This week I sat down with Harvard Professor Avi Loeb, founder of the Galileo Project and a leading authority on the investigation of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)
Guest | Avi Loeb, Professor at Harvard University [@Harvard]
On Twitter | https://twitter.com/Galileo_Project
Host | Matthew S Williams
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/matthew-s-williams
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Episode Description
This week I sat down with Harvard Professor Avi Loeb, founder of the Galileo Project and a leading authority on the investigation of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)
He is also the author of the best-selling book, "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth," and the upcoming "Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and our Future in the Stars."
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Resources
The Galileo Project - Harvard University: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast
Interview with Prof. Avi Loeb:
The authors acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional unseeded lands of the Lekwungen Peoples.
Matt: Welcome back to Stories from Space. I'm your host, Matt Williams. And joining me today is a very special guest: Israeli-American theoretical physicist, astrophysicist and cosmologists, Professor Abraham Loeb. Professor Loeb, welcome aboard.
Loeb: Thanks for having me.You can call me, Avi
Matt: Okay, will do. So to give the listeners a brief rundown of your credentials. And I've, I've had to write these several times when writing articles and pieces that feature your work. And I found that it is hard to keep up with all the titles and abbreviations. But I think I've got a shortest version here possible. So Professor Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is the longest serving Chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, the founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, the director of the Institute forTheory and Computation at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a leading authority on hypervelocity stars, black holes, interstellar objects, astrobiology and... anything else?
Loeb: Thank you, Matt. Actually, you know, in the recent expedition, I boarded a private jet that took us to the ship that we used, then the pilots welcome me as I entered the jet. He said, “Welcome aboard Professor Loeb. And I told him, “No titles are needed.You can just call me Avi, because I'm a fundamentally, I'm a curious farmboy.” So we could have saved us some time, if you describe just me by just these three words.
Matt: Okay, well, people who I feel, yeah, they'll figure it out. In addition, you are also the Science Theory Director of Breakthrough Initiatives. And we've chatted several times about Breakthrough Starshot and your work there. And as I understand it, in June 2020, you were also sworn in as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science andTechnology.
Loeb: Yeah, this is true. I served on that board and advising on science matters, the White House. But overall, you know, fundamentally, I'm just curious about the cosmic neighborhood we inhabit and, in particular, whether we have any neighbors.
Matt: Hmm. Well, yeah, this, this has been the subject of your work for quite some time. Now. I remember when I first came across your work, it was one of the first articles I've written.You had written an article on how hypervelocity stars escape our galaxy all the time, and how they could actually bring their planets along for the ride. And how this would have drastic implications for panspermia and how life gets distributed throughout the Universe.
Loeb: Yeah, in fact, there are very fast stars originating from the vicinity of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But other galaxies eject stars close to the speed of light.That when they have mergers of two supermassive black holes that act as a slingshot that could kick stars up to
the speed of light. So, in fact, throughout the intergalactic space, in the cosmic space, there are stars moving at a fraction of the speed of light. And being on a planet around them must be thrilling because then you traverse space, close to the highest speed possible. Also, you live longer relative to other cosmic civilizations, because of the time dilation, you're really moving close to the speed of light.
So, there must be some beneficiary of these cosmic events where two black holes are in relatively close proximity to each other, they move around, and they slingshot stars into intergalactic space at close to the speed of light. Unfortunately, we are in a relatively, we are stuck. Let's put it that way. On the Earth around this typical star, the Sun, and not much. I mean, the speed of the Sun relative to the center of the Milky Way galaxies is merely just a 10th of a percent of the speed of light. So we're not likely to go intergalactic anytime.
Matt: No, yeah, well, no.Yeah. Listeners, I'd say take this down.Those stars transporting entire solar systems, they could be they could be how intergalactic travel actually happens. Who knows? We may get that someday and that would really be interesting.
Loeb: I mean, the only thrilling experience in our near future is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the sister galaxy of the Milky Way. It's on its path towards merging with the Milky Way Galaxy, and it will come to our neighborhood within a few billion years. And at that point, it's possible that it will kick the Sun a little bit outwards from the center of the merger product. But that will not be such a dramatic change. I mean, we will, we could potentially see the Milky Way from a distance so to speak, as the Andromeda galaxy comes by, and perhaps grabs the Sun, and then eventually merges with it.
