Speaker 1: Okay, so I want you to just for a second
picture of this. There's this object about the size.
Speaker 2: Of Manhattan, right, huge.
Speaker 1: Huge, and it's just hurtling through our solar system. Now,
the official story, the classification, is that it's just a comment,
you know, a boring run of the mill comic.
Speaker 2: What if it's not?
Speaker 1: What if it's not? What if that Manhattan sized object
is actually a nuclear powered alien spacecraft on a deliberate
reconnaissance mission.
Speaker 2: And that is the ultimate high stakes question hanging over
all of astronomy right now. I mean, this isn't just
some fun hypothetical you'd see in a movie. No, this
is a genuine, active scientific debate happening between world renowned
physicists about a real interstellar visitor.
Speaker 1: That's right, and welcome to the deep dive. Our mission
for you today is to get you the most comprehensive
briefing possible on this this incredibly anomalous object. It's called
three I T lists.
Speaker 2: And we should probably say it right from the get go.
It's pronounced three i at lists.
Speaker 1: Three i at lists exactly. And you are about to
be dropped right into the middle of this intellectual collision
between two absolute titans in the field.
Speaker 2: On one side, you have doctor Michio Kaku. He's arguing
for a natural explanation, but one that hinges on an
almost unimaginable age for this object.
Speaker 1: Well, on the other side, you have Professor Avi Lobe
from Harvard who argues that the anomalies, the weird things
about this object are just too profound to ignore and
they might actually signal alien technology.
Speaker 2: This isn't just a polite academic disagreement. The fundamental divide
here is really about how you treat an anomaly in science.
How so well do you stretch the known laws of
physics and chemistry to try and make it fit, or
do you take a step back and say, maybe maybe
the anomaly itself is pointing into something we don't know at.
Speaker 1: All, something designed.
Speaker 2: Something possibly designed. And we're going to be pulling all
the key pieces of this puzzle directly from our sources today,
which are some fantastic interviews from News Nation that featured
both of these experts.
Speaker 1: And let's get the basic facts on the table right away,
because this is happening now. The clock is ticking. It
really is three ietlasts. Three Ietlass is an interstellar object
that means it came from outside our solar system, beyond
the pull of our Sun.
Speaker 2: And the critical date, the one everyone is waiting for,
is December nineteenth, which.
Speaker 1: From the time of this discussion is less than six
weeks away. So what happens on December nineteenth.
Speaker 2: That's its closest pass to Earth. It is still going
to be very very far away, to be clear, but
it's our best chance to get the clearest data. It's
the moment of truth.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's start with the first sight of this argument,
the case for this being a deeply strange but ultimately natural,
very old.
Speaker 2: Comet, right because when three ilass was first spotted, the
initial classification was comet, that's what it looked like.
Speaker 1: But that didn't last long.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, almost immediately the standard comet playbook just got
thrown out the window. We started getting observations that simply
didn't line up with our definition of a you know,
a dirty snowball from the Oort cloud.
Speaker 1: And that first big observation, the one that really threw
a round. I remember seeing all the chatter about this online,
was the mystery of its tail.
Speaker 2: Or more accurately, the lack of.
Speaker 1: One exactly there were these new images, and interestingly, they
were coming from observatories in Spain, not NASA.
Speaker 2: We'll get to the NASA part later because that's a
whole other story it is.
Speaker 1: But these images from Spain seem to show the object
losing its tail completely after it.
Speaker 2: Passed the Sun, and that is a classic huge red flag.
A comet's tail is its defining feature, right, It's what
makes it comet a comet.
Speaker 1: It's the whole show it is.
Speaker 2: It's what happens when the Sun's energy, the solar wind
blasts the frozen ices on the comet's surface, the water, methane,
carbon monoxide and turns them into gas. That gas and
dust creates the glow the coma and the tail that
streams behind it.
Speaker 1: So if the tail just vanishes.
Speaker 2: It suggests one of two things. Either the object has
completely run out of those volatile.
Speaker 1: Ices like an old spent comment, right.
Speaker 2: Or it was never made of the standard stuff we
associate with comments from our solar system in the first place.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's use that as a jumping off point
for doctor Kaku's perspective, because he takes these bizarre observations
like the missing tail, and he constructs this really, I mean,
it's an incredibly elegant natural explanation, it really is, And.
Speaker 2: His entire solution hangs on one single factor time immense
almost unimaginable stretches of time. Kaku's key argument is that
three I at LEAs isn't just some random interstellar traveler.
He thinks it's a very.
Speaker 1: Old object, and he puts a number on it.
Speaker 2: He does. He places its likely age around a staggering
seven billion years old.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, So why is that number so important? Seven billion?
Speaker 2: Because it provides context the comments that are native to
our own solar system, the ones out in the Kuiper
Belt or the Ort Cloud, they're typically around three to
four billion years old.
