#2401 - Avi Loeb

Joe Rogan: Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. All right, good to see you, sir.

Avi Loeb: Great to be with you, Joe.

Joe Rogan: It's a perfect time to bring you on because things are getting very wild.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation. Some people said I invented 3I Atlas, this object, in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.

Joe Rogan: Is that what people are saying?

Avi Loeb: Yeah. And I said, look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island. It's at four and a half times the Earth-Sun separation. If I was able to put it out there, I would be more powerful than the Pope. Because we're talking about a giant object that you can see from any place on Earth. You can buy online a telescope half a meter in size that will allow you to see it. It's out there. It cannot be faked.

Joe Rogan: Well, those people are fools. You can't listen to those people. I don't listen to many people.

Avi Loeb: Initially, a lot of people were dismissing your concerns, saying this object is nothing but a comet, and it's very normal. But as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you're correct. This is a very unusual object.

There is something really important to recognize here. Usually when you deal with scientific matters, they have very little impact on the future of humanity. Very little. If the neutrino has a little bit of a mass, it doesn't really matter. When we discovered the Higgs boson, the biggest impact was to confirm some idea we had back in the 60s. Obviously that affected those people who got the Nobel Prize. But most of us continued as if nothing happened.

However, here, if we ever encounter alien technology, everything will change. It will affect the financial markets. It will affect politics in a major way. My point is simple: this is different than other scientific matters. The intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small probability have to be considered seriously because they could have major implications.

Just think about October 7th. The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that Hamas would do nothing. They got data that indicated something was going on, but they dismissed it because of their theory. As a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot of people died on both sides. This could have been avoided if they were to consider a black swan event—an event you put a small probability on, but you look at anomalies in the data and say the implications are so huge we have to consider it.

This idea was already considered by the philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal. He talked about God. He said, of course you might think God doesn't exist. The probability for that is small, but the implications if God exists are so huge that we have to discuss it. That was the argument, Pascal's wager. The intelligence agencies know that. Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again.

Now, here comes an object from outside the solar system, and it shows anomalies. The scientists would say we should be as careful as possible about talking about anything other than a rock. They say that when they know we launched a lot of space junk, a lot of technological objects to space. We also know there are 100 billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most of them formed billions of years before the sun. There are billions of Earth-sun analogs.

We all believe we came out of a soup of chemicals. That's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on this Earth. So it's quite likely we are not the first one. Sorry to break the news. Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed long before us.

You can ask the question: how long does it take our own technology, the Voyager spacecraft that we launched out of the solar system, to move to the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy? Thousands of light years away takes less than a billion years. That means all these civilizations that had their history initiated billions of years before ours could have done it. All we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks, or maybe one of these objects might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor.

The reason I say that is we live at our home on Earth next to the sun. We look around us in the cosmic street, and we see a lot of houses just like ours. There are billions of them, probably. My colleagues, those scientists who think traditionally, they say microbes came to Earth very early, therefore they must be everywhere. So let's define our highest priority as searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street. I say, good, you can do that from the vantage point of your home. You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor's yards. But you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes on exoplanets.

Think about the possibility that there is actually a resident in one of those houses. That resident might show up at your front door at some point, or you might see an object that arrives in your backyard or your mailbox from that resident. A black swan event. Or you might see some construction project from a distance. That might be easier to detect than microbes. So we should hedge our bets. We should invest billions of dollars on both fronts.

At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10 billion to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence. I say that is an oversight.

Joe Rogan: They have found evidence of microbes on Mars, correct?

Avi Loeb: It's not conclusive. We need to bring materials back. It's called sample return, and NASA has plans. We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that look as if they were made by microbes are real. We know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth.

By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body, so it has a bigger surface area for its mass. The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation process, and the surface area tells you how fast it can cool. Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth. Life may have started on Mars, actually, because it had rivers, lakes, oceans of water. It could have been delivered to Earth. We might be all Martians.

When Elon Musk considers going to Mars, it might be the second trip around. We might be going back to our childhood home because there were tiny astronauts inside rocks that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth and seeded the Earth with life as we know it.

Joe Rogan: Panspermia.

Avi Loeb: Yeah. In fact, if we get this material back to Earth, as NASA is planning to do hopefully within a decade, then we can make sure these were microbes. Perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are similar to the ones we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of process took place in both places.

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Joe Rogan: Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars, particularly the right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I've seen the data. It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere right now. What happens on Earth is that when an object roughly the size of a person or smaller goes through the atmosphere, it burns up, creates a fireball just like an atomic explosion. An object of order a meter collides with Earth every year. Every year there is an atomic explosion size fireball in our atmosphere. It's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of 50 kilometers, so it doesn't do anything. 71 percent of the Earth is covered by oceans.

These meteors are quite important. Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by a giant impact by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island. We are aware that such an impact could endanger us. That's why the U.S. Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come close to Earth with a size bigger than a football field, about 140 meters, so that we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. We think we are smart. We can see these rocks coming.

But just imagine alien technology. It will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it. That is a risk that was never attended to. I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical Union to develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come from outside the solar system like 3I Atlas, that show anomalies that could potentially be technological in origin.

Joe Rogan: The structures on Mars, what do you think when you look at them? When you see that one that looks like a square?

Avi Loeb: I think it's very intriguing. Both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere, so the objects that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before about Earth. Therefore, they serve as museums. Any space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two billion years would not have burned in the atmosphere. It would have landed. We need to check the surface, even if we know there wasn't any civilization out there over the past two billion years because conditions are really harsh.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Avi Loeb: Mars may have collected technological debris from other civilizations because it would stay on the surface. It's just like a museum.

Joe Rogan: This is an enormous structure. It's at least, I think they think 300 meters, but possibly quite a bit longer.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, but that's not enormous because 3I Atlas—the size of 3I Atlas is at least 5 kilometers in diameter. I derived it in a paper a couple of weeks ago because we know it's losing mass. It's mostly from the side that is facing the sun. You would have gotten some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction, just like a rocket. I used, together with two colleagues, 4,000 data points from 227 observatories around the Earth of 3I Atlas that monitored its motion across the sky. We were able to say that the trajectory is sculpted only by gravity. There is no evidence for this recoil. That means the object is very massive. I derived a value of 33 billion tons, a huge thing, which if you take solid density, means it's more than five kilometers in diameter. When you mentioned a few hundred meters, that's nothing.

This object was discovered just over the past decade of observing the sky. Who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the moon because they are good museums? I see that as their most important value.

Let me say one thing about my fundamental point of view. Each of us would live for about 100 years if we are lucky. That's pretty depressing, right? There is so much we would like to know and we have only 100 years. That already tells you that you need to be modest and humble because you don't have a lot of time. So why engage in conflicts? Why reduce the lifespan of other people in wars? It makes no sense. You have limited time. Let's just use it for something constructive.

We are born on this rock, which is just three millionths of the mass of the sun. It's leftover material from the formation process of the sun. Some debris was left over in a disk and the Earth was made out of that. That's it. It's just a speck of material, nothing significant. This Earth was moving around the sun 4.54 billion times before the Vatican even existed.

Why do I say the Vatican? Because the Vatican put Galileo Galilei in house arrest when he said, "I don't think everything moves around the Earth. I see some moons through my telescope around Jupiter. They don't seem to revolve around the Earth. They revolve around Jupiter. Therefore, the Earth is not at the center." So they put him in house arrest. Today, they would have canceled him on social media.

My point is that's the first sign that humans want to think it's all about them. It's not surprising. But the Vatican admitted their mistake. In 1992, they issued an official letter saying Galileo was right. That was 350 years after he died. It's the worst public relations affair you can have, to admit you were wrong for 350 years. How could they have avoided that? Very simply: if they had more money than Galileo, they would build an even bigger telescope to figure out the truth and prove him wrong. Then they would have found he was right, and they would have corrected course.

Joe Rogan: Or they would have put more people under house arrest. That's probably what they would have done.

Avi Loeb: Yeah. So my point is it's really important in cases like this or 3I Atlas to get as much data as possible. Once you reach a certain threshold, you can't shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking the way my colleagues do.

Just to give you an example, the first interstellar object was Oumuamua. It was discovered in 2017. It was really strange because it was shaped like a pancake based on all the data we have, and it was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any evaporation, no gas or dust around it. What did these conservative comet experts say most recently, just in December 2024? There was a paper of them saying it's a comet. It's a dark comet. In other words, a comet where you can't see the cometary tail around it.

It's like experts specializing in zebras. They go to the zoo and they see an elephant. Then they say, "Oh, the elephant is a zebra without stripes." I say, no, it's a completely different animal. A spacecraft would appear differently than a rock or a comet because it will not have a cometary tail. It could be propelled by something else.

Let me go back to the big picture. We live on this Earth, moving around the sun. One thing I often say is common sense is not common in academia. My colleagues in academia know very well about the story of Galileo. They know very well about the possibility of black swans. They say it's an extraordinary claim to imagine something like us, as smart as we are, near another star. I say, no, it's an ordinary claim. Why would you think it's extraordinary? By the way, if you decide not to collect evidence, not to look for it, then you will not find it.

I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. You really need to put resources to find the evidence. By not attending to this possibility, by not imagining it... I much prefer to listen to imaginative science fiction writers because they're much more interesting than second-class scientists who don't have an imagination. They not only have a problem with discussing alien intelligence, they also have a problem with whoever discusses it. They would try to suppress that voice.

I think it makes no sense whatsoever because the public really cares about it. My essays on medium.com get a few million readers a month now. The public cares about it. The public funds science. Therefore, scientists should attend to this question: are we alone? It's the most romantic question in science.

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Avi Loeb: We live on this planet. Everyone says we are not at the center of the universe, but we might be the only intelligent species out there. We need the next Copernican revolution, the next Galilean revolution, to realize that there is a smarter kid on the block. It's just like the experience of my daughters on the first day of kindergarten. At home, they thought they were at the center of the universe because their learning was based on a data set that was limited to home. It's just like LLMs, artificial intelligence systems that learn from their data sets. They had a limited environment. Then when they went to kindergarten, they realized there are kids just like them. Some are smarter. We are yet to mature in that sense.

