeb's name to the public sphere. This for this story, let's start around December of twenty seventeen. The entire world of astronomy, Uh huh is a buzz because they've tracked something unusual. Oh woah moah is what
they ended up calling it. And boffins like Professor Karen Meach were over I don't want to say over the moon, but they were fascinated with it because it was so it was so weird. Its first name was super Unsexy. Was like one I slash twenty seventeen. You won, because that's how they name all this stuff in the sky. And what they found is that first off, they caught it late. It was first observed. It was about twenty
one million miles from Earth. I was already heading away from the Sun. So it's like you walk outside of a gas station and you see a car driving away from the parking lot getting back on the interstate. That's exactly what it was like.
Uh.
But the scary part is human beings at large did not know about this like half mile long, very unusual ovuler or cylindrical object until after it had reached its closest point to Earth about fifteen million miles away, super close and astronomical terms.
Well, yeah, and because the thing kind of like those little solar microtips we were talking about the planet like send them so fast, this thing was traveling over like somewhere between fifty nine thousand miles per hour and eighty something thousand miles per hour. So you literally, I mean imagine just like it's just flying across and it was an interstellar object. Right, it's been confirmed that that thing originated outside of our star system and just kind of did.
A fly by, and no one knows how it started going. No one knows. You know, it's very it's like a cotton eye jove space. Right, we don't know where it's gonna end up, don't you invoke.
That resen So it's the rest of the day, Dade, it's in there forever. I'm gonna give it to the other bil I had to man forgot nothing.
That's this is another thing about I forget.
Yeah, that's what it's called, right. Yeah. Is that a Hawaiian where it feels like yeah.
Yeah it is. It actually stands for oh what is it? It's like the first one that arrives a traveler from Afar, the first to arrive or something like that.
Yeah, and then something about history I want to say, But yes, the name means there's a there's a pretty cool story about from Afar, right, Yeah, first that's it. Yeah, mess here from before or scout right. But the idea is, or the story behind the name is I think, pretty cool and inspiring and a heck of a lot better than one I twenty seventeen. Blah blah blah blah blah.
You know, it's funny that we have a podcast on the network called Aftershock. It's like a scripted like fiction podcast about uh, sort of an island that's that shoots up in the middle of the Pacific, out of nowhere, and there's a lot of Hawaiian culture that's that's referenced in it, and there is a character who kind of comes to the island, and the native islanders or the people that have come from nearby refer to them as
omum wu. I believe because it means like a traveler, you know, guy, like a scout, like you said.
I think the like the doubling there is for emphasis. Anyway, it's a great story. Please read it when you get a chance. It's the kind of inspiring science stuff we love. And why is everybody interested in this thing? Again, you can find some great, easily accessible explanations of why and like why it is considered unusual in terms of its shape, its rotation, its speed, and its direction. And then you can also see really compelling arguments about how humanity figured
out this is an interstellar object. Why is Lobe interested in this? He also notes that it's super weird, and again he knows what he's talking about, but he is one of the most credible people to publicly say we should also just check and see if like someone made and it got sent here or like is it is it like a flying bumper essentially from a car wreck.
Yeah, some sort of a space jetsum, you.
Know, But think about this. He is working on a project to send these weird little solar sale microchips to other star systems right when Omuma shows up. So he is working on a project that would do this very thing. We wouldn't send large, potentially rocky cigar shaped things that spin around on their access every seven and a half hours or whatever. But he is thinking about doing a
very similar thing right to send another star system. So he's like, well, wait, maybe somebody already did that for us. What if this is just some kind of a sensor system meant to fly past?
And there's there's a logic to it that I love. There's also a really cool stripe of humility there, the idea that hey, if I have a good idea, then somebody else probably was thinking along those same lines, you know, separated by chasms space and time. But so he does like he gets unfairly. I would think he gets people saying like look at this nutso guy when he's asking instead quite reasonable questions like you said, Matt, he's there's
something familiar about this idea. And one of his other reasonable questions he's not the only one asking, is hey, let's see if it emits radio signals. That's an easy thing to check, you know what I mean, it didn't so far as they know.