Speaker 1: The same age as our Solar system itself exactly.
Speaker 2: So what we're dealing with here is an object that
is potentially twice the age of anything from our own
cosmic backyard.
Speaker 1: That's an extra what three four billion years spent just
drifting through interstellar space, passing through who knows how many
different star systems.
Speaker 2: Nebulae precisely, and that age gap is the engine of
Kaku's whole theory. He argues that this object has had
an enormous amount of time to accumulate, as he colorfully
puts it, garbage, cosmic garbage, cosmic garbage. This process of
just gathering dust gas, different elements from countless different stellar neighborhoods,
maybe remnants of supernovae. That's what he believes explains its
profoundly anomalous chemical makeup.
Speaker 1: And we really need to slow down and talk about
that chemical composition because this is the scientific smoking gun
for Coacou's theory. It is he specifically points to the
nickel content and the iron content being completely off scale. Now,
for those of us who aren't astrophysicists, why is finding
a lot of nickel and iron and a comet so weird?
Speaker 2: That is the critical question. I think of a standard comet,
we call it a dirty snow for a reason. It's
mostly rich in volatiles.
Speaker 1: The ices, the ices, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Water, methane, all those HNCO compounds. Nickel and iron, on
the other hand, are what we call refractory element, meaning
they require extremely high temperatures to turn into gas. When
our solar system was forming four and a half billion
years ago, materials like iron and nickel condensed much closer
to the hot young Sun. That's what formed the rocky
planets like Earth and Mars.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the heavy rocky stuff stayed close to the fire,
so to speak.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the light, icy, volatile stuff got pushed way
out of the cold, distant edges to the Oort cloud.
So a traditional comet should be like a pristine, frozen
sample of those original ices.
Speaker 1: So when astronomers point a spectroscope at an object they
think is a comet and the readings for nickel and
iron come back off scale, like way outside the expected range,
that's a huge problem.
Speaker 2: It's a paradox. Yeah, that composition is just incompatible with
the idea that it formed and the cold, icy nursery
of our solar system four billion years ago.
Speaker 1: But Cook, who resolves this paradox with time?
Speaker 2: He does. He says, Look, seven billion years is more
than enough time for this thing to have encountered multiple
star systems, maybe pass through different accretion disks, maybe even
spent some time in a much warmer environment. You're a
different kind of star long long ago.
Speaker 1: So over billions of years, it just collected and held
on to this this metallic garbage that a younger purer
commet from our own neighborhood just wouldn't have.
Speaker 2: And suddenly the object isn't evidence of alien engineering. It's
a product of much deeper, much longer cosmic history.
Speaker 1: You know, that makes an incredible amount of sense. It's
good scientific logic, right, use the least exotic explanation first.
Speaker 2: Ockham's razor right.
Speaker 1: And in this case, the most powerful force isn't aliens.
It's just time. He uses that one dimension to explain
away all the weird chemical signatures. It's a beautifully simple
way to dismiss the need for alien probes, and.
Speaker 2: It really speaks to the nature of interstellar travel itself.
If you're coming from a different star, you're not bound
by the chemical history of our star. It's entirely possible
this object formed in a region of space where nickel
and iron were just much more common in the original
gas cloud.
Speaker 1: Speaking of comment, it's clear this whole debate has reached
far beyond the scientific community. Kaku shared this great little
anecdote in the interview that shows just how much this
has captured the public's imagination.
Speaker 2: It was a very telling moment, and I think it's
something we can all kind of recognize.
Speaker 1: So what happened.
Speaker 2: Cacusaid he was just sitting on an airplane and he
overheard the people near him talking, actually arguing back and
forth about the nature of this comment. Oh way, yeah,
he the world expert theoretical physicist, was just sitting there
quietly listening to civilians debate the chemical composition and origin
of three adellis.
Speaker 1: I would pay so much money to see that, just
to watch the temptation on his face to lean over
and be like, excuse me, I happen to understand string
theory and the math behind this object, and I'm here
to tell.
Speaker 2: You, he said. The temptation was very high, but he resisted.
He kept quiet. But just the fact that an interstellar
anomaly is now common airplane chatter, you know, it's not
just a footnote in the Astrophysical Journal.
Speaker 1: No, it shows the magnetic pull this story has. It's
a genuine scientific mystery that everyone can get invested in. Absolutely, So,
before we switch gears to the more radical theory, Kaku
did give his official quantified assessment. He weighed in on
the odds of this thing actually being an engineered object.
Speaker 2: And that's the voice of scientific caution you expect to hear.
He said. The odds of it being extraterrestrial in nature
are and um quoting non zero but very small.