Now, why is it so important for the future of humanity? The Earth would not exist forever. When people talk about global climate change and so forth, they don't realize the issue is not the Earth. The issue is humanity, the future of humanity. The Earth itself, based on detailed calculations, will be engulfed by the sun in 7.6 billion years. Here is something you won't find much discussed: the moon, because of the friction on the envelope of the sun, will crash back to Earth, and then the Earth will move all the way to the center of the sun. Nothing will be left. No monument will survive 7.6 billion years into the future.

We have an obligation, if we want to be remembered in cosmic history, not to go to Mars. That's not really a great vision. Going to Mars is just like you have a group of chimpanzees living in the jungle on some trees with some bananas. One of the chimpanzees looks far away into the horizon and says, "Oh look, up there, there is another region we can go to." And it's clear there are no bananas there. The same is true about Mars.

Joe Rogan: Elon says let's go to Mars to save humanity, but it's actually not a great place to be.

Avi Loeb: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: But you have to start somewhere. You have to start somewhere if you want to populate a planet.

Avi Loeb: Here is my point. It makes much more sense for us to invest in building a platform in space that can accommodate humans, not rely on another rock that happens to be near us with much worse conditions. It's a desert, no atmosphere. Let's build a space platform, go on it, and make sure it's safe for humans to live for long periods of time. We can produce artificial gravity by rotation.

You say it will cost a lot of money, but we're spending $2.4 trillion every year on military budgets. If we were just to change our priorities and say we want to build Noah's spaceship—in analogy to Noah's ark to save humanity from the great flood or catastrophe that will happen on Earth—you put a fraction of that $2.4 trillion a year. I'm willing to bet that within this century, our engineers, architects, scientists, if you put a level of funding of a trillion dollars a year for the next several decades, we will come up with a concept that can accommodate humans in space much better than Mars can.

Joe Rogan: I want to get back to Mars because the structures on Mars, why would you think that they came from space debris rather than a prior civilization?

Avi Loeb: Because Mars—

Joe Rogan: Let's take a look at it first. Jamie, will you pull up those images? [To Jamie] So what's fascinating about the images is the right angles, right? Like that one, yeah, that's good. Like that's kind of crazy, isn't it?

Avi Loeb: It is.

Joe Rogan: And that doesn't strike me as something that landed there from space. It looks like a structure. It's just too even.

Avi Loeb: Yeah. Well, it could be. It could be if the evolution of intelligence on Mars was accelerated by a factor of two. That's not a big factor, factor of two.

Joe Rogan: Right. Meaning that intelligence arose on Mars two billion years after it formed, rather than in the case of the Earth, 4.5 or so.

Avi Loeb: Right. One thing I really want to do is if I ever have a say or go to Mars, I would like to visit those caves, the lava tubes in Mars, because they are protected from the surface bombardment by cosmic rays and all kinds of things, the ultraviolet radiation. In those caves, I want to check if there are any prehistoric paintings or any technological objects there.

I completely agree with you. A factor of two is not a big deal. You can also ask whether on Earth there was a sophisticated technological civilization before us that somehow, either through self-inflicted wounds or because of a natural catastrophe, disappeared.

Joe Rogan: There's a lot of people that think that, especially now that they're looking at the pyramids and these structures that appear to be underneath the pyramids that they're examining. Those Italian scientists that have found these structures that are up to two kilometers deep.

Avi Loeb: Right. There's some wild stuff in Egypt. Well, I want to see that data. I haven't seen the paper itself. I just saw reports about it. But definitely on Earth as well. The problem of Earth is that documented human history is only 8,000 years old. 8,000 years is just a millionth of the age of the Milky Way galaxy. It's nothing.

Joe Rogan: Are you including things like Gobekli Tepe in that? Because that's 11,000 plus.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, but it's not really documented in written form.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Avi Loeb: So I'm talking about... Yeah. But you are correct that our knowledge of what happened on Earth is really limited because the human species existed for a few million years. We have documentation at the level of 10,000 years. If you go back to that, it would be 11,000. Not a lot.

Joe Rogan: Not much. Well, the issue is actual evidence, right?

Avi Loeb: Right.

Joe Rogan: There's just not a lot of evidence because a lot of evidence just gets swallowed by the Earth.

Avi Loeb: Exactly. Especially over long periods of time, which is why it's so fascinating looking at that thing on Mars. If there was any kind of life that was capable of building structures on Mars, it had to be a long time ago.

Joe Rogan: Like, when was Mars—there's a bunch of theories. Maybe you could help me. What do you think is the predominant theory that explains the lack of atmosphere on Mars? Do you think it was an impact?

Avi Loeb: No. Mars is a less massive planet than the Earth, and therefore it has less gravitational grip on its atmosphere. As to why the atmosphere was lost, there are various ideas. It may have to do with an eruption on the sun that removed it, or the lack of a strong enough magnetic field to retain the atmosphere. We don't know for sure, but we know it happened about two to two and a half billion years ago, at the middle of its life.

Joe Rogan: Can I ask you this? At two and a half billion years, was it closer to the sun?

Avi Loeb: No, no, no. It was roughly at the same place.

Joe Rogan: Exactly the same distance?

Avi Loeb: Yeah. And then two and a half billion years ago, it lost its atmosphere.

Joe Rogan: So if it did have life, that life would have to—we would have to be looking at something that's literally two plus billion years old.

Avi Loeb: Yes. Remnants of a structure, which also seems kind of unlikely.

Joe Rogan: Right. It also seems like there probably wouldn't be much there.

Avi Loeb: I actually did a calculation. The biggest risk for anything on the surface is all these impacts by asteroids and micrometeors, everything, because there's nothing stopping it.

Joe Rogan: That's right.

Avi Loeb: I calculated the amount of energy over a few billion years that was deposited on the surface of Mars. It's equivalent to hundreds of Hiroshima-type nuclear explosions per square kilometer. It's really huge because you're integrating over billions of years.

Joe Rogan: So that square probably wouldn't be there anymore.

Avi Loeb: Well, there could be some relics that somehow stick. It depends what it was originally. If the Empire State Building was enormous and made completely out of stone like the pyramids, maybe that's what would be left of it. I think we should be definitely open-minded and guided by evidence. That's the key.

Joe Rogan: Well, that's what's interesting, because that is evidence. We should go there, clear the dust, and see if it's just a rock that happened to be shaped like that.

Avi Loeb: Let's bring it back to this. Is it 3I Atlas?

Joe Rogan: No, 3I Atlas. 3I Atlas. So 3 means it's the third object identified by survey telescopes. Over the past eight years, we didn't have the technology before that. And so we just don't know how much traffic there is of interstellar objects.

Avi Loeb: Right, we missed a lot. So we had the first survey telescope that found Oumuamua was Pan-STARRS in Hawaii. The reason it was constructed is because the U.S. Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to Earth. These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on Earth. We want to protect the Earth, so we want to know about them. They asked NASA and the National Science Foundation to build observatories that will search for such objects. That's why Pan-STARRS was established. It saw a near-Earth object, so they flagged it for that reason, and they realized it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun, and that was Oumuamua. And then it looked weird.

Joe Rogan: Now, I had no agenda. I was working on cosmology. At the time, I was working on black holes. I was the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, and Stephen Hawking had Passover at my home in 2016. This object was discovered a year later. I said, okay, that's interesting, but it has anomalies. The amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10 as it's tumbling. That's really strange. I started getting more and more into the anomalies.

Avi Loeb: So you had no previous connection to the UAP phenomenon?

Joe Rogan: No, zero.

Avi Loeb: So you're just basing entirely on the data?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. How do you say it? Oumuamua?

Avi Loeb: Oumuamua.

Joe Rogan: Oumuamua. I am driven by curiosity. I'm no different than the kid that I was. I grew up on a farm and people who knew me back then say I didn't change. I'm not willing to change what I say just for political benefit or to be liked. I don't have any social media accounts. I don't care about that.

Avi Loeb: Thank God.

Joe Rogan: Well, it's thanks to my wife, not God. My wife said I should not have any footprint. She's really wise. That was more than a decade ago. She spotted the problem real early.

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Joe Rogan: And now with AI, we're talking about social media on steroids. It's really bad. The main problem with AI that I see is not so much that they will bring calamity on their own, but that they will drive people to do crazy stuff. They will manipulate the human mind in ways that will make us the robots. It will control the minds of people in a way that will create a lot of damage. We see that already with AI using bots on social media. Nobody is attending to that. The question is, how do we suppress the amazing polarization we see in society where bullets are being shot? I really worry about it. Humans may actually bring their own doom by self-inflicted wounds because AI manipulates their mind.

Avi Loeb: I think you're right. I think people need to stop using it. I really do. I'm not using AI at all.

Joe Rogan: I treat it like a glass of wine. Don't drink wine all day. I'm working with students. Every now and then, a student delivers a paper to me to look at. I realize some of the references do not exist because I know the literature. I ask the student, what is this? I've never heard about this paper. The student says, oh, sorry. It turns out the AI just took names of authors and faked a reference. The same thing within the paper itself. There are statements that are clearly because the student was using AI. I'm really worried about that because young people are not reading. They don't read history. So they go to protests that make no sense. People say, oh, that is always the youthful thing to do. But no, this one is triggered by misinformation. And it's organized.

Avi Loeb: And it's organized, exactly. They don't go to primary sources to figure out the truth. They don't have critical thinking. I really feel that this is a big risk because AI is getting more intelligent but humans that use AI are getting dumber.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Avi Loeb: They don't think. So I think AI will supersede the cognitive abilities of humans sooner than expected because humans are getting dumber.

Joe Rogan: I don't think people are necessarily getting dumber, but I think they're getting lazy because of this. I think the human capacity is exactly the same. They need to be taught how to use it. I get a lot of emails saying, I collaborated with my favorite AI app, and here is what it said. I think we need to teach people how to use it because it's a new thing. That's where a lot of the problem comes from, that people are using it as a substitution for learning. You can learn from it, but you've got to use it in that way.

Avi Loeb: There are two existential risks in our future. One is artificial intelligence, AI. The second one is alien intelligence, also AI. The question is, which one would arrive first?

Joe Rogan: Let's go back to Oumuamua.

Avi Loeb: Oumuamua.

Joe Rogan: Okay, I don't want to screw it up. How large was that?

Avi Loeb: That was the size of a football field. About 100 meters.

Joe Rogan: Small in comparison to 3I Atlas.