Well, yeah, and we have to remember, everything we know about this object is observed from we are observing it from so far away. We only know or believe, let's say, infer and now believe that it's cigar shaped and spinning on its axis because it well, yeah, because of the way light it reflects light in a pattern right over like seven and a half hours. So we imagine, or we believe, we infer humanity scientists, that it is spinning because of the way it's reflecting the light from the
sun as it's moving past us. But it's a tiny little blip on a screen when you're observing it. We don't actually have a picture of this thing. But if you go to NASA, they've got like this three D model that makes you think, oh, they know every ridge on this thing. They know exactly what it looks like and how it's shaped and all this stuff. But no, no, no, no no, we have some really.
Modeling assumptions right based on material science, on chemistry, and on the sensor analysis that is capable off a very very minimum amount of information. Instead, like for anybody who would cast aspersion on the good folks at NASA, Like imagine getting as far as they have with such a small amount of knowledge Like that, to me is one of the cool things about humans. And Lope knows all about this. This is, by the way, Umoham is not the main.
Focus of this story.
It's a big part of the story because later Professor Lowe made some other claims doubling down on the interrogation the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In twenty nineteen, he and one of his students, Amir Saraj discovered something like a kissing cousin to Amua Moah, another object that they believed to be interstellar that crashed into Earth in twenty fourteen, leaving a bunch of strange, strange stuff in its wake.
Right now, it's known as c in EOS twenty fourteen zero one zero eight or Interstellar medior one what not.
Nearly as sexy as a but you know, I get, I get that it's a descriptive and it might not just be space rocks.
Lobe is arguing it might be genuine proof of extraterrestrial life. We're gonna pause for word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So like if he is tenured, right, and if you're tenured, you kind of have a safety a safety net in your career.
Your credibility is, you know, is your currency in that field. And nobody's gonna go out on a limb about something as controversial or fringy seeming as extraterrestrial life or proof thereof. So if he's gonna do that, he's probably gonna have something to back it up, or at least a really strong belief and belief that there is proof out there to back it up.
I don't know if Okay, I don't know if this is a really good term, but I fell in love with this term, and I don't think it's a legit scientific term. But he starts conducting what we could call forensic astronomy.
Cool.
That sounds like a cool job, right, I think, So put that on a tender profile.
Well, I mean, like again, we talked about all this like space junk and the debris and little detritus kind of floating out around there, and you know, if you analyze it, or if you have the wherewithal and the technology to do so, it can lead to clues sort of like ice cores. You know, various things that points to historical goings on, you know out there in the ink, Like you.
Say, Ben, out there in the ink, Yeah, I mean okay, So cast your memories back, folks. Eight January twenty fourteen, a fireball crashes from the sky. Biblical level stuff, you know. Religions get started based on things like this. It happens off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and everyone forgets
about it for five years. It is just recorded, and it's sitting there until until these guys start saying, what if we look through the records, What if we check everything humans know about objects from space and start looking for indicators kind of like, what if we profile heavily objects, things with unusual speed or direction.
Well, let's not forget things like that fly through Earth's atmosphere all the time and land somewhere, sometimes in the desert, sometimes in a house. It's happened before, We've reported on that before. Often they are very tiny objects, right, Sometimes they're a little bit bigger. Sometimes they kill the dinosaurs that.
Was one time.
Give a meta is a bad rap from then on out, you know.
Just because they wreak havoc and annihilate entire civilization that species.
Yeah, but you're you're absolutely right too. There's I think that's a great point, Matt. There's so much to look at. This is not a one afternoon thing for these guys.
Well yeah, and what makes basically what makes this object special?
Right?
Because often it's just a meteorite that lands and hits the ground and you're like, oh, that's some special rock right there, but it doesn't really mean much more than that.
I'm sorry, ding dong question real quick.
Meteors are bigger meteorites or more diminutive meteors, but still quite large.
Yeah.
So, like I believe checkm in this. But a meteor is the one that hits No meteorite is the one that hits earth, right.
It breaks off usually, right? Is that the deal? Okay?
So shout out to NASA dot gov for meteors and meteorite facts. Love it.
Yeah, Well, like, so, I imagine if it's a meteor shower, right, you're gonna look up in the sky and see shooting stars that are just flying through, maybe impacting the atmosphere, but they just continue on their way. Meteorite is the one that lands, got it, Okay?
And meteoroids are rocks.
Heck, yeah, okay, so what about asteroids? What about metroids, me hemorrhoids.
Wait, what's the name of the protagonist, the metroid Samos? Samos? That's right, what a great name.
I almost said Seamus. That would have been so.