Speaker 1: Non zero but very small. I like that.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect scientific hedge for him. You have to
remain open to the possibility, that's the non zero part,
but you have to prioritize the bulk of the evidence.
And so far, this object mostly behaves like an object
following Newtonian physics.
Speaker 1: It responds to gravity, it interacts with the.
Speaker 2: Sun for the most part, barring very significant anomalies. So
for Kuku, that small chance of it being et just
doesn't outweigh the massive plausible explanation provided by extreme age.
It grounds the whole discussion. In reality we can test.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we need to slow down, take a deep breath,
and cross the chasm into a totally.
Speaker 2: Different way of thinking, a very different.
Speaker 1: Way, because if Mitchi O Kaku is using time to
explain away the anomalies, Professor Avi lob is grabbing those
same anomalies and holding them up as proof of intelligent
technological design.
Speaker 2: And we really need to introduce Professor Loebe properly here,
because he is not some fringe character. He is a
highly accomplished Harvard astronomer. He's the head of the Galileo project.
Speaker 1: I'm author of the book Extraterrestrial Right.
Speaker 2: He's really made a name for himself by actively pursuing
the hypothesis that some of these astronomical oddities you might
remember the previous interstellar visitor Umomua, might actually be alien technology.
Speaker 1: So for Loeb, the weird behavior of three ihls isn't
just an old comment acting strange.
Speaker 2: No, for him, it suggests steering, propulsion, even reconnaissance.
Speaker 1: And he doesn't just base this on a gut feeling.
He's using hard calculations derived from how the object behaved
after it passed the Sun that October twenty ninth date exactly.
Speaker 2: And let's start with the most compelling piece of physical
evidence he presents, the jets.
Speaker 1: This is where we get into the whole fragmentation versus
thruster debate.
Speaker 2: So observers noted that after its closest approach to the Sun,
the object displayed not one, but seven, maybe even more
distinct jets of material shooting out from it.
Speaker 1: And the crucial part isn't just that there were jets,
but the energy they had.
Speaker 2: The energy was immense. These jets managed to penetrate over
a million kilometers through the solar wind.
Speaker 1: And the solar wind is not a gentle breeze. It's
a powerful force, right, A stream of charged particles moving
at incredible speeds creating this constant pressure.
Speaker 2: It's a cosmic hurricane. So for anything to push back
against that, to penetrate it over a million kilometers requires
a serious amount of velocity in momentum.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how does Lobe use that fact?
Speaker 2: His method is to calculate the amount of mass you'd
need to achieve that, assuming three IADA lists is just
a standard natural comment.
Speaker 1: Right, the dirty snowball model exactly.
Speaker 2: So, the gas outflow from ice turning into gas sublimation
is actually relatively slow, maybe a kilometer per second, give
or take.
Speaker 1: So with that slow ejection speed to get the momentum
you need to punch through a million kilometers of solar wind.
Speaker 2: Lobe's calculation forces an enormous mass requirement. The jests must
have carried away about five billion tons of mass.
Speaker 1: Five billion to.
Speaker 2: Five billion tons.
Speaker 1: That sounds like an impossible amount of material for a
small object to just shed.
Speaker 2: It is, unless it has a colossal surface area For
all that ice to sublimate.
Speaker 1: From which leads to his next point.
Speaker 2: Precisely, to achieve that kind of mass loss through normal
comet mechanics, the object would need a total surface area
equivalent to a body that's at least twenty kilometers in diameter.
Speaker 1: But the original estimates for three a atlists were much
smaller than.
Speaker 2: That, much smaller. So this leads the standard natural hypothesis
with a major problem. The only way you can satisfy
that five billion ton mass loss is if the object broke.
Speaker 1: Up, If fragmented, it had.
Speaker 2: To have shattered into many, many smaller pieces, and the
combined surface area of all those pieces adds up to
that twenty kilometer minimum.
Speaker 1: But that seems like a huge constraint. I mean, if
three iolis had shattered to that degree, wouldn't our telescopes
have already seen a huge, wide debris cloud.
Speaker 2: That's the key skeptical question, and that is where Lobe
offers the technological alternative. Okay, what if those jets are
not standard slow out gassing from ice? What if they're
highly efficient technological thrusters?
Speaker 1: All right, so unpack the physics of that for us.
How does calling it a thruster solve that? Five billion
ton paradox.
Speaker 2: It all comes down to the relationship between mass and velocity.
In the momentum equation, momentum is mass times velocity. So
if you can achieve a much much higher velocity for
the stuff you're rejecting, say ten or even one hundred
times faster than natural sublimation, which is easily achievable with
modern propulsion technology.
Speaker 1: And you need far far less mass to create the
same amount of push.
Speaker 2: Exactly the same penetrating thrust and momentum, you're just being
way more efficient with your fuel.