All together, it will become one giant elliptical galaxy, after the merger takes place. And, you know, we, the rest of the Universe, aside from this merger product will recede away from us at an ever- increasing speed, we will be left surrounded by darkness in the distant future. And so, we better take a look right now about what the Universe has, because 10s of billions of years from now, we won't have any clue as to what happens to those distant galaxies that will exit from our event horizon.
Matt: Hmm. Well, I do like your optimism and thinking that humanity or its, its progeny will be around, and I certainly hope you're right.Yes. And that is something else I recall, writing about was, what's it going to be like, in the year 1 trillion or so? Life forms living in a Universe where even the nearest galaxies beyond their event horizon, they can't see when–
Loeb: The first step for survival would be to move away from the Sun. And because within a billion years, the Sun will boil off all the oceans on Earth. So we just have 20% or 50% of the age of the Earth left for us to still be here, and actually move towards a star that is much longer lived than the Sun. And actually, the nearest star to us right now is Proxima Centauri, and it will live hundreds of times longer than the Sun.
So, we might move there or to any dwarf star that weighs, that has a mass that is a 10th of the mass of the Sun.Those stars live for potentially trillions of years. So we could survive that long if we were to go to a furnace, a nuclear reactor that burns the fuel much more slowly. But of course, such a furnace is fainter than the Sun. So we will, I mean, the habitable region around it is closer in.
And actually there is a habitable planet, in principle, near Proxima Centauri. It's called Proxima b, there is another one that was detected may also be habitable.The only problem is that when you get close to the furnace, these small stars all have large flares and especially in the ultraviolet. And it's not at all clear whether these flares allow life as we know it, because they may sterilize the planet.
Matt: And in fact, you've written quite a few papers on the possible habitability of Proxima b, based on what we know, right? Around red dwarfs? And I remember, I remember a paper you wrote that said that, given the long timelines of red dwarf stars and how they're the most common in the Universe, that this could have a Fermi Paradox implication. And yeah, I even listed it as one of the possible resolutions to the Fermi Paradox.
Loeb: Well, there is this fundamental question: why are we next to a star which is not the most abundant in the Milky Way galaxy?The dwarf stars are 10 times more abundant. And then the answer may be that the life as we know it is not possible near those much more abundant stars. And, of course, it will take us a while to figure it out. And why exactly that's the case? It's possible that they cannot maintain their atmospheres because of the flares on the host star because of the excess ultraviolet emission. We know these are features of dwarf stars.
And so, a star like the Sun is perhaps a better furnace for life that develops on timescales of billions of years. But in principle, we don't even need a star.That's the old-fashioned way of keeping us warm. If we are an advanced technological civilization, we could build our own habitat and, for example, have our own nuclear reactors. We don't need to use gravity for nuclear fusion, we can just do it ourselves. And in principle, you can imagine a future where humanity will live on a space station and in fact, you can live next to a star like the Sun even as it evolves.
Because, if you adjust your distance from the furnace so that you're still comfortable, then you can always maintain habitability. It's much better to do that than to sit on a rock that happened to be at some distance. And therefore, it's habitable for a fixed amount of time. So I see our future perhaps on a moving platform that can adjust its distance from stars and potentially also becoming dependent on that because it produces its own energy supply.
You can also think about other civilizations, you know, around other stars. And if they were not sophisticated enough to build such a platform, and they were left on the rock that they were born on, then they probably cried for help when the star became much more bright. I mean, most stars from billions of years before the Sun. So it's possible that their cries for help came billions of years ago, and we were not around to listen. Obviously, these cries for help are the best sources for radio signals.
If we are ever hoping to detect someone, it would be when they cry for help. And if nobody listens, these cries would end up a, you know, this would be the most important news item in the news reports in the media. It's not global warming as a result of the technologies. It's because of the star. And you can't really control the star and so, they must have tried to do mass exodus on spaceships and who knows whether they survived or not. It's quite likely that a lot of civilizations came and went and are by now gone, you know.
And therefore, when we try to address the Fermi Paradox, we ask, “Oh, what, what is the chance that we would get a radio signal?” Well, that depends on the lifespan of a technological civilization, that enters the Drake Equation. But the point is, if those technological civilizations sent equipment to space in the form of Voyager One, Voyager two, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, or New Horizons that we sent to interstellar space. And they will exit the Solar System in 10,000 years, they would leave the Oort cloud, you know, they will become space trash.