Lob and Sarage are looking through their files and credit where it's due. Saraj has this moment where he's looking at this fireball from twenty fourteen and he says, hey, this little guy is moving way too fast to be gravitationally bound to the Sun, which other things in the Solar system are. So where did it come from? What does that indicate about its origin? They say, Okay, we got to go figure out, like we have to get boots on the ground, right, this is where the cool
metal detector story comes in. And then, like so much other science, they said, who, we're going to need some cash because it's a it's kind of out of the way to get to Papua New Guinea.
Yeah. Yeah, then there's much research to be done and diving.
And diving is crazy expensive maritime maritime sensors and research of that nature gets very expensive very quickly. As Paul and I can attest from Missing in Alaska. It's a fantastic show. Season three is on the way. Everybody, please check it out. You might hear some familiar voices. So several years after they start digging into this and they see this anomalous thing in the records, they say this like, they go public and they say, look, this might be interstellar.
We're pretty sure it's interstellar. It could also be something made rather than something that just happened, and across the planet, physicists and scholars trembled. There was a disturbance in the force, because that's stuff that that stuff that makes the news when a Harvard expert says it, and so he's like, look, this could be alien technology. It could be used. He it could have used a solar sale.
It could have been like starshot exactly again why this is so fascinating, and also why other scientists in his field are like, come on, Abby.
Snatch right, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, that's that's right. He his team, though, they soldier on and in April of twenty twenty two, a merre rights an article confirming that the Department of Defense's Space Command has got up got together with NASA because Space Command for a militant society like the US tends to have the best space sensors. I feel like that's a diplomatic way to say it, anyway.
So they got with those guys, figured out what they could, you know, get past security clearances and all this other stuff, and they were able to confirm with ninety nine point nine percent certainty that this meteor was interstellar.
WHOA.
So they confirmed that obvious suspicions might have they let's get let's say they have fifty percent more sand to them that it could be something made. Even though that is an extraordinary claim, right, we do know that it came from somewhere else. So in May of twenty twenty three, that expedition that we were hoping was going to happen is happening.
We were not called. But that's fine. No, I just really want to get out to that part of the world, man, don't you. Even though the capital is very dangerous. Really, yeah, it's super dangerous that capital. Yeah, Port Moresbio.
I think it's called I still want to go. Let's go.
Let's go. That's what they said. They said for science, And for.
Like a month, they searched and searched and they're like, well, I don't know, and guess what in June they found something.
Yeah, okay, so a little bit about the search, all right. They have a ship named the Silver Star Nice, and they have on this ship they have a sled. It's like a metal detector and a sled from a Christmas movie, had a kid. The sled is riddled with these molybdenum magnets on both sides and they drag it across the seafloor and hope they pick stuff up. And this is beyond a needle in a haystack situation. The ocean's kind of big. They're looking for stuff that's kind of small.
They owe a lot of thanks to a crypto mogul, as he's described Charles Hoskinson, who says, yeah, you can use my jet. Here's one point five mil. Heck, yeah, that wor nice.
Mister h looks seriously. Thank you billionaires for wanting to do something interesting like this every once in a while. This is really good. Good on you billionaires.
I like that you didn't say specifically thank you for doing something good. You said thank you for doing something interesting?
Yeah, why not if you get the money, let's at least make this thing a little bit weirder.
You know, yeah, why not? Right, So when they drag this sled across the floor of the ocean, they get a lot of junk, black powder, volcanic ash, because volcanoes have been a thing for a while, still very popular in the Pacific Ocean. And Lobe starts getting by his own admission, you can read this in an interview with Times of Israel and several other interviews, because he does them a lot. By his own emission, he and the
team were getting kind of frustrated. You know, we came all this way, we're looking, we're looking, we're doing the best science we can. We're filtering volcanic out and then we're going through whatever's left with a microscope. And then they find feerls mm hmmm. They find a bunch of tiny little balls.
I was gonna say, yeah, these are not substantial in any way. These are not pieces of a machine that anyone would recognize as pieces of a machine. As you said, They are like actually microscopic.
Right, They're very very small. I mean they range in size, but we are talking millimeters and they are composed of This is what amazes Avi in the team they're composed of iron. Okay, that's fine, that happens. Magnesium, sure, why not titanium?
Right on?
What you expect to see those, right, we expect in the universe all over the place.
But we have a missing a missing expected house guest here a very negligible amount of nickel, which is it's a mystery at this point. Nichola is supposed to be there. You know what I mean. You go to McDonald's, you order a happy meal, it doesn't have fries. What's going on? I guess they could do apples.
