Interstellar Artifacts - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 9/17/23

and then your wishes come true. And you know, there is a book, a famous book by Steven Weinberg and the physicists who won the Nobel Prize called the First three Minutes, and towards the end of it, he says, the more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless, it seems, and that's a depressing thought. The universe is pointless. And I thought about it, and I realized that he's completely wrong.

The reason he finds the universe pointless, and by the way, it's not only him, but it's all my colleagues that work on studying the universe is because they focus on lifeless objects, you know, elementary particles, radiation, things that have no life. And we know from our own life that finding a partner brings a meaning to your life, and loneliness is pointless. And so my advice is, let's search for a partner out there, for a neighbor, because that

would change our perspective. Suddenly the universe would appear to be meaningful. And you know, that is a very basic perspective that could change the future of humanity because if we find a partner, a neighbor that is more accomplished than we are, we could learn something new that we haven't yet learned in the last century of science and technology. They could inspire us to go into space, and at the very least I can imagine that, you know, it would convince us that what we are doing now makes

no sense. I mean, we are engaged in conflicts. Two trillion dollars a year is going to military budgets worldwide, and just you know, think about using this money for space exploration. I calculated that we could reach every star in the Milky Way galaxy by sending probes within one century. Billions of probes with this budget in one century, we'll go towards every star. So it's just a matter of priorities.

And perhaps if we realize that we have a neighbor out there and they reached our doorstep before we reached their doorstep, you know, that would convince us to work together because we are all in the same boat earth, sailing through space. And when I was in the Pacific Ocean, I realized, you know, all the team members were working together, selflessly towards the success of the mission. That's the kind

of attitude that I'm really hoping for. If you know, there would be this way coming from a neighbor, that will change the priorities of humanity, make us all work together as equal members of the human species.

moving very fast. It actually came from behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. And even though it came from behind the Earth, it was moving at forty five kilometers per second, faster than Earth relative to Earth itself. And we calculated in twenty nineteen. January twenty nineteen, when that was exactly five years after this object was found

by the US government. It was just put in a catalog of NASA, and I was interviewed about another meteor that landed near Kamchatka, and it's called the Kamchatka meteor,

just a couple of weeks earlier. So the radio interviewer wanted to ask questions about that, and I looked at the online and found this catalog of NASA, and I asked my student to check if any of the objects, the fastest objects might have originated from outside the Solar System, because I was already intrigued by Omuamua that looked unlike any rock that we're familiar with in the Solar System, and so I said, why don't we find if there is any me that came from outside the source system?

And we found this one and then submitted the paper for publications and the refere is. My colleagues rejected it. They said, we don't believe the US government. So at the time, I was chair of the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, and I complained about

it to my colleagues there. I said, look, I mean this is data that you know, the US Space Command is getting more funding than NASA, and we should trust the you know, the data, because you know, they're supposed to alert the US President if a ballistic missile is coming from North Korea, and if they make mistakes, they will say no, it's going to Mexico while it's heading towards Washington. So it's you know, they know what they're

talking about anyway. So as a result of me frustrated, one of the people with behind the National Security Defense suggested to help, and it ended up with a person from the White House reaching to the US Space Command, and there was the letter issued by the US Space Command in March twenty twenty two, three years later, saying that they confirm after looking at the data again, they confirmed that it's of interstellar origin. This meteor came from outside the Solar System, and they do it at the

ninety nine point nine nine percent confidence. That was a letter sent to NASA. The Department of Defense basically came to my defense on this matter, and our paper was accepted for publication at that point, and the government also released the data about the fireball, the light curb from this meteor, and that allowed us to conclude two things. Well.

