WEBVTT

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This is Later with Lee Matthews the
Lee Matthews Podcast More What You Here weekday

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afternoons on the Drive. Abraham ave
Lobe is a professor of science at Harvard

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University, longest serving chair of Harvard's
Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's

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Black Hole Initiative, and current director
of the Institute of Theory and Computation within

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the Center of Astrophysics. She's got
a new book out that's fascinating if you

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are like me and like to look
into these kinds of things. It's called

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Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
and Our Future in the Stars. Ave

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Lobe, welcome, thanks for having
me. Let's start with just our recent

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history. I mean, we've come
a long way in exploring the stars and

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learning and understanding the stars since the
rs CEBO radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

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Yeah. Well, ours CBO was
looking for radio signals, which is similar

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to waiting for a phone call at
phone, and that will not necessarily happen

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if nobody is calling you when you're
listening, You'll need the counterpart to be

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active. Different approach which might be
much better. That's the one I'm describing

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in my book is to check around
your backyard or your mailbox whether there is

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any package there that may have arrived. The sender doesn't need to be alive

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at the time that you recovered the
package. And that's a completely different approach,

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and we haven't done so until the
last decade. Only over the past

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decade we've found the first objects from
outside the Solar System in the vicinity of

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Earth. And guess what the first
two of them. It was a meteor

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from twenty fourteen and a large object
that passed near Earth from twenty seventeen called

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Uma. Both of the looked really
strange relative to asteroids or comets that were

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familiar with. Yeah, I gather
they had a symmetry to them. And

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one of the things I've learned I
do a lot of scuba diving, and

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when you're in a search and rescue
situation, you look for symmetry symmetry spaces

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because nature is not symmetrical. Yeah, I mean, so, what was

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unusual about the meteor was that it
was moving very fast. In fact,

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outside the Solar System, it was
moving faster than ninety five percent of all

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the stars in the vicinity of the
Sun relative to the frame of the Milky

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Way galaxys. And moreover, when
it collided with Earth, it only exploded

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in the lawera atmosphere of the Earth, and that implied that it has material

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strength puffer than all the space rocks
we had seen before that were cataloged by

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NASA over the past decade, one
hundred and seventy two of them. So

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that raised the possibility, at least
in my mind, that maybe it's artificial

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in origin, because if you imagine
voyager that we sent to interstellar space in

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the distant future colliding with another planet
that looks like the Earth, it would

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appear as the meteor in the sky
of that planet. So that's one object,

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the meteor. And then in twenty
seventeen there was another one the size

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of a football field that didn't collide
with Earth, but past near Earth.

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And it was very strange because it
was flat in its shape and was also

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pushed away from the Sun without evaporating, without any rocket effect, And so

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the question is what was shing it? So these are the normalies of these

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two objects. They didn't look like
the typical space rocks that were used to

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He calls it a practical wakeup called
Abraham RV. Lobe is with us his

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book Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial
Life and Our Future in the Stars,

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and he does it in a way
that makes it very easy to understand it.

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You can tell by by just by
talking to him. That is the

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I think the mind boggling thing too, av is that, Okay, when

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we see the light from a star
that is hundreds of light years away,

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conceivably that star could have already exploded
and expired. We just haven't seen it

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happen yet. So it makes sense
that if something's being transmitted to us from

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Afar, it would be the same
effect, right, And just keep in

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mind that for chemical rockets of the
type that we launched, all the spacecraft

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that we launched, it takes about
half a billion years to cross the Milky

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Way galaxy. So it's a very
long time. And actually our son in

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one billionaire will extinguish all life forms
on errors. It will basically vaporize all

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the oceans and boil them off,
and that would mean that life as we

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know it will not exist on Earth
once the Earth's ages by another billion of

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years, and that is twenty percent
fifth of the age of the Earth so

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far. So we just have twenty
percent left, and you can think of

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other stars that they may have formed
earlier than the Sun. In fact,

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most stars on billions of years before
the Sun, they already went through that

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phase if they had a planet like
the Earth around them. And there must

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have been a lot of tragedies in
the history of the Milky Way in the

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past where civilizations like us were eliminated. And obviously if they send the equipment

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to space, if they send spacecraft
just like we did, you could still

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find those things. They would be
relics. Just in the way that we

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do archaeology, we can find relics
of cultures that exist in the past and

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are not around anymore. Talking to
Ave Lobe his book Interstellar, The Search

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for Extraterrestrial Life and and Our Future
in the Stars, what can the reader

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do to go along with this?
I mean, is this all being done

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by scientists with Van Dyke beards and
telescopes, or is there something the average

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person can do to feel as though
they're part of this well. I established

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the Galileo Project at Harvard University where
we have an observatory in monitoring the sky

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twenty four seven, and we are
planning to make copies of this observatory in

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place them in various locations within the
US. And one way to take part

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in that is, I mean,
obviously by funding those observatories. I mean,

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we know exactly how to make such
an observatory. We need funding at

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a level of a fraction of a
million dollars pair of observatory, and it

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can be named after any donor that
is interested in contributing. So so there

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is of course a lot of work
to be done. It can be done

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in many places by planting those observatories
that would monitor the sky interstellar the search

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for extraterrestrial life and our future in
the stars. There's been a lot of

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recent videos that people have been spreading
around on social media that cannot be explained.

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Many NASA experts chiming in on them, but I gather you don't get

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into that too much. An interstellar
No, I actually discuss it because it's

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a hot topic in Washington right now. Hearing at the House of Representatives where

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really eyewitnesses talked about this, and
one of them even said that there are

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programs for retrieval and reverse engineering of
alien spacecraft. That's David Grush and hopefully

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the Congress we look into that and
see if the story is real. But

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the point is that, you know, we don't need to wait for the

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US government to tell us because this
is a scientific matter. The sky is

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not classified, the oceans are not
classified, and I went to the Pacific

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Ocean after an interstellar meteor. We
already analyze the materials and the results will

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be reported tomorrow. Professor of Science
at Harvard University, Chair of Harvard's Department

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of Astronomy, and his new collection, his new creation, Interstellar, The

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Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future
in the Stars alb Lobe. We look

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forward to reading the book. Thank
you for John, Thanks for listening to

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Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee
Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to

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The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five
to seven and iHeart Media presentation