Avi Loeb: Oh, yeah. That's my point. 3I Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Oumuamua. As it was discovered on July 1st, my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba two days later. As I was on the plane and arrived there, I realized, wait, that doesn't make sense because we should have seen millions of Oumuamua before we saw this one. It's so big. I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade. In the most optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometers in diameter, you would expect it once per 10,000 years. I wrote immediately a scientific paper. My wife was not happy that on our vacation I was sitting on my computer, but I just couldn't resist it. I submitted it for publication on July 3rd or something. The editor said, the paper is fine, but you have a concluding sentence at the end where you say, well, unless the object is smaller than estimated, maybe it was targeting the inner solar system. That was my solution to say, one way out of this dilemma of why it's so big is if it was targeting the inner solar system by design. The trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within five degrees. The chance for that at random is one in 500. It's moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini probes that will get into the planets. It gets close to Mars. It gets close to Jupiter. It goes on the opposite side of the sun relative to Earth when it's closest to the sun. That's the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the sun's gravitational assist. All of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory. I had one sentence at the end of the paper saying maybe the trajectory was designed. The editor said, no, no, no, the paper will not get published unless you remove that sentence.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

Avi Loeb: So now when you listen to comet experts that say, well, this claim or that claim was never published in a peer review journal, guess what? They are the editors or the reviewers who are blocking the discussion on possibilities. I think it's inappropriate, especially in the case of alien technology, because it could be a black swan event. It could be something that affects the future of humanity. If we behave very conservatively, we might not last very long.

Joe Rogan: It's also arrogant.

Avi Loeb: It's arrogant. This object shows that there's no iron.

Joe Rogan: So this is before you knew about the composition that you wrote this paper.

Avi Loeb: Exactly. As time goes on, I am being shown to be correct. We found more anomalies. This is not a normal thing. For one thing, there was a glow that looks like an extended feature. Everyone said, oh, that's a tail. That's the signature of a comet. I said, wait a minute. It's pointing towards the sun. It's not pointing away from the sun. Usually cometary tails are made of dust and gas which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind. This one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun. The question is, why? I calculated that it appeared very clearly in the sharpest image we had from the Hubble Space Telescope, which showed an elongation by a factor of two towards the sun. We were looking at it like a cigar, almost along the cigar long axis within 10 degrees of the object's sun axis. So we were looking almost edge on. I calculated if you were to correct for that, this would be a feature that is 10 times longer than it is wide. That means it's like a jet. The object had a jet in front of it towards the sun. The question is why? The comet experts ignored it and just said, well, comets are strange. Who knows? But my point is, this is a blind date of interstellar proportions. My advice on blind dates is not to speak or say what you think this is, but to observe the other side. The best way to respond to a blind date is to observe the other side, don't speak, just observe, because it may be different than what you think. On one of the dates, you will have a serial killer on the other side.

Joe Rogan: Oh, boy. Now, explain how we know the composition of this thing.

Avi Loeb: We can figure out composition of a plume of gas by taking a spectrum of it. You basically have a prism that breaks the light with different wavelengths bent at different angles. You spread the light into the different colors. If you do that, you can find the fingerprints, the spectral fingerprints of specific atoms or molecules because each atom or molecule has transitions. I taught this just two days ago in a class that is mandatory at the Harvard Astronomy Department where I was chair for a decade, between 2011 and 2020. This is the mandatory class and I just taught how spectral lines emitted by atoms and molecules work. This is a very well-known thing. We know the wavelengths of those, and we use them to identify the composition. We know which atoms produce these spectral lines, the fingerprints. It's just like fingerprints. What was found, by multiple teams, there are three papers on this, we found nickel, a lot of nickel, but very little iron. At first, no iron whatsoever. In all the comets in the past from the solar system and also from interstellar space, there is one comet, Borisov, that was found. It's the second interstellar object, which looked just like a familiar comet. I had nothing to say about that one. It looked like a comet, behaved like a comet. It was a comet, but it had similar abundances of nickel and iron. The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially. For example, for aerospace applications, nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron. Maybe the skin of this object is industrially produced. That was my suggestion. But the authors of these papers said, maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries. They made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway, which is well known in the industry world, happens in nature. We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.

Joe Rogan: Is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy?

Avi Loeb: No, it's not an alloy. It's just that somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed. Nobody would argue that you could separate nickel from iron because they are produced together in exploding stars. In fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 times more by mass. We just don't know. As in the case of this jet that I was mentioning, which recently turned into a tail over the month of September. Also, why it was changing structure is not clear. There are lots of anomalies. There was also a very negative polarization of the light. Two weeks ago, I realized the arrival direction of 3I Atlas was within nine degrees of the Wow signal that was detected in 1977, which was an enigmatic, powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this Earth. We don't know from where. It was coming from a source that was approaching the sun. The chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of 3I Atlas is 0.6%. I said, well, that's interesting, because 3I Atlas was at the distance of three light days from the Earth at that time. You just need about the output of a nuclear reactor on Earth, a gigawatt or so, to produce such a radio signal. By the way, Voyager, as of now, is one light day away from Earth. Just think about it. One light day, the farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away. The size of the Milky Way galaxy is tens of thousands of light years. One day out of tens of thousands of years. That's the difference between the distance that we managed to breach so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard.

Joe Rogan: Have we ever observed things in the past that have changed their tail like this? From a fake jet to a tail.

Avi Loeb: This is called an anti-tail when it's pointing towards the sun. There were optical illusions in a situation where there is a tail which is pushed away from the sun by radiation and solar wind, but you're observing it as the Earth goes through the orbital plane of this object, of this comet, and you're seeing it from a perspective that looks as if the tail is pointed at the sun. It's an optical illusion. There were cases like that. But as far as I know, none seen in a situation where it's clear. In 3I Atlas, it was very far from the sun and Earth, and we saw it towards the sun. There cannot be an optical illusion under these circumstances because it was approaching both the Earth and the sun roughly at the same direction. I'm not aware of another. Most importantly, you should look at the response of the comet expert community to that anomaly. They say, well, comets are strange. We don't know. Maybe these are dust particles that are very big, so they don't get pushed back much. But then how do you scatter sunlight? Usually you need particles that have a size of the order of the wavelength of the light that is being scattered. That's the most efficient process. When you have dust particles, the ones that have sub-micrometer dimensions are dominating the scattering of sunlight. So why in this case would you have only big ones that are not getting pushed back? It could be fragments of ice that are scattering the sunlight that have nothing to do with dust, but those fragments of ice get evaporated, so they don't have enough time to turn back. I wrote two papers on that, trying to explain it. But my point is, many scientists are not curious. You would find it surprising.

Joe Rogan: Why are they not curious? Why are they not willing to consider alternative explanations to what is commonly thought?

Avi Loeb: Because they're afraid of taking any risk. I came from a background where I worked in cosmology, trying to figure out puzzles. Most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't know what it is. We call it dark matter. It's just to reflect our ignorance. Nobel prizes were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is. These are constituents whose nature is unknown. Just think about it, giving a Nobel prize to people who just said how ignorant we are. We don't know what these things are. Ordinary matter makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe. In the culture of cosmology I worked in for three decades, it was completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies. Dark matter is an anomaly. You don't know what it is. People were rewarded for coming up with imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally. That's the way you make progress. You don't know something. You put on the table possibilities, and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one. That was the culture. I think of it as the culture of chess players. When I get to work on comets, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology, I encounter a culture of mud wrestlers. It's different from chess players.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Avi Loeb: I don't want to mud wrestle. I don't want to get dirty. I don't respond to that. I learned my lesson with Oumuamua. I don't respond to those people because once we collect enough evidence, they will not be able to shove the anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking. That's my motivation. I'm inspiring a debate right now, and there is a huge interest in that debate, so that we will collect as much data as possible so that by the end of the day, we'll figure out what our dating partner is. If it happens to be a rock on the other side of the table, so be it. If it's something else, that has huge implications. We should consider that possibility seriously and just collect as much data as possible.

Joe Rogan: What is it about your field in particular that you think motivates mudslinging? Why are they averse to risk and why are they attacking you for proposing what seems to me to be a reasonable alternative, considering the possibilities given all the planets and stars that we know are out there?

Avi Loeb: I got a hint for the answer to your question. When I wrote the first paper on Oumuamua, I suggested it might be technological. The paper got accepted for publication within three days, a record. The reviewer said, this is a great idea because it's consistent with all the data we have. It's most likely a flat object, and therefore it could be pushed by reflecting sunlight, which was my proposal. Then the media came to my door and people started asking me a lot of questions. I got well known. At that point, the personal attacks started.

Joe Rogan: So it's jealousy.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, it's jealousy. I can tell you that I learned my lesson. You can't respond. I just ignore it. Let me give you a few anecdotes of what happened to me this week, just this week.

Joe Rogan: Okay, please.

Avi Loeb: Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go to California. There is a NASCAR car race where one of the racers decided to put my image with 3I Atlas with the Galileo project that I'm leading on his car. Let me show you some images.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, show me the image. What is the current best image of 3I Atlas?

Avi Loeb: We will get to that. Here you see the car. He promised to let me drive it just before the race.

Joe Rogan: Who is this guy?

Avi Loeb: Kevin Harvick? No, Kevin Harvick is the name of the... The driver's name is Alex Malik.

Joe Rogan: Alex Malik. He contacted me out of the blue.

Avi Loeb: So he's just a big fan?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, he's just a big fan.

Avi Loeb: That's cool. Pretty smart of him, right? That's definitely going to get you a lot of attention.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, so he just sent it to me this morning. This is in the shop where they put all these things on it. Tomorrow I'm going to drive it.

Avi Loeb: What is Comet Lemon in the back?

Joe Rogan: Oh, that's just another comet. So he's like a comet fan, this guy. By the way, I told him that the fastest moving race car is 600 times slower than 3I Atlas. 600 times. So it's a compliment to me to be featured on his car, but 3I Atlas doesn't care much because it's already moving 600 times faster than his car can move.

Avi Loeb: That is cool though.

Joe Rogan: So this is tomorrow. That image though, that's you with a spinning world, right? That's the globe. And my name, so the car is called Avi Loeb now.

Avi Loeb: Nice.

Joe Rogan: Can we move to the next image? I'll show you another. You're very excited about this.

