Episode 259 Interstellar with Dr Avi Loeb

Original Airdate 05.27.2023 (On Podcast Audio Platforms)
We’re pleased and honored to present a special guest for this episode, Dr. Abraham “Avi” Loeb. Dr. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at the age of 24. He has written nine books and nearly 1000 papers, led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative, and served as a long-standing member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, among many other achievements. Although his work with the Breakthrough Starshot project to send “light sails” speeding toward nearby stars may have initially gained him the most notoriety in science news, his study and theory of a recent anomalous visitor put him on the radar of the general public. In October 2017, a Hawaiian observatory detected the first interstellar object to pass through our solar system, which was subsequently named Oumuamua, meaning “scout” in the Hawaiian language. That fact alone may have registered a blip of mild interest to most. Yet the first artists’ conceptions of the object as a cigar-shaped asteroid put further curiosity of the masses to rest as it being, albeit odd, just another space rock. However, analysis of sensor data of Oumuamua, with no visual inspection obtained during its visit, led Dr. Loeb and his team to conclude that it was nothing like it was portrayed to the public. Instead, their research showed it was roughly the size of a football field, reflective, spinning, thin as a sheet of paper, and moving unusually. Dr. Loeb hypothesized that Oumuamua could likely be a probe, perhaps manufactured by an ancient alien civilization to gather information as star systems pass by. Not surprisingly, many of his peers met this open-minded thinking with dismissive resistance, hesitant or unwilling to entertain such bold and adventurous speculation. Join us for a fascinating discussion with one of the world’s leading astrophysicists on the challenges of searching for extraterrestrial life on the eve of his appearance at the upcoming annual Contact in the Desert conference taking place June 2 through 4, 2023, in Indian Wells, California.
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Chapters:
00:00:00 - The Astonishing Junk Drawer
00:04:46 - Monster Fest and Meet & Greet Announcement
00:08:53 - The First Interstellar Meteor Expedition
00:13:20 - The Galileo Project and Searching for Extraterrestrial Artifacts
00:17:45 - Crunching SETI Signals
00:21:36 - Discovering MasterClass
00:25:37 - Promoting the No Sleep Podcast
00:29:51 - Quantifying Anomalous Phenomena
00:33:48 - The Importance of Looking to the Future and Collecting New Data
00:38:19 - Lack of Evidence for Extraterrestrial Visitations
00:41:58 - Lack of Data for Analysis of Anomalous Footage
00:45:53 - Tracking UFOs on Roofs of Buildings
00:49:58 - Project Breakthrough Star Shot
00:54:45 - The Mechanism Behind Light Sails
00:59:25 - The concept of a Dyson Sphere
01:03:41 - Saving Money with Mint Mobile
01:07:54 - Levitating Trains and Physics of Friction
01:12:22 - Searching for Interstellar Objects
01:17:10 - The Rendering of Extraterrestrial Objects
01:21:42 - The Webb Telescope and its Vantage Point
01:26:20 - Elegance in Embedded Technology
01:30:27 - Scientific Intolerance and the Search for Extraterrestrial Objects
01:35:01 - The Galileo Project and the Critics
01:39:27 - The Evolution of Scientific Communities
01:43:29 - Limitations of AI and its interpretation of spatial relationships
01:47:41 - The Alien Created by Technology
01:52:16 - Correcting the Classification of 'Oumuamua'
01:56:39 - The Importance of Gathering Evidence
02:01:22 - The Nature of Unmeasurable Phenomena
02:05:34 - Speculating on the Purpose of an Extraterrestrial Object
02:10:13 - Credits and Contact Information