And it's possible that the interstellar space is littered with such trash, space trash from civilizations that are gone by now the sendes are not alive anymore. And of course, we can learn about those past civilizations by finding this trash.Their trash is our gold. Because we can learn about their history from this trash. It's just like archaeology, we can also figure out how we can survive longer, what is the best approach for us to go become an interstellar species.
So there are lots of things that we could learn as long as we are open minded enough to look around and check our backyard, meaning the Solar System, for any interstellar objects. And, you know, just an anecdote.The first interstellar objects were detected only over the past decade, we just didn't have the facilities to detect them before. And the first was actually a meteor detected by US government sensors, mostly satellites, back in 2014.
And I went after its relics, actually, just a few weeks ago. And the second was, or more more. So you know, there were this was a relatively recent events.These were just detected over the past decade, and we have a lot to learn about what our cosmic neighborhood might have sent us.You know, we can learn about our neighbors just by looking at our backyard.
Matt: Hmm. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because that, I mean, that brings us to the real piece de resistance here. And yeah, and what is I would say arguably, this has been your focus. It's been what a lot of your activities have been about these past few years or so. ‘Oumuamua was the first interstellar object that we detected as it was passing by Earth. But yes, a later review of archival data revealed but that wasn't the first, that in fact, it was the 2014 one.
Loeb: Exactly.Yeah. Right.Yeah. So ‘Oumuamua re was the size of a football field at about 100 meters. And it was the, it was discovered by PanSTARRS. It's a Near Earth Object. PanSTARRS was a telescope that was constructed to find near Earth objects. So it flagged this one as well because it passed within a sixth of the Earth's Sun separation. And then it realized, Oh, actually, astronomers realized that it was moving too fast to be bound to the Sun. So it's actually an interstellar object.
It was the first reported and I was intrigued because I wrote a paper a decade earlier forecasting no detections by PanSTARRS of such objects based on what we know about rocks in the Solar System. It turns out to explain ‘‘Oumuamua, you need an abundance far greater than you would expect from rocks, tossed into interstellar space from planetary systems like the Solar System. So it's puzzling the fact that they detected it.
But moreover, its properties were unusually, based on the reflection of Sunlight as it was tumbling, it appeared to be flat, the best fit model was a flat object. And moreover, it had no cometary evaporation that was apparent to telescopes. And nevertheless, it was pushed away from the Sun by some mysterious force. And I argue that it may be just the reflection of Sunlight that is pushing it. And for that it had to be very thin. And I suggested that it may be technological in origin.
And then three years later, there was a technological object discovered that show the push away from the Sun by reflection of Sunlight, and no cometary evaporation. And astronomers on the same telescope by PanSTARRS realized that within a few weeks, they realized actually, it came from Earth.This is a rocket booster that NASA launched in 1966. So it was discovered in September 2020, it was given the name 2020 SO.
And then, to me, it signified the fact that the idea that I mentioned for ‘Oumuamua is viable, because here is an object that shows these properties. And we know it's artificial, because we produced it. The question is, who manufactured ‘Oumuamua. And then in January 2019, I was asked for a radio interview about a meteorite that was discovered a month earlier in over the Bering Sea, and it was 10 meters in size, very big one. And I looked online and found this catalog of NASA, and I asked my student, Amir Siraj, undergraduate student, to go through the catalog, because I was inspired by ‘Oumuamua, and search whether the fastest moving objects may be of interstellar origin.
And sure enough, we found this one. And then the government confirmed the assertion that it is interstellar. So altogether, this was the – actually, because it was detected in Japan on January 8 2014, this was almost four years before ‘Oumuamua. It was half a meter in size. And therefore, it was the first object that is much smaller than ‘Oumuamua, we estimated that there should be a million such objects within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun at any given time.
And that's simply because the chance of the Earth to bump into one of them to cross the trajectories is quite small. And so there are plenty of them. We were lucky enough to see one in 2014. And the estimate is that they collide with Earth, once per decade, and the one from 2014 released a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy, we calculated that it was moving at 60 kilometres per second outside the Solar System. So it was moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun.
And moreover, it had material strength that is tougher than all the other space rocks, all the other meteorites in the NASA catalog over the past decade, that was 272 of them. So, this was an outlier in speed. It was an outlier in material strength. And I decided to go ahead and arrange an expedition that will look for there any anything left any materials left from this object. We went there, and we
found it. We found spherules.These are molten droplets from the surface of this meteorite. And we are now in the process of analyzing their composition.