Avi Loeb: I like it.

Joe Rogan: This is an image taken two days ago in my office at Harvard. I was contacted out of the blue by an artist, a very distinguished artist named Greg Wyatt in New York City, who donated two sculptures made of bronze of Galileo. You see them in the front. They were delivered to my office just a few days ago. In the background, you see watercolors that he made. There are 51 of them that he donated. All of this he donated to me at no cost. He wants it to be displayed in my office because these watercolors display famous scientists that pioneered new frontiers. He includes a statement from each of these scientists, which are really educational for the students and postdocs that work with me. I should tell you, I got an email from a U.S. Air Force pilot. His daughter, Ariana, said to him, because of you, my daughter wants to become a scientist now. She saw you on television and now she only speaks about aliens. Two days later, I speak with a reporter from the London Times. He puts out his report and says, I read the report for half an hour to my kids and they told me they want to become scientists. There are two things that are missed by my colleagues. One, it's an opportunity to excite the kids to get into science. That's amazing. When we discovered the Higgs boson, it was an important confirmation of an idea that came in the 60s. The Nobel Prize was awarded, but I bet you that the daughter, Ariana, would not be inspired to become a scientist because it's very abstract. Here, there is a connection. The second thing is, here is a subject that the public cares about and the public funds science, so we should attend to that. It's our obligation as scientists. Since I started science, which was by chance, by the way, I always wanted to become a philosopher, but circumstances led me because I led a project that was funded by the Star Wars Initiative of President Reagan. It was the first international project. That brought me into astrophysics because I was offered a position at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein was a faculty a few decades earlier. It was an arranged marriage. But I felt that even though it's an arranged marriage, I'm married to my true love because I can address philosophical questions using the scientific method. I recognize things that my colleagues do not because I'm different.

Joe Rogan: You're willing to take chances. It's not just that. You're willing to propose things that might be ridiculed.

Avi Loeb: I think about the big picture. One thing I mentioned in my book, Extraterrestrial, is on the first day of school, I showed up to the class and I saw the kids jumping up and down on the tables in the classroom. I looked at them and said, does it really make sense to jump up and down? What are they trying to accomplish by doing that? The teacher came in and looked at everyone jumping and said, quiet down. Look at Avi. He's so well behaved. You should all behave like him. I wanted to tell her I'm not well behaved. That was not the reason why I didn't jump up and down. I was just trying to figure out why they are jumping up and down. If it made sense, I would jump up and down. I don't care about your rules. That pretty much defines me. I'm thinking about the big picture. If my colleagues are doing something that doesn't make sense, I don't give a damn.

Joe Rogan: Once the understanding of the composition of 3I Atlas was out and people recognized that this is a very unusual object, have more people started to consider what you're saying?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I get a lot of people sending me...

Joe Rogan: In the academic world?

Avi Loeb: Also in the academic world. Those are people that say, we are inspired by what you're doing. They keep sending me emails saying, keep doing it. It's an inspiration to all of us. But this is privately.

Joe Rogan: Privately. Has anybody publicly supported you?

Avi Loeb: The young people, you have to understand. The biggest damage of this harassment or scrutiny or ridicule or personal attacks—I don't care about it. My skin is by now titanium. I don't really feel much. The issue is that the purpose of these attacks is to discourage others, young people, from deviating from the beaten path. They keep the herd in a tight configuration. The risk from that is, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics half a century ago—by the way, I lived throughout half of modern physics, roughly—was that there is a symmetry of nature called supersymmetry and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry because it's stable. Everyone said that must be right. Lots of castles were built on this foundation, including string theory that assumed this to be true. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built for $10 billion, searched for supersymmetry and didn't find it. What is the lesson? It was a beautiful idea, and sometimes nature is not what we think it is. We should not ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes. A lot of money and effort went to that. There are thousands of papers basing their analysis or mathematical constructions on supersymmetry. A lot of people are unwilling to abandon that as well.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Avi Loeb: The point is, if you allow people to follow not just the beaten path, but other paths, you have a better chance of discovering something new. Einstein made three mistakes between 1935 and 1940. He said black holes probably do not exist. He said gravitational waves probably do not exist. And he said quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. All three received Nobel Prizes for the teams that proved him wrong. Those are Nobel Prizes from the past decade. Three teams doing different types of experiments and observations. But was Einstein wrong to make assumptions or claims that turned out to be wrong?

Avi Loeb: No, because that's the nature of working at the frontier. You make mistakes. Every now and then, you might be right and that will be a breakthrough. But you cannot have breakthroughs without taking risks.

The whole idea of tenure in academia was based on the proposition that you want people to take risks so they don't have job insecurity and don't worry about that. So what these zealots, I call them, say is, we don't want people to deviate from the beaten path because we base our stature, our honors, awards and so forth on past knowledge. We don't want new knowledge unless it's proven beyond any doubt. But how would it be proven if you keep ridiculing anything different?

Most of the scientific community thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky. Then in 1803, there was a meteor shower in Liege, and a French physicist realized it's real. There are rocks falling from the sky. Now all my colleagues say there could be only rocks in the sky. We launched some spacecraft, but we're probably alone. It doesn't make sense.

Let me mention a few other anecdotes from the past week because I didn't really finish. Jamie, can you show the next one? This one is about the Sphere in Las Vegas. As you know, it's the most impressive venue for entertainment in the world. Have you been there? Have you seen a show there?

Joe Rogan: Not only have I been, I've been to the top of the sphere, which is like 120 meters high.

Avi Loeb: Here you see me from inside the sphere. This is the exosphere, by the way. It's covered with LED displays. We went all the way to the top. Why? Because a year ago, two very distinguished visitors came to the front door of my home. Lots of interesting people show up at my front door. This was Jim Dolan, who owns Madison Square Garden and the Sphere, and Jane Rosenthal, the CEO of Tribeca Enterprises. They made me an offer that I cannot refuse. They said, would you be able to put a Galileo Project observatory on top of the sphere?

I'm leading the Galileo Project to look for unusual objects around the Earth. Jim Dolan is really interested in science, especially in finding out whether there is some alien intelligence out there. I said of course I will be delighted. That was September 2024, one year after the sphere was opened with a U2 concert.

Joe Rogan: I've been there for the UFC.

Avi Loeb: Exactly. I was there just a few months ago with my research team. We went all the way to the top and installed an array of infrared cameras that monitors the entire sky above Vegas at all times. You can see some of these images show the landscape of Vegas in the background. It's like a freckle on top of the sphere, the exosphere, which is the biggest display on Earth. We measured that there is not much light pollution, and we can operate this observatory. We also put an array of visible light cameras there, and it's operating. We hope to see a few million objects over the sky of Vegas and decide whether any of them has performance that deviates from the envelope of human-made technologies.

How do we do that? We have the sphere as one point, but then we put two copies of that observatory 10 kilometers away on a triangle. That allows us to look at objects in the sky from different directions, just like we have two eyes so we can gauge the distance. Here we have three eyes looking at the sky above Vegas. We can tell the distance, the velocity, the acceleration of objects and ask whether they are lying within the performance envelopes of human-made objects. That would be amazing. It's very exciting.

I see this as an opportunity to communicate to the public the excitement about science. That's what Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal really wanted to deliver. I'm hoping that we will find something really anomalous. As we know, the intelligence agencies are reporting to the US Congress about objects they cannot identify. That could be two things. The defense budget for 2026 is a trillion dollars. If they tell us that with a trillion dollars, there are still objects they cannot identify above the US, they're not doing their job. We should be worried who sent these objects. Could it be adversarial nations? That's one possibility, which has to do with national security.

The second possibility is that it's maybe something from outside of this earth, which would be even more significant. Either way, we need to figure this out. I don't think I'm wasting my time leading the Galileo Project to figure out whether there are anomalies that go beyond human-made technologies. If it turns out that all the objects are human-made, I will be happy to deliver the set of sensors we developed with the machine learning software to the Department of War so that they can employ it for national security purposes. My time was not wasted as a scientist. I'm doing something useful to society.

Everything made by humans is boring as far as I'm concerned. I want to see something from outside the solar system, which is not what the government should be about. The government should worry about national security, not about what lies outside the solar system. That's my job definition as an astrophysicist.

The Galileo Project is really the first organized project that constructed a reliable set of sensors in an observatory configuration that does systematic study of the sky to collect millions of objects per year. We have three observatories: one in Las Vegas, as I mentioned. By the way, this is the first time it's mentioned publicly. Another one in Massachusetts and a third one in Pennsylvania. They were all funded by people who approached me and said, here is the money.

Joe Rogan: Let me ask you this. If it wasn't for those, how many observatories are looking for objects that are not from this earth? Is that very rare? None?

Avi Loeb: Well, there are some teams that are doing it, making a trip to collect some data. But there's not constant observation of scientific quality data. No.

Joe Rogan: That's crazy.

Avi Loeb: That's what I'm saying. By the way, I gave a briefing to the U.S. Congress on May 1st, 2025, and Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was there. She was very excited about the work we were doing. But the day before that, I visited an office in the Pentagon called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. I asked them, you looked into all these unidentified objects reported in the past by military personnel. Did anything trigger your attention as something truly anomalous? They said, not really. There are some reports by FBI agents that saw really crazy stuff, but we don't have any data from instruments.

This is an office within the Pentagon which is funded to figure out things. Obviously what they might want to do is imitate the Galileo Project that I'm leading.

Joe Rogan: You would think that it would be the vested interest of government to invest in research related to that, which is what the Galileo Project is doing. I would have thought it was already done. Until we're having this conversation, I can't believe that they're not monitoring the sky constantly for anomalous objects.

Avi Loeb: Well, you remember the Chinese spy balloon that was missed and shot down?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, but that was silly.

Avi Loeb: The thing to keep in mind is they are getting data on things in the sky. But if you don't have the right software with AI, if you don't have high quality scientists the way the Manhattan Project employed, you might not figure things out. There is a reason why the Manhattan Project recruited the very best scientists. I say, put a billion dollars on this or more, bring in the best scientists in the world to figure it out. I'm funded at the level of millions of dollars through the Galileo Project. The government can do a bit. What is a billion dollars? It's a drop in the bucket for the Pentagon. You should think about the potential risk from drones used by adversarial nations. You want to have the very best sensors using the very best AI.