Comes from.
In my mind. It's like if you imagine the atmosphere, but you find another atmosphere that appears to be breathable for humans, and it's got a ton of oxygen and a ton of carbon dioxide, but there's no nitrogen for some reason.
Right barely. Any that's a great yeah, that's a great comparison. And so Loeb explains this. He says, you know, compared to what we know about metal alloys that humans make, to compared to what we know about asteroids and the familiar astrophysical sources, this stuff is weird. Also, thankfully it's magnetic.
That's the main way we're able to find it, and there are probably a lot more of these things out there, and they're probably a lot smaller particles, like we are just seeing the big chunks right of whatever this to this wreckage was. And so he asked those questions. And again people say it's controversial for him to even bring these up. He says he and his team, to be clear,
a lot of people worked on this. They say, is it possible that this just occurred naturally and to your point, Matt came from a wildly different kind of environment or situation, or did someone purposely make this thing? That's a very dangerous question in the halls of academia.
Well, okay, so, oh boy, I'm going to ICP territory. But how does one become magnetized? If one is a metal?
You're going to drop some bars from the Great Malenco.
Well, yeah, no, I don't know what that is. But I'm just wondering.
But I'm just wondering.
I don't know. Sorry, I'm just wondering if it's possible, Like if you find a magnetized object or something. Usually I would assume, and maybe I'm completely wrong with this, I would assume that it became magnetized over time because it's it's a metal that's capable of being magnetized, and then it's been basically affected by the fields for long enough that it then gains those properties. But like ICP, I don't know how magnets.
Work, Okay, I think you have to. I don't know either. I know Magneto was right in the comics. That has nothing to do with anything. I just want to say that Magneto is right. But to become magnetized, a substance or material has to have the ability to be magnetic, right, like you can't magnetize everything, and it has to enter the magnetic field of an existing magnet like Earth.
Right right.
So I think that that's the basis of it. They talk about it in the paper they publish, which you can read for free online, and we'll tell you how to find that one at the end. Is that some I think we're on base. I think that's roughly right. Like man, magnetization is like radicalization you hang out with others.
Well, I think so, because of it's the electrons get, yes, kind of angled in one direction, right when when you're magnetized, and that occurs through some process there are a lot of different types of magnetism. I just remember as a kid doing those experiments where you run a magnet across in one direction like a metal substance, and if you do it long enough that that metal substance, if it is able to be magnetized, becomes magnetized because you're effected
at its field and it's electrons. But so if you find something on the bottom of the ocean floor, maybe it's been there for a long time and it got magnetized through some process running over I don't know, another magnetized thing. I just don't understand it, and I feel like such a dumb dumb.
And so critics again accused Professor Loebe of being too credulous, right to having too much of a tendency to believe in unproven things. But if you look at his actual statements past the headlines, the stuff that he is stating as fact is all logical and grounded. The stuff people have a problem with him saying that stuff that it's what ifing. It's just asking questions, right, And I think that's fine to do so, and you could argue that's the heart of good science. He's just talking openly about
the possibilities because it hasn't been disproven. So like for example, he talks in depth where he says, basically says, this is already a win for science. We don't need aliens. We found in interstellar object. This is something from outside the Solar system. And unlike Mua Moa, this is the one we can touch, right because we could send humanity rather could send a craft to chase uma. It would be very expensive, it would take a long time.
How do you catch up to that thing?
And I mean when you have questions like that, it becomes a matter of priority where it's like you know something that is reasonably going to yield.
Results exactly and it's such a gamble. I mean just just the math already is tough. So this is even without the idea of extraterrestrials. This stuff here on the ocean floor by Papua n Guiney. It's great. It's a huge win for science. And people are only i think looking at skance at it because they think maybe he's asking to the questions he's pondering or to provocative because he says, look is this technological in origin? Droplets melted
from a semiconductor or an electric circuit. But that explained you know, magnetism.
There's something interesting too, because if you did design something like this and you imagined it would one day interact with an atmosphere at the speeds it's traveling to reach another star system, you imagine it's going to break up and probably you know, be broken down to its constituent alloys and stuff, right, because it's going to probably burn up unless it's made out of something that is designed to both withstand that heat and pressure and the impact
into either a water or rocky substance as it impacts a planet. I mean to be the interstellar spacecraft solar wind thing star shot that he was developing, is meant to fly past, take some pictures, and then its mission is over, continues barreling through towards another star maybe at some point in its life, but humanity would never know what happened to that thing after it makes its first pass.