Matt: And in fact, this was part of the Galileo Project, which you founded, and back in July of 2021.
Loeb: Yeah, years ago. Exactly. And that was based on several multi billionaires that visited the porch of my home and I'm with other people. That was during the pandemic. And, you know, it was about half a year after my book, Extraterrestrial came out. Over the past two years, I had about 3000 interviews with huge interest from the public. Also, you know, there are lots of artists that were inspired by my work.
Just over the past week I received a message from a sculptor in Spain who, who is planning to create a sculpture in celebration of my scientific research.There is a songwriter who won three Grammy’s, four Emmys, two Oscars, and so forth. And he is writing a song about my research. And then there is a playwright who just sent me a few days ago, a complete play that he wants to be featured in on Broadway in NewYork City, about the research. And there is a filming crew, one out of 50, that approached me to be part of the expedition. And I chose one that is documenting my current research.
So there is a huge amount of interest. And, you know, during the expedition, I wrote a 38 diary reports about my experience there. And there were millions of people who read them over the two weeks of the expedition. And I got a lot of emails, one from someone who said that he had a stroke just a few weeks earlier. And reading my essays gave him the strength to live because he enjoys the way science is done.
A lot of people appreciate the fact that they get a glimpse into how science is done. So, for me, it was the biggest reward that I could get, that people appreciate this. And then, you know, that was my previous book, Extraterrestrial, there is a new book that I will have, in fact, in a month coming out.The title is Interstellar, and it's already available for pre orders.
Matt: Now, and so the subject there is sort of astrobiology in the larger sense, right? Because yeah, ‘Oumuamua confirmed a number of things, which is that, for on, interstellar objects are significant, are statistically significant. And that 1000s of them have entered our Solar System over time and some stayed, and those could be rendezvoused with someday and studied. And it is a bit like the Drake equation there. It's like if just a fraction of a percent of those were artificial satellites, or something like the Voyager probe that just wound up here. Well, the odds of us finding something are pretty good.
Loeb: Yeah, well actually, the numbers are even more promising. Because if you assume that ‘Oumuamua was not functional, you know, it was not targeting the inner Solar System. If you just say, it was on a random trajectory, and they're, you know, in orbits are being populated randomly with objects like it, then there should be a quadrillion such objects right now, within the volume of the Oort Cloud, the outskirts of the Solar System.
A quadrillion is 10 to the power 15. So, it's a huge number. And that's why it was a challenge to account for such a large number, assuming that this object is a rock. Now, recently, I wrote a paper, and that was after my book was published and about the possibility. I mean, originally, I thought it could be space trash, like, for example, the surface layer of a bigger object, because you want it to be thin so that the reflection of Sunlight pushes it.
But recently, I wrote a paper saying, well, maybe it's a broken Dyson Sphere, it's a piece from a Dyson Sphere.This is a concept that Freeman Dyson came up with for a civilization to harness the energy from the parent star. And then by surrounding it with absorbing materials. And, of course, making a rigid body is impossible, engineering-wise. And a much, much better approach would be to have tiles that are hovering above the star and are basically balancing the gravity of the star by radiation pressure. So they're just floating like heights above the star, and they overlap. And so you cover the entire star with those tiles.
But then, as the story evolves, eventually, it becomes much more luminous, and then it would break up this structure. So I said, maybe the pieces from a broken Dyson Sphere, you know, could appear like ‘Oumuamua because it had radiation pressure acting on it. And there could be many possible scenarios where a thin film or membrane would, you know, be abundant.
This trash, just like plastic bags are in the oceans, you know.The oceans are full of plastics, and they keep accumulating over time. And the same is true for any technological trash. Because it doesn't move faster than 10s of kilometres per second.That's the characteristic speed of all the spacecraft that we launched. And that's much smaller than the escape speed from the Milky Way galaxy.
So all of these technological objects that are not functional anymore, will still be bound by gravity to the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, and that will be just floating around just like plastics in the ocean. And they keep accumulating over the billions of years that technological civilization is through them.
And so even if those civilizations are not around anymore, you can still find the trash, this space trash. We are sending five such probes already. And so, my point is, let's just check our backyard – and meaning the Solar System – and see if there is anything beyond the rocks that we are familiar with.There might be a tennis ball thrown by a neighbor.