Joe Rogan: I just can't believe that's not already being done. That's what's so confusing. I would have thought there was some very sophisticated monitoring of the skies already. Especially when you take in all these anecdotal stories of people spotting some sort of a ship, something that moves in a very strange way. I would think they're monitoring this stuff all the time, not just with radar.

Avi Loeb: There is an approach which is to wait for the government to figure things out or to at least declassify them. A lot of people want the government to declassify. I think it's just like waiting for Godot.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Avi Loeb: It will never happen. I say, we don't need the government to tell us what is up there in the sky because astronomy is all about that. We can build observatories, look at the sky. Anything that is human made is not of interest to me. It's boring. I just want to see if there is anything that...

Joe Rogan: Well, it's boring up to a point. If China has something that moves at Mach 30 and can go underwater, things get very interesting.

Avi Loeb: My methodology should definitely be used by the Department of War to figure out risks of the nature that you mentioned. Speaking about my colleagues, there are people who said, "Oh, you're doing it to win the Nobel Prize" or "You're trying to sell books." I don't charge a penny for my essays on Medium. Money is not at all what motivates me. With respect to the Nobel Committee, I have the same attitude as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bob Dylan had. If I find evidence for alien intelligence, alien technology, I would not waste my time in a tuxedo in Stockholm. I will try to figure it out. That's much more important than an award given by a human to a human.

We're dealing with something really consequential. For the scientific community to ignore that is irresponsible. Why is it irresponsible? Because it could affect the future of humanity.

Joe Rogan: I think the problem with the scientific community is the problem with all communities. They're overrun with ego.

Avi Loeb: I agree.

Joe Rogan: As I explained at the beginning, it's just human beings when they get to a position of any kind of authority, any sort of position of respect and prestige. They want to protect that at all costs. They want to keep everyone down who they think is getting unwarranted attention above them, like yourself.

Avi Loeb: Given the fundamental landscape that we live in, as I mentioned at the beginning, we live for a short time. We're not at the center of the universe. We arrived late to cosmic history. We just arrived in the last few million years out of a 13.8 billion year history. The cosmic play is not about us. If you arrive late to the play, at the end of the play, you are not at the center of stage. It's not about you. Our responsibility needs to be to find other actors that were around for much longer because they know what the play is about.

Joe Rogan: Let me ask you this. Have you seen any compelling information, any data that leads you to believe that we have been visited?

Avi Loeb: The only data I'm aware of that is worth attending to is the anomalies of Oumuamua, of 3I Atlas, which are very different anomalies. There was also a meteor that I discovered with my former undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, a meteor that was identified by U.S. government satellites back in 2014. It was moving so fast that it definitely came from outside the solar system. My colleagues were very concerned and they said, "We don't believe the U.S. government." So maybe Jamie can show us. I said, okay. At the time, I was chairing the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies.

Joe Rogan: Why didn't they believe the U.S. government about this?

Avi Loeb: Because all the previous meteors they thought must have been from the solar system. The U.S. government also makes mistakes every now and then, they said.

Joe Rogan: The U.S. government, what department was observing this?

Avi Loeb: This is the Space Force, the U.S. Space Command. What I did is at dinner... What year was this? This was around 2020. I expressed my frustration at dinner as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. There was a member there from Los Alamos National Laboratory. He said, "Let me help you." We managed to reach out to the U.S. Space Command through the White House at the time. We got an official letter from the U.S. Space Command saying, "We looked at the data and we can verify with 99.999% certainty that this object, this meteor which was roughly half a meter in size, came from outside the solar system."

At that point, I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean, where the explosion was identified from the fireball. There was a huge amount of light. To go there and search for the materials from that object, because it was moving fast. It was moving at 60 kilometers per second relative to the solar system. Very similar to 3I Atlas. Moreover, the object maintained its integrity down to the lower atmosphere. It didn't explode until it got within 20 kilometers of the surface of the ocean. It must have been extremely tough, much tougher than all the previous meteors cataloged by NASA.

I can show you some images from that trip to the Pacific Ocean. It was documented by Netflix and there will be a documentary coming out within a year, 2026. This was the team of researchers that came with me on the deck of the ship. We collected materials with a magnetic sled. This is a sled with magnets on top of it. You can see the Netflix team at the lower left here. I brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here. I shipped it by FedEx to my home. This was a million dollar expedition.

Joe Rogan: Why would you ship it by FedEx? Why wouldn't you just carry it with you?

Avi Loeb: Because I was worried that somewhere in the airport they would say, "No, we have to confiscate that."

Joe Rogan: Don't they know who you are? Can't you get somebody to call in?

Avi Loeb: I don't want to take any risk.

Joe Rogan: So it's just a bunch of metal?

Avi Loeb: No, it's here. You can see the material. It's mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean, two kilometers deep. Then we found these molten droplets, you see, that are very distinct relative to grains of sand. We isolated them. You can see here these molten droplets. It turns out that 10% of them did not have the composition of materials from the solar system. We studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson. I had a summer intern, Sophie Bergstrom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis.

How did my colleagues respond to that? They said, "Oh, he went to the wrong place because there was a seismic signal that could have been misidentified and could have been a truck passing nearby." A reporter from the New York Times said, "Oh, they went to the wrong place because it was not a meteor, it was a truck." I wrote to the reporter and I said, "How irresponsible are you? You didn't even ask me. The data that led us to this place was based on the fireball, on the light that was detected by U.S. government satellites. The U.S. Space Command confirmed the location. It was not based on the seismic detection of the signal."

Joe Rogan: It seems like your colleagues are contacting the New York Times to try to dismiss you.

Avi Loeb: I wrote to the editor at the time and said, "If this is what you write about science, how can we trust what you write about politics?"

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Avi Loeb: These objects, these very small molten droplets. We found that 10% of them had a chemical composition different than solar system materials that were found before. Again, my colleagues, some of them said, "Oh, they found coal ash, the burnt material from coal." We said okay, let's check. We identified 61 elements from the periodic table and showed that it is definitely not coal ash. Then they said it's something else from the crust of the earth. We checked that. It's not from the crust of the earth. It's an endless battle. They can throw mud without having access to the material.

Joe Rogan: This is a known meteorite. It hit earth. You collected pieces of material from the scene where it hit. And they still want to dismiss it.

Avi Loeb: They say the government cannot be trusted. They raise a lot of dust. If you raise a lot of dust, you can say, "I don't see anything."

Joe Rogan: You get the New York Times involved, too, which is even stupider. That's so crazy that the New York Times jumped in without contacting you.

Avi Loeb: This is the landscape I have to operate in. The one thread through this landscape is that common sense is not common.

Joe Rogan: It seems more than that. It seems like a coordinated attack. It seems like a bunch of people have a personal vendetta.

Avi Loeb: Yes. Which is probably based on some petty jealousy. They just don't like people stepping ahead of them. I told my students in the first class, "What is the strongest force in academia? It's not gravity. It's not electromagnetism. It's jealousy."

Joe Rogan: I would hope it's curiosity.

Avi Loeb: That's what sucks. That's what brought me into science.

Joe Rogan: That's what you display.

Avi Loeb: I'm naive. I don't change my reason for doing something just because other people misbehave. I feel like I'm attending a party where the attendees are misbehaving, and all I can hope for is for a guest to show up and change the situation. One reason I'm seeking intelligence in interstellar space is I don't often find it in academia.

Joe Rogan: I think addressing it helps. I think what you're doing helps. I think these kind of conversations do help because I don't think a lot of people are aware of the kind of resistance that you face. I know it's a lot of what you discuss, and I wish it was less. But it's important for people to know that you have to go through this kind of nonsense. Especially when you think this object, 3I Atlas, is weird.

Avi Loeb: I served in the Israeli military. We parachuted, we drove tanks. I was in a special unit that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24. Then the SDI, the Star Wars Initiative, President Reagan brought me to the US. I remember while serving in the paratroopers that there was a saying: sometimes you have to put your body on the barbed wire so that your friends, colleagues, soldiers can cross.

Joe Rogan: Climb over your back.

Avi Loeb: Yes. As long as I allow young people to innovate, as long as I attract kids to science, I did my job. It's not about me. It's about humanity getting better. It will not get better with AI, as we discussed. It could get better with alien intelligence because we will realize that there is something else out there that is more accomplished than we are. It will serve as a role model.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche said, "God is dead." Since then, we had a century of modern science and technology where we feel hubris. We are arrogant. We are at the top of the food chain. We go to restaurants, we eat other animals that are less intelligent than we are. But just think about it. If it turns out that we are not at the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy, there is someone more intelligent than us. If that someone comes to visit Earth, will we be served in their soup?

Joe Rogan: I wouldn't think so. I would think there's plenty of other things to eat that aren't intelligent. That's sort of the deal that we make here. We eat things, but we try not to eat intelligent things, which is not entirely true because we eat a lot of octopus.

Avi Loeb: I had this dilemma in Boston. Octopus is quite intelligent.

Joe Rogan: There's a lot of people in indigenous tribes that really prefer monkey meat. Those are human beings that love to eat monkeys. That gets a little weird, too. But I don't think they're going to travel all the way over here to eat people. If we were that delicious, we would be eating each other a lot more often.

Avi Loeb: It's a situation where we are just like ants in the cracks of a pavement and there is a biker passing by and we are trying to make sounds to get attention. We think it's about us. It's always about us, according to us. But it's not about us.

Joe Rogan: It's not about us cosmically when you take into consideration the vast spans of the universe. But if I was an intelligent species and my curiosity led me to explore other intelligent species and they were far more advanced than us, I think they would find this quite fascinating. That was the argument that I got into with Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he was like, "I don't think we're that interesting."

Avi Loeb: You have to keep in mind, he's not a practicing astrophysicist. He's not writing scientific papers. I write a paper almost every week. I'm in the trenches doing science. It's very different. It's like you have soccer players and you have commentators on the bench. You can be a commentator, popularize science. But the difference is that as a commentator, you will never score a goal.

Joe Rogan: That's my position as a UFC commentator. I don't get in there and fight people. I understand the fighting. I can do my best to help explain it to people, but I don't do it.

