All language subtitles for My Search for Proof Aliens Exist _ Avi Loeb _ TED (720p).English

When I look up at the sky at night,

I see 100 billion stars
of the Milky Way galaxy.

They look like lights in cabins
of a giant spaceship,

The Milky Way, sailing through space.

And I wonder

if there are other
passengers in those cabins.

There are 100 billion of them,

comparable to the number of people
who ever lived on Earth.

It would be arrogant to think otherwise,

that we are alone,

that we are unique and special,

especially if you read the news every day.

We are not the pinnacle of creation.

There is room for improvement.

(Laughter)

I'm just a curious farm boy,

and I wonder about the world around me.

And I hate to behave
like the adults in the room,

because they often pretend to know
more than we actually know.

And that bothered me
since I was a young kid.

And so I decided to become a scientist

and answer the questions
based on evidence,

not based on prejudice,

not based on the politics

of getting the largest number
of likes on social media.

I don't have a footprint on social media.

I enjoy nature.

Whatever it brings
to our doorstep is welcome.

So let's just look around.

And for 70 years,

we've been searching for radio signals.

This is equivalent to staying at home

and waiting for a phone call
that may never come

because nobody cares that we are lonely.

It may also be that others
are addicted to digital screens

and they live in a virtual reality,

as we are at this point in time.

A much better approach

is to check if there is any
object in our backyard

that may have arrived
from a neighbor's yard.

Like a tennis ball,

that may tell us
that the neighbor plays tennis.

And we haven't really checked
until the last decade.

The first object to have been
reported by astronomers

that came from outside
the solar system looked really weird.

It was discovered
by a telescope in Hawaii.

When it passed close to Earth,
it was the size of a football field.

What you see behind me
is the artist's depiction.

It looked really weird

because as it was tumbling
every eight hours,

the amount of sunlight reflected from it
changed by a factor of ten,

which meant that it has
a very extreme shape,

most likely flat, like a pancake.

And moreover,

it exhibited a push away from the sun

by some mysterious force

because there was no evaporation,

no cometary tail around it,
no dust, no gas.

So the question was, what is pushing it?

And I suggested that maybe
it's the reflection of sunlight,

but for that, the object had to be
very thin, like a sail.

And that meant that it was
not produced naturally.

Maybe it's a surface layer,
maybe it's space trash,

like a plastic bag tumbling in the wind.

And so we go back 70 years to a question
that Enrico Fermi, the physicist,

asked at Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?"

Well, this is a question
that single people often ask.

But if you stay at home --

(Laughter)

You will not find anyone.

You have to go to dating sites.

At the very least, you need to look
through your windows for other people.

And he didn't seek the evidence.

He was just asking the question
and kept repeating it.

And if we don't look for evidence,
we will not find anything.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's a way to maintain our ignorance.

And science is better than politics.

We can find the evidence
if we allocate the funds for it.

This is a real image,
what you see behind me,

it's the Tesla Roadster car

that was put as a dummy payload
on the Falcon Heavy launch of 2018.

It's now moving in an elliptical
orbit around the Sun,

and perhaps in 20 million years,
it will collide with Earth.

And if it will do so unexpectedly,

some of my colleagues would argue

"This is a rock of a type
that we've never seen before."

(Laughter)

We cannot see it with our best telescopes
because it's too small.

It doesn't reflect enough sunlight.

'Oumuamua was the size of a
football field, big enough for us to see.

And so the next Copernican revolution

would be that we are not
at the intellectual center

of the universe.

Not only that we are not at the physical
center of the universe,

but actually, you know, we arrive
to the play relatively late.

We are not at the center of stage.

The play is not about us.

We should be modest.

We keep thinking
that it's about us, but it's not.

And we better find other actors
that will tell us what the play is about.

And people often say extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence,

but they are not seeking the evidence.

Actually, extraordinary evidence
requires extraordinary funding.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Elon Musk argued recently,

"I don't see any aliens."

But new scientific knowledge
does not fall into our lap.

We had to invest 10 billion dollars

in the Large Hadron Collider
in order to find the Higgs boson.

We had to invest 10 billion dollars
in the Webb telescope

in order to find the first
generation of galaxies.

This is the way science is done.

You need to put the effort
in order to find something new.

And only over the past decade,

we discovered objects that came
from outside the solar system.

The first one was actually a decade ago.

It was a meteor, an object
half a meter in size

that collided with Earth

and burned up in the atmosphere.

It was spotted
by US government satellites.

The fireball that it generated

released a few percent
of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy,

and it was moving too fast
to be bound to the Sun's gravity.

And so we concluded it's interstellar.

It came from outside the solar system.

Could it be a Voyager-like meteor?

Imagine our own spacecraft
colliding with a planet like Earth.

In the future, it would appear as a meteor
of unusual material strength

and unusual speed,

which are exactly the properties
of this meteor from 2014.

And then 'Oumuamua was discovered in 2017,

and finally a comet appeared,

also from interstellar space,
was moving too fast.

And so my colleagues argued,

"Well, this one looks familiar.

Doesn't it convince you that the others
are natural in origin?

Rocks of a type
that we've never seen before?"

And I say, if I go down the street
and I see a weird person,

and after that I see a normal person,

it doesn't make the weird person normal.

(Laughter)

Now the US --

(Laughter)

Director of National intelligence --

(Applause)

Avril Haines delivered three reports

to the US Congress, talking
about unidentified anomalous phenomena.

The good news is the sky
is not classified.

We don't need to wait
for the US government to tell us

what lies outside the solar system.

Their day job is national security.

My day job is figuring out
what lies beyond the solar system.

And the sky is not classified.

We can answer the question ourselves.