Matt: But yeah, your words here, that actually puts me in mind of something that Gregory Matloff said. He, too is a professor there at the NewYork City College ofTechnology. He's worked for NASA. And yes, he's a member of Breakthrough Starshot. And he said something very similar. I asked him about his paper that was on von Neumann probes and their multiplication.
And so I had to ask, I said, “What do you think of the Hart-Tipler Conjecture? And he said, “That's a ridiculous idea. We haven't even begun to explore our own Solar System, let alone the Universe. So how can we say there's no evidence?” And he specifically pointed out the possibility of finding the
remnants of interstellar probes in the Oort Cloud, in the Kuiper Belt, in the Asteroid Belt. Right? We're not going to find that floating around Earth, necessarily, and how we have, I can't recall the statistics. He said that, within the Asteroid Belt, we've examined just a handful of objects up close. And there's really hundreds of millions, and just two objects in the Kuiper Belt. So...
Loeb:Yeah, what is the point?The point is really, that interstellar objects was just discovered over the past decade. And I mentioned two of them. Both are, both, the first two that we detected, appear to be different than the space rocks that we are familiar with. So I think that is the way the Universe sends us a message that, you know, we should be open-minded as to what comes our way from interstellar space.
In much the same way that you know, most of the matter in the Universe, 83% of the matter in the Universe cannot be found in the Solar System. It's called Dark Matter. We don't know what it is. And for 90 years, we've been searching for it, we haven't found it. So rather than say, like a paper a few weeks ago, said, when I came back from the expedition, it said, “Well, we cannot fit the US government data about the first interstellar meteor as a stony meteorite of the type that we find in the Solar System.Therefore, the data must be wrong.”
This is not a viable approach, because then you would exclude the existence of Dark Matter, you would say the data is wrong, I'm only fitting the data with no matter in the sources. And well, that's not the case. We know that. And so, we should be open-minded. I mean, it's a learning experience. Science is about new knowledge. Not that, you know, we are not supposed to always explain everything with past knowledge when there are anomalies. But in particular, here, there are objects that do not resemble what we already encountered.
Matt: Now, I have to ask, just getting back to your recent expedition. So now as I understand that there, you guys went out in the boat, you were just off the coast of Papua-New Guinea, in the South Pacific. And you were using a metal net to drag the bottom of the ocean where this meteor would have landed, to pick up basically the bits and pieces that were left over.
Loeb: Yeah. And this was, what, it was not a net, it was more of a sled weighing 200 kilograms in mass, one meter in width that was connected by a cable to the ship.The ship was fittingly called the Silver Star. And we basically, we had the region of about 10 kilometers that we criss-crossed around the meteor path that was defined by the government data and seismometer data from the region, about 90 kilometres away from a loose island in Papua-New Guinea.Yes.
Matt: So in addition to 50 spheroles... Loeb:You also now we have more actually Matt: Oh, what's the total? What's the total up?
Loeb: Now it's more like 150 because we looked at them. Last week, we looked at the some additional material more carefully.The thing is on the shape, we could already only pick with our
tweezers. Spherules, these are metallic marbles that we found among all the particles that you know represent the sand on the at the bottom of the ocean two kilometres deep. So we found that we could only pick up things bigger than a 10th of a millimeter with our tweezers, but now we find things that are smaller in the laboratory. So last week, that tally increased to about 150. But these are smaller spherules mostly.
Matt: And there was also a wire was there not? A stretch of metal wire, and yeah, just a lot of curiosities. So is there a earthly explanation, right? Something that that could be ruled out right away? Is there an earthly explanation for these little marbles?
Loeb: Well, so we can already tell that these were a result of heating the surface of the meteorite to a very high temperature, because they have ridges, they have dendrites on the surface that indicates very high temperatures and fast cooling. And these are basically the droplets that melted off the surface of the meteorite. And we found them mostly along the meteor path that we localized, and not so much far away from it. We made a map of those ferals in there mostly concentrated around the meteor path.
So that shows some correlation. And of course, we went also to control regions, regions that are far away – 10s of kilometres away – so that we can compare notes and you know, compare the types, the type of spherules we find there from other meteorites or some other background events, you can imagine. Other sources, I mean, the most abundant constituent that we found on the ocean floor that was attracted by our magnets, is volcanic ash. Basically, black powder, and those particles are smaller than a 10th of a millimeter, we could filter them out with a mesh.