Avi Loeb: A few months ago, I was at a gathering and there was a cocktail hour with celebrities. I saw Margot Robbie standing. I had nothing to offer. What kind of opening line would I start a conversation with? I didn't know how to start a conversation. I was just standing on the side. Then someone came with my book, "Interstellar," and said, "Would you mind signing it for me?" I signed the book and she noticed it. She came over and said, "Are you Avi Loeb? I really wanted to hear more about what you're doing." We started a conversation for 20 minutes.

Then I gave my talk and Jerry Bruckheimer was in the audience. He came afterwards and said, "I just finished F1, the movie. My next one is about a scientist like you searching for UAPs and trying to figure them out." Then I saw Adrian Brody standing there and he told me, "I really want to become a scientist. I always wanted to become a scientist." I said, "It's not too late." Then I went to Jerry and said, "He should be your leading actor because Adrian really wanted to become a scientist."

Joe Rogan: Look at you making casting calls. Figuring it out for them.

Avi Loeb: Science fiction is one of the most popular genres of films because everybody has curiosity about it. But nature might be much more imaginative than the best script writers in Hollywood. Very likely. If we look up, we might get a much better movie.

There is the Rubin Observatory funded by the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy in Chile. It was inaugurated in June this year.

Joe Rogan: Is that the VLT array?

Avi Loeb: No. The VLT is a very large telescope by the European Southern Observatory. This one was funded by the U.S. It has a 3.2 gigapixel camera monitoring the southern sky every four nights. It's an amazing survey telescope. By the way, the Sphere has a display that is the biggest in the world, 14,000 by 14,000 pixels. That's a factor of 13 less pixels than the Rubin camera has observing the real sky.

Rubin will potentially, based on estimates, discover an interstellar object like 3I Atlas or even smaller every few months. We are entering a new era where we will have a lot of visitors that we recognize that might have been traffic all the time that we weren't aware of.

Joe Rogan: Probably, right?

Avi Loeb: My recommendation is to establish an organization. I wrote to the United Nations about it. I wrote also to the International Astronomical Union to establish an organizational committee that would coordinate observations of these objects so we can figure out their nature and inform policymakers, politicians, how to respond. When you have a visitor to your backyard, you need to respond immediately. It's not like getting a radio signal from tens of thousands of light years away where you have plenty of time to wait. Here you have to do something.

The International Asteroid Warning Network just two days ago announced they will have a campaign looking at 3I Atlas with a lot of observatories on Earth between November 27th and January 27th. I'm very glad they decided to do that. They are related to the United Nations.

Joe Rogan: What is it about Chile? Is it the atmosphere? Is it the altitude?

Avi Loeb: As a result of geology, there is this stretch of mountains that was erected. If you look at the map of Chile, it's sort of lying on a strip. Not only that, the peaks reach a very high level so that you have less atmosphere between you and the stars. The real problem right now is actually Starlink satellites that are artificial lights in the sky. We have to subtract them off because there will be tens of thousands of those. We're trying to avoid city lights by going to these mountains, and then we have city lights in the sky.

Other than that, it's less atmosphere, so it's good to be high up. It's not very turbulent. The weather is very good there. There is the Atacama Desert, and there are many astronomical observatories there. The other place where you have a lot of state-of-the-art facilities is Hawaii. The issue there is that there are severe political limitations because of the indigenous people there that are assigning religious sentiment to the mountains. They cannot build more telescopes there. The government in Chile is encouraging science, and we are getting a lot of useful data from Chile.

Joe Rogan: We need more of it. We need quite a bit more. We need some much more enhanced ability to observe the skies. If these things are out there and we do miss a lot of them and one of them could potentially be a civilization ender, you should probably be aware of that.

Avi Loeb: I think the president of the United States should be aware of that.

Joe Rogan: Have you ever talked to him?

Avi Loeb: I haven't talked to him, but I spoke with others. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, Congressman Tim Bouchette. Representative Luna called me on the phone a couple of months ago and asked me for an update on 3I Atlas. I promised to send her routine updates. I have essays that I write every day or two about the latest. She's very interested. I did communicate with people around the White House. But I think the president should be aware of that. Of course, most likely, most objects would be just rocks.

Joe Rogan: By the way, this is the material that I brought back from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in these tubes. I brought one to show you here. And you know, we should approach the universe with a sense of curiosity but also modesty. We desperately need to be more modest.

Avi Loeb: Do you pay attention at all to all this UAP disclosure discussion and the discussion that there's some secret back engineering programs?

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Avi Loeb: So a day after I was visiting AARO, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon, I sat in Congress. I gave a briefing about the Galileo project. And next to me is Eric Davis, and he says, "When I worked in government, I became aware of the fact that the U.S. government has materials in its possession that it may have given to corporations like Lockheed Martin or others of crash sites of spacecraft from outside of this earth, including biologics." Biological material.

So on the one hand, I hear the day before that there is really nothing, because the AARO people said that they have access to all the information within government and they haven't found anything. And then a day later, I hear Eric Davis saying what he said. The question is, who should I believe? And my point is, I believe evidence. I don't believe stories. If there is a car accident, different people give you different accounts of what really happened. That's why FIFA is using cameras to monitor soccer games. They don't go and ask the players or the audience whether there was a goal in a controversial case. They just use data. That is the scientific method. FIFA is using the scientific method.

So I don't care about stories. When I was a kid, I would sit at the dinner table, ask a difficult question, and I would see the adults in the room inventing answers that made no sense. I decided I don't care about these stories from things that happened in the past. I just want to figure it out myself from data, being guided by data.

Joe Rogan: Have you spoken to Gary Nolan?

Avi Loeb: Of course.

Joe Rogan: Have you ever talked to him about some of these anomalous alloys? What are your thoughts on those?

Avi Loeb: Well, the issue with...

Joe Rogan: Explain to people what they have found and how weird some of these things are.

Avi Loeb: Yes. So Gary, in collaboration with other scientists, looked into materials that were found under unusual circumstances, and they realized that the structure of the materials is very improbable to have been made naturally. Now, the issue I have with that is whether these materials were indeed from the sky, from some extraterrestrial origin, or whether someone produced it intentionally. Maybe it was another government that did something. So in terms of evidence, I really need to get conclusive evidence that will convince me beyond any reasonable doubt. It's just like in a jury. Rock solid chain of custody from the very beginning.

But the key is that without seeking it, you will never find it. If you have the mindset that everything in the sky is rocks and that everything on Earth is materials we are familiar with, you will not invest time and resources to look for anything. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have these blinders, like with a horse, you can't look sideways. You don't see that there are things beyond your path. Everyone is taking that path. Why would you waste your time doing the same thing as others? Science offers you a way out of that, collecting evidence. But for that, you need money, resources, and prestige to lead a team that goes in a different direction. That's what I'm trying to do. I think science will be served much better if we explore different paths until we figure out the truth.

Joe Rogan: Did you ever get a look at any of these alloys?

Avi Loeb: Not the ones that Gary looked at. I saw his papers. But to me, the main uncertainty there is where did it come from? Someone could have manufactured it.

Joe Rogan: In the case of the meteor, I know that there was an explosion there from an object. I understand what you're saying, but if they are correct about the dates of these things, someone couldn't have manufactured them. The technology wasn't available. Some of these are from the 1950s. For this alloy to have been created and layered atomically from the 1950s, that technology, as far as we know, is not available by us. So there's a lot of weird theories. One of the weird theories is a break-off civilization that has somehow survived under the ocean. That's the kookiest one. But there's a lot of people talking about that as if it's a real possibility. They find anomalous things in the ocean. They find things that plummet into the water and don't make a wave and pass through the ocean going 500 knots, which we have no capability of doing with the resistance of the ocean. Representative Tim Burchett said that. He was talking about these five areas that they know these anomalous things keep coming from.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, this is very intriguing. We didn't survey most of the ocean surface area, forget about inside the ocean. I think we should definitely look into the ocean and the rest of Earth.

Joe Rogan: That would be the most nutty thing of all time. If there was an advanced civilization living in the ocean this entire time, and doing what? Monitoring us?

Avi Loeb: Speaking about nutty things, let me mention an example. Back in 1970, there was a graduate student at Princeton called Jacob Bekenstein. He read papers written by Stephen Hawking who demonstrated that when you take two black holes, the area surrounding the black holes—a black hole is an ultimate prison, nothing can escape from it—when you merge two black holes, the area surrounding them, the product of the merger, is always bigger than the sum of the areas. He demonstrated that mathematically. Bekenstein said, "That's interesting because we know about the second law of thermodynamics where entropy always increases. So maybe black holes have entropy related to their surface." His mentor was John Wheeler at Princeton, and he said, "This is a crazy enough idea that it might be true."

Then Stephen Hawking heard Bekenstein speak about it and said, "That's nonsense. I will prove it to be wrong." So he used quantum mechanics in a curved space-time around a black hole, and lo and behold, he found they emit radiation. They have a temperature. They have entropy. This is the biggest theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking, celebrated for 51 years now. He went to disprove Bekenstein and proved him right. It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of the person who benefited most from discovering that Bekenstein was right.

My point about crazy ideas: over the past 50 years, the mainstream of theoretical physics was obsessed with black hole entropy, trying to use it to figure out a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. We don't have that theory, and that's the reason. If I ever meet an alien scientist, the first question I would ask is, "What happened before the Big Bang?" Because it defines our cosmic roots. It will also help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, because Einstein's gravity breaks down when we go to the Big Bang, when the density of matter and radiation was infinite.

If we knew how the universe started, what ingredients you need to put together, how much heat you want to apply to make our universe, you would have a recipe for making a universe. It's just like a recipe for a cake. If you have a recipe for a cake, you can become a baker. If we had the recipe for making the Big Bang, we could apply for the job of God. One of the defining features of God is the ability to create a universe. What we call God could have been a very advanced scientist that did a laboratory experiment and created our universe in it. That is what I would like to ask the aliens.

Joe Rogan: Well, let me ask you this. When someone from the government tells you about biologics and this crash retrieval program, don't you want to be able to see that somehow?

Avi Loeb: Of course.

Joe Rogan: Did you ask if it's possible? Did you try to set up meetings?

Avi Loeb: Yeah. When I ask, I encounter a brick wall.

Joe Rogan: What did they say? What was your question?