First of all, it came with a very high speed already outside the Solar System, faster than ninety five percent of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun relative to the local frame of the Milky Way galaxy. That's unusual, faster than ninety five percent of the stars near the Sun. And moreover, it exploded only in the lower atmosphere, where the stress on the object was far greater than on all other space rocks that we had seen as meteors two hundred and seventy two of them in the NASA

catalog over the past decade. So the object was unusually tough material strength, larger than even iron meteorites, which make up five percent of the meteors. So you know, if that raised the possibility that it may be a voyager like meteor. Just imagine our own spacecraft voyager going to interestellar space and eventually colliding with a planet like the Earth. It would appear as a meteor in the sky of

that planet. Is of unusual material strength because it's made of stainless steel, and unusual speed because it was propelled by a rocket. And so I decided to go to the side of the meteor and find what it was made of. And that was a big challenge. You know, there were many failure points. First, we had to get one and a half million dollars had to fund the expedition, and gladly Charles Hoskinson and the Thunder contacted me out of the blue and we had a zoom call and

he said, you have the money. And then organizing a team of twenty eight people, the best in the world by the way, and that was again a very fortunate circumstance that those people agreed and joined, and actually many

of them volunteered to join us. And then we built a sled with magnets on both sides that is one wide and two hundred kilograms in mass, and we placed it on the ocean floor, connected with a cable to the ship that was fittingly called the Silver Star, and we basically dragged the sled back and forth, just like mowing the lawn across the region that is seven miles in size, and the ocean is more than a mile deep.

And what we were looking for are the molten droplets from the surface of the object when it was exposed to the fireball the immense heat that surrounded it, and those droplets were supposed to be a millimeter or best in size, the size of a grain of sand. So just think about it, searching for planes of sand at the bottom of the ocean a mile deep, across the region of seven miles in length. And so many of my colleagues obviously said, you will find nothing. It's a

waste of time. And I said, you know, why don't you sit back and relax. I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm doing the heavy lifting and if I come back with nothing, you can say that's what I expected. So we went there, and then after six days, I mean, at first the sled was not lying on the ocean floor because the cable was lifting it. It was guiding, and the exceptional engineers that we had on the ship realized that we need to go with the current in

order to keep it on the floor. But then we started collecting materials and most of it was volcanic ash. This is black powder from volcanic activity. And then after the sixth day, I mean, I wrote forty three diary reports altogether, and after the sixth day I wrote an essay on mediu dot com. All of them were published, by the way, and there were few millions millions of people around the world who read those reports. They were

very excited, and then they were translated to Spanish. And on the sixth day I wrote a report with the title where are the sperrels? These are the molten droplets. We didn't find them yet, And then I was straightforward, we didn't find them, And then the following day we started filtering the black powder. The particles that are small, We let them out with a mesh and that had the size of a quarter of a millimeter, and then we started looking at the big particles through a microscope

and lo and behold, we found a sparrow. It looked very distinct from the background sand. It was like a metallic marble. And I basically hugged the person who found it first on the microscope. And I was so thrilled because I knew that if you find an aunt in the kitchen, there must be many more out there. And then we found the fifty of them during the expedition that lasted two weeks between June fourteenth to twenty eight, twenty twenty three. And when we came back to had

I shipped the materials by FedEx. It arrived a few days later to my home. I realized that a few days of a delay is not a big deal, because this material took millions of years to arrive to us from far away. And then I brought it to a laboratory of Stein Jacobson at Harvard that has the best mass spectrometer in the world to analyze the composition of the squirrels, and we found that there isn't a excess

of cereals along the meteor path. We made the map my post dot Laura Domini made that map, and we saw concentration of extra excess of cerreals along the path, and of course there were some background ferrols in the control regions and also in the area of the meteor, but on top of that there was an excess. And then we found a special type of cereals that were along the meteor path in those regions of excess, and that the composition of that was never seen before in

the scientific literature. Its materials that have a very different abundance of elements than in the solar system. You know, elements like lanthanum, uranium, beryllium are hundreds of times more abundant in those serals, and that was never seen anywhere. And so we reported the results the findings. And now, I mean, so far we analyzed only about the tenth

of the spirals we have. When we came back to Harvard, my summer intern found six hundred more in addition to the fifty we had on the ship, and so altogether we have about seven hundred right now. So we analyzed fifty seven and we are now in the process of analyzing many more. And it's just, you know, an amazing story. Of discovery, taking risks despite all odds, and being successful. And you know, there were so many points of failure that every team member was essential for the success of

this mission. And we will go again because for now we can just say it came from outside the Solar System, but to be able to tell if it uh natural, if it's if it was a rock that came from an unusual environment different than the Solar System, or it was technological gadget, maybe we found the element of semiconductors.