But, you know, there could still be some contaminants from geological effects or other meteorites in the background. So, what we are planning is to compare the composition of spherule at the meteor location to those in the control regions. And we are in the process of doing that right now. It will probably take a few weeks. And we plan to report the results in a scientific paper to be submitted to a peer reviewed journal.
The other thing is, you know, first we want to check whether the material itself is different than you find in the Solar System. In terms of the abundance of elements, radioactive isotopes that have a finite lifetime, we could even date the material, basically, inferring its age. And if it's different from the age of the Solar System, we know that it spent a long time through the journey in interstellar space. So that these are things we can in principle infer, if we find them, you know. If you make a sense of all the radio isotopes.
Matt: So, let's assume for a second that this was a piece of some kind of technology, a satellite or a deep space probe, and melts up in the atmosphere. We are able to pick up these little granulated bits of melted metal and the composition will indicate basically where it came from. Or, at least, establish some constraints there. But yeah, there would be indicators that this was not naturally occurring minerals that were thrown out exactly.
Loeb: So, that's exactly the second question that we want to address. If indeed the material is different from Solar System materials, is it technological in origin, and you can imagine melting computer screens or melting semiconductors or melting an object like New Horizons, spacecraft. Obviously, the droplets will have a different composition than you find in nature, for naturally produced rocks.
And hopefully, we should be able to tell that kind of an origin and at the very, you know, we could also use the spherules as a guide to where we might search for bigger pieces of the original object and go there again.
And obviously, if you find a big piece, you can easily tell the difference between a rock and technological gadget. Because the gadget will have a label saying made on some exoplanet, or it might have also buttons that we can press. Which will raise the question, should we press a button?
Matt: Yeah. And this is the goal of the Galileo Project, right?
Loeb: Exactly yeah. Exactly.The Galileo Project, in addition to doing these expeditions, aims to find more objects like ‘Oumuamua that do not collide with Earth. So the meteor was discovered because it produced a fireball, even though it was small, just half a meter in size. A US government sensors could see the fireball from its friction with air, but then an object like ‘Oumuamua was detected just because of the its reflection of sunlight.
It was detected by telescopes and therefore it had to be much bigger and further, 100 meters, 200 times bigger, in order for telescopes to see enough of their, of the reflected sunlight. And so in the future there is the Rubin Observatory that may find more objects like ‘Oumuamua, we hope to study them. And the third branch of the Galileo Project is to study unidentified anomalous phenomena that the US government talks about.
We have a working observatory that monitors the sky 24/7 at Harvard University, in the infrared, optical, radio and audio, and we're analyzing the data with machine learning algorithms that try to separate natural objects like birds from human made objects like balloons, or drones, or aeroplanes, and see if there is anything else.
Matt: And satellite information to comes into this?
Loeb: Exactly. We partnered with Planet Labs, and we're getting their data. And so, we will use that to look at the objects from above, not just from below, we have a one working observatory at Harvard University, and we plan to make five copies of it based on funding that we are expecting to receive. And maybe even more, depending if we get more funding.The idea is to cover enough, a large enough number of sites so that we can get to the bottom of the nature of those unidentified objects that the US government talks about.
Matt: Well, that all sounds very exciting. And I think I speak for everyone when I say, I look forward to hearing what the results are. And it is very exciting to think that we are now on the precipice of
this very new, very auspicious era where UAP – unidentified aerial phenomenon – has become a public matter, a matter of science rather than a clandestine affair that's overseen by the military and government agencies in total secrecy.
I want to thank Professor Loeb for coming on and hope that we can pick this up again very soon. And a reminder to my listeners, Interstellar: the Search for Extraterrestrial Life and our Future in the Stars.This book, which addresses many of the questions we're now facing in terms of, “Have we been visited by interstellar visitors?”
And what does this portend for our species for the future of our species? It is available now for preorder its official releases scheduled for August 29. And I now have my copy, which I will be reading with great interest and reviewing very soon. Keep an eye open for that here as part of a new segment that looks at potential extraterrestrial phenomenon and how we have dealt with this over time.
So thank you again, Professor Loeb, and good luck, and I also advise my listeners to check out the Galileo Project for regular updates on their research and findings.That two promises to be very exciting.
In the meantime, thank you for listening. I'm Matt Williams, and this has been Stories from Space.