If there's an extraterrestrial civilization that makes something like this and it's designed to fly through a star system and maybe accidentally impacts Earth like them, information or the usefulness of this machine theoretically would have already been done. It's if you imagine it's sending signal as it's flying through entering our star system. Oh there's a planet here. It's
sending information back to wherever it originated. Oh there's a planet, and we're oh, and it's gone because it crashed, right, But it's fulfilled its purpose. Nobody's going to come looking for it. But now that civilization would know that this planet is.
Here, Earth is compromised.
I mean, but really it's like it's almost like sending out spores the the way the way Starshot was designed. If there's another civilization doing that with just a much more robust substance, it does feel like a very close potential one to one.
And there are more questions too. I mean, in every I think with Emerson who said, in every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They returned to us with a sort of alienated majesty. But like, yeah, of course we see ourselves in these things. And the neat thing is that this idea, this theory, these suppositions do line up, right, they do jibe together. And he is not saying, by any means that that is true, nor
is he saying it's confirmed. He's saying it makes you wonder, you know, I mean, why is this alloy tougher than iron meteors? Right? And what other questions do these initial questions inspire. Here's a question from our producer, when are these guys going to take an ad break?
Is it now? Ben? Is it now?
I think we owe it to mister decant and we've returned. All right, here's where we're at now. All in all, Love's team has recovered something in the area of fifty of these tiny spherical, mostly iron fragments. Again, the controversy stuff, I think it's a little overblown and it's unfair to the science being conducted. But we should note that not all scientists are necessarily persuaded that these materials are interstellar. At this point. They're saying there could be other explanations, right,
like terrestrial pollution, sad reality of the ocean. There's a lot of human made stuff down there. Is it possible that we just don't we just haven't recognized what human made kind of thing produced this?
But what of the nickel?
But what about the nickel? We're not talking Royce the five nine. Yeah, the nickel part is really interesting.
It is the lack of nickel really makes it makes you again, makes Auvy and everybody else involved to go that's kind of weird.
It takes it past the past the threshold of philosophy. As Lot said, Yeah.
For sure, but again for a lot of other people what you just said been potential pollution or some other thing we're just not accounting for. Is a possibility here of why there's no Nickel.
I guess, yeah, we have to, I mean we have to be fair and say that. Professor Loeb, for his part, he acknowledges that all of the investigative avenues must be explored, and that he also says multiple times the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Dope.
Of course he's going to say that he's an astronomer from Harvard, right, I feel like that.
Yeah, okay, but can can we get to go back to be so? To me is one of the most fascinating points in this whole episode.
Yeah. In Scientific American, and he appears in multiple Scientific American articles, as do his colleagues, etc. In one recent one, he says, at this time, the possibility that any uap R extraterrestrial is highly speculative emphasis hours, and he says, but if we entertain this possibility for fun. Then the tumbling motion of omuam woa could potentially be meant to scan signals from all possible directions.
So let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. So we believe omuama is shaped like a cigar, right, and then imagine it is spinning like long ways round, right, and.
It also rotating clockwise.
Exactly in this weird tumbling motion. And so imagine if you have censors on both ends of the cigar, and as it's tumbling around, it's just scanning literally everything. Did you guys see that movie Prometheus?
Yeah, yeah, it was had issues, but there were things about it that I loved. I loved the depiction of like ancient almost love Craftian beings.
Space is haunted.
Yeah that, well, this is not the same thing, but I'm just this is what the picture in my mind. They have these little spheres that one of the engineers puts up into the like just kind of lets it levitate and then it's live.
Boys, right, those are called the engineers, the big the big giant gray guys.
Yeah yeah, well, well this is the human team when they arrive for the first time.
Are you talking about the things that shoot out the lasers and map the tunnels and tunnel yeah, so sorry, they aren't. The other guys also called engineers literally.
Yeah, you know, you're right, My bad.
I mean the Eldrich astronauts are called the engineers.
Yes, one of the human teams that is a specialist in mapping these things uses that technology to scan those tunnels, right, and the shape of the structure. And I'm imagining something like this on much larger scale. But I don't know why it wouldn't be shaped like a sphere or why you wouldn't design it as a sphere, because you could potentially have it spin in a much more uh, I don't know, efficient fashion. It would also travel more efficiently.