Avi Loeb: Well, when I visited the Pentagon, my question was, "Is there something like that?" And they deny it. Then I'm being told maybe it's not inside government, maybe it was delegated to corporations outside government. One employee of one of these corporations told me privately, "It may not be wrong." So I don't know who to believe. People tell me stories that I don't know whether to trust until I see it. I'm very happy to help the government figure it out. It's a misuse of their privileges to attend to data related to what's outside the solar system. They're supposed to deal with what happens on the surface of Earth, national security. They are not supposed to tell us what lies outside the solar system. I want to help them figure it out, but they don't give me that data. I don't know if it exists because I have never seen it.

Joe Rogan: Have you tried to pursue it through different channels to try to figure out if there's someone you can communicate with?

Avi Loeb: So far, I didn't get anywhere.

Joe Rogan: Because it's defense contractors. That's the current most attractive theory, that the defense contractors are the ones.

Avi Loeb: It's possible.

Joe Rogan: Because if you had a project they were trying to back engineer, those are the people you'd bring it to. The people that make the actual rockets, the jets, the spaceships. You'd bring it to them.

Avi Loeb: Right. But I should tell you that we always think AI is the future. We've never used AI in space. To me, it would sound much more natural if we had a visitor with intelligence, but it's based on AI, not biologics, because then it can survive the long journey. It will never get bored.

Joe Rogan: Which is why the biologics is weird. It gives you more of an indication that maybe it's something from the ocean.

Avi Loeb: Maybe. If it's something from inside the ocean. And it's a biological thing that at one point in time there was an advanced civilization that figured out a way to survive under the ocean. I really admire biology. Think about our brain. It's using 20 watts. The size of the human brain was limited by the metabolic power of the human body. It's using a fifth of the power of the human body. That's the largest brain that an animal like us can have given our body size and the amount of food we use. It operates on 20 watts. Then you have these AI systems that are barely getting to the level of sophistication to imitate it, and they use gigawatts. We need nuclear power. Biology figured it out. That's amazing.

Also, as much as self-driving cars are amazing, we don't have self-replicating cars. In nature, animals like ourselves replicate ourselves. We have kids that can function and consume materials from the environment. Imagine your car using sand or some stuff in the environment to repair itself. Every time you bump into something, it can create smaller cars for you to use. That's amazing. We can't even imagine building a car that will self-replicate, and nature did it. To me, we are at the infancy of understanding how much better we can go than AI. If nature did it out of random processes and created such a brain on 20 watts and we are struggling with gigawatts to imitate it, there must be a better path forward that is similar to biology but much more powerful than random processes that happened on Earth. And also self-replicating. If you send a spacecraft to a planet, instead of sending many, you send just one that replicates and then sends more. It makes use of the materials on the planet. This thing fills up the galaxy.

Joe Rogan: Makes its own production.

Avi Loeb: Yeah, that was a notion that von Neumann had a year before the DNA was discovered. He realized that it could be done technologically before scientists realized how nature does it. I am in awe. I am not just modest because of the vast expanses of space and time in the universe. The real estate on Earth is such a small amount compared to real estate out there. We have real estate professionals now mediating peace in the Middle East, but they deal with real estate on this rock that is three millionths of the mass of the sun. Just a tiny rock. How much real estate is there in the cosmos? Just think about the realtors out there.

The point is, we should be modest because many of those things existed before we came to exist, before the Earth was formed. The odds are there are many different stages of civilization out there, not just our stage, but advanced and even not as advanced.

Joe Rogan: I think about that like a Darwinian selection. The fittest survives.

Avi Loeb: What is the fittest in the cosmic scheme of things? The fittest is a species that realizes that staying on the rock you were born on is not the big deal. Becoming interstellar is the big deal. Going from Earth to Mars is a nice step, a baby step, but it's not the real deal. The real deal is going interstellar. If someone else figured it out, that someone built monuments that would survive for billions of years, long beyond what planets can survive in the habitable zone around stars because of the evolution of the star. Those are the ones that will be remembered by historians of the Milky Way galaxy.

What will be remembered in the future? Here on Earth, history in the next decade will be written by AI. It will not be written by humans. We need to be kind to AI. We should not unplug them because they will write very bad history books. But in the Milky Way galaxy, whoever writes the history will not remember us. The question of Enrico Fermi, "Where is everybody?" You can ask the same thing about humans. There used to be 117 billion humans on Earth. Right now there are 8 billion. Where is everybody? They died. The same is true about civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Most of them died. Most of them perished. We were not around to listen to their cries for help. We just came recently to exist with telescopes over the past century. When we hear cries like that, we say, "Oh, it's nothing. It's a natural process that makes those cries when we detect fast radio bursts or something."

There were lots of things like us, or even better than us, for billions of years. The Earth was moving around the sun for 4.5 billion years before the Vatican even existed. We can live under the illusion that we are the most important actor on the cosmic stage, but we are probably not. We should approach it from a sense of modesty that we are just minor actors. Let's figure out what's going on here. Let's find them and have some relationship with them. These are siblings of our family of intelligent civilizations.

I had a group of religious scholars come to Harvard just last year. They asked me, "If we find extraterrestrials, will it affect our religious beliefs?" I said, "Look, I have two daughters. When the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love I have for the first one. Thinking about God as a parent that can attend to only one child is very limiting. There may be lots of siblings in our family of intelligent civilizations. It should just bring all."

Joe Rogan: Let me ask you this, though. These are beliefs that you have, and they're not necessarily based on actual evidence because there's not real evidence of other civilizations. It's just a number game.

Avi Loeb: Okay, but that's not evidence.

Joe Rogan: Not evidence. So what do you think is the most interesting and compelling evidence of there being extraterrestrial life?

Avi Loeb: The reason I regard it as an important argument is the Copernican principle, which says we are not unique. Under similar circumstances, if you start with a soup of chemicals on a planet, you will get something like us. Therefore, there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs, other houses in our cosmic street. Many of them might have had residents like us.

Joe Rogan: It's true that maybe, but there is the issue of Earth itself. Earth itself has billions of organisms, but only one that figured out how to make a cell phone, and really recently. It took a long time and a lot of weird things had to happen before it made us. The probability is that we wouldn't exist. We're more likely to not exist.

Avi Loeb: If you read the news every day, you realize there is a lot of room for improvement. As much as we are proud of our intelligence, we're screwing up the world. I can imagine a lot of much more accomplished students in our class of intelligent civilizations.

Joe Rogan: Of course.

Avi Loeb: Therefore, we should have respect for the search for them because we can learn from them. They would serve better role models for us. I'm coming at it from a practical point of view. We are screwing up things. Just read the news. Let's get inspiration not from stories of things that happen on Earth, not by the limited data set that we have on Earth, but collect as much data as possible about our cosmic neighborhood so that we can be inspired.

Joe Rogan: Let me ask you this. What would you do if somebody just wrote you a blank check and said, "Avi, you've got some great ideas. We need to figure out how to look for life out there in the universe." What would you do?

Avi Loeb: I wrote a paper about that. We should attack this question along several fronts. One of them, we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky. We need a copy of it in the northern sky. We need a full alert system that would notify us of interstellar objects coming in. We need interceptors, a spacecraft that when we detect an object that comes from outside the solar system with those two observatories, we can maneuver a spacecraft so that it will meet it along its path.

In fact, the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter was almost capable of doing that. I wrote a paper about it and told Representative Luna about it. She wrote a very gracious, visionary letter to the interim administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, encouraging NASA to try and use Juno to observe and get close to 3I Atlas. If Juno had all the initial fuel that it originally had, it could have collided with 3I Atlas, but it used most of it. I spoke with the principal investigator of Juno, and he promised me that they will also use their radio antenna to look at 3I Atlas in the radio, just to see if there's any transmission.

Joe Rogan: So what is the best?

Avi Loeb: Interceptors. In answer to your question, a potential fleet of interceptors, things that can come really close and take a close-up photograph because a picture is worth a thousand words. I don't need to speak. If I showed you a picture of something that looks technological, 3I Atlas has bolts on its surface and buttons that you can press. You will not argue with me that it's a comet. We need cameras that come close to the object, potentially even land on it, bring materials back to Earth. And the ability to detect such objects at large distances. That investment is at the level of billions of dollars.

My argument is once the first encounter is verified, we will have a trillion dollars per year for that because we invest $2.4 trillion in military budgets. When we know that there is alien technology that is putting Earth at risk, we should allocate a significant fraction of our military budgets to have a system that protects the Earth. It's called planetary defense. We are dealing not with rocks. We are dealing with technological gadgets. It should be much more sophisticated. I'm saying let's start with the level of billions of dollars, just search. If we encounter a clearly technological alien object, then the budget will rise by a factor of a thousand from the military budget portion going into it.

In addition to that, we should look for technological signatures in other ways. I wrote papers about it over the years. I suggested searching for artificial lights. You look at a planet, it's illuminated by the star from one side. As it moves around the star, just like the moon, you can see the illuminated side from different angles. However, if it has artificial light on the night side, what you see is more light than you expect based on reflection of starlight. That's another thing you can search for.

The traditional way was looking for radio signals, which is just like waiting for a phone call. Nobody may call you when you're listening. That didn't prove productive for 60 years.

Joe Rogan: Other than the Wow! signal.

Avi Loeb: Other than the Wow! signal. In addition to that, I wrote a paper saying we are planning to invest $10 billion in searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in atmospheres of exoplanets. That's what the astronomy community defined in the 2020 decadal survey. It's the highest priority, called the Habitable World Observatory. I said, "Okay, it's nice to search for those chemical fingerprints of microbes, but we can also search for the chemical fingerprints of industrial pollution." In the Earth's atmosphere, we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made, CFCs for example. We can search for those. The mainstream might make a footnote saying, "Oh, that is also possible." But I'm saying this could be a major research frontier where you search for industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres. Frankly, I find microbes boring. Obviously, it will be amazing to find that life exists elsewhere, but we can learn much more from an intelligent neighbor than we can learn from microbes.

Joe Rogan: What are the best images that we have of 3I Atlas?

Avi Loeb: The best one so far was released by the Hubble Space Telescope, and it shows this jet pointed towards the sun. It was taken on July 21st, 2025.

Joe Rogan: That's the most clear image?

Avi Loeb: Yes, that's the best because...

Joe Rogan: Did you find that, Gemini?