Speaker 1: So the mass required for that fuel suddenly drops from
five billion tons of rock and ice.
Speaker 2: To what Lobe suggests could be just a small fraction
of the spacecraft's total mass.
Speaker 1: Which means the object can be much smaller, much denser,
and it can stay in one piece. It doesn't have
to break up at all.
Speaker 2: It completely resolves the paradox. If the object stays whole,
then the massive thrust we're observing must come from efficient
high speed propulsion, and that is, by its nature technological.
Speaker 1: So it leaves us with this stark choice. It's either
a pile of shattered rock or it's an intact steered craft.
Speaker 2: A binary choice.
Speaker 1: Man, it really makes that December nineteenth day feel like
some kind of cosmic reveal. Part, are we looking at
a giant pile of space rubble or one solid object
demonstrating propulsion?
Speaker 2: It's exactly that, and the physical evidence of the jets
is only one part of Lobe's argument. He also focuses
very heavily on the object's trajectory.
Speaker 1: Right. He argues that its path is just statistically too
perfect to be a random it suggests intent.
Speaker 2: This is where the statistics start to feel, honestly a
little unsettling.
Speaker 1: So what are the odds we're dealing with? A path
that looks deliberate?
Speaker 2: Low points out two very specific astronomical oddities in its trajectory. First,
the object's path is aligned with the plane of the planets,
what astronomers call the ecliptic plane.
Speaker 1: So it's flying flat on the same plane as Earth, Mars, Jupiter,
et cetera.
Speaker 2: To within the deviation of only five degrees. Now, you
have to think about the massive three dimensional volume of
space an interstellar object could arive from. It could come
from above below any random angle.
Speaker 1: So the probability of a random object just happening to
come in and align itself that closely with the flat
disc of our panetary orbits must be incredibly low.
Speaker 2: It is low. Have calculated the likelihood of that specific
alignment happening by chance as one in five hundred.
Speaker 1: One in five hundred, Okay, already improbable.
Speaker 2: But then you layer the second factor on top of that,
the timing.
Speaker 1: The timing of its flybys.
Speaker 2: Yes, the timing of its arrival is, in his words,
perfect to pass close to several key planets in our
solar system, which ones Mars, Venus and Jupiter. So this
isn't just a random path through space. It's a series
of opportune flybys that maximizes the potential for observation.
Speaker 1: And he calculated the odds of that too, he did.
Speaker 2: He puts the likelihood of that specific advantageous timing occurring
by random chance is one in twenty thousand.
Speaker 1: Okay, stop right there, a one in five hundred chance
of its alignment combine with a one in twenty thousand
chance of its timing the odds multiplied right that that
feels like it moves beyond statistical improbability and into the
realm of well design, doesn't it. If someone were to
design a reconnaissance path through our solar system. This is
exactly the projectory they would pick.
Speaker 2: That is precisely the implication Lobe wants us to wrestle with.
A non random trajectory suggests one of two things. Either
it was deliberately placed on this path billions of years
ago just possible, I guess, or that it's currently being
steered to optimize its viewing angles as it passes through.
If you were a probe sent a monitor for life
in a new star system, you would naturally want to
graze past the most interesting planets, and this object is
set to do exactly that.
Speaker 1: It looks for all the world like a reconnaissance mission
it does. This is where I find the whole debate
so thrilling, because Cocker's age theory explains the object's composition beautifully,
but it does absolutely nothing to explain the trajectory.
Speaker 2: And Lobe's technological theory explains the trajectory beautifully, but it
requires this massive leap of faith to assume intelligent design.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate scientific tension. And Lobo didn't even stop there.
He introduced an updated, even more radical hypothesis.
Speaker 2: Based on new observational data. Yeah, he suggested that three
Iets could be a nuclear powered alien spacecraft.
Speaker 1: Nuclear powered Okay, where did that come from?
Speaker 2: It comes from his analysis of data from the Hubble
space telescope. Load claims that the Hubble picture appears to
show the object emitting its own light.
Speaker 1: Not just reflecting sunlight, which is what we'd expect from
a rock or a comet exactly.
Speaker 2: If it's glowing on its own, that suggests an internal
power source.
Speaker 1: And then there's this halo. He talks about, a glow
of scattered light that he says is in front of
the object, not trailing behind it like a normal comet tail.
Speaker 2: And that placement is incredibly important. The direction of a
tail tells you about the forces acting on the material.
Speaker 1: Solar radiation pushes the dust away from the sun, creating
that trailing tail.
Speaker 2: Right, So, if this glow, this halo of light or
material is in front of the object, that requires a
whole different explanation that goes beyond simple solar mechanics.
Speaker 1: And did he analyze what the halo is made of?