If it's if it is intelligently designed, then we have to also allow for possible cultural prejudices, right in terms of design, like why.
Is shaped like that here?
Why do humans use ace ten in numbers? Right? Why? Why is that the one?
I never thought about that? Geez Ben, we're involved.
No, you're you're absolutely right. But but in this in this idea, uh aviy Lobe is saying, well, why not, like what if it's just for fun? Like what if it is spinning around? Because it's got really powerful scanners on those two ends, and it's just doing what it needs to do. And here's the other thing.
Yeah, Yeah, it's thought.
That Omua Muha has been traveling for hundreds of millions of years.
Yes, so is it broken apart by then? Whatever? It might be just.
The sheer rock of space and traveling between star systems at least theoretically, but the thing has been bombarded by cosmic rays and appears to have this red hue at least scientists believe because of its irradiation. Basically over hundreds of millions of years.
It's been through some rough roads, is what they're saying, right.
I guess just if you send something out like that, is it like our voyager system where we're monitoring it for the entirety of its trek, or do we lose contact with it interesting at some point? Or is it a standalone Yeah, just so many possibilities you're saying it.
It might be some sort of alien space station that's out there exploring and monitoring the cosmos like we do with ours.
We're case for sci oh boy.
Yeah, Well, just a thing that goes and it just sees what it sees and at some point its mission is completed and it's sent all that information back to wherever it originated.
I don't know.
For me, sensor systems are the concept of sensor systems that have just been sent out not just our way, but towards a bunch of other stars. Feels like a super plausible thing.
I mean, it seems like a logical inevitability for any civilization that is interested in space exploration. You want to see what's out there, so you have to build eyes and ears and then put those things on some kind of device to go a little further than you can on your planet. I mean, it's I think it's brilliant. It also asked the question if this was made designed intelligently, dare we say, then, how would the designers monitor it?
Right?
What would be their medium of communication? Is it something that humans are aware of? Is it something they could remotely understand?
You know?
Are there a bunch of like little maybe on their world? The life dominant life form is just like a naturally spinning cylinder. And those guys are like, well, of course, is how we're going to build the satellite? Right, They'll get it all the maybe they're like, all the evidence we have proves that all life in the universe is spinning cylinders, so they'll recognize this.
If they're also alive, that's it. Well, but would you want to be found? I think Obvi's next point in this quote, you've found man is again the next mind blowing thing.
Yeah, dark forest. So there's the idea that is so weird, a cosmic stitch up that Umuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, the what he called the galactic parking lot, such that it disguises its origin.
Yeah, I mean, would you really want a super powerful advanced civilization to know exactly where you are? I mean the way we did with Voyager and Forger two, the one that had the golden plate on it, the Golden disc.
It's the Vigier in Star Trek.
Would you really want to just say, hey, we're down here. It feels like maybe a short sighted move, but.
I don't know.
Yeah, the dark forest, Right, what's the like, what what's the old riddle? What's the spookiest message you could receive from like alien civilization? It's just be quiet, they're listening. Right. No one would said that message because it would give double way too. I mean this again, this is not is not proven, but it's it's we're thinking about it just so. As he said, literally, it's fun to explore
it conceptually. And he also ends that quote by saying this, rather than simply wonder about possible scenarios, we should collect better scientific data and clarify the nature of uap is a groom yep? I mean, how is that controversial?
You know?
Nope, that's it. That's the thing.
He also asked, what if this thing from twenty fourteen, what if it's somehow tagged Earth and gave Amua mua a destination point. WHOA, that's kind of cool, right, I have no idea how that would work, because how would you observe it.
The thing in twenty fourteen enters the atmosphere and it's still sending information back to its originating point as it's entering the atmosphere, and he goes, oh, this planet has a viable atmosphere for life. So then a mua mua comes by and he's like, let's verify that information, and they verify, and then in you know, twenty twenty five, they show.
Up, yeah, or they just drove by and We're like, ah, we could do a little better as this kind of mids you know what I mean, like keep the windows rolled up. It's a bad neighborhood. Oh jeez, I don't know though, I mean no, do you. What's your take on these concepts?
Man? Well, I'm no rocket scientist.
It fascinates me and I think it's endlessly curiosity inducing. And then to hear somebody with this level of expertise kind of ruminating on some of this stuff, it really opens up the minds to the possibilities. You know, I can't really speak to the specifics of what this thing might be, but I am fascinated by the fact that it's existed for so long, and it's moved so far
and maintain and you know it's size. I guess relative size and shape, you know, based on what we know, because I mean, if it was space wreckage or debris or whatever, you think it would have broken apart over time or you know, gotten smaller or fragmented or whatever.
Maybe it did. Maybe that, of course, was a much bigger spinny cylinder, right.
Yeah, they're all spinny cylinders, bro, It's just spinny cylinders all the way down. That's exactly all. I don't, so I want to read something from NASA's website. They've gotten an overview on a muamua and this is a It speaks to this concept that potentially it was that its originating point was disguised, just because again I think this makes the mind wonder if it's a possibility here you preliminary orbital calculations suggest the object came from the approximate
direction of the bright star of Vega. That's from our perspective here on Earth, right, not street Fighter to Vega with the clause in, but that's in the northern constellation
of Lira. I guess if you're looking up there. However, it took so long for the interstellar object to make the journey, even at the speed of about fifty nine thousand miles per hour that's twenty six point four kilometers per second, that Vega was not it was nowhere near that or originating position when Amua Mua was there three hundred thousand years ago. So it it came from somewhere that a star system has moved into at this point when it you know, three hundred thousand years after it left.
So it just makes you go hmm. Man, there's more to this.
I love it. I love the idea. The speculative stuff gets a lot of attension, and it should because it's smart to think about it, and it has. It brings more and more questions as way leads on the way. But again, the science behind this too is legitimate. This is a credible series of investigations. They're not playing around, they're not trying to like builk people in some weird you know by a piece of it is still a
rock scheme or whatever. So I have great respect for that, and I also you know, it reminds me of the Three Body Problem or the series that came out recently or came out years ago that plays with the idea of dark Forest quite a bit. And it's ultimately, if you think through it with with brutal logic, then it feels like a prisoner's dilemma. Right. You simply cannot risk the entirety of your civilization on the gamble that another
civilization will understand, acknowledge, or be cool with you. Those are all three tremendous assumptions, you know, uh, And to get even one of them wrong could have existential consequences.
Yeah, that's so terrifying if a civilization of just like oh you're who, I don't have time for this, and literally like the wave of a hand kind of thing, and we're just.
God, uh, this is a we have we have other sons at home.
Yeah yeah.
But but with that, you know, I think there's there's something we can conclude, which is Loeb is not claiming that he and his team or anyone have found proof of extraterrestrial civilization or life. He is saying that they have found something extraordinarily strange, and at this point he is asking what if. And he's one of the smartest, most well positioned people to ask that sort of question.
That's the soul of goods. I also all got I love the idea of haunted space, and I just if you guys are kid with it, I have to ask you about this comic book series. I want to see if you've read it, Outer Darkness.
I don't think I know that one.
You are going to love it.
Cool.
It's it's like imagine all your favorite horror movies, hauntings, demonic possession, lovecraft stuff, really weird period fiction. It's all in there. It's an absolute great rate.
Oh yeah, I've heard about this. It's on a list of ones that I'm supposed to pick up.
Oh what, there's another really good one called Nameless.
Yes, yeah, I love Nameless.
That one's upsetting, Yeah, gnarly. I would say the Week of Stomach maybe not apply, but that's another good existential like what's out there, like almost event horizon esque, kind of like space as a.
Portal to hell evil gnosticism, right, that's right. Yeah. And then oh man, there's so many good horror space graphic novels and explorations. Nameless as a stem to stern banger, super optimistic and inspiring. Read it and you'll see what we mean. Yeah, the tinge of sarcasm, outer darkness, also stem disturned banger. That's going to be a reread for me, gents.
And and you know, we might speak of rereading. We might need to give the science a little more time and perhaps one day ask Professor l himself to drop by the show.
What do you guys think, Abby, Come on down, come on out.
He does. He does, again, seem like a person acting in good faith with sincerity, and he, just like the rest of us, he wants to believe, like he wants the truth to be out there.
Can you imagine actually talking with him? Please, Abby, please come come do an episode. That'll be awesome.
Yeah we could. Yeah, let's make it happen. And at that point, you know who else we would like to hear from you, fellow conspiracy realists. Let us know what's on your mind. If you have proof of extraterrestrial civilization, of course, as always, hit us up. Or if you don't, that's fine too. If you just have some cool ideas, we love to hear those. Well, yeah, we love to hear anything that you've got to offer. You can reach
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