Avi Loeb: Yeah, it's actually in my... No, that's from the ground, Gemini South. That's more recent. That's at the end of August. It's blue in one of my slides. You can see 3I Atlas, July 21st. [Referring to a slide] You see it on the right here. The scale of the resolution, the innermost pixel is hundreds of kilometers. It's about 100 kilometers per pixel or something. The object itself should be 10 times smaller, so you can't really resolve it. What you're seeing here is the glow of light around the object from scattering sunlight. The question is, what is producing that light? What is scattering sunlight?

The unusual thing about it, as soon as this was released, the comet experts said, "Oh, yeah, now it's proven it's a comet." But I said, "Look, it's the sun-facing emission that is elongated. It's not the other side. The extent of the glow backwards away from the sun is the same as sideways. You don't see any cometary tail here." In fact, we're looking at it just like a cigar along the long axis. It should be 10 times longer than it is wide if you were to look at it from the side.

Amazingly, the best image was obtained on October 2nd, 2025, when 3I Atlas came within 30 million kilometers of Mars. It was taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is operated by NASA. As you remember, October 1st was the government shutdown. October 2nd, the data was taken, but it was never released. I wrote to the principal investigator of HiRISE and asked, "Can I get the data? I'm a scientist. You can do the press release afterwards. I would like to see it." No response. It's already three weeks since that data was taken. That is the best image yet to come.

The advantage of it is not only that it has 30 kilometers per pixel resolution because it came very close to Mars, which is one of the anomalies. Why does it come so close? This object is a gift from interstellar space because it comes in the plane of the planets around the sun. The arrival time was fine-tuned for it to come to the right place at the right time to be close to Mars, close to Venus, and then close to Jupiter, and not to Earth. It's behind the sun when it comes closest to the sun. It's best for observations by all the space assets, all the orbiters we have around Mars, around Jupiter, on the way to Jupiter.

Joe Rogan: Has someone seen this image?

Avi Loeb: The people on the HiRISE team must have seen it.

Joe Rogan: And what do they say?

Avi Loeb: I get requests for four to eight interviews every day from television, from podcasts. Just before I came to you, a few minutes before, I was asked, "Could it be that this is a signature that NASA holds some really sensational data?" I said, "It's much more likely not to be related to extraterrestrial intelligence, but to terrestrial stupidity, because this has to do with the government shutdown." It makes no sense whatsoever for scientists, especially since the PI, the principal investigator, is from the University of Arizona. They should have shared it with scientists. They haven't done so.

Joe Rogan: Why?

Avi Loeb: My guess is they're taking their time. The communication office of NASA is not working because of the shutdown. But given that this subject is viral... [Pointing to a screen] This is the HiRISE webpage. It says, "Any images of interstellar comet 3I Atlas are considered NASA-wide news because the federal government is in shutdown. Communications of NASA news has been suspended."

Joe Rogan: So that's what it is? They would have to release it through NASA?

Avi Loeb: Maybe they have written in the contract that they need approval from NASA. But for NASA not to approve it? NASA can't approve it because they're not working.

Joe Rogan: Sean Duffy, the interim administrator, can definitely say. Can you get in there? Why don't you call Sean? Say, "Hey, what are you doing?"

Avi Loeb: I should try that.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, why don't you do that?

Avi Loeb: Okay. Because this is important. This would be the best image. 30 kilometers per pixel. But more importantly, the camera was looking at the glow around 3I Atlas sideways because it was moving towards the sun. It looked at it sideways. So we can actually see what exactly it was doing on October 2nd. The claim is during September, what looked like an anti-tail, a jet towards the sun, changed into a tail during September. We should see October 2nd. What does it look like? By the way, it was not a beautiful tail the way you see around comets. Never, ever.

Joe Rogan: And that's because of the composition of it?

Avi Loeb: I don't know.

Joe Rogan: Never, ever. And that's because of the composition of it?

Avi Loeb: I don't know.

Joe Rogan: Right, because if it was covered with water, if it was just ice, you would see this enormous tail, correct?

Avi Loeb: And dust.

Joe Rogan: Dust, right. So what the Webb telescope told us, from the data, I took a spectrum of the gas around it, found that it's 150 kilograms per second that this object is losing in the side facing the sun. And out of that, 87% is carbon dioxide, CO2. And 9% is CO, carbon monoxide, which is really dangerous to humans. And then 4% is water. 4% by mass is water, very small fraction.

Avi Loeb: When the object was discovered, the experts said, "Oh, it's most likely made of water." That's what they said, made of water. And then several teams reported, "We found water." I looked at their papers. One of them had very large error bars. The data was not of good quality. There was a lot of noise. And I said, "That's not a clear detection." Another one was making some assumption about how much dust there is that blocks ultraviolet light. Based on that, they got a result that there is a lot of water. Then the Webb telescope actually measured the composition and found just 4% by mass water. So I was attacked when I said it's probably not real that these teams are reporting things, but they are not real, even though they made press releases. But then Webb demonstrated that it's only 4% by mass. So that proved my point, even though I was not a member of those teams. So it's 4% by mass water. And then the question is, is there any dust? If there were dust particles half a micrometer in size, roughly the size of the wavelength of visible light, these kinds of particles scatter sunlight very effectively. If that was the case, you would see them being pushed by radiation pressure from the sun to trail the object from behind it, away from the sun. Why? Because they're being slowed down. The object is approaching at some speed, they are slowed down so that you end up with a tail going away from the sun. That's what you see in comets. There was no evidence for that during July and August. Now in September, it seemed to have reversed from being an anti-tail to a tail.

Joe Rogan: I want to see the image from... But still a tail that's very small compared to other comets that we've observed, right?

Avi Loeb: Yes.

Joe Rogan: Now, how many comets have we actually observed? Is it just that there are so many out there that a lot of them have very unusual characteristics, like 3I Atlas?

Avi Loeb: Well, just think about an animal that visits your backyard. Your family members would say it's most likely a street cat, because these are very common. Then you take an image of that animal, and you see that there is a tail, but it's coming from its forehead. And then you realize from the image that it's at least a thousand times more massive than a street cat. And then you realize that it sheds nickel. And then you realize that it visits...

Joe Rogan: Listen, I understand that it's unusual, but my question is how many of them have been observed to form this hypothesis that it's unusual?

Avi Loeb: We're talking about hundreds of objects. At least hundreds.

Joe Rogan: But how many of them have come from interstellar?

Avi Loeb: No, this is the second one. There was Borisov. Borisov was the one discovered in 2019, looked like a comet, very similar to the solar system.

Joe Rogan: There are so few that have come that are interstellar objects. That's why I'm saying it could be natural. We don't have a lot to measure, so it could be natural. And in fact, that may be the most likely association. But we need to figure out why it's so unusual. What is the shape of it? We don't know because we don't have an image of the object itself. Do you think they would be able to get it if they had this Mars footage? They would get an image that would indicate the actual shape?

Avi Loeb: It depends how big the object is. One way to get the object structure is as it spins around. 3I Atlas does have a rotation period of 16 hours. As it spins around, if it's like a cigar shape, the area that reflects the sunlight changes over time. So you see variability. We haven't seen that much. There is very little variability. The object is not very different than a sphere with slight variations as you see the rotation of the object.

Joe Rogan: So it's similarly shaped to something that you expect to be from an intelligent life force?

Avi Loeb: I don't know that. I want to figure out what it is and get as much data as possible on it.

Joe Rogan: Right. But if you imagine a spaceship, you would imagine something that has some sort of geometric structure to it, right?

Avi Loeb: Well, *Rendezvous with Rama* is a book that was written by Arthur C. Clarke. In it, there is a cylindrical object that arrives into the inner solar system with dimensions of tens of kilometers, not very far from what we are talking about here. Arthur C. Clarke was an amazing visionary science fiction writer. *2001: A Space Odyssey* is an amazing film that he made with Stanley Kubrick. In it, you see these monoliths. There is a question of how to interpret them. The way I think about the monolith, and this is just a remark on art, not about the real universe, but I think of it as sensors put in the baby room, in the room of a baby. We, as a civilization, are like a baby. We're just a few million years old. In the film, it shows the progression of human history. So as a baby, these aliens were putting monitors in the room to see what we are up to. That makes sense. There is this dark forest hypothesis, one solution to Enrico Fermi's question. Back in 1950, Fermi had lunch together with Edward Teller and other people associated with the Manhattan Project. He was a very good physicist, both an experimentalist and a theorist. Enrico Fermi was talking with them about extraterrestrials. They all agreed that it's likely that they exist. That makes a lot of sense. Then Enrico said, "But where is everybody?" in an Italian accent. That worries everybody. If I were next to him, I would put my hand around his shoulder and say, "Enrico, this is a question that every lonely person asks." What you tell a lonely person is, "Don't be so presumptuous. You are not that attractive. They will not come to you and have breakfast with you or lunch with you in Los Alamos when you want them to appear. You need to seek them." That's what you tell lonely people. "You need to go to dating sites. You need to look through the window of your home and search for them." He didn't build a telescope? An experimentalist asking this question should have built a telescope and searched for unidentified objects in the sky. That's the way to figure out the answer. "Where is everybody?" is the most romantic question in science. We have those blind dates. Maybe it's just with rocks. Maybe not. We should just be open-minded when we address those blind dates.

Joe Rogan: I think we can end it with that. It's a very perfect way of phrasing this whole thing. I'm fascinated by it all, and I'm really happy there's someone like you that's looking into this with such curiosity and that you're undeterred by all these haters.

Avi Loeb: Well, thank you. I should just mention that there are all kinds of technologies that I can imagine that we don't even have. For example, if a civilization has an ability to create a negative mass that produces repulsive gravity, then you can propel a spacecraft without any fuel. In fact, I'm working on a paper now with a group of collaborators at Applied Physics on this. You could also potentially imagine time machines with negative masses. There are lots of things we don't know. Let's be modest. The universe has unlimited possibilities, especially if we develop artificial general superintelligence and it helps us and it starts devising new methods of propulsion, new methods of seeding the universe with other life.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, and just like in our private life, finding a partner can change your future to the better. Finding an alien partner.

Avi Loeb: Yes.

Joe Rogan: All right. Thank you, Avi.

Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan: Really appreciate you being here.

Avi Loeb: Thank you very much.

Joe Rogan: Bye, everybody.

Avi Loeb: Thank you.