Speaker 2: He did. He analyzed the dust content and found that
if it is dust, it's a minimal mount less than
a millimeter thick. Abladd from the surface over a period of.
Speaker 1: Six months, so we're not talking about a giant plume
of escaping gas and dirt.
Speaker 2: It's more like a veneer, right, and Lob's conclusion from
that is that this minimal amount of dust suggests dirt
on a solid surface, which is a far cry from
a traditional fluffy, ice rich comet nucleus.
Speaker 1: So if it's a solid surface and it appears to
be glowing on its own.
Speaker 2: That implies an onboard energy source, something powerful enough to
generate light and potentially propel the object, which leads him
directly to the hypothesis of a nuclear power source. It's
the ultimate statement of technological independence.
Speaker 1: So whether you lean towards Kaku's ancient garbage collecting rock
or Loeb's radical alien technology, there's one thing they both
immediately agreed.
Speaker 2: On a major point of agreement, and.
Speaker 1: That's the controversy surrounding the lack of public access to
some of the most critical data.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we saw this rare joint outcry from both experts,
with Kaku and Loe both calling on NASA to release
its best imagery of the object.
Speaker 1: And this specific imagery was taken on October second by
the high rise camera, which.
Speaker 2: Is on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or MRO.
Speaker 1: The MRO is orbiting Mars and its high rise camera
is one of the most powerful, highest resolution cameras that
NASA has anywhere off of Earth.
Speaker 2: So getting a clean shot of three ils from the
MRO is fundamentally crucial because of its relative proximity and
the level of detail it can capture. It could potentially
resolve this whole fragmentation debate immediately.
Speaker 1: But the data was withheld.
Speaker 2: It was and the justification given, which was cited by
both Professor Loeb and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, was the
government shutdown at the time, and Loob.
Speaker 1: I remember, was furious about this. He argued, it's just
unacceptable for the politics of the moment, you know, the
internal machinery of Washington d C to sabotage the progress
of science.
Speaker 2: It's a total breakdown of scientific communication and frankly public trust.
And doctor Kakou, coming from his very different perspective, was
equally blunt about it.
Speaker 1: What was his take.
Speaker 2: He's stressed that keeping secrets over what is essentially a
sheet of paper or you know, a hard drive full
of images is completely pointless.
Speaker 1: Why hide the raw data, that's his question.
Speaker 2: It only fosters counter productive speculation among the public. I mean,
if the data shows it is just a boring rock,
release it and end the speculation. If it's something revolutionary,
the public absolutely deserves to know.
Speaker 1: He's right. The only real outcome of that kind of
secrecy is an increase in conspiracy theories exactly. And this
brings us right to the issue of, you know, public
safety and potential panic. When you have two brilliant physicists
openly arguing about a potential nuclear powered alien craft, the
public is naturally going to ask, are we in danger?
Speaker 2: That is the most immediate, gut level concern, and this
is where both experts thankfully unite to offer reassurance.
Speaker 1: We need perspective on the sheer scale of space here.
Speaker 2: An immense amount of perspective. The object gets no closer
than one hundred sixty seven million miles away on December nineteenth.
Speaker 1: One hundred and sixty seven million miles. That is an enormous,
completely safe distance.
Speaker 2: Doctor Kaku offered the most definitive reassurance. He said, the
object is harmless, it's too far away, and we won't
be invaded. By aliens from a Hollywood movie set.
Speaker 1: That's a good line to keep in mind when the
speculation starts to run wild online.
Speaker 2: It is, and Kako's critique of the speculation itself is
really important for scientific integrity. He warns that speculation has
to be quantified.
Speaker 1: What does he mean by that?
Speaker 2: You can't just alarm the public without also stating your
level of confidence. The risk of crying wolf, of promoting
this frightening scenario that turns out to be just a
fragmented rock, is that it leads to a severe public backlash.
Speaker 1: People will eventually say, what we wasted all our emotional
and political energy on a false alarm, and.
Speaker 2: That erodes public trust and science itself. It's a very
real danger.
Speaker 1: And he did point out that Professor Lobe, to his credit,
was careful in the public discussion to state that the
overall probability of his technological speculations being true are in
fact quite low.
Speaker 2: Which is an essential scientific qualification. It's your job as
a scientist to explore the boundary conditions to check the
non zero probabilities, but you have to communicate the likelihood
of the core hypothesis with care.
Speaker 1: It's the difference between exploring a possibility and asserting effect exactly. Now,
there's one more anomaly we have to address, because it
was initially seen as a potential smoking gun for intelligent guidance.
Speaker 2: Ah, the speeding up concern.
Speaker 1: Right, Kaku himself had previously suggested that if three I
Atlas picked up extra energy as it whipped around the Sun,
if its speed increased beyond what gravity alone could explain,
that would be a very strong indicator of propulsion.
Speaker 2: And there was some initial speculation that it did speed
up just a little bit as it went around the Sun,
and yes, in a vacuum that sounds deeply concerning. It
suggests a push an impulse.
Speaker 1: But Kaku immediately downplayed this here labeled it as not
a smoking gun.
Speaker 2: And this is where we have to dive a little
deeper into the messy reality of comets. Why is a
slight acceleration after passing the Sun not definitive proof of
alien guidance?
Speaker 1: So what's the natural explanation?
Speaker 2: It's because of the non gravitational forces that are exerted
by outgassing. If a natural comet has an uneven surface,
maybe one side is icier than the other and that
side happens to be facing.
Speaker 1: The sun, it sublimates faster, it.
Speaker 2: Sublimates faster, and the resulting jet of gas acts like
a very subtle, completely natural thruster. It's the rocket principle,
but on a tiny chaotic scale.
Speaker 1: Ah So if a big piece of the comet breaks off,
or if a large pocket device on one side suddenly vents,
that momentary focus blast of gas can provide a small
push forward exactly.
Speaker 2: Kakuu emphasizes that these natural processes outgassing breaking off a
piece can easily create a sudden, small spurt in velocity
without needing to invoke extraterrestrial engineering at all.
Speaker 1: It's an accepted, if complicated part of cometary physics.
Speaker 2: It is. For it to qualify as a technological smoking gun,
the acceleration would need to be massive, sustained, and directed
in a way that defined the known physics of outgassing.
Speaker 1: So, once again, even the most promising physical evidence for
propulsion can potentially be explained by the highly complex chaotic
behavior of an extremely old, unusual but natural object. The
tension continues, and that scientific tension has to resolve itself somehow.
The focal point for that resolution is December nineteenth.
Speaker 2: That's the big day. It's the date of the closest approach,
and it's expected to be decisive because data will just
be flooding in from Rare from Hubble, from the web
Space telescope, and from hundreds of terrestrial observatories all across
the globe, all pointing at the same spot.
Speaker 1: And Professor Lobe he outlines too specific almost, I mean
they sound like they're from a Hollywood movie. These two
binary outcomes, he believes will settle the question by the holidays.
Speaker 2: So outcome number one is the conformation of the natural hypothesis.
How would that look if it disintegrates, if we see
the pieces separating being pulled apart by the Sun's tidal
forces from its close pass, This would confirm that three
eyey to us was essentially a fragile, fragmented structure, a
rubble pile basically, that just broke.
Speaker 1: Up the same way natural comets often.
Speaker 2: Do exactly, and that would validate the need for that
massive twenty kilometer surface area Lobe calculated, and it would
fully support the natural explanation.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what's outcome number two.
Speaker 2: Outcome number two is where the technological hypothesis remains viable.
This happens if it maintains its structural integrity.
Speaker 1: If it stays in one solid piece.
Speaker 2: Yes, if it stays visually in one piece, and we
continue to see evidence of those very high speed penetrating
jets without any sign of a massive debris cloud, then
what then, As Lope puts it, we must contemplate a
technological origin. Structural integrity plus high speed propulsion without fragmentation
equals design at.
Speaker 1: Sounds like he's setting up a definitive scientific test. It
either holds together or it falls apart.
Speaker 2: He seems quite confident that this close up data will
be enough. He said he would definitely know what the
nature of the object is by the holidays, which he
called a nice gift for all of us, regardless of
the outcome.
Speaker 1: Now, for Ccku, the bar for definitive nail it to
the wall proof of intelligent life is much much higher
than just seeing if it stays in one.
Speaker 2: Piece, so much higher. He requires an undeniable sign of consciousness.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Kaku's point is that observing strange physics, even a glowing
intact object with super efficient thrusters, is still subject to
potentially undiscovered natural laws. There could be some physics we
just don't know about yet.
Speaker 1: So the ultimate scientific smoking gun, short of, you know,
an alien landing on the.
Speaker 2: White House lawn, would be communication.
Speaker 1: Communication, because that implies intentionality and a shared consciousness.
Speaker 2: Yes, Kaku argues, we'd need to see some kind of
Morse code or recognizable mathemat pattern like prime numbers. Ye,
a shared language that we would instantly understand, not just
random static or unexplained energy spikes.
Speaker 1: That kind of intelligence signal would transcend physics and be
undeniable proof of both consciousness and technology.
Speaker 2: And that's the core difference of their approaches, isn't it.
Load is looking for physics that defies our current understanding
of nature.
Speaker 1: While Kakhu is looking for proof of language that confirms intelligence.
Speaker 2: And no matter what we learn on December nineteenth, the
mission to monitor this object is not going to end.
It will continue its journey out of our inter solar system.
And there are already future observation windows being planned. This
is the long game, This is the very long game.
Speaker 1: Let's detail these future windows because they're pretty incredible. The
first one is scheduled for October third, twenty twenty five, and.
Speaker 2: This is where we see that focus come back to
the high rise camera on the MRO, the orbiter near Mars.
Speaker 1: So what's the plan at.
Speaker 2: That point in its trajectory? Three il lasts will be
near Mars Again, NASA plans to use the mro's powerful
camera to look at it when it's about twenty nine
million kilometers away from the planet.
Speaker 1: And even at that distance twenty nine million kilometers, the
MRO can still get extremely high resolution data.
Speaker 2: That's the hope. They expect to achieve a thirty kilometer
pixel resolution on the nucleus.
Speaker 1: Thirty kilometers per pixel. Now, that might sound blurry to us,
but for an object so small and so far away,
that level of detail is a massive leap forward.
Speaker 2: It is. It will allow astronomers to get a much
better sense of the object's overall shape, maybe even some
surface features, and critically confirm once and for all if
it's still a single solid piece.
Speaker 1: If that thirty kilometer resolution image comes back showing a smooth,
unnaturally geometric shape, I think the technological debate gets a
massive boost.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And then there's a second major window even further
out near Jupiter. Schedule from March sixteenth, twenty twenty six
and I found.
Speaker 1: This detail fascinating because it really highlights the collaboration happening
between scientists and policymakers. This plan came directly from conversations
between Professor Lobe and Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna.
Speaker 2: That's right. She wrote a formal letter to NASA encouraging
them to use the junoprobe, which is currently orbiting Jupiter,
to observe three Iatalus when it gets near that planet.
Speaker 1: Which just shows that the potential significance of this object
has gone beyond the lab. That's entered the political realm,
with Congress actively trying to marshal our existing space resources
to get more data.
Speaker 2: All of this long term planning, all this intense scrutiny,
it leads us directly to the policy implications. If we
accept even the non zero chance that this is a visitor,
how should we as a planet respond.
Speaker 1: This is maybe Lobe's most profound contribution to the whole discussion.
Speaker 2: I think, so he stresses this urgent need for an
international organization, a formal body to be established right now
before we have definitive proof.
Speaker 1: And what would this body do?
Speaker 2: It would be tasked with deciding how humanity should respond.
To such a visitor entering our as he calls it, backyard.
Speaker 1: That is a massive undertaking. I mean, we're talking about
preparing a diplomatic or maybe even a security response to
an entity whose intent is completely unknown, And that.
Speaker 2: Is the core of his argument. We don't know the intent.
Is it peaceful, is it just monitoring? Is it preparatory
for a later visit? We have no idea.
Speaker 1: So he's saying that waiting for definitive proof, a signal
a landing is too.
Speaker 2: Late, far too late. He argues, a coordinated, non panicked,
pre agreed global response plan is essential to prevent chaos
and ensure that humanity for once speaks with a single
voice when confronted with non terrestrial technology.
Speaker 1: That really moves the conversation from abstract physics into geopolitical reality.
We're discussing international security protocols for an object that might
be seven billion years old.
Speaker 2: We've spent a lot of time focused on these unknowns
coming from deep space, these huge cosmic questions, But the
interviews with doctor Kaku also brought up some immediate man
made threats right here on Earth that deserve an equally
critical deep dive.
Speaker 1: And the transition here is actually smoother than you might think,
because it relates directly back to that issue of data
and secrecy and public trust we were just talking about
with the MRO images.
Speaker 2: That's a great point. The frustration over NASA with holding
a crucial image connects directly to our modern crisis of
fabricated information.
Speaker 1: And Kaku introduced the threat he has personal frustrating experience
with the deep fake revolution.
Speaker 2: He seemed genuinely concerned. He was warning the public that
the ease with which documents and more importantly, videos can
now be forged is rapidly eroding our ability to trust
what we see.
Speaker 1: And hear, and he is a victim of this himself.
Speaker 2: He is. He cited his own ongoing personal battle against
sophisticated deep fakes that are impersonating him on multiple networks,
making it look like he's talking nonsense or endorsing strange products.
Speaker 1: It's a really chilling parallel, isn't it. On one hand,
you have an official agency, NASA with holding real data.
On the other, you have malicious actors creating highly convincing
fake data.
Speaker 2: And if a world renowned physicist can be successfully impersonated
on a public network talking about complex topics with total credibility,
how's the average person supposed to verify anything?
Speaker 1: It creates this foundational crisis of reality. The vacuum caused
by secrecy gets filled by conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Theories, and the entire information landscape gets flooded with fabricated content.
Both of those things undermine legitimate scientific inquiry. They make
the search for truth, whether it's about three I atlas
or the integrity of an election, exconentially harder.
Speaker 1: But Kaku worn that while deep fakes are the crisis
of today, there's an even larger, more profound and existential
technological risk looming. He calls it the real risk going.
Speaker 2: Forward, the quantum revolution.
Speaker 1: The quantum revolution. This is a threat that just transcends politics,
borders even deep fake technology. He's talking about quantum computers
and their ability to utterly dismantle our current global security architecture.
Speaker 2: And we really need to understand the fundamental differference here.
Speaker 1: Okay, so explain the difference between a classical digital computer
and a quantum computer. Cocker simplifies it nicely by talking
about zeros and ones.
Speaker 2: Right, your computer, your phone, everything you're using right now
runs on bits binary digits. A bit can be a zero,
or it can be a one. That's it. It's discrete
defined logic. A quantum computer uses quibbits and quibbits harness
the bizarre properties of quantum mechanics, specifically superposition and entanglement.
Speaker 1: Superposition means the quibit can be both a zero and
a one at the same time, right exactly.
Speaker 2: It exists in an infinite continuum of values between zero
and one, all at the same time. This means that
instead of searching possibilities one by one, like going down
a massive list, a quantum computer can explore that entire
infinite possibility space simultaneously, and that.
Speaker 1: Allows it to solve certain types of problems that are
basically impossible for classical computers.
Speaker 2: And what is the most significant and frankly terrifying problem
that a quantum computer can solve almost instantly?
Speaker 1: Breaking encryption?
Speaker 2: Breaking encryption Taku's warning is simple. A quantum computer will
be able to break into any known digital code that
includes the sophisticated encryption that secures our banks, our communications,
our nuclear codes, all of our critical infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Every system of digital security we have relies on mathematical
problems that are just too complex for normal computers to solve.
Speaker 2: Quickly, and quantum computers just bypass that complexity completely.
Speaker 1: It's a foundational vulnerability. Everything we've built digitally is based
on those zeros and ones, which suddenly become meaningless to
a quantum system that computes in an infinite realm.
Speaker 2: And this is in some distant sci fi future either.
Kaku gave a very specific timeline for this risk.
Speaker 1: He said, five ten or fifteen years from.
Speaker 2: Now, five ten or fifteen years. It's not science fiction anymore.
That's why intelligence agencies like the CIA and the FBI
are on extremely high alert. They know that a breakthrough
in quantum computing represents a total overhaul of global.
Speaker 1: Security and the ability of a rival nation to possess
that capability first.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate global security threat.
Speaker 1: It is truly mind boggling to end our deep dive.
By placing the uncertainty of a seven billion year old
commet against the certainty of a ten year countdown to
global digital code breaking, it forces you to reevaluate what
you even consider a threat.
Speaker 2: It does one is cosmic and hypothetical, the other is
technological and imminent. But the common thread really is the
need for a sophisticated intelligence and policy response.
Speaker 1: Whether it's preparing for a non random celestial visitor or
preparing for the collapse of global encryption.
Speaker 2: The message is that we have to start planning for
the exponential unknowns, not just the linear projections of what
we already know.
Speaker 1: Well. This has been an extraordinarily deep dive into three
iatless three iatless. We've navigated this intense intellectual tension.
Speaker 2: On one side doctor cuck Who's scientifically grounded explanation that
all its weirdness is just the result of immense age.
Speaker 1: And on the other Professor Love's technological hypothesis that its
jets and its statistically perfect trajectory point directly to a steered,
maybe even nuclear powered craft.
Speaker 2: We've seen how the exact same data, the off scale
nickel content, the jet calculations that one in twenty thousand
improbability can lead these brilliant experts to radically different conclusions
about the nature of reality.
Speaker 1: And we are heading toward a resolution with that December
nineteenth closest approach, offering the data to finally settle the
fragmentation versus technological propulsion debate.
Speaker 2: We've also explored the necessity of transparency, the absurdity of
the MRO image secrecy, and that dangerous parallel between controlling
ascronomical information and the rise of man made threats like
deep fakes, and the looming quantum crisis.
Speaker 1: At its heart, the core question we keep returning to,
beyond just what three I list is, is really about
our collective response. This object raises the possibility of an
encounter that would require rapid globally coordinated action.
Speaker 2: He really does.
Speaker 1: So our final ponderable for you, based on Professor Lobe's
urgent policy recommendation, is this, given the complexity and the
non zero possibility of an interstellar visitor having unknown intent,
do you agree that we need a global, internationally recognized
organization right now before we have definitive proof dedicated to
deciding humanity's response.
Speaker 2: Or should we wait for a clear signal, a piece
of technology, or a landing before we even start preparing
a political or security response. Let us know what you think.
We'll be watching that December nineteenth data very closely, and
we'll be back soon with more deep dives into the
topics that redefine our understanding of the universe.