So I'm leading the Galileo project.

We built an observatory
at Harvard University

that monitors the sky 24/7,

looking for objects that are not familiar,

not birds, balloons,
drones, airplanes, satellites.

So far, we monitored
half a million objects.

Haven't found anything unusual yet,

but we keep looking

and we are using machine-learning
software to figure out

what we are looking at.

But the most exciting endeavor
that I was involved in

is an expedition to the Pacific Ocean
near Papua New Guinea,

to look for the materials from this meteor
that I described before.

And the US Space Command
issued a letter to NASA

confirming at the 99.999 percent

that this object indeed originated
from outside the solar system.

Based on its high speed, it was moving
faster than 95 percent of all stars

in the vicinity of the Sun.

It exploded in the lower atmosphere,

about 90 kilometers away
from Manus Island in Papua New Guinea,

and that meant that the object
had material strength

tougher than even iron meteorites.

And so I led an expedition in June 2023.

You can see the team on the ship
that was fittingly called Silver Star,

and we used the sled
with magnets on both sides

to search for droplets left over
from the explosion of this meteor.

And at the bottom left you see
the filming crew of Netflix.

They are preparing a documentary
about this research,

and the director asked me,

"Avi,

it looks like you are running,"
because I was jogging at sunrise,

as I often do on land for a few miles.

And he said, "Are you running away
from something or towards something?"

And I said, "Both.

I'm running away
from some of my colleagues

who have strong opinions
without seeking evidence,

and I'm running towards a higher
intelligence in interstellar space."

Now we used this sled and collected
magnetic particles

from the ocean floor about a mile deep.

And then I brought them to my colleagues
at Harvard University.

They look like metallic spheres,

very distinct from the background of sand
in which they were collected.

And my colleague at Harvard,
Stein Jacobsen,

is a world-renowned geochemist.

He used the electron microprobe,
a mass spectrometer, in his laboratory.

The person on the other side
of me in this picture

is a summer intern, Sophie Bergstrom,

who found most of our molten droplets.

And so I called her the spheral hunter.

And most of our spherules were actually
of a type familiar from the solar system,

but about 10 percent of them
looked unusual,

and they had a chemical composition

very different
from solar system materials.

They had abundances of elements
like beryllium, lanthanum, uranium,

that are up to a factor of 1,000 more

than found in solar system materials.

They were not from the Earth,
not from the moon, not from Mars,

not from asteroids.

And so now the question arises,

was this a rock from another star?

And of course, one possibility

is that there was a natural
process that produced it.

For example, most stars are dwarf stars,
10 percent of the mass of the sun,

and they are 100 times
denser than the sun.

And so if you bring a planet
like the Earth close to them,

they spaghettify the planet,

make a stream of rocks

that could be ejected at a speed
similar to that of this meteor.

But it's also possible that this object
was of artificial origin,

in which case,

if we look for bigger pieces
of the object,

we might find a gadget with buttons on it.

And I asked students in my class,

"If we find such a gadget,
should we press a button?"

(Laughter)

Now, some of my critics
argued, maybe it's coal ash.

So we looked at 55 elements
from the periodic table

and found that the abundances of elements
are very different from coal ash.

So it's not coal ash.

Others argued,

"Maybe it was not a meteor,
maybe it was a truck."

Well, the data came
from US government satellites.

We actually based our search region

on the Department of Defense coordinates,

and we went 26 times back and forth,
searching that region.

So the next expedition,
hopefully within the year,

will search for bigger
pieces of the object,

maybe even the core of the object,

because that could have
a huge impact on humanity.

We all know the biblical
story about Moses,

who looked at the bush

that was burning without being consumed,

with religious awe,
and that gave Moses the sense

that there is a superhuman entity,

God, out there.

Now, Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882

argued, "God is dead."

And that gave rise to the modern period

of science and technology,

where humans have this hubris,

they lack modesty.

Nobody is smarter than us,

we are at the top of the food chain.

Maybe AI will do a little better.

But AI is just a digital mirror.

It reflects our faults.

It's nothing better than us.

It's not a digital species.

It's just us.

(Applause)

And if we find a partner
out there, of course,

that will give a new meaning
to our existence.

And it's a whole different ball game.

Something from another star
has nothing to do with us.

And we better be ready for that.

Not look at the mirror
and imagine something like it,

as science fiction stories do.

Now the good news is, next year,

the Rubin Observatory in Chile

will survey the southern sky
every four days

with a camera that is
the size of a person,

3.2 billion pixels,

a thousand times more
than your cell phone camera.

And so if we find
more objects like 'Oumuamua,

it might give us a sense of modesty.

We might bring back this sense
of awe that Moses had.

Except in this time, it will be based

on something that was delivered
from interstellar space, from a neighbor.

And that is quite promising, actually,
because it may change our priorities.

Instead of spending four trillion dollars
a year on military budgets,

killing each other
for territories on this rock,

the tiny rock, left over
from the formation of the sun,

we might realize that there is
a smarter kid on the block,

and that kid may provide a better
role model than our politicians.

(Applause)

And if we allocate four trillion dollars
a year to space exploration,

we could send a CubeSat towards
every star in the Milky Way galaxy,

hundreds of billions of them,
within one century.

And it gets better than that,

because if we find a superhuman
intelligence out there ...

We might learn new physics.

The first question I would ask is,
"What happened before the Big Bang?"

And they might have
quantum gravity engineers

that are capable of creating
a baby universe in the laboratory.

And this job of creating a new
universe can be perfected.

And that would help us actually,

(Laughter)

given that there is a lot
of room for improvement

in the world that we inhabit.

Thank you.

Chris Anderson: Thank you, Avi